And now, while the nation is rejoicing…it is suddenly plunged into the deepest sorrow by the most brutal murder of its loved chief.
We are now continually passing paroled men from Lee's army on their way to their homes…Many found blackened ruins, instead, and kindred and friends gone, they know not whither. Oh, how much misery treason and rebellion have brought upon our land!
—SERGEANT LUCIUS BARBER
APRIL 21, 1865
It is hard for the old slaveholding spirit to die. But die it must.
—SOJOURNER TRUTH
I hereby repeat…my unmitigated hatred…to the perfidious, malignant, & vile Yankee race.
—SECCESSIONIST EDMUND RUFFIN
* Who Killed Abraham Lincoln?
* Was Jefferson Davis Wearing a Dress When He Was Captured?
* What Did the Confederate Soldiers Come Home to Find?
* What Does “Forty Acres and a Mule” Mean?
* Why Was President Andrew Johnson Impeached?
* Who Were the Carpetbaggers and Scalawags?
* Who Started the Ku Klux Klan?
* Whatever Became Of?
More than 360,000 dead Union soldiers. Another 275,000 wounded. At least 258,000 Confederate dead and 100,000 more wounded. (In The Atlas of the Civil War, James McPherson notes that if the same proportion of Americans were killed in a war today, the number of dead would exceed 5 million.) In the Confederate states, an estimated 50,000 civilians dead. These dry statistics of death and destruction can only hint at the vast expense of the Civil War, by far the most costly of America's wars.
Many of the “best and brightest” on both sides—those young men who would be expected to lead the country into the future—had been killed or disabled. Along with the horrific number of deaths and crippling wounds, much of the seceded South was left in smoldering ruins. The southern economy was practically nonexistent. The dollar value of the destruction was staggering. Although cotton resumed its significant position almost immediately, it was another twenty-five years before the number of livestock in the South returned to prewar levels. The regional rancor that had boiled over into war was replaced by the bitter hatred of the defeated for the victor. And for millions of free blacks—as well as their masters—the world had been turned upside down.
Across the country, however, both the jubilation over the war's end and the bitterness of defeat were obscured by the death of Abraham Lincoln.
Who Killed Abraham Lincoln?
On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Lincoln attended a performance of Our American Cousin, a popular comedy starring Laura Keene, at Ford's Theater in Washington. Arriving late, he was accompanied by his wife and two young guests, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Miss Clara Harris. At least a dozen other people had been invited to go with the Lincolns but had, for a variety of reasons, declined the honor. The play, which had already begun, was briefly halted to welcome the arriving president.
By this time in his life, Lincoln was well aware that he faced danger. He disliked the special guard assigned to him but still kept an envelope filled with the threatening letters he had received. The possibility of assassination was a real one, and Lincoln, who had thought powerfully about death all of his life, once told his old friend Ward Hill Lamon about a dream he'd had.
There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs…. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me…. I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers. “The President,” was the answer, “he was killed by an assassin!”…I slept no more that night.
Around ten o'clock John Wilkes Booth, an actor familiar to the theater's staff, entered Ford's and joked with the ticket taker, who allowed him in “courtesy of the house.” He had been at the theater earlier in the day, secretly boring a small hole in a wall through which he could open the door to Lincoln's box if it were locked. Booth climbed to the dress circle and, around ten-thirty, entered the president's box. Standing about four feet behind Lincoln, who was leaning forward to see one of his generals in the audience, Booth held a single-shot derringer with a barrel less than two inches long and fired a small round ball into the back of Lincoln's head. (The ball is currently in the National Museum of Health and Medicine.) Major Rathbone rose to stop the assassin, but Booth stabbed him with a dagger, then leaped twelve feet to the stage, breaking his leg in the process. He waved the dagger, shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus shall it ever be for tyrants!”), and hurried to an exit, where a stagehand held a horse for him. Some in the audience were confused and thought the shooting was a part of the play until the screams came: “The president has been shot.” They were followed by cries of “Booth!” from playgoers familiar with the actor.
The first doctor to reach Lincoln was Charles A. Leale, a twenty-three-year-old army surgeon fresh out of medical school. When Leale got to him, the president was already paralyzed, his eyes closed. Initially, Leale thought he was dead, but as the young doctor probed the wound with a finger, the president showed signs of life. Two other doctors rushed in, and the three agreed to have Lincoln removed to a house across the street. Too long to fit on the bed, Lincoln was stretched across it diagonally. Two more doctors, including Lincoln's family doctor, Robert K. Stone, reached the stricken president; they would be followed by a stream of medical men, sixteen in all, and all useless. (One of them, army doctor D. W. Bliss, would also preside over the care of President Garfield when he was shot sixteen years later. His performance in that shooting was equally lacking.) The wound was probed twice more, but nothing was done for the dying president except to keep the wound free of coagulating blood. At 6:50 A.M. Lincoln stopped breathing, then recovered briefly, only to stop again. At 7:22 he “breathed his last.”
