1864-1865 “All the Force Possible…”
On the night before Sherman entered the place, there were citizens who could enumerate their wealth by millions; at sunrise the next morning they were worth scarcely a dime…. Government had seized their cotton; the Negroes had possession of their lands; their slaves had become freemen; their houses were occupied by troops; Confederate bonds were waste paper; their railroads were destroyed, their banks insolvent. They had not only lost wealth, but they had lost their cause.
—CHARLES COFFIN
DECEMBER 1864
I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
—PRESIDENTABRAHAM LINCOLN
MARCH 17, 1865
This is a sad business, colonel. It has happened as I told them in Richmond
it would happen. The line has been stretched until it is broken.
—GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE
MARCH 1865
* Did a Confederate General Order a Massacre of Black Troops at Fort Pillow?
* How Did Both Sides Treat Their POWs?
* Why Were the Two Armies Back at the Wilderness near Chancellorsville?
* How Did the North and South Pay for the War?
* What Was “the Crater”?
* Did Admiral David Farragut Really Say “Damn the Torpedoes. Full Speed Ahead!”?
* Who Ran Against Lincoln in 1864?
* Did General Sherman Really Say “War Is Hell”?
* Which Civil War Battle Was Fought in Vermont?
* What Did General Sherman Give President Lincoln for Christmas in 1864?
* Who Burned Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina?
* How Did Richmond Fall?
* What Happened at Appomattox Courthouse?
The small, undistinguished man in a battered uniform checked into Washington's famed Willard Hotel with his son on March 8, 1864. The clerk nearly turned the officer away until he unceremoniously signed the register. When Abraham Lincoln heard that the man he was expecting had arrived, he invited him to the weekly White House reception that evening. There was a tremendous crush of people eager to greet this short, rough-bearded, cigar-chewing soldier. Finally the crowd grew so thick that the man had to stand on a couch to be seen and avoid the crush of the mob flocking to meet the new lieutenant general of the Armies of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln had found his general.
It had taken three long, bloody years. But in March 1864 Grant was ordered to Washington to assume command of the Union armies. Promoted to lieutenant general, the puny Ohio boy who had once quit the army as a depressed failure now led more than half a million Union soldiers. Unlike the collection of bickering, chest-thumping, incompetent, or small-minded men who preceded him, Grant planned to coordinate these troops and, in his words, “concentrate all the force possible against the Confederate armies in the field.” This was Lincoln's dream come true: a commander who understood that rebel armies, not Confederate cities, were the true target.
In the first three years, the war had grown progressively more brutal. Now Grant and Union commanders like William T. Sherman would elevate the grim battle statistics to new levels of horror and devastation. The year of 1863 had been the bloodiest of the war. The year to come would grow even worse.
In Richmond, the situation was past bleak. As the Richmond Examiner stated it on New Year's Eve, “To-day closes the gloomiest year of our struggle.” With the devastating military losses of 1863 and the economy in a shambles, Jefferson Davis's beleaguered government was struggling to survive. Union sympathies in the Confederate states were being openly expressed. In Raleigh, North Carolina, the Standard's pro-Union stance brought a mob of Confederate troops to the newspaper's offices. At about the same time, a group of pro-Union civilians wrecked the presses of the secessionist Raleigh Journal. Several peace overtures would be made this year. All would be rejected because they denied the Union. Desertions from the Confederate ranks had become epidemic. But the Confederate armies still in the field were like wounded, cornered animals protecting their lair. The men leading those armies were still dangerous—defiant and unwilling to surrender.
Growing desperately short on manpower, the Confederacy began to extend conscription. The youngest and the oldest were soon being drafted. Mail clerks in Richmond, who had gone on strike a few months earlier over wages, were also called to join all the walking wounded from the hospitals pressed to defend the city. The manpower shortage even reached the point of the unthinkable—freeing and arming slaves who would fight.
As the new year began, the Confederacy had only two substantial armies left in the field. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, some 66,000 ill-clad, ill-fed troops, was now falling back toward Richmond. A second army, in Georgia under Joseph E. Johnston, was attempting to hold Atlanta, the Confederacy's other remaining key city. Two smaller Confederate forces were also active. One was in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, protecting the last great storehouse and granary of the Confederacy. The second, in Tennessee, was under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a brilliant, unconventional, and controversial cavalry genius.
Did a Confederate General Order a Massacre of Black Troops at Fort Pillow?
Early in April, Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest sent a message to his commander, Leonidas Polk. “There is a federal force of 500 or 600 at Fort Pillow which I shall attend to in a day or two, as they have horses and supplies which we need.”
Constructed early in 1862 by the notorious Gideon Pillow, the Confederate fort was an earthwork garrison with a nearby trading post on a bluff high above the Mississippi River. Fifty miles north of Memphis, Fort Pillow had been captured by Union forces in June 1862, and by 1864 it was one of the many garrisons used to defend the Union supply lines. A Union gunboat lay in the river to provide additional protection for the garrison. In the spring of 1864, the fort was manned by some 295 white troops of the 13th West Tennessee Cavalry—Unionists, some of some of whom had deserted from the Confederate ranks and were considered traitors by the Confederate Tennesseans. Also in the fort were 292 black soldiers of the 11th U.S. Colored Troops, mostly freed slaves sent north from Memphis; they were as despised by the Confederate troops as the “renegade Tennesseans” were. Official Richmond policy dictated that black Union soldiers were to be treated as runaway slaves who should be returned to their former masters; to the Confederate troops, the nearest trader willing to pay for black captives was just as good. The Confederate Congress had also sanctioned a policy of killing white Union officers who commanded black troops. Lieutenant General Kirby Smith, who ran a practical fiefdom in the Trans-Mississippi Department known as “Kirby Smithdom,” had declared a policy of killing all captured blacks in U.S. uniform, a policy the Richmond government only weakly disputed.
At this time, Tennessee was painfully feeling the endgame of the war. The state, which had actually voted against secession in a referendum in 1861, was always divided uneasily between Unionists and Confederates. Now more Tennesseans expressed Union sympathy, eager for ending the war and rejoining the Union on generous terms. But this division led to bad blood among Tennesseans. It was made worse when the Union commander at Fort Pillow, Major William Bradford of Tennessee, reportedly began to roam the country, stealing food, cattle, and anything of value from Confederate sympathizers. Confederate Tennesseans turned for help to General Forrest, a Tennessee man himself and one of the Confederate leaders most dreaded by Union soldiers.
The wily survivor of the Confederate debacle at Fort Donelson earlier in the war, Forrest had also escaped paralysis or a potentially fatal wound at Shiloh, when he was shot near the spine. A tough, mean-spirited, unflinching character, Forrest had moved from Abraham Lincoln-style log-cabin, frontier poverty by handsomely profiting in the slave trade. This business earned him a fortune large enough to mount his own cavalry battalion once the war began. “War means fighting',” he once said, “and fightin' means killin'.” On at least two occasions that applied to his fellow Confederates as well as the enemy. He once came close to a duel with Confederate General Earl Van Dorn. (Van Dorn was killed later in the war by a civilian, who said that the general had “violated the sanctity of his home” in an incident involving the man's wife.) In another fabled exploit, Forrest once argued with a subordinate in the aftermath of a battle. The man started to pull a gun and it fired, striking Forrest in the left side. Opening his penknife with his teeth, Forrest grabbed the gunman's hand before he could shoot again and sunk the knife into his stomach. The young officer died soon after. Twelve days later Forrest was in the saddle again. In another famous episode, Forrest used a small force of about four hundred men to march and ride in circles to confuse the Union soldiers; he captured more than sixteen hundred troops under Union officer Abel Streight.
Forrest was called the most remarkable soldier the war produced by both Robert E. Lee and William T. Sherman—who also called him “a devil” and put out a reward for his capture. Forrest was basically uneducated, not a schooled gentleman like many of his Confederate colleagues—many of whom he openly despised. A recent Forrest biographer, Jack Hurst, summarizes the unconventional cavalry leader as
impatient with many of the seemingly petty rules of war and warriors, unwritten laws of cavalierish gallantry which seemed oblivious to the awesome imperatives of winning. To him, everything always had depended on final triumph, not on gentlemanly gamesmanship…. Like all the frontier fights he had made, this was not a game. It was a struggle for no less than survival…. After Shiloh, he began to wage war more nearly the way he had lived the rest of his life; not only single-mindedly, but confident in his own counsel and following his own rules.
And it was the notoriety of those personal rules that would blacken Forrest's name at Fort Pillow in April 1864.
A few weeks earlier, Forrest and his men had been turned away at Paducah, Kentucky, by Union troops who resisted his demands for surrender. That was a first; Forrest's fearsome legend was so powerful that his previous surrender demands had always been accepted. When the general learned that black Union troops helped repel his men at Paducah, it seemed only to make them angrier about their failure and the garrison at Fort Pillow was the target of their vengeance. At 5:30 A.M. on April 12, fifteen hundred of Forrest's men surrounded the fort. Having ridden seventy-two miles in twenty-seven hours, the general arrived at the fort at 10:00 A.M. to position his men where they could fire down on the Union soldiers. At 3:30 P.M., Forrest sent out a flag of truce and demanded the fort's surrender, promising to treat all the men of Fort Pillow as prisoners of war in his note to the Union commander, Major Lionel F. Booth. A Philadelphia clerk who had joined the army in 1858, Booth had risen to command a battalion of the 1st Alabama Siege Artillery (African Descent). But he had been killed by a sharpshooter earlier that day. Without letting on that Booth was dead, Major William F. Bradford, the supposedly renegade Tennessean, requested an hour to consult with his subordinates. Bradford was playing for time, expecting reinforcements to arrive on Mississippi transports.
Forrest could see the smoke from the steamers on the river and, suspecting the Union of delaying tactics, he gave the fort only twenty minutes to decide. He also repositioned his men under the flag of truce, a no-no in nineteenth-century warfare, where such niceties were still honored. (Forrest had been accused of using this tactic on other occasions.) At the end of that time the surrender was refused, and Forrest ordered an assault.
The Confederates drove the Union soldiers out of the fort and down the riverbank, where many tried to surrender. What happened next was long debated, both during and after the war. Without question, the Union troops died in unusually large numbers, suggesting that a massacre had taken place. Witnesses on both sides recounted scenes of murder as the surrendering Union soldiers, blacks in particular, were simply shot dead. One Union witness said, “I also saw at least 25 negroes shot down, within 10 or 20 paces from the place where I stood. They had also surrendered, and were begging for mercy.” He later testified hearing a Confederate officer order his men to “kill the last God damned one of them.” And as one member of the Confederate 20th Tennessee put it a week later, “The slaughter was awful.” He also wrote that General Forrest “ordered them shot down like dogs.” The Union troops suffered 231 killed, 100 wounded, and 26 captured. The black units suffered 66 percent killed, the white units only 35 percent, most casualties occurring after the walls had been breached. The attacking Confederates suffered only 14 killed and wounded.
Bradford was captured. Two days later, as he was being transported to a prison camp, he was shot; his captors claimed he was trying to escape. A Union sympathizer said he'd been assassinated.
Civil War Voices
Confederate General Nathan Forrest, following the Fort Pillow massacre: “The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.”
Did Forrest actually order a massacre? It was widely thought so at the time, although his supporters point to his surrender demand promising fair treatment for all prisoners. Perhaps it is more likely that Forrest had been promising a “no quarter” threat—that is, to show no mercy or clemency to the defeated—for months. And his men took him at his word. Given the stated policy of the Richmond government toward black troops and their Union officers, and the charged feelings of hatred toward armed blacks among many Confederate soldiers, the seeds of an atrocity had been sown. Forrest simply nursed them. He may not have actually ordered the execution of the black soldiers, but he had created an atmosphere so poisonous that a massacre was likely, if not inevitable. As the commander, he must be ultimately deemed responsible for the actions of his men.
The Fort Pillow incident was not the only massacre of black captives. In North Carolina, when the Confederates recaptured coastal Plymouth in April 1864, a Union sergeant testified that blacks in uniform were shot, hanged, or had their brains beaten out by musket butts. White officers were reportedly dragged through town with ropes around their necks. Similar cases were reported elsewhere, though never on the scale of Fort Pillow. To black Union fighting men, “Remember Fort Pillow” became a rallying cry. And at Petersburg in June 1864, Charles Francis Adams reported of the black troops, “The darkies fought ferociously. If they murder prisoners, as I hear they did…they can hardly be blamed.”
How Did Both Sides Treat Their POWs?
