1861 “In Dixie Land, I'll Take My Stand”
You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be.
—JEFFERSON DAVIS
FEBRUARY 1861
It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN's FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS
MARCH 4, 1861
A reckless and unprincipled tyrant has invaded your soil. Abraham Lincoln, regardless of all moral, legal, and constitutional restraints, has thrown his Abolitionist hosts among you, who are murdering and imprisoning your citizens, confiscating and destroying your property, and committing other acts of violence and outrage, too shocking and revolting to humanity to be enumerated.
—PIERRE BEAUREGARD
JUNE 1, 1861
* Why Did Secession Come?
* Who Elected Jefferson Davis President?
* Why Did Lincoln Sneak into Washington for His Inauguration?
* Did Lincoln Deliberately Provoke the Shots Fired at Fort Sumter?
* What Was the Anaconda Plan?
* Who Were the “Plug Uglies”?
* Why Did Robert E. Lee Resign from the U.S. Army?
* What Is Habeas Corpus and What Did Lincoln Do with It?
* What Happened at Manassas?
* Who Was “Little Mac”?
* What Was the Trent Affair?
* What Was a “Radical Republican”?
* Was It Really “the Brothers' War”?
The nation held its breath. The days between Abraham Lincoln's election in November 1860 and inauguration in March 1861 were momentous times, dark and tense. Before Lincoln entered office, the first states of the Confederacy had left the Union. Eleven federal arsenals and forts in the South had been seized by state militias. In the White House, lame duck President James Buchanan wanted to leave office with the country at peace. But South Carolina, the first and most hawkish of the seceded states, was moving toward a war footing.
In the back rooms of Congress and at a Peace Conference presided over by former President John Tyler—who would become the only former president to join the Confederacy—well-meaning politicians on both sides desperately tried to avert bloodshed. Among them was a Mississippi senator who advised the governor of South Carolina to proceed cautiously, especially with regard to Fort Sumter, an unfinished and obscure federal fortress in Charleston Harbor. “The little garrison in its present position presses on nothing but a point of pride,” said the senator. But he was also a realist. “We are probably soon to be involved in that fiercest of human strife, a civil war.”
That cautious senator was Jefferson Davis.
Civil War Voices
Mary A. Ward, relating the mood in her state of Georgia following secession in postwar testimony before Congress:
The day that Georgia was declared out of the Union was a day of the wildest excitement in Rome [Georgia]. There was no order or prearrangement about it at all, but the people met each other and shook hands and exchanged congratulations over it and manifested the utmost enthusiasm. Of course, a great many of the older and wiser heads looked on with a great deal of foreboding at these rejoicings and evidence of delight, but the general feeling was one of excitement and joy.
Then we began preparing our soldiers for the war. The ladies were all summoned to public places, to halls and lecture rooms, and sometimes to churches, and everybody who had sewing machines was invited to send them; they were never demanded because the mere suggestion was all-sufficient. The sewing machines were sent to these places and ladies that were known to be experts in cutting out garments were engaged in that part of the work, and every lady in town was turned into a seamstress and worked as hard as anybody could work; and the ladies not only worked themselves but they brought colored seamstresses to these places, and these halls and public places would be filled with busy women all day long.
But even while we were doing all these things in this enthusiastic manner, of course, there was a great deal of the pathetic manifested in connection with this enthusiasm, because we knew that the war meant separation of our soldiers from their friends and families and the possibility of their not coming back. Still, while we spoke of these things, we really did not think that there was going to be actual war.…We got our soldiers ready for the field, and the Governor of Georgia called out the troops…. The young men carried dress suits with them and any quantity of fine linen.…
Every soldier, nearly, had a servant with him, and a whole lot of spoons and forks, so as to live comfortably and elegantly in camp, and finally to make a splurge in Washington when they should arrive there, which they expected would be very soon indeed. That is really the way they went off; and their sweethearts gave them embroidered slippers and pincushions and needle-books, and all sorts of such et ceteras, and they finally got off.
Why Did Secession Come?
The census of 1860 is quite revealing. On paper, the Confederacy had no chance. Twenty-three states remained in the Union (more would be added during the war). The population of these states was about 22 million, 4 million of them men of combat age. There were 100,000 factories employing 1.1 million workers. The Union possessed more than 20,000 miles of railroad—more than the rest of the world's railroads combined—and 96 percent of the country's railroad equipment. Union banks held 81 percent of the nation's bank deposits and $56 million in gold.
The eleven Confederate states held a population of approximately 9 million, which included nearly 4 million slaves. There were only 20,000 factories in the Confederate states employing about 100,000 workers. With only 9,000 miles of track, the Confederacy's rail lines were insignificant compared to the Union's. More important as the war progressed, the Confederacy lacked the factories to produce new rails and equipment to replace those captured or destroyed in what would become the first war to move by train. Nor could it come remotely close to the Union in the production of weapons. As in World War II, when the U.S. production capacity simply buried the other warring powers, the Union was capable of vastly outproducing the Confederacy. In addition, the Union states thoroughly outproduced the Confederate states in every category of agricultural production, with the exception of cotton. But the most important agricultural product of the South would basically go unsold through the war years, once the Union began effectively to blockade cotton shipments out of Confederate ports.
In other words, the Union and Confederate states were not “one nation under God.” They were two nations, divided by politics, economy, and culture—all of those differences generated by the institution of slavery. The America of the Union states was racing toward the twentieth century, with banks, booming factories, railroads, canals, and steamship lines. Its population was mushrooming with the influx of immigrants escaping the famine and political turmoil of Europe, particularly in Ireland and Germany.
The southern states of the Confederacy were, in many respects, standing still in time. They remained stuck in the agricultural, slave-based economy of Jefferson's time, when the gentlemen planters of Virginia helped create the nation. Most of its cash wealth was tied up in slaves, and its chief product was the cotton produced by those slaves. In other words, the Confederacy was an easy economic hostage to slavery and the cotton system.
Two countries, two cultures, two ideologies. Despite the common ground of language, religion, race, and heritage—America was primarily a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation—the people of the day saw more differences between themselves. The simplest explanation for the war was that many in the Confederacy saw themselves being steamrollered by a northern economic machine that threatened every aspect of their way of life, hence this seemingly irrational contradiction in people proclaiming a fight for “liberty” by defending the enslavement of someone else.
Why did this war come? There was a widely shared feeling among many in the Confederacy that their liberty and way of life were being overpowered by northern political, industrial, and banking powers. That defensive posture was whipped into flames with a race-baiting hysteria that politicians of the future Confederacy—the slaveowning class, with the most to lose from emancipation—used to spread fear. There was a fear of blacks taking control and the certain sexual ravishing of the flower of southern womanhood if the slaves were allowed to go free. (That's where Mark Twain got it right about Sir Walter Scott's being to blame for the Civil War.) The potent mix of economic fear and racially tinged emotions coalesced over the question of slavery. Even those in the Confederacy who held no slaves thought the powers of the North had no right to tell them how to live their lives. With their political power diminishing in Congress as the free states were growing in number and population, the men who made the Confederacy turned to the one weapon they thought they had a right to use—secession.
Human nature and historical inevitability also played a big part in creating the massive tragedy of the Civil War. For those whites in the Confederacy who held no slaves—though they were a majority, they lacked political and economic clout—there was the fear of being overwhelmed. The fear itself was fanned by politicians and editorial pages, warning that the “Black Republicans” of Lincoln and the “abolitionist Yankees” who owned the banks and set the prices for their crops would make them economic slaves. And once the war began, that fear was bolstered by a more basic human instinct: the powerful need to defend one's home and property.
Who Elected Jefferson Davis President?
Abraham Lincoln was on a train bound for his inauguration when word came that Jefferson Davis had been chosen as provisional president of the Confederate States of America on February 18, 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, the Confederacy's provisional capital. Alabama “Fire-eater” William Lowndes Yancey (1814-1863), one of the most outspoken advocates of secession, introduced Davis to a cheering crowd: “The man and the hour have met. Prosperity, honor and victory await his administration.” His inauguration was marked by boisterous applause, booming cannons, and incessant renditions of “Dixie” by the Montgomery Theater band. An actress named Maggie Smith danced on a flag of the United States.
Lincoln's opposite had a much better résumé and seemed much better prepared to lead his “country” into war. A former war secretary, Davis has been called one of the most effective to hold that position, even though he is best mockingly remembered for a proposal to create camel-mounted cavalry patrols in the southwestern desert. In fact, he was largely responsible for professionalizing and modernizing the U.S. Army. An experienced soldier, Davis was a West Pointer, a decorated veteran and hero of the Mexican War. Lincoln had none of these qualifications. His military experience was limited to leading a few volunteers in the Black Hawk War; Lincoln said he'd fought mosquitoes and led a charge on an onion patch.
Yet the two men, who never met, shared some interesting traits. Like the Union president, Jefferson Davis was not a popular leader, although time and Confederate mythology have made him seem more so. His handling of military affairs, like Lincoln's, was extremely controversial. Both men would have terrible times with their generals. Politically, Davis faced tremendous hostility from a large, well-organized faction, just as Lincoln had to contend with cranky fellow Republicans and virulent opposition Democrats. When Davis tried to manage the war by placing power in the hands of a central government, he was called a tyrant and dictator, just as Lincoln was. And on a personal level Davis, like Lincoln, had known tragedy and great personal loss. The war would bring even more. Each man lost a son as well as many friends during the war years. Each would grimly read the casualty reports, a heavy burden for both.
Although much has been made of Lincoln's 1860 victory with less than 40 percent of the vote, Davis's claim to the office was on even more shaky democratic ground. For a “country” that came into existence based on the protection of individual rights against a powerful central government, the Confederacy had allowed few people any say in electing a president. None of the six initial Confederate states had even chosen secession in popular voting. According to William C. Davis in Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour, their withdrawal from the Union had been decided in state conventions by 854 men, all of them selected by their legislatures. Of those, 157 had voted against secession. In other words, fewer than 700 mostly wealthy and upper-middle-class men had decided the destiny of 9 million people without benefit of an election. And Tennessee's secession was orchestrated by its governor after the popular defeat of a secession proposal.
Born in Kentucky on June 3, 1808, the president of the Confederacy graduated in the lower third of his 1828 West Point class. Posted to the infantry, Davis fell in love with Sarah Taylor, the daughter of his commander and a future president of the United States, Zachary Taylor. A brief first army career ended in 1835, distinguished by run-ins with superiors and fellow officers that showed Davis's streak of certainty. This was a man who didn't believe that he was always right; he knew he was always right. He returned to Mississippi as a plantation owner with his eldest brother, Joseph. By standards of the day, the Davises treated their slaves progressively; for instance, they allowed them to take what food they wanted rather than being rationed. The slaves were also permitted to choose their own names, and their housing was better than standard slave quarters. Nonetheless, they were still slaves, inferior beings fit only for servitude, and, in Davis's view, private property protected by the Constitution.
In 1835 Davis married Sarah Taylor without the full blessing of her parents, but they did not elope, as later myth suggested. Five weeks later both of them fell sick, and Sarah died at age twenty-one, the first of Davis's personal tragedies. Malaria or yellow fever contracted in the mosquito-infested swampland of Davis's plantation, Brierfield, felled the newlyweds, and Davis would be plagued by ill health brought on by malarial fevers for the rest of his life.
After ten years out of public life, Davis was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1845. That same year he married Varina Howell, a nineteen-year-old beauty half his age. Serving one year in the House, he resigned to lead a group of Mississippi volunteers to fight in Mexico. Fate brought him to serve again under Taylor, who treated him warmly, their grief a shared sorrow. Wounded at the Battle of Buena Vista, Davis returned a war hero and parlayed his new fame into a Senate seat, which he held until he was named war secretary by President Franklin Pierce in 1853.
Davis reclaimed his Senate seat in 1857 and sat on the committee that investigated John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. The senators concluded that “it was simply the act of lawless ruffians, under the sanction of no public or political authority.”
A staunch states' rights Democrat, Davis tested the waters for a run at the White House in 1860. At the Baltimore convention, his name was placed in nomination, ironically, by Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts. (During the Civil War, Butler became one of the most notorious Union generals, known throughout the Confederacy as “Beast Butler.”) Davis didn't press hard because he knew he would never garner sufficient northern support to win the election.
When the Democrats split between Stephen Douglas and John Breckinridge, their defeat was guaranteed. Counseling caution and still seeking compromise, Davis backed Mississippi's secession. OnJanuary 21, 1861, after making an emotional farewell speech on the Senate floor, he withdrew with four other senators. Named commander of Mississippi's militia, he became a compromise candidate for the provisional presidency of the six seceded states of Confederacy. At age fifty-three and in poor health, he would have preferred a military appointment. But Davis was elected on February 9 and inaugurated nine days later in Montgomery. (He was formally elected by popular vote to a six-year term and was inaugurated for a second time on February 22, 1862.)
Soon after his election, Davis told a northern visitor that slavery was not the cause of secession, explaining: “My own convictions, as to negro slavery, are strong. It has its evils and abuses.… We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him—our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.… You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be.”
In the flurry of organizing a government and an army, one of Davis's first acts was to dispatch three commissioners to Washington in an attempt to negotiate a settlement with the Union. Leading them was the Confederate vice-president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens of Georgia. Nicknamed “Little Ellick,” he weighed about ninety pounds and was described by Lincoln as “a little, slim, palefaced consumptive man.”
Lincoln admired a speech that Stephens once gave in the House, and during their years as fellow Whigs in the Thirtieth Congress, the lanky Lincoln and the small Georgian became friends, although they later parted ways over slavery. A slaveowner, Stephens had a reputation as a “humanitarian master” because he didn't whip his slaves and never separated families. A moderate Unionist, he voted against Georgia's secession but felt honor-bound to remain loyal when the state seceded. When the Confederate Congress met in Montgomery, “Little Ellick” sought the presidency; losing out to Davis, he was chosen as vice-president. Throughout the war he and Davis would disagree, often vehemently, and Stephens became the center of much of the sentiment against Davis in the Confederate government.
At Christmas, before going to Washington, Lincoln had sent Stephens a letter marked “For Your Eyes Only,” promising that his administration would not interfere with slavery. Now Stephens arrived in Washington, hoping to negotiate an end to the crisis. With the situation moving toward a showdown, Stephens and the other delegates met in secret with Lincoln's secretary of state, William Henry Seward. Speaking without presidential authority, Seward promised that Fort Sumter would be evacuated. But Lincoln refused to meet with Stephens, unwilling to legitimize a Confederate government he now viewed as a collection of rebels.
Civil War Voices
London Times correspondent William Russell on Jefferson Davis (1861).
Mr. Davis is a man of slight, sinewy figure, rather over the middle height, and of erect, soldierlike bearing. He is about fifty-five years of age; his features are regular and well-defined, but the face is thin and marked on cheek and brow with many wrinkles, and is rather careworn and haggard. One eye is apparently blind, the other is dark, piercing, intelligent.
William Howard Russell, the world's first great war correspondent, had gained an international reputation for his battlefield reporting on the Crimean War (1853-1856). In 1861 Russell came to America to cover the Civil War for the London Times, but his dispatches were also published in both Union and Confederate papers. Although he was initially welcomed by both sides, his objectivity, his general scorn of things American, and his unwillingness to take sides eventually earned him few friends on either side of the conflict.
Songs of the Civil War
“Dixie” (1859)
I wish I was in de land ob cotton,
Ole times dar am not forgotten;
Look away, look away, look away, Dixie Land.
In Dixie Land whar I was born in,
Early on one frosty mornin',
Look away, look away, look away, Dixie Land.
Chorus
Den I wish I was in Dixie! Hooray! Hooray!
In Dixie Land, I'll take my stand,
To lib and die in Dixie.
Away, away, away down south in Dixie
Away, away, away down south in Dixie.
Composed in New York by Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815-1904), one of the originators of the blackface minstrel show, this song was widely popularized in the South. Played at Jefferson Davis's inauguration, it was a favorite on both sides of the conflict and was played at Lincoln's inauguration as well.
Henry Hotze, a member of the Mobile (Alabama) Cadets, recalled hearing “Dixie” when he first went to Virginia in the early days of the war: “It is marvelous with what rapid-fire rapidity this tune of ‘Dixie’ has spread over the whole South. Considered as an intolerable nuisance when first the streets re-echoed it from the repertoire of wandering minstrels, it now bids fair to become the musical symbol of the new nationality, and we shall be fortunate if it does not impose its very name on our country.”
The source of the name “Dixie” is somewhat obscure. It has often been considered an abbreviation of the Mason and Dixon Line, which honors British astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon who in 1763 had surveyed the disputed boundary of the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. During the Missouri Compromise debate in 1820, the Mason and Dixon Line came to mean the border dividing the free states from the slave states.
But according to Stuart Berg Flexner in I Hear America Talking, the name may actually derive from the French dix (ten). In bilingual Louisiana, “Dix” was printed on the back of ten-dollar notes issued by the Citizen's Bank in New Orleans. In time New Orleans and much of the South were called “the Land of Dixie,” inspiring Emmett's song (whose actual title was “Dixie's Land”). A third suggestion is that slaves popularized the word with a song about the good life at “Dixie's,” supposedly a kind slaveowner.
As Henry Hotze feared, “Dixie” indeed did “impose its very name on our country.” Sung by Union soldiers as they advanced toward the war's first major battle, it was also played by military bands in Washington and Richmond after Lee's surrender to Grant in 1865.
Why Did Lincoln Sneak into Washington for His Inauguration?
President-elect Lincoln and his family broke their train journey from Illinois to Washington with a stop in Philadelphia. Late that February evening, Lincoln met in secret with private detective Allan Pinkerton.
The son of a Glasgow, Scotland, police sergeant, Pinkerton (1819-1894) had come to America and settled near Chicago. While cutting wood, he discovered and captured a gang of counterfeiters. The incident led to a career in police work, with Pinkerton ultimately becoming Chicago's first detective. In 1850 he opened Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, specializing in railroad security. An abolitionist, he also helped the Underground Railroad. During the 1850s his agency worked for the Illinois Central Railroad, the line for which Lincoln had provided legal services and where in 1857 Pinkerton encountered another Illinois Central executive, former army engineer George Brinton McClellan.
After the 1860 election, another of Pinkerton's clients, the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad, feared that secessionists in Maryland would cut its tracks in order to isolate the capital. Sent to Baltimore to protect the railroad, Pinkerton's men infiltrated secessionist groups, finding the city seething with Confederate sentiment.
That night in Philadelphia, Pinkerton told Lincoln that his agents had learned of an assassination plot: Lincoln was to be killed when he changed trains in Baltimore. Though Pinkerton advised him to depart for Washington a day early, Lincoln refused, having already promised to attend Washington's Birthday festivities in Harrisburg the next day. Later that night, however, he received confirmation of the plot from General Winfield Scott.
After the following day's events, Lincoln secretly returned to Philadelphia. Wearing an overcoat and disguised by a brown hat, he slipped into the last sleeping car of a train bound for Baltimore. Squeezing his lanky frame into a small sleeping berth, he posed as the invalid brother of one of Pinkerton's female detectives. Traveling with Lincoln were Pinkerton and a trusted friend from Springfield, Ward Hill Lamon. Acting as bodyguard for the president-elect, Lamon was a walking arsenal, with brass knuckles, a pair of revolvers, derringers, and two large knives. At three-fifteen in the morning the train reached Baltimore without incident, and Lincoln's coach was hooked up with a train going to Washington. (Years later Lamon claimed that Pinkerton had invented the entire assassination plot to gain access and credibility with Lincoln. But there was certainly enough evidence to support the detective's suspicions, including the corroboration by General Scott. And four years later Lincoln's assassination would actually be plotted by Maryland natives in Baltimore.)
Lincoln reached the capital at dawn on February 23. His wife, who had stayed on their original train with their sons, arrived later that day, shaken by the journey and by the frenzied Baltimore crowds who shouted Lincoln's name in anger. When the opposition newspapers heard of Lincoln's surreptitious arrival, the president-elect was widely mocked as a country bumpkin and depicted by cartoonists as slinking into the town. London correspondent William Howard Russell wrote, “The cold shoulder is given to Mr. Lincoln. People take particular pleasure in telling how he came towards the seat of his government disguised.”
Civil War Voices
Abraham Lincoln, from his first Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861). (See Appendix IV for the complete text.)
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue 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.
Civil War Voices
Texas Governor Sam Houston: “I am for the Union without any ‘if.’”
Heroic stature counted for little when it came to where a man stood on the question of secession. That reality was dramatically underscored in Texas. As the greatest hero of Texas's battle for independence from Mexico and the Republic's first president, Sam Houston had fought hard to bring Texas into the United States. Once Texas gained statehood, he was elected one of the state's first two senators and, in 1859, was elected governor of Texas.
But Houston was a Union man. Even if Texans chose to secede, Houston urged them to remain independent and not join the Confederacy. When the Texas convention voted to leave the Union, Governor Houston issued the formal statement of secession in February 1861. But he refused to take a required oath of loyalty to the Confederacy and was deposed as governor.
When Lincoln offered to send Union troops to maintain his governorship, Houston declined and spent his last two years in Huntsville, Texas, where he died in July 1863.
Did Lincoln Deliberately Provoke the Shots Fired at Fort Sumter?
Lincoln did not have to wait long to find out that “the better angels” would not prevail. “The mystic chords” would soon be drowned out by the sound of cannonballs exploding around a federal fort. Nor would it take long for America to realize that this was going to be a war of strange and horrifying coincidences, pitting friend against friend, former comrades against one another.
Just as people have wondered whether President Franklin Roosevelt provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to draw America into the war with Germany and Japan, some historians have accused Lincoln of pushing the Confederacy to fire the shots that started a civil war. While his inaugural address promised that the federal government would not start a war and that no attempt would be made to retake federal facilities already held by Confederate forces, Lincoln had also declared that he would “hold, occupy, and possess” installations still under federal control in the Confederacy. This seemed well within a president's call. But beyond that, Lincoln made no threats.
Everything changed on the day after his inauguration, when Lincoln received an alarming message from Major Robert Anderson, who commanded the U.S. troops holding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. He reported that there was less than a six-week supply of food left in the fort.
Near the center of the entrance to Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter was an unfinished, five-sided brick structure that rose directly from the water, its foundations built on a shoal. Named for Thomas Sumter, a South Carolina general in the Revolution, it was one of a series of forts begun when the War of 1812 had shown the inadequacy of America's coastal defenses. Designed to serve 650 men, Fort Sumter was now occupied by about 125 men, some 40 of whom were completing the fortifications. Surrounding it were smaller forts already held by the South Carolina militia under the command of the elegantly named Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (1818-1893).
One of President Davis's first military appointments, Beauregard had been made a brigadier general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States on March 1. A Louisianian nicknamed the “Little Creole” and “Little Napoleon,” he was second in his West Point class (1838), where he studied artillery under the same Robert Anderson who now commanded Fort Sumter. In Mexico, Beauregard had served with Winfield Scott and was twice wounded. He probably set an unusual record when he served as the superintendent of West Point for only five days, January 23-28, 1861, before being removed for his Confederate sympathies.
When South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, Fort Sumter and the other two United States military installations in Charleston Harbor—Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney—became a symbol of “foreign” authority. Moultrie and Castle Pinckney were abandoned by Major Anderson following South Carolina's secession. President Buchanan believed that both the secession and “coercion” of states were unconstitutional and wanted only to finish his term in peace. When South Carolina seized Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney, along with the customhouse, post office, treasury, and an arsenal, Buchanan did nothing. When South Carolina fired on The Star of the West, an unarmed steamer coming into the harbor with supplies for the fort, he again stood pat. He had also pledged not to reinforce Fort Pickens, on the coast near Pensacola, Florida, in exchange for an agreement not to attack it. Uncharacteristically, however, he refused demands to remove the federal troops from Fort Sumter. “If I withdraw Anderson from Sumter, I can travel home to Wheatland by the light of my own burning effigies,” said Buchanan, referring to his home in Pennsylvania.
Anderson's letter about his dwindling supply of food gave Lincoln his first crisis. Few presidents have ever faced a problem of similar proportion on the day after taking office. General-in-chief Winfield Scott advised Lincoln that relief of the fort was impossible; Secretary of State William H. Seward thought evacuating the fort was a good way to cool things off. Seward, the ambitious former governor of New York and U.S. senator who had helped found the Republican party, resented Lincoln's election and saw himself as a “prime minister,” a puppet master who would eventually pull the strings for the inexperienced new president. It was Seward's certainty that Unionists in the Confederacy would come to their senses and revoke secession that led him to meet with the Confederate emissaries against Lincoln's specific instructions and secretly promise that Lincoln would abandon the fort.
Searching for a middle ground that would uphold federal authority but not provoke a war, Lincoln quickly demonstrated his independence from the calculating Seward. On March 29 he decided to resupply but not reinforce the fort, and to let South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens know the supplies were coming. Seward opposed the idea and again recommended Sumter's evacuation. But Lincoln held his ground, establishing his authority over Seward and the rest of the Cabinet. On April 8 the president notified Governor Pickens of his decision.
Civil War Voices
Editorial, the Charleston Mercury:
The gage is thrown down and we accept the challenge. We will meet the invader, and God and Battle must decide the issue between the hirelings of Abolition hate and Northern tyranny, and the people of South Carolina defending their freedom and their homes.
After Lincoln refused to meet with the delegates of the Confederate states, the die was cast. Jefferson Davis ordered Beauregard to demand Sumter's surrender, “and if this is refused, proceed…to reduce it.”
As the federal defenders scurried to complete Sumter's defenses, Beauregard delivered the Confederate ultimatum to Major Anderson. Anderson's reply: “Gentlemen, I will await the first shot and if you do not batter the fort to pieces about us, we shall be starved out in a few days.”
Told to state the time of his evacuation, Anderson replied that he would leave by noon on April 15 barring other instructions or additional supplies from his government. Learning that his answer was unacceptable, Anderson shook the hand of Colonel James Chesnut, Jr., Beauregard's emissary (a former U.S. senator now a member of the Confederate Congress), and said, “If we never meet in this world again, I hope that we may meet in the next.”
Anderson himself was a proslavery Kentuckian but a Unionist. Both he and Beauregard had been wounded in the Mexican War. Now Beauregard had his former teacher surrounded by cannons, perhaps eager to show that he had been taught well.
At 4:30 A.M. on April 12, 1861, a single mortar was discharged. It was the signal for forty-three Confederate guns around Fort Sumter which proceeded to fire some four thousand shells. The bloodiest war in American history had begun. Although Edmund Ruffin, a wild-eyed secessionist with a long mane of silvery-white hair, was said to have fired the first shot, that distinction actually belonged to Captain George S. James. Ruffin fired the first shot from another battery.
All of Charleston crowded the harbor shores to watch. Mary Boykin Chesnut, the wife of Beauregard's aide, wrote in her diary:
There was a sound of stir all over the house, pattering of feet in the corridors. All seemed hurrying one way, I put on my double gown and a shawl and went too. It was to the housetop. The shells were bursting…. The regular roar of the cannon—there it was…. The women were wild there on the housetop. Prayers came from the women and imprecations from the men. And then a shell would light up the scene…. We watched up there, and everybody wondered that Fort Sumter did not fire a shot.
Inside the fort, Captain Abner Doubleday, Anderson's second-in-command, fired the first federal shot in reply. It bounced harmlessly off the iron wall of a nearby Confederate fortress. Although federal relief vessels were beginning to arrive, the expedition was not prepared for the crisis, and the ships rode at anchor. On the second day of the bombardment, the fort began to burn. Lacking supplies and troops sufficient to mount a true defense, Anderson ordered the fort's flag lowered and a bedsheet raised in its place. Fort Sumter was surrendered without the loss of any men on April 13.
During the next day's evacuation, Anderson ordered a cannon salute to the flag. One gun exploded, killing Private Daniel Hough. Another private, Edward Galloway, was wounded and died several days later. The war's first deaths were accidental.
On April 15, following the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln proclaimed a state of insurrection rather than a state of war. He issued a call for seventy-five thousand volunteers for three months to crush the rebellion.
For many years some historians—generally those sympathetic to the Confederate cause—argued that Lincoln had provoked the Confederates into firing the first shots in order to get world opinion on the side of the Union. But this theory ignores a great many facts. First, South Carolina had already fired the first shots against a federal ship and, by taking the other federal forts and arsenals, had begun the war. Jefferson Davis was ready to fire on Sumter before hearing of the relief expedition, as soon as Lincoln refused to meet with Vice-President Stephens and the other Confederate delegates. Davis had also written to General Braxton Bragg at Pensacola, ordering him to take Fort Pickens. Bragg was not ready, otherwise the war might have begun off the coast of Florida.
Lincoln, hoping to keep the wavering slave states from joining the Confederacy, was reluctant to take offensive action. He expected that these southern states—Virginia, in particular—would remain loyal if the Union were attacked. But instead of bringing back the undecided states, Fort Sumter and Lincoln's proclamation calling for volunteers prompted secession proceedings in four more states. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee soon joined the Confederacy, now eleven states strong. (The others were South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas.)
Civil War Voices
From the diary of Theodore Upson, a sixteen-year-old Indiana farmboy, who enlisted and later fought under Grant and Sherman (April 1861.)
Father and I were husking out some corn. We could not finish before it wintered up. When William Cory came across the field he was excited and said, “Jonathan they have fired upon and taken Fort Sumter.” Father got white and couldn't say a word.
William said, “The President will soon fix them. He has called for 75,000 men and is going to blocade (sic) thier (sic) ports, and just as soon as those fellows find out that the North means business will get down off thier (sic) high horse.”
Father said little. We did not finish the corn and drove to the barn. Father left me to unload and put out the team and went to the house. After I had finished I went in to dinner. Mother said, “What is the matter with Father?” He had gone right upstairs. I told her what we had heard. She went to him. After a while they came down. Father looked ten years older. We sat down at the table. Grandma wanted to know what was the trouble. Father told her and she began to cry. “Oh my poor children in the South. Now they will suffer! God knows how they will suffer! I knew it would come. Jonathan I told you it would come!”
“They can come here and stay,” said Father,
“No they will not do that. There is their home. There they will stay. Oh to think that I should have lived to see the day when Brother should rise against Brother.”
She and Mother were crying. I lit out for the barn. Oh I do hate to see women cry.
We had another meeting at the schoolhouse last night; we are raising money to take care of the families of those who enlist. A good many gave money, others subscribed. The Hulper boys have enlisted and Steve Lampman and some others. I said I would go but they laughed at me and said they wanted men not boys for this job; that it would all be over soon; that those fellows down South are big bluffers and would rather talk than fight. I am not so sure about that.
What Was the Anaconda Plan?
Troubled by gout and too fat to ride a horse, seventy-five-year-old Winfield Scott (1786-1866) was head of the army. Born in Virginia ten years after American independence was declared, he was nick-named “Old Fuss and Feathers” because of his reputation as a stickler for strict conformity to regulations. Scott had been in every American military action since the War of 1812, in which he had been captured once but emerged with a hero's reputation second only to Andrew Jackson's. He had fought in the Indian wars and then in the Mexican War, where he had led the army to Vera Cruz. Again he emerged a hero in that most political of American wars, becoming the first lieutenant general in the American army since George Washington. But unlike Washington and Jackson, Scott couldn't translate his military success into political victory. Becoming the Whig candidate after fifty-three ballots in 1852, he lost the presidential election to Democratic Senator Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire.
When he counseled the evacuation of Fort Sumter, some Republicans saw reason to question the Virginian's loyalty. A devoted Unionist, however, Scott responded to the “insurrection” with a strategic plan. In May he wrote to General George McClellan,
We rely greatly on the sure operation of a complete blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf ports soon to commence. In connection with such a blockade, we propose a powerful movement down the Mississippi to the ocean, with a cordon of posts at proper points…the object being to clear out and keep open this great line of communication in connection with the strict blockade of the seaboard, so as to envelop the insurgent States and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.
As Scott pointed out, his strategy had two main elements: a blockade of the South's Atlantic and Gulf ports and an expedition of eighty thousand men supported by navy gunboats down the Mississippi to New Orleans. The Confederacy would be split in two, and the embargo would lead to its economic strangulation.
Leaked to the press, Scott's approach was mocked as overly cautious and was soon derisively christened the Anaconda Plan, after the large, boa-like snake that kills its victims by constriction. But this was the post-Napoleonic era of visions of battlefield glory. The romantic images of the recent Crimean War and its famed Charge of the Light Brigade, immortalized in Tennyson's 1854 poem, were what civilians and soldiers had in mind when they thought of war. Most people, including young General McClellan, wanted a grander, Napoleonic offensive, and even Lincoln thought Scott's plan was too mild. Still, Lincoln saw the wisdom of this strategy and ordered the blockade. Despite the considerable derision mounted against Scott's Anaconda Plan, the blockade of southern ports and control of the Mississippi provided the ultimate basis for the economic and military defeat of the Confederacy.
When Lincoln announced the blockade on April 19, 1861, it was bark without much bite. There was actually very little that the Union could do either to go to war or to prevent southern trade. The Union, faced by an adversary whose “country” was larger than all of western Europe, was woefully unprepared. Even though it comprised twenty-three states and possessed most of the nation's industry and agriculture as well as the vast majority of its banking and financial wealth along with canals, roads, and a rapidly growing railroad and telegraph network, the Union didn't have much of an army. Before the war, the U.S. Army was small: about 16,000 officers and men. At the outbreak of the war, there were 1,108 officers. Nearly 400 of them, including many with significant wartime experience in Mexico, remained loyal to their home states and resigned to join the Confederacy or were dismissed for suspected Confederate sympathies. The same was true of the navy. Of 1,554 officers, 373 were either dismissed or left to join the Confederacy.
While the challenge on land was daunting for both armies, Lincoln's call for a naval blockade seemed preposterous. With thirty-five hundred miles of Confederate coastline and 180 possible ports of entry to patrol, the blockade would be the largest such effort ever attempted. The U.S. Navy had only forty-two warships in operation, most of them patrolling distant oceans. Almost all of them were sailing vessels, which a new generation of steam-powered ships had rendered obsolete. The Union actually had only three warships suitable for blockade duty.
While the military situation faced by Lincoln and his administration was difficult, it was far worse for Jefferson Davis. Although the Confederate Congress authorized an army of a hundred thousand men, they could offer little to pay, clothe, feed, or arm them. The Confederate states had a small fraction of the Union's manufacturing capabilities and hardly more of the share of the nation's available cash. Dependent on its cotton trade for hard currency, the Confederacy was extremely vulnerable to a blockade. Davis responded to Lincoln's call by asking southern shipowners to help “resist aggression” by operating as privateers against the North's seagoing commerce. It was officially sanctioned piracy.
The Union blockade was ridiculed by people in the Confederacy and by sympathizers in Great Britain. But Lincoln had the last laugh and a secret weapon in Navy Secretary Gideon Welles who soon earned the nickname “Old Father Neptune.” By calling back the navy ships, buying vessels from the large merchant fleet, and beginning a massive shipbuilding program, Welles put together a fleet of 136 new ships and had 52 more under construction by the end of the year.
Privateers and blockade running—remember, that was Rhett Butler's contribution to the Confederate effort in Gone With the Wind—enabled the Confederacy to survive as long as it did, bringing in 60 percent of the weapons used by its armies, along with shoes, food, blankets, and medicine. But as the war lengthened, the Union navy's increasing ability to reduce shipments into southern ports took a terrible toll on the Confederate economy. Inflation is one of those boring economic words, but it crippled the Confederacy. Salt—which before refrigeration was the only way to preserve meat—went from $2 a bag before the war to as high as $60 a bag in 1862. Despite the Confederacy's grandiose talk about brilliant generals and glorious causes, you can't feed an army—or the families they left behind—on idealism or troop movements. The blockade and the harsh realities it created meant suffering equal to that brought by any Union general.
Songs of the Civil War
“Maryland! My Maryland,” a poem by southern schoolteacher James Ryder Randall (1839-1908), was later set to the tune of the familiar Christmas hymn “O Tannenbaum” (April 1861).
The despot's heel is on thy shore,
Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,
Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore.
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!
I hear the distant thunder-hum,
Maryland!
The Old Line's bugle, fife, and drum,
Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb—
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she'll come! she'll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!
Who Were the “Plug Uglies”?
As Lincoln had learned from his miserable experience in Baltimore, Maryland's chief city was part of the Union in name only. The city was seething with secessionist sentiment, and the fate of Maryland as a member of the Union was still up in the air. With Virginia's secession and the Confederacy moving its capital to Richmond, the Confederacy was now literally in Lincoln's view. Confederate flags flew from the rooftops in Alexandria, directly across the Potomac from the Capitol. Washington was near panic as rumors of a Confederate attack raced through the city, which was defended only by a disorganized, ragtag Union army lacking effective leadership.
Rushing to the capital was the 6th Massachusetts militia under the impetuous Benjamin Butler (1818-1893), a paunchy, ambitious Massachusetts Democrat who had supported Jefferson Davis for the presidency in 1860. After secession, Butler became an enthusiastic War Democrat (later a Republican), commanding the first northern troops to reach Washington. As Butler's men passed through Baltimore on April 19, 1861, they were taunted by pro-secession civilians known as “plug uglies.” (According to New York Times columnist and word maven William Safire in his Civil War novel Freedom, “their name came from the plug hats as well as from the spikes studded in the front of their boots, worn by the hoodlums to do greater injury with a kick.”) When the mob began to throw bricks, paving stones, and rocks, the troops fired. No one ever took responsibility for ordering or firing the first shot, but federal guns were turned on civilians armed only with clubs and stones. The ensuing melee left at least twelve civilians dead and dozens more injured. Four soldiers were also killed. Weeks passed before a real clash between armies led to a comparable number of casualties.
The governor of Maryland and the mayor of Baltimore begged Lincoln to forbid any more federal troops to pass through the city, but Lincoln refused. That night, Marylanders burned railroad bridges to prevent any more troops from moving through the state. Bands of “plug uglies” roamed over Maryland, assaulting travelers. The area was close to anarchy. And in Washington rumors of a secessionist mob intent on attacking and burning the city filled the air. For the moment, Maryland appeared to be on the verge of joining the Confederacy, which would completely surround the capital with rebellious states. When he met some of the wounded Massachusetts men, Lincoln was beyond worried, saying, “I don't believe there is any North. The [New York] Seventh Regiment is a myth. Rhode Island is not known in our geography any longer. You are the only Northern realities.”
Civil War Voices
Warren Lee Goss of Massachusetts, who enlisted after the Baltimore riots, describes the transition from civilian to soldier (1861):
My first uniform was a bad fit; My trousers were too long by three or four inches; the flannel shirt was coarse and unpleasant, too large at the neck and too short elsewhere. The forage cap was an ungainly bag with pasteboard top and leather visor; the blouse was the only part which seemed decent; while the overcoat made me feel like a little nubbin of corn in a large preponderance of husk. Nothing except “Virginia mud” ever took down my ideas of military pomp quite so low.
…The first day I went out to drill, getting tired of doing the same thing over and over, I said to the drill sergeant: “Let's stop fooling and go over to the grocery.” His only reply was addressed to a corporal: “Corporal, take this man out and drill him like hell”; and the corporal did! I found that suggestions were not so well appreciated in the army as in private life, and that no wisdom was equal to a drillmaster's “Right face,” “Left wheel,” and “Right, oblique, march.” It takes a raw recruit some time to learn that he is not to think or suggest, but obey. Some never do learn. I acquired it at last, in humility and mud, but it was tough. Yet I doubt if my patriotism, during my first three weeks' drill, was quite knee high. Drilling looks easy to a spectator, but it isn't. After a time I had cut down my uniform so that I could see out of it, and had conquered the drill sufficiently to see through it. Then the word came: On to Washington!
Why Did Robert E. Lee Resign from the U.S. Army?
Barely able to climb a set of stairs, aging General Winfield Scott was physically incapable of commanding in the field. But he still had his wits. Besides proposing the Anaconda Plan, he also advised the new president to appoint a new army commander and suggested his fellow Virginian Robert E. Lee. On April 18, Lee met with Frank Blair, Sr., a powerful backroom politician (and the father of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair) who unofficially offered Lee command of the Union army.
Born on January 19, 1807, in Stratford Hall, a plantation on the banks of the Potomac River in Virginia, Robert E. Lee descended from the line of Virginia Lees that had been among the country's most influential families. It was clear that he had the credentials and bloodlines to lead the nation's military in a crisis. One of his ancestors, Richard Henry Lee, issued the motion calling for independence at the Continental Congress in 1776. Another, Francis Lightfoot Lee, had also signed the Declaration of Independence. A third, Arthur Lee, was a chief minister to France during the Revolution and served in the Continental Congress.
Robert E. Lee's father, Major General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, had been one of George Washington's most skilled cavalry officers and trusted aides. The man who eulogized Washington as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” Henry Lee also served as Virginia's governor and as a U.S. congressman. A great soldier, he was a terrible businessman. Twice jailed for failing to pay his debts, Lee also became involved in Aaron Burr's notorious misadventure to set up an empire in the Louisiana territory. During a political controversy in Virginia just before the War of 1812, Lee was helping a friend defend his printing press against an angry mob when he was stabbed and left for dead. Broke, disfigured, and crippled, Henry Lee was sent to Barbados by President Monroe. Robert's two brothers didn't restore much of the luster to the family name. His half brother, Henry, married a morphine-addicted woman and then fathered a child with his wife's teenage sister. Known as “Black Horse Harry,” he then embezzled his in-laws' money. Robert's other brother, Carter, used up what little cash their father had left behind.
Forced from the family home, Robert E. Lee lived with his mother's family until he went to West Point, emerging second in his class (1829). He later married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, a granddaughter of Martha Custis Washington, the wife of the first president, whose son by her first husband had been adopted by Washington. The connection to Washington was a powerful one. After the Mexican War, Lee was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from 1852 to 1855. Following a two-year leave, he commanded the troops sent to put down John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry. He once said, “Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less.”
After Virginia seceded from the Union on April 17, Lee was torn between duty and home. Declining Lincoln's offer of command, on the twentieth of April he resigned his commission and received command of Virginia's state forces on April 22. Lee said he personally opposed slavery as “a moral and political evil,” even though he was part of the plantation aristocracy, and later in the war did nothing to prevent captured blacks from being returned to slavery. His views of the Union were also contradictory. Lee supported the preservation of the Union that his father and uncles had helped create. But his deepest loyalty was to his native Virginia, a common feeling in a time when there was not yet an American identity. To Lee and others, state meant more than country, and Lee said he could not “raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” Lincoln later observed that he could never quite understand Lee and all the other southern officers who professed loyalty to America but still broke their oaths of allegiance to join the Confederacy.
Two days after Lee resigned, Arlington House, the Custis family residence overlooking the Potomac, was occupied by Union forces, and General Irvin McDowell took the mansion as his headquarters. A wartime law required that property owners in areas occupied by federal troops appear in person to pay their taxes. The Lees were obviously unable to comply, and the estate was confiscated. In 1864 two hundred acres of the grounds around Arlington House were set aside as a military cemetery for the Union dead. In 1882 Lee's son George Washington Custis Lee sued for return of the land. By then the hills were covered with graves, and he accepted the government's offer of $150,000 for the property that is now Arlington National Cemetery.
Civil War Voices
Robert E. Lee's letter to General winfield Scott, explaining his decision to resign his command in the U.S. Army (April 20, 1861).
Since my interview with you on the 18th inst. I have felt that I ought no longer to retain my commission in the Army. I therefore tender my resignation, which I request you will recommend for acceptance. It would have been presented at once but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted the best years of my life, and all the ability I possessed.
During the whole of that time—more than a quarter of a century—I have experienced nothing but kindness from my superiors and a most cordial friendship from my comrades. To no one, General, have I been as much indebted as to yourself for uniform kindness and consideration, and it has always been my ardent desire to merit your approbation. I shall carry to the grave the most grateful recollections of your kind consideration, and your name and fame shall always be dear to me.
Save in defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.
Be pleased to accept my most earnest wishes for the continuance of your happiness and prosperity, and believe me most truly yours,
R.E. Lee
While Lee would one day become a legendary general of Napoleonic stature, one of his first encounters in the Civil War was nearly disastrous. Cheat Mountain in western Virginia was a critical position, controlling the traffic on a major turnpike and several mountain passes. On September 11, 1861, in a steady, drenching rain, Lee attacked two thousand Union troops on Cheat Mountain. Some captured Union soldiers convinced Lee that he was outnumbered when in fact he had a large advantage. Union reinforcements arrived, and the skirmish continued for two days. Having lost the element of surprise, Lee withdrew. His failure was severely criticized, and he was dubbed “Granny Lee” and “Evacuating Lee” by the Richmond newspapers.
Songs of the Civil War
“The Battle Cry of Freedom,” by George Root. Written in response to Lincoln's call for volunteers, this was the most popular of the more than two hundred songs he composed (others include “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching” and “Just Before the Battle, Mother”).
Yes, we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom!
We will rally from the hillside, we'll gather from the plain,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.
Chorus
The Union, forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitor, up with the star;
While we rally round the flag, boys, rally once again.
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.
We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true and brave.
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom;
And although they may be poor, not a man shall be a slave,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.
MILESTONES IN THE CIVIL WAR: 1861
January Following Lincoln's election and the secession of South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana secede from the Union.
January 9 The merchant vessel Star of the West, en route to Fort Sumter with supplies, is fired on by South Carolina forces. The ship returns to New York.
January 29 Following years of bitter fighting over the status of slavery in the territory, Kansas is admitted as the thirty-fourth state with a constitution prohibiting slavery.
Throughout the month, various state militias take over a series of federal forts and arsenals throughout the South. These include the valuable arsenal at Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Forts Morgan and Gaines, guarding the harbor at Mobile, Alabama; and the U.S. arsenal at Mount Vernon, Alabama.
February 4 In Montgomery, Alabama, the six seceding states form a provisional government of the Confederate States of America.
On the same day, a Peace Convention called by Virginia's leaders and with former President John Tyler presiding convenes in Washington, D.C. With 131 delegates from twenty-one states—though none from the seceded states—the convention fails to reach a compromise.
February 9 The Confederate Provisional Congress elects Jefferson Davis president. The vice-president is Alexander Stephens, a relatively moderate senator from Georgia. In Davis's Cabinet are Secretary of State Robert A. Toombs (who served a year, then became a brigadier general), Treasury Secretary Christopher G. Memminger, War Secretary Leroy Walker, Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory, and Attorney General Judah P. Benjamin, who would later serve as secretary of war and of state.
Tennessee voters reject a secession convention by nearly ten thousand votes.
February 23 Texas secedes from the Union, the seventh Confederate state.
March 4 Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated as the sixteenth president. The major figures in his Cabinet are Secretary of State William H. Seward, Secretary of War Simon Cameron (to be replaced by Edwin M. Stanton), Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, and Attorney General Edward Bates.
March 16 The Confederate Congress, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, adopts a constitution modeled on the U.S. Constitution but which prohibits the passage of any law impairing slavery.
April 12 After months of threats, negotiations, and attempts at supply and reinforcement, Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, is bombarded by South Carolina troops. Union Major Robert Anderson surrenders the fort on April 13.
April 15 Following the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln proclaims “a state of insurrection.” He issues a call for seventy-five thousand three-month volunteers. Black volunteers are rejected.
April 17 Balking at Lincoln's request for troops, Virginia secedes from the Union, the eighth and most important state to do so. One month later, its capital, Richmond, is designated the capital of the Confederacy.
April 19 In Baltimore, Union troops marching to Washington from Massachusetts are stoned by Confederate sympathizers. During the ensuing riot, twelve civilians and four soldiers die.
Lincoln orders the naval blockade of all Confederate ports; Confederate blockade runners and privateers will operate successfully during the war, but this blockade cripples the southern economy.
May 6 Arkansas and Tennessee secede from the Union, the ninth and tenth Confederate states. Tennessee joins without a vote and remains divided throughout the war, with the eastern areas remaining loyal and contributing troops to the Union.
May 13 Queen Victoria announces Great Britain's neutrality. The Confederacy is not officially recognized but granted “belligerent status.”
May 20 North Carolina, which will suffer the heaviest death toll of any Confederate state, secedes, the eleventh Confederate state.
May 24 When Union troops move into Alexandria, Virginia, Elmer Ellsworth, a close friend of Lincoln's, becomes the first combat fatality of the war, shot while removing a Confederate flag from a hotel roof. James T. Jackson, the hotelkeeper who shot Ellsworth, is killed by Union troops. Ellsworth's body lies in state at the White House, and both men become instant martyrs to their respective sides.
July 2 Lincoln authorizes the suspension of the constitutional right of habeas corpus in exceptional cases in a limited area between Washington and New York.
July 21 Battle of 1st Bull Run (1st Manassas). Union forces are routed by Confederates in a battle watched by Washington residents, who had come by carriage, expecting to see the war end in a day.
July 22 A congressional resolution states that the war is being fought to “preserve the Union,” not to abolish slavery.
July 27 Lincoln replaces General Irvin McDowell as head of the Army of the Potomac with thirty-four-year-old General George B. McClellan.
August 5 The first income tax is passed to finance the war.
August 30 In Missouri, Union General John C. Frémont institutes martial law and frees the slaves of any secessionists. In September, Lincoln overrules the order and transfers Frémont.
August The Confiscation Act authorizes the appropriation of any property, including slaves, of rebel slaveholders.
September U.S. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles authorizes the enlistment of slaves.
October 21 Battle of Ball's Bluff. Another one-sided Union defeat near Leesburg, Virginia. Lincoln's good friend Senator Edward Baker is killed in the fighting.
November 1 After a battle of wills, General-in-Chief Winfield Scott is retired by Lincoln and replaced by General George B. McClellan.
November 8 The Trent Incident. Confederate agents Mason and Slidell are taken from the British ship Trent, setting off a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Great Britain and bringing the two countries to the brink of war.
What Is Habeas Corpus and What Did Lincoln Do with It?
From the White House, Lincoln could see Confederate flags flying in Alexandria and Confederate campfires burning at night. Baltimore was ready to explode. And vastly fewer Union militiamen had arrived in the nation's capital than Lincoln and his staff expected. In this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, the president called a Cabinet meeting. One of his first decisions was a limited suspension of the writ of habeas corpus along the rail lines between Philadelphia and Washington, essentially targeting Maryland.
Habeas corpus literally means “[that] you have the body”; a writ of habeas corpus is issued by a court and orders the authority to release a person being held in custody. Derived from English law, it is an essential part of the Constitution, intended to protect individuals from arbitrary imprisonment. Basically, it protects everyone from being arrested and held without reasonable charges. It was and is one of the individual protections that separates America from monarchies and other governments in which soldiers or sheriffs can literally knock on your door and haul you away without explanation.
With the suspension of habeas corpus, Lincoln authorized General Scott to make arrests without specific charges to prevent secessionist Marylanders from interfering with communications between Washington and the rest of the Union. In the next few months, Baltimore's Mayor William Brown, the police chief, and nine members of the Maryland legislature were arrested to prevent them from voting to secede from the Union.
When an otherwise obscure secessionist named John Merryman was arrested, the ancient Chief Justice, Roger Taney, went into action. A Marylander himself and the author of the Dred Scott decision, Taney issued a writ of habeas corpus for Merryman, demanding that the authorities give a reason for his detention. The military refused, and Taney, who thought that Lincoln might have even him arrested, issued an argument stating that only Congress could suspend the privilege of the writ and that Lincoln had broken the laws. Protection from arbitrary arrest became the first serious constitutional crisis of the war.
But in an address to Congress in July, Lincoln responded to Taney by asking “whether all the laws, but one, [were] to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” In other words, if Taney was so worried about the Constitution, why hadn't he done anything to prevent secession? Lincoln further argued that the Constitution states that “the Privileges of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when, in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The Constitution never specified which of the three branches of government could suspend the writ, so Lincoln argued that any of the three equal branches could do so.
Twice more during the war Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus, including the suspension “throughout the United States” on September 24, 1862. Although the records are somewhat unclear, more than thirteen thousand Americans, most of them opposition Democrats, were arrested during the war years, giving rise rise to the charge that Lincoln was a tyrant and dictator.
Civil War Voices
Commanding a unit of Illinois volunteers, Ulysses S. Grant, having resigned his army commission, applied for reinstatement into the regular army (May 24, 1861).
Having served for fifteen years in the regular army, including four years at West Point, and feeling it the duty of every one who has been educated at the Government expense to offer their services for the support of the Government, I have the honor, very respectfully, to tender my services until the close of the war, in such capacity as may be offered. I would say, in view of my present age and length of service, I feel myself competent to command a regiment, if the President, in his judgment should see fit to entrust one to me.
Since the first call of the President, I have been serving on the staff of the Governor of this State, rendering such aid as I could in organization of our State militia, and am still engaged in that capacity.
U.S. Grant
A few weeks after Robert E. Lee made his fateful decision to cast his lot with his home state of Virginia and the Confederacy by resigning from the army, another soldier was trying desperately to get himself back into the army.
The two men, who had briefly crossed paths in Mexico, couldn't have been more different. Lee was a courtly, patrician, southern gentleman; Ulysses S. Grant, the son of a flinty, tough Ohio tanner and self-made businessman. Cast against the elegant, brilliant Lee, Grant was the “Rodney Dangerfield” of the Civil War: he got little respect, both early in the war and from later historians. A blue-collar sort of soldier, Grant had been an abject failure at almost everything he tried, including his early army career, until it came to making modern war.
Born in Ohio on April 27, 1822, the future general and president was the first child of Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant. The Grants named their son Hiram Ulysses and moved soon after his birth to Georgetown, Ohio, where the boy spent the first sixteen years of his life.
Jesse Grant, whose own father had been unable to support his children, had been apprenticed to a tradesman at the age of eleven, and a hard pioneer childhood had made him mean-spirited as well as ambitious. Always disappointed with Ulysses, Jesse Grant never failed to let his son know that he showed so little potential. On the puny side, Ulysses detested working in his father's tannery and had no head for business. To escape, he worked on a farm owned by his father.
After a year at a Kentucky boarding school, the seventeen-year-old Grant was sent to West Point, an appointment secured with the help of one of his father's politically connected acquaintances. When he arrived at “the Point,” Grant stood at five-foot-one and weighed 120 pounds. In a momentous twist of fate, his name was changed forever. Attempting to enroll as Ulysses Hiram Grant, he discovered his appointment had already been made in the name of Ulysses S. Grant, because the congressman who appointed him thought his middle name was his mother's maiden name. Unable to correct the error, Grant took the new name as his own.
If it hadn't been for the Civil War, Grant might have been relegated to history's dustbin. Though he had served in Mexico, his postwar army career in the depressing northwest frontier had been clouded by his resignation under a charge of drunkenness. After that, his every business venture, every investment as a civilian, even a small farm, turned sour. Grant was back working as a clerk in his father's tannery in Galena, Illinois—a humiliating personal defeat—when the war broke out and “rescued” him. He immediately saw a return to service as the only road for his future and wrote letters seeking a commission.
Grant also tried the personal approach, going to the Cincinnati headquarters of George B. McClellan, who had been named a general of the Ohio volunteers. But Grant's infamous reputation preceded him: McClellan had a recollection of his being on a drinking spree when they had crossed paths at Fort Vancouver in 1853. The general avoided an interview with Grant, who had to settle for the command of a group of Illinois volunteers.
As in Lee's first Civil War battle, Grant's first encounter was also less than glorious. Early in the morning of November 7, 1861, some three thousand Union troops under Grant were transported by boat from their camp at Cairo, Illinois, and met the Confederate forces under the inept General Gideon Pillow, one of Jefferson Davis's worst political appointees to a military position. Though the Confederates fought stubbornly, they were pushed back to their camp at Belmont, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi.
Grant's troops were celebrating and looting the Confederate camp when they suddenly came under heavy fire from cannon on the high bluff across the river. These troops were commanded by General Leonidas Polk (1806-1864), a friend of Davis's. A West Pointer, Polk had traded his sword for the robes of an Episcopal bishop but then returned to the Confederate army. Now he ferried twenty-seven hundred Confederate troops across the river and attacked Grant. When an aide cried that they were surrounded, Grant is said to have replied calmly, “Well, we must cut our way out as we cut our way in.”
Forced to leave behind his wounded and the captured Confederate materials, Grant was fortunate to escape with his command intact. He was also fortunate to be alive. “Bishop” Polk could see Grant and had invited nearby soldiers to “try your marksmanship on him if you wish.” Perhaps Grant was already out of range because none took up the challenge. Grant called the action a “raid” and said he'd won. Polk called it a “battle” and said he'd won. It was an inconclusive waste of lives, but it gave Grant his first taste of command and seeing the men under him die.
Documents of the Civil War
Pierre G. T. Beauregard, who had ordered and led the attack on Fort Sumter, took command of a Confederate army guarding an important train junction at Manassas, Virginia, about thirty miles south of Washington, D.C. He issued this proclamation aimed at rousing the citizens to defend their state (June 1, 1861).
A reckless and unprincipled tyrant has invaded your soil. Abraham Lincoln, regardless of all moral, legal, and constitutional restraints, has thrown his Abolitionist hosts among you, who are murdering and imprisoning your citizens, confiscating and destroying your property, and committing other acts of violence and outrage, too shocking and revolting to humanity to be enumerated.
All rules of civilized warfare are abandoned, and they proclaim by their acts, if not on their banners, that their war-cry is “BEAUTY AND BOOTY.” All that is dear to man—your honor and that of your wives and daughters—your fortunes and your lives, are involved in this momentous contest.
What Happened at Manassas?
When the Disney Company lost “the third battle of Manassas” in 1994, a lot of attention was focused on the area where a little stream called Bull Run meanders through the Virginia countryside. That modern battle was fought over whether a theme park devoted to Disney's version of American history, along with extensive real estate and commercial development, belonged near the site of two of the most important battles of the Civil War, including the very first significant meeting of the two armies.
The first three months of war saw only minor fighting. On June 10, 1861, the Confederates beat back a Union attack at Big Bethel on the Virginia coast. Other clashes took place in western Virginia (soon to become the state of West Virginia), where, according to newspaper reports, the victor at the Battle of Rich Mountain was a young Union general named George Brinton McClellan—even though he had little to do with the victory. But McClellan understood that the Civil War would be fought in the newspapers as well as the trenches, and he made certain that telegraph lines followed him wherever he went.
Events were now moving toward the war's first great battle. At Alexandria, Virginia, General McDowell's federal army was being pressured to heed the Union newspapers and politicians demanding “On to Richmond!”
A West Pointer, Irvin McDowell (1818-1885) had assumed command somewhat by default. He was one of the few regular army officers available after the mass defections to the Confederacy. A man with a legendary appetite—it was said he could eat an entire water-melon for dessert—McDowell was modest, honest, and didn't drink alcohol, which set him apart from many of the Union generals who would follow him. With strong political pressure behind him, he was forced to act before his army was ready. When given his assignment, he did not even have maps of Virginia.
Responsible for blocking the federal approach to the Confederate capital and holding the railroad junction at Manassas was General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter and McDowell's classmate at West Point. Beauregard had deployed his army along Bull Run, the stream near Manassas about thirty miles southwest of Washington.
Some fifty miles away, at the northern end of Virginia's rich Shenandoah Valley, two more armies faced each other. The Union troops were under General Robert Patterson, an aging army veteran; the Confederates commanded by General Joseph E. Johnston (1807-1891). Patterson's orders from Washington were to block Johnston so he could not slip south to Manassas to reinforce Beauregard.
Marching from Alexandria on July 16, the Union army began to move into Confederate territory. Many of the men were three-month volunteers, assembled immediately after Fort Sumter, and their discharge date was approaching rapidly. Singing “Dixie” as they marched and with regimental bands playing, these green soldiers had no foreboding of what lay ahead.
Adding to the pomp and almost festive mood were crowds of civilians and politicians accompanying the army. Among them was Lincoln's private secretary, John G. Nicolay, who later wrote:
The business of the war was such a novelty that McDowell's army accumulated an extraordinary number of camp-followers and noncombatants. The vigilant newspapers of the chief cities sent a cloud of correspondents to chronicle the incidents of the march and conflict. The volunteer regiments carried with them…companionship unknown to regular armies…Senators and representatives in several instances joined in what many rashly assumed would be a mere triumphal parade.
A Confederate observer said the procession included “gay women and strumpets” and that they carried picnic baskets, opera glasses, champagne, and tickets that had been printed for “a grand ball in Richmond.” As John Nicolay reported, there were at least fifty correspondents from Union newspapers along with another twenty-six journalists from the Confederate press, making it perhaps the best-reported battle of any war before CNN came along.
McDowell ignored the reporters and spectators. He was far more concerned about his undisciplined troops. While his plan of attack was sound, he was relying on untested troops who lacked experience with the rigors of a forced march, and had little or no acquaintance with combat. The march had the air of a country outing as the soldiers broke ranks to pick berries or fill canteens. Their overconfidence was only bolstered when the first Confederate sentries retreated before their celebratory advance. But then came a brief exchange of fire between the Union troops and some Confederates under James K. Longstreet; like his fellow Confederate generals, Beauregard and Johnston, Longstreet was still wearing his Union army uniform. At this sign of a fight, some of the Union soldiers began to have second thoughts. Volunteers nearing the end of their enlistment period quickly decided that this was a good time to request an early discharge.
When McDowell's army delayed for two days at Centreville, Virginia, Johnston used the time to move about two thirds of his Confederate troops from the Shenandoah Valley to Bull Run by train, giving the armies almost equal strength. In so doing, he made military history: it was the first time that troops used the railroad for strategic mobility—one of many historic firsts in the Civil War.
On Sunday, July 21, the battle began in full fury. Initially, the Union forces seemed justified in their confidence as the Confederates retreated. But among those troops fresh from the Shenandoah area were a brigade of Virginians commanded by Thomas J. Jackson (1824-1863). Born in western Virginia, Jackson was the son of a debtridden lawyer who died of typhoid when the boy was two years old. When his mother died five years later, Thomas was separated from his brother and sister and raised by a bachelor uncle. With the equivalent of only a fourth-grade education, he was admitted to West Point in 1842; rising steadily in the class rankings, he graduated in 1846, seventeenth in a class of fifty-nine.
After West Point, Jackson was commissioned a second lieutenant and joined an artillery unit in Mexico. For bravery during the siege of Vera Cruz, he was promoted to first lieutenant and earned wide praise. He stayed in the army until 1851, when he left to join the faculty of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. Even then, Jackson demonstrated some of the eccentricities for which he was later famed. Daring, calm, and tactically brilliant on the battlefield, he was also a hypochondriac, very concerned about his digestive system and his diet. Among his idiosyncrasies was a refusal to eat pepper because he thought it made his left leg hurt. A tall, rigid man, he never let his back touch a chair, always sitting bolt upright to keep his internal organs in “alignment.” Aides said they often saw him raise his right arm and hold it aloft for many minutes. He never explained whether he did so to engage in silent prayer or to cause blood to flow downward and “establish equilibrium,” which he considered essential to good health. Stern and silent, with little sense of humor, Jackson didn't drink, smoke, dance, curse, play cards, or attend the theater. Instead, he strolled around camp handing out Sunday school leaflets. He refused to write a letter that would be in transit on Sunday, and he habitually sucked lemons, spoke in a voice “so shrill it seemed feminine,” and napped before battle. He also believed that Yankees were devils.
This day at Manassas, General Barnard Bee told Jackson he was being beaten back, but Jackson said he would stop the Union advance with bayonets if necessary. What happened next belongs to Civil War mythology. Bee supposedly called out, “Oh men, there are Jackson and his Virginians, standing behind you like a stone wall! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Follow me.”
Thus Bee supposedly gave Jackson his immortal nickname. But there are many reported versions of this speech. Although the name seemed complimentary, it was not clear if it had been meant as an insult. Was Bee praising Jackson's immovable resolve or complaining that Jackson was not coming to his support? Bee never said; he was wounded in the fighting moments later and died the next day. Some have labeled the entire episode a fabrication. Almost everything about Bee's words—if he said them at all—is subject to dispute. In fact, Bee's men may have been behind Jackson's. But all that matters is that the Richmond papers reported the heroic version of Jackson's stand, and a legend was created. Thomas Jackson became “Stonewall” and his 1st Virginia Brigade the “Stonewall Brigade.”
At a moment when both armies were exhausted from the day's fighting and the fate of the battle hung in the balance, fresh forces reinforced the thinning Confederate lines. Their arrival had an extraordinary effect. What first seemed like a sure Union victory quickly turned into a massive rout of the inexperienced Union volunteers, who wilted under the Confederate surge. Jackson then issued the order “Charge, men and yell like the furies.” This was the first Union experience of the blood-curdling “Rebel Yell,” a shrieking, high-pitched scream that has entered Civil War folklore. Self-assured and confident three days earlier, the Union army turned back toward Washington in a riotous dash of soldiers, horses, and all those civilians who had come to watch.
As one Union newsman reported, “All sense of manhood seemed to be forgotten…. Even the sentiment of shame had gone…. Every impediment to flight was cast aside. Rifles, bayonets, pistols, haversacks, cartridge-boxes, canteens, blankets, and overcoats lined the road.”
Civil War Voices
New York World correspondent Edmund Clarence Stedman saw two congressmen attempting to stem the rout at Manassas.
Both these Congressmen bravely stood their ground till the last moment…. But what a scene!…For three miles, hosts of Federal troops…were fleeing along the road, but mostly through the lots on either side. Army wagons, sutler's teams [merchants who followed the army with wagons full of goods], and private carriages choked the passage, tumbling against each other amid the clouds of dust and sickening sights and sounds. Hacks containing unlucky spectators of the late fray were smashed like glass, and the occupants were lost sight of in the debris.
Wounded men lying along the banks…appealed with raised hands to those who rode horses…but few regarded such petitions.
Then the artillery, such as was saved, came thundering along, smashing and overpowering everything….
Who ever saw such a flight?…It did not slack in the least until Centreville was reached.
In Washington, where the Associated Press had already issued a premature report of victory, the news changed around 5:00 P.M. As word came in of the devastated Union army in full retreat, the city was sent reeling into a panicky shock.
When a jubilant President Davis arrived at the Manassas battlefield from Richmond, Jackson asked him for ten thousand men to follow the fleeing Union troops right into Washington and end the whole thing. But his request was ignored, for the Confederates lacked sufficient men and supplies. This was the first chance for the Confederate press to turn on the Davis administration, which also suffered its first casualty. Criticized because the troops were unable to pursue the defeated Union army, Leroy Walker resigned as the Confederate secretary of war. His place was taken by Judah Benjamin, who was emerging as Davis's most reliable and efficient administrator. In spite of the emerging criticism, this first decisive Confederate victory was hailed wildly throughout the Confederacy and taken as a sign that the second “War of Independence” would end quickly. The powers of Europe and the Lincoln administration would surely recognize the legitimacy of the Confederate cause and negotiate a peaceful settlement.
In the wake of the battle, Stonewall Jackson sent off an envelope to his pastor. Expecting a battle report, the preacher discovered a contribution for his church's “colored Sunday school,” which Jackson had forgotten to send the day of the battle.
Wilmer McLean, a farmer who had granted the use of his home as Beauregard's Manassas headquarters, had seen enough of the war. After his house had been shelled, McLean decided to move his family farther south, where “the sound of battle would never reach them.” They settled in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and in the McLean parlor, on an April day nearly four years later, Lee would surrender his army to Grant.
Civil War Voices
Generals Joseph E. Johnston and Beauregard spoke to the soldiers of the Confederate states (July 1861).
One week ago, a countless host of men, organized into an army, with all the appointments which modern art and practiced skill could devise, invaded the soil of Virginia. Their people sounded their approach with triumphant displays of anticipated victory. Their generals came in almost royal state; their great Ministers, Senators and women came to witness the immolation of our army and subjugation of our people, and to celebrate the result with wild revelry.
It is with the profoundest emotions of gratitude to an overruling God, whose hand is manifest in protecting our homes and liberties, that we, your Generals commanding, are enabled, in the name of our whole country, to thank you for that patriotic courage, that heroic gallantry, that devoted daring exhibited by you in the actions of the 18th and 21st, by which the hosts of the enemy were scattered, and a signal and glorious victory obtained.
Rebuffed in his desire to carry the war to Washington, Beauregard took his feud with his civilian superiors to the press. It was the beginning of an unhappy relationship that was the equal of any of Lincoln's more widely discussed problems with his generals. Beauregard was transferred west, but the hero of Manassas was already being touted as an alternative to President Davis.
Who Was “Little Mac”?
The Confederacy had its Little Napoleon in Beauregard. But the Union could boast of one as well. On July 27, 1861, six days after the Union defeat at Bull Run, Lincoln replaced General Irvin McDowell, the defeated Union leader, with General George B. McClellan. Not yet thirty-five, McClellan had gained national prominence by taking the credit for two of the few Union victories in the first year of the war, the relatively minor battles of Rich Mountain and Carrick's Ford in western Virginia.
If history is indeed often determined by character—the so-called Great Man theory—McClellan may provide clear proof of it. In the negative. He seemed to have everything going for him and blew it. Brilliant, vain, superior, egotistic, paranoid: These are just a few of the words used to describe the man who—after Lincoln and Grant—influenced the course of the war more than anyone else in the Union. Unfortunately, in McClellan's case it was for the worse.
In his biography of McClellan, The Young Napoleon, Stephen W. Sears wrote:
When making war, General George Brinton McClellan was a man possessed by demons and delusions. He believed beyond any doubt that his Confederate enemies faced him with forces substantially greater than his own. He believed with equal conviction that enemies at the head of his own government conspired to see him and his army defeated so as to carry out their traitorous purposes. He believed himself to be God's chosen instrument for saving the Union. When he lost the courage to fight, as he did in every battle, he believed he was preserving his army to fight the next time on another and better day…. While he basked in the appellation given him by his admirers—the Young Napoleon—he was called by a legion of derisive opponents Young McNapoleon.
McClellan was admitted to West Point before he turned sixteen, having already begun his university education. The son of a Philadelphia doctor, a haughty young aristocrat who looked down his nose at his social inferiors, he served with distinction in Mexico. Trained as an engineer, he went into the booming world of railroading and became an executive for the Illinois Central, where he encountered two people who would change his life. Allan Pinkerton, the private detective under contract to the railroad, and Abraham Lincoln, then serving the railroad as an attorney. A conservative Democrat, McClellan differed sharply with the Republican Lincoln in politics and held a low opinion of the future president, whom he considered his social and intellectual inferior. He later wrote that Lincoln “was not a man of very strong character, & as he was as destitute of refinement—certainly in no sense a gentleman—he was easily wrought upon by the coarse associates whose style of conversation agreed so well with his own.”
Now Lincoln had summoned him to take command. And a few days later McClellan noted with characteristic egotism to his wife of one year, “Who would have thought, when we were married, that I should so soon be called upon to save my country?”
Civil War Voices
General George B. McClellan's recollections of his assuming command of the troops in the Washington, D.C., area following the defeat at Bull Run.
All was chaos, and the streets, hotels, and bar-rooms were filled with drunken officers and men absent from their regiments without leave….
The first and most pressing demand upon me was the immediate safety of the capital and the government. This was provided for by at once exacting the most rigid discipline and order….
I lost no time in acquiring an accurate knowledge of the ground in all directions, and by frequent visits to the troops made them personally acquainted with me, while I learned about their condition, and their needs, and thus soon succeeded in inspiring full confidence and good morale in place of the lamentable state of affairs which existed on my arrival.
Thus I passed long days in the saddle and my nights in the office—a very fatiguing life, but one which made my power felt everywhere and by everyone.
At this moment of crisis, McClellan, the professional soldier, was exactly what the demoralized Union army desperately needed. Initially he proved a superb organizer and had an extraordinary rapport with his troops, who dubbed him “Little Mac.” By the end of August, McClellan's army had grown to seventy-five thousand men.
Civil War Voices
London banker Baron Rothschild, when asked who would win the war.
“The North.”
“Why?”
“Because it has the largest purse.”
What Was the Trent Affair?
One of the basic oversights of a typical American education has been the tradition of teaching American history as if it happened in a vacuum and that nothing else of interest or importance was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time. For instance, during the Civil War years, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) in China was responsible for the loss of as many as twenty million lives. In 1848 Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. This cultural myopia is due partly to a powerful streak of American egotism: the only important things are what happened in America. That's one reason our schoolbooks tended to underplay, for instance, the crucial role of the French in winning America's independence. And it is certainly true of teaching the Civil War. In 1860 the world was getting smaller, for steamships, railroads, and telegraphs had created a nineteenthcentury revolution in communications and transportation. More than ever before, events in Europe had an impact on events in America.
Throughout the early months and years of the war, one of the most critical questions facing both sides was the reaction of Europe. Would Queen Victoria's Great Britain, in particular, recognize the Confederate cause? Such recognition would give the Confederacy political legitimacy and allies capable of openly furnishing weapons and other supplies.
This question was complicated by the messy relations among Europe's three great powers—England, France, and Russia—at the time. England and France, the victors over Russia in the Crimean War to control Central and Eastern Europe, salivated at the prospect of the downfall of the United States government. Having lost the war, Russia needed the United States to balance its European enemies. Soon after the surrender of Fort Sumter, Queen Victoria officially announced Britain's neutrality but acknowledged the Confederates as belligerents. This status meant that the Confederacy could buy arms from neutral nations and seize ships on the high seas. Though short of recognizing the Confederacy, this gave it hope and was viewed as an unfriendly act by Lincoln's administration.
Throughout the Union, the assumption was that England, which had abolished slavery and the slave trade, would side with the Union. (Russia had also freed its serfs in 1861.) But this question, like most every other great question between nations, ultimately fell to dollars and pounds and international trade, not morality. The British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, was sympathetic to the Confederacy. England's manufacturers needed cotton, and the merchants knew that the Union blockade would close lucrative ports to trade. Despite the government's neutrality, British shipbuilders were soon producing blockade runners designed to slip past the Union ships to deliver English goods to the South and carry cotton back to England.
European recognition was critical to the Confederacy, and the issue nearly blew up for the Union in the fall of 1861 over an incident known as the Trent Affair. During a storm on the night of October 11, a Confederate blockade runner slipped out of Charleston, South Carolina, carrying James Mason and John Slidell to London and Paris to seek official recognition of the Confederacy.
A Virginia lawyer who had served in both houses of Congress, James Murray Mason (1798-1871) was a tobacco-chewing, staunch states' rights Democrat who had drafted the controversial Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Jefferson Davis chose his old friend Mason, a tenyear veteran of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to serve as the Confederacy's envoy to England. Born in New York and educated at Columbia, John Slidell (1793-1871) moved to New Orleans and set up a law practice. He joined the Senate in 1853 but resigned along with his law partner and fellow senator Judah Benjamin when Louisiana seceded in February 1861.
Reaching Havana, Mason and Slidell transferred to the Trent, a British mail steamer bound for England. The next day the Trent was met by the Union sloop San Jacinto. In a flagrant violation of international law, Captain Charles Wilkes (1798-1877), one of the first Americans to sail around the world, ordered two shots fired across the Trent's bow. He then boarded the Trent and demanded the surrender of Mason and Slidell. Outraged, the British captain had no choice; the San Jacinto sailed to Boston, where Mason and Slidell were jailed while the Trent continued to England.
While the Union rejoiced over the capture of the Confederate diplomats and Congress thanked Wilkes for his “brave, adroit, and patriotic conduct in the arrest of the traitors,” the British had an entirely different reaction. Queen Victoria herself was outraged, and London's cries for war were heard across the Atlantic. Lord Palmerston issued an ultimatum: release the diplomats or face war. Prince Albert, the queen's influential husband, counseled moderation and toned down the outraged diplomatic correspondence from London. But an army of eight thousand British soldiers set sail for Canada, and sympathy for the Confederate cause grew in the British business community. On both sides of the Atlantic, the rhetoric grew hot. The Times of London wrote, “By Capt. Wilkes let the Yankee breed be judged. Swagger and ferocity, built on a foundation of vulgarity and cowardice, these are the characteristics, and these are the prominent marks by which his countrymen, generally speaking, are known all over the world.”
Although Secretary of State Seward thought that war with England might bring the seceded states back to the Union, the president realized that America could not fight London and the Confederacy at the same time. Lincoln said, “One war at a time,” and sought a facesaving reconciliation. He had another compelling reason to seek peace: The Union needed the 2,300 tons of saltpeter, a key ingredient in gunpowder, that had been secretly purchased from the British. By late December passions had cooled between the two countries, and Lincoln agreed to release the Confederate emissaries, recognizing that they had been taken illegally. On January 1, Mason and Slidell were turned over to the British.
Mason's job was to convince the British government to support an independent Confederate nation. This effort was part of “cotton diplomacy.” Although never announced as an official policy of the Confederate government, planters had begun to withhold cotton for export. The idea went back to an 1858 speech by South Carolina's James Hammond, who suggested that if the South's cotton planters held back their crop, “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her.”
It was an ambitious scheme, but it never really worked. In 1860, before the war, a large harvest had pushed prices down and allowed British mill operators to stockpile a two-year inventory of cotton. In addition, new sources of cotton were emerging in Egypt and India, England's expanding empire on the other side of the world. Finally, the loss of southern cotton was far less troublesome to Britain than the loss of the lucrative northern wartime market.
What Was a “Radical Republican”?
It sounds like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it? Radical and Republican simply don't fit. In modern politics, even the most moderate Republicans would profess to be conservatives, and few would suffer to be called liberals. But the picture was different in 1861. The “Radical Republicans” were those men who viewed the war as a crusade against slavery, pure and simple. Although a minority in the Republican party, they held great sway, and, from the war's outset, they often made life difficult for Lincoln.
If Lincoln was going to do away with constitutional guarantees, such as habeas corpus, Congress—and a group of Radical Republicans, in particular—decided to wreak equal havoc on due process and individual rights.
As the war's first year drew to a close, Lincoln faced political opposition not just from Democrats in Congress and the press opposed to the war but also from members of his own Republican party who were unhappy with the course of the war. A few months after the debacle at Bull Run, another Union military disaster only increased the pressure on Lincoln. Once more, it was the result of the inexperience of the Union commanders. And, sadly for Lincoln, it would mean a personal tragedy as well as another humiliating Confederate victory.
Born in London, Edward D. Baker came to America with his family in 1816 and moved to the Utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. After studying law and serving in the brief Black Hawk War, he moved to Springfield, Illinois, in 1835 to open a law office. He was elected to the state legislature, where he met Lincoln. Though they squabbled over local politics, the men became close friends, and Lincoln named his second son, Eddie (who died in 1850, at age four), after Baker.
As a congressman, Baker broke ranks with his party over the war with Mexico and volunteered to fight. A handsome man with a fondness for champagne, cards, and poetry, Baker moved to Oregon, becoming its senator in 1860, the first Republican elected to high office on the West Coast. He introduced Lincoln at his first inauguration and following Fort Sumter's fall, he issued a call for “sudden, bold, forward determined war; and I do not think anybody can conduct war of that kind as well as a dictator.” When Lincoln offered him an appointment as a brigadier general, Baker chose instead a commission as colonel in order to retain his Senate seat.
Despite his early military experience, Baker was no military genius, as was true of a good many of the “political” generals and officers produced by both Union and Confederate sides in the war's early days. On October 21, 1861, Baker's 1,700-man brigade crossed the Potomac River from Maryland to Virginia on a reconnaissance mission.
With only three boats available, the crossing was ill planned and slow. On the Virginia side of the river, the Union troops faced a hundred-foot-high bank called Ball's Bluff, which could be reached only by walking up a narrow cowpath. When the troops reached the top, they found themselves on open ground and confronted by four concealed Confederate regiments. Baker was killed instantly by a bullet through the brain. In a frenzied panic, the Union men raced backward, tumbling over the cliff onto the bayonets of their comrades below. Dozens tried to scramble into the boats, which capsized, drowning many more soldiers.
Civil War Voices
Randolph A. Shotwell, a seventeen-year-old private in the Virginia army, was among the Confederates on Ball's Bluff.
A kind of shiver ran through the huddled mass upon the brow of the cliff; it gave way; rushed a few steps; then, in one wild, panic stricken herd, rolled, leaped, tumbled over the precipice! The descent is nearly perpendicular, with ragged, jutting crags, and a water-laved base. Screams of pain and terror filled the air. Men seemed suddenly bereft of reason; they leaped over the bluff with muskets still in their clutch, threw themselves into the river without divesting themselves of their heavy accouterments, hence went to the bottom like lead. Others sprang down upon the heads and bayonets of those below. A gray-haired private of the First California was found with his head mashed between two rocks by the heavy boots of a ponderous “Tammany” man, who had broken his own neck by the fall! The side of the bluff was worn smooth by the numbers sliding down.
…As it happened, the two larger bateaux were just starting with an overload when the torrent of terror-stricken fugitives rolled down the bluffs—upon them. Both boats were instantly submerged…. The whole surface of the river seemed filled with heads, struggling, screaming, fighting, dying! Man clutched at man, and the strong, who might have escaped, were dragged down by the weaker…. Captain Otter, of the First California…was found a few days later with two men of his company clutching his neckband. Had he attempted to save them, or had they seized him and dragged him down? One officer was found with $126 in gold in his pocket; it had cost his life.
The Union losses included more than two hundred killed and wounded, with more than seven hundred captured. Told of Baker's death, Lincoln was deeply shaken. His close friends Elmer Ellsworth, who died in Alexandria, Virginia, the war's first Union combat fatality, and now Baker were dead. One who saw Lincoln at this moment reported, “His hands were clasped upon his heart; he walked with a shuffling, tottering gait, reeling as if beneath a staggering blow. He did not fall, but passed down the street, carrying not only the burden of the nation but a load of private grief which, with the swiftness of the lightning's flash, had been hurled upon him.”
Ball's Bluff was immediately denounced by newspapers and politicians as another fiasco. They demanded accountability for the disaster and for the loss of a patriot like Baker. A few days later, three Radical Republicans met with the president. Fellow party members, they were critical of Lincoln's conciliatory attitude toward the South, the appointment of McClellan, a Democrat, and his slow pace, the sharp defeats the Union had suffered at Bull Run and Ball's Bluff, and Lincoln's assumption of almost dictatorial powers. They told Lincoln that they planned to set up a congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, ostensibly to oversee the president and specifically charged with rooting out corruption and inefficiency in the Union army. The committee was made up of these abolitionist politicians known as Radical Republicans; it was led by Senators Benjamin Franklin Wade (Ohio), who served as chairman, and Zachariah Chandler (Michigan) and from the House Congressman George Washington Julian (Indiana). Another member was the pro-Union Democrat from Tennessee, Andrew Johnson.
Working in secret session, the committee's main target was McClellan, whom they considered a coward. Some even suggested that he was a traitor. But they avoided a frontal attack on the young general, going after his subordinate generals. The first victim was General Charles P. Stone. Although the overall commander of the forces defeated in the Ball's Bluff disaster, Stone had had little to do with the battle and had been nowhere near the scene. But McClellan knew the wolves needed a lamb, and he happily sacrificed Stone. Brought before a secret session of the committee, Stone faced an inquisition. He was without benefit of counsel, was not told the charges against him, and did not know his accusers or their testimony. On the committee's orders, Stone was arrested at midnight on February 8, 1862, and whisked away to Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor, where he was imprisoned for 189 days. Never charged and never cleared, his military career was ruined, although he eventually prospered as a civilian engineer. (Ironically, in 1887 he was the engineer who constructed the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty in the same harbor where he had been held.)
Later victims of the committee included Major General Fitz-John Porter, one of the Union's most successful generals on the battlefield—and unfortunately for him, an avid supporter of McClellan's. A cousin of the naval hero David Dixon Porter, he became the scapegoat for the Union defeat in the Second Battle of Bull Run, in 1862. Charged with disloyalty, disobedience, and misconduct, Porter was court-martialed and cashiered from the army in disgrace. (An 1878 inquiry completely exonerated him and he was recommissioned. He later served as New York City's police, fire, and public works commissioner.)
Although the committee continued its political vendettas throughout the war, it had little influence on Lincoln. And the generals it tended to support usually had little success with Lincoln or on the battlefield. Myth has it that Mrs. Lincoln was scrutinized by the committee for suspected secessionist sympathies. There was even a report that Lincoln was forced to appear before the committee to defend her, but the story was an unfounded rumor.
Was It Really “the Brothers' War”?
The Civil War has been given many names, but perhaps the most fitting and poignant is “the Brothers' War.” The war is filled with the stories of families divided and former comrades facing one another over their different loyalties. Sadly, it was no exaggeration.
Divided loyalties went all the way to the White House. Mary Todd Lincoln was from an aristocratic family in the border state of Kentucky, and the Washington gossips spoke of her as being proslavery and in favor of southern secession. Four of Lincoln's brothers-in-law served the Confederate cause. One of them, Ben Hardin Helm, was a West Pointer who had turned down Lincoln's personal offer of a commission in the Union army; becoming a Confederate general, he was killed in the Battle of Chickamauga.
The border states provided the most frequent source of divided loyalties. Kentucky's Henry Clay, “the Great Compromiser,” who tried for years to overcome the sectional strife that led to the war, had grandsons serving on both sides. John J. Crittenden, the former governor and U.S. senator from Kentucky who had proposed the Crittenden Plan in December 1860 as a way of avoiding the war, had sons serving on opposite sides: Major General Thomas L. Crittenden for the Union and Major General George B. Crittenden for the Confederacy.
And the saga of the Civil War is peppered with stories of friends, family members, and former comrades who encountered one another on the battlefield. Major A. M. Lea was part of the Confederate boarding party that captured the U.S.S. Harriet Lane during a naval battle off Galveston, Texas. On deck he found a dying Union lieutenant—his son.
James McQueen McIntosh, a brigadier general in the Confederate army who was killed in action in 1862, had a younger brother, John B. McIntosh, who reached the same rank in the Union army.
During the famous battle of the first ironclads, the Virginia (previously known as the Merrimac) was commanded by Franklin Buchanan. On board the Congress, a Union vessel sunk during that battle, was his brother Paymaster McKean Buchanan. And in one of the most extreme and notorious instances of families divided, Union Brigadier General Philip St. George Cooke was assigned to hunt down the daring Confederate Cavalry General Jeb Stuart. Stuart was Cooke's son-in-law and supposedly said of his father-in-law's decision to remain in the Union army, “He will regret it but once, and that will be continuously.” Cooke's own son, John Rogers Cooke, was also a Confederate brigadier general. And his nephew John Esten Cooke, a well-known novelist before the war, also rode with Jeb Stuart and was responsible for making Stuart one of the war's great romantic heroes.