THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

 

MIKE RESNICK

 

According to Locus, Mike Resnick is the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short fiction. He is the author of 69 novels, over 250 stories, and 3 screenplays, and has edited 41 anthologies. His work has been translated into 25 languages, and he is the Guest of Honor at the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention.

 

 

IN 1860, ABRAHAM Lincoln, who made no secret of his beliefs in his debates with Stephan Douglas, was elected President of the United States, which were feeling less united by the minute. Before he could take the oath of office, seven states had already seceded from the country.

Lincoln had considered taking Hannibal Hamlin, the staunch Maine Republican, as his vice president, but Hamlin had spoken so forcefully in favor of initiating military action against the South that Lincoln was convinced he couldn’t possibly avoid war with Hamlin on the ticket. Instead he chose a moderate Tennesseean who, though much more conservative than Hamlin, had nonetheless stood up to the slave owners and secessionists in his state. That man was Andrew Johnson, former Governor of Tennessee and currently one of its two Senators.

The state of peace didn’t last very long. The military decided to abandon the indefensible Fort Moultrie in South Carolina. Rather than bringing his men back north when South Carolina officially seceded in December of 1860, Major Robert Anderson secretly relocated one hundred and twenty-seven men—thirteen of them musicians—to Fort Sumter. As military strategies went, this one wouldn’t go down in history as one of the most brilliant. The fort wasn’t yet complete, and fewer than half the cannons had been installed.

Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina kept demanding that Anderson withdraw his men and take them back north, and Anderson kept ignoring him. The first shots of the Civil War were fired on January 9, 1861, when the steamship Star of the West tried to land reinforcements for Fort Sumter and was instantly repulsed by Confederate troops. During the next three months, Confederate Brigadier General Beauregard made almost daily demands that Anderson abandon the fort. Anderson ignored them.

Lincoln realized that the fort would run out of food and ammunition sometime in mid-April, so on April 6 he sent a small fleet to land in Charleston to bring supplies and reinforcements to the beleaguered men of Fort Sumter.

On April 11, Beauregard demanded one more time that Anderson surrender. Anderson stalled for time, hemmed and hawed, and finally listed his conditions for surrender. They were unacceptable, and early in the morning of April 12, as many Charleston residents watched the action from their verandas and windows, the Confederate army began thirty-four consecutive hours of bombardment. At the start of the thirty-fifth hour, Anderson surrendered.

Amazingly, not a single Union soldier was killed during the action. In fact, the only fatality occurred quite by accident when the victorious Confederates allowed the Union a hundred-gun salute.

And that was the end of the first of the two battles that comprised the First Civil War.

 

 

THE SECOND AND final battle of the First Civil War occurred three months later, on July 21. The Union had been humiliated at Fort Sumter, and they were determined not to suffer another such travesty against the ‘inferior’ Confederate forces.

Lincoln’s generals outlined the situation to him. They would crush the rebellion once and for all by marching on Richmond in northern Virginia. They had 28,000 men primed and ready, they had the superior generals, the superior weaponry, the superior lines of supply, the superior strategy. It could be done in an afternoon, and Lincoln could accept all the Southern states back into the Union the next morning. Why, it would be such an easy victory that Congress and members of the government could take their horse-drawn carriages to the northern end of the battlefield and watch the Union’s triumph first-hand.

A couple of men didn’t see it quite that way. One was General Beauregard, who had 33,000 men at his command. And the other was Thomas J. Jackson, who picked up a new name during the battle: Stonewall.

Lincoln was less certain of an easy victory than his generals and military advisors, though he approved the plan. Finally General McDowell, who was in command of the Union troops, invited him to come to the battlefield and see for himself, and after some hesitation, Lincoln agreed.

McDowell led his Union troops into battle. Five hours later he led them out of battle; the proper word for it was retreat.

During those five hours his troops suffered 2,900 casualties, and most of his invited audience, who had anticipated watching an easy victory while having their picnics just beyond the battlefield, caused quite a traffic jam as they fled back to Washington D.C.

But one observer didn’t flee.

Nobody knew quite when or how it happened. One moment Lincoln was sitting on a chair, speaking with two of his cabinet members. The next moment he was sprawled on the ground, a bullet lodged in his head above his left eye. He was dead before any of McDowell’s medics could reach him, the most important casualty of the Battle of Bull Run.

And that was the end of the First Civil War.

 

 

ANDREW JOHNSON WAS sworn in that evening. His address to the joint session of the Congress was brief and to the point:

“A good and honorable man was a tragic, and I’m sure accidental, victim of the conflict this afternoon. I wish his death had accomplished something meaningful, but all it did was emphasize the brutality and futility of war.

“And perhaps in that respect it did accomplish something meaningful, because I have reached the decision that as your President I will preside over no further military debacles and deaths. The War of Southern Secession is over. I am not pleased with this. I am from Tennessee, a border state that believes in the Union, and that no man may own another. But I also believe that the Lord did not create men to kill one another either, and I will not be the one who ever orders men to take up arms against their brothers. I hope we can reach an accommodation with the secessionist states; I hope we can, with logic and goodwill, convince them to rejoin the Union. But no man will die because he and his neighbors have voted to go their own way.

“We face numerous problems, some caused by the secession, others that have been with us for generations. I pledge myself and my Presidency to addressing those problems that Mr. Lincoln died before he could address.”

It wasn’t as eloquent as some of his predecessor’s speeches, but it officially wrote fini to the war.