As the events at Fort Pillow demonstrated, the lot of Civil War prisoners had become a dangerous one. Passions and propaganda had destroyed the accepted conventions of warfare and treatment of captives, earlier codified in Europe. By 1864, vengeance replaced any gentleman's code of “civilized” warfare. If there was ever “fair play” in wartime, the brutality of the Civil War had destroyed it.
Formal prisoner exchanges, used earlier in Europe, were not instituted initially because Lincoln did not want to recognize the Confederacy. Gradually, however, informal exchanges under flags of truce became common between the two sides but did not involve large numbers of men in the early years of the war. Finally, in 1862, an agreement was made between the two armies—rather than the two governments—under which all prisoners were supposed to be exchanged within ten days of their capture. Under this agreement, a certain number of enlisted men could be exchanged for an officer; a general was worth from forty-six to sixty privates; a major general, forty privates; and finally down to two privates per noncommissioned officer.
There was also a curious system called “parole,” borrowed from the European military tradition, in which released prisoners agreed not to serve a military role until they had been officially exchanged for an enemy prisoner. Using the honor system, parole worked well enough to keep the prisons relatively empty, although it created a mountain of paperwork and a bureaucratic nightmare for the two governments. That was good for soldiers, who often waited months before being told to report back for duty when they had been officially “exchanged.” In 1863, after capturing Vicksburg, Grant paroled more than 31,000 Confederate soldiers rather than transporting them back to Union prison camps. He was furious when some of these parolees turned up among the Confederate captives at Chattanooga; in April, after taking overall command, he ordered an end to prisoner exchanges until the Confederates agreed to honor the one-for-one bargain.
In the wake of Fort Pillow and other reports of the killing of black prisoners, Grant also demanded that the Confederates make no distinction between white and black prisoners. It was this April 17 order, coupled with Grant's desire to place a further strain on Confederate manpower and resources, that effectively halted prisoner exchanges. Grant's decision certainly added to the woes of the hard-pressed Confederacy, but its unintended effect was a grim death sentence for thousands of Union prisoners.
Prisoner of war camps were among the most tragic and inhumane disgraces of the war. Just as the character of the war changed as the years went by and the casualties mounted, the character of the prisons grew bleaker and more cruel. Retribution on the part of sadistic and vindictive administrators on both sides eventually replaced the most basic humane treatment.
The very first Confederate prison camp was in Charleston, inside Castle Pinckney, and its Union captives were treated quite gallantly by their captors, the young cream of Charleston society. But that brand of treatment would not last long. As the battles grew in size, the number of captives on each side grew as well. The Confederate government converted the Libby & Son Ship Chandlers & Grocers, a cotton warehouse near downtown Richmond, into a prison for Union officers. The 150-by-100-foot three-story prison held twelve hundred men in eight crowded, vermin-infested drafty rooms. One of its notorious “turnkeys,” Dick Turner, reportedly shot anyone who went to a window for light and air. Libby was the scene of the largest mass prison escape of the war, led by Union Colonel Thomas E. Rose of Pennsylvania, captured at Chickamauga in September 1863. Using makeshift tools, Rose planned an elaborate escape route through a tunnel from the prison's cellar. On February 7, 1864, Colonel Abel D. Streight, the officer who had surrendered his large force to Nathan Forrest's much smaller cavalry, declared the tunnel long enough and demanded, as the senior officer, to be the first to escape.
One attempt was aborted when the tunnel proved too short and the prisoners had to dig farther for two more days. While the other prisoners held a musical show to mask the escape, Rose and his men went out through the tunnel and disappeared on the streets of Richmond. The next day's roll call revealed that 109 prisoners were missing. Fifty-nine made it back to the Union lines. Two drowned while crossing streams, and the remaining forty-eight, including Rose, were recaptured. Exchanged in July, Rose went on to fight in the Battles of Franklin and Nashville, Tennessee, the last two major battles in the West. A career soldier, he resigned from the army with the rank of major in 1894. Streight rejoined his men and also fought at Franklin and Nashville.
Libby Prison and the nearby Belle Isle Prison, where thousands of Union prisoners lived in tents with little to eat, were rightfully notorious. But the conditions in these camps paled in comparison to the treatment that lay in store for the captives in a Confederate prison camp officially named Camp Sumter but better known as Andersonville.
When the concentration of war prisoners in Richmond drained the local food supply, a new prison site was selected in the heart of Georgia, near the village of Andersonville in Sumter County. The first prisoners arrived in February 1864 and found a fifteen-foot-tall stockade surrounding about sixteen acres of open land. Designed for ten thousand men, there was little in the way of housing, clothing, or medical care. The only fresh water was a thin trickle from Stockade Creek, a stream that flowed through the prison yard into nearby Sweet Water Creek. Cooking waste flowed into the stream, with the downstream serving as the prison latrine. Bloodhounds were kenneled nearby to track down runaways, who were chained or put in stocks as punishment for escaping. During the next few months, 400 new prisoners arrived each day, and in June the prison was expanded to twenty-six acres. By August it contained more than 33,000 Union prisoners, making it the fifth-largest city in the Confederacy.
Andersonville was initially overseen by John Henry Winder, the Confederate commander responsible for all prisons. His death of fatigue in February 1865 probably saved him from a postwar trial and execution. Winder was succeeded by Henry Wirz, a Swiss-born Confederate officer with a reputation for cruelty and sadism. Under Wirz, Andersonville was certainly worse than any other prison, Union or Confederate. Georgia's summer heat, disease, and inadequate food and medical care took a terrible toll: of the 45,000 prisoners at Camp Sumter, at least 13,000 died. (Some have argued that the camp at Salisbury, North Carolina, was even worse. Although smaller than Andersonville, with only 10,000 prisoners, Salisbury saw a mortality rate of 34 percent, higher than Andersonville's 29 percent.)
Civil War Voices
Henry Hernbaker, a Union soldier captured at Gettysburg and a prisoner at both Belle Isle Prison on the James River near Richmond and Andersonville.
I was now taken to Andersonville, where I remained about seven months, and the horrors I met there it is useless for me to attempt to describe…. The sun was scorching hot, and having nothing to protect us from its burning rays, the whole upper surface of our feet would become blistered, and then would break, leaving the flesh exposed, and having nothing to dress it or protect it in any way, gangrene would follow, and some would lose their feet, and part of a limb, and death would soon follow. And I have seen others die from want of nourishment. The amputations would average as many as six per day, and I saw not a single instance of a recovery from them. Some became victims of total blindness, occasioned by constant exposure to the heat of the sun and its action on the nervous system.
In the month of June it rained twenty-one days in succession, and there were often fifteen thousand of us in the stockade without any shelter of any kind. In the hospital the poor sick who were too feeble to help themselves, and literally swarming with lice, had all their life's blood taken away from them in that way. In fact, it is hardly possible to conceive a greater accumulation of woes to come upon mortal man than fell to the lot of the prisoners at Andersonville. Three thousand died in the month of August, and I have counted one hundred dead bodies in a row, and some of them so decomposed as to fall to pieces upon being removed. There have been as many as one hundred and fifty died in one day, and you can imagine what a foul atmosphere there would be. Day after day, I have gone the rounds of the wretched hospitals and looked upon every variety of suffering that the human frame is capable of presenting. I have heard Capt. Wirz swear that he was killing more d—d Yankees with his treatment than they were with powder and lead in the army…. Another old friend of mine…was shot dead by the rebel guard for reaching under the dead line for a drink of water, and another was shot dead at my feet for reaching under the dead line for a piece of mouldy bread.
Another Andersonville inmate was Sergeant Lucius Barber of Illinois, captured while fighting in Georgia under Sherman.
At 4 o' clock P.M. the Georgia Hell, which clutched in its iron grasp ten thousand Union soldiers, was seen in the distance. We were marched up to the commandant's headquarters…where a rigid search was performed…. This devil in human shape, Wirz, I will briefly describe. Any man gifted with any discernment would pronounce him a villain at first sight…. As he moved around amongst us, he spit out his vile abuse in the most disgusting manner, nearly every word an oath…. About sundown we were marched to the outside gate of Hell…. Its huge doors swung open to admit us and we were in the presence of—I do not know what to call them. It was evident they were human beings but hunger, sickness, exposure and dirt had so transformed them that they more resembled walking skeletons, painted black. Our feelings cannot be described as we gazed on these poor human beings…. Such squalid, filthy wretchedness, hunger, disease, nakedness and cold, I never saw before. Thirty-five thousand souls had been crowded into this pen, filling it completely. Poorly clad and worse fed, drinking filth and slime, from one hundred to three hundred of these passed into the gate of the eternal world daily.
There were nearly 13,000 graves at Andersonville, although the actual death toll was probably much higher. After the war, Clara Barton went to the prison site to bury properly and identify the dead and missing of Andersonville. What she saw enraged her, and she tried to testify at Wirz's trial. Even without her testimony, Wirz was quickly convicted. He was executed as the man responsible for Andersonville's conditions and held accountable for at least 10,000 of the Union deaths. Wirz was the only Confederate soldier executed by the Union after the war. (Long after, the controversy over the Confederate treatment of Union prisoners continued. Many defenders of Wirz and the Confederate cause faulted Grant's halting of prisoner exchanges, blaming the many prisoner deaths on food shortages alone. The Daughters of the Confederacy even erected a memorial to Wirz in 1909, saying he was “judicially murdered” by Yankees and claiming Grant was responsible for the Union deaths.)
The Confederacy did not have a monopoly on inhumane prison conditions. Point Lookout, Maryland, was the largest Union POW camp; designed for 10,000 men to live in tents, it often contained twice that number. Another Union prison, Fort Jefferson, in the Dry Tortugas near Key West, Florida, was an old fort that was converted to a military prison late in 1861. It was used not for POWs but criminals in the Union armies. Like the notorious Devil's Island, it had a merciless climate and a brutal work camp noted for disease and hard labor. (Dr. Samuel Mudd, the doctor convicted for treating the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin, was sentenced to life imprisonment at Fort Jefferson.)
The worst Union prison was in Elmira, in upstate New York, where 2,963 Confederate soldiers died, nearly a quarter of the 12,123 men held there. This death rate was only slightly less than Andersonville's and more than double the average death rate in the other Union prison camps. Built in May 1864, after prisoner exchanges were halted, the camp was designed to hold 5,000 men. The deaths at Elmira were caused by diseases brought on by starvation and terrible living conditions. During a bitterly cold winter, clothes sent by families for the prisoners were deliberately withheld, and hundreds of men, forced to live in tents with no blankets, froze to death. In May 1864 War Secretary Stanton ordered prisoner rations reduced to the same amount issued to Confederate soldiers. This supposedly ensured that Confederate prisoners were receiving the equivalent of the rations Union prisoners were getting. In other words, in the midst of plenty in the Union, malnourished Confederate prisoners suffered epidemics of scurvy, diarrhea, pneumonia, and smallpox. Survivors of the camp nicknamed the prison “Hellmira.”
Civil War Voices
General Grant to General Meade (April 9, 1864): “Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.”
Why Were the Two Armies Back at the Wilderness near Chancellorsville?
By May, Grant was ready to attack, pressing his large army once more toward the Confederacy. His focus was not on Richmond but on the remaining Confederate armies in the field. On May 4, 1864, about 120,000 men in the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River and started what Confederate General John B. Gordon called “the seventh act in the ‘On to Richmond’ drama played by the armies of the Union.” It was familiar terrain for Lee and his troops as well as many of the Union veterans. The Battle of Chancellorsville, Lee's greatest victory, had been fought here one year earlier.
Civil War Voices
Union Private Warren Goss, reaching Chancellorsville and the blackened ruins of the old Chancellor House, found grim reminders of Hooker's 1863 debacle (May 1864).
Weather-stained remnants of clothing, rusty gun-barrels and bayonets, tarnished brasses and equipments, with bleaching bones and grinning skulls, marked this memorable field. In the cavity of one of these skulls was a nest with three speckled eggs of a field bird. In yet another was a wasp nest. Life in embryo in the skull of death.
On May 5, Lee's 66,000-man Army of Northern Virginia attacked the Army of the Potomac in the Wilderness, the same tangle of woods that had seen such terrible fighting in 1863.
Civil War Voices
Private Warren Goss, 2nd Massachusetts Artillery, described the Wilderness (May 5, 1864).
No one could see the fight fifty feet from him. The roll and crackle of musketry was something terrible, even to the veterans of many battles. The lines were very near each other, and from the dense underbrush and the tops of trees came puffs of smoke, the “ping” of the bullets, and the yell of the enemy. It was a blind and bloody hunt to the death, in bewildering thickets, rather than a battle….