In a 1995 American Heritage article, “How Did Lincoln Die?,” Dr. Richard A. R. Fraser argues that Lincoln's wound was not necessarily fatal. The attending doctors went against medical practice accepted even then by probing the wound, first with fingers and then a metal probe. According to Fraser, this unsterile activity certainly worsened Lincoln's chances for survival, which was a distinct possibility given that many people, including Civil War combat victims, have survived greater head wounds than the one Lincoln suffered.
Within hours Vice-President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), a Unionist senator from Tennessee who had also been targeted for assassination, was sworn in as the seventeenth president. The only member of the Senate from a seceded state to remain loyal, he was also a War Democrat among the Radical Republicans in Lincoln's Cabinet and Congress. At the inauguration a few weeks earlier, Johnson had been noticeably drunk, the result of too much “medicinal” brandy. It would now fall to this former tailor, who had known frontier poverty just as Lincoln had, to stitch the severed nation back together.
Booth's attack was the culmination of months of planning. Born in Maryland into one of America's most prominent theatrical families, Booth was the son of Junius Brutus Booth, the leading Shakespearean actor in America. An actor himself, John Wilkes Booth was known to the Lincolns, who had seen him perform; Lincoln once invited him for a visit between the acts of a play, a request the actor ignored. A white supremacist and Confederate sympathizer who had never served in a Confederate army, Booth had earlier hatched a scheme to kidnap Lincoln, take him to Richmond, and exchange him for Confederate prisoners and a negotiated peace. By April, with no Confederate government in Richmond, Booth decided to kill the president instead. His fellow conspirators, some of them Confederate veterans and all but one Marylanders, were assigned to assassinate other Cabinet officers, including Vice-President Johnson, Secretary of State Seward, and General Grant. A brutal thug, Lewis Powell, was assigned to kill Seward at his home and nearly succeeded, but Seward was wearing a heavy neck brace that probably saved his life. Powell wounded two of Seward's sons and a secretary before escaping.
After racing out of Ford's to the waiting horse, Booth escaped over the Navy Yard Bridge. Joined by one accomplice, a half-witted and star-struck David Herold, they stopped at the house of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, who set Booth's leg in a splint. (Mudd knew Booth but said he did not recognize him that night.) The two then went to the home of a wealthy Confederate sympathizer, who hid them for six days. On April 21 they went to Virginia, eventually reaching the farm of Richard H. Garrett in Bowling Green. While sleeping in Garrett's tobacco barn, Booth and Herold were surrounded by Union cavalry, who called for them to surrender. Herold did; Booth refused, and the barn was set afire. He was then shot and killed, with Sergeant Boston Corbett taking credit for the fatal shot. (According to Stewart Sifakis in Who Was Who in the Civil War, Corbett was armed with a rifle, but Booth was killed by a pistol shot. More likely, Booth killed himself to avoid capture.)
Amid the swirling rumors of a massive conspiracy hatched in Richmond, President Johnson appointed a nine-man military commission to investigate the assassination. It would make the Warren Commission, which probed John F. Kennedy's assassination, look like a textbook investigation. Focusing on the involvement of Jefferson Davis in the conspiracy, the commission—which was illegal in the sense that it should have been a civilian rather than a military proceeding—went down one blind alley after another. Obscuring the fact of two plots—first a kidnapping, then a murder—the commission seemed to be interested in vengeance, not truth. All of the conspirators tried were found guilty. Four, including Mary Surratt, the mother of John Surratt, at whose boardinghouse the plot was hatched, were convicted and executed in July. Three other defendants, including Dr. Mudd, were sentenced to life imprisonment. (Both Mudd and Mrs. Surratt have passionate defenders who continue to attest to their innocence. Mudd was later pardoned and released, but a century of investigation and scrutiny of his case has not been able to completely exonerate him.) John Surratt, Booth's chief accomplice and a member of a Confederate spy ring in Canada and upstate New York, escaped and fled to Canada. He went on to England and then the Papal States. Arrested in 1866, Surratt was brought back to the United States for trial but was freed after the jury split. He retired to Baltimore and lived until 1916.
