1862 “Let Us Die to Make Men Free”
I have put you in motion to offer battle to the invaders of your country….
You can but march to a decisive victory over…mercenaries sent to subjugate and despoil you of your liberties, property, and honor.
—CONFEDERATE GENERAL ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON
APRIL 3, 1862
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it—if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it—and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
—PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN
AUGUST 22, 1862
The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like eggshells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way.
—UNION SOLDIER DAVID L. THOMPSON
AFTER THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM
* What Happened at Fort Donelson?
* How Did “a Tin Can on a Shingle” Make History?
* What Was the Peninsular Campaign?
* What Happened at Shiloh?
* Who Fought for the Confederacy?
* Why Did the Defeated Citizens of New Orleans Call Benjamin Butler a “Beast”?
* Why Did Lincoln Fire General McClellan?
* What Was “The Prayer of Twenty Millions”?
* What Happened at Antietam?
* Why Did Lincoln Fire General McClellan Again?
“All quiet along the Potomac” became the catchphrase for journalists in Washington as the new year opened with an almost eerie stillness. Following the Union disasters of the war's first months, volunteers poured into the capital, reaching nearly 200,000 men by midwinter and turning Washington into an armed camp. But as one soldier noted, there were three types of people, the first group being soldiers; “the other two classes are politicians and prostitutes, both very numerous, and about equal in…honesty and morality.”
The sight of McClellan's doing little more than overseeing parades was not a big hit with most of the politicians. Even President Lincoln, who desperately wanted McClellan to succeed, began to doubt his abilities and resolve. But Lincoln had few options. Most of the Union generals seemed more concerned with politicking for power, promotion, and glory. Lincoln's headaches were compounded by a Cabinet crisis. The charges of corruption in the War Department had become so overwhelming that Secretary of War Simon Cameron, a powerful Pennsylvanian who was also pressing for the emancipation of slaves, against Lincoln's wishes, was pushed out and made ambassador to Moscow. His place was taken by Edwin Stanton, a nononsense lawyer Lincoln had known since they butted heads in Springfield. A Democrat, Stanton did not think highly of Lincoln, calling him an “imbecile.”
Lincoln probably took some pleasure from a proposal he received from the king of Siam, who offered to send the president a herd of fighting elephants to aid the Union war effort. Lincoln politely declined, stating that the weather “does not…favor the multiplication of the elephant.”
What Happened at Fort Donelson?
While McClellan paraded, Ulysses S. Grant remained a rather obscure brigadier general with a reputation for hard drinking. But he was far less interested in parades and drills than he was in taking action. Operating in coordination with Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote and his small flotilla of gunboats, Grant attacked two Confederate forts on the Tennessee River. First, the gunboats forced the fall of Fort Henry, one of a string of small forts—little more than piles of dirt—thrown up along the Tennessee to protect the Confederacy's borders.
But the Confederate forces in nearby Fort Donelson proved more resistant. The Union gunboats failed to dislodge them, and in sharp fighting the Union forces were pushed back when Grant took charge. Leading a counterattack, he sent the Confederate defenders reeling. Commanding Fort Donelson was John B. Floyd, President Buchanan's war secretary, who had been accused of misusing funds meant for Indians and sending federal arms south during the Buchanan years. Next in command was Gideon Pillow, a man Grant knew and disdained since serving with him in Mexico. A law partner of former President Polk's, Pillow was a political appointee who had performed miserably during the Mexican War. Inept as a soldier, Pillow had been Polk's “spy” inside Winfield Scott's army in Mexico. He had compounded his battlefield shortcomings by attempting to take credit in the press for Scott's military success, and he was tried for insubordination. At Fort Donelson, both Floyd and Pillow offered sharp rebuttals to the notion of Confederate command superiority. During the war, each side would have its share of incompetent, corrupt, ill-equipped, cowardly, and drunken officers, often political appointees. For the Confederacy, Floyd and Pillow were such men.
Facing defeat, they were afraid to face also the ignominy of being the first Confederate officers to surrender. So they fled, leaving Simon B. Buckner in command of the hopeless situation. When Buckner later told Grant that Pillow had made a hasty departure, Grant said, “If I had got him, I'd let him go again. He will do us more good commanding you fellows.”
Civil War Voices
General Grant, replying to a request for terms of surrender from General Simon B. Buckner (February 16, 1862): “Sir: Yours of this date, proposing armistice and appointment of Commissioners to settle terms of capitulation, is just received. No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”
A year behind Grant at West Point and a friend during the Mexican War, Simon B. Buckner had once loaned Grant money to pay a hotel bill when he resigned from the army. Expecting his old comrade to communicate in a more gentlemanly fashion, Buckner called Grant's terms “ungenerous and unchivalrous.” But to Grant, honor among friends was one thing. War was another. His terms were accepted.
The fall of Fort Donelson meant Grant's name had been made. The newspapers quickly decided that his initials stood for “Unconditional Surrender.” Other generals were not so thrilled. In particular, his immediate superior, Henry Halleck, fearful that Grant's rising star might damage his own career, demoted him and sought to smear his name by resurrecting the drinking charges. But with the help of Elihu Washburne, an influential Illinois congressman, the case went directly to Lincoln, who saw in Grant what he was looking for—aggressive command. He immediately nominated Grant for promotion to major general.
Pillow and Floyd were suspended for their actions, and Floyd died in 1863. Pillow held command once more but was accused of hiding behind a tree during a battle and never led troops again. Simon Buckner was held briefly as a prisoner, although Grant did return his former comrade's earlier favor by putting his own purse at the disposal of the captive.
Another Confederate officer at Donelson accepted neither surrender nor slinking off in the night. Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877), a hot-tempered Tennessean who had amassed a small fortune as a slave trader and plantation owner, enlisted in the Confederate army as a private and rose rapidly. With his own money, he mounted a cavalry battalion. When Fort Donelson was about to fall, he organized a breakout, successfully removing five hundred men along with horses and supplies to Nashville. Forrest eventually emerged as one of the most daring Confederate leaders, but he was also among the most controversial. Later in the war, he was accused of ordering the massacre of black Union troops.
For Lincoln, this brief glimmer of hope brought by the fall of Fort Donelson, the first major blow to the Confederacy, was tempered by personal tragedy. As Grant was assaulting the Tennessee forts, Lincoln's two youngest sons, Willie and Tad, were ill with what doctors called a bilious fever, probably typhoid. It was contracted from water contaminated by the overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions in Washington, where the troops' sewage ran straight into the Potomac, the source of the White House drinking water. Lapsing into a coma, eleven-year-old Willie died on February 20. First Eddie in 1850 and now for a second time, the grief-stricken president had to bury a son. Lincoln told an aide, “He was too good for this earth. It is hard to have him die.”
Mary Todd Lincoln took the news even harder, collapsing with a nervous breakdown, and did not leave her room for three months. One day, according to Elizabeth Keckley, a seamstress who had become her confidante, the president led his wife to a window and pointed to a mental hospital in the distance, saying, “Try and control your grief or it will drive you mad and we may have to send you there.” (Mary Todd's biographer Jean Baker refutes this story in its details but not its characterization of Mrs. Lincoln's depression.)
Although she recovered, Mary Lincoln never went into Willie's rooms again and began seeing spiritualists and attending séances in an attempt to contact her dead child. Spiritualism and mediums had experienced a major revival in midcentury America, and attempts to contact the dead were commonplace among Lincoln's Cabinet members and other politicians. Long after Willie's death, Mary Lincoln would tell her half sister Emili, the wife of Confederate General Ben Hardin Helm, that both her dead boys came into her rooms at the White House.
Lincoln himself also had to fight through the sorrow brought on by the loss. Having struggled with fits of depression—he called it the “hypo,” short for hypochondria—all his life, he drew on tremendous reserves of personal strength during the war, and the melancholy that had sometimes disabled him in earlier years apparently never affected his wartime behavior.
Songs of the Civil War
Julia Ward Howe's poem, which would become “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (February 1862).
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath
are stored;
He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift
sword;
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling
camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and
damps;
I have read his righteous sentence in the dim and flaring
lamps;
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel;
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall
deal”;
Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his
heel,
Since God is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call re
treat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea.
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Born into an affluent New York family, Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) had written several books of poetry and, with her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, one of abolitionist John Brown's six financial backers, published the Abolitionist, a Boston antislavery journal. In the capital to meet with Lincoln, Howe and a group of abolitionist friends sang snatches from popular army songs during a long carriage ride. One common tune, in homage to John Brown, started:
John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave,
His soul goes marching on.
After a companion suggested that Howe could write better words to the tune, that night in her hotel room she turned to the book of Isaiah and wrote all five verses. The Atlantic Monthly, the nation's leading literary magazine, paid her $5 for the poem.
But it was Army Chaplain Charles Caldwell McCabe who is credited with popularizing the poem. He first taught it to fellow prisoners of war in Richmond's Libby Prison. Later released, McCabe began to sing the song at fund-raisers for the chaplains corps. Following the battle at Gettysburg in 1863, he sang the song while the president was in the audience. With tears in his eyes, Lincoln stood and shouted, “Sing it again.” The song soon became the unofficial anthem of the Union.
How Did “a Tin Can on a Shingle” Make History?
Throughout human history, violence and technology have gone hand in hand, and weapons grew more deadly as men became more “civilized.” Stone replaced bone. Steel replaced stone. Gunpowder overcame steel. In the Civil War, the rapid advances of the Industrial Age changed warfare more dramatically than in any previous war. War would not change again so radically until the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan eighty-five years later.
The revolutionary changes in warfare in the Civil War became clear in the early weeks of March 1862. The railroad and telegraph, both relatively recent inventions, had already proven their value, but it was naval warfare that was about to change most drastically.
Hampton Roads is a channel through which three of Virginia's rivers—the James, Nansemond, and Elizabeth—empty into Chesapeake Bay. Union forces in Fort Monroe and Newport News held the northern shore of the channel; on the shores to the south were Norfolk and the Gosport Navy Yard, occupied by Confederate forces since the Union navy abandoned the port at the beginning of the war. The channel itself was controlled by a Union fleet, which blocked the water route to Richmond.
Secretly, the Confederate navy had begun work on a warship whose sides would be covered with metal armor. They had raised the frigate Merrimac, scuttled by the Union navy, and were covering its wooden sides with iron prepared at Richmond's Tredegar Iron Works. (At this arsenal of the Confederacy, slaves were employed to cast the cannons that were meant to keep them in chains.) But word of this secret soon reached Washington, which also launched a mission to build an ironclad. The plan was for the Union's ironclad to sail into the Norfolk Navy Yard and destroy the dock and the Merrimac before its conversion was completed.
The contract to design and build the Union's Monitor went to New Yorker John Ericsson, a Swedish immigrant and internationally renowned engineer. His design was not simply a wooden warship covered in steel. He drew plans for a flat, raftlike ship with a revolving turret equipped with two eleven-inch guns. Although the Union navy wanted the ship ready in a hundred days, that deadline came and went.
Late in February, a free black woman from Norfolk passed through enemy lines and went to the Navy Department. Inside her dress was hidden a letter from a Union sympathizer who worked in the Confederate navy yard reporting that the Merrimac was nearly finished. The race to complete the Monitor became more urgent.
Finished at a Brooklyn shipyard for $275,000, the Monitor was a long ocean voyage away from Hampton Roads. The strange-looking vessel moved into New York Harbor on March 6; barely seaworthy, it nearly missed its appointed date with history. It leaked badly, and in heavy seas, waves broke over the top of the vessel, threatening to put out its engine boilers. When the rough seas subsided, the Monitor was towed through relatively calm coastal waters.