…The uproar of battle continued through the twilight hours. It was eight o'clock before the deadly crackle of musketry died gradually away, and the sad shadows of night, like a pall, fell over the dead in these ensanguined thickets. The groans and cries for water or for help from the wounded gave place to the sounds of the conflict, and thus ended the first day's fighting of the Army of the Potomac under Grant.
The Reverend A.M. Stewart, a Pennsylvania chaplain who had been with the Army of the Potomac since the Peninsula Campaign, was at the first Battle of Chancellorsville (May 5, 1864).
What awful, what sickening scenes! No, we have ceased to get sick at such sights. Here a dear friend struck dead by a ball through the head or heart! Another fallen with leg or thigh broken, and looking, resignedly yet wistfully, to you for help away from the carnage. Another dropping his gun, quickly clapping his hand upon his breast, stomach or bowels, through which a Minnie has passed, and walking slowly to the rear to lie down and die. Still another—yea, many more—with bullet holes through various fleshy parts of the body, from which the blood is freely flowing, walking back and remarking, with a laugh somewhat distorted with pain, “See, the rascals have hit me!” All this beneath a canopy of sulphur and a bedlam of sounds, like confusion confounded.
Night at length put an end to the carnage, and left the two armies much in the same position as at the opening of the strife.
The “work of death,” as Reverend Stewart called it, began once again the next day, Friday, May 6. When a Union attack smashed through the Confederate line, Lee himself spurred his horse to the front to lead a counterattack. He was pulled back by his own men, who shouted, “Go back, General Lee! Go back!” Also in the thick of the fighting was Confederate General James K. Longstreet. In an eerie repeat of the day a year earlier in Chancellorsville in which Stonewall Jackson had been wounded by his own troops, Longstreet was also hit. Unlike Jackson, however, he survived his injury.
As the two armies battled, fire once again broke out in the woods, adding to the soldiers' woes.
Civil War Voices
Private Warren Goss (May 6, 1864):
Flames sprang up in the woods in our front, where the fight of the morning had taken place. With a crackling roar, like an army of fire, it came down upon the Union line. The wind drove the blinding smoke and suffocating heat into our faces. This, added to the oppressive heat of the weather, was almost unendurable. It soon became terrible. The line of fire, with resistless march, swept the thickets before its advance, then reaching out its tongue of flame, ignited the breastworks of resinous logs, which soon roared and crackled along their entire length. The men fought the enemy and the flames at the same time. Their hair and beards were singed and their faces blistered….
During the conflict our men had exhausted their ammunition and had been obliged to gather cartridges from the dead and wounded. Their rifles, in many instances, became so hot by constant firing, that they were unable to hold them in their hands. The fire was the most terrible enemy our men had that day, and few survivors will forget the attack of the flames.
By the end of two days of close combat in the Wilderness, the battle was at a standstill, with heavy losses on both sides. The Union had casualties of more than 17,000 (2,246 killed and 12,073 wounded); the Confederates suffered approximately half that many. But in the grim new mathematics of this war, the Union could afford such ghastly losses, while the dwindling Confederate forces would be hard-pressed in the coming war of attrition.
Acting on a hunch that Grant would next try to get between his Confederate forces and Richmond, Lee pulled his troops out of the Wilderness, concentrating them near Spotsylvania Court House, a strategic crossroad. Several more days of all-out fighting took place there as the Union army tried to seize the momentum and crush the Confederate army.
Calling this battle “the most desperate engagement in the history of modern warfare,” Horace Porter, an aide to Grant, described the combat:
It was chiefly a savage hand-to-hand fight across the breastworks. Rank after rank was riddled by shot and shell and bayonet thrusts, and finally sank, a mass of torn and mutilated corpses; then fresh troops rushed madly forward to replace the dead; and so the murderous work went on. Guns were run up close to the parapet, and double charges of canister played their part in the bloody work. The fencerails and logs in the breastworks were shattered into splinters, and trees over a foot and a half in diameter were cut completely in two….
The opposing flags were in places thrust against each other, and muskets were fired with muzzle against muzzle. Skulls were crushed with clubbed muskets and men stabbed with swords and bayonets thrust between the logs in the parapet which separated the combatants. Wild cheers, savage yells, and frantic shrieks rose above the sighing of the wind and the pattering of the rain and formed a demoniacal accompaniment to the booming of the guns…. Even the darkness of night and the pitiless storm failed to stop the fierce contest.
At about the time of the fighting at Spotsylvania, Lee lost another key lieutenant. On May 8, 1864, Union General Philip H. Sheridan boasted that his cavalry could whip Confederate General Jeb Stuart out of his boots. Grant said, “Let him start right out and do it.”
With the most powerful cavalry force the Army of the Potomac had ever mounted—more than 10,000 troopers riding four abreast—Sheridan's column stretched for thirteen miles. The confident general made no effort to conceal his movement. Alerted to Sheridan's advance, Stuart positioned his 4,500 troopers between the Union column and Richmond. At Yellow Tavern, an abandoned inn six miles north of Richmond, the two cavalry forces fought for three hours on May 11. Even though they were outnumbered, the Confederate troops stubbornly defended their position until the Union force withdrew. But during that withdrawal, a dismounted Union cavalryman shot at a large, red-bearded Confederate officer on a horse thirty feet away. Fatally wounded, Stuart died the next day. Lee had lost his greatest cavalry leader. Hearing the news, he told a staff member, “I can scarcely think of him without weeping.”
Documents of the Civil War
Ulysses Grant's bulletin to the War Department.
Headquarters in the Field
May 11, 1864—8 A.M.
We have now ended the sixth day of very heavy fighting.
The result, to this time, is much in our favor.
Our losses have been heavy, as well as those of the enemy. I think the loss of the enemy must be greater.
We have taken over 5,000 prisoners by battle, whilst he has taken from us but a few, except stragglers.
I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.
U.S. Grant
Lieut. Gen. Commanding the Armies of the United States
Ten days later, after more than two weeks of constant fighting at Spotsylvania Court House, Grant pulled his Army of the Potomac out of its trenches and sent it marching southeast. Lee took a parallel course, always staying between Grant's army and Richmond. On June 1, their paths converged at Cold Harbor, the site of a McClellan Lee battle in 1862. After twenty-eight days of almost constant fighting, Grant's men had suffered more than 31,000 casualties, more than his western armies had lost in three years of war. Now, just a few miles northeast of Richmond, Grant faced Lee, who had pushed the Army of Northern Virginia to Cold Harbor in time to construct a formidable defensive position.
Civil War Voices
Sergeant George Cary Eggleston of Virginia, recalling the Confederates' arrival at Cold Harbor (June 1, 1864):
By the time we reached Cold Harbor we had begun to understand what our new adversary meant, and therefore, for the first time, I think, the men in the ranks of the Army of Northern Virginia realized that the era of experimental campaigns against us was over; that Grant was not going to retreat; that he was not to be removed from command because he had failed to break Lee's resistance; and that the policy of pounding had begun, and would continue until our strength be utterly worn away, unless by some decisive blow to the army in our front, or some brilliant movement in diversion…we should succeed in changing the character of the contest. We began to understand that Grant had taken hold of the problem of destroying the Confederate strength in the only way that the strength of such an army, so commanded, could be destroyed, and that he intended to continue the plodding work till the task should be accomplished, wasting very little time or strength in efforts to make a brilliant display of generalship in a contest of strategic wits with Lee. We at last began to understand what Grant had meant by his expression of determination to “fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”
…We had absolute faith in Lee's ability to meet and repel any assault that might be made, and to devise some means of destroying Grant. There was, therefore, no fear in the Confederate ranks, of anything that General Grant might do; but there was an appalling and well-founded fear of starvation, which indeed some of us were already suffering….
But what is the use of writing about the pangs of hunger? The words are utterly meaningless to persons who have never known actual starvation, and cannot be made otherwise than meaningless. Hunger to starving men is totally unrelated to the desire for food as that is commonly understood and felt. It is a great agony of the whole body and of the soul as well. It is unimaginable, all-pervading pain inflicted when the strength to endure pain is utterly gone….
When we reached Cold Harbor the command to which I belonged had been marching almost continuously day and night for more than fifty hours without food and for the first time we knew what actual starvation was. It was during that march that I heard a man wish himself a woman—the only case of that kind of remark I ever heard of—and he uttered the wish half in grim just and made haste to qualify it by adding, “or a baby.”
In the next two days, Grant lost another 5,000 men. On June 3, the third day at Cold Harbor, the Union troops massed for a great push that opened at 4:30 A.M. What followed was a terrible slaughter during an assault on well-dug Confederate trenches. In approximately one hour of fighting, the Union suffered between 6,000 and 7,000 casualties. By noon the attack was called off. And afterward Lee's army still stood between Grant's men and Richmond.
Grant decided on a new strategy. On June 12 he packed up his men and moved them south to Petersburg, twenty miles below Richmond, the hub of every railroad connecting Richmond to the rest of the eastern Confederacy.
The six weeks of fighting since Grant moved into the Wilderness had produced unprecedented and astonishing losses. Assessing this campaign, historian Richard Wheeler writes in Voices of the Civil War,
Grant's Wilderness campaign had cost him more than 50,000 casualties. During the campaign's progress, Washington sent him about 40,000 reinforcements. President Lincoln accepted the horrendous casualty reports without protest, but he must have agonized over them in private. They affected him not only as a man of conscience but as a politician. This was the Presidential election year, and his conduct of the war was the leading issue.
Civil War Voices
Susan Lee Blackford, a Virginia volunteer in the Women's Relief Society, the Confederate equivalent of the Union's Sanitary Commission (May 12, 1864).
Mrs. Spence came after me just as I was about to begin this morning and said she had just heard that the Taliaferro's factory was full of soldiers in a deplorable condition. I went down there with a bucket of rice, milk, etc. to see what I could do. I found the house filled with wounded men and not one thing provided for them. They were lying about the floor on a little straw. Some had been there since Tuesday and had not seen a surgeon. I washed and dressed the wounds of about fifty and poured water over the wounds of many more. The town is crowded with the poor creatures, and there is really no preparations for such a number. If it had not been for the ladies many of them would have starved to death. The poor creatures are very grateful, and it is a pleasure to us to help them in any way. I have been very hard at work ever since the wounded commenced coming. I went to the depot twice to see what I could do. I have had the cutting and distribution of twelve hundred yards of cotton cloth for bandages, and sent over three bushels of rolls of bandages, and as many more yesterday. I have never worked so hard in all my life and I would rather do that than anything else in the world. I hope no more wounded are sent here as I really do not think they could be sheltered. The doctors, of course, are doing much, and some are doing their full duty, but the majority are not. They have free access to the hospital stores and deem their own health demands that they drink up most of the brandy and whiskey in stock, and, being fired up most of the time, display a cruel and brutal indifference to the needs of the suffering, which is a disgrace to their profession and to humanity.
MILESTONES IN THE CIVIL WAR:JANUARY-JUNE 1864
January 2General Patrick R. Cleburne, an Irish immigrant who had become one of the most respected Confederate commanders in the West, proposes to his high command that some slaves be freed and trained to fight in the Confederate armies. His colleagues call the idea “revolting” and believe that it would demoralize the army. (Cleburne died later that year, and the Confederacy moved to arm some slaves four months later, but the war ended before any blacks ever joined a Confederate army.)
January 19 Arkansas, a slaveholding state that remained in the Union, adopts a new antislavery constitution.
February 3-14 General William T. Sherman captures Meridian, Mississippi. Following the strategy he will use as he drives east to the Atlantic coast from the Mississippi, Sherman begins to destroy supplies, buildings, and railroads in his path.
March 10 Grant is named commander of the Union armies following his victory at Chattanooga.
April 12 The Fort Pillow Massacre. Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest captures this Tennessee fort on the Mississippi River. In the aftermath, hundreds of black and fifty-three white soldiers are murdered.
April 30 As the Union armies begin to tighten their grip, Jefferson Davis and his pregnant wife, Varina, suffer a personal tragedy. Joe, their five-year-old son and Davis's favorite, falls from a balcony at the Confederate White House and dies the next day. Mary Boykin Chesnut notes in her diary, “These people, the Davises, had enough to bear without calamity at home. And now it comes to the very quick.” Davis later has the balcony torn down.
May 3 Grant, with 120,000 troops, begins his inexorable advance into Virginia, driving toward Richmond and Lee's sixty thousand troops.
May 4 General Sherman begins his march toward Atlanta with an army of 110,000 men.
May 5-6 The Wilderness. A bloody but inconclusive battle is fought in tangled woods. Brushfires kill hundreds of wounded men unable to be evacuated.
May 8-12 Battle of Spotsylvania. Attempting to maneuver around Lee, Grant's army is met at this Virginia town. Five days of fighting lead to a stalemate.