While Jefferson Davis would be suspected of complicity, in fact, Lincoln's assassination was the work of a band of zealots—some psychopathic, others mentally unstable—in a small but tragically successful conspiracy.
Civil War Voices
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles (April 14-15, 1865).
The giant sufferer lay extended diagonally across the bed, which was not long enough for him. He had been stripped of his clothes. His large arms, which were occasionally exposed, were of a size which one could scarce have expected from his spare appearance. His slow, full respiration lifted the clothes with each breath that he took. His features were calm and striking. I had never seen him appear to better advantage than for the first hour, perhaps, that I was there. After that, his right eye began to swell and that part of his face became discolored.
…The room was small and overcrowded. The surgeons and members of the Cabinet were as many as should have been in the room, but there were many more, and the hall and other rooms in the front or main house were full. One of these rooms was occupied by Mrs. Lincoln and her attendants, with Miss Harris. Mrs. Dixon and Mrs. Kinney came to her about twelve o'clock. About once an hour, Mrs. Lincoln would repair to the bedside of her dying husband and with lamentation and tears remain until overcome by emotion.
[April 15]
…About 6 A.M. I experienced a feeling of faintness and for the first time after entering the room, a little past eleven, I left it and the house, and took a short walk in the open air. It was a dark and gloomy morning, and rain set in before I returned to the house, some fifteen minutes [later]. Large groups of people were gathered every few rods, all anxious and solicitous. Some one or more from each group stepped forward as I passed, to inquire into the condition of the President, and to ask if there was no hope. Intense grief was on every countenance when I replied that the President could survive but a short time. The colored people especially—and there were at this time more of them, perhaps, than of white—were overwhelmed with grief.
…A little before seven, I went into the room where the dying President was rapidly drawing near the closing moments. His wife soon after made her last visit to him. The death struggle had begun. Robert, his son, stood with several others at the head of the bed. He bore himself well, but on two occasions gave way to overpowering grief and sobbed aloud, turning his head and leaning on the shoulder of Senator Sumner.
Not everyone was similarly moved. Declining the honor of accompanying Lincoln's body back to Illinois, Zachariah Chandler, the Radical Republican senator from Michigan, said, “The Almighty continued Mr. Lincoln in office as long as he was useful.”
Another view of the aftermath, from a Union soldier, Sergeant Lucius Barber (April 21, 1865).
Marched at half past five. The news came today that President Lincoln, Secretary Seward and son have been assassinated, resulting in the President's death and severely wounding the others. And now, while the nation is rejoicing with unspeakable joy at its deliverance, it is suddenly plunged into the deepest sorrow by the most brutal murder of its loved chief.
We are now continually passing paroled men from Lee's army on their way to their homes, or to where their homes were. Many found blackened ruins, instead, and kindred and friends gone, they know not whither. Oh, how much misery treason and rebellion have brought upon our land!
Was Jefferson Davis Wearing a Dress When He Was Captured?
With Lee's message to leave Richmond, Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet met hastily and left on April 2 for Danville, North Carolina, a hundred and forty miles to the south. Also aboard the train was the Confederate treasury's remaining gold, worth an estimated $500,000-$600,000, as well as Confederate banknotes, negotiable bonds, and a chest of jewels donated by southern women to purchase a warship. With the treasury gold and a grim determination somehow to keep fighting, this government on the run had no clear plan. Davis was still convinced that the war could go on and hoped to establish a new capital in Danville, while awaiting news from Lee, who had said he could fight in the hills of Virginia for another twenty years! When they reached Danville, the treasury was assigned a new value: $327,022. All attempts to sort out the discrepancies in values and dispensing of official funds were useless; rumors of Davis's absconding with the Confederate treasury persisted for years but were simply baseless. However, they provided Margaret Mitchell with a plot line in Gone With the Wind, and somebody certainly ended up with portions of the Confederate treasury. Maybe it was Rhett Butler after all!
After Lee's surrender, the escaping Cabinet began to scatter. Davis continued south until he was reunited with his wife and family. Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and War Secretary John Breckinridge, once the vice-president of the United States and the 1860 Democratic contender for president, escaped to Havana, Cuba, and then to Europe. Hoping to reach safe haven in Texas or Mexico, where large numbers of former Confederate soldiers were heading, Davis continued south, pursued by an eager federal army. Shortly after Lincoln's assassination, President Johnson and Secretary Stanton put a price on Davis's head and named him as a conspirator in the murder plot.