 

 

WITH NO WAR to fight, the new President began dismantling the war machine that Lincoln had been building up. It was clear that the major responsibility for the disaster was General McDowell—but the Union already had one scapegoat in Colonel Anderson, who had presided over the defeat at Fort Sumter—and if he was to usher in an era of goodwill, Johnson decided he didn’t need a second disgraced military leader.

A lot of men disagreed, and many of them had spent their lives in the military. William Tecumseh Sherman resigned his commission within a week of Johnson’s speech to congress, and when General George McClellan was not put in charge of what remained of the Union army, he quit after making a major speech condemning Johnson and warning that war was going to occur whether the new President wanted it or not.

A year after taking office, Johnson got his Congress and his country to pass the 14^th Amendment, but of course it didn’t apply to the states of the Confederacy, and in truth it wasn’t needed in the states that still belonged to the Union. Still, everyone felt it was an eloquent and vital addition to the Constitution.

The peace, or more accurately the truce, between the Union and the Confederacy held, but there were many strains. The Confederate currency wasn’t backed by gold, and the exchange rate made it all but impossible for those from Confederate states to purchase Northern goods. Also, no member of the Confederacy could bring his slaves with him on excursions to the Union—or rather, he could bring them, but the second they crossed the border between the two countries they were officially free men, and very few opted to go back with their ‘owner’ to the Confederacy.

By 1863 both sides were feeling the pinch of being separate—and rival—economies. The Confederacy was falling far behind in manufacturing, while the Union constantly had food shortages. Johnson felt the Union’s problem could be solved simply by expanding to fertile new lands west of the Mississippi, but his advisors counseled against it. The South was clearly hurting; who knew when they might resurrect the war, solely for economic reasons? And with Sherman and McClellan gone and the talented Ulysses S. Grant cashiered out for continued drunkenness, the army was still being commanded by General McDowell, and he was not the man one wanted the fate of the country to depend upon.

So Johnson stopped looking West, and since he felt he couldn’t very well replace McDowell for errors committed two years earlier, his alternative was to build the army to such an extent that should the Confederacy attack, it didn’t matter who the Union’s commanding general was, they would muster such an overwhelming force that no one could stand against them.

The Confederacy noted the military build-up, and President Jefferson Davis felt he had no choice but to increase the size and strength of his own army. He couldn’t match the Union’s manpower, but there was no question that in Robert E. Lee he had the most brilliant general, and Lee’s subordinates, from Beauregard and Stonewall Jackson on down, were clearly superior to what was left of their Union counterparts.

Still, despite the single-minded attention on both sides to the military, not a shot was fired. As the election of 1864 drew near, no one was more surprised than Andrew Johnson that the peace had held.

 

 

THERE WASN’T MUCH question that Johnson was going to be re-elected. The Democrats were decimated, and the Republicans had kept the peace. He searched around for a Vice President. It would be a wholly symbolic choice; in that era the Vice President didn’t even attend cabinet meetings.

He was worried that the Confederacy might see his pursuit of peace as a sign of weakness, so he felt he needed a tough, no-nonsense Vice President, one who had argued for war back in 1859 and 1860. Even in this nation of northern states, he wanted a man recognized as a true Northerner, and finally he hit upon what he thought was the perfect choice, a Democrat turned Republican, a man Lincoln himself had considered for the office four years earlier: Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine.

This didn’t sit well with the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis even made a speech condemning the choice, at which point Johnson made an answering speech, inviting the Confederacy to re-join the Union and put up their own candidates. Neither side took it seriously, and tensions continued to grow as Johnson won an easy victory.

Things came to a head on April 14, 1865.

 

 

UPON BEGINNING HIS first elected term, Johnson cast about for some way to bolster the sagging economy, and finally he hit upon an across-the-board 20% increase on all tariffs applied to Confederacy imports. Davis responded with a total cessation of agricultural exports to the Union.

It’s difficult to say which side suffered more because of Johnson’s tactic. Both economies took major hits, the Confederacy’s more than the Union’s—but the Union had tremendous food shortages, and towns and cities suffered severe displacements of their populations as they were unable to supply the citizenry with essential foodstuffs.

It was on April 12 that South Carolina announced that it would be unable to pay its debts by the end of June, and Johnson felt his strategy was working. There was every possibility that South Carolina might return to the Union if the Union would guarantee its debts, and that might well start a stampede of secessionist states back to the stars and stripes.

Two days later, convinced he had hit upon the most effective strategy, Johnson celebrated by going out to Ford’s Theater to watch a performance of Our American Cousin.

A failed actor and Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth was waiting for him.

 

 

IT TOOK HANNIBAL Hamlin exactly forty-three minutes after the assassination of President Johnson and four minutes after taking the oath of office to declare war on the Confederacy. His instructions to General McDowell were to pursue a symbolic victory at Fort Sumter “at any cost.”

He got his victory, the first of the Second Civil War. The cost was 8,300 men.

 

 

MCDOWELL WAS REPLACED in January of 1866. And his replacement was replaced. And so was his replacement. It made no difference. None of them were a match for Lee, and those few generals who might have been were no longer in the service.

The Union had a large advantage in manpower. The South had an advantage in its military leadership. Each side was certain that it held the high moral ground, and neither side was willing to toss in the towel.

1868 came and went, and so did 1872, and 1876, and soon it was the dawn of the Twentieth Century and the two sides, their resources and manpower horribly depleted, fought on. Over the years a number of men and women from both sides had had enough, crossed the Mississippi, and started forming their own nation to the west of the seemingly endless conflict.

The Second Civil War came to an end in 1911, when the Confederacy finally outlawed slavery, and after half a century the two nations, joined by their Western brethren, became one united country again, just in time for a nasty little disturbance that was brewing across the ocean in Europe.