May 15 A Union force entering the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia is defeated by Confederate General Jubal Early, setting back a Union offensive.
May 31 In Cleveland, Radical Republicans who oppose President Lincoln nominate General John C. Frémont as their presidential candidate.
June 1-3 Battle of Cold Harbor. Grant assaults Lee's defenses, with devastating losses on each side. Grant recognizes his mistakes but realizes that he has the superior numbers with which to wear down the Confederate army.
June 7 In Baltimore, the Republicans nominate President Lincoln to run for a second term despite his national unpopularity. His new vice-presidential candidate is Andrew Johnson, a southern War Democrat who is expected to widen the ticket's appeal in the border states.
June 15-18 Lee fights off another of Grant's attacks on Petersburg, Virginia. Grant settles into a long siege of the city in a repeat of his successful tactic at Vicksburg a year earlier.
June 27 Battle of Kenesaw Mountain (Georgia). Sherman orders an assault on Confederate positions, resulting in a deadly failure; nearly two thousand Union men are casualties. The Confederates win a defensive victory.
June 30 Congress passes the Internal Revenue Act to increase taxes to finance the war.
Treasury Secretary Chase resigns, and this time the resignation is accepted by Lincoln.
How Did the North and South Pay for the War?
Hate the IRS? Thank the Civil War. Along with all the other modern developments for which the Civil War is justly famed—advances in communications, technology, medicine, and military hardware—it also created a major transformation of the federal government. Before the war, the average American might have come into contact with the federal government in only one way—getting mail delivered. There was no Social Security, no Medicare, no student loan guarantees, no lunch programs, no highway fund to build interstates, no air traffic controllers, FCC, or Education Department. And for much of the war there was no tax man. There had been plenty of death during the Civil War; now there were also taxes.
Born in New Hampshire, Salmon P. Chase (1808-1873) was a devout Episcopalian who liked to recite psalms while bathing and dressing. Moving to Ohio, he became a lawyer and eventually an ambitious politician who wanted very much to become president. During the 1830s he had taken a strong stand against slavery in speeches and writings, declaring that the Constitution was an antislavery document. He joined the Free-Soil party in 1848 and as a Free-Soiler and Democrat was elected to the Senate, where he became a vociferous abolitionist voice, opposing both the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A two-term governor of Ohio, Chase was a serious contender for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination, but he was undone by his antislavery views, which would have spelled defeat in the general election. Instead, he was extremely influential in switching Ohio's convention votes to Lincoln, who rewarded Chase with a Cabinet post despite his lack of any financial experience.
Chase was a quick study. As secretary of the treasury, he was faced with the enormous task of financing the war. Initially he relied on loans from private financiers. When they proved insufficient, he was forced to issue war bonds, which were marketed by Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, whose brother knew Chase from Ohio politics. While Cooke earned millions in commissions (and was later accused of profiteering), his bond sales actually brought the government a great deal of money—more than a billion dollars. But as sources of private capital dried up, Chase was forced to print paper money. In 1862, when the government was spending about $2.5 million a dayon the war, “greenbacks,” backed by Treasury gold, were introduced as first federal paper money. (Individual states had printed paper money previously.) These greenbacks were accepted only over serious congressional reservations about the practice of printing paper money. Some legislators even argued that the Constitution said that Congress could “coin money” and took that literally to mean that only coins could be produced. But Chase's arguments won the day, and the Legal Tender Act was passed in 1862. (Ironically, as the Supreme Court's Chief Justice, he later declared the act unconstitutional.) The first bills carried his picture, hundreds of thousands of little campaign posters for a presumed run at the presidency.
At the same time the Legal Tender Act was passed, Congress also passed the first Internal Revenue Act. As military defeats piled up for the Union, the money crisis deepened, ruining the government's credit rating. The Internal Revenue Act provided for taxes on just about everything. Read this and weep: The first income tax rates were 3 percent! There were also sin taxes (on tobacco and liquor, among other items), luxury taxes (on jewelry and yachts), license taxes, inheritance taxes. You name it, and the Civil War taxed it. (The tax laws died after the war. It was only in 1913, with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, that the income tax became part of the Constitution.)
Although no country bumpkin—he had been a well-paid corporate lawyer before the war—Lincoln was not familiar with finance and allowed Chase enormous leeway. Under Chase's tenure, the Treasury expanded enormously, with the number of clerks growing from 383 to more than 2,000. This rapid growth created many of the first federal jobs, mostly clerical, for women. It also gave Chase enormous patronage power. A dispute with Lincoln over one of these appointments finally led to Chase's resignation in June 1864.
If anything, Chase's Confederate counterpart had a far more difficult, if not impossible, task. Christopher G. Memminger was born in Germany and brought to South Carolina after his father's death. He became a member of Davis's Cabinet on February 21, 1861, and was faced with the dismal job of keeping the Confederacy financially solvent. In its earliest days, the Confederacy lacked the organization and mechanics to establish a system of taxes or tariffs. So it relied on the sale of bonds, which would be redeemed after the war. As a wave of patriotism swept the Confederacy after Fort Sumter, the initial reaction to these bonds was strong. Foreign buyers were also sought, and Memminger opposed the cotton embargo because he realized that it was the only source of Confederate credit with foreign lenders.
But the Confederacy's poor credit rating forced Davis's administration to turn to taxes that were considered even more onerous and unconstitutional than they were in the Union. In 1863 the Confederate states imposed an income tax along with a 10 percent “tax in kind.” This essentially meant that farmers had to turn over a portion of their crops to agents of the Richmond government. Slaves, incidentally, were not taxed as property. There was a careful legal argument for this bit of reasoning, but it's worth noting that most of the lawmakers held slaves; most of the working poor, who had to turn over their crops and couldn't buy their way out of conscription, did not.
Civil War Voices
Victoria V. Clayton, the wife of Confederate General Henry D. Clayton of Alabama, wrote of the changes southern women were facing as the war closed in on them.
We were blockaded on every side, could get nothing from without, so had to make everything at home; and having been heretofore only an agricultural people, it became necessary for every home to be supplied with spinning wheels and the old-fashioned loom, in order to manufacture clothing for the members of the family. This was no small undertaking. I knew nothing about spinning and weaving cloth. I had to learn myself, and then to teach the Negroes. Fortunately for me, most of the Negroes knew how to spin thread, the first step towards clothmaking. Our work was hard and continuous. To this we did not object, but our hearts sorrowed for our loved ones in the field….
We were required to give one-tenth of all that was raised, to the government. There being no educated white person on the plantation except myself, it was necessary that I should attend to the gathering and measuring of every crop and the delivery of one-tenth to the government authorities. This one-tenth we gave cheerfully and often wished we had more to give.
My duties…were numerous and often laborious; the family on the increase continually, and every one added increased labor and responsibility. And this was the case with the typical Southern woman.
What Was “the Crater”?
Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, now encamped in Petersburg, had taken severe losses during the Wilderness and later campaigns. But dug in behind heavy fortifications, Lee's men were in a strong position. So Grant had returned to the tactic that had worked at Vicksburg, a siege of the city. The Union little appreciated his idea. A few months earlier Grant had been hailed as a savior. At the Wilderness he may have been thinking that a breakthrough to Richmond could bring him the presidency. Now the newspapers were calling him “Butcher Grant.” Nearly a year after Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, the war seemed no closer to being over.
Outside besieged Petersburg, the ill-starred Ambrose Burnside had a plan literally to blow a hole in the Confederate defenses and send the Union troops streaming into the breach. The idea was brought to Burnside by Colonel Henry Pleasants, a coal mine engineer who led a Pennsylvania regiment of coal miners. Occupying a position just a hundered and fifty yards from the Confederate lines, they planned to tunnel under the Confederate fortification and blow it up. Burnside quickly approved the plan, and the regiment began work on June 25.
The tunnel was four feet wide at the bottom, two feet wide at the top, and five feet high. On July 27 the miners carried four tons of black powder to the end of the tunnel and placed it in the side galleries. Then they carried dirt back into the main tunnel and tamped it into the last thirty-four feet so that the blast would not come back out the entrance. Burnside organized an assault force to rush past the gap the explosion would create in the rebel defenses.
At 3:15 A.M. on July 30, Colonel Pleasants lit the ninety-eight-foot fuse and sprinted back out of the tunnel. When there was no explosion after forty-five minutes, two volunteers entered the tunnel and relit the fuse. In minutes, a hundred-and-seventy-foot section of the Confederate entrenchments suddenly erupted in a huge blast, throwing dirt and timbers a hundred feet up in the air. An entire Confederate regiment was buried by the debris.
Under the initial plan, the attack through the exploded breach was to be carried out by black soldiers who had already proven themselves and had been trained for this task for two weeks. But General George Meade, still uncertain that black troops were reliable and afraid of bad publicity, worried their possible failure would lead to the criticism that he didn't value their lives. At the last minute, he ordered a different division to lead the attack. Straws were drawn, and the division under James H. Ledlie, a drunkard with political connections, got the assignment. Ledlie stayed behind drinking rum as his men, completely unprepared, charged into the gaping hole instead of around it.
The Battle of the Crater proved disastrous. The Union took four thousand casualties as the disorganized men were trapped inside the crater, easy targets for the Confederate riflemen. Afterward Grant said, “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.”
Burnside's checkered Civil War career was finally finished and he resigned a few months later, never to serve in the army again.
Civil War Voices
Luther Rice Mills, a Confederate soldier, described life under siege in Petersburg.
Something is about to happen. I know not what. Nearly everyone who will express an opinion says Gen'l Lee is about to evacuate Petersburg…. I go down the lines, I see the marks of shot and shell, I see where fell my comrades, the Crater, the grave of fifteen hundred Yankees, when I go to the rear I see little mounds of dirt, some with head-boards, some with none, some with shoes protruding, some with a small pile of bones on one side near the end showing where a hand was left uncovered, in fact, everything near shows desperate fighting. And here I would rather “fight it out.” If Petersburg and Richmond is evacuated—from what I have seen and heard in the army—our cause will be hopeless. It is useless to conceal the truth any longer. Many of our people at home have become so demoralized that they write to their husbands, sons and brothers that desertion now is not dishonorable. It would be impossible to keep the army from straggling to a ruinous extent if we evacuate. I have just received an order…to carry out on picket tonight a rifle and ten rounds of cartridges to shoot men when they desert. The men seem to think desertion is no crime and hence never shoot a deserter when he goes over—they always shoot but never hit.
Did Admiral David Farragut Really Say “Damn the Torpedoes. Full Speed Ahead!”?
Among those disgusted by the Union's failure to end the war was David G. Farragut, the veteran sailor who had fought in the War of 1812 and was responsible for the pivotal capture of New Orleans in 1862. Now, in the summer of 1864, he said, “The only comfort I have is that the Confederates are more unhappy, if possible, than we are.”
Commanding the naval squadron maintaining the coastal blockade, Farragut's main target was Mobile, on Alabama's Gulf coast. It was a city that he had wanted to take as soon as New Orleans fell, but he had been directed to other assignments. One of the two functioning Confederate ports, Mobile was still used by the blockade runners who kept the Confederacy's lifeline to the world open. Opposing Farragut as commander of Mobile's naval defenses was Franklin Buchanan, who had been the Confederate commander of the Virginia in the famous first fight between the ironclads at Hampton Roads (see page 215). Once again, it was a case of two comrades now turned against each other, for in their early navy days, Farragut and Buchanan had battled pirates together in the West Indies. As Farragut waited, he wrote, “I am tired of watching Buchanan and wish from the bottom of my heart that Buck would come out and try his hand upon us.”
Thirty miles long, Mobile Bay was protected by three Confederate forts, three gunboats, and the Tennessee, a ram modeled on the Virginia and considered the strongest ironclad ever built. The channel into the harbor, a narrow pass bristling with Confederate guns, had also been filled with obstructions and lined with mines, or “torpedoes”—beer kegs filled with powder that exploded on contact with a passing ship.
After making a personal reconnaissance of Mobile Bay, the crusty old Farragut decided to take on the seemingly impossible and put his squadron into action on August 5. With four ironclad “monitors” in the lead and fourteen wooden vessels lashed together in pairs, the fleet would run past the forts and the Tennessee. Aboard the Hartford, his flagship, Farragut was in the leading pair of wooden vessels. When the Confederate forts and ships began their incessant, heavy fire, he climbed into the Hartford's rigging, and a sailor was sent to lash him on so he wouldn't fall. As the smoke of battle around him grew so thick he couldn't see, Farragut untied himself, climbed higher, and relashed himself, remaining aloft for the rest of the action.