Civil War Voices
From Frank Moore's The Rebellion Record (1864), describing the capture of Jefferson Davis.
As he got to the tent door thus hastily equipped, and with this good intention of preventing an effusion of blood by an appeal in the name of a fading but not wholly faded authority, he saw a few cavalry ride up the road and deploy in front.
“Ha, Federals!” was his exclamation.
“Then you are captured,” cried Mrs. Davis, with emotion.
In a moment she caught an idea—a woman's idea—and as quickly as women in an emergency execute their design, it was done. He slept in a wrapper—a loose one. It was yet around him. This she fastened ere he was aware of it, and then bidding him adieu, urged him to go to the spring, a short distance off, where his horses and arms were. Strange as it may seem, there was not even a pistol in the tent. Davis felt that his only course was to reach his horses and arms, and complied. As he was leaving the door, followed by a servant with a water bucket, Miss Howell flung a shawl over his head. There was no time to remove it without exposure and embarrassment, and as he had not far to go, he ran the chance exactly as it was devised for him. In these two articles consisted the woman's attire of which much nonsense has been spoken and written, and under these circumstances, and in this way, was Jefferson Davis going forth to perfect his escape.
But it was too late for any effort to reach his horses, and the Confederate President was at last a prisoner in the hands of the United States.
Captured on May 10, 1865, in some woods near Irwinville, Georgia, Davis was soon to be humiliated by the report spread through the country that he had been captured while wearing women's clothing. Knowing the rumor to be false, Secretary Stanton apparently enjoyed the notion and encouraged the spread of the story, which eventually entered Civil War mythology. The northern newspapers had a field day, with editorial cartoons depicting the Confederate president in hoopskirts concealing a large Bowie knife. New York showman P.T. Barnum offered $500 for the dress Davis was supposed to be wearing. When it didn't materialize, Barnum displayed a figure of Davis wearing another dress, stolen from his wife's trunk. Over the next few years, it would be seen by thousands at Barnum's New York Museum.
Following his capture, Davis was taken with his wife and children to Macon, taunted along the way by the Union soldiers singing, “We'll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.” On May 22 Davis was imprisoned in Fort Monroe, Virginia, to begin what turned out to be seven hundred and twenty days of imprisonment without benefit of trial. Under constant watch by guards who had orders not to speak if spoken to, Davis endured a harsh imprisonment as ordered by Stanton, who was still eager to implicate him in the assassination conspiracy.
In a dungeonlike cell which had been prepared for him, he was shackled in leg irons on orders from Washington. When the officer arrived to shackle him, Davis protested, “These are no orders for a soldier! They're for a hangman. No soldier should accept them. The world will ring with this disgrace, I tell you. The war's over. The South is conquered. America is my only country. I plead against this degradation for the honor of America.”
Davis's condition worsened. A light was kept burning in his cell around the clock, and he could not leave the cell area for any reason. The New York Herald described the former president as “literally in a living tomb…His life has been a cheat. His last free act was an effort to unsex himself and deceive the world. He is…buried alive.” In the cold, damp cell, his poor health grew rapidly worse. His life was saved only by the intervention of John J. Craven, a medical officer who provided Davis with some basic comforts and kept an account of his imprisonment.
News of this degrading and humiliating treatment eventually evoked an outpouring of sympathy in both the South and North. Even the staunch Republican Unionist and abolitionist Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, took up Davis's case. Later in the summer, Davis was permitted to take walks in the open air. Under Craven's attention, his prison conditions and health gradually improved. Never brought to trial, Davis was finally released after two years of confinement on $100,000 bail after a surety bond was signed by, among others, Greeley and another abolitionist, Gerrit Smith. He was now homeless and penniless.
Documents of the Civil War
General Grant proclaimed the end of hostilities.
War Department, Adj.-Gen's. Office
Washington, D.C., June 2, 1865
Soldiers of the Armies of the United States:
By your patriotic devotion to your country in the hour of danger and alarm, your magnificent fighting, bravery, and endurance, you have maintained the supremacy of the Union and the Constitution, overthrown all armed opposition to the enforcement of the laws and of the proclamation forever abolishing Slavery—the cause and pretext of the Rebellion—and opened the way to the rightful authorities to restore order and inaugurate peace on a permanent and enduring basis on every foot of American soil. Your marches, sieges, and battles, in distance, duration, and resolution, and brilliancy of results, dim the luster of the world's past military achievements, and will be the patriot's precedent in defense of liberty and right in all time to come. In obedience to your country's call, you left your homes and families, and volunteered in her defense. Victory has crowned your patriotic hearts; and, with the gratitude of your countrymen and the highest honor a great and free nation can accord, you will soon be permitted to return to your homes and families, conscious of having discharged the highest duty of American citizens. To achieve these glorious triumphs and secure to yourselves, your fellow countrymen, and posterity, the blessings of free institutions, tens of thousands of your gallant comrades have fallen and sealed the priceless legacy with their blood. The graves of these a grateful nation bedews with tears, honors their memories, and will ever cherish and support their stricken families.
