In 1861 eleven states attempted to divorce themselves from a political union, citing irreconcilable differences and seeking custody of land and people. By 1865 the demand for separation had been irrefutably denied.
For all the destruction wreaked over four years, much had not changed. The U.S. military, although dramatically reduced in number after the war, continued its peculiar role as an instrument of domestic rather than international policy. Federal occupation of the Southern states persisted for twelve years after Appomattox. The prewar conquest of Native Americans resumed, halted only momentarily along the banks of the Little Bighorn in 1876. After a brief euphoria over African American freedom, a swath of segregationist Black Codes replaced slavery as the next roadblock to civil equality. As wars go, the Civil War was only the twelfth in which the country had been involved since its revolution (and just one of over thirty to date). The victor had manifested the ideals of Union and abolition only to struggle ever after with the magnitude of their realism.
Yet incredible change was wrought by the conflict. A once mighty rebellion had imploded, reduced to a truncated cabinet on the run and a currency of no value. Fortunes spent on human property were gone. Home to a majority of presidents before the war, Southern states would not provide another chief executive until Woodrow Wilson nearly a half century later. In four years the South lost a quarter of its men of military age, half of its wealth, and its position of political preeminence in the United States.
In contrast to the Confederacy, the North flourished. Washington, D.C., had grown from a sluggish burg of forty thousand to a paper-mill metropolis of well over one hundred thousand. Nearly invisible to most citizens before the war, the central government became the overriding power of the land, not yet a bureaucratic giant, but no longer a civic afterthought. The triumph of the Union politically welded North with South, a transcontinental railroad would soon economically bind East with West, and a new monetary system forever altered the landscape of progress. Moreover, slavery was over in the United States. Whatever problems of emancipation that lay in wait, at least the country was finally beginning to accept awesome responsibility of its own Declaration that “all men are created equal.”
Counting civilian and military deaths, the nation lost nearly seven hundred thousand souls. Domestic births and immigration replaced these numbers faster than they had occurred, and in fact the overall population increased by millions during the war. Yet the lives of fathers, brothers, friends, and sons lost could never be replaced.
Among the new graves, one contained a president. Mortally wounded at a public gathering while holding his wife’s hand, Abraham Lincoln was but the first at the scene of the crime to receive a grim fate. His assassin died from a gunshot wound twelve days later, possibly self-inflicted. Maj. Henry R. Rathbone, the last-minute guest of the Lincolns, went on to marry his fellow witness and fiancée, the lovely Clara Harris. Years later, he went progressively insane and killed his wife, dying himself not long after in an asylum. Mary Todd Lincoln, having buried two sons and a husband by the end of the war, lived to bury yet another son. Her eldest and only surviving child, Robert, subsequently had her committed briefly to an asylum.
Falsely accused of being an accomplice in the Lincoln assassination, Jefferson Davis was captured while escaping southward from his fallen capital. Charged with treason, he was imprisoned for two years and then released without trial. With financial backing from a handful of admirers, the continually ill and indebted former president wrote a legal and moral defense of the rebellion entitled The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. The two-volume work proved to be an argumentative and commercial failure, symbolic of Davis’s final decades on earth. Among his setbacks, worst may have been his personal losses. Fathering four sons, Davis lost one before and one during his presidency. His remaining two sons died long before his own death in 1889.
Davis’s most cherished general, the Virginia aristocrat ROBERT E. LEE, lived just five years after his surrender at Appomattox Court House. Accepting the presidency at Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, Lee survived long enough to witness fame and recognition on a national level. Resisting such accolades, the former general solidified his image as an incorruptible gentleman. In honor of the idolized Rebel, his last post was renamed Washington and Lee College after his death in 1870.
Commanding general of all Union forces during the final year of the war, Ulysses S. Grant went on to become the eighteenth president of the United States. Serving two terms, his administration proved to be one of the most corrupt and ineffective in national history. Nearly bankrupt after several poor business decisions, Grant saved his family from abject poverty by completing his memoir just before his death of throat cancer in 1885. It became a bestseller.
