Don’t Know Much About History

The space of time separating George Washington’s first inauguration in April 1789 from Lincoln’s first in March 1861 was only seventy-two years, a finger snap in the long stream of history. But that slice of history contained extraordinary events. From a third-rate republic, a sliver of sparsely populated seaboard extending inland for a few hundred miles from the Atlantic, threatened by foreign powers and dangerous Indian tribes, America had become a pulsing, burgeoning world economic power whose lands stretched across an entire continent.

It was a nation in the midst of powerful growth. Canals were spreading across the country, connecting the inland regions to the busy Atlantic ports. The first generation of steamships was beginning to make use of those canals and to carry prospectors around Cape Horn to California. The first railroads were being built, linking the great, growing cities across the widening landscape of America. A new generation of invention was alive, with Americans turning their attention, as Tocqueville noted, to practical pursuits. In 1834, Cyrus McCormick patented his horsedrawn reaper that would begin a revolution in American agriculture. Borrowing from an earlier invention, Eli Whitney improved on a machine that made cotton king in the South—the famous cotton “gin,” short for “engine”—and then set up a factory in the North using the idea of interchangeable parts to ease mass production—an idea that helped produce the guns that would help the Union defeat the Confederacy. In 1843, Congress voted funds to construct a telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington, and Samuel Morse (1791–1872) perfected the design of the telegraph and devised a code to use it. By 1851, America’s mass-produced innovations—clocks and locks, Colt revolvers and sewing machines, reapers and railroads—were the talk of Europe.

Writing from Paris in the throes of France’s bloody revolution, Jefferson had once almost giddily expressed the notion that “a little rebellion” was good for the republic. Had Jefferson known how devastating the ultimate rebellion would be, he might have acted more forcefully to forestall it during his years of power and influence. History is an unending stream of such speculations and backward glances.

Why was there a Civil War? Could it have been avoided? Why didn’t the North just let the South go? (A popular sentiment in 1860.) These questions have troubled and fascinated Americans ever since the war took place. No period in American history has been written about more, and with more sentiment and emotion—and even romance. Each year, dozens of new volumes appear in the vast library of books about Lincoln, slavery, the South, the war and its aftermath. It is hardly surprising that one of America’s most popular novels—and the equally adored film it inspired—is set during the Civil War era. Without arguing its historical or literary values, there is no question that Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind typifies—and is partly responsible for—the American passion about and romance with the Civil War era.

But as other historians and novelists have made much clearer, there was very little that was truly romantic about the Civil War. It was four years of vicious, devastating warfare that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, murderously divided families and friends, and left much of southern territory smoldering. Political and military bungling occurred on both sides. There were war atrocities of the worst sort. Even today the issues behind the Civil War and the wounds it left continue to underscore the political and social debate in America.

To comprehend the Civil War’s roots, it might be useful to think of America in the first half of the nineteenth century not as one large country but as two separate nations. The America of the North was rushing toward modernity as it underwent its urban and industrial revolutions. While agriculture was still important in the North’s economic structure, it was the enormous commercial enterprises—railroads, canals, and steamship lines; banks and booming factories—that were shaping the northern economy. Its population was mushrooming as massive influxes of European immigrants escaping the famines and political turmoil of Europe came to its cities, lured by the growing myth of America’s unlimited wealth and opportunity.

Starting in 1845, the first year of the potato blight and famine in Ireland, some 1.5 million Irish came to America over the course of the next several years. By 1860, one-eighth of America’s 32 million people were foreign-born, and most of them had settled in the North, drawn to the mill towns of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. It was these foreign workers who would feed the ravenous appetite of the new industrial machine and be pressed into the sprawling slums and tenements of the cities, where they were held captive by companies that were far from enlightened. They dutifully joined the political machines that claimed to represent them, and ultimately provided cannon fodder under the Civil War’s conscription laws.

The southern states, on the other hand, had largely remained the agrarian, slave-based economy they were in Jefferson’s time, when the gentlemen planters of Virginia had helped create the nation. The basis of their wealth was now cotton—produced only to be shipped to the textile factories of Great Britain and New England—and the slaves who produced that cotton, as well as the tobacco, rice, and corn that were staples in the southern states. Although importation of slaves had been outlawed in 1807, the slave population continued to grow at an astonishing rate. And though overseas slave trade was prohibited, trading slaves between states was an enormous business. This contradiction of logic—no foreign slave trade, but a lively domestic one—was one of the laws that many southerners felt were unfairly forced upon them by the North.

But even without African trade, the slave numbers were incredible. The nearly 700,000 slaves counted in the census of 1790 had swollen to 3.5 million in 1860. At the same time, the general population of the South grew far more slowly, absorbing few of the immigrants flocking to American shores. It was room to grow more cotton, and slaves to plant, pick, and produce it, that underscored all debate about America’s expansion, prompting at least one foreign war and southern talk of the conquest of Cuba and other lands to the south.

The United States was now two countries, two cultures, two ideologies destined for a collision. The simplest explanation for the war might be that southerners, in a very basic expression of human nature, did not want to be told how to live their lives—with respect to slavery, politics, or any number of other questions. This basic resistance to being ruled by someone else had been ingrained into the American character before the Revolution, became part of the national debate from the time Jefferson drafted the Declaration, and was written into the compromises that created the Constitution. But it was a powder keg with a long-burning fuse, an emotional question of ideology that simmered for those decades between Washington and Lincoln, factoring into every question facing the nation and every presidential election of that time, until it ultimately exploded with such horrifying results.

[Note: This chapter is meant to briefly summarize the events leading up to the Civil War, the conduct of the war itself, and the immediate aftermath. Since this book was first written, I decided that the Civil War was the central—and often most misunderstood—event in the American drama and felt it needed to be addressed in a separate book. Don’t Know Much About the Civil War was published in 1996.]

Why was there a war with Mexico?

For the first time in America’s short history, the nation didn’t go to war with a foreign power over independence, foreign provocation, or global politics. The war with Mexico was a war fought unapologetically for territorial expansion. One young officer who fought in Mexico later called this war “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” He was Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant.

The war with Mexico was the centerpiece of the administration of James K. Polk, the most adept of the presidents between Jackson and Lincoln. Continuing the line of Jacksonian Democrats in the White House after Tyler’s abbreviated Whig administration, Polk (1795–1849) was even dubbed Young Hickory. A slaveholding states’ rights advocate from North Carolina, Polk slipped by Van Buren in the Democratic convention and was narrowly elected president in 1844. His victory was possible only because the splinter antislavery Liberty Party drew votes away from Whig candidate Henry Clay. A swing of a few thousand votes, especially in New York State, which Polk barely carried, would have given the White House to Clay, a moderate who might have been one president capable of forestalling the breakup of the Union and the war.

It was a Manifest Destiny election. The issues were the future of the Oregon Territory, which Polk wanted to “reoccupy,” and the annexation of Texas, or, in Polk’s words, “reannexation,” implying that Texas was part of the original Louisiana Purchase. (It wasn’t.) Even before Polk’s inauguration, Congress adopted a joint resolution on his proposal to annex Texas. The move made a war with Mexico certain, which suited Polk and other expansionists. When Mexico heard of this action in March 1845, it severed diplomatic relations with the United States.

Treating Texas as U.S. property, Polk sent General Zachary Taylor into the territory with about 1,500 troops in May 1845, to guard the undefined “border” against a Mexican “invasion.” After months of negotiating to buy Texas, Polk ordered Taylor to move to the bank of the Rio Grande. This so-called army of observation numbered some 3,500 men by January 1846, about half the entire U.S. army. Escalating the provocations, Polk next had Taylor cross the Rio Grande. When a U.S. soldier was found dead and some Mexicans attacked an American patrol on April 25, President Polk had all the pretext he needed to announce to Congress, “War exists.” An agreeable Democratic majority in the House and Senate quickly voted—with little dissent from the Whig opposition—to expand the army by an additional 50,000 men. America’s most naked war of territorial aggression was under way.

MILESTONES IN THE MEXICAN WAR

1846

May 3 An indication of the war’s course comes in the first battle. At Palo Alto, 2,300 American soldiers scatter a Mexican force twice their size. In the ensuing Battle of Resaca de la Palma, 1,700 Americans rout 7,500 Mexicans. Accompanied by a group of Whig newspapermen, General Taylor is made an immediate national hero and is touted as the next Whig president. President Polk orders a blockade of Mexican ports on the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.

June 6 In the related conflict with the British over the jointly controlled Oregon Territory, Polk submits a treaty with England setting a boundary between Canada and the United States at forty-nine degrees north latitude. Eliminating the threat of war with Great Britain, Polk can concentrate on the Mexican invasion.

June 14 American settlers in California, also a Mexican possession, proclaim the independent Republic of California. On July 7, Commodore John Sloat lands at Monterey and claims California for the United States. In August, California is annexed by the United States, and Commodore David Stockton establishes himself as governor.

August 15 Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney arrives in Las Vegas and announces the annexation of New Mexico, also a Mexican territory, by the United States. Kearney occupies Santa Fe without firing a shot, and sets up a provisional government there.

September 20–24 General Taylor captures the city of Monterey, Mexico, but he agrees to an armistice allowing the Mexican army to evacuate the city, earning President Polk’s great displeasure.

November 16 General Taylor captures Saltillo, the capital of Mexico’s Coahuilla province. The successful military exploits of General Taylor, a Whig, are increasing his heroic stature at home, to the annoyance of both President Polk and General Winfield Scott, the commanding general in Washington and also a Whig. The three men know well the political dividends brought by battlefield success, having cut their political teeth in the age of Andrew Jackson. Facing political pressure, Democrat Polk places General Winfield Scott in command of an expeditionary force that sails for the Mexican fortress city of Vera Cruz.

1847

January 3 General Scott orders a force of 9,000 of General Taylor’s men to assault Vera Cruz by land.

February 22–23 The Battle of Buena Vista. Ignoring Scott’s orders, Taylor marches west to Buena Vista and, after refusing to surrender to a superior Mexican force commanded by Santa Anna, Taylor’s 4,800 men, mostly raw recruits, defeat a Mexican army of 15,000 largely untrained peasants. One of the heroes on the American side is Jefferson Davis, who leads a Mississippi infantry regiment in a counterattack using eighteen-inch Bowie knives. With loyal Whig newspapers trumpeting another triumph for Taylor, his run for the next presidency seems assured.

February 28 Marching south from El Paso, Colonel Alexander Doniphan wins a battle against massed Mexican forces at Sacramento Creek, Mexico, and occupies the city of Chihuahua the next day.

March 9–29 The Battle of Vera Cruz. Scott’s forces land near Vera Cruz, the most heavily fortified city in the Western Hemisphere. Scott lays siege to the city. After a long bombardment with high civilian casualties, the city falls three weeks later. Scott’s losses are minimal.

April Pressing his offensive, Scott begins a march toward Mexico City. By mid-May he takes the cities of Cerro Gordo, capturing 3,000 prisoners, and Puebla, only eighty miles from Mexico City.

June 6 Through a British intermediary, Nicholas P. Trist, chief clerk of the U.S. State Department, begins peace negotiations with Mexico.

August 20 As Scott nears Mexico City, Santa Anna asks for an armistice. Peace negotiations fail, and the armistice ends on September 7.

September 8 Scott takes Molino del Rey. In another hard-fought battle, although heavily outnumbered, Scott takes the heights of Chapultepec, overlooking Mexico City. Formal peace is still several months away, but the actual fighting concludes with the triumphal entry of Scott’s army into the Mexican capital.

November 22 Nicholas Trist leaves Washington to negotiate a peace treaty with Mexico.

December 22 A somewhat obscure freshman congressman from Illinois rises to speak against the Mexican War. It is Abraham Lincoln’s first speech as a member of the House of Representatives.

1848

February–March The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the war with Mexico, is signed and then ratified by the Senate. Under its terms, the United States receives more than 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory, including the future states of California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado, as well as Texas. The border with Mexico is set at the Rio Grande. In return, Mexico is paid $15 million and the United States takes on claims against Mexico by Americans, totaling another $3.25 million. One Whig newspaper announces, “We take nothing by conquest. . . . Thank God.”

What did America gain from the Mexican War?

Won quickly and at relatively little expense, the Mexican War completed the dream of Manifest Destiny. Then came what seemed a heavenly confirmation of the popular notion that God had ordained America to go from coast to coast. On the morning of January 24, 1848, James Marshall, a New Jersey mechanic building a sawmill for Johann Sutter on the American River, east of San Francisco, spotted some flecks of yellow in the water. These proved to be gold, sparking the mad California gold rush of 1849, which sent a hundred thousand people or more racing west that year. During the next few years, some $200 million worth of gold would be extracted from the hills of California.