U.S. Grant, Lt. General
MILESTONES IN THE CIVIL WAR: MAY 1865-1866
1865
May 2 President Johnson offers a reward of $100,000 for the capture of Jefferson Davis.
May 10 Johnson declares that armed resistance to the federal government is officially at an end.
May 12-13 Battle of Palmito Ranch. A force of 80 black and white Union infantry and cavalry attack a Confederate outpost on the banks of the Rio Grande at Palmito Ranch, twelve miles from Brownsville, Texas. The Confederate troops, who have done nothing to break an unofficial truce, consist of about 350 cavalrymen. In two days of back-and-forth fighting, the Confederate troops force the Union soldiers to withdraw and pursue their disorganized retreat. The Confederates suffer only five minor wounds in the skirmish, while 30 Union soldiers are killed or wounded and another 113 captured. The small battle marks the last fighting by land forces of any size during the war. A Confederate victory, its outcome has no consequence and is a futile waste of life.
May 23-24 The Grand Review. Some 150,000 men parade through Washington in the course of two days. First, the Army of the Potomac, in crisp uniforms and led by General Meade, passes by with smart discipline. In the following days, Sherman's army of Westerners, the worn veterans of the March to the Sea, are cheered wildly by thousands of spectators lining the streets.
May 25 In Mobile, Alabama, which had escaped serious war damage, thirty tons of munitions stored in a warehouse suddenly explode. Nearly eight city blocks are destroyed, and more than three hundred people die in the explosion and fires that follow.
May 29 Johnson proposes his plan for “Restoration.” It is at odds with congressional plans for “Reconstruction.” He also announces a general pardon to all persons who directly or indirectly participated in “the existing rebellion” except for a few leaders of the Confederacy.
June Congress equalizes pay, equipment, arms, and medical services for black troops.
September Congressman Thaddeus Stephens urges the confiscation of the estates of Confederate leaders and the distribution of their lands to adult freedmen in forty-acre lots.
September 5 All southern ports are reopened to foreign shipping.
November 24 Mississippi establishes the first of the restrictive “Black Codes,” which restore many prewar rules, sharply limiting the rights and freedoms of freed blacks with respect to voting, holding property, and education, virtually reenslaving them.
December 1 The writ of habeas corpus, suspended by Lincoln, is restored.
December 4 The 39th Congress convenes. All of the Confederate states except Mississippi have met the president's requirements for readmission. But many are unrepentant. Georgia sends the former vice-president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, to the Senate. The House simply omits the former Confederate states from the roll call. Congress then creates a Joint Committee on Reconstruction—or the Committee of Fifteen—chaired by William Fessenden of Maine and hard-liner Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania.
December 18 After passing through the House of Representatives in January, the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolishes slavery, is ratified by the states and proclaimed in effect by Secretary of State Seward. (See Appendix IX for the complete text.)
December 24 Meeting in the law office of Thomas M. Jones in Pulaski, Tennessee, six former Confederate officers form a secret society that will become the Ku Klux Klan.
* The weekly magazine The Nation is first published.
* Mark Twain publishes his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
1866
February 19 Congress authorizes the continued existence of the Freedmen's Bureau, created a year earlier to provide medical assistance, food, and other aid to free slaves; President Johnson vetoes the act.
April 9 Congress passes a Civil Rights Act over Johnson's veto, the first significant legislation ever passed over a presidential veto. It includes many of the guarantees that will become part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution when parts of this act are questioned.
June The House passes the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all native-born or naturalized Americans, and submits it for ratification by the states. It includes a provision that excludes former Confederates from holding office. Ratification of the amendment is a condition for readmission to the Union. It is not declared ratified by the states until July 28, 1868. (See Appendix X for the complete text.)
July 10 Over Johnson's veto, Congress passes a new Freedmen's Bureau Bill, continuing the department for two more years.
July 30 In New Orleans, forty-eight blacks are killed when whites riot over the proposed introduction of black voting rights. Similar violence takes place elsewhere in the South.