One of the Union monitors, the Tecumseh, sank after striking a torpedo, and a Union naval disaster seemed imminent as the fleet was almost stationary, with ships nearly colliding with one another in a sort of seagoing traffic jam. This was Farragut's immortal moment. According to one witness, the admiral ordered, “Damn the torpe-does! Go ahead!” (not “Full speed ahead”), and the Hartford surged forward, passing the fort and the Confederate fleet, which had been hit hard by the Union guns, leading the Union ships through.
With one Confederate gunboat captured and two others out of action, only the Tennessee was still battleworthy. But Buchanan was not going to give up, and he aimed this ram at Farragut's flagship and the rest of the Union fleet. The two ships collided without extensive damage, then the entire Union fleet turned its guns on the Tennessee. Finally, the concentrated fire became too much for the Confederate ironclad. Buchanan, already limping from his wounds at Hampton Roads, was hit, and his leg was broken. Soon after, the Tennessee called for a truce.
The Union losses were 145 dead, including 93 who went down with the Tecumseh. During the next two days, two of the forts guarding Mobile fell, and on August 23 Fort Morgan, the Confederate stronghold overlooking the bay, was taken. While the city itself remained in Confederate hands, the port of Mobile was sealed off. Word of the victory was welcome news for Lincoln. Any Union progress was significant at this point, for his prospects for a second term were seriously in doubt.
Civil War Voices
Abraham Lincoln (August 1864).
This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.
Who Ran Against Lincoln in 1864?
Lincoln's pessimism was well founded. After nearly four years of war that seemed no closer to being over, with battlefield casualties growing by enormous numbers, and with a war-weary nation angry and disillusioned, Lincoln's prospects seemed worse than bleak. A prominent New York Republican, Thurlow Weed, was convinced he could not be reelected, saying, “The people are wild for peace.” Although since Lincoln's time no sitting American president has ever lost an election in time of war, recent history was not on Lincoln's side. No incumbent president since Andrew Jackson had been reelected. Initially, there was some doubt that Lincoln would even receive his party's nomination, as a Cabinet revolt coalesced around Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase in March 1864. Ambitious and smart, Chase was also self-assured. One Senate colleague said, “Chase is a good man, but his theology is unsound. He thinks there is a fourth person in the Trinity.”
As treasury secretary, Chase had used patronage to build a strong power base among an inner circle of Republicans who considered themselves stronger than Lincoln. An effort early in the year to replace Lincoln with Chase on the Republican ticket failed when word of this palace coup was made public and Chase appeared disloyal; he resigned his treasury post a few months later.
Lincoln won the party's nomination, although his vice-president, Hannibal Hamlin, was dropped in favor of Tennessee Governor Andrew Johnson, a Democrat who brought more regional balance to the ticket. The Republicans also decided to run as the Union party in 1864. But some disenchanted Republicans, still eager to replace Lincoln, turned to John C. Fremont, the famed general and explorer who had been the first Republican presidential nominee, in 1856, and whom Lincoln had removed from command in a controversy over freeing slaves. Fremont eventually withdrew from the race, convinced by fellow Republicans that he could only throw the election to a Democrat.
Lincoln's real opposition came from another general he had fired, George B. McClellan, who became the Democrats' nominee at their Chicago convention in August. Although running on a peace platform that included “efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities,” McClellan ran with the notion of continuing the war. His essential argument was over Lincoln's conduct of the war and the issue of emancipation, not the war itself.
Lincoln's strategy was simple: Portray the Democrats as disloyal and pray for victories.
Did General Sherman Really Say “War Is Hell”?
Lincoln's presidency was probably saved on September 2, 1864, the day General William T. Sherman marched into Atlanta after four months of fighting throughout Georgia.
After capturing Atlanta, Sherman almost immediately ordered the civilian evacuation of the city. He said later, “I was resolved to make Atlanta a pure military garrison or depot, with no civil population to influence military measures.”
Civil War Voices
General William T. Sherman in a letter to the mayor and town commissioners of Atlanta (September 12, 1864).
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. And those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace…. You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home is to stop the war.
Sherman's most famous words were not spoken until after the war, if at all. In remarks attributed to him on June 19, 1879, in an address at Michigan Military Academy, the general said, “War is at best barbarism…. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot, nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
What he did in Atlanta in 1864 was living proof of what he later said. With Atlanta under Sherman's control and the Confederate army under General John Hood a diminishing threat, Sherman was ready to embark on the next leg of his journey through the heartland of the Confederacy, the notorious March to the Sea. But before he left Atlanta, he planned to make sure the city would no longer contribute to the Confederate war effort.
On November 15 one of his aides wrote:
A grand and awful spectacle is presented to the beholder in this beautiful city, now in flames. By order, the chief engineer has destroyed by powder and fire all the storehouses, depot buildings and machine-shops. The heaven is one expanse of lurid fire; the air is filled with flying, burning cinders; buildings covering two hundred acres are in ruins or in flames; every instant there is the sharp detonation or the smothered booming sound of exploding shells and powder concealed in the buildings, and then the sparks and flame shoot away up into the black and red roof, scattering cinders far and wide.
These are the machine-shops where have been forged and cast the Rebel cannon, shot and shell that have carried death to many a brave defender of our nation's honor. These warehouses have been the receptacle of munitions of war, stored to be used for our destruction. The city, which next to Richmond, has furnished more material for prosecuting the war than any other in the South, exists no more as a means for injury to be used by enemies of the Union.
Civil War Voices
David P. Conyngham, a correspondent for the New York Herald, with Sherman's army in Atlanta.
Sherman's orders were that Atlanta should be destroyed by the rearguard of the army, and two regiments were detailed for that purpose. Although the army…did not pass through until the 16th, the first fires burst out on the night of Friday, the 11th of November, in a block of wooden tenements on Decatur Street, where eight buildings were destroyed.
Soon after, fires burst out in other parts of the city. These certainly were the work of some of the soldiers, who expected to get some booty under the cover of the fires.
…On Sunday night a kind of long streak of light, like an aurora, marked the line of march and the burning stores, depots and bridges in the train of the army.
The Michigan engineers had been detailed to destroy the depots and public buildings in Atlanta. Everything in the way of destruction was now considered legalized. The workmen tore up the rails and piled them on the smoking fires. Winship's iron foundry and machine shops were early set on fire. This valuable property was calculated to be worth about half a million of dollars…. Next followed a freight warehouse, in which were stored several bales of cotton. The depot, turning-tables, freight sheds, and stores around were soon a fiery mass. The heart was burning out of Atlanta.
The few people that had remained in the city fled, scared by the conflagration and the dread of violence.
…The Atlanta Hotel, Washington Hall, and all the square around the railroad depot, were soon in one sheet of flame. Drug stores, dry goods stores, hotels, negro marts, theatres, and grog-shops were all now feeding the fiery element. Worn-out wagons and camp equipage were piled up in the depot and added to the fury of the flames.
A store warehouse was blown up by a mine. Quartermasters ran away, leaving large stores behind, The men plunged into the houses, broke windows and doors with their muskets, dragging out armfuls of clothes, tobacco, and whiskey, which was now more welcome than the rest. The men dressed themselves in new clothes and then flung the rest in the fire.
The streets were now in one fierce sheet of flame; houses were falling on all sides, and fiery flakes of cinders were whirled about. Occasionally, shells exploded and excited men rushed through the choking atmosphere, and hurried away from the city of ruins.
At a distance the city seemed overshadowed by a cloud of black smoke, through which, now and then, darted gushing flames of fire or projectiles hurled from the burning ruin. The sun looked, through the hazy cloud, like a blood-red ball of fire; and the air for miles around felt oppressive and intolerable…. the “Gate City” was a thing of the past.
Sherman's capture of Atlanta, combined with Farragut's success at Mobile Bay, was the deciding factor in the election of 1864. Lincoln pronounced the fall of Atlanta a gift from God and ordered a day of thanksgiving. One-hundred-gun salutes were fired from Boston to St. Louis and New Orleans. Before Atlanta, the fate of the Lincoln-Johnson ticket was uncertain. The war's toll had the country in an evil mood and the sentiment against Lincoln grew ugly. For instance the New York World, long an enemy of Lincoln's complained, “In a crisis of the most appalling magnitude requiring statesmanship of the highest order, the country is asked to consider the claims of two ignorant, boorish, third-rate backwoods lawyers for the highest stations in the Government. Such nominations, in such a conjuncture, are an insult to the common sense of the people. God save the Republic!”
Lincoln won convincingly. Despite Republican fears that McClellan was still popular with enlisted men, the soldiers' vote went overwhelmingly to Lincoln (116,887 for Lincoln to 33,748 for McClellan). With 2,206,938 votes, Lincoln won 55 percent of the total popular vote to McClellan's 45 percent; Lincoln's margin in the Electoral College was even more substantial, 212-21. McClellan took only his home state of New Jersey and the border states of Delaware and Kentucky. While not a sweeping landslide, the victory seemed to be a mandate for Lincoln's emancipation policies. Other Republicans simply thought that the voters had rejected McClellan.
Which Civil War Battle Was Fought in Vermont?
Desperate men sometimes take desperate measures. And the Confederacy was growing more desperate by the day. A long way from Atlanta, a group of some of the most desperate Confederates was hatching a plot that would exact some retribution for the loss of Atlanta, although nobody would ever make a movie about the burning of St. Albans, Vermont.
During the war years, St. Albans was a quiet village on Lake Champlain, just fifteen miles from the Canadian border. Far from the battlefields and devastation, life in small northern towns like St. Albans had changed little since the start of the war except for the publication of the casualty rolls. Vermont had been among the most responsive of the Union states in meeting Lincoln's calls for volunteers.
On October 10, 1864, three young men checked into a hotel. The spokesman signed the register as Bennett Young and explained that they had come from St. John's, Canada, for a sporting vacation. Every day or so two or three more men would arrive until there were about twenty. All were young and friendly. The Bible-quoting Young struck up a conversation about theology with a pretty girl he met. The friendliness ended, however, when the visitors threw off their overcoats to reveal Confederate uniforms. The whole event seemed to take on an almost comic air as Young melodramatically announced, “This city is now in the possession of the Confederate States of America.” With rebel yells, the raiders entered the town's banks and made off with some $200,000 in gold. While the banks were being robbed, eight or nine of the young rebels, their guns drawn, herded the townspeople onto the common and stole their horses. When the gold proved too heavy to carry, they negotiated for cash with a resident. Young later administered to some of the bank officers and tellers an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy and Jefferson Davis. Then he ordered the men to set the town on fire. They had brought along bottles of “Greek fire,” a phosphorus-based chemical hand grenade that was supposed to burst into flames when exposed to air. The townsmen, who had begun to fight back, started to fight the fires instead.
The raiders jumped on their stolen horses and crossed back into Canada, pursued by a Vermont militia that eventually caught up with them. But the sympathetic Canadian authorities refused to extradite the men, trying them instead in a Montreal court, which declared that they were soldiers under military orders. Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin helped the raiders by sending along the military orders that would legitimize Young's raid. (These orders were carried to Canada by “Little Johnny” Surratt, a reliable courier who lived with his mother in a Washington boardinghouse known to be a haven for Confederate sympathizers.) Tried only for violating Canada's neutrality, the raiders were acquitted and freed. The Canadian government did return $88,000 of the funds found on the raiders.
This raid was not the Confederacy's only attempt to take the war to the Union. In fact, it was part of a much larger scheme hatched primarily by Judah Benjamin, who had masterminded a well-funded plan to use Confederate agents and sympathizers in Canada to stir up trouble in the Union. These saboteurs and raiders, Benjamin hoped, could raid the Union prisons, free the Confederate prisoners, and seize federal arsenals to arm both the prisoners as well as the Copperheads, who were growing more vocal in their opposition to Lincoln. At worst, the Copperheads might embarrass Lincoln; at best, they could contribute to his defeat at the polls. This strategy might even force the Union to divert troops to the Canadian border, weakening the assaults on Virginia and Georgia.
The St. Albans raid turned into a comic disaster, and all the well-laid plans to arm the Copperheads proved a far-flung fantasy. But another target was New York City. In a raid initially planned to take place on election day, the attack on the Union's largest city did not actually come off until late November, also in retaliation for the sacking of Atlanta and the destruction of the Shenandoah Valley. Eight Confederate agents planned to burn some of the city's hotels with a hundred and forty firebombs made from “Greek fire,” the same substance present at St. Albans. The raiders checked into various hotels in New York. They set fire to piles of clothing and rubbish but, unfamiliar with the chemical mixture, did not produce the great blazes they wanted. Although a spectacular fire was set at Barnum's Museum, where a few animals were frightened and a seven-foot woman in the sideshow went berserk, there was little damage. By midnight, all the fires had been put out.
All of the conspirators escaped from New York by train through Albany and back into Canada. But one of them, Robert Cobb Kennedy, who had been expelled from West Point before the war, was later caught after another harebrained scheme to free some captured Confederate generals. He was tried by a military commission headed by General John A. Dix; its judgment read, “The attempt to set fire to the city of New York is one of the greatest atrocities of the age. There is nothing in the annals of barbarism which evinces greater vindictiveness. It was not a mere attempt to destroy the city, but to set fire to crowded hotels and places of public resort, in order to secure the greatest possible destruction of human life.” Kennedy was executed as a spy by hanging on March 25, in Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor.
Disgusted by the absurdity of the results of his attempts to undermine the Union, Benjamin pulled the plug on the Canadian adventure.
Civil War Voices
The object of the firebombers was New York's wealthier locales. The Union's largest city, however, was not a place for only the wealthy. A report of the Council on Hygiene and Public Health revealed what life was like for most of the urban poor in America's richest city back in the “good old days.”
In some of the apartments of the tenant-houses, the rags that cover the floor in lieu of carpet reek with filth. They have become a receptacle for street mud, food of all kinds, saliva, urine, and faeces…. The bed clothing is often little better….
That the evils and abuses of the system continue undiminished is seen on every hand. Not only does filth, overcrowding, lack of privacy and domesticity, lack of ventilation and lighting, and absence of supervision and of sanitary regulation, still characterize the greater number of them; but they are built to a greater height in stories, there are more rear tenant-houses erected back to back with other buildings, correspondingly situated on parallel streets; the courts and alleys are more greedily encroached upon and narrowed into unventilated, unlighted, damp, and well-like holes between the many-storied front and rear tenements; and more fever-breeding…culs-de-sac are created as the demand for the humble homes of the laboring poor increases.
Major George W. Nichols with General Sherman's headquarters staff, Cobb's Plantation, Georgia (November 23, 1864).
General Sherman camped on one of the plantations of Howell Cobb. It was a coincidence that a Macon paper, containing Cobb's address to the Georgians as General Commanding, was received the same day. This plantation was the property of Cobb's wife, who was a Lamar. I do not know that Cobb ever claimed any great reputation as a man of piety or singular virtues, but I could not help contrasting the call upon his fellow-citizens to “rise and defend your liberties, homes, etc., from the step of the invader, to burn and destroy every thing in his front, and assail him on all sides,” and all that, with his own conduct here, and the wretched condition of his Negroes and their quarters.
We found his granaries well filled with corn and wheat, part of which was distributed and eaten by our animals and men. A large supply of sirrup made from sorghum…was stored in an old out-house. This was also disposed of by the soldiers and the poor decrepit Negroes which this humane, liberty-loving general left to die in this place a few days ago. Becoming alarmed, Cobb sent for, and removed, all the able-bodied mules, horses, cows and slaves. He left here some fifty old men—cripples—and women and children, with nothing scarcely covering their nakedness, with little or no food, and without means of procuring it. We found them cowering over the fireplaces of their miserable huts, where the wind whirled through the crevices between the logs, frightened at the approach of the Yankees, who, they had been told, would kill them. A more forlorn, neglected set of human beings I have never seen.
A few months later, as the Confederate Congress and the Davis administration debated freeing the slaves to serve in its armies, Howell Cobb, the former governor of Georgia, wrote, “Use all the Negroes you can get, for the purpose for which you need—but don't arm them. The day you make soldiers out of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
What Did General Sherman Give President Lincoln for Christmas in 1864?
Confederates like Howell Cobb were not the only ones who thought that blacks should not be carrying weapons. Many of those in agreement were Union officers, perhaps none more outspokenly so than William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891). Having helped to secure Lincoln's reelection with the capture of Atlanta, Sherman had left Atlanta in cinders and was now in full swing on his infamous March to the Sea. His destination was Savannah, on the Atlantic coast. It was a rapid, devastating sweep through Georgia. Sherman was unforgiving in his goal of utterly destroying any Confederate capability to continue resistance, and he ordered the destruction of all railroads.
Largely because of this march, Sherman would emerge from the Civil War with the most clearly divided reputation of all the soldiers and statesmen of the era. Lionized in the Union, he was a Yankee Lucifer in the Confederate states, particularly in Georgia and the Carolinas, which would feel the uncompromising heat of his furious approach to war. Among the most perplexing men in the Civil War, Sherman was a complicated character of many moods. Though he professed to be apolitical, he owed his career in part to the powerful politicians in his family.
Having adopted Louisiana as his home before the war, he was a reluctant warrior, weeping after South Carolina's secession and prophetically telling a friend, “This country will be drenched in blood.” But he would then exact the harshest retribution on the Confederate South. Once judged “insane” by newspapers, fellow officers, and the men he commanded, he later became a Union hero, second only to his comrade Grant. Never an opponent of slavery, he would issue a postwar order that gave the emancipated slaves one of the most generous new beginnings.
Born in Ohio, Sherman was named Tecumseh at birth after the powerful Shawnee Indian leader who had nearly defeated the United States Army. When neighbors said they thought the name was strange, his father prophetically said, “Tecumseh was a great warrior.” After the elder Sherman, debt-ridden, died when the boy was nine, “Cump,” as he was called, was taken in by Thomas Ewing, a neighbor and close friend of his father's. The Ewings adopted the boy as their own but decided that a proper name was needed, so a priest baptized him William. Among his new family were three brothers, Thomas, Jr., Charles, and Hugh, who would all join the Union army, and a “sister,” Ellen, whom Sherman later married. His “father”—later father-in-law—would become a powerful senator from Ohio, influential in Republican circles. Sherman's blood brother, John, also went into politics, represented Ohio in the House of Representatives, and was made Ohio's senator when Salmon Chase was elevated to the treasury post by Lincoln. But unlike most other politically well-connected generals, Sherman had credentials that merited his appointment.
Sixth in his 1840 West Point class, Sherman had left the army along with many other officers when it seemed that civilian life offered greater chances for success. After a string of failures in banking, real estate, and law, Sherman was in Louisiana just before the war began, running a military academy that would later become the foundation for Louisiana State University. Among his students was the son of P.T. Beauregard, the Confederate general who would occupy Sherman's tent after the first day at Shiloh. Though he had great friendships with many who joined the Confederacy and had no moral qualms about slavery, Sherman felt, as many Union professional soldiers did, that secession was treason. He returned to Missouri when Louisiana seceded.
After Fort Sumter, Sherman was given command of some raw volunteers who were among the men routed at the First Battle of Manassas. Then he went west to Kentucky, where a combination of deep depression and strange decisions led to the widespread belief that he had gone insane. Influential family members, including his wife, Ellen, interceded with Lincoln, and Sherman was eventually transferred to join Grant in a fateful partnership. At Shiloh, Sherman took decisive command and helped stave off a Union rout, even though his own lack of caution nearly allowed the Confederate army of Albert Johnston and Beauregard to destroy a Union army. The success at Shiloh seemed to give Sherman a new vigor and sense of purpose, and he became Grant's most trusted ally and colleague. When Grant was later promoted to lead the Union armies, he gave Sherman his former command in the West. With that command Sherman made his decisive assault on Atlanta.
Once Atlanta was emptied and Lincoln's future as president assured, Sherman embarked on the campaign that made him notorious. Cutting his army off from its supply base, Sherman had ordered his men to forage for their food during the three-hundred-mile march. After the recent harvest, food was plentiful for the Union soldiers, who appropriated farm carriages and wagons and loaded them with bacon, meal, turkeys, chickens, and anything else they could lay their hands on. Sherman himself said,
No doubt many acts of pillage, robbery and violence were committed by these parties of foragers usually called “bummers,” for I have since heard of jewelry taken from women, and the plunder of articles that never reached the commissary; but…I never heard of any cases of murder or rape. And no army could have carried along sufficient food and forage for a march of three hundred miles, so that foraging in some shape was necessary.
Meeting only light resistance from the disintegrating Confederate cavalry, Sherman's march was soon being joined by newly liberated slaves, who latched onto the Union army. As General Henry Slocum wrote:
It was natural that these poor creatures, seeking a place of safety, should flee to the army and endeavor to keep in sight of it. Every day as we marched on we could see, on each side of our line of march, crowds of these people coming to us through the roads and across the fields, bringing with them all their earthly goods, and many goods which were not theirs. Horses, mules, cows, dogs, old family carriages, carts, and whatever they thought might be of use to them were seized upon and brought to us…. At times they were almost equal in number to the army they were following.
These freed fugitives would generate considerable controversy. Moving rapidly and living off the land, Sherman did not want to be burdened by these liberated blacks, whose legal status was uncertain. Nor did he want to enlist any of them in the war effort. Like many other Union commanders, Sherman was racist and had no use for black troops in his command. His defiance of presidential and War Department orders on the subject bordered on insubordination, but his success in the field allowed him to set his own policies. While he thought that freed blacks would perform acceptably as laborers to dig trenches, build forts, haul water, and chop wood, he did not think they could fill the role of soldier. He even wrote to his brother, the senator, “I won't trust niggers to fight.”
In one controversial incident, Sherman was accused of allowing the blacks following his army to be killed or recaptured by the Confederates at Ebenezer Creek, near Savannah, Georgia, on December 3. One of Sherman's officers, General Jefferson Columbus Davis, was a proslavery Union officer who had been at Fort Sumter. In Sherman's rear guard, Davis prevented nearly five hundred freed slaves from crossing a pontoon bridge over a river as they straggled behind the Union troops. When the troops had safely crossed, Davis had the bridge pulled away, leaving these former slaves trapped and defenseless. As the Union soldiers watched and tried to help some of the blacks with makeshift rafts, many of them were killed or recaptured by Joseph Wheeler's Confederate cavalry riders. Sherman was unaware of the incident until a Union newspaper broke the story and made it an issue. (Jefferson C. Davis had already earned considerable infamy, apart from his name. In September 1862 Davis and Major General William Nelson got involved in a dispute after Nelson relieved Davis of duty. Davis cornered Nelson in a Louisville hotel and demanded an apology. When Nelson refused and slapped Davis in the face, Davis followed him into the street and shot him in the chest. Davis was never brought to trial for the murder.)
Although his attitude toward blacks would continue to cause Sherman trouble, particularly with War Secretary Stanton, the Ebenezer Creek incident was overlooked in light of his stunning successes. By early December, Sherman had reached the outskirts of Savannah. Defended by a small garrison, which slipped away without a fight, Savannah surrendered on December 22.
With the city in his hands, Sherman wired a message to Lincoln on December 22, 1864: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition; also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.”
Sherman's message actually reached Lincoln on Christmas Eve and was widely published in newspapers throughout the North.
Converted into a base of Union operations, Savannah was spared the severe sentence carried out on Atlanta a few weeks earlier. A mercy ship from Boston carrying food and supplies was even sent to the occupied city, a far cry from the devastation visited upon Atlanta.
Newsman Charles Coffin described the radical impact of Sherman's arrival on this bastion of old southern life.
Society in the South, and especially in Savannah has undergone a great change. The extremes of social life were very wide apart before the war. They were no nearer the night before Sherman marched into the city. But the morning after, there was a convulsion, an upheaval, a shaking up and a settling down of all the discordant elements. The tread of that army of the West, as it moved in solid column through the streets, was like a moral earthquake, overturning aristocratic pride, privilege and power.
Old houses, with foundations laid deep and strong in the centuries, fortified by wealth, name, and influence, went down beneath the shock. The general disruption of the former relations of master and slave, and forced submission to the Union arms, produced a common level….
On the night before Sherman entered the place, there were citizens who could enumerate their wealth by millions; at sunrise the next morning they were worth scarcely a dime. Their property had been in cotton, Negroes, houses, land, Confederate bonds and currency, railroad and bank stocks. Government had seized their cotton; the Negroes had possession of their lands; their slaves had become freemen; their houses were occupied by troops; Confederate bonds were waste paper; their railroads were destroyed, their banks insolvent. They had not only lost wealth, but they had lost their cause.
Toward the end of Sherman's occupation of Savannah, a fire was accidentally set in a wooden warehouse district, and the wind soon took it to the former Confederate arsenal, which exploded. Although the Union troops, the freed slaves, and the citizens of Savannah worked together, the fire left a “wilderness of chimneys.”
Sherman prepared to move north and rendezvous with Grant, still stalled outside Petersburg. But first he had to move through the Carolinas, starting with South Carolina, the “birthplace” of the war and to many Union men “the cause of all our troubles.”
Civil War Voices
From the wartime diary of Eliza Andrews, a girl in Georgia (December 24, 1864).
About three miles from Sparta we struck the “burnt country,” as it is well named by the natives, and then I could better understand the wrath and desperation of these poor people. I almost felt as if I should like to hang a Yankee myself. There was hardly a fence left standing all the way from Sparta to Gordon. The fields were trampled down and the road was lined with carcasses of horses, hogs, and cattle that the invaders, unable either to consume or carry away with them, had wantonly shot down, to starve out the people and prevent them from making their crops. The stench in some places was unbearable; every few hundred yards we had to hold our noses or stop them with the cologne Mrs. Elzey had given us, and it proved to be a great boon. The dwellings that were standing all showed signs of pillage, and on every plantation we saw the charred remains of the ginhouse and packing screw, while here and there lone chimney stacks, “Sherman's sentinels,” told of homes laid in ashes. The infamous wretches! I couldn't wonder now that these poor people should want to put a rope round the neck of every red-handed “devil of em” they could lay their hands on. Hayricks and fodder stacks were demolished, corncribs were empty, and every bale of cotton that could be found was burnt by the savages. I saw no grain of any sort except little patches they had spilled when feeding their horses and which there was not even a chicken left in the country to eat. A bag of oats might have lain anywhere along the road without danger from the beasts of the field, though I cannot say it would have been safe from the assaults of hungry men.
Crowds of soldiers were tramping over the road in both directions; it was like traveling through the streets of a populous town all day. They were mostly on foot, and I saw numbers seated on the roadside greedily eating raw turnips, meat skins, parched corn—anything they could find, even picking up the loose grains that Sherman's horses had left.
MILESTONES IN THE CIVIL WAR: JULY-DECEMBER 1864
July 5 New York editor Horace Greeley receives a letter stating that the Confederate delegates in Canada wish to discuss peace. Lincoln sends an emissary to discuss their proposal. The attempt at a negotiated peace is aborted when the Confederates refuse to restore the Union and to accept the abolition of slavery as a condition of peace.
July 14 Confederate General Jubal Early is able to reach the outskirts of the District of Columbia until he is slowed by Union General Lew Wallace. Reinforcements arrive, and Early withdraws.
July 17 President Davis replaces Joseph Johnston, who has been attempting to blunt Sherman's march on Atlanta, with John B. Hood.
July 20-28 Hood switches to the offensive, attacks Sherman's army outside Atlanta, and suffers heavy losses that he cannot afford. Sherman spends the rest of August slowly circling Atlanta and cutting all rails and roads into the city.
July 30 General Burnside directs a mine attack on Petersburg with disastrous results. His military days are over.
August 5 Admiral David Farragut captures Mobile, Alabama, closing one of the last ports open to Confederate blockade runners. His famous words are “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!”
August 29 In Chicago the Democrats nominate General George McClellan to face Lincoln. The president is running against two generals he has fired during the war.
September 2 Atlanta falls to Sherman. Much of the city is burned, just as in Gone With the Wind. Sherman wires Lincoln, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” On September 7 Sherman orders the evacuation of the civilian population of the city.
September 17 Republican candidate Frémont withdraws from the presidential race. He states that he doesn't want to split the Republicans and allow McClellan to win.
September 19-October 19 Union General Sheridan defeats Confederate General Jubal Early, although Sheridan suffers heavy losses. Early is finally driven from the Shenandoah Valley, one of the last remaining supply sources for the Confederate army.
October 11 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Taney, author of the notorious Dred Scott decision, dies at the age of eightynine.
October 13 By a slim margin Maryland adopts a new state constitution, which abolishes slavery.
October 20 Lincoln proclaims that the last Thursday in November will be celebrated as Thanksgiving Day.
October 31 Nevada, which will be known as the Battle State for gaining statehood during the war, is admitted as the thirty-sixth state.
November 8 Election day. Lincoln wins reelection with a wide margin in the electoral college but by fewer than a half-million votes. The Republicans also make gains in the House and retain control of the Senate.
November 16 Sherman begins his infamous March to the Sea, from Atlanta to Savannah on Georgia's Atlantic coast.
November 29 Sand Creek Massacre. In Colorado Territory, citizens around Denver attack a peaceful Indian camp and kill some five hundred Arapahoe and Cheyenne men, women, and children.
November 30 Battle of Franklin, Tennessee. In an ill-planned assault, Hood's Army of Tennessee attacks a Union army. He loses nearly 6,300 dead and wounded from his force of 27,000. Among the Confederate dead are six generals: John B. Carter, States Rights Gist, H. B. Granbury, John Adams, O.F. Strahl, and Patrick Cleburne. Union General Schofield withdraws from Franklin and retreats to Nashville to join the Union forces under General George H. Thomas.
December 6 Grant asks, then pleads, then angrily commands George Thomas to attack the Confederates under Hood outside Nashville before they can slip past him and strike into Ohio.
Lincoln nominates his former rival Salmon P. Chase to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in a gesture of reconciliation.
December 15-17 Battle of Nashville. With 55,000 Union troops, George Thomas finally strikes Hood's much smaller army outside the city. Forty-five hundred of Hood's men are captured and another 1,500 are killed or wounded, leaving a force of 14,000 men.
December 22 Sherman enters Savannah, Georgia, unopposed.
* The phrase “In God We Trust” is added to American coins for the first time.
Who Burned Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina?
Shortly before moving on to South Carolina, Sherman said, “The truth is the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate, but feel she deserves all that seems in store for her.”
Leaving Savannah on February 5, 1865, Sherman's 60,000 men took a direct line toward Columbia, South Carolina. They faced only token resistance from any organized Confederate troops.
Civil War Voices
Confederate cavalry officer J.P. Austin, among those trying to block Sherman:
He [Sherman] swept on with his army of sixty thousand men, like a full developed cyclone, leaving behind him a track of desolation and ashes fifty miles wide. In front of them was terror and dismay. Bummers and foragers swarmed on his flanks, who plundered and robbed everyone who was so unfortunate as to be within their reach….
Poor, bleeding, suffering South Carolina! Up to that time she had felt but slightly—away from the coast—the devastating effects of the war; but her time had come. The protestations of her old men and the pleadings of her noble women had no effect in staying the ravages of sword, flame, and pillage.
Columbia's fate could readily be foretold from the destruction along Sherman's line of march after he left Savannah. Beautiful homes, with their tropical gardens, which had been the pride of their owners for generations, were left in ruins…. Everything that could not be carried off was destroyed. Thousands who had but recently lived in affluence were compelled to subsist on the scrapings from the abandoned camps of soldiers…. Livestock of every description that they could not take was shot down. All farm implements, with wagons and vehicles of every description, were given to the flames.
By the night of February 15, the first of the Union soldiers had reached the Congaree River, across from Columbia. The next day they sighted their cannon on the statehouse across the river and fired shells into the heart of the city. J.P. Austin watched from a mile away: “It was from this point we saw the flames burst forth from public buildings, stores, and beautiful homesteads…. Columbia was in flames…. By 12 o'clock, the city was one great sea of fire.”
Confederate troops evacuated Charleston on the same day that Columbia was occupied by Sherman. As they withdrew, General Hardee, the Confederate commander, set fire to all the Charleston warehouses where cotton was stored. The fire spread and detonated a store of gunpowder; at least two hundred people died. The next day the Stars and Stripes again flew over Fort Sumter.
Years later, Sherman responded to the controversy over the origins of the fires, and the charges that he had ordered them set. “Though I never ordered it and never wished it, I have never shed many tears over the event, because I believed it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the war.”
Civil War Voices
From Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865). (See Appendix VIII for the complete text.)
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
A week after Lincoln's second inauguration, Sherman's army occupied Fayetteville, North Carolina, reducing an arsenal to rubble. Organized resistance to Sherman was all but finished, and more Union troops were moving into North Carolina.
How Did Richmond Fall?
Lee knew his army was trapped. As Richard Wheeler writes in Voices of the Civil War: “By March, 1865, Grant had been besieging Petersburg for nine months. His lines, which began southeast of Richmond, ran through Petersburg's eastern environs and then curved around the city. Grant's current strength was about 125,000 men. Lee probably had less than half that number. Moreover, faith in the cause had weakened and desertions were rising.”
With meager supplies of food, clothing, and shelter, Lee's soldiers had suffered a miserable nine months in trenches around Petersburg and Richmond, protecting the capital at the government's insistence. But by March, after consulting with Jefferson Davis, Lee determined to escape from Petersburg and move southeast, linking up with the remnants of General Joe Johnston's army, then trying to contain Sherman. As a diversion, he prepared an attack on a Union earthworks called Fort Stedman, which contained mortars and heavy cannon that were being used against Petersburg. The opposing lines there stood only a hundred and fifty yards apart.
Twelve thousand men from Lee's already thin lines were placed under the command of General John B. Gordon, who waited in the predawn of March 25, 1865. As fifty axmen cut down the obstructions in front of the fort, Gordon observed a curious incident. Frequently during the war, the pickets on either side had struck up conversations and a strange camaraderie during the long nights of guard duty. It was no different during the long siege of Petersburg. Hearing Confederates moving about, a Union picket asked what they were doing. One of Gordon's men said, “Never mind, Yank. We are just gathering a little corn.”
“All right, Johnny,” said the Union soldier. “I'll not shoot at you while you are drawing rations.”
Then Gordon ordered the soldier to fire the shot signaling the assault. He hesitated, and Gordon gave the order again. The Confederate soldier, to satisfy his conscience, yelled, “Hello, Yank! Wake up. We are coming.” With that he fired the signal and the attack was on.
Skirmishers went out and overcame the sleeping Union pickets, and Fort Stedman was captured quickly in the first rush. Some of the rebels turned the nine captured cannon around and fired on the Union lines. More than a thousand prisoners, including a surprised Union general, were initially taken.
But the expected Confederate reinforcements were delayed when their train broke down. And while the Union batteries in other nearby forts delivered heavy fire, Union infantry reinforcements quickly arrived and added to the counterattack. By 8:00 A.M. Lee, watching from the Confederate lines, ordered Gordon to withdraw from Fort Stedman. Many of the soldiers chose to surrender rather than face Union fire while racing back to their own lines. Once broken, the attack was a disaster for Lee; his army lost more than 4,000 men as prisoners and casualties while the Union forces suffered about 1,600 casualties.
Not far away, Lincoln was on a steamboat at City Point, meetingwith Grant and his other commanders to discuss the certain fall of Richmond. In another clash at Five Forks, just southwest of Petersburg, on March 29, the Confederates under Gettysburg's George Pickett again took heavy casualties. Lee poignantly remarked to an aide, “This is a sad business, colonel. It has happened as I told them in Richmond it would happen. The line has been stretched until it is broken.”
Civil War Voices
From a Richmond newspaper.
The numbers of Virginians reported absent from their regiments without leave, will, this morning, exceed fifty thousand. What can this mean?…News reaches us to-night that General Pickett has lost control of his troops at Five Forks, and that the Yankees are gradually moving towards Richmond. It seems that our troops have become discouraged and are easily confused. The Yankee assault on Pickett's Division has completely demoralized it, if reports are true.
Richmond Examinereditor Edward Pollard, described the evacuation of Richmond:
It was eleven o'clock in the morning when General Lee wrote a hasty telegram to the War Department, advising that the authorities should have everything in readiness to evacuate the capital at eight o'clock the coming night, unless before that time despatches should be received from him to a contrary effect.
A small slip of paper, sent up from the War Department to President Davis, as he was seated in his pew in St. Paul's Church, contained the news of the most momentous event of the war….
The report of a great misfortune soon traverses a city without the aid of printed bulletins. But that of the evacuation of Richmond fell upon many incredulous ears…. There were but few people in the streets; no vehicles disturbed the quiet of the Sabbath; the sound of the churchgoing bells rose into the cloudless sky and floated on the blue tide of the beautiful day. How was it possible to imagine that in the next twenty-four hours…this peaceful city, a secure possession for four years, was at last to succumb…?
As the day wore on, clatter and bustle in the streets denoted the progress of the evacuation and convinced those who had been incredulous of its reality. The disorder increased each hour. The streets were thronged with fugitives making their way to the railroad depots; pale women and little shoeless children struggled in the crowd; oaths and blasphemous shouts smote the air….
When it was finally announced by the Army that those who had hoped for a despatch from General Lee contrary to what he had telegraphed in the morning had ceased to indulge in such an expectation and that the evacuation of Richmond was a foregone conclusion, it was proposed to maintain order in the city by two regiments of militia; to destroy every drop of liquor in the warehouses and stores; and to establish a patrol through the night. But the militia ran through the fingers of their officers…and in a short while the whole city was plunged into mad confusion and indescribable horrors.
It was an extraordinary night; disorder, pillage, shouts, mad revelry…. In the now dimly lighted city could be seen black masses of people crowded around some object of excitement…swaying to and fro in whatever momentary passion possessed them. The gutters ran with a liquor freshet, and the fumes filled the air. Some of the straggling soldiers…easily managed to get hold of quantities of the liquor. Confusion became worse confounded; the sidewalks were encumbered with broken glass; stores were entered at pleasure and stripped from top to bottom; yells of drunken men, shouts of roving pillagers, wild cries of distress filled the air and made night hideous.
But a new horror was to appear upon the scene and take possession of the community. To the rear-guard of the Confederate force…on the north side of James River…had been left the duty of blowing up the iron-clad vessels in the James and destroying the bridges across the river…. The work of destruction might well have ended here. But the four principal tobacco warehouses of the city were fired; the flames seized on the neighboring buildings and soon involved a wide and widening area; the conflagration passed rapidly beyond control. And in this mad fire, this wild, unnecessary destruction of their property, the citizens of Richmond had a fitting souvenir of the imprudence and recklessness of the departing Administration.
Morning broke on a scene never to be forgotten…. The smoke and glare of fire mingled with the golden beams of the rising sun…. The fire was reaching to whole blocks of buildings…. Its roar sounded in the ears; it leaped from street to street. Pillagers were busy at their vocation, and in the hot breath of the fire were figures as of demons contending for prey.
First into Richmond on Monday, April 3, were Massachusetts troops under General Godfrey Weitzel. Soon an unbroken line of blue uniforms was pouring into the capital as the sullen residents watched. The only cheers came from the blacks of Richmond. As the fires continued, the Union regiments organized the blacks into fire corps, but it was useless and the fires burned out by evening.
At about the same time, Grant rode into Petersburg and was soon joined by Lincoln and his eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, now a member of Grant's staff, his other son, Tad, and Admiral Porter, on whose boat Lincoln had been staying. As one of Grant's aides reported, Lincoln “dismounted in the street and came in through the front gate with long and rapid strides, his face beaming with delight. He seized General Grant's hand as the general stepped forward to greet him, and stood shaking it for some time and pouring out his thanks and congratulations…. I doubt whether Mr. Lincoln ever experienced a happier moment in his life.”
The next day, Lincoln was taken to the fallen Confederate capital by boat.
Civil War Voices
Correspondent Charles Coffin on Lincoln's arrival in Richmond:
No carriage was to be had, so the President, leading his son, walked to General Weitzel's headquarters—Jeff Davis's mansion…. The walk was long and the President halted a moment to rest.
“May de good Lord bless you, President Linkum!” said an old Negro, removing his hat and bowing, with tears of joy rolling down his cheeks.
The President removed his own hat and bowed in silence. It was a bow which upset the forms, laws, customs, and ceremonies of centuries of slavery.
What Happened at Appomattox Courthouse?
While Lincoln sat in Jefferson Davis's office and enjoyed his moment of glory, Grant had unfinished business with Lee. After evacuating the trenches at Petersburg, Lee's starving, ragged Army of Northern Virginia headed west, looking for a way around Grant's army. With the route south to North Carolina blocked, Lee had no choice but to continue marching his exhausted soldiers west.
Civil War Voices
Confederate General Gordon, commanding Lee's rear guard:
Fighting all day, marching all night, with exhaustion and hunger claiming their victims at every mile of the march with charges of infantry in the rear and of cavalry on the flanks, it seemed the war god had turned loose all his furies to revel in havoc. On and on, hour after hour, from hilltop to hilltop, the lines were alternately forming, fighting and retreating, making one almost continuous shifting battle. Here, in one direction, a battery of artillery became involved; there, in another, a blocked ammunition train required rescue. And thus came short but sharp little battles which made up sideshows of the main performance, while the different divisions of Lee's lionhearted army were being broken and scattered or captured.
At Sayler's Creek, Anderson's corps was broken and destroyed; and General Ewell, with almost his entire command, was captured as was General Kershaw, General Custis Lee—son of the general-in-chief—and other prominent officers….
The roads and fields swarmed with the eager pursuers, and Lee now and then was forced to halt his whole army, reduced to less than 10,000 fighters in order to meet these simultaneous attacks. Various divisions along the line of march turned upon the Federals, and in each case checked them long enough for some other Confederate commands to move on….
General Lee was riding everywhere and watching everything, encouraging his brave men by his calm and cheerful bearing. He was often exposed to great danger from shells and bullets….
On that doleful retreat…it was impossible for us to bury our dead or carry with us the disabled wounded. There was no longer any room in the crowded ambulances which had escaped capture…. We could do nothing for the unfortunate sufferers who were too severely wounded to march, except leave them on the roadside with canteens of water.
Lee had ordered food to be sent by rail from Lynchburg, Virginia, to the town of Farmville, twenty-five miles away on the south side of the Appomattox River. On April 6 pursuing Union troops had taken advantage of a gap in the Confederate column and, in the Battle of Sayler's Creek, cut off and captured a third of Lee's men. General Philip H. Sheridan reported the victory to Grant, adding, “If the thing is pressed I think Lee will surrender.” Hearing of the message, Lincoln wired Grant, “Let the thing be pressed.”
On April 7 the remaining portion of Lee's army reached Farmville and the food in the waiting boxcars. Word soon came that Union troops were rapidly approaching. To slow their advance Lee had ordered a bridge destroyed, but the Union soldiers arrived in time to put out the flames. Lee's bedraggled, starving army held the federal soldiers off and then began marching toward Appomattox Courthouse. At ten o'clock that night, Lee received a message from Grant, requesting his surrender. Without comment, Lee passed the note to James Longstreet, who read it and, looking up, said, “Not yet.”
On the evening of April 8 the final Confederate council of war was held. A last-ditch attempt to break through the Union lines was attempted, but the odds were simply too great. When told that his army could not go forward, Lee said, “There is nothing left me but to go and see General Grant, and I had rather die a thousand deaths.” Finally, a flag of truce was carried between the two generals.
Civil War Voices
Confederate officer William Miller Owen:
General Lee rode through our lines towards Appomattox Court House…. By a singular coincidence, the meeting of the generals took place in the house of [Wilmer] McLean, the same gentleman who in 1861 at the Battle of Bull Run, had tendered his house to General Beauregard for headquarters. He removed from Manassas after the battle, with the intentions of seeking some quiet nook where the alarms of war could never find him; but it was his fortune to be in at the beginning and in at its death.
Lee, accompanied by a single aide, reached the McLean house first. Grant, who had served with Lee in Mexico, soon arrived with his entourage.
Civil War Voices
Grant's recollection of the meeting with Lee at Appomattox:
When I left camp that morning I had not expected so soon the result that was then taking place and consequently was in rough garb. I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horseback in the fields, and wore a soldier's blouse for a coat, with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army who I was.
When I went into the house, I found General Lee. We greeted each other, and after shaking hands took our seats. I had my staff with me, a good portion of whom were in the room during the whole of the interview.
What General Lee's feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.
General Lee was dressed in a full uniform which was entirely new, and was wearing a sword of considerable value…. In my rough traveling suit, the uniform of a private with the straps of a lieutenant general, I must have contrasted very strangely with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high and of faultless form….
We soon fell into a conversation about old army times. He remarked that he remembered me very well in the old army;…Our conversation grew so pleasant that I almost forgot the object of our meeting, and said that he had asked for this interview for the purpose of getting from me the terms I proposed to give his army….
…When news of the surrender first reached our lines, our men commenced firing a salute of a hundred guns in honor of the victory. I at once sent word, however, to have it stopped. The Confederates were now our prisoners, and we did not want to exult over their downfall.
Grant told Lee that his men could keep both their horses and mules and their personal side arms. Lee remarked that this would have a “happy effect.” Before taking leave, he also asked Grant for rations for his men. Grant authorized all the provisions he wanted.
Documents of the Civil War
Robert E. Lee's final order to the men of the Army of Northern Virginia.
General Order No. 9 April 10, 1865
After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to this result from no distrust of them; but, feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I have determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen.
By the terms of the agreement, officers and men can return to their homes and remain there until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed; and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you his blessing and protection.
With an unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your Country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration of myself, I bid you all an affectionate farewell.
(Sgd.) R.E. Lee
Genl.
On April 12, three days after the surrender, the remains of the Army of Northern Virginia, now reduced to some eighteen thousand men, stacked their weapons and were issued paroles, and the army that kept the power of the Union at bay was no more. Two days later, at the ruins of Fort Sumter, General Robert Anderson raised the flag that he had lowered exactly four years earlier.
That same day, April 14, a jubilant Lincoln invited Grant and his wife to join him and his wife in Washington. Mrs. Grant had been embarrassed and abused by Mrs. Lincoln, who was jealous of Grant's popularity and whose behavior had become increasingly erratic. So the Grants declined the offer to spend an evening with the Lincolns at Ford's Theater.
MILESTONES IN THE CIVIL WAR: 1865
January Although it was most likely the handiwork of Edwin Stanton, Sherman issues Field Order No. 15, authorizing the use of abandoned land in Florida and South Carolina for exclusive settlement by blacks, who are given land confiscated from or abandoned by the Confederates. Whites are barred from these areas. Each freed family would be given forty acres, clothing, seed, and farm equipment. (This short-lived experiment failed during Reconstruction, but many blacks continued to date history from “the time Tecumsey was here.”)
January 11 A constitutional convention in Missouri adopts a resolution abolishing slavery in the state.
January 15 Fort Fisher, protecting Wilmington, North Carolina, falls to joint Union army-navy forces.
January 16 Politician Francis Preston Blair, Sr., an adviser to Lincoln, has been secretly meeting in Richmond with Jefferson Davis to discuss peace negotiations. Davis will only discuss peace “between the two nations.” Lincoln rejects this language. Although Blair visits Davis again, nothing comes of their meetings.
January 30 Lincoln issues passes for three Confederate commissioners to cross the Union lines for peace discussions.
January 31 The House passes the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. It goes to the states for ratification. Illinois, Lincoln's home state, ratifies first on February 1.
February 2 Lincoln goes to Hampton Roads, Virginia, to meet with the Confederate peace delegates.
February 17 The city of Columbia, South Carolina, is almost completely destroyed by fires of mysterious origin. Although Sherman's forces are blamed, they may have been set by departing Confederate soldiers.
February 22 Wilmington, North Carolina, the last open Confederate port, falls to Union forces.
March 2 Lee's request for negotiations is rejected by Lincoln, who demands surrender before negotiation.
March 3 Congress establishes the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen's Bureau) to aid former slaves and white refugees.
March 4 Lincoln is inaugurated for a second term. (See Appendix VIII for the text of his inaugural address.)
March 13 In a desperate act, Jefferson Davis signs a bill allowing blacks to enlist in the Confederate army; slaves who enlist will be freed. Although blacks are seen in Confederate uniforms, few actually join.
March 27-28 In a meeting at City Point, Virginia, with his generals, Grant and Sherman, and Admiral David D. Porter, Lincoln calls for a speedy end to the war with as little loss of life as possible. He also advocates generous terms of surrender in order to avert further bloodshed.
April 1 In one of the last battles of the war, Sheridan routs a Confederate force at Five Forks, Virginia.
April 2 Lee withdraws from Petersburg, after ten months of fighting, including a six-month siege. He advises Davis to move the Confederate government from Richmond.
In Selma, Alabama, Nathan B. Forrest suffers one of his few defeats. Though he escapes capture, the Union troops capture 2,700 prisoners along with guns and supplies.
April 3 Union troops enter Petersburg and Richmond. Two days later, Lincoln arrives in Richmond to tour the city. Cheered by the city's former slaves, he also sits in President Davis's chair.
April 6 The last battle between the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac is fought at Sayler's Creek, Virginia.
April 9 Lee formally surrenders to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia.
April 11 In his final public address, Lincoln urges conciliation.
April 14 Lincoln is assassinated in Ford's Theater by the actor John Wilkes Booth, a southern sympathizer. He dies the following morning, the first president to die by assassination. On April 15 Andrew Johnson takes the oath of office as president.
April 18 Confederate General J.E. Johnston surrenders to General Sherman, making the formal end of Confederate resistance.
April 26 John Wilkes Booth is shot and killed in Bowling Green, Virginia.
April 27 The steamship Sultana, with a capacity of four hundred passengers, is crowded with more than two thousand people; most aboard are Union soldiers returning from Confederate war prisons. When one of the ship's boilers explodes near Memphis, on the Mississippi, seventeen hundred people are killed. It remains the worst marine disaster in U.S. history.