Apart from the profitable return on investment brought about by the gold rush, the aftermath of the Mexican War and the Oregon Treaty brought other, less happy dividends. The addition of these enormous parcels of new territory just made the future of slavery a bigger question; there was now that much more land to fight about. From the outset of the fighting, opposition to the war was heard from abolitionists like the zealous William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who said the war was waged “solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery.” Garrison was joined in his views by antislavery pacifist Horace Greeley (1811–72), who protested the war from its beginning in his New York Tribune. Another ornery gadfly went to jail in Massachusetts for his refusal to pay poll taxes that supported a war he feared would spread slavery. Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) spent only a single night in jail—an aunt paid his fine—but his lecture “Resistance to Civil Government” (later titled “Civil Disobedience”) was published in 1849 in the book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

The most ironically horrible aftermath of the war with Mexico was the practical battle experience it provided for a corps of young American officers who fought as comrades in Mexico, only to face one another in battle fifteen years later, when North met South in the Civil War. Among the many young West Pointers who fought in Mexico were two lieutenants named P. T. Beauregard and George McClellan, who served on General Scott’s staff. Beauregard would lead the attack on Fort Sumter that would begin the Civil War. McClellan later commanded the armies of the North. Two other comrades at the Battle of Churubusco, Lieutenants James Longstreet and Winfield Scott Hancock, would face each other at Gettysburg. A young captain named Robert E. Lee demonstrated his considerable military abilities as one of Scott’s engineers. A few years later, Scott urged Lincoln to give Lee command of the Union armies, but Lee would remain loyal to his Virginia home. When Lee and Grant met years later at Appomattox Court House, Grant would remind Lee that they had once encountered each other as comrades in Mexico.

AMERICAN VOICES

From “Civil Disobedience” by HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1849):

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? . . . Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

The American ideals of individual freedom and the democratic spirit found an extreme expression in the literature of the New England writers known as the Transcendentalists. Chief among them was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), who urged Americans to stop imitating Europe and “go beyond the world of the senses.” Emphasizing individuality and an intuitive spirituality, he balked at the emerging industrial society around him.

A student and friend of Emerson’s, Henry David Thoreau took Emerson’s ideas a step further, removing himself from society to the cabin on Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, which provided the experience for his masterpiece Walden (1854). Thoreau’s writings deeply influenced Mahatma Gandhi, who adopted Thoreau’s notion of “civil disobedience” as the means to overthrow British rule in India; and Gandhi, in turn, influenced Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance.

Also part of this “flowering of New England,” as it was called by the critic Van Wyck Brooks, was Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64). But the author of the American classics The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) rejected the Transcendentalists and Emerson, whom he called “a seeker for he knows not what.” The Transcendentalist utopian community Brook Farm was the model for Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. Depicting the New England obsession with sin and guilt, Hawthorne expressed a rejection of the grim Puritanism that dominated the era.

How did Frederick Douglass become the most influential black man of his time?

Among the most outspoken critics of the Mexican War was a man who called the war “disgraceful, cruel and iniquitous.” Writing from Rochester, New York, in his newspaper, the North Star, Frederick Douglass criticized other opponents of the war for their weak response. “The determination of our slaveholding President to prosecute the war, and the probability of his success in wringing from the people men and money to carry it on, is made evident, rather than doubtful, by the puny opposition arrayed against him. . . . None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks.”

For anyone to write so defiantly against a generally popular war was remarkable. That the author was an escaped slave writing in his own newspaper was extraordinary.

Frederick Douglass (1817–95) was born to a slave mother and most likely sired by his first owner. He was taught to read by the wife of one of his masters—although she had been told that it was illegal and unsafe to teach a slave to read—and taught himself to write in the shipyards of Baltimore. In 1838, he escaped, disguising himself as a sailor to reach New York and then Massachusetts, finding work as a laborer in bustling New Bedford, the shipbuilding and whaling center. After making an extemporaneous speech to an antislavery convention in Nantucket, Douglass began a life devoted to the cause of freedom, for women as well as blacks. In the process, he became one of the most famous men in America, black or white. A speaker of extraordinary power, Douglass was first employed by William Lloyd Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society. His lectures were grand performances that would leave his audiences in turns laughing and tearful. He braved hecklers, taunts, eggs, and death threats, and with each lecture his fame and influence grew. In 1845 the Society printed his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

It remains one of the most chilling accounts of life as a Maryland slave, containing the power to provoke utter revulsion at the “peculiar institution.” The book’s appearance and Douglass’s growing celebrity as a speaker forced him to move to England out of fear that he would be seized as a fugitive. He returned to America in 1847 and began publication of the North Star in Rochester, putting him in the front lines of the abolitionist forces. Douglass and Garrison later fell out over tactics, but his stature continued to grow. In one of his most famous speeches, given in 1857, Douglass said, “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.”

During the Civil War, he became an adviser to Lincoln, recruiting black soldiers for the Union cause and lobbying for their equal pay, which was reluctantly granted. After the war he accepted a number of government appointments, and was later made ambassador to Haiti. (It is worth noting, however, that many of his friends and supporters of both races were unhappy when late in life Douglass married a white woman after the death of his first wife, Anna. In 1884, he married Helen Pitts, a college-educated suffragist twenty years younger than Douglass. She was disowned by her family, and the white press accused her of marrying for fame and money. It was also reported that the marriage proved that the black man’s highest aspiration was to have a white wife. The couple remained active in social causes until his sudden death of a heart attack in 1895.)

AMERICAN VOICES

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, from a letter to his former master, published in the North Star (September 8, 1848), ten years after his escape:

The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their ghastly terror before me; the wails of millions pierce my heart and chill my blood. I remember the chain, the gag, the bloody whip; the death-like gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman; the appalling liability of his being torn away from wife and children, and sold like a beast in the market. . . .

Your mind must have become darkened, your heart hardened, your conscience seared and petrified, or you would have long since thrown off the accursed load, and sought relief at the hands of a sin-forgiving God. How, let me ask you, would you look upon me, were I, some dark night, in company with a band of hardened villains, to enter the precincts of your elegant dwelling, and seize the person of your own lovely daughter, Amanda, and carry her off from your family, friends, and all the loved ones of her youth—make her my slave—compel her to work, and I take her wages—place her name on my ledger as property—disregard her personal rights—fetter the powers of her immortal soul by denying her the right and privilege of learning to read and write—feed her coarsely—clothe her scantily, and whip her on the naked back occasionally; more, and still more horrible, leave her unprotected—a degraded victim to the brutal lust of fiendish overseers, who would pollute, blight, and blast her fair soul. . . . I ask, how would you regard me, if such were my conduct?

. . . I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery. . . . I shall make use of you as a means of exposing the character of the American church and clergy—and as a means of bringing this guilty nation, with yourself, to repentance. . . .

I am your fellow-man but not your slave.

Frederick Douglass

Where did the Underground Railroad run?

Douglass had used his wits and unusual abilities to escape slavery. The Narrative was deliberately vague about the assistance he received along the way. Douglass did not want to endanger those who aided him, or make it easier for slave-chasers to figure out his route, thereby making escape difficult for other slaves. But he was helped by some brave individuals along the road.

For thousands of other blacks who refused submission between 1840 and 1861, the mostly anonymous people who led the way to freedom became known as the Underground Railroad. A loose network of individuals who believed that every single freed slave represented a victory against slavery, the Underground Railroad ran from the South northward through Philadelphia and New York, its two key stations, to freedom in Canada or the Northeast. While claims for the numbers of slaves it moved to freedom were vastly inflated in later years, the railroad existed and performed a dangerous and noble service.

From “station” to “station,” as each safe spot along the treacherous route was known, the slaves slipped in the dark of night, led by the “conductors.” While many of these were white abolitionists, often Quakers, the ranks of “conductors” were also joined by escaped slaves who risked far more by returning to help other slaves out. Of these, the most famous was Harriet Tubman (1820?–1913). Born a Maryland slave, like Douglass, Tubman made her way northward to freedom in 1849 and immediately returned to the South to aid other slave escapes. She made at least nineteen trips herself, and was personally responsible for bringing out at least 300 slaves, sometimes “encouraging” them to leave at gunpoint. She even succeeded in freeing her parents in 1857. Her success did not go unnoticed in the South; at one point there was a reward of $40,000 for her capture.

Although illiterate, she was a natural leader and a brilliant planner. Her life was undoubtedly saved when illness kept her from joining abolitionist John Brown’s suicidal raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. But during the Civil War she continued her militant defiance, serving with Union troops as a cook and as a spy behind Confederate lines. On another occasion she reportedly led 750 slaves to freedom, with the help of Union troops.

AMERICAN VOICES

SENATOR JOHN C. CALHOUN of South Carolina, from a March 4, 1850, speech read to the Senate for the ailing Calhoun before his death:

I have, Senators, believed from the first that the agitation on the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion. Entertaining this opinion, I have on all proper occasions, endeavored to call the attention of both the two great parties which divide the country to adopt some measure to prevent so great a disaster, but without success. The agitation has been permitted to proceed with almost no attempt to resist it, until it has reached a point when it can no longer be disguised or denied that the Union is in danger. You have thus had forced upon you the greatest and gravest question that can ever come under your consideration—How can the Union be preserved?

. . . What has endangered the Union?

To this question there can be but one answer,—the immediate cause is the almost universal discontent which pervades all the States composing the Southern section of the Union. [The discontent] commenced with the agitation of the slavery question and has been increasing ever since. . . .

One of the causes is, undoubtedly, to be traced to long-continued agitation of the slave question on the part of the North, and the many aggressions which they have made on the rights of the South during the time.

What was the Compromise of 1850?

The election of 1848 was really about the future of slavery and the Union. But you wouldn’t know it from the chief candidates. The hero of the Mexican War, General Zachary Taylor, got the Whig nod without expressing or even possessing any opinions about the chief question of the day: the future of slavery in the new territories. The Democratic nominee, Lewis Cass, sidestepped the issue with a call for “popular sovereignty,” or leaving the decision up to territorial governments. The only clear stand on slavery was taken by an aging Martin Van Buren, who had given up equivocating and was now running on the Free Soil ticket, a splinter group of antislavery Democrats. Taylor’s image as the conquering hero won the popular imagination, and with Van Buren’s third party draining Democratic votes from Cass, Taylor was elected.

As president, Taylor had no policy or plan to cope with the new territories, including the impact of the gold rush on the American economy. But when California petitioned for admission as a free state in 1849, the issue was placed squarely once more before Congress, with the fate of the Union hanging in the balance. Southerners, who accepted the Oregon Territory as free, didn’t want slaves kept out of another state, especially one of California’s size and wealth.

Only another compromise saved the Union for the moment, this one as distasteful to abolitionists as all the others in history had been. A package of bills, mostly the work of the aging Henry Clay, was introduced and heatedly debated in the Senate, chiefly by the other two congressional giants of the age, Daniel Webster—who was willing to accept limited slavery in preservation of the Union—and South Carolina’s John Calhoun (1782–1850), the preeminent spokesman for the slave-plantation system. Because Calhoun was too ill to speak, his views were presented by Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia. Vowing secession, Calhoun died before the compromise was signed into law. New faces on the congressional stage also joined the fray. William Seward of New York weighed in with an impassioned antislavery speech. The new senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, finally ramrodded the compromise through by dividing it into five separate bills and pulling together sufficient support for each of these.

It was only Zachary Taylor’s death in office in 1850 that finally allowed passage of the Compromise of 1850. Taylor’s successor, Millard Fillmore (1800–74), signed the five bills that made up the Compromise of 1850. Under these bills:

• California was admitted as a free state;

• New Mexico and Utah were organized without restrictions on slavery;

• Texas, also unrestricted as to slavery, had its boundaries set and received $10 million for the land that would become New Mexico;

• The slave trade (but not slavery itself) was abolished in the District of Columbia;

• A new Fugitive Slave Act provided federal jurisdiction to assist slave owners in the recovery of escaped slaves.

It was the last of these bills that provoked the most controversy, since it gave slave owners enormous powers to call on federal help in recovering escaped slaves. Under the law, no black person was safe. Only an affidavit was needed to prove ownership. Commissioners were granted great powers—thoroughly unconstitutional in modern light—to make arrests. Even the expenses of capturing and returning a fugitive slave were to be borne by the federal government. Although the burden of proof was on the accused fugitives, they were not entitled to a jury trial and couldn’t defend themselves. And citizens who concealed, aided, or rescued fugitives were subject to harsh fines and imprisonment.

Suddenly free blacks, many of whom thought they had been safely established for years in northern towns, were subject to seizure and transport back to the South. Angry mobs in several cities bolted at the law with violent protests. In Boston, seat of abolitionist activity, William and Ellen Craft, who gained fame when they escaped through a ruse that involved Ellen posing as the male owner of William, were defended and hidden from slave catchers. When federal marshals snatched a fugitive named Shadrach, a mob of angry blacks overwhelmed the marshals and sent Shadrach to Montreal. Outraged by this defiance of federal law, President Fillmore sent troops to Boston to remove a seventeen-year-old captured slave named Thomas Sims.

Resistance grew elsewhere. In Syracuse, New York, a large group of mixed race broke into a jail and grabbed William McHenry, known as Jerry, from his captors, spiriting him off to Canada. And in Christiana, Pennsylvania, a Quaker town that openly welcomed fugitives, troops again were called out after some escaped slaves shot and killed an owner and then escaped to Canada. President Fillmore sent marines after these slaves, but Canada refused to extradite them. In the South, these were viewed as affronts to what was considered their owners’ property and honor. New anger was spilling over into renewed threats of the Union’s dissolution.

Why was Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most important and controversial American novel of its time?

The number of blacks actually captured and sent south under the Fugitive Slave Act was relatively small, perhaps three hundred. But the law did produce another, unintended effect. Calling the law a “nightmare abomination,” a young woman decided to write a novel that shook the conscience of America and the world.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is certainly not the great American novel. It is far from the best-selling American novel. But for a long time it was surely the most significant American novel.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was the daughter, sister, and wife of Protestant clergymen. Her father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, was a Calvinist minister who took the family to Cincinnati, where he headed a new seminary. There Harriet Beecher met and married Calvin Stowe, a professor of biblical literature. The seminary was a center of abolitionist sentiment, and a trip to nearby Kentucky provided the young woman with her only firsthand glimpse of slavery. In 1850, her husband took a teaching job at Bowdoin College in Maine, and there, after putting her children to bed at night, Stowe followed her family’s urgings to write about the evils of slavery.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly first appeared in serial form in the National Era, an abolitionist journal. In 1852 a Boston publisher brought out the book in its complete form. Simplistic and overly melodramatic, the novel was also deeply affecting. The plot attempted to depict the lives of slaves and slaveholders through three primary characters: Eliza, a slave who wants to keep her child who is about to be sold off, and sets off in search of the Underground Railroad; Eva, the angelic but sickly daughter of a New Orleans plantation owner; and Uncle Tom, the noble slave sold to a series of owners, but who retains his dignity through all the degradations he suffers in hopes of being reunited with his family. That family, living together in Tom’s idealized cabin on a Kentucky farm, represented the humanity of slaves, depicting them as husbands and wives, parents and children, in stark counterpoint to the common image of slaves as mere drudges.

Many of the book’s characters were simply caricatures calculated to jolt tears from even the most heartless. But the book contained unforgettable images and scenes, perhaps the most famous of which was the picture of the barefoot Eliza, her child in her arms, leaping from one ice floe to another across the frozen Ohio River to escape a ruthless slave trader. There was the cherubic child Eva, trying to bring out the good in everyone in a weepy death scene; the vicious plantation owner, Simon Legree—pointedly written as a transplanted Yankee—vainly trying to break the will and spirit of Tom; and Uncle Tom himself, resilient and saintly, the novel’s Christlike central character, beaten by Legree but refusing to submit to overseeing the other slaves.

The reaction of the public—North, South, and worldwide—was astonishing. Sales reached 300,000 copies within a year. Foreign translations were published throughout Europe, and sales soon afterward exceeded 1.5 million copies worldwide, a staggering number of books for the mid-nineteenth century, when there were no paperbacks or big bookstore chains. A dramatic version played on stages around the world, making Stowe one of the most famous women in the world, although not necessarily wealthy; pirated editions were commonplace. The theatrical presentation also spawned a brand of popular minstrel entertainments called Tom Shows, which provided the basis for the use of Uncle Tom as a derisive epithet for a black man viewed by other blacks as a shuffling lackey to whites.

In a time when slavery was discussed with dry legalisms and code words like “states’ rights” and “popular sovereignty,” this book personalized the question of slavery as no amount of abolitionist literature or congressional debate had. For the first time, thousands of whites got some taste of slavery’s human suffering. In the South, there was outraged indignation. Yet even there the book sold out. Stowe was criticized as naive or a liar. In one infamous incident, she received an anonymous parcel containing the ear of a disobedient slave. Faced with the charge that the book was deceitful, Stowe answered with A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which provided documentation that every incident in the novel had actually happened.

In 1862, Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe and reportedly said, “So you’re the little woman that wrote the book that made this great war.” The copies sold can be counted, but the emotional impact can’t be calculated so easily. It is safe to say that no other literary work since 1776, when Tom Paine’s Common Sense incited a wave of pro-independence fervor, had the political impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

What forced the Republicans to start a new political party?

After Polk left the White House, America was cursed by a string of presidents who were at best mediocre and at worst ineffectual or incompetent. Polk’s successor in the White House, Zachary Taylor, had enormous battlefield experience but was ill prepared for the political wars of his administration. Before he had a chance to grow in office, he died of cholera in 1850 and was succeeded by Vice President Millard Fillmore (1800–74). Overshadowed by the congressional giants of his time—Webster, Clay, and Calhoun—Fillmore made little impact in his abbreviated administration other than by winning passage of the Compromise of 1850 and dispatching Commodore Matthew C. Perry to open trade and diplomatic relations with Japan, a further extension of the Manifest Destiny mood that had spilled past the California coast to overseas expansionism.

The campaign of 1852 brought another ineffectual leader to the White House in Franklin Pierce (1804–69), and his election was symptomatic of the country’s problems. The two major parties, Whig and Democrat, were fracturing over slavery and other sectional conflicts. Having once been a significant third-party factor, the Free Soil Party, which had opposed the Compromise of 1850, was leaderless. Looking for the battle-hero charm to work once more, the Whigs put up General Winfield Scott, the commander during the Mexican War. But this time the charm had worn out. A northern Democrat taking a southern stand, Pierce outpolled Scott easily, but in his attempts to appease southern Democrats, he lost northern support and any hope of holding the middle ground against the two ends.

The election results meant political chaos. The Whigs were in a tailspin, no longer led by Clay and Webster, the two congressional masters who once gave the party its strength. Northern Democrats, rapidly outnumbered by the growing ranks of southerners in their party, were being pushed out. Out of the chaos came a new alliance. A series of meetings, the first occurring in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854, resulted in the birth of a new party known as the Republicans. A group of thirty congressmen adopted this party label on May 9, 1854. Although the Republicans made antislavery claims that attracted former Free Soilers and other antislavery groups, the party’s opposition to extending slavery beyond its existing boundaries came from economic and political reasoning rather than from moral outrage. Essentially, the party appealed to the free, white workingman. Its basic tenet was that the American West must be open to free, white labor. Not only were the Republicans opposed to slaves in the West; they wanted all blacks kept out. This was hardly the ringing message of morality that we tend to associate with the antislavery movement, but it was a message that appealed to many in the North. In 1854 the Republicans won 100 seats in Congress. Just six years after the party was born, it would put its first president into the White House.

Why was Kansas “bloody”?

In 1854, Dorothy and Toto wouldn’t have recognized Kansas. The next battlefield in the free-slave conflict, the Kansas Territory was where the debate moved from harsh rhetoric to bloodshed in what might be called the first fighting of the Civil War. At the heart of the hostilities was the long-debated question of whether slavery should be extended into new territory. Convinced that the North was trying to overwhelm them economically and politically, southerners believed the answer to the question was new slave territory. Behind that question, however, were old-fashioned greed and political ambition.

In 1854, Stephen Douglas (1813–61), the Democratic senator from Illinois who had pushed through the Compromise of 1850, wanted to organize new territory in the West that would become Kansas and Nebraska. His motive was simple: he was a director of the Illinois Central Railroad and a land speculator. The new territory would open the way for railroad development, with Chicago as its terminus. But Kansas would lie above the line marking slavery’s boundary under the Missouri Compromise and would have to be free. To win approval for the new territory, Douglas bargained with southern Democrats who would not vote for a new free territory. Looking to a presidential run in 1856, for which he would need southern support, Douglas offered a solution. To win over southerners, he agreed to support repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which had governed new territories for thirty-four years. With Douglas and his southern Democratic allies, the Kansas-Nebraska Act did just that in May 1854.

The betrayal of the Missouri Compromise just about killed the Democratic Party in the North. With opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act as their cornerstone, the Republican Party mushroomed. Another new party also profited from Douglas’s bargain with the South. Born of fierce opposition to the waves of immigrants entering America, they were called Nativists, and an ugly racist streak lay beneath their dislike of foreigners and Catholics. Initially a secret society that preached the twin virtues of white Protestantism and defensive nationalism, they were called the Know-Nothings because they always answered, “I don’t know” when asked about their party. Their message struck home in the mid-1850s, and they became a powerful splinter party force, capturing a substantial number of Congressional seats and state legislatures.

With the Kansas-Nebraska Act calling for “popular sovereignty” in the territories, Kansas was flooded with groups from both sides of the slavery issue. Northerners opposed to slavery’s expansion attempted to transport antislavery settlers to Kansas to ensure that the territory would eventually vote against slavery. Enraged by this interference from the New England “foreigners,” thousands of Missourians called Border Ruffians poured across the line into Kansas to tip the balance in favor of slavery in the territory. In an illegal and rigged election, the pro-slave Ruffians won, but antislavery forces refused to concede defeat and set up a provisional free state government in Topeka.

President Pierce denounced this government, giving the pro-slave forces justification for an offensive. And the first blow in the Civil War was struck in May 1856 when the town of Lawrence, established as an antislavery center, was sacked by pro-slave forces. Three days later in retaliation, a fanatical abolitionist named John Brown attacked a pro-slavery town on Pottawatomie Creek, slaughtering five settlers in the night. These attacks brought Kansas to a state of chaos. By October 1856, some 200 people had died in the fighting in Bloody Kansas and President Pierce’s mishandling of the Kansas fighting left him without support.

The political disarray produced another weak president in James Buchanan (1791–1868). Ignoring the ineffectual Pierce, the Democrats turned to Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan, a Democratic Party loyalist whose chief political asset seemed to be that he was minister to England during the Kansas furor, and couldn’t be blamed for it. In fact, he said little during the campaign, prompting one Republican senator to say that there was no such person as Buchanan—that “he was dead of lockjaw.”

Gaining popular strength as blood was spilled in Kansas, the Republicans took a page from the old Whig playbook and chose the Pathfinder, John C. Frémont, the celebrated western explorer and high priest of Manifest Destiny who had led the way to California, as its 1856 standard-bearer. Like the Whig generals before him, Frémont was a military man with no political experience, although his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, was one of the most powerful men in Congress. The Pathfinder’s campaign slogan was simple: “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Frémont.”

The Know-Nothings or American Nativists, also bolstered by the Kansas debacle, sent up former president Millard Fillmore. Pledging secession if the Republican Frémont was elected, southern Democrats forced preservation of the Union to the forefront of the election. Their threat carried some weight. With only 45 percent of the popular vote, Buchanan was elected as Frémont (33 percent) and Fillmore (22 percent) split the rest of the vote. The last of the Democratic heirs to Andrew Jackson, Buchanan was perhaps the weakest, most ineffectual of all the prewar presidents. Inaugurated in 1857, James Buchanan was the last president born in the eighteenth century, the oldest president at his inauguration (until Ronald Reagan in 1981), and the nation’s only bachelor president. (That distinction has inspired a century and a half of speculation. Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who is openly gay, once described Buchanan as the nation’s only homosexual president. Buchanan’s orphaned niece, Harriet Lane, then in her twenties, served as his official hostess and there were also whispers of a relationship between them, as well as speculation about Buchanan’s frequent visits to a well-known widow, Mrs. Rose Greenhow, who lived across the street from the White House and was arrested during the Civil War as a Confederate spy. But no evidence of Buchanan’s sexual preferences has ever been offered.) Though Buchanan pledged noninterference and popular sovereignty, it was too late for these empty slogans.

AMERICAN VOICES

ROBERT E. LEE, in a letter to his wife Mary Custis Lee (December 1856):

In this enlightened age there are few, I believe, but will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it, however, a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, and while my feelings are strongly interested in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are stronger for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race, and I hope, will prepare and lead them to better things. [Emphasis added.]

This letter was written some four years before Robert E. Lee (1807–70) was appointed to lead the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in April 1861. Lee had just completed three years as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and was serving in Texas. He was the son of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a famed Revolutionary War hero. His mother, Ann Carter Lee, came from the most prominent family in Virginia, and his wife, Mary Custis Lee, was a descendant of Martha Custis Washington. They were part of the Virginia slaveholding aristocracy, and during the war, their home and property in Arlington, Virginia, would be confiscated by the federal government and eventually provide the land for Arlington National Cemetery.

What was the difference between a man named Dred Scott and a mule?

Buchanan hoped the Supreme Court could settle the burning questions of slavery in the territories and reconciliation between North and South. He publicly expressed his hope that the Court would remove the burden of a solution from Congress and himself in his inaugural address on March 4, 1857. The slavery question, he said, “belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is now pending, and will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled.” But Buchanan was suffering from a terminal case of wishful thinking—or he was seriously deluded. Two days later, the Supreme Court altered the future of the debate and of the nation.

Instead of solving the problem, the court’s ruling threw gasoline on a smoldering fire. Any hopes of judicial or legislative settlement to the questions were lost in the Dred Scott decision.

The ruling came in a case brought on behalf of Dred Scott; the case was a legal odyssey that began 1834 when Dr. John Emerson joined the army as a surgeon. Emerson spent several years at a number of posts, including Illinois, Wisconsin Territory, and his home state of Missouri. During all of these moves, Dr. Emerson had been accompanied by his personal servant, Dred Scott, a slave. Emerson died in 1846, and with the help of a sympathetic lawyer, Scott sued for his freedom, claiming that because he had lived in territories where slavery was illegal (Illinois barred slavery under the Northwest Ordinance; Wisconsin under the Missouri Compromise), he was legally free. A St. Louis county court accepted Scott’s position, but the Missouri supreme court overruled this decision and remanded Scott, his wife, and their child to slavery. On appeal, the case finally went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the chief justice was Roger Taney, an eighty-year-old former slave owner and states’ rights advocate who had been appointed by President Andrew Jackson after serving as Jackson’s attorney general. He had taken the seat of John Marshall.

The Court split along regional and party lines, although Justice Robert Grier of Pennsylvania joined the majority. Letters later revealed that he had done so at the request of President Buchanan, who interfered to prevent a purely sectional decision. While each justice wrote an opinion, it was Taney’s ruling that stood as the majority decision. False in some parts, in others illogical, Taney’s ruling contained three principal points, all of them death blows to antislavery hopes. Free or slave, said Taney, blacks were not citizens; therefore, Scott had no standing before the court. Negroes, he wrote, “are so inferior that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”

Taney could have stopped there, but he went much further. Scott had never ceased to be a slave and therefore was not a citizen, but property of his owner, no different from a mule or a horse. This led to his final and most damaging conclusion. Because slaves were property, and property was protected by the Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights, Taney argued that Congress had no right to deprive citizens of their property—including slaves—anywhere within the United States. In his judgment, only a state could prohibit slavery within its boundaries. With one sweeping decision, Taney had obliterated the entire legislative history of compromises that restricted slavery, from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850.

Southerners, overjoyed by the ruling, wanted to go another step. Armed with the force of Taney’s decision, southerners were poised to question the constitutionality of the 1807 law prohibiting the slave trade itself and any laws that proscribed slavery. Conciliatory northerners thought that the Court had given its approval to the notion of popular sovereignty, allowing the states to set their own slavery policy.

But instead of giving slavery a new lease on life and destroying the Republican Party, the decision produced two unexpected results. It further split the Democrats between North and South, and it strengthened the Republicans, politically and morally. Rather than accepting Taney’s decision as a defeat for their position opposing slavery’s spread, Republicans grew more defiant. In the North and in border states, many people who had been fence-sitters on the slavery question were driven into the Republican camp. The situation got uglier when prominent Republicans charged that President Buchanan knew in advance of the Court’s ruling and had conspired with Taney to extend slavery by this decision, a conspiracy theory that won popular approval in the North and advanced the Republican cause and which later evidence would show to be completely true.

AMERICAN VOICES

CHIEF JUSTICE ROGER B. TANEY, from Dred Scott v. Sandford (March 6, 1857):

The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. The right to traffic in it, like an ordinary article of merchandise and property, was guaranteed to the citizens of the United States, in every State that might desire it, for twenty years. And the Government in express terms is pledged to protect it in all future time, if the slave escapes from his owner. . . . And no word can be found in the Constitution which gives Congress a greater power over slave property, or which entitles property of that kind to less protection than property of any other description. The only power conferred is the power coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner in his rights.

What did Lincoln and Douglas debate?

A year after the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, two men stood on a platform with Taney’s ruling hanging over their heads like a black cloud. One of them was the dapper, short, but powerfully robust Little Giant, Stephen Douglas. As he stood in the Illinois summer sun, Douglas must have known that he was one of the most powerful and well-known men in America, but that he was fighting for his political life and perhaps the future of the nation. Unable to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1852 and 1856, Douglas kept alive his hopes of making a run in 1860, believing that he could hold the Union together by a conciliatory approach to the South that would accept a moderate form of slavery through “popular sovereignty.” But before he could run for president in 1860, Douglas had to hold on to his Senate seat.

His Republican opponent seemed unimpressive. A former one-term representative, at six feet, four inches in height, Abraham Lincoln may have towered over Douglas, but he lacked the senator’s stature and clout. But Douglas was not fooled. As he commented to a friend, “He is the strong man of the party—full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd.”

Born in 1809 in Kentucky, Lincoln was the son of an illiterate pioneer farmer. At age seven, Lincoln moved with his family to Indiana, and in 1830, the Lincolns settled in southern Illinois. Upon leaving his family home, Lincoln went to New Orleans and returned to Illinois to manage a general store in New Salem. He led a detachment of Illinois militia in the Black Hawk War, but as he liked to say, fought nothing but mosquitoes. At twenty-five, Lincoln won a seat in the Illinois legislature while studying for the bar, and he became a lawyer in 1836. A Whig, Lincoln graduated to Congress in 1846 for a single term marked by his partisan opposition to “Polk’s war” in Mexico. Although he lost his seat and returned to Springfield to build his legal practice, he joined the Republican Party in 1856 and was prominent enough to win 110 votes for a vice presidential nomination at the first Republican national convention. In 1858, after delivering his “House Divided” speech to a state Republican convention in Springfield, he was the unanimous choice of the Illinois Republicans to oppose Douglas.

Feeling that his chances would be improved by head-to-head confrontation, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates at various spots around the state. With much to lose, Douglas agreed to seven such meetings. Even though the nation had plunged into a depression in 1857 after a panic in the stock market, and there were other questions of national importance, it was clear that Lincoln and Douglas would battle over one question: their views on slavery.

Each man had a simple plan of attack. Douglas would make Lincoln look like a raving abolitionist; Lincoln would depict Douglas as pro-slavery and a defender of the Dred Scott decision. In fact, Lincoln and Douglas were not far apart in their views, but their ambitions exaggerated their differences and their attacks on each other forced them into dangerous corners. Douglas was not afraid of race baiting to paint Lincoln as a radical who favored racial mixing.

This attack forced Lincoln more than once into adopting conservative language that seemed to contradict some of the opinions he had stated earlier. He opposed slavery, but wouldn’t force the states where it existed to surrender their rights. Lincoln stated that slavery would die gradually, but, when pressed, guessed it would take one hundred years to happen. And while he argued, in the words of the Constitution, that “all men are created equal,” he balked at the notion of allowing blacks the vote, jury duty, intermarriage, or even citizenship. Lincoln said, “I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

These debates paired off two men of great intellect, presence, wit, speaking ability, and political instincts. A crucial moment came when Lincoln asked Douglas if the people of a territory could exclude slavery before the territory became a state. This sprang a costly trap on Douglas. He answered that the people had the power to introduce or exclude slavery, no matter what the Supreme Court said. This was a roundabout denunciation of the Dred Scott ruling and it probably gave Douglas a temporary victory. Douglas retained his Senate seat when the Democrats maintained control of the Illinois legislature, which then selected the state’s senator. But in the long run, he had shot himself in the foot. Southern Democrats would never support a man for president who equivocated about Dred Scott.

Lincoln lost the election, but it did him no harm. In fact, it increased his national visibility tremendously. With the Democrats further fracturing along North-South lines, the Republicans were beginning to feel confident about their chances in the presidential campaign of 1860. And Abraham Lincoln had the look of a candidate who might be able to win the White House for them.

AMERICAN VOICES

LINCOLN’S “House Divided” speech at Springfield, Illinois (June 17, 1858):

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.

Why did John Brown attack a federal arsenal?

Debates, antislavery novels, abolitionist conventions, Congress, and the Supreme Court had all failed. Some said action was needed. And the man shouting loudest for action was John Brown (1800–59). Viewed through history as a lunatic, psychotic, fanatic, visionary, and martyr, Brown came from a New England abolitionist family, several of whom were quite insane. A failure in most of his undertakings, he had gone to Kansas with some of his twenty-two children to fight for the antislavery cause, and gained notoriety for an attack that left five pro-slavery settlers hacked to pieces.

After the massacre at Pottawatomie, Brown went into hiding, but he had cultivated wealthy New England friends who believed in his violent rhetoric. A group known as the Secret Six formed to fund Brown’s audacious plan to march south, arm the slaves who would flock to his crusade, and establish a black republic in the Appalachians to wage war against the slaveholding South. Brown may have been crazy, but he was not without a sense of humor. When President Buchanan put a price of $250 on his head, Brown responded with a bounty of $20.50 on Buchanan’s.

Among the people Brown confided in was Frederick Douglass; Brown saw Douglass as the man slaves would flock to, a “hive for the bees.” But the country’s most famous abolitionist attempted to dissuade Brown, not because he disagreed with violence but because he thought Brown’s chosen target was suicidal. Few volunteers answered Brown’s call to arms, although Harriet Tubman signed on with Brown’s little band. She fell sick, however, and was unable to join the raid.

On October 16, 1859, Brown, with three of his sons and fifteen followers, white and black, attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on the Potomac River not far from Washington, D.C. Taking several hostages, including one descendant of George Washington, Brown’s brigade occupied the arsenal. But no slaves came forward to join them. The local militia was able to bottle Brown up inside the building until federal marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart arrived and captured Brown and the eight men who had survived the assault.

Within six weeks Brown was indicted, tried, convicted, and hanged by the state of Virginia, with the full approval of President Buchanan. But during the period of his captivity and trial, this wild-eyed fanatic underwent a transformation of sorts, becoming a forceful and eloquent spokesman for the cause of abolition.

While disavowing violence and condemning Brown, many in the North came to the conclusion that he was a martyr in a just cause. Even peaceable abolitionists who eschewed violence, such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, overlooked Brown’s homicidal tendencies and glorified him. Thoreau likened Brown to Christ; Emerson wrote that Brown’s hanging would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

The view in the South, of course, was far different. Fear of slave insurrection still ran deep, and the memory of Nat Turner (see Chapter 3) remained fresh. To southern minds, John Brown represented Yankee interference in their way of life taken to its extreme. Even conciliatory voices in the South turned furious in the face of the seeming beatification of Brown. When northerners began to glorify Brown while disavowing his tactics, it was one more blow forcing the wedge deeper and deeper between North and South.

AMERICAN VOICES

JOHN BROWN at his execution:

I am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.

Why did the southern states secede from the United States?

Within days of Lincoln’s election in 1860, the South Carolina legislature voted to secede from the Union. In his final message to Congress, lame-duck president Buchanan stressed that states had no right to secede, but having always favored the southern cause, Buchanan did nothing to stop such an action. In South Carolina, local militia began to seize the federal forts in Charleston’s harbor. Buchanan attempted weakly to reinforce Fort Sumter, the last Charleston fort in federal hands, but the supply ship turned back. (On leaving the White House, Buchanan is supposed to have told Lincoln, “My dear sir, if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [his Pennsylvania home], you are a happy man indeed.”

Before Lincoln was inaugurated, five more states seceded, and in February 1861, these seven states, all from what is called the “lower South” (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas), formed the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis (1808–89), U.S. senator from Mississippi, was elected president. By the time the war began, the first seven states of the Confederacy would be joined by four more: Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

On March 4, 1861, after secretly slipping into Washington to foil an assassination plot that had been uncovered, Lincoln was inaugurated. In one of history’s great ironies, the oath of office was administered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, which had greatly contributed to Lincoln’s election.

For years, secession had been held out as a blustering threat that both sides believed would never be used. Why did it finally happen? There were many factors: the widespread southern feeling that the South was being overpowered by northern political, industrial, banking, and manufacturing strength; the fear that the southern way of life was threatened by northern control of Congress; race-baiting hysteria that southern editorialists and politicians fanned with talk of black control of the South and widespread intermarriage and rape of southern white womanhood. Typical of the rhetoric at the time were these comments: “Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter? In ten years or less our children will be the slaves of negroes.” A South Carolina Baptist preacher said, “If you are tame enough to submit, abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” And, “Submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!! . . . Better ten thousand deaths than submission.”

All these disparate emotions and political views coalesced in the slavery issue. In the southern view, secession was the last resort to block emancipation. Faced with a legislative confrontation in which its political power was diminishing, the South resorted to the one power it possessed to control its destiny: leaving the Union.

What cannot be overlooked in any discussion of political, social, and economic reasons for the South’s breaking away are human nature and historical inevitability. History has repeatedly shown that a more powerful force—in this case the North—will attempt to overwhelm a weaker one for its own interests. For those white southerners who held no slaves—and they were a majority—there was the common denominator of fear. Fear that Lincoln, the Republicans, and the abolitionist Yankees who owned the banks and the factories that set the prices for their crops would make them the slaves of free blacks. Human nature dictates that people who are pushed to the wall either break or push back. To ask why cooler heads did not prevail and settle these questions amicably overlooks the character of the South—proud, independent, individualistic, loyal to the land, and even chivalrous. For such people, a stubborn refusal to submit was the answer. As the new president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, put it, “Will you be slaves or be independent? Will you consent to be robbed of your property?” To Davis, submission meant the loss of liberty, property, and honor itself.

Given the social, economic, historical, social, and psychological reasons behind secession, there is another issue that is often overlooked: the two sides were not made up of two monolithic points of view—pro-slavery, anti-Union secessionists in the South, and abolitionist, pro-Union forces in the North. That they were is a myth and a vast oversimplification. After the first seven states seceded, there were still eight slave states left, and attempts were being made in Washington to craft some compromise to keep the Union intact. Did all southerners want to leave the Union? Hardly. While the lower South states where slavery was more deeply entrenched were solidly secessionist, according to James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, the voters in Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri had elected a majority of pro-Unionists to state conventions that would decide the question. In North Carolina and Tennessee, the voters had rejected secession conventions entirely. Conventions in Missouri and Arkansas rejected secession. Even in Texas, Governor Sam Houston, the greatest hero of Texas independence, opposed secession. The Texas secession deposed him as governor. (It may be stating the obvious, but blacks and women did not figure into these votes.) That is one reason it is more appropriate to call the two sides Union and Confederacy, instead of North and South.

Why didn’t the North allow the South to go its own way? Some people, including such prominent abolitionist voices as New York newspaperman Horace Greeley, argued that the North should do just that, although he may have believed that the southern states would not actually go through with it. Hardcore abolitionists were glad that the slaveholders had broken the “covenant with death,” as some of them, like Garrison, called the Constitution. But if the seceding states were permitted to go, it would mean the end of the United States of America as it was created in the Declaration and the Constitution. The result would be anarchy. The practical result would be economic dislocation and international weakness that could only result in the collapse of the nation’s institutions.

There were certainly deep philosophical and patriotic reasons that many people had for wanting to preserve the Union. But to most northerners, the issue was more practical: simple economics. In his prizewinning book The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand sums up the prewar attitudes of a great many Americans in the North: “We think of the Civil War as a war to save the Union and to abolish slavery, but before the fighting began most people regarded these as incompatible ideals. Northerners who wanted to preserve the union did not wish to see slavery extended into the territories; some of them hoped it would wither away in the states where it persisted. But many Northern businessmen believed that losing the South would mean economic catastrophe, and many of their employees believed that freeing the slaves would mean lower wages. They feared secession far more than they disliked slavery, and they were unwilling to risk the former by trying to pressure the South into giving up the latter.”

AMERICAN VOICES

From LINCOLN’S first inaugural address
(March 4, 1861):

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous question of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The 1860 Census

History doesn’t show whether London’s touts laid odds on the war’s outcome. On paper, as they say in sports, this contest looked like a mismatch. About the only thing the South seemed to have going for it was a home-field advantage. Looking at numbers alone, the South’s decision and fortunes seemed doomed from the outset. But as the history of warfare has consistently proven, Davids often defeat Goliaths—or, at the least, make them pay dearly for their victories. The South needed no better example than the patriots who had defeated England in the Revolution.

UNION

• Twenty-three states, including California, Oregon, and the four slaveholding “border states” of Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland, and seven territories. (West Virginia would join the Union in 1863.)

• Population: 22 million (4 million men of combat age).

• Economy: 100,000 factories.

1.1 million workers.

20,000 miles of railroad (70 percent of U.S. total; 96 percent of all railroad equipment).

$189 million in bank deposits (81 percent of U.S. total bank deposits).

$56 million in gold specie.

CONFEDERACY

• Eleven states.

• Population: 9 million (3.5 million slaves; only 1.2 million men of combat age).

• Economy: 20,000 factories.

101,000 workers.

9,000 miles of railroad.

$47 million in bank deposits.

$27 million in gold specie.

In addition, the North vastly outproduced the South in agricultural products and livestock holdings (except asses and mules). The only commodity that the South produced in greater quantities than the North was cotton, raised by slave labor. The North had the means to increase its wartime supplies and ship them efficiently by rail. The South would have to purchase weapons, ships, and arms from foreign sources, exposing itself to a Union naval blockade.

On the South’s side of the balance sheet were several small but significant factors. The U.S. Army was largely comprised of and led by southerners who immediately defected to the South’s cause. The armies of the North were largely going to be made up of conscripts from urban areas, many of them immigrants who spoke little or no English, were less familiar with arms and tactics, and would be fighting on “foreign” turf for the dubious goals, in their minds, of “preserving the Union” and stopping the spread of slavery. All of this gave the southern armies an immediate advantage in trained soldiers and command leadership. In addition, the war would be fought primarily in the South. All the advantages of fighting at home—familiarity with terrain, popular partisan support, the motivation of defending the homeland—which had contributed to the American defeat of the British in the Revolution, were on the side of the Confederacy.

What was the difference between the Confederate and U.S. constitutions?

One week after Lincoln’s inaugural address, on March 11, the Confederacy adopted a constitution. Given the long-held arguments that the crisis was over such issues as federal power and states’ rights, and not slavery, it might be assumed that the new Confederate nation adopted some very different form of government, perhaps more like the Articles of Confederation, under which the states operated before the Constitution was adopted.

In fact, the Constitution of the Confederate States of America was based almost verbatim on the U.S. Constitution. There were, however, several significant but relatively minor differences, as well as one big difference:

• The preamble added the words, “each State acting in its sovereign and independent character,” and instead of forming “a more perfect Union,” it was forming “a permanent federal government.” It also added an invocation to “Almighty God” absent from the original (see Chapter 3: “What three-letter word is not in the Constitution?”).

• It permitted a tariff for revenue but not for protection of domestic industries, though the distinction between the two was unclear.

• It altered the executive branch by creating a presidency with a single six-year term, instead of (then) unlimited four-year terms. However, the presidency was strengthened with a line item veto with which certain parts of a budget can be removed by the president. (Many U.S. presidents of both parties have argued for the line item veto as a means to control congressional spending. A line item veto was finally passed in 1996 and used first by President Bill Clinton. However, in 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the line item veto was unconstitutional.)

• The major difference between the two constitutions regarded slavery. First, the Confederate version didn’t bother with neat euphemisms (“persons held in service”) but simply and honestly called it slavery. While it upheld the ban on the importation of slaves from abroad, the Confederate constitution removed any restrictions on slavery. Slavery was going to be protected and extended into any new territory the Confederacy might acquire.

In other words, while “states’ rights” is a powerful abstraction, and the back-and-forth between federal power and the power of the states has been a theme throughout American history, there was really only one right that the southern states cared about. Examining the speeches by southern leaders (see Calhoun above) and the Confederate constitution itself underscores the fact that the only right in question was the right to continue slavery without restriction, both where it already existed and in the new territories being opened up in the West.

MILESTONES IN THE CIVIL WAR

1861

April 12 The war officially begins when South Carolina militia forces commanded by General Pierre G. T. Beauregard (1818–93), second in the West Point class of 1838, bombard Fort Sumter, the federal garrison in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. Lacking sufficient supplies, the fort’s commander surrenders.

April 15 Declaring a state of “insurrection,” Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers for three months’ service. Lincoln rejects the suggestion that black volunteers be accepted.

April 17 Virginia secedes, the eighth and most influential state to do so. Poorly defended, Washington, D.C., lies but a hundred miles from Richmond, seat of the Confederacy. From the White House, Lincoln can see Confederate flags flying over Arlington, Virginia.

April 19 In Baltimore, crowds sympathetic to the Confederacy stone Union troops marching to reinforce the capital; four soldiers are killed, the first casualties of the war. President Lincoln orders a naval blockade of southern ports. The blockade will prevent cotton, the South’s principal cash crop, from being shipped to Europe and limit imports of munitions and other supplies crucial to the South’s war effort. The Union navy is small at the time, and many of its commanders and sailors are southerners who defect, but the American merchant marine is powerful, and merchant ships are pressed into service. Coupled with a major shipbuilding effort, the navy soon has hundreds of ships—including the first generation of ironclad warships—available to enforce the blockade, making this strategy a significant element of the Union’s eventual victory.

At the suggestion of General Winfield Scott, the seventy-five-year-old, arthritic, and overweight commander of the U.S. Army, Lincoln asks Robert E. Lee (1807–70) to take field command of the Union forces. Instead, Lee resigns his U.S. Army commission on April 20 and assumes a commission in the Confederate army. Torn over the oath he took upon entering the United States Army, Lee decides he cannot take up arms against his home state of Virginia.

Lee is not alone. Many of the battle-tested commanders in the U.S. Army are southerners who join the Confederate forces. In the war’s early period, the Union armies will be led by generals who are political appointees. This disparity in leadership quality is a major factor in keeping the Confederacy’s military hopes alive and prolonging the war.

May 6 Arkansas and Tennessee secede, the ninth and tenth states to join the Confederacy, although the eastern parts of Tennessee remain loyal to the Union and contribute troops to Union armies.

May 13 British queen Victoria announces Great Britain’s neutrality in the conflict. Although the Confederacy is not recognized diplomatically, it is given “belligerent status,” meaning British merchants could trade with the Confederate States.

May 20 North Carolina secedes, the eleventh and final Confederate state. It will suffer the heaviest death toll of any Confederate state.

May 24 Union troops move into Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Elmer Ellsworth, a close friend of Lincoln’s, becomes the first combat fatality of the war. He is shot while removing a Confederate flag from a hotel roof. The hotel keeper who shot him, James T. Jackson, is killed by Union troops. Both men become martyrs to their respective sides.

July 2 Lincoln authorizes the suspension of the constitutional right of habeas corpus.

July 21 The First Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas). In Virginia, Confederate armies under Generals Joseph E. Johnston (1807–91) and Beauregard rout Union troops. Poor Union generalship is largely to blame, a problem that bedevils the Union war effort as Lincoln searches for effective commanders. During the fighting, Confederate General Thomas J. Jackson (1824–63), West Point class of 1846 and a professor of military tactics and natural philosophy at Virginia Military Institute, is given the nickname Stonewall for his leadership of the stand made by his troops that turned the tide of battle.

August 5 After the crushing defeat at Bull Run, the Union realizes that this is not going to be a ninety-day war. To pay for the war, Congress passes the first income tax law, and enlistment periods are increased from three months to two years.

August 10–30 In the West, Union forces are defeated at Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, and one of the Union’s most experienced commanders, General Frémont, the Pathfinder, withdraws, surrendering much of Missouri, a border state that had not joined the Confederacy. To reverse his military losses, Frémont declares martial law and announces that the slaves of secessionists are free. Lincoln requests that this order be withdrawn, but Frémont refuses, and Lincoln removes him from command.

October 21 Battle of Ball’s Bluff (Virginia). Another rout of Union forces, with some 1,900 Union troops killed.

November 1 Lincoln forces aging General Winfield Scott to retire, and replaces him with George B. McClellan (1826–85) as general-in-chief.

1862

January 11 Edwin Stanton replaces Simon Cameron as war secretary. Cameron’s War Department had been riddled by corruption and mismanagement.

January 27 Lincoln issues General War Order Number 1, calling for a Union offensive; McClellan ignores the order.

January 30 The Union ironclad ship Monitor is launched.

February 6 Opening a Union offensive in the West, General Ulysses S. Grant (1822–85) initiates a campaign in the Mississippi Valley, capturing Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Ten days later, Grant takes Fort Donelson, near Nashville.

February 25 Nashville, Tennessee, surrenders to Union troops, and the city remains in Union control for the rest of the war.

March 9 In the first battle between two ironclad ships, the Union Monitor engages the Confederate Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimac) off Hampton Roads, Virginia. The battle is inconclusive, but the Virginia is scuttled to prevent her capture.

March 11 Annoyed at McClellan’s inaction, Lincoln removes him as general-in-chief, replacing him with General Henry W. Halleck, but makes him head of the Army of the Potomac.

April 4 The Union Army of the Potomac begins the Peninsular Campaign aimed at Richmond, capital of the Confederacy. Stonewall Jackson will successfully tie up these Union troops for two months.

April 6–7 Battle of Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee). Confederate forces under General Albert S. Johnston (1803–62) attack Grant’s army. Union forces are nearly defeated, but reinforcements arrive and drive off the Confederate army. Losses are staggering: 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers are killed or wounded in the two days of fighting; the combined losses are more than the total American casualties in the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War put together.

April 16 President Jefferson Davis signs the Confederate Conscription Act, the first military draft in American history.

April 25 The important port city of New Orleans, Louisiana, surrenders to Union Flag Officer David Farragut. Pushing north on the Mississippi River, Farragut captures Natchez, Mississippi, on May 12.

May 4–14 In Virginia, McClellan’s army takes Yorktown, Williamsburg, and the White House, only twenty miles from Richmond. But in spite of his numerical superiority, the overcautious McClellan halts to await reinforcements instead of pressing the offensive.

June 2 Robert E. Lee takes command of the Confederate Armies of Northern Virginia.

June 6 Memphis, Tennessee, falls to Union forces.

June 25–July 2 The Seven Days’ Battles. Lee attacks McClellan and eventually drives him away from Richmond. The Peninsular Campaign, which might have captured Richmond and ended the war, is over.

July Congress passes a second Confiscation Act that frees the slaves of all rebels. It also authorizes the acceptance of black recruits.

August 9 Battle of Cedar Mountain (Virginia). Confederate forces under Stonewall Jackson defeat Union troops.

August 30 Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas). Confederate generals Lee, Jackson, and James Longstreet (1821–1904) defeat Union forces under General John Pope (1822–92), forcing Union troops to evacuate all the way back to Washington. In less than a month, Lee has pushed two Union armies twice the size of his from the gates of Richmond all the way back to the Union capital. Pope is sacked and McClellan is reinstated. Pope is sent west to Minnesota to quell an Indian uprising there.

September 17 Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg, Maryland). With Pope’s retreat, Lee takes the offensive, but in one of those small moments that alter history, a copy of his orders falls into Union hands, allowing McClellan to anticipate Lee’s strategy. In the single bloodiest day of the war, McClellan’s Union forces meet Lee’s advancing army. The dead and wounded exceed 10,000 for both sides. Lee pulls back, his invasion blunted, but McClellan fails to pursue the retreating Confederate army. The battle is a critical turning point. With Lee’s offensive stalled, the likelihood of European recognition of the Confederacy is sharply reduced.

September 22 With the Union success at Antietam, Lincoln feels he can issue the Emancipation Proclamation from a position of strength. The proclamation is published in northern newspapers the following day.

By itself, the Emancipation Proclamation doesn’t free a single slave, but does change the character and course of the war. Lincoln’s contemporary critics and cynical modern historians point to the fact that Lincoln freed only the slaves of the Confederacy, not those in border states or territories retaken by Union forces; as one newspaper of the day comments, “The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”

Lincoln’s position is that under his war powers he can legally free only those slaves in rebel-held territory; it is up to Congress or the states to address the question of universal emancipation. But abolitionist voices, such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, welcome Lincoln’s decision.

In the Confederacy, of course, the proclamation simply seems to confirm what secessionists have always believed: that Lincoln plans to force them to surrender slavery, a right they believe to be theirs, constitutionally granted and protected. They also see the proclamation as an incitement to slave rebellion, and stiffen their resolve to defend the South against Yankee encroachment.

The proclamation produces two other immediate results. First, because of it, France and England end a tense diplomatic dance, finally resolving not to recognize the Confederacy. To do so would endorse slavery, which is illegal and politically unpopular in both countries. Second, in the North, the proclamation has the effect of making the war considerably less popular. White workers, who were volunteering freely when the cause was the Union’s preservation, are less interested in freeing slaves who they think will overrun the North, taking jobs and creating social havoc. The serious decline in enlistments forces passage of the Conscription Act in March 1863, which applies to all men between twenty and forty-five—unless they are wealthy enough to pay a substitute—and later leads to violent anticonscription reaction.

November 5 Annoyed that McClellan did not follow Lee after Antietam, Lincoln relieves him as the head of the Army of the Potomac and he is replaced by Ambrose Burnside, with disastrous results. General Burnside (1824–81) had enjoyed early successes in devising an amphibious assault on the North Carolina coastline, but when it comes to command of the entire army, even Burnside feels he is out of his depth. He will soon be proved correct. McClellan returns to New Jersey and does not command again, but he will run against Lincoln in 1864.

December 13 Battle of Fredericksburg (Virginia). Despite an overwhelming numerical advantage, General Burnside’s Union troops are routed by Lee with severe casualties, losing 12,000 to the Confederates’ 5,000.

“IN GOD WE TRUST”

The motto was added to money in 1862 under the Legal Tender Act by Salmon Chase. Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Chase was a devout Epsicopalian and abolitionist who sang hymns as he bathed. These “greenbacks” were the first federal paper money. (Previously states had issued paper currency.) Although no politician would dare to contest these words today, one popular American president later wanted to do away with the words. Theodore Roosevelt, as religiously moral and Christian-minded as any president America has ever seen, wanted to remove the slogan for seemingly opposite viewpoints. As a constitutional conservative, he believed that the words were unconstitutional in that they established a religion in opposition to the First Amendment. As a very devout Christian, Teddy Roosevelt also believed putting God on the money was a sacrilege.

1863

January 1 The Emancipation Proclamation is formally issued. The proclamation frees only those slaves in rebel states with the exception of some counties and parishes already under Union control. In England, the news is greeted by mass rallies that celebrate emancipation.

January 3 Battle of Murfreesboro (or Stone River, Tennessee). The Union advance toward Chattanooga, a southern rail center, is checked after a costly draw.

January 4 Grant is ordered by Lincoln to repeal his General Order Number 11, which had expelled Jews from his area of operations. Grant had issued the order because he thought that most of the merchants following his army and charging excessive prices were Jewish. (He was incorrect.)

January 25 The hapless General Burnside is replaced as head of the Army of the Potomac by General Joseph Hooker (1814–79). Despite his failure as a military leader, Burnside earns historical notoriety for his bushy “muttonchop” facial hair, which will come to be called, in a reversal of his name, “sideburns.”

January 26 The secretary of war authorizes the governor of Massachusetts to recruit black troops. While blacks fought in every previous American war, a 1792 law barred them from the army. The 54th Massachusetts Volunteers is the first black regiment recruited in the Union. Eventually, 185,000 black soldiers in the Union army will be organized into 166 all-black regiments. Nearly 70,000 black soldiers come from the states of Louisiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. While most are pressed into support units forced into the most unpleasant tasks, and are paid less than their white counterparts, black troops are involved in numerous major engagements, and sixteen black soldiers will receive the Medal of Honor. Their impact is even greater in the navy, where one in four sailors is black; four of these will win Medals of Honor.

March 3 Lincoln signs the first Conscription Act. Enrollment is demanded of males between the ages of twenty and forty-five; substitutes can be hired or payments of $300 can be used for an exemption.

May 2–4 Battle of Chancellorsville (Virginia). In another devastating battle, losses for both sides exceed 10,000 men. Lee’s army defeats Hooker’s Army of the Potomac. During the fighting, Stonewall Jackson leads a daring rear-end attack, forcing the Union withdrawal. But as he returns to Confederate lines, he is mistakenly shot by a Confederate soldier and dies of pneumonia on May 10, costing the Confederates one of their most effective field generals.

May 14 Battle of Jackson (Mississippi). Union general William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–91), named at birth for the notorious Indian chief and adding the William later, defeats the Confederates under General J. E. Johnston.

May 22 General Grant, in concert with Sherman, begins the long siege of the Confederate citadel at Vicksburg, Mississippi, the key to control of the Mississippi River.

The U.S. War Department establishes the Bureau of Colored Troops to supervise recruitment and enlistment of black soldiers.

June 22 Pro-Union West Virginia, severed from Virginia, is admitted as the thirty-fifth state, with a state constitution calling for gradual emancipation.

June 24 Planning an invasion of Pennsylvania that signals a shift in southern strategy, Lee’s army crosses the Potomac and heads toward Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with the idea that a victory there will give Lee a clear road to Washington.

June 25 General George Meade (1815–72) is put in charge of the Army of the Potomac after General Hooker is removed by Lincoln for his failure to be more aggressive. Meade begins organizing his army for the coming confrontation with Lee, who has begun an invasion of the North.

July 1–3 The Battle of Gettysburg. Confederate troops in search of shoes meet up with a detachment of Union cavalry. Reinforcements are poured in. In three days of ferocious fighting that mark the final turning point in the war, the Union army takes a strong defensive position and turns back repeated Confederate assaults. Confederate losses reach 28,000 killed, wounded, or missing, a third of the army’s effective strength, to the Union’s 23,000. Now severely undermanned, Lee retreats to Virginia, unable to press his drive against the North. His army in tatters, Lee seems ripe for picking, and Lincoln wants the remnants of the Confederate army destroyed, ending the war. But Meade, licking his own wounds, fails to press Lee, allowing him to cross the Potomac and escape safely into Virginia.

July 4 General U. S. Grant’s long siege of Vicksburg ends in victory as he demands an unconditional surrender, giving new popular meaning to his initials. More than 29,000 Confederate troops lay down their arms, and the Union now possesses complete control of the Mississippi River, effectively splitting the Confederacy in two, east from west.

July 13–16 New York’s draft riots. In New York City, resentment against the Conscription Act turns into deadly rioting in which blacks are lynched. Federal troops sent from the Gettysburg battlefield eventually quell the rioting. Similar riots occur in several major northern cities, including Boston, Rutland, Vermont, and Troy, New York. The crowd’s anger has two sources: the idea of fighting to free the slaves, and the unfairness of allowing the wealthy to avoid conscription by paying a substitute. In some northern counties, taxes are raised to pay for large numbers of substitutes so that residents of those counties will not have to fight. Many working-class men raise the slogan, “It’s a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.”

July 18 In the charge made famous by the film Glory, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers assault Fort Wagner. Protecting the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, the fort is considered nearly impregnable.

AMERICAN VOICES

LEWIS DOUGLASS, serving the 54th, writing to his fiancée before the second charge on Fort Wagner, describes the previous day’s action:

This regiment has established its reputation as a fighting regiment, not a man flinched, though it was a trying time. Men fell all around me. A shell would explode and clear a space twenty feet. Our men would close up again, but it was no use—we had to retreat, which was a very hazardous undertaking. . . . My Dear girl I hope again to see you. I must bid you farewell should I be killed. Remember if I die in a good cause, I wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops—we would put an end to this war.

Lewis Douglass was one of Frederick Douglass’s two sons serving in the 54th, which lost half its men in the assault. Despite the loss, the bravery of the regiment amazed many whites and encouraged more black regiments. Both of Douglass’s sons survived.

August 21 While most of the war is fought between organized armies, in the western states of Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas a cruel form of partisan war takes place, with its roots in the Bloody Kansas wars. Of these partisan guerrillas, the most vicious is William C. Quantrill, whose “raiders” include the psychopathic “Bloody Bill” Anderson, who carries his victims’ scalps on his saddle, and the future outlaws Jesse James and Cole Younger. With 450 men, Quantrill raids Lawrence, Kansas, and slaughters more than 150 civilians. The following October, he commits another such raid of terror in Baxter Springs, Kansas. In 1865, Quantrill will head east, intending to assassinate Lincoln, but will be killed in Kentucky by Union soldiers in May after the war’s official end.

September 19–20 The Battle of Chickamauga (Georgia). The Union armies led by Generals William Rosecrans (1819–98) and George H. Thomas (1816–70) are defeated by Confederates under General Braxton Bragg (1817–76). Once again, losses for both sides are extremely high: 16,000 Union casualties to 18,000 Confederate. The Union army retreats to Chattanooga.

October 16 Grant is given command of Union forces in the West; Grant replaces Rosecrans in Chattanooga with General George Thomas, nicknamed the Rock of Chickamauga for his heroic stand in that battle.

November 19 Dedicating a military cemetery on the notorious Pennsylvania battlefield, Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address, one of the immortal speeches in history. (Written in snatches over several days and completed the morning he delivered it, the speech was not written on the back of a letter, as myth has it.)

November 23–25 In a stunning assault, Grant sweeps up over mountains to drive General Bragg’s Confederate forces away from Chattanooga. Tennessee is again brought under Union control. Grant’s Union forces, having split the South east from west by controlling the Mississippi, can now split it horizontally with a march through Georgia to the sea that will be led by General Sherman.

December 8 Looking toward the end of the war, Lincoln offers a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction that will pardon Confederates who take an oath of loyalty.

1864

January 14 General Sherman begins his march across the South by occupying Sheridan, Mississippi. His strategy is simple—total war. Sherman either destroys or takes anything that might be used by the enemy to continue fighting. He demonstrates his planned tactics for the march ahead by burning and destroying railroads, buildings, and supplies.

March 10 His star rising after Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Grant is named commander of the Union armies, replacing General Halleck.

April 17 Grant suspends prisoner-of-war exchanges with the Confederates. His intention is to further weaken the Confederate forces. While it is effective, this strategy leads to the deaths of many Union soldiers held prisoner in overcrowded camps where food supplies are meager.

May 4 Grant begins an assault on Virginia with an army of 100,000 aimed at Lee’s Virginia army.

May 5–6 Battle of the Wilderness (Virginia). During two days of inconclusive but bloody fighting, many of the wounded on both sides die when caught by brushfires ignited by gunfire in the dense woods of the battleground.

May 8–12 Battle of Spotsylvania (Virginia). Another five days of inconclusive fighting make Grant’s plan clear: a war of attrition that will wear down Lee’s outnumbered, poorly fed, and ill-clothed forces.

May 13–15 In Georgia, with an army of 110,000, Sherman defeats General Johnston, but Johnston preserves his smaller army with a skillful retreat.

June 3 Battle of Cold Harbor (Virginia). Ignoring horrible losses, Grant continues to assault Lee’s impregnable defenses, a ghastly mistake that Grant later admits. To date, in this campaign, Grant has suffered more than 60,000 casualties, a number equal to Lee’s entire army. One southern general comments, “This is not war, this is murder.” But Grant’s costly strategy is accomplishing its purpose of wearing out Lee’s army.

June 15–18 Grant begins the long siege of Petersburg, Virginia, recalling the tactics he used earlier against Vicksburg.

June 27 Johnston’s Confederate forces turn back Sherman at Kenesaw Mountain, Georgia.

July 2–13 A year after Gettysburg, Confederate forces under General Jubal Early (1816–94) raid Maryland, heading toward Washington, D.C. With a small force, Early continues to harry Union troops in Virginia.

July 14 General Early is slowed down by Union General Lew Wallace (1827–1905). The lightly defended city of Washington is reinforced, although Early reaches the District of Columbia but then withdraws. (Later governor of New Mexico and minister to Turkey, General Wallace gains his greatest fame as the author of the novel Ben Hur.)

July 17 Despite his success at preserving his forces against Sherman’s assault, Johnston is replaced by General John B. Hood (1831–79), who attempts to take the offensive against Sherman.

July 22 General Hood’s first attack on Sherman outside Atlanta is turned back, as is a second assault six days later.

July 30 At Petersburg, General Burnside oversees the mining of Confederate fortifications. In a disastrously miscalculated explosion, his own force suffers nearly 4,000 casualties. Burnside is relieved of any command.

August 5 In a Union naval attack on the key southern port of Mobile, Alabama, Admiral David Farragut (1801–70) orders his fleet to continue to attack after mines in the harbor sink one of his ships. From the rigging of his flagship, Farragut shouts, “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!” He successfully closes the port, cutting off the South from vital supplies being smuggled in by blockade runners. Farragut is given the new rank of vice admiral, created especially for him, and ecstatic wealthy New Yorkers give him a purse of $50,000.

AMERICAN VOICES

GENERAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN, in a letter to the mayor and councilmen of Atlanta (September 1864):

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought this war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. . . . The only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.

After capturing the city, Sherman gave orders for it to be evacuated and burned.

September 2 Sherman takes Atlanta after Hood’s withdrawal. Much of the city is set on fire. With Atlanta and Mobile in Union hands, northern morale is lifted, providing Lincoln a much-needed boost in the coming election, in which Lincoln’s chances do not look good.

September 19 and October 19 Union forces under General Philip Sheridan (1831–88) twice defeat Jubal Early’s Confederates while taking heavy losses. The Confederates are driven from the Shenandoah Valley, one of their remaining supply sources.

November 8 Lincoln has been campaigning against two generals he has sacked, John C. Frémont and George McClellan. Although Frémont withdraws from the race, Lincoln wins reelection by less than a half-million popular votes, but his margin in the electoral vote is sweeping.

November 16 Sherman begins his notorious march from Atlanta to the sea at Savannah, destroying everything in his path by cutting a forty-mile-wide swath through the heart of the South, earning him the title Attila of the West in the southern press. A Confederate attempt to cut Sherman’s supply lines is crushed, effectively destroying General Hood’s army. Three days before Christmas, Sherman marches into Savannah unopposed, completing the horizontal bisection of the South. He sends Lincoln a telegram offering Savannah as a Christmas present. Of his march, Sherman comments, “We have devoured the land. . . . To realize what war is, one should follow our tracks.”

January 15 Fort Fisher, North Carolina, falls to Union land and sea forces, closing off another southern port of supply.

January 16 Sherman’s army wheels north through the Carolinas on a march as destructive as his Georgia campaign.

February 4 Robert E. Lee is named commander-in-chief of the Confederate army, accepting the post despite the seeming hopelessness of the cause.

February 17 Columbia, South Carolina, is burned; General Sherman and retreating Confederate forces are both blamed for setting the fires. A day later, Sherman occupies Charleston.

February 22 Wilmington, North Carolina, the last open southern port, falls to Union forces.

March 4 Lincoln is inaugurated for a second term.

AMERICAN VOICES

From ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S second inaugural address:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

April 1 The Battle of Five Forks (Virginia). In the last major battle of the war, General Sheridan throws back a Confederate assault.

April 2 Lee withdraws from Petersburg, ending the six-month siege. He advises President Jefferson Davis to leave Richmond. A day later, Union troops enter Petersburg and Richmond. Two days after that, Lincoln tours Richmond and sits in President Davis’s chair.

April 8 Surrounded and facing starvation, Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. At Lincoln’s request, the terms of surrender are generous, and Confederate officers and men are free to go home with their horses; officers may retain their sidearms, although all other equipment must be surrendered.

April 11 In his last public address, Lincoln urges a spirit of generous conciliation during the reconstruction.

April 14 While watching a comedy at Ford’s Theatre, Lincoln is shot and mortally wounded by the actor John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. The first president to be assassinated, Lincoln dies the following day, and Andrew Johnson, the vice president, takes the oath of office.

April 26 Booth is cornered and shot dead near Bowling Green, Virginia.

April 18 Confederate general Johnston surrenders to Sherman in North Carolina. Scattered resistance continues throughout the South for several weeks, ending in May, when Confederate general Richard Taylor surrenders to Union general Edward R. S. Canby, and General Kirby Smith surrenders western Confederate forces.

May 10 Captured in Georgia, Jefferson Davis, presumed (incorrectly) to be a conspirator in the Lincoln assassination plot, is jailed awaiting trial. Later released on bail, he is never tried. The only southern officer executed for war crimes was Major Henry Wirz, commander of the infamous Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, despite evidence showing he had tried to ease the suffering of his prisoners. In 1868, as one of his final acts in office, President Johnson grants amnesty to all southerners, including Davis, who declines to accept it.

What did the Civil War cost America?

The federal army began force reductions on April 13, 1865. According to Senate figures at the time, the Union had enlisted 2,324,516 soldiers, approximately 360,000 of whom were killed. The Confederate army peaked at about one million soldiers, with losses of some 260,000. The war cost the Union side more than $6 million and the Confederate states about half that much.

The number of war dead was equal to nearly 2 percent of the population at the time. Civilian casualties are difficult to measure, but James McPherson, the prominent Civil War historian, puts the number at more than 50,000, mostly in the South. (Using 2000 census figures of a population of some 280 million Americans, an equivalent loss today would be well more than 5.5 million dead.) Thousands more were critically wounded or disabled. A wave of syphilis, fostered by the thousands of young men who had frequented the many brothels that sprouted up in most cities during the war, was spread to many women.

But it is impossible to measure the cost in lives and dollars alone. A generation of America’s “best and brightest”—the young, well-educated, and motivated Americans on both sides—died. It is impossible to calculate the loss of their intelligence, invention, and productive potential. The deep animosity—regional and racial—that had been created in the wake of the bitter war would continue to bedevil American society and politics for most of the next 150 years.

Was Abe really honest?

After George Washington, no American president—or any American historical figure—has been draped in more mythic splendor than Abraham Lincoln. The Railsplitter. The Great Emancipator. Honest Abe. Assailed in office, nearly denied the nomination to a second term, vilified by the South, and martyred in death, Lincoln eventually came to be considered this country’s finest president. Was he?

Unlike other “log cabin” presidents of an earlier era, Lincoln was truly from pioneer family stock. His father was illiterate, his family dirt poor. After his mother’s death, his stepmother encouraged his bookishness and introduced him to the Bible. That was important. Without self-righteousness or false piety, Lincoln was a deeply spiritual man, and he needed every ounce of spiritual reserve for the trials he faced.

Lincoln was that quintessential American hero, the self-made man—reading law on his own, winning local election, gaining the Illinois bar and election to the House in 1847. He was unquestionably tall, at six feet four. And he could tell a good story around the general store—no small asset in American politics, as another, more recent president has shown. He was also honest, generally a political liability. Newsman John G. Scripps once remarked that Lincoln was “a scrupulous teller of the truth, too exact in his notions to suit the atmosphere of Washington as it now is.”

By modern American standards, Lincoln was a racist. By the standards of his day he was liberal, or, in the less polite phrase of the time, a “nigger lover.” Like other presidents who have achieved greatness, Lincoln grew in office. His grudging acceptance of slavery in the states where it existed was gradually replaced by the sentiment voiced in the Gettysburg Address, a recommitment to the Jeffersonian ideal that “all men are created equal.”

A melancholy man who suffered greatly, for both public and private reasons, Lincoln was faced with problems graver than those faced by any other president, and in his ability to bend the presidency to the exigencies of the day, he did things that modern presidents never could have done. While Congress was out of session, he created an army out of state militias, called up volunteers, blocked ports, and, most controversially of all, suspended the writ of habeas corpus in order to detain thousands without firm charges and due process of law. A breach of basic constitutional rights, this suspension was provided for, argued Lincoln, “in cases of rebellion or invasion.”

During the war, he faced opposition from one side by so-called Radical Republicans and abolitionists for his moderation toward slavery. More dangerous opposition came from the Peace Democrats, the remnants of the northern Democratic Party who were given the name Copperheads by a newspaper because they were so poisonous. Sympathetic to the South, the Copperheads wanted to stop the war and considered Lincoln a dictator for his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the draft acts, and even the Emancipation Proclamation.

Lincoln surmounted these challenges, winning the reelection that cost him his life. By the time of his assassination, Lincoln had moved from resolute commander-in-chief, prosecuting the war at horrendous costs, to healing unifier. While some called him a dictator, there is little doubt that a weaker president might have failed in the most basic test of Lincoln’s presidency—preserving the Union from dissolution.

Why did the Union win the war?

The simplest answer is that the Confederacy was fighting history, not just the Union. In many respects, the Confederate states fielded an eighteenth-century army to fight a nineteenth-century war against a twentieth-century power. And while the South fought ferociously, the numbers were finally too great for it.

Outmanned two to one, the Confederate armies were worn away by Grant’s woeful tactics of attrition. The successful blockade of southern ports reduced supplies of munitions, food, and other necessities to the point of bringing the South to starvation. The ultimate failure of the Confederacy to gain foreign recognition further weakened its prospects. The oft-cited superiority of southern military leadership overlooks two factors: the number of these commanders, like Stonewall Jackson, who died early in the conflict; and the rise of Grant and Sherman in the western war against the less brilliant Confederate commanders there. When Grant gained command of the army and Sherman began his march, their willingness to wage total war, matched with the manufacturing strength, wealth, and great population advantage of the North, simply proved too much for the South.

In retrospect, it was a war that also turned on a number of small moments, the speculative “ifs” that make history so fascinating. At a number of turning points, small things, as well as larger strategic decisions, might have changed the course of the war.

If McClellan hadn’t been given Lee’s battle plans at Antietam . . .

If Lee had listened to Longstreet at Gettysburg and attempted to outflank the Union troops . . .

If the 20th Maine hadn’t pushed back a rebel assault at Gettysburg with a bayonet charge . . .

The speculation is interesting but ultimately useless, because it didn’t happen that way, and any of those changes might simply have prolonged the inevitable.

Who killed Lincoln?

On Friday, April 14, 1865—Good Friday—Lincoln met with his cabinet and then lifted the blockade of the South. His mood was high in those days, and he was preaching moderation and reconciliation to all around him, preparing a moderate plan of reconstruction that would bring the rebellious states back into the Union fold with a minimum of recriminations and punishment. That evening he took his wife and a young couple they knew to see a play called Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in downtown Washington. The Washington policeman guarding the president left his post, either for a drink or to get a better view of the play. There was a pistol shot. Lincoln slumped over. A man jumped from the president’s box to the stage, in the process catching his spur on the bunting that draped the box and breaking his shin. He brandished his gun and shouted either “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus be it ever to tyrants.”) or “The South shall live.” Then he escaped through a back exit to a waiting horse.

A second assassin had assaulted Secretary of State William Seward at home with a knife. Attacks on General Grant and vice president Johnson were planned but never carried out. Lincoln was taken to a lodging house across the street from the theater, where he died the next morning, throwing the shocked nation into a profound grief of a kind it had never experienced before. Hated and derided during the war years by the Copperheads, Radical Republicans who thought him too moderate, and a host of other groups who found fault with him for one reason or another, Abraham Lincoln had become, in death, a hero of the entire nation. Even leaders of the Confederacy spoke of his death with regret.

Secretary of War Stanton took charge, and martial law was announced in Washington. The assassin, it was soon discovered, was John Wilkes Booth, an actor like his more famous father, Junius Brutus Booth, and his brother Edwin Booth. A fanatical supporter of the South—though he never joined the Confederate army—Booth first plotted with a small group of conspirators in a Washington boardinghouse to kidnap Lincoln. Then he planned instead to assassinate the president along with other key government figures.

An intensive, unprecedented manhunt followed in which a $50,000 reward was placed on Booth’s head and hundreds of people with any connection to the actor were arrested. Booth was finally trapped in a Bowling Green, Virginia, tobacco-drying barn on April 26 after the Union army was tipped off to his whereabouts. After Booth refused to surrender, the barn was set afire by a Union officer. Limping from his broken leg, Booth moved toward the barn door and was shot. He lived another two and a half hours; it was his twenty-seventh birthday.

A military tribunal sentenced four other captured conspirators, including boardinghouse owner Mary Surratt, to be hanged. Although conspiracy theories involving Jefferson Davis and most other prominent leaders of the Confederacy abounded in the press, they were all dismissed and disproven. Davis was captured and held for two years without trial, but eventually released to go home to write his version of events in the war. (Another more farfetched conspiracy theory had Secretary of War Stanton plotting Lincoln’s death, but it is completely unsupported by evidence.)

Must Read: April 1865: The Month That Saved America by Jay Winik.

AMERICAN VOICES

“O Captain! My Captain!” by WALT WHITMAN (from Memories of President Lincoln):

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman (1819–92) was a self-educated son of a house builder. He learned the printing trade and edited newspapers in New York and Brooklyn between 1838 and 1855, the year in which produced the 12-poem first edition of Leaves of Grass. (By the time of his death, it included more than 350 poems.) Now considered a classic of original American literature, it was not thought so in antebellum America. Reviewers were shocked by his references to anatomy and “body electric.”

During the Civil War, he served as a “wound dresser,” or nurse, to soldiers in Union hospitals and camps, and his prose reports of the carnage he witnessed are extraordinary accounts of the suffering. In addition to “O Captain,” which the public liked but critics did not, Whitman wrote “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and two other elegies to the dead Lincoln.

“I have not gained acceptance in my own times,” he said himself before his death following a series of crippling strokes. But he would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest and most original of America’s poetic voices.

What was Reconstruction?

In the aftermath of the war, the southern states were devastated—physically, economically, even spiritually. The postwar South, it has been said, was worse off than Europe after either of the twentieth-century world wars. Provisional military governors were established in the rebellious states, but Lincoln’s plans for restoring the secession states to full membership in the Union were moderate and reconciliatory. Southerners could become citizens once more by taking a simple loyalty oath. When 10 percent of the citizens of a state had taken the oath, the state could set up a government. Radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Ben Wade of Ohio, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, wanted stricter terms, and the situation was at a standstill when Lincoln died and was succeeded by Andrew Johnson (1808–75).

Johnson’s life was an incredible American success story. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, perhaps even poorer than Lincoln, Johnson was the son of a hotel porter who died when the boy was three. He never attended school, and the impoverished Johnson family indentured him to a tailor, at nine years old. He ran away six years later and set up his own tailor shop in Greenville, Tennessee, at age seventeen. At eighteen, he married his sixteen-year-old wife, Eliza, and she later taught him to read, write, and do mathematics more effectively. He entered politics on a local level and devoted his energy to the free laboring class. Although he held slaves, he had no love for the South’s planter elite. A Jackson Democrat, he served as a U.S. representative, Tennessee’s governor, and senator from Tennessee, where he was one of the architects of the Homestead Act, which granted free public land to settlers. He campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860, but he stayed loyal to the Union after Lincoln’s election, the only senator from a seceding state to remain in Congress, proclaiming in 1861, “Show me the man who makes war on the government, and fires on its vessels, and I will show you a traitor.” In 1862, he was appointed military governor of Tennessee, and in 1864, Lincoln saw Johnson as a “war Democrat,” a loyal southerner who would help win votes in the border states. The choice was not widely applauded by northern Republicans. “To think that one frail life stands between this insolent, clownish creature and the presidency! May God bless and spare Abraham Lincoln,” said the New York World in 1865. Johnson did not help his cause when, because of an extreme case of the nerves, he had a few too many whiskeys before he was sworn in as Lincoln’s vice president, resulting in a rambling, drunken speech. One of the co-conspirators in the Lincoln assassination, George Atzerodt, had been assigned to target Johnson, and he stalked the vice president, but his courage failed at the last minute.

As president after Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson favored Lincoln’s moderate approach to what he called “restoration,” which would readmit states after they had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, which had been passed in December 1865. But Johnson would butt heads with the Radical Republicans, who not only wanted retribution but wanted to maintain the control of Congress they had enjoyed during the war years, when Democrats, mostly southerners, were missing from Congress.

As the southern states gradually returned to the fold, they antagonized northerners by returning to Congress the leadership of the Confederacy, and by passing so-called Black Codes, meant to control former slaves. Obviously designed to circumvent the Thirteenth Amendment, the codes outraged the Republicans, who formed a Committee of Reconstruction that soon heard tales of violence and cruelty toward freed slaves. Congress established a Freedmen’s Bureau aimed at helping the approximately four million freed slaves, and then passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared blacks citizens and denied states the power to restrict their rights. Johnson vetoed the bill, but the Republicans had the votes to override the veto, for the first time in American history. Johnson was left weaker than ever. This override was a symbol of strength, giving Congress the upper hand in the power struggle that followed the war and leading to passage of a series of Reconstruction Acts.

The first of these acts divided the South into military regions under the control of generals. Unlike Lincoln’s proposed plan, statehood could only be attained by adopting a state constitution allowing blacks to vote, and by accepting the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended citizenship to blacks and provided for punishment of any state that denied the vote to any of its adult male citizens. (This still fell shy of barring race as a voting qualification, and women and Indians were still left on the outside looking in.)

Who celebrates Decoration Day and Juneteenth?

On May 1, 1865, a northern abolitionist named James Redpath, who had come to Charleston, South Carolina, to organize schools for freed slaves, led black children to a cemetery for Union soldiers killed in the fighting nearby to scatter flowers on their graves. According to legend, southern women had begun to do the same thing to the graves of fallen Confederate soldiers. This was the beginning of the tradition of Decoration Day, as it was known, a ceremony to honor the fallen of the war. Several towns wanted to lay claim to what would become known as Memorial Day, and Waterloo, New York, was granted the official distinction by Congress for its ceremony on May 5, 1866.

In 1866, Congress created national military cemeteries, foremost of them in Arlington, on the land confiscated from the family of Robert E. Lee. In 1866, the tradition gained new importance when General John Logan founded the Grand Army of the Republic, a powerful veterans’ organization. Logan ordered all GAR posts to decorate graves on May 30. By 1873, New York had made Memorial Day a legal holiday, and every northern state soon followed suit.

But the bitterness of the war carried over even into these solemn ceremonies. In the early days of these ceremonies, the division between North and South remained stark. In the South, women formed Ladies Memorial Associations with the purpose of disinterring soldiers in distant graves and reburying them nearer their homes. Their efforts led to Confederate Memorial Days, which varied in date from April to late May throughout the South. By the 1890s, the United Daughters of the Confederacy had taken over the task. In Arlington Cemetery in 1869, guards were placed around a handful of Confederate graves to prevent them from being decorated. Southern states kept separate memorial days, considering May 30 a “Yankee” holiday. And in 1876, a bill making the date a national holiday was defeated. (By the early twentieth century, as most veterans of the Civil War were dead, the tradition was fading. But following the two world wars, veterans’ groups successfully lobbied for a national holiday on May 30 to honor the dead in all America’s wars. In 1968, Memorial Day was made one of five “Monday” holidays, and many people simply think of it as the first official weekend of the summer vacation season now.)

At around the same time that Decoration Day ceremonies were flowering with much official support, another more grassroots tradition was taking hold. But it has yet to achieve national recognition. On June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger informed slaves in the area from the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston, Texas, that they were free. Lincoln had officially issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, but it had taken two more years of Union victories to end the war and for this news to reach slaves in remote sections of the country. According to folk traditions, many of the newly freed slaves celebrated the news with ecstasy. Many of them began to travel to other states in search of family members who had been separated from them by slave sales.

That spontaneous celebration—commonly called Juneteenth—has become an unofficial holiday celebrating emancipation in many parts of the United States.

Why was President Johnson impeached?

As the first president to take office after an assassination, Johnson encountered his next unfortunate first when he became the first president to be impeached. Under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, “the President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

What were Johnson’s “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Ostensibly the issue was a law that Congress called the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited the president from dismissing any official who had been appointed with Senate consent without first obtaining Senate approval. Challenging the law’s constitutionality, Johnson tried to dismiss War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, an ally of the Radical Republicans. The House promptly impeached him.

The equivalent of a grand jury indictment, Johnson’s impeachment meant he would be tried before the Republican-controlled Senate, with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding. Under the guise of constitutional law, this was a blatant partisan attempt by Congress to fundamentally alter the system of checks and balances. And it came remarkably close to success. On May 16, 1868, the Senate voted 35–19 in favor of conviction, but that fell one vote short of the two-thirds needed for removal of the president.

Four days later, Ulysses S. Grant was nominated by the Republicans to run for the presidency. To face the hero of the war, the Democrats chose Horatio Seymour of New York instead of the incumbent Johnson. For the remainder of his administration, Johnson was politically crippled, and the Republican Congress pressed forward with its more aggressive Reconstruction plan strengthened.

After unsuccessful tries for the Senate and House, Johnson returned to the Senate in 1875, the only former president to serve in the Senate. He survived a cholera epidemic but was never completely well again. He suffered a series of strokes and died in office a few months later. A champion of religious freedom who resented the practice of selling church pews to the wealthy, he had a Masonic funeral and was buried wrapped in an American flag with a copy of the Constitution beneath his head.

Who were the carpetbaggers?

The era of Reconstruction would prove to be a very mixed bag. Northern philanthropists opened or revitalized what would become the leading colleges of the South. More significantly, Reconstruction produced the first—albeit limited—black political power in the nation’s history. Indeed, Ulysses Grant’s margin in the popular ballot was based on the large black vote that turned out in his favor. Republican legislators who saw the full impact of the black vote rushed to provide for black suffrage with the Fifteenth Amendment, which would bar race as a condition for voting. The simple idea that blacks had any political power just a few years after they were released from slavery and declared citizens was an extraordinary achievement, if not a revolutionary one.

The underside of this achievement was the corruption of power the period produced, and the backlash it created among whites. Largely uneducated and illiterate, the newly freed blacks were ill prepared for the intricacies of constitutional government. They were ripe for exploitation by whites, some of whom came from the North and were called carpetbaggers because they traveled with all their possessions carried in a carpetbag, a type of soft luggage made of carpet material.

The traditional view has been that these carpetbaggers were charlatans who wanted to acquire power by using black votes to gain office. One such northerner was George Spencer, who made money with contraband cotton and later served in the Senate. Yet the historian Eric Foner dismisses the myth of the carpetbagger in his massive study of the period, Reconstruction. Rather than low-class manipulators, Foner demonstrates that many of those northerners who moved to the South were middle-class professionals who saw the South as a means for personal advancement and opportunity, just as others went west after the war. Of the so-called carpetbaggers, argues Foner, quite a few were idealists who had moved south before blacks got the vote.

Another maligned class was the “scalawag,” the southern-born white Republican, even more hated than carpetbaggers by southern Democrats, because they were seen as traitors to both race and region. Again, Foner says, the traditional view of the scalawags as corrupt profiteers exploiting illiterate blacks reflects more postwar antagonism than political reality.

Reconstruction, in the strict political sense of the word, had little to do with the physical rebuilding of the South. Emancipation had undone slavery, which had been the keystone of the southern economy. Now that four million slaves were free, what exactly were they free to do? Senator Thad Stevens, one of the Radical Republicans, proposed breaking up the largest plantations in the South and providing slaves with “forty acres and a mule.” But even the most progressive thinkers of the day still believed property was sacred, and the plan went nowhere. Confusion reigned as many freedmen moved to the towns, looking for work that didn’t exist. The Southern Homestead Act of 1867, which was supposed to open up public lands in the South to blacks and whites loyal to the Union, failed because the poor didn’t have even the small amount needed to buy the land. Instead, most of the land went to big speculators, lumber companies, and large plantation owners.

A gap between intent and reality quickly arose, and the sharecropping system was developed to fill that gap. It was essentially slavery under a new face. Now free blacks worked the land as tenant farmers, splitting the crop with the owner, who also provided the seed and supplies at a price he set, payable in crops. Somehow the sharecroppers never seemed to earn enough to pay off their debts to the landowners.

Another problem was capital. With the end of the war, the West again beckoned to expansionists, and northern banks were sending money west to be spent on building railroads. Without hard cash to finance rebuilding, it was difficult for the South to sustain the growth it needed. Some manufacturing centers slowly came to life, especially around the coal-rich region of Birmingham, Alabama, where steel mills grew, but their development was insignificant compared with the outburst of industrial and railroad growth in the North and West. The fact that Republicans controlled the politics and the banks created a deep distrust and hatred of Republicanism that sent white southerners scrambling for the Democratic Party. By 1877, most southern governments were back in conservative, white, Democratic hands. Those hands kept the South Democratic until Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were able to tap the region’s underlying conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s.

An even more fearful outgrowth of the white backlash to Reconstruction came about as antagonized whites of the South, bitter over their losses, looked for new means of acquiring power. To a large class of white southerners, the idea of blacks in politics, and even controlling southern state legislatures, was simply unacceptable. The need to combat black political power gave rise to secret paramilitary societies dedicated to maintaining white supremacy. Some had names like the Knights of the White Camellia and the Pale Faces, but the most notorious, powerful, and ultimately long-lived was the Ku Klux Klan, which first met in Nashville’s Maxwell House in April 1867.

Organized by former commanders, soldiers, and leaders of the Confederacy as well as southern churchmen, and using a combination of mystical talk, claims of being ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers—hence the white sheets—and outright terror tactics, the Klan gained enormous power in the postwar South. Through lynchings, beatings, burnings, and other forms of political terrorism, it successfully intimidated both blacks and “liberal” white Republicans. As Lerone Bennet eloquently puts it in Before the Mayflower, “The plan: reduce blacks to political impotence. How? By the boldest and most ruthless political operation in American history. By stealth and murder, by economic intimidation and political assassinations, by the political use of terror, by the braining of the baby in its mother’s arms, the slaying of the husband at his wife’s feet, the raping of the wife before the husband’s eyes. By fear.”

Northern outrage over these injustices quickly faded as the nation busied itself with other concerns, like the spread westward. The reforms of the Reconstruction Acts, whether truly well intentioned or powered purely by political ambition, faded as the nation turned its attention to building an empire in the West and coping with a depression, so often the aftermath of wartime economies, that followed another stock market panic in 1873.

On balance, the era of Reconstruction created some opportunities, but fell far short of the lofty goals of true freedom for blacks in the South, as the near future would so oppressively prove.

AMERICAN VOICES

CHIEF JUSTICE SALMON P. CHASE, writing for the majority in the case of Texas v. White (1869):

The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible union, composed of indestructible States. . . . Considered therefore as transactions under the Constitution, the Ordinance of Secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the Acts of her Legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation on law. . . . Our conclusion therefore is that Texas continued to be a State, a State of the Union, notwithstanding the transactions to which we have referred.

This postwar decision, involving the payment of U.S. Treasury bonds, made it clear that secession was unconstitutional.