November In the first postwar elections, Radical Republicans sweep to majorities in both houses, further weakening President Johnson.
Civil War Voices
Southern journalist Charles H. Smith:
It were in the ded of winter, thru snow and thru sleet, over creeks without bridges and bridges without floors, thru a deserted and deserlate land wher no rooster was left to krow, no pigs to squeel, no dog to bark, wher the rooins of happy hoams adorned the way, and ghostly chimniz stood up like Sherman's sentinels a gardin the rooins he had made.
What Did the Confederate Soldiers Come Home to Find?
Like those who defend America's use of the atomic bomb on Japan to save millions of lives in World War II, William T. Sherman always maintained that the devastatingly destructive war he had waged on the Confederacy shortened the war and saved soldiers' lives. His good intentions went unappreciated by the victims of his ruthlessness. For many along his path, after Sherman's troops departed, there was literally nothing left on which to support a family. Houses were looted. Those animals not taken by the Union troops were killed. Under Sherman's “scorched earth” policy, any item that could be useful for farming or manufacturing was destroyed, the grim “justice” for what Sherman viewed as treason.
In the aftermath of the war, the entire Confederacy, save sections west of the Mississippi that had been spared the massive battles, was devastated—physically, economically, even spiritually. The postwar South was probably worse off than Europe after either of the world wars of this century. Because of Sherman's notorious destruction of the southern railroads, many of Lee's defeated soldiers had to walk home from Virginia. Many found that their homes had been burned. In some cases, entire towns and even whole counties had been evacuated. Common were the stories of farmers—many women and children included—who hitched themselves to plows in the absence of field animals.
But there was remarkable resilience as well. In The Long Surrender, Burke Davis notes that energetic Southerners, joined by newcomers drawn south by the promise of economic revival, began a dramatic rebuilding. The rails to Atlanta were restored only a month after Sherman left. In fact, many southern railroad companies, led by former generals like P. T. Beauregard, had trains rolling by the time Jefferson Davis was freed. (Still, they would be burdened for decades by unfair rates and restrictive tariffs set by Northerners, who controlled the vast majority of railways and the legislatures that set rates.) In devastated Charleston, workmen were busy rebuilding “when guns were being stacked at Appomattox.” Memphis, Chattanooga, and Birmingham all witnessed an extraordinary resurgence in heavy manufacturing, with Birmingham becoming a steel center. (Birmingham's revival was led by General Josiah Gorgas, the genius behind the Confederate wartime ordnance, who kept his armies supplied with ammunition despite facing overwhelming odds.) Above all, the world was waiting for southern cotton. The industry revived almost overnight.
What Does “Forty Acres and a Mule” Mean?
As bleak as things were for the defeated Confederates, it was even more difficult and uncertain for the four million freed slaves, accustomed to centuries of a system that had not remotely prepared them for emancipation. For these millions displaced by the war's end, there was a true emergency. To address that crisis, Congress had established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865. A temporary federal agency under the War Department, it was to assist the emancipated slaves in making the transition to freedom. A year later, when Johnson vetoed a congressional bill continuing the work of the bureau, the veto was overridden by Congress, and the department was repeatedly extended.
Headed by General Oliver Otis Howard, an abolitionist who had lost his arm during the Peninsula Campaign and later marched with Sherman to the sea, the Freedmen's Bureau, as it was known, distributed trainloads of food and clothing provided by the federal government. The supplies went both to freed slaves and southern white refugees. During a relatively brief existence, the agency spent a staggering $17 million in direct aid. Much of it went to constructing hospitals for the former slaves and providing medical care. More than four thousand schools were built for black children, and most of the major Negro colleges in the United States, including Fisk and the Hampton Institute, were founded with the bureau's assistance. (General Howard helped establish what would become a black university in Washington, D.C., which was named for him. He served as Howard's third president, from 1869 to 1874.)
But the bureau was more than a friendly welfare agency. It held far-reaching powers that proved ripe for corruption. It regulated wages and working conditions, handled legal affairs, and oversaw the confiscation and redistribution of lands, one of its most controversial roles. Fulfilling Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens's call for “forty acres and a mule” for every freed black adult, the bureau was responsible for more than 800,000 acres of land that had been abandoned or confiscated from former Confederates, including Brierfield, the plantation of Jefferson Davis. The charges of corruption later leveled against the agency hurt its reputation, but Howard was cleared of any wrongdoing after a congressional investigation.