In the meantime, the renamed Virginia was ready to steam out of port under the command of Franklin Buchanan (1800-1874). A Baltimorean who was the first superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy and who had accompanied Commodore Matthew Perry on the expeditions to the Orient that opened Japan to the Western world, Buchanan had resigned from the U.S. Navy to enter Confederate service. On Saturday, March 8, he led a small Confederate fleet out to do battle with the Union's blockading fleet and shore batteries.
One Union observer recalled, “We saw what to all appearances looked like the roof of a very big barn belching forth smoke as from a chimney on fire. We were all divided in opinion as to what was coming. The boatswain's mate was the first to make out the Confederate flag. And then we all guessed it was the Merrimac (Virginia) come at last.”
On the Union's Cumberland, pilot A. B. Smith said, “As she came ploughing through the water…she looked like a huge half-submerged crocodile. Her sides seemed of solid iron, except where the guns pointed from the narrow ports…. At her prow I could see the iron ram projecting straight forward, somewhat above the water's edge.”
The Union shore batteries and ships fired as fast as they could. Aboard the Cumberland, Smith recalled,
Still she came on, the balls bouncing upon her mailed sides like India-rubber, apparently not making the least impression, except to cut off her flag-staff and thus bring down the Confederate colors…. We had probably fired six or eight broadsides when a shot was received from one of her guns which killed five of our marines. It was impossible for our vessel to get out of her way, and the Merrimac soon crushed her iron horn, or ram, into the Cumberland…knocking a hole in the side…and driving the vessel back upon her anchors with great force. The water came rushing into the hold.
The renamed Virginia's attack on the wooden ships was like that of a tank assaulting a phalanx of Roman archers or a modern jet fighter encountering a World War I biplane. It was war between two different eras. As the Cumberland went down fighting, the tradition of wooden warships, dating from the ancient empires of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, sank with it.
The Virginia then turned its attention to the Congress, a Union vessel grounded in the channel's shallow waters. On board was McKean Buchanan, the brother of the Virginia's commander, Franklin Buchanan. Set afire, the Congress surrendered. Franklin Buchanan ordered another Confederate vessel to board the Congress and remove the wounded. But the Union batteries onshore continued to fire at the Confederates, even though they were clearly rescuing Union sailors, among them McKean Buchanan. Enraged, Commodore Franklin Buchanan took up a rifle and returned fire, in the process suffering a severe leg wound that took him out of the action. He was replaced by Lieutenant Jones.
By day's end, the Union's situation looked grim. The Virginia was hardly damaged, even though it had been the target of more than a hundred Union guns. Some of its guns were damaged, and its ram had been sheared off and left in the side of the Cumberland, but the Confederate ironclad had lost little of its fighting ability. Both sides knew it could simply sail out the next day and obliterate the Union fleet. In Washington there was panic as rumors flew that the Virginia would move up the Potomac and level the capital. A dispirited emergency Cabinet gathered for prayers.
Late in the day they were answered. The scenario and naval history were altered with the arrival at Hampton Roads of the Union's Monitor. Lieutenant John L. Worden (1818-1897) and his crew of fifty-seven sailors had weathered the sea voyage and the very likely threat of sinking. The Monitor took up position alongside the Minnesota, another crippled Union vessel, to await the light of day. In another coincidence, the Monitor's second-in-command, Dana S. Greene, knew that he would be facing his naval academy roommate, Walter R. Butt, aboard the Virginia.
When morning came, observers on both sides got their first look at the Union's entry in the ironclad arms race. Sitting only 18 inches above the water, at 172 feet long and 41½ feet wide, it was a small and rather unimpressive sight. One Confederate onlooker called it “a tin can on a shingle!”
Curious spectators crowded the shores on both sides. They did not have long to wait. The two ironclads locked onto each other, guns blasting. Watching with astonishment aboard the helpless Minnesota, Commander G. J. Van Brunt later recalled, “Gun after gun was fired by the Monitor, which was returned with whole broadsides from the rebels, with no more effect, apparently, than so many pebble-stones thrown by a child…. the shot glanced off…clearly establishing the fact that wooden vessels cannot contend successfully with iron-clad ones, for never before was anything like it dreamed of by the greatest enthusiast in maritime warfare.”
Like prizefighters exchanging blows, the two vessels battled for hours. Aboard the Monitor, Commander Worden was blinded when a shot hit the pilothouse, and his vessel was left momentarily out of control. Lieutenant Jones, now commanding the Virginia, thought the Union ship was withdrawing. His boat now leaking, his crew exhausted by two days of continuous action, and short on powder and shot, Jones ordered the Virginia to return to Norfolk. However, the Monitor was undamaged; seeing the Virginia depart, it took up position once again by the grounded Minnesota, whose crew had been prepared for the worst. Now a hero, the “savior” of Hampton Roads, the Monitor's temporarily blinded Commander Worden was taken to Washington to meet with a joyous but tearful Lincoln.
Inconclusive in the sense that neither ironclad emerged a clear victor, the long-term advantage went to the Union. The Monitor's arrival prevented the Confederates from breaking the Union's effective blockade of the Confederate capital as well as another potential Union military disaster, which Lincoln could ill afford. The Confederate navy would soon abandon Norfolk, and the Union would be far more capable of stepping up its production of ironclads.
The two days of fighting at Hampton Roads attracted worldwide attention and dramatically demonstrated the superiority of ironclads. Naval, warfare would never be the same. In England, then the world's greatest naval power, it was clear that the “tin can on a shingle” could wreak havoc on its mostly wooden navy. (England had two experimental ironclads in development.)
Ironically, neither vessel ever figured prominently in the war again. Forced out of Norfolk, the Virginia was run aground by her crew on May 11 and set afire to prevent her capture. The Monitor lasted only a few more months. While being towed off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, she foundered in heavy seas and went down with sixteen crew members on December 31, 1862. (Rediscovered in 1976, the Monitor is a popular diving site. Her anchor was recovered in 1983, but the hull is too badly corroded to raise.)
Civil War Voices
Abraham Lincoln, in a note written but never sent regarding General George B. McClellan (April 9, 1862): “It is called the Army of the Potomac but it is only McClellan's bodyguard…. If McClellan is not using the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.”
The relationship between Lincoln and McClellan grew testy. Though Lincoln offered his qualified support, McClellan barely concealed his disdain for the president, disparaging his as “the original gorilla” and “a well-meaning baboon,” characterizations that were actually first used by Edwin Stanton and later given racial overtones in the anti-Lincoln press. In a notorious incident, Lincoln called one evening at McClellan's residence to find the general away. Lincoln waited patiently for him, but when McClellan returned, he ignored the president and went to bed. It was not an isolated incident. However, Lincoln was willing to overlook McClellan's contempt as long as the general gave him victories.
What Was the Peninsular Campaign?
Lincoln's patience finally ran out. Having issued presidential War Orders calling for an offensive that McClellan simply ignored, the president was exasperated and on the brink of replacing the young commander before he had actually led troops into battle. After nearly eight months of organizing and training the Army of the Potomac, McClellan finally yielded to the calls for action by Lincoln, Congress, and the public.
Lincoln wanted a drive directly south from Washington, straight to Richmond. But McClellan, fearing the Confederate armies camped at Manassas, had concocted a much more ambitious plan. Moving his large army by water, he hoped to bypass the Confederate lines and start his drive only sixty miles from Richmond. Reluctantly, Lincoln approved but ordered McClellan to leave behind a sufficient force to defend the Union capital. This diversion of troops would lead to trouble, for McClellan repeatedly used Lincoln's order as an excuse for his failures.
Before moving, McClellan and the Union received another embarrassment. When the Confederate army pulled out of its trenches at Manassas and moved south to the Rappahannock River, closer to Richmond, the abandoned artillery at Centreville proved to be nothing more than logs painted black, which the press dubbed “Quaker guns.” It was also clear that the Confederate army at Manassas was about half the size McClellan had claimed.
Undeterred, the young general simply altered his plan by taking the army farther south to Fort Monroe, near the site of the Monitor-Merrimac battle. From there he would march up the narrow peninsula between the York and James rivers and capture Richmond. This approach gave the plan its name, the Peninsular Campaign.
An armada of 400 boats was pulled together near Washington and Alexandria to move the Army of the Potomac. Along with the troops, this fleet had to haul more than 1,200 wagons and ambulances, 300 pieces of artillery, tons of ammunition, 15,000 horses, and tons of rations for the troops and food for the animals. This logistical nightmare was accomplished by Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, one of the obscure and unsung heroes of the Union effort. Brought into the War Department after Cameron's dismissal, Meigs was a genius at supply and distribution, one of the major factors behind the Union's ultimate success.
On April 4, McClellan's 112,000 men landed and began slogging through the rain-soaked, flat, muddy Virginia countryside. Despite months of training, many of the recruits were unwilling to carry all their equipment, and the Army of the Potomac's route was soon littered with castoffs. One soldier recalled, “Castaway overcoats, blankets, parade-coats, and shoes were scattered along our route in reckless profusion…. The colored people along our route occupied themselves in picking up this scattered property. They had no their faces a distrustful look, as if uncertain of the tenure of their harvest.”
Civil War Voices
P. Regis de Trobriand, a French-born New York officer, on the Union's march up the peninsula:
The small number of houses…which were on the line of our march were all abandoned. Their occupants had left on our approach…. Near a deserted hut we met four children crouched at the side of the road…. Their mother was dead, and their father had abandoned them. They wept while asking for something to eat. The soldiers immediately gave them enough provisions to last them several days…. But what became of these children? This is the horrible side of war.
The army continued to Yorktown, the site of the historic surrender of the British army to George Washington's ragged rebels eighty years earlier, sealing America's victory in the War of Independence. The powerful symbolism of this nearly sacred Virginia site was not lost on the opposing Confederate troops. They saw themselves as heirs of the patriot army of Washington, the greatest Virginian of all, pitted in a struggle for liberty against a powerful government in a second war of independence.
Under General Joseph E. Johnston, one of the victorious commanders at Bull Run, the Confederates had only 15,000 men entrenched at Yorktown. Lincoln urged McClellan to attack. But the general was stalled by his natural caution, reinforced by the faulty intelligence provided by his secret service head, Allan Pinkerton.
Following Lincoln's notorious incognito arrival in Washington, Pinkerton had remained in Washington, hoping for a formal appointment from the president whose life he had apparently saved. But when no job was offered, he joined McClellan as chief of the secret service in the Department of the Ohio. In this role Pinkerton proved highly successful in his own spying expeditions into the seceded states, but he also kept McClellan informed of behind-the-scenes politicking in Washington, specifically, inside Lincoln's Cabinet.
When McClellan was promoted, Pinkerton followed him to Washington and then to the peninsula, where he was in charge of collecting information about Confederate troop strength. With much of his information coming from the escaping slaves who trickled into the Union lines, Pinkerton proved totally inept at consolidating the duplicated or erroneous reports he was receiving, and he consistently overestimated the Confederate strength, often by as much as two or three times the actual number. Known by his code name of Major E.J. Allen, Pinkerton catered to McClellan's need to feel that he was outnumbered, enabling the general continually to call for additional men and supplies.
At Yorktown, McClellan was convinced that he was outnumbered by the Confederates, when his numbers were vastly superior. Instead of attacking, he ordered the army to dig in and began a siege. His caution and hesitation gave the Confederate armies time to reinforce both Yorktown and Richmond.
In Richmond, President Davis was now receiving military advice from Robert E. Lee. At the war's outset, Lee had failed in what may have been the impossible task of securing pro-Union western Virginia for the Confederacy.
As McClellan settled in, Lee wrote to Jefferson Davis: “I am preparing a line that I can hold with part of our forces out front, while with the rest I will endeavor to make a diversion to bring McClellan out.” When Lee ordered his soldiers to build earthwork fortifications to protect Richmond, he was called “the King of Spades.” All along the sixteen-mile line, Lee's troops complained that they had not joined up to dig holes.
In early May, McClellan finally moved to attack. But the Confederate army had anticipated his move. Having forced the Union army to delay for a month, ample time to fortify the Richmond area with troops, it now withdrew from Yorktown back toward the capital, leaving McClellan holding an empty bag. He nonetheless claimed a great victory. A small action against the Confederate army's rear guard at the historic colonial capital of Williamsburg, Virginia, was inconclusive. But McClellan trumpeted what seemed like consecutive triumphs, and the Union press enthusiastically agreed. The real picture was far less rosy.
Civil War Voices
Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston to his troops before attacking General Grant's Army at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee (April 3, 1862).
Soldiers of the Army of the Mississippi: I have put you in motion to offer battle to the invaders of your country…. You can but march to a decisive victory over…mercenaries sent to subjugate and despoil you of your liberties, property, and honor. Remember the precious stake involved; remember the dependence of your mothers, your wives, your sisters, and your children on the result; remember the fair, broad, abounding lands, the happy homes that will be desolated by your defeat. The eyes and hopes of eight million rest upon you.
What Happened at Shiloh?
While “Young Napoleon” inched toward Richmond, the Union armies were moving more rapidly in the West. Following the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, Ulysses Grant was taking the war to the Confederacy while the Union navy attempted to control the Mississippi River.
With 42,000 men, Grant moved to Pittsburg Landing, on the west bank of the Tennessee River only a few miles from Tennessee's border with Mississippi. As Grant marched, his waterborne ally Foote attacked Island Number Ten, a Confederate fort on the Mississippi near New Madrid, Missouri. At the same time, a Union army led by Major General Don Carlos Buell was moving from the east to link up with Grant.
Facing Grant, General Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation to General Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate commander in Virginia) was building a Confederate army in Corinth, Mississippi. He was joined by P.G.T. Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter and Bull Run, whose pronouncements to the press about Jefferson Davis's administration had won him few fans in Richmond. He had been sent west to keep him quiet.
At Pittsburg Landing, Grant made one of his most costly mistakes. Confident that the Confederates would remain at Corinth, he failed to order adequate defenses. His troops did not dig defensive entrenchments; pickets—or sentry lines—were not placed far enough from the camp. Cavalry patrols were not sent out to serve as an alarm in case of attack. The Union soldiers—many of them recent recruits with little training—were casually camping in tents near Shiloh Church, a simple log meetinghouse a few miles from the river. Named for the biblical village whose name means, ironically, “place of peace,” it was this primitive Methodist church that would give the coming battle its awful name in history.
When the Confederates attacked unexpectedly on the morning of April 6, chaos reigned once more in the Union ranks. Suddenly another disaster loomed as the Union soldiers ran in panicked retreat, many of them hiding near the river. Under William Tecumseh Sherman, one of Grant's commanders and a veteran of the Bull Run debacle, some of the Union troops began to regroup. Of Sherman, Grant later said, “He inspired a confidence in officers and men that enabled them to render services on that bloody battlefield worthy of the best of veterans.”
Civil War Voices
New York Tribune war correspondent Junius Henry Browne.
Hotter and hotter grew the contest…. The light of the sun was obscured by the clouds of sulphurous smoke, and the ground became moist and slippery with human gore…. Men glared at each other as at wild beasts; and when a shell burst with fatal effect among a crowd of the advancing foe, and arms, legs, and heads were torn off, a grim smile of pleasure lighted up the smoke-begrimed faces of the transformed beings who witnessed the catastrophe….
…There was no pause in the battle. The roar of the strife was ever heard. The artillery bellowed and thundered, and the dreadful echoes went sweeping down the river, and the paths were filled with the dying and the dead. The sound was deafening, the tumult indescribable. No life was worth a farthing…. Yonder a fresh regiment rushed bravely forward, and ere they had gone twenty yards a charge of grape sent the foremost men bleeding to the earth…. Death was in the air, and bloomed like a poison-plant on every foot of soil.
During the fierce fighting around a peach orchard near the Shiloh meetinghouse, General Albert Sidney Johnston was wounded. Having led a charge that captured a critical position, he had apparently emerged without a scratch even though there were many bullet holes in his clothes. He had been hit in the leg but thought it a minor wound and sent his surgeon to tend to the Union wounded, ignoring the blood that was trickling into his boot. When Johnston turned pale and fainted, his aides finally realized that he was wounded and assisted him off his horse. There was no chance to treat what was actually a severed artery, and Johnston died a few minutes later.
Born in Kentucky, Johnston had graduated eighth in his class from West Point (1826) and served in the Black Hawk War. Following his wife's death in 1836, he went to the Republic of Texas, enlisting as a private. His skills as a soldier were obvious, and a year later he was named a brigadier general and then Texas's secretary of war. At the beginning of the Civil War Johnston, who had returned to the U.S. Army as a brigadier general in California, was a highly esteemed officer, and Grant “expected him to prove the most formidable man that the Confederacy could produce.” Both sides had offered him a high command. But as a Texan and a close friend of Jefferson Davis's, Johnston followed Texas out of the Union.
Despite the loss of their commander, the Confederates still seemed to have the upper hand, and a large number of Union soldiers under General Benjamin M. Prentiss was captured. Although Prentiss was later scapegoated for the Union losses at Shiloh, the heroic stand of his heavily outnumbered men at a spot so frenzied with fighting it was called the Hornet's Nest had actually gained the Union valuable time. The additional time needed to collect his men as prisoners further delayed the Confederate attack.
Driven back to the river, the Union forces were now supported by artillery and the heavy weapons aboard two gunboats. They were able to withstand the final Confederate push when the first of General Buell's Union reinforcements arrived in the late afternoon, ferried from the opposite side of the river.
With nightfall came a heavy rain, and Beauregard, now in command, made his headquarters in the same tent that the Union's Sherman had occupied that morning. He wired Richmond a confirmation of Johnston's death along with a premature report of victory. But on the following day the Union troops regained the advantage, strengthened by Buell's reinforcements and the arrival of another force under General Lew Wallace, which had been lost in the nearby woods. Many of the men who had run from the battle and hidden by the river during the first day's combat now returned to fight. Few were prepared for the scenes of carnage they would witness.
Civil War Voices
Sixteen-year-old John A. Cockerill, a Union regimental musician.
I passed…the corpse of a beautiful boy in gray who lay with his blond curls scattered about his face and his hands folded peacefully across his breast. He was clad in a bright and neat uniform, well garnished with gold, which seemed to tell the story of a loving mother and sisters who had sent their household pet to the field of war. His neat little hat lying beside him bore the number of a Georgia regiment. …He was about my age…. At the sight of the poor boy's corpse, I burst into a regular boo-hoo, and started on.
Here beside a great oak tree I counted the corpses of fifteen men…. The blue and the gray were mingled together…. It was no uncommon thing to see the bodies of Federal and Confederate lying side by side as though they had bled to death while trying to aid each other.
In General Grant's own recollections of Shiloh: “I saw an open field…over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before, so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across…in any direction, stepping on dead bodies without a foot touching the ground.”
On this second day of intense fighting, the Union army finally broke the Confederate resistance, and Beauregard decided to withdraw back to Corinth. The impact of the fighting at Shiloh was staggering, with the casualty figures outstripping anything that had yet been witnessed. More than 13,000 Union men had been killed, wounded, or captured; the Confederate losses were nearly 11,000. More Americans were killed in these two days of fighting than in all three previous American wars combined. Besides General Johnston, the Confederacy lost Mary Lincoln's half brother Samuel B. Todd to a sharpshooter's bullet in his head as he led a charge. As bad as the situation looked to Lincoln in Washington, it was worse for Jefferson Davis in Richmond. In Johnston, he had lost the man he considered his best general and a dear friend. He wept at the news and said, “The cause could have spared a whole State better than that great soldier.” And he still had to contend with the increasingly difficult Beauregard, who was already fixing blame on the loss at Shiloh on the dead Johnston.
If anyone still retained romantic notions of a short war won by grand charges and heroic actions, the illusions were shattered at Shiloh. Along with the rest of the country, Grant realized that the war would not come to a quick, bloodless end. As he later wrote,
Up to the battle of Shiloh I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies. Donelson and Henry were such victories…. But when Confederate armies were collected which not only attempted to hold a line farther south…but assumed the offensive and made such a gallant effort to regain what had been lost, then, indeed, I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.
Back in Washington, news of the twin victories at Shiloh and Island Number Ten, which had fallen to naval bombardment on April 7, was tempered by word of the horrendous losses. The casualty lists were accompanied by calls for Grant's removal. Once again, rumors flew that the general had been drunk during the battle, backbiting most likely perpetrated by his superior Henry Halleck, who arrived at the battlefield and assumed direct command, in essence demoting Grant. Disgusted by this treatment and the savaging he received in the press, Grant considered resigning. Charles Dana, a newsman working for Secretary of War Stanton, met with Grant and found no evidence of a drinking problem. Lincoln said, “I can't spare this man. He fights.” Grant was restored to his position.
Civil War Voices
Belle Reynolds, a housewife from Peoria, Illinois, who had followed her husband into the field at Shiloh, became a battlefield nurse and an eyewitness to the carnage.
We climbed the steep hill opposite the Landing, picked our way through the corrals of horses, past the long line of trenches which were to receive the dead, and came to an old cabin, where the wounded were being brought. Outside lay the bodies of more than a hundred, brought in for recognition and burial—a sight so ghastly it haunts me now.
…And that operating table! These scenes come up before me now with all the vividness of reality…one by one, they would take from different parts of the hospital a poor fellow, lay him out on those bloody boards, and administer chloroform; but before insensibility, the operation would begin, and in the midst of shrieks, curses, and wild laughs, the surgeon would wield over his wretched victim the glittering knife and saw; and soon the severed and ghastly limb, white as snow and spattered with blood, would fall upon the floor—one more added to the terrible pile.
Until three o'clock I had no idle moments; then, having done all in my power to minister to so much wretchedness, I found my long-taxed nerves could endure no more. One of the surgeons brought me a spoonful of brandy, which revived me. Feeling that my labors were at an end, I prepared to leave, and had just turned to go in the direction of the boat, when a hand was laid upon my shoulder. The shock was so sudden I nearly fainted. There stood my husband! I hardly knew him—blackened with powder, begrimed with dust, his clothes in disorder, and his face pale. We thought it must have been years since we parted. It was no time for many words; he told me I must go. There was a silent pressure of hands. I passed on to the boat….
At night I lived over the horrors of the field hospital and the amputating table. If I but closed my eyes, I saw such horrible sights that I would spring from my bed; and not until fairly awakened could I be convinced of my remoteness from the sickening scene. Those groans were in my ears! I saw again the quivering limbs, the spouting arteries, and the pinched and ghastly faces of the suffers.
The conditions described by Belle Reynolds were not unusual but commonplace during the war. Medicine had barely emerged from its dark ages. (Harvard Medical School did not own a microscope or a stethoscope until 1868.) Anyone who saw the film Dances with Wolves, in which Kevin Costner pulls his boot back on over a bloody foot rather than face a surgeon, has seen an example of Civil War battlefield medicine and a soldier's reaction to it. As Belle Reynolds witnessed, surgery basically meant amputation. “Sawbones” as a nickname for doctor was grimly accurate, for at that time amputation was the only medical treatment for a fracture or severe laceration; the procedure accounted for 75 percent of all the operations performed by Civil War doctors.
Although ether, chloroform, and nitrous oxide had come into use as anesthetics, few doctors were trained to use them. Deprived of supplies by the Union blockade, Confederate doctors couldn't obtain any anesthetics. Then, a good surgeon meant a fast surgeon; the best could remove a limb in a few minutes. When the demand for ether and chloroform during the hellish battles sometimes outstripped the supplies, soldiers were given a drink of whiskey—the most widely administered medicine—and a gun cartridge and were grimly and literally told to “bite the bullet.”
Adding to the ghastly statistics was the fact that surgery was not the worst horror the wounded had to face. To survive the operating table only meant the likelihood of getting gangrene or other little-understood infections, thought to be caused by bad air. The doctors had no understanding of antiseptic conditions in hospitals, let alone on a battlefield. Combat surgery was performed in the open on tables made of doors or rough wooden boards laid upon boxes, with tubs underneath to catch the blood. The surgeons used the same knives and saws all day, wiping them on a bloody apron. Unfortunately for many on the battlefield, a revolution in medicine lay just ahead. Building on the work of French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and his germ theory of disease, English surgeon Joseph Lister (1827-1912) had begun his work in antiseptics around 1865, too late to have any impact on the Civil War. (By 1869 Lister's use of carbolic acid on surgical instruments, wounds, and dressings had reduced surgical mortality from 50 to 15 percent.)
Yet as primitive as Civil War medical conditions were, the majority of amputees were probably saved by the saw. According to fairly well-kept Union records, of some 29,000 amputations performed, a little more than 7,000 resulted in death. Operations performed within forty-eight hours of a wound were twice as likely to be successful as those performed after that length of time. Union medical records—the Civil War was the first bureaucratic war, and very good records exist, at least on the Union side—show that amputation was far from a death sentence, depending on what was amputated. For instance, of nearly 8,000 finger amputations performed, there were fewer than 200 deaths. One of the most deadly procedures was amputation of the thigh. Of some 6,300 Union cases there were 3,411 fatalities (a mortality rate of 53.6 percent). Of some 29,000 surgical amputations recorded by the Union, there were 7,283 fatalities. (Confederate records were not kept as scrupulously, and most were later destroyed. It is safe to assume that Confederate medical conditions were worse than those of the Union, given the severe shortages created by the blockade.)
The horrors of amputation and its bleak aftermath were compounded by diseases that killed approximately twice the number of soldiers who fell in battle. Americans who watched the modern civil war in the African nation of Rwanda during the summer of 1994 saw the deadly effects of dysentery and other intestinal illnesses: Massive numbers of people died in very short periods of time. The situation was not so different during the Civil War.
Simple hygiene, as we understand it, could have saved thousands of lives. Crowded into filthy camps where open-air latrines often ran directly into sources of drinking water, the soldiers were subject to a medical textbook gallery of diseases. Even simple ailments for modern Americans—measles, mumps, chicken pox—were often deadly to the recruits, especially those from rural, unpopulated areas where they were less likely to have been exposed to common diseases.
Farmboy soldiers were even more likely to succumb to sexually transmitted diseases, known at the time as “the ailments of Venus.” Venereal disease ran rampant, particularly among the troops that spent long periods near cities like Washington, Richmond, New Orleans, and Nashville, where bordellos and red-light districts flourished. In The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War, Thomas P. Lowry told of more than 180,000 cases of venereal disease among the white Union troops. (The Confederate rate was probably lower because the troops spent less time near cities.) Untreated venereal diseases—or, more accurately, venereal diseases treated only with medieval combinations of herbs, poultices, and whiskey—sent many veterans home to infect their wives with a scourge that lasted well after the last shots of the war were fired.
Early in 1862, before most of the war's major engagements, the Union had lost 2 percent of its force to disease. By far the worst of the Civil War ailments was dysentery, as well as severe diarrhea. To the soldier, these ailments went by several names—“Tennessee Trots,” “Virginia quick steps,” or simply “the bowel complaint.” The massive outbreaks of dysentery actually influenced military events on several occasions. Its debilitating effects were one of the reasons McClellan was ultimately forced to withdraw from the peninsula. After the battle at Shiloh, General Beauregard had to abandon Corinth, Mississippi, because of an epidemic of dysentery that put a third of his army on the sick lists. Bluntly stated, many more soldiers died from diarrhea than were killed in battle.
Civil War Voices
From Herman Melville's poem “Shiloh,” written after the bloody two-day battle (April 1862).
Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest field of Shiloh—
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched one stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh—
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there—
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.
Who Fought for the Confederacy?
Draft-dodging is something most people associate with cowardice—or high principle, depending on your point of view—and they think it came into vogue during the Vietnam War. But it is actually a long tradition in America, one that dates from the Civil War. In every previous American war, from the Revolution to the War of 1812 and the conflict with Mexico, volunteers had supplied sufficient numbers of troops. But with McClellan's Army of the Potomac practically banging on the doors of Richmond, the Confederate government was forced to turn to a military draft. It was unpopular then and has been a difficult issue for Americans ever since.
The spring of 1862 looked pretty disastrous for the Confederacy after the defeats at Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, and the fall of Island Number Ten. With a large Union army nearing Richmond and the one-year enlistments about to run out for many of its men, the vastly outmanned Confederacy passed the Conscription Act on April 16. The measure seemed to be completely at odds with the Confederacy's fundamental existence. Even more than in the Union (which would institute a draft a year later), the Confederate draft was hated. To states' rights hard-liners, conscription amounted to the trampling of individual rights by a central government, exactly why so many had left the Union. Coming on the heels of controversy over its few victories, as well as several more recent defeats, the draft created another crisis for Jefferson Davis's government.
Under the Conscription Act, all healthy white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five were liable for a three-year term of service, and the enlistment for all one-year soldiers was extended to three years. An amendment in September 1862 raised the age limit to forty-five. Late in the war, in February 1864, when the Confederate armies had suffered huge losses, the age limits were extended to between seventeen and fifty. At the time, Jefferson Davis remarked, “We're about to grind the seed corn of the nation.”
But not everyone had to go, and there was the rub, as it would continue to be. The Confederate draft law exempted men in certain occupations considered to be valuable for the home front, such as railroad and river workers, civil officials, telegraph operators, miners, druggists, and teachers. In many Confederate states, there was suddenly a booming interest in the teaching profession. Far more controversial was an amendment passed on October 11, the so-called “twenty-nigger” law, which exempted the overseers of twenty or more slaves. Fearing the possible danger of hundreds of thousands of unsupervised slaves, this was one of the most hated parts of the law, as wealthy young planters used the exemption for themselves.
Equally onerous was the policy of allowing substitutes. For a price, a wealthy young Southerner could get a farmboy to take his place as a conscript. In the Confederacy, a new call arose that would later be repeated in the northern states: “A rich man's war, a poor man's fight.” The clerks who administered the Conscription Act in Richmond would be called the Bureau of Exemptions.
Many in the Confederacy, including Vice-President Stephens and Governors Joseph Brown of Georgia and Zebulon Vance of North Carolina, vehemently opposed the draft as unconstitutional and openly worked to thwart it in their states. Brown believed that Georgia's troops should fight only in Georgia. Though North Carolina contributed the most volunteers to the Confederate armies, its Governor Vance fraudulently exempted men by adding them to civil servant rolls or by having them enlist in the state militias.
Civil War Voices
With the Confederate army in Corinth, Mississippi, Sam R. Watkins recalls the aftermath of Shiloh and the passage of the draft law in his memoir, Co. Aytch.
Well, here we were, again “reorganizing,” and after our lax discipline on the road to and from Virginia, and after a big battle, which always disorganizes an army, what wonder is it that some men had to be shot, merely for discipline's sake? And what wonder that General Bragg's name became a terror to deserters and evil doers? Men were shot by scores, and no wonder the army had to be reorganized. Soldiers had enlisted for twelve months only…and they naturally looked upon it that they had a right to go home…. War had become a reality; they were tired of it. A law had been passed by the Confederate States called the Conscript Act…. From this time till the end of the war, a soldier was simply a machine, a conscript. It was mighty rough on rebels. We cursed the war, we cursed Bragg, we cursed the Southern Confederacy. All our pride and valor had gone, and we were sick of war and the Southern Confederacy.
A law was made by the Confederate States Congress about this time allowing every person who owned twenty negroes to go home. It gave us the blues; we wanted twenty negroes…. The glory of the war, the glory of the South, the glory and pride of our volunteers had no charms for the conscript.
Why Did the Defeated Citizens of New Orleans Call Benjamin Butler a “Beast”?
“Success has a hundred fathers and failure is an orphan” goes an old saying. And the capture—or fall—of New Orleans in April 1862 may prove the maxim. The largest city in the Confederacy, its wealthiest and most active port, the home of many Europeans sympathetic to the Confederacy who felt comfortable in the city's Continental atmosphere, New Orleans was crucial to the Confederate cause. For the Union, taking the port meant control of the lower Mississippi. Just as numerous Union Navy and War Department officials would later take credit for hatching the plan to attack New Orleans, many Confederate officers and politicians would point accusing fingers long after the city was lost.
But the credit for carrying out the Union attack belonged to one man, sixty-year-old Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut (1801-1870), one of the Civil War's indomitable spirits. Born in Tennessee, young Farragut had been taken in as a foster child by Commodore David Porter (1780-1843). At the age of nine he became a midshipman, serving under his adoptive father. Barely a teenager in the War of 1812, Farragut was captured while fighting the British. He later served in the Mediterranean and in the Mexican War. Having left Norfolk, Virginia, when secession was announced, Farragut initially balked at taking a command that might force him to attack Norfolk, but he accepted command of the fleet attacking New Orleans.
One of the greatest naval battles in North American history commenced early on the morning of April 24, 1862, when Farragut led his seventeen ships past a waiting Confederate fleet. The Union navy also faced numerous obstructions, including burning boats and an immense chain placed across the river as well as the two fortresses overlooking the mouth of the Mississippi. For three days these forts had been pounded by mortars on flatboats, the brainchild of David Dixon Porter (1813-1891), Farragut's adoptive brother. A major contributor to the Union's naval success, Porter was one of those men who would aggressively try to take credit for everything that worked for the Union at New Orleans. While Navy Secretary Gideon Welles—nicknamed “Old Father Neptune”—respected his ideas and energy, he was suspicious of his overwhelming need for glory. Of Porter, Welles once recorded, “I did not always consider David to be depended upon if he had an end to attain, and he had no hesitation in trampling down a brother officer if it would benefit himself.”
As Farragut's armada advanced, the crash of hundreds of cannon and mortars could be heard sixty miles away. When it was over, Farragut had run the gantlet of the forts and Confederate fleet with the loss of only a single ship, 37 men killed, and another 147 wounded—a small fraction of the numbers who died in the great land battles of the war. On the morning of April 25, Farragut's warships steamed into New Orleans and aimed their guns at the defenseless city. Twenty-nine thousand bales of cotton, along with rice, corn, tobacco, and sugar, had been torched to prevent their capture. A substantial number of supplies had already been taken by looters as New Orleans, in a panic, fell into near chaos. In the nearby shipyards, miles of cordwood stacked for steamboat fuel were also set afire. As he sailed into New Orleans, Farragut saw “desolation, ships, steamers, cotton, coal, etc., were all in one common blaze…. The Mississippi, which was to be the terror of the seas, and no doubt would have been to a great extent…soon came floating by us, all in flames, and passed down the river.” The uncompleted Mississippi, the Confederacy's great hope of destroying Union blockade vessels, was also scuttled to prevent its capture.
Historians have debated whether the loss of New Orleans might have been averted. Most requests for men and ships to defend the city had been rejected by Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet. In one of his worst military miscalculations, Davis believed the two forts guarding the mouth of the river could stop any Union fleet. Instead of confronting Farragut, available ships were ordered upriver to stop the Union gunboats coming down the Mississippi from the north. Confederate troops and guns had been stripped from New Orleans's defenses to be sent to other armies. And two Confederate ironclad battleships under construction, more powerful than anything then on the seas, might have created havoc for the Union fleet, but they were delayed by shortages and incompetence. Everything conspired against a Confederate success. But the great injury of the loss of New Orleans would soon be compounded by insult.
Documents of the Civil War
Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler's General Orders No. 28 (May 15, 1862).
As the Officers and Soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women calling themselves ladies of New Orleans, in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any Female shall, by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.
When the contents of a chamber pot was dumped on the head of Flag Officer Farragut, Benjamin Butler, the commander of the Union troops occupying New Orleans, was not amused. For Butler, it was the final indignity that his troops would have to take from the defiant civilians. Having led the first troops into Baltimore after Fort Sumter, Butler had made no friends when he clamped martial law on that city. He became even more reviled when, faced with the disdain of New Orleans, he issued his notorious order that the women of the city be treated like prostitutes if they showed any sign of contempt toward the Union officers. The Confederate press christened him “Beast” Butler.
Another Confederate response came from Louisiana's own General P.G.T. Beauregard, who had Butler's order read to his troops, then said, “Men of the South! shall our mothers, our wives, our daughters and our sisters, be thus outraged by the ruffianly soldiers of the North, to whom is given the right to treat, at their pleasure, the ladies of the South as common harlots? Arouse friends, and drive back from our soil, those infamous invaders of our homes and disturbers of our family ties.”
Butler's portrait was later found adorning the inside of chamber pots used throughout the South long after the war. Butler was given a second nickname when the rumors spread that he and his troops were looting the grand homes of New Orleans, stealing the silver. Soon political cartoonists called him “Spoons” Butler and depicted him carrying off Confederate silverware.
Far more significant than blackening the name of “Beast” Butler, however, the fall of New Orleans was a devastating military and economic loss to the Confederacy.
Civil War Voices
From the diary of Mary Chesnut: “New Orleans gone—and with it the Confederacy. Are we not cut in two? The Mississippi ruins us if it is lost…. I have nothing to chronicle but disasters…. The reality is hideous.”
The famed lady diarist was succinct and accurate. The loss of New Orleans devastated Confederate hopes, for it meant Union control of the Mississippi and the loss of one of the Confederacy's chief ports. The Confederacy was now cut off from the Texas beef and Louisiana salt that its armies desperately needed. At a relatively small cost in terms of casualties—particularly when set against the huge losses at Shiloh and in other battles that lay ahead—the capture of New Orleans was also a severe blow to any hope for recognition by either Great Britain or France, for both had come to see the Confederacy as a losing cause. When news of New Orleans reached London, Charles Francis Adams, the American ambassador to Great Britain, literally danced across the floor.
MILESTONES IN THE CIVIL WAR: 1862
January 11 Edwin Stanton replaces Simon Cameron as war secretary. Under Cameron, a Pennsylvania politician with an unsavory reputation, the War Department has been riddled by corruption and mismanagement.
January 27 In General War Order No. 1, Lincoln calls for a Union offensive, but it is ignored by McClellan.
February 13 The West Virginia Constitutional Convention decides that “no slave or free person of color should come into the state for permanent residence.”
February 16 Fort Donelson (Tennessee) surrenders to the Union forces under Grant.
February 25 Union troops take Nashville, Tennessee, without a struggle, and the city remains in Union hands for the rest of the war. The loss is a blow to Confederate morale and means the loss of tons of Confederate supplies stockpiled there.
March 9 Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac, Hampton Roads, Virginia. The first battle between two ironclad ships ends inconclusively. The Merrimac, a captured Union ship which has been refitted by the Confederates and rechristened the Virginia, is later blown up to prevent its capture.
March 11 Because of McClellan's failure to act, Lincoln demotes him from general-in-chief to command only the Army of the Potomac, allowing him to concentrate on the Richmond campaign. All the Union commanders now report directly to the secretary of war.
April 4 The Peninsular Campaign. In its first major offensive, the Army of the Potomac advances toward Yorktown, Virginia, on the peninsula between the James and York rivers. It will take Yorktown on May 4 and Williamsburg on May 5.
April 6-7 Battle of Shiloh. At Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, two days of furious fighting and tremendous casualties end when the Union forces under Grant force the Confederate army under Beauregard to withdraw.
April 7 Island Number Ten, a Confederate fortress on the Mississippi, falls to combined Union land and naval forces. The Mississippi is in Union hands all the way to Memphis.
April 10 Lincoln signs a congressional resolution calling for gradual, compensated emancipation. Slavery is also abolished in Washington, D.C.
April 16 President Davis signs the Conscription Act, the first draft in American history.
April 25 New Orleans surrenders to Union Flag Officer David Farragut.
May 14 Despite his successes and overwhelming superiority, McClellan halts the Union army's advance six miles from Richmond.
May 9 General David Hunter, who had organized a black regiment without official approval and was nicknamed “Black David,” issues a proclamation freeing the slaves of rebels in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina and arming able-bodied blacks in those states. Lincoln revokes this order.
May 12 Natchez, Mississippi, surrenders to Farragut, who is pushing up the Mississippi.
May 20 Lincoln signs the Homestead Act, guaranteeing 160 acres of land to anyone who will settle and improve it for five years.
June 1 Robert E. Lee replaces the wounded Joseph Johnston.
June 6 Memphis falls to Union forces.
June 25-July 2 Seven Days' Battle. Under Lee's command, the Confederates force McClellan's Army of the Potomac to retreat, ending the Union threat to Richmond and the possibility of an early end to the war. But the casualties are high again. Union losses are about 16,000 dead and wounded; the Confederates lose some 20,000 dead and wounded, a much higher percentage of their forces.
July Congress authorizes the acceptance of blacks into military service and passes a second Confiscation Act, freeing the slaves of all rebels.
July 11 Looking for an effective commander, Lincoln names Henry W. “Old Brains” Halleck general-in-chief.
August 28-30 2nd Bull Run (2nd Manassas). The Union forces under General Pope are defeated by the Confederates for a second time at this spot, a few miles south of Washington. McClellan is brought back to replace Pope, who is sent west to quell an Indian uprising in Minnesota.
September 17 Antietam. The Union forces under McClellan meet Lee's army in Maryland in the bloodiest single day of the war and American history. There are combined casualties of 23,110 dead, wounded, or missing. Although technically a draw, the battle forces Lee to abandon a general invasion of the North.
September 23 The preliminary text of the Emancipation Proclamation is published. It will take effect on January 1, 1863.
September 27 Composed of free blacks from New Orleans, the First Regiment Louisiana Native Guards is formed, the first officially recognized black regiment.
October 8 Battle of Perryville (Kentucky). A second Confederate invasion of the North under Braxton Bragg is checked by Union General Don Carlos Buell.
November 5 After McClellan's failure to pursue Lee after Antietam, Lincoln dismisses McClellan for a second time, replacing him with Ambrose E. Burnside. McClellan returns to New Jersey and does not command again, but he will run against Lincoln in 1864.
December 13 Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Under Burnside, the Union army is routed with large casualties.
December 31 Battle of Murfreesboro or Stones River (Tennessee) begins. It will be fought until January 2, 1863. Inconclusive, it produces combined casualties of nearly 25,000.
Documents of the Civil War
General David Hunter's order freeing the slaves in his military department (May 9, 1862).
General Orders No. 11. The three states of Georgia, Florda, and South Carolina, comprising the Military Department of the South, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three states—Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina—heretofore held as slaves are therefore declared forever free.
Lincoln still wanted this to be a war for the Union, not emancipation. Any action that changed the Union's goals might cause the secession of the border states and the loss of politically shaky congressmen who had already declared that the war was being fought to preserve the Union. Ten days after Hunter's order was issued, Lincoln overruled Hunter on the grounds that he lacked the authority to issue such an order. The exercise of such power, declared Lincoln, “I reserve to myself.”
Why Did Lincoln Fire General McClellan?
It took God seven days to create the earth. It took Robert E. Lee that long to force George McClellan out of Virginia. With his army, moreover, went the Union's hopes for an early victory.
The Union's successes in the West in the early months of 1862—the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson, the costly battle at Shiloh and the victory at Island No. Ten, the fall of New Orleans, Natchez, Mississippi, and Memphis, and Beauregard's withdrawal in June from Corinth, Mississippi—seemed to be astonishingly good news. War Secretary Stanton was so optimistic, he ordered recruitment offices closed. It seemed that the very backbone of the Confederacy might be broken with a victory in Virginia, where McClellan was only six miles from Richmond with a large, well-equipped army.
But McClellan had little of the strength of character and single-mindedness that men like Grant and Farragut brought to the war. The Confederate leaders seemed to have his number. At Yorktown, McClellan was tricked by General John Magruder, who simply had his men march around in circles, letting the Union outposts see this seemingly endless line of troops. Lincoln's private secretary, John Hay, summed up the feelings about McClellan when he wrote, “The little Napoleon sits trembling before the handful of men at Yorktown afraid either to fight or run. Stanton feels devilish about it. He would like to remove him if he thought it would do.” Stanton, a War Democrat and previously a supporter of McClellan's, was also growing impatient. When McClellan asked for 40,000 additional men, he stormed, “If he had a million men he would swear the enemy has two millions, and then he would sit down in the mud and yell for three.” Those words were echoed by Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, also a disillusioned McClellan supporter, who wrote to Horace Greeley, “McClellan is a clear luxury—fifty days—fifty miles—fifty millions of dollars—easy arithmetic but not satisfactory. If one could have some faith in his competency in battle—should his army ever fight one—…it would be a comfort.” When decisiveness and a willingness to commit to all-out war might have ended the Civil War in the summer of 1862, McClellan chose caution. It was a terribly expensive decision in more ways than Salmon Chase was calculating.
While McClellan played the Union's Hamlet, fitfully wondering whether “to fight or not to fight,” three Confederate legends were about to be made through the audacious leadership McClellan so sorely lacked. In the spring and summer of 1862 the brilliance of Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jeb Stuart would dazzle and embarrass the vastly larger Union forces in Virginia. Lee had served as an adviser to President Davis, but when Joseph Johnston was wounded on May 31 at the Battle of Fair Oaks (also called Seven Pines), Lee was put in charge of the army defending Richmond, which he renamed the Army of Northern Virginia.
Before Lee took that command, he had already made one important decision as Davis's adviser. Attempting to keep the Union troops from reinforcing McClellan in the assault on Richmond, Lee dispatched Stonewall Jackson into the Shenandoah Valley, where, over the course of a few months, he made military history.
The pious, Bible-thumping Jackson, who believed his troops were “an army of the living God,” embarked on a two-month campaign that mystified the Union commanders. Vastly outnumbered, Jackson marched his 17,000 troops around the Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1862 like a man possessed. Enduring forced marches of twenty-five miles, his men moved more quickly than any army should have been able to, earning them the nickname “Jackson's foot cavalry.” In a month they marched more than four hundred miles, threw panic into the Union, and stole many tons of goods from Union depots. Food and supplies were taken from Union General Nathaniel Banks in such quantity that the Confederates christened him “Commissary” Banks. The Confederate press soon lionized Jackson. One paper said he was “the idol of the people and is the object of greater enthusiasm than any other military chieftain of our day.” Another Southerner wrote, “Hurrah for old Stonewall!!!!… What can save their army from annihilation. Isn't it delightful to think about?”
But this romantic vision of a somewhat eccentric Jackson and the glorious exploits of his troops masked another image, that of a relentless Confederate counterpart to John Brown, whose brave demeanor at his hanging Jackson had witnessed and admired. Like Grant and Sherman, the Union commanders who would be vilified for their devastating approach to the conflict, Jackson believed in total, aggressive war. In The Destructive War, Charles Royster summed up Jackson:
He ordered hard marches; he denied applications for furloughs; he severely punished infractions of discipline; he arrested officers who departed from his instructions; he ordered soldiers absent without leave to be brought back into the army in irons; he had deserters shot—during three days in August 1862, thirteen of his men were executed; he tried to kill as many of the enemy as possible, and he did not shrink from getting his own men killed doing it. Jackson did not go through the Civil War's often-described transition from notions of chivalric gallantry to brutal attrition. For him the war was always earnest, massed, and lethal.
Lee's plan worked perfectly; the threat Jackson posed to Washington, D.C., meant that Lincoln desired more troops for the capital's defense. Instead of assisting McClellan at Richmond, General McDowell's 40,000 men were pulled back to defend Washington. Here again McClellan would find reason to claim that he was being sabotaged. He was still under the misapprehension caused by Pinkerton's reports of the Confederate troops' numbering as high as 150,000; Johnston, later Lee, actually had about 50,000 men defending Richmond. McClellan had more than 150,000.
During this time, the heroics of Jackson's “foot cavalry” would soon be complemented by the antics of twenty-nine-year-old Jeb Stuart (1833-1864). Flamboyant in his ostrich-plumed hat, red-lined cap, and gold spurs, Stuart commanded with a style that was equally flamboyant. He kept a group of black minstrels and a banjo player on his headquarters staff. He wrote dispatches for the London newspapers that made him an international celebrity. But it was his military daring that thoroughly embarrassed the Union commanders, especially his notorious ride around McClellan in June 1862. For four days, June 12-15, Stuart led 1,200 cavalry troopers—including another young officer named John S. Mosby and writer John Esten Cooke, who would provide much of the literary embellishment that made Stuart's ride so remarkable—on a reconnaissance that completely encircled the Union positions in Virginia. While providing Lee with valuable information about the federal troops and their positions, Stuart's ride was also a propaganda coup. Confederate newspaper headlines boasted of his “Magnificent Achievement” and “Unparalleled Maneuver,” boosting the sagging Confederate morale and once again embarrassing McClellan. However, it also alerted McClellan to the weakness of his position.
A few days after Stuart's return, the so-called Seven Days' Battle began in earnest on June 26 with the Battle of Mechanicsville (also called Beaver Dam Creek or Ellerson's Mill). In a pattern that would repeat itself, the Union army technically won in Lee's first battle as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Nevertheless, McClellan ordered a retreat to a better defensive position, asked for more troops, and blamed Lincoln for his defeat. The week's worth of fighting around Richmond concluded at Malvern Hill, where the Confederates again suffered greater losses, but still succeeded in pushing McClellan back from the gates of Richmond. He was ultimately forced to withdraw from the peninsula, and in August the Army of the Potomac was loaded onto steamers for the depressing ride back to Washington.
Lincoln decided he had seen enough of McClellan. General John Pope, an unbearably cocky soldier who had taken credit for the fall of Island Number Ten and brought an unduly optimistic spirit with him, was given command of all Union troops north and west of Richmond. (Henry Halleck, made general-in-chief of the U.S. Army, would stay in Washington.) Pope made few friends, either among his own troops or with his adversaries. First he disparaged the men of his new command when he arrived:
I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies; from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary and to beat him when he was found…. Dismiss from your minds certain phrases, which I am sorry to find much in vogue amongst you. I hear constantly of “taking strong positions and holding them,” of “lines of retreat” and “bases of supplies”. Let us discard such ideas…. Let us look before us and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.
Then Pope raised Confederate hackles by enforcing the harsh treatment of Virginians. He ordered food taken from farms and threatened to hang captured Confederate officers and civilian sympathizers as traitors. Lee would take particular pleasure in dealing with Pope. And later that summer Pope would get a taste of McClellan's humiliation by Jeb Stuart when Stuart's cavalry rode into Pope's camp and stole his hat, uniform, and dress cloak along with $35,000 in cash and notes regarding Union troop positions—information that would come in handy for Robert E. Lee.
Civil War Voices
Katharine Wormley, a U.S. Sanitary Commission volunteer serving on a Union transport ship used to move wounded from the peninsula battles to hospitals (June 1862).
We went on board; and such a scene as we entered and lived for two days I trust never to see again. Men in every condition of horror, shattered and shrieking, were being brought in on stretchers borne by “contrabands,” who dumped them anywhere, banged the stretchers against pillars and posts, and walked over the men without compassion. There was no one to direct what ward or what bed they were to go into. Men shattered in the thigh and even cases of amputation, were shoveled into top berths without thought or mercy. The men had mostly been without food for three days, but there was nothing on board for them; and if there had been, the cooks were only engaged to cook for the ship, and not for the hospital.
We began to do what we could. The first thing wanted by wounded men is something to drink (with the sick, stimulants are the first thing). Fortunately we had plenty of lemons, ice, and sherry on board, and these were available at once. Dr. Ware discovered a barrel of molasses, which, with vinegar, ice and water made a most refreshing drink. After that we gave them crackers and milk…. It was hopeless to try and get them into bed; indeed, there were no mattresses. All we could do at first was to try and calm the confusion, to stop some agony, to revive the fainting lives, to snatch, if possible, from immediate death with food and stimulants. Imagine a great river or sound steamer filled on every deck—every berth and every square inch of room covered with wounded men; even the stairs and gangways and guards filled with those who are less badly wounded; and then imagine fifty well men, on every kind of errand, rushing to and fro over them, every touch bringing agony to the poor fellows, while stretcher after stretcher came along, hoping to find an empty place; and then imagine what it was to keep calm ourselves, and make sure that every man on both boats was properly refreshed and fed. We got through about one A.M.
When Lincoln called for troops to put down the rebellion, there was an immediate outpouring of food, clothing, medical supplies, and money from individual citizens. In April 1861 the Reverend Henry Bellows of New York organized a number of women's aid organizations into the Women's Central Association of Relief. But seeing an urgent need for coordinating these volunteer groups, Bellows proposed a commission of civilians, medical men, and military officers to oversee the Union's aid activities. The administration named a Commission of Inquiry and Advice in Respect of the Sanitary Interests of the United States Forces, which later became known as the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the American Red Cross.
Some of the country's most accomplished citizens joined the Sanitary Commission, including Elisha Harris, the sanitarian in charge of the Staten Island quarantine station; abolitionist Samuel Howe, the husband of the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; and Frederick Law Olmsted, the chief architect and superintendent of New York's Central Park. Mary Livermore, the wife of a Chicago minister, left her family in a housekeeper's care and went to work for the commission, eventually organizing three thousand chapters in the Midwest. Mary Ann Bickerdyke, a commission agent, went farther, joining the Union troops on the battlefield and assisting them for four years. A trained nurse, “Mother Bickerdyke,” as she came to be known, won the admiration of William Sherman, becoming the only woman he allowed in his camps.
Mother Bickerdyke was one of thousands of Union nurses. They were officially led by Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887), a professional nurse who had fought to reform the treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill and who was appointed head of the nursing corps by Simon Cameron. In temperament Bickerdyke's opposite, she was called “Dragon Dix.” Fighting the Victorian notion that women did not belong with men in hospitals, Dix had to ensure the moral rectitude of her nurses. She accepted only women over thirty and stated unequivocally that “all nurses are required to be very plain-looking women. Their dresses must be brown or black, with no bows, no curls, no jewelry and no hoopskirts.”
Another volunteer was Louisa May Alcott, not yet famous as the author of Little Women. In the fall of 1862 she applied to serve as a nurse, although her only experience had been nursing her dying sister and reading Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale's landmark 1860 book about her experiences in the Crimean War. Working twelve-hour shifts amid the pain and screams of an army hospital, Alcott bore up as many other women did. She later contracted typhoid herself and returned to Massachusetts, where she collected letters about her experience in Hospital Sketches, her first published book.
The entry of women into the nursing profession as well as the opening of certain federal clerk's jobs was a foot in the door for many women. While much has been made of the women who worked in the factories during World War II—the “Rosie the Riveters”—the first openings actually came in the Civil War, when thousands of women were forced to fend for themselves when the men went off to war. It was the beginning of a sea change in how American women saw themselves; many who had committed their energy to abolition would channel their protest into the suffrage movement after the war.
Among those women who clerked in the Patent Office was Clara Barton (1821-1912). Even though she had not been trained as a nurse, she left the Patent Office to become a volunteer nurse (not affiliated with Dix's nursing corps). While she feared that people would view her as a “camp follower,” Barton was undeterred and took wagonloads of supplies to the battlefields. During the fighting at Antietam (see below), she took over from a surgeon who was killed as he drank from a cup she had handed him. Although she would cross swords in a rivalry with Dix, Barton emerged from the Civil War as the “Angel of the Battlefield” and went on to found the American Red Cross.
What Was “The Prayer of Twenty Millions”?
President Lincoln was walking a tightrope. The crisis precipitated by General Hunter's order freeing the slaves demonstrated the precarious balancing act he was attempting to perform. Focused solely on winning the war, Lincoln had to contend with his powerful abolitionist supporters, who wanted him to make it clear that the war was being fought to end slavery. Knowing that emancipation was not why most men fought for the Union and fearful of losing border state support, Lincoln was reluctant to turn the war into a struggle for the freedom of the slaves. As long as he maintained preservation of the Union and an end to the rebellion as the cause, he could control opinion in Congress and the country.
But the voices calling for emancipation were growing louder. Before the war, the influential newspaper editor Horace Greeley (1811-1872), editor of the New York Tribune, had advocated allowing the South to secede. But once the war began, he was a staunch Unionist who joined the Radical Republicans impatient with Lincoln's delaying of emancipation.
One of the most influential journalists of his century, Greeley was born in New Hampshire and apprenticed to a Vermont printer at the age of fourteen. At twenty he moved to New York and became the editor of several papers, gaining a reputation as a political writer and allying himself with two powerful Whig leaders, William Seward (then governor of New York) and Thurlow Weed, another prominent New York politician and journalist. In 1841 Greeley founded the New York Tribune as an alternative to the sensational tabloids of the day. The paper was successful and influential—Greeley would remain its editor for thirty-one years—espousing the issues of social fairness and decrying the monopolies and land being given to speculators and the wealthy. (For several years, Greeley employed Karl Marx, who wrote The Communist Manifesto, as a European correspondent.) Greeley was also an enthusiastic supporter of migration to the West. But the quote most often associated with him—“Go west, young man,” his advice to a young minister who had lost his voice—was coined by John Soule, an Indiana newsman who wrote the words in 1851. Greeley repeated the phrase in print and became so identified with it that he later reprinted Soule's article to acknowledge the proper credit.
While opposed to slavery, Greeley had never been an outright abolitionist, preferring a moderate course like the one adopted by Lincoln. (He was influential in Lincoln's nomination.) Once the slave states seceded, however, he became passionate about the return of the Confederate states and was one of the first to voice the cry “On to Richmond.” Once the war began, there was no room for moderation. To Greeley, it was a war for freedom. And by the summer of 1862 he publicly chided Lincoln over the faltering war effort. With the claim that he spoke for “twenty millions,” Greeley wrote an open letter to Lincoln on August 19, 1862.
To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States:
Dear Sir: I do not intrude to tell you—for you must know already—that a great proportion of those who triumphed in your election, and of all who desire the unqualified suppression of the rebellion now desolating our country, are sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of rebels. I write only to set succinctly and unmistakably before you what we require, what we think we have a right to expect, and of what we complain.
I. We require of you, as the first servant of the Republic, charged especially and preeminently with this duty, that you EXECUTE THE LAWS…
II. We think you are strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty with regard to the emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act. Those provisions were designed to fight Slavery with Liberty. They prescribe that men loyal to the Union, and willing to shed their blood in her behalf, shall no longer be held, with the nation's consent, in bondage to persistent, malignant traitors, who for twenty years have been plotting and for sixteen months have been fighting to divide and destroy our country. Why these traitors should be treated with tenderness by you, to the prejudice of the dearest rights of loyal men, we cannot conceive.
III. We think you are unduly influenced by the councils, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States. Knowing well that the heartily, unconditionally loyal portion of the white citizens of those States do not expect nor desire that Slavery shall be upheld to the prejudice of the Union…we ask you to consider that Slavery is everywhere the inciting cause and sustaining base of treason…
IV. We think timid counsels in such a crisis calculated to prove perilous, and probably disastrous. It is the duty of a Government so wantonly, wickedly assailed by rebellion as ours has been, to oppose force in a defiant, dauntless spirit. It cannot afford to temporize with traitors, nor with semitraitors…
V. We complain that the Union cause has suffered, and is now suffering immensely, from mistaken deference to rebel Slavery. Had you, sir, in your Inaugural Address, unmistakably given notice that, in case the rebellion already commenced, were persisted in, and your efforts to preserve the Union and enforce the laws should be resisted by armed force, you would recognize no loyal person as rightfully held in Slavery by a traitor, we believe the rebellion would therein have received a staggering if not fatal blow…
VI. We complain that the Confiscation Act which you approved is habitually disregarded by your generals, and that no word of rebuke for them from you has yet reached the public ear. Frémont's Proclamation and Hunter's Order favoring Emancipation were promptly annulled by you; while Halleck's Number Three, forbidding fugitives from slavery to rebels to come within his lines—an order as unmilitary as inhuman, and which received the hearty approbation of every traitor in America—with scores of like tendency, have never provoked even your remonstrance. …And finally, we complain that you, Mr. President, elected as a Republican, knowing well what an abomination Slavery is, and how emphatically it is the core and essence of this atrocious rebellion, seem never to interfere with these atrocities, and never give a direction to your military subordinates, which does not appear to have been conceived in the interest of Slavery rather than of Freedom….
VIII. On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile—that the rebellion, if crushed out to-morrow, would be renewed within a year if Slavery were left in full vigor….
IX. I close as I began with the statement that what an immense majority of the loyal millions of your countrymen require of you is a frank, declared, unqualified, ungrudging execution of the laws of the land, more especially of the Confiscation Act…. We cannot conquer ten millions of people united in solid phalanx against us, powerfully aided by Northern sympathizers and European allies. We must have scouts, guides, spies, cooks, teamsters, diggers, and choppers from the blacks of the South, whether we allow them to fight for us or not, or we shall be baffled and repelled. As one of the millions who would gladly have avoided the struggle at any sacrifice but that of principle and honor, but who now feel that the triumph of the Union is indispensable not only to the existence of our country but to the well-being of mankind, I entreat you to render a hearty and unequivocal obedience to the law of the land.
Yours,
Horace Greeley.
Still looking to reassure the majority of those in the Union who didn't want to fight for abolition, Lincoln responded to Greeley on August 22.
The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be the Union it was.
If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them.
If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them.
My paramount object is to save the Union and not either to save or destroy slavery.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it—If I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it—and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
What I do about slavery and the colored race I do because I believe it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union….
…I have stated my purpose according to my views of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.
Civil War Voices
Robert E. Lee, to the people of Maryland, encouraging them to secede (September 8, 1862).
The government of your chief city has been usurped by armed strangers—your Legislature has been dissolved and by the unlawful arrest of its members—freedom of the press and of speech has been suppressed—words have been declared offenses by an arbitrary decree of the Federal Executive—and citizens ordered to be tried by military commissions for what they may dare to speak.
Believing that the people of Maryland possess a spirit too lofty to submit to such a government, the people of the South have long wished to aid you in throwing off this foreign yoke, to enable you again to enjoy the inalienable rights of freemen, and restore the independence and sovereignty of your state.
In obedience to this wish our army has come among you, and is prepared to assist you with the power of its arms in regaining the rights of which you have been so unjustly despoiled.
This is our mission, so far as you are concerned. No restraint upon your free will is intended—no intimidation will be allowed within the limits of this army at least.
Marylanders shall once more enjoy their ancient freedom of thought and speech. We know no enemies among you, and will protect all of you in every opinion.
It is for you to decide your destiny, freely, and without constraint.
Documents of the Civil War
From Robert E. Lee's “Lost Order” (September 9, 1862).
The army will resume its march tomorrow, taking the Hagerstown Road. General Jackson's command will form the advance, and after passing Middletown, with such portions as he may select, take the route toward Sharpsburg, cross the Potomac at the most convenient point, and by Friday night take possession of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, capture such of the enemy as may be at Martinsburg, and intercept such as may attempt to escape from Harpers Ferry.
General Longstreet's command will pursue the same road as far as Boonsboro, where it will halt with the reserve, supply, and baggage trains of the army….
The commands of General Jackson, McLaws, and Walker, after accomplishing the objects for which they have been detached, will join the main body of the army at Boonsboro or Hagerstown.
Each regiment on the march will habitually carry its axes in the regimental ordnance wagons, for use of the men at their encampments, to procure wood, etc.
By command of General R.E. Lee
What Happened at Antietam?
When John Pope arrived in Virginia, he warned his men about “disaster and shame.” It was a pretty good description of what he had to live with after Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet finished with him at the Manassas battlefield in late August. Cut off from communications with Washington, unaware of his enemy's location, and expecting help from McClellan that would never come, Pope suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of Lee's army in the Second Battle of Bull Run. Only this time the casualties were five times as high as they had been the first time the two armies met. With Pope falling from grace, McClellan's star began to rise again, and in the aftermath of the defeat, McClellan was given command of the two armies, to merge them again into a single Army of the Potomac.
The vainglorious McClellan wrote to his wife: “Again I have been called upon to save the country….I still hope for success, and I will leave nothing undone to gain it….It makes my heart bleed to see the poor, shattered remnants of my noble Army of the Potomac…and to see how they love me even now. I hear them calling out to me as I ride among them, ‘George don't leave us again.’”
By early September, Lee was on the move north to the Potomac, on Maryland's southwestern border. His army numbered about 55,000 men. Many were shoeless, short on ammunition, and exhausted from a rigorous march. McClellan's forces approached 90,000 men. Again, however, McClellan would be convinced by scouts that he was outnumbered. He thought Lee had more than 100,000 men.
A strange occurrence changed events. Special Orders No. 191, Lee's master plan for opening an invasion of the North, was sent to his generals. Stonewall Jackson copied the orders he received and sent them on to Harvey Hill, his brother-in-law. Hill, in the meantime, had received his own set, so the additional copy was treated casually. On September 13, when the Union troops took over the campground vacated by Hill, Private W.B. Mitchell found the copy of Lee's orders wrapped around some cigars. Presented with the dispatch, McClellan said, “Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to go home.”
But even then caution took hold. Instead of pressing forward, McClellan waited overnight. In pursuit of the Confederates, he encountered heavy resistance at South Mountain. Although the Confederates were driven back, the delay allowed Lee to set up a defensive line at Sharpsburg, in western Maryland, behind a creek called Antietam. McClellan followed Lee and spent two days preparing an assault on the Confederate lines. Once again his caution allowed Lee to summon reinforcements and strengthen his defenses.
The Battle of Antietam took place on September 17, with McClellan's artillery preceding an infantry assault on Lee's lines at two sites that would come to be known as “the cornfield” and “the Dunkard Church.” One Confederate participant was Brigade Commander John B. Gordon, who recalled that
the artillery of both armies thundered. McClellan's compact columns of infantry fell upon the left of Lee's lines with the crushing weight of a landslide….Pressed back…the Southern troops, enthused by Lee's presence, re-formed their lines, and, with a shout as piercing as the blast of a thousand bugles, rushed in countercharge upon the exulting Federals [and] hurled them back in confusion….
Again and again…by charges and counter-charges, this portion of the field was lost and recovered, until the green corn that grew upon it looked as if it had been struck by a storm of bloody hail….From sheer exhaustion, both sides, like battered and bleeding athletes, seemed willing to rest.
By ten-thirty in the morning the scene had shifted to a new Union attack that struck several Confederate brigades stationed at a sunken road. As the blue-clad troops of the Union formed a column four lines deep, John Gordon, who would be struck by five separate Union bullets in the following action, again described the scene: “The brave Union commander, superbly mounted, placed himself in front, while his band in rear cheered them with martial music….As we stood looking upon that brilliant pageant, I thought…‘What a pity to spoil with bullets such a scene of martial beauty!’ But…Mars is not an aesthetic god.”
Mars that day was also an insatiable god. The fighting at “the sunken road” was devastating for both sides, but still it went on. When some of the Union troops finally moved around the right side of the Confederate lines, they opened up a withering fire at a spot that would all too aptly be called “the Bloody Lane.”
Civil War Voices
Union Staff Officer D.H. Strother, watching from Union headquarters across Antietam Creek.
As the smoke and dust disappeared, I was astonished to observe our troops moving along the front and passing over what appeared to be a long, heavy column of the enemy without paying it any attention whatever. I borrowed a glass from an officer, and discovered this to be actually a column of the enemy's dead and wounded lying along a hollow road—afterward known as Bloody Lane. Among the prostrate mass I could easily distinguish the movements of those endeavoring to crawl away from the ground, hands waving as if calling for assistance, and others struggling as if in the agonies of death.
I was standing beside General McClellan during the progress and conclusion of this attack. The studied calmness of his manner scarcely concealed the underlying excitement, and when it was over he exclaimed, “By George, this is a magnificent field, and if we win this fight it will cover all our errors and misfortunes forever.”
Civil War Voices
Enlisted New Yorker David L. Thompson, cut off after a Union retreat.
There was nothing to do but lie there and await developments. Nearly all the men in the hollow were wounded, one man…frightfully so, his arm being cut short off. He lived a few minutes only. All were calling for water, of course, but none was to be had.
…We heard all through the war that the army “was eager to be led against the enemy.” It must be so, for truthful correspondents said so, and editors confirmed it. But when you came to hunt for this particular itch, it was always the next regiment that had it.
The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like eggshells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way. Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness.
The Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) would become known as “the bloodiest day of the war.” The Confederates suffered about eleven thousand casualties, the Union attackers more than twelve thousand. But the Confederate army could not afford such losses.
After the grisly fighting McClellan, who continued to believe in the inflated estimate of Lee's army, decided once more to play it safe. An opportunity for what might have been a decisive and finishing blow to the Army of Virginia and the hopes of the Confederacy was lost. Despite possessing superior numbers as well as Lee's plans, McClellan acted tentatively, allowing Lee to escape across the Potomac and back into Virginia.
Lee would later attribute the failure of his invasion to the Lost Orders. Private Mitchell, wounded at Antietam, was discharged after eight months in the hospital. He died three years later, leaving his family in poverty.
Why Did Lincoln Fire General McClellan Again?
Lincoln was at turns angry and gloomy over Lee's escape. But the victory at Antietam gave him the opportunity he had been looking for. Still torn over the political wisdom and constitutionality of emancipation, Lincoln had decided that freeing the slaves in the Confederacy—while exempting those in the border states—would help shorten the war. He just needed a military victory to provide the right moment to make such a controversial announcement. On September 23 the Union newspapers published a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation. It would not take effect until the following January.
With the announcement of the victory at Antietam and eventual emancipation, Confederate hopes for European recognition were further dashed. Both England and France had outlawed slavery years earlier, and support for the Confederacy was politically impossible, particularly in England, now that slavery had emerged as the underlying issue of the war. It was also more apparent in Europe that the Union would inevitably emerge the victor.
Yet McClellan still did little to follow up on his costly victory. Exasperated at his “slows,” Lincoln finally ordered McClellan to “cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy, or drive him south.” One time, responding to his claim that his horses were weary, Lincoln wrote, “I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the Battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”
Though McClellan finally started to move the army out of Washington late in October, his pace was glacial. Disappointed and angry, Lincoln finally had had enough. On November 5 he dismissed McClellan as the head of the Army of the Potomac and replaced him with General Ambrose E. Burnside.
Now best remembered as the man whose muttonchop whiskers on the side of his face became known as “sideburns,” Burnside may have been one of the most hapless Union commanders; however, unlike others who preceded and followed him, Burnside was under no illusions about his talents. A native of Liberty, Indiana, Ambrose Everett Burnside (1824-1881) was the son of a South Carolina slaveowner who had moved to Indiana after selling his slaves. A West Pointer (1847), he served garrison duty in Mexico and was wounded by the Apaches. He tried to design a new type of breech-loading rifle but, failing to win a government contract, went bankrupt. Turning his patent over to creditors, he went to work for McClellan at the Illinois Central Railroad. With the outbreak of war he volunteered, serving at Bull Run, but left when his three-month enrollment was up. He then returned with a commission and served under McClellan. A reluctant commander, Burnside accepted the offer from Lincoln after twice refusing it because he felt inadequate to the job. He was right; that he was an unfortunate choice quickly became apparent.
Burnside took his Army of the Potomac to Warrenton, Virginia, just north of the Rappahannock River, and divided it into three divisions commanded by Generals Summer, Hooker, and Franklin. Lee's army lay about thirty miles away, south of the Rappahannock, divided into two corps: one commanded by Stonewall Jackson; the other by General James Longstreet. In mid-November, Burnside began the next Union “drive to Richmond” by sending 30,000 men under Summer toward Fredericksburg, a town on the south bank of the Rappahannock. The Union army stopped and made camp on some hills north of the river. Longstreet moved quickly and took up a position in some hills south of the town. Reinforcements from both sides began to stream in. Soon the Army of Northern Virginia was facing the Army of the Potomac, and it was clear that Fredericksburg would be the scene of a major battle.
The two armies were on opposing heights separated by the town and the river. Burnside had more than 100,000 men to Lee's 78,000, but the Confederates occupied the stronger position. Lee took ample time to prepare a strong defense and he wanted nothing more than for the Union army to attack the positions he had been fortifying for weeks. To attack, Burnside would have to cross the river on pontoon bridges (which had been delayed in arriving), move through the town, then cross a wide plain.
The Union advance on Fredericksburg began with an artillery barrage that would allow the placement of the pontoon bridges that would be used for the river crossing. The cannon fire was devastating, and houses and chimneys soon tumbled.
Civil War Voices
Confederate officer Robert Stiles of the Richmond Howitzers, a Yale man, described the scene in Fredericksburg during the Union bombardment.
I saw walking quietly and unconcernedly along the same street I was on, and approaching General Barksdale's headquarters from the opposite direction, a lone woman. She apparently found the projectiles which were screaming and exploding in the air, and striking and crashing through the houses, and tearing up the streets, very interesting…. [H]aving reached the house I rode around back of it to put my horse where he would at least be safer than in front. As I returned on foot to the front, the lady had gone up on the porch and was knocking at the door.
One of the staff came to hearken, and on seeing a lady, held up his hands, exclaiming in amazement, “What on earth, madam, are you doing here? Do go to some safe place, if you can find one!”
She smiled and said, with some little tartness, “Young gentleman, you seem to be a little excited. Won't you please say to General Barksdale that a lady at the door wishes to see him?”
The young man assured her General Barksdale could not possibly see her just now; but she persisted. “General Barksdale is a Southern gentleman, sir, and will not refuse to see a lady who has called upon him.”
…The General did come to the door, but actually wringing his hands in excitement and annoyance. “For God's sake, madam, go and seek some place of safety. I'll send a member of my staff to help you find one.”
She again smiled gently—while old Barksdale fumed and almost swore—and then she said quietly, “General Barksdale, my cow has just been killed in my stable by a shell. She is very fat, and I don't want the Yankees to get her. If you will send someone down to butcher her, you are welcome to the meat.”
The Union cannons and three detachments of volunteers finally did their work, clearing the town of the sharpshooters who were preventing the completion of the bridges. The Union columns advanced into Fredericksburg.
Civil War Voices
Robert Stiles observed the withdrawal of the last Confederates from Fredericksburg.
The last detachment was under the command of Lane Brandon…my classmate at Yale…. Brandon captured a few prisoners and learned that the advance [Union] company was commanded by Abbot, who had been his chum at Harvard Law School when the war began. He lost his head completely. He refused to retire before Abbot…. The enemy finding the way now clear, were coming up the street, full company front, with flags flying and bands playing, while the great shells from the siege guns were bursting over their heads and dashing their hurtling fragments after our retreating skirmishers.
Buck [Denman] was behind the corner of a house, taking sight for a last shot. Just as his fingers trembled on the trigger, a little three-year-old fair-haired baby girl toddled out of an alley accompanied by a Newfoundland dog, and gave chase to a big shell that was rolling lazily along the pavement, she clapping her hands and the dog snapping and barking furiously at the shell.
Buck's hand dropped from the trigger. He dashed it across his eyes to dispel the mist and make sure he hadn't passed over the river and wasn't seeing his own baby girl in a vision. No—there is a baby, amid the hell of shot and shell; and here come the enemy. A moment, and he has grounded his gun, dashed into the storm, swept his great arm around the baby, gained cover again, and, baby clasped to his breast and musket trailed in his left hand, is trotting after the boys up to Marye's Heights.
As Confederate Colonel E. Porter Alexander reported to General Longstreet in describing the position of his First Corps' artillery on Marye's Heights, overlooking the town, “A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.”
Alexander was describing six hundred yards of open field that stretched between his position and the town. The left side of Lee's line was anchored on Marye's Heights and on a 1,200-foot-long stone wall at the base of the heights. The retaining wall was built alongside the main road to Richmond, which had been cut away and sunken by years of use. Shoulder high, the stone wall was an ideal position from which to defend. Lafayette McLaws had stationed his Georgia brigade, commanded by General Thomas R.R. Cobb, in the sunken road. The Confederate soldiers were packed two ranks deep behind the wall and had a clear field of fire to their front.
Around noon on December 13, 1862, a brigade of blue-coated men filed out of Fredericksburg, formed their battle lines, and charged toward the stone wall. They were cut to pieces by the Confederate artillery and fell back before the Georgians behind the wall fired a single volley. Two more brigades charged in quick succession with the same result. McLaws ordered the South Carolina brigade to join Cobb's men behind the stone wall, making the line four ranks deep. Stepping back from the wall to reload and back up to fire, the rebel defenders lay down a rapid and continuous storm of bullets.
Civil War Voices
Union General Darius N. Couch.
[T]he whole plain was covered with men, prostrate and dropping, the live men running here and there, and in front closing upon each other, and the wounded coming back. The commands seemed to be mixed up. I had never before seen fighting like that—nothing approaching it in terrible uproar and destruction. There was no cheering on the part of the men, but a stubborn determination to obey orders and do their duty. I don't think there was much feeling of success. As they charged, the artillery fire would break their formation and they would get mixed. Then they would close up, go forward, receive the withering infantry fire and…fight as best they could. And then the next brigade coming up in succession would do its duty, and melt like snow coming down on warm ground.
Throughout the afternoon Burnside sent wave after wave of infantry to the slaughter. Fires set in the brush killed the wounded who could not escape. Even after the sun went down, the fighting continued in the dusk until night finally brought an end to the butchery. For the Confederate defenders on Marye's Heights it was, as one Union officer put it, “a day of such savage pleasure as seldom falls to the lot of soldiers, a day on which they saw their opponents doing just what they wished them to do.”
Seven Union divisions had been spent in fourteen charges on the stone wall. No Union soldier ever reached the wall; few got within fifty yards. Burnside lost 7,000 men in the attack; the Confederate defenders lost only 1,200 men.
Finally, on the fifteenth of December, a truce was established to pick up the wounded of both armies. The Union troops withdrew across the river to their original camps. Fredericksburg was reoccupied by the Confederates. (The three-year-old child rescued by Buck Denman spent the battle with the Confederates on Marye's Heights. She was returned to her mother afterward.)
The final count at Fredericksburg revealed dreadful but uneven losses on both sides. There were some 5,000 casualties for the Confederates and 12,700 Union casualties, more than 6,000 of them dead. This defeat caused Lincoln to despair. The choice of Burnside, who ignored Lincoln's warning not to attack, had proved calamitous. Many Union soldiers and officers said that McClellan would have never assaulted such a well-defended position. But Burnside clearly didn't know when to pull back from disaster.
The Army of the Potomac, having suffered the worst defeat in the history of the American army, settled into winter quarters without much hope or confidence.
Documents of the Civil War
From General Burnside's report of the battle at Fredericksburg to Major General Henry Halleck (December 1862).
General: I have the honor to offer the following reasons for moving the army of the Potomac across the Rappahannock, sooner than was anticipated by the President, Secretary of War or yourself, and for crossing at a point different from the one indicated to you at our last meeting at the President's.
During my preparations for crossing at the place I had first selected, I discovered that the enemy had thrown a large portion of his force down the river and elsewhere, thus weakening his defenses in the front, and also thought I discovered that he did not anticipate the crossing of our whole force at Fredericksburg, and I hoped by rapidly throwing the whole command over at that place to separate, by vigorous attack, the forces of the enemy on the river below from the forces behind and on the crest in the rear of the town, in which case we could fight him with great advantage in our favor….
To the brave officers and soldiers who accomplished the feat of thus recrossing the river in the face of the enemy, I owe everything.
For the failure in the attack I am responsible, as the extreme gallantry, courage, and endurance shown by them was never exceeded, and would have carried the points had it been possible.
To the families and friends of the dead I can only offer my heartfelt sympathies, but for the wounded I can offer my earnest prayers for their comfortable and final recovery.
Civil War Voices
John B. Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department in Richmond (December 1, 1863).
God speed the day of peace! Our patriotism is mainly in the army and among the ladies of the South. The avarice and cupidity of the men at home could only be excelled by the ravenous wolves; and most of our sufferings are fully deserved. Where a people will not have mercy on one another how can they expect mercy? They depreciate the Confederate notes by charging from $20 to $40 per bbl. for flour; $3.50 per bushel of meal, $2 per lb. for butter; $20 per cord for wood, etc. When we shall have peace let the extortionists be remembered! Let an indelible stigma be branded upon them.
A portion of the people look like vagabonds. We see men and women and children in the streets in dingy and dilapidated clothes; and some seem gaunt and pale with hunger—the speculators and thieving quartermasters and commissaries only looking sleek and comfortable. If this state of things continues a year or so longer, they will have their reward. There will be governmental bankruptcy, and all their gains will turn to dust and ashes!