The nation as a whole recovered from the war very slowly. For Confederate soldiers, there was the long walk back from the battlefields. Defeated, penniless, stripped of their flag and cause, thousands discovered they had also lost their homes. After four years of warfare, whole counties of Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Virginia, and elsewhere lay in ruins. Adding to the misery, Federal military occupation continued into the 1870s. Economically, the cotton market rallied quickly, which merely benefited those with sufficient capital. Many of the fortunate few were the same families who owned considerable land and property before the war. Otherwise, livestock and industrial production took years to return to their prewar levels, which were modest to begin with. By the 1880s and 1890s most former Confederate states had recovered enough to provide pensions to impoverished veterans and widows, consisting of monthly or yearly payments of a few dollars. Some states managed to provide artificial limbs to qualifying applicants.
The Union soldier’s outlook was naturally brighter by comparison. For the most part, however, the vast majority were not unlike my ancestor, Pvt. Andrew Cook. He returned to a life of subsistence farming, quietly living out his remaining years in the state that he represented on the field of battle. He was an unheralded man, yet lucky. Although more than two million veterans from both sides managed to survive the war, hundreds of thousands suffered from mental and physical wounds ever after. Burden of care for these veterans fell mostly upon their families.
Many soldiers never made it back home. Accidents and illness continued to claim lives with the same ease as during the war. Men died in military hospitals, in camp awaiting discharge, and en route to their loved ones. One incident cost more lives than the first day of the battle of Gettysburg. On April 27, 1865, a Federal transport steamer exploded while transporting more than two thousand passengers, many of whom were recently released from Confederate prison camps. The majority on board perished, nearly equaling the number of deaths from the sinking of the luxury liner Titanic forty-seven years later.
In the wake of such national sacrifices, soldiers hesitated to recollect the war, let alone venerate it. Most of the memorializing was left to citizens. Soon after the war’s end, many communities began a tradition of strewing springtime blossoms upon the graves of the recently fallen. Aptly referred to as Decoration Day, the event eventually became Memorial Day, intended to honor all veterans of all American wars. Despite its altered title and purpose, Memorial Day testified to the lasting anguish of the defeated. Many areas in the South refused to celebrate the holiday on its original designation of May 30, opting instead for their own anniversaries, such as May 10 (the death of Stonewall Jackson), May 26 (Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender in North Carolina) and June 3 (the birthday of Jefferson Davis).
By the 1880s, veterans on both sides began to form regimental reunions. In some cases, joint Union and Confederate reunions gathered to commemorate battle anniversaries, yet for the most part there pervaded a mutual respect and distance.
Gradually the war transferred from a possession of veterans to a ward of the nation. In the 1890s the federal government embarked on a plan to protect major battle sites. Descendants of veterans formed ancestral societies as their soldier relatives faded one by one. After the turn of the century, novels, histories, and the new medium of film presented the war to generations of Americans born well after the fighting. Emerging from these creations was the prominent theme of reconciliation, which evolved into a mainstay of American thinking. By 1920 grandchildren and great-grandchildren of veterans North and South commenced each school day with an increasingly popular verse, pledging allegiance to “one nation indivisible.”
Generations later, the Civil War still echoes. Strangely, it is restless. From classrooms to Congress, the Union still fights to define itself, to balance state and national interests, and to address racial disharmony. A common casualty of this lingering unrest is the war itself. For many, there is an incentive to make the Civil War into something it was not, altering history to serve contemporary wants and needs. Heroes and villains are exaggerated, institutions take on characteristics they never possessed, battles are magnified as the greatest and the worst. It may be impossible to fully separate emotion from examination, but it is critical to view the past with some objectivity. Continual diligence and discretion are required, lest we attempt to build a stable present upon the brittle foundations of myth and misunderstanding.
In searching for truth, Americans in the 1800s paid great attention to a person’s last words, as if parting utterances were the most pure and deliberate reflections of an entire being. Legend has it that Lincoln told his wife not to worry about appearing too possessive of him, Lee supposedly whispered battle commands and ended with “Strike the tent,” and Davis uttered, “Pray excuse me, I cannot take it.”
Appropriately, there has been no last word on the Civil War, no peace treaty, no final declaration, no irrefutable endpoint, because the past cannot truly be disconnected from the present. To this day, the historic struggle colors our current perceptions, and we are compelled to constantly examine and evaluate the issues left settled and unsettled by that uniquely American war.