To white Southerners, the bureau came to represent the worst of what they thought the North had in store for them. Some blacks were settled on public lands under the Southern Homestead Act of 1867, but the hopes of massive land redistribution in the South never materialized. Property rights were still considered sacred by Congress, and much of the land meant for the former slaves ended up in the hands of speculators, lumber companies, railroads, and large plantation owners. When President Johnson announced the restoration of abandoned lands to pardoned Southerners, most free blacks had little choice but to participate in sharecropping arrangements. Working as tenant farmers who paid for seed and supplies with a portion of their crops, the sharecroppers learned that slavery had merely been replaced by this economic arithmetic that never quite added up in their favor, a new form of bondage from which there was equally little hope of escape.
As a guardian of voting rights, the Freedmen's Bureau also failed to measure up. In the worst postwar voting catastrophe, forty-eight blacks died when the police of New Orleans put down a peaceful demonstration in favor of the black vote. General Philip Sheridan, the military governor of Louisiana, had been away during this “Riot of New Orleans” and called the killings a massacre. In other southern states, “Black Codes” designed to restore the prewar condition of blacks were quickly introduced. To many of the former slaves, it must have seemed that the war had changed very little.
Civil War Voices
Former slave Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist and women's rights pioneer, wrote about postwar racial attitudes in the nation's capital (October 1, 1865).
A few weeks ago I was in company with my friend Josephine S. Griffing, when the conductor of a streetcar refused to stop his car for me, although [I was] closely following Josephine and holding on to the iron rail. They dragged me a number of yards before she succeeded in stopping them. She reported the conductor to the president of the City Railway, who dismissed him at once, and told me to take the number of the car whenever I was mistreated by a conductor or driver. On the 13th I had occasion to go for blackberry wine, and other necessities for the patients in the Freedmen's Hospital where I have been doing and advising for a number of months. I thought now I would get a ride without trouble as I was in company of another friend, Laura S. Haviland of Michigan. As I ascended the platform of the car, the conductor pushed me, saying “Go back—get off here.” I told him I was not going off, then “I'll put you off” said he furiously, clenching my right arm with both hands, using such violence that he seemed about to succeed, when Mrs. Haviland told him he was not going to put me off. “Does she belong to you?” said he in a hurried angry tone. She replied, “She does not belong to me, but she belongs to humanity.” The number of the car was noted, and the conductor dismissed at once upon report to the president, who advised arrest for assault and battery as my shoulder was sprained by his effort to put me off. Accordingly I had him arrested and the case tried before Justice Thompson. My shoulder was very lame and swollen, but it is better. It is hard for the old slaveholding spirit to die. But die it must.
Why Was President Andrew Johnson Impeached?
The death of Abraham Lincoln was tragic in ways beyond the obvious. Before his death, Lincoln had proposed a series of lenient postwar measures designed to restore peace and the status of the seceded states. His “10 percent” plan allowed a state to be recognized if 10 percent of the voting population agreed to abide by federal regulations and support the Constitution. With Lincoln's death, the weaker President Johnson was at the mercy of a Congress under the control of the Radical Republicans, led by hard-liners like Pennsylvania's Thaddeus Stevens, an uncompromising and longtime supporter of rights for blacks, and Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Massachusetts senator beaten on the Senate floor before the war, who would hold out for a far more punitive Reconstruction plan. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 were passed on March 7 over Johnson's veto. The congressional plan, which held that the southern states had committed “suicide,” set a harsh agenda for their return to the Union.
Under the first of the Reconstruction Acts, the South was divided into five military districts with a U.S. Army general in charge of each. In other words, the South was essentially under martial law. Generals John Schofield, Daniel Sickles, John Pope, Edward Ord, and Philip H. Sheridan now held nearly dictatorial powers over their military districts. To preserve order and carry out the dictates of Congress, some 200,000 U.S. soldiers were stationed throughout the South. These military commanders removed thousands of civil officials from their jobs and actively registered black voters. Former slaves were now in a position to dominate their former masters.
The Radicals in Congress knew that the vote of large numbers of blacks could lead to their domination of the area for years to come, and they pressed for a Civil Rights Act that would prevent the states from restricting black voting rights. When the Radical Republicans swept the congressional elections of 1866, as the balance of power had shifted totally from the White House to Congress. In one blatant attempt to consolidate that power, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in March 1867, which said a president could not remove any official, including his own Cabinet members, without Senate approval. To challenge this blatant assault on constitutional “checks and balances,” Johnson asked for the resignation of War Secretary Edwin Stanton, a Democrat but an ally of the Radicals. The president was promptly impeached by the House—the equivalent of a grand jury indictment—on eleven charges. Tried before a Republican Senate with Chief Justice Salmon Chase presiding, Johnson was acquitted by a single vote on May 18, 1868. Those Republicans who voted for his acquittal paid with their political careers. Four days later, Ulysses S. Grant was nominated by the Republicans to run for the presidency. Johnson served out the balance of his term as a political cripple.
Who Were the Carpetbaggers and Scalawags?
The era of congressional Reconstruction was something of a mixed blessing. Well-meaning Northerners who came south to assist blacks and open schools established some of the leading black colleges in the South. And for the first time in American history blacks gained political power, providing the votes that elected Grant and putting the first blacks in Congress. Mississippi sent two black men to the Senate. Blanche Bruce was a former slave, and Hiram Revels, a clergyman who had recruited black soldiers during the war, took Jefferson Davis's old seat in the Senate. (After his term in Congress, Revels became president of Alcorn Agricultural & Mining College.) The simple fact that men who had a few years earlier been in chains were now voting and sitting in the Congress was an astonishing, revolutionary event, albeit a short-lived one.
The flip side of this achievement was the corruption that came along at the same time. For the most part uneducated, the blacks of the South were not prepared for democracy and ripe for exploitation. The worst of the exploitation often came at the hands of unscrupulous Northerners who had rushed south to fill the political void. Depicted in the contemporary press as men rushing in with their belongings in a “carpet bag,” they were soon derided as “carpetbaggers” and became a popular symbol of all that was hated about the North. The traditional view that all of these men were corrupt vandals was soundly refuted as postwar propaganda by Eric Foner in his massive study of the period, Reconstruction. Foner gives convincing evidence that many so-called carpetbaggers moved to the South out of a desire to improve the lot of blacks; others were simply entrepreneurs who helped reestablish the economy of the South.
Despised even worse than carpetbaggers were those former Confederates who were seen as jumping on the northern bandwagon. These white southern politicians who joined the Republican party after the war and advocated the acceptance of and compliance with congressional Reconstruction were labeled “scalawags”—traitorous opportunists who had deserted their countrymen. Again, Foner had dismissed that idea as reflecting postwar animosity more than political reality. Many so-called scalawags, he shows, believed that acceptance of the Reconstruction Acts was the fastest way to return to home rule. But they merited the disdain and attacks of those Confederates still loyal to “the Cause.” Perhaps the most hated of the scalawags was General James Longstreet, Robert Lee's “Warhorse,” who compounded his sin of embracing Republicanism by suggesting that “Marse Robert” had made mistakes at Gettysburg.
Who Started the Ku Klux Klan?
One of the most far-reaching consequences of the presence of the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and federal troops in the former Confederacy was a violent backlash that formally began on Christmas Eve, 1865. As Reconstruction seemed to threaten to destroy any semblance of control over their lives, some Southerners began to form secret organizations whose single purpose was to intimidate and terrorize blacks and Republicans. With such names as Pale Faces, the Sons of Midnight, and the Knights of the White Camellia, these secret societies adopted what now sound like silly names and rules. But there was nothing amusing about their aims and tactics. Their principal goal was simple: to combat black political power and maintain white supremacy.
On December 24, 1865, a group of six Confederate veterans met in Pulaski, Tennessee, and formed another such group, giving it the name Ku Klux Klan, derived from the Greek kuklos (“circle”). In a Nashville convention in 1867, the KKK adopted a declaration, stating its intention was to “protect the weak, the innocent and the defenseless…to relieve the injured and oppressed.” At this meeting, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most feared Confederate general of the war and called “the Fort Pillow Butcher” in the northern press, became the first Grand Wizard of the Empire.
Operating as a quasi-military organization, the Klan, which had also adopted the name Invisible Empire, grew quickly with the addition of more former rebel soldiers. They initially used parlor tricks and Halloween pranks: pretending they were dead rebel soldiers from the battlefield, they appeared to drink whole buckets of water that went down a hose. At first the goal was simply to frighten blacks when they rode up in the middle of the night. Wearing white robes and pointed hoods, these “ghosts of dead rebel soldiers” gradually escalated the violence. Beatings, lynchings, burning, and other acts of terrorism, rape, and murder replaced the simple night-riding in sheets. The pretense of secrecy fell away, and most southern towns-people knew exactly who was under those robes. “Klaverns” often included the most powerful men in a town—the bankers, newspaper publishers, and business owners. A sort of Rotary Club of racist terror.
The Klan's political terrorism achieved its intended effect. Added to the “Black Codes,” the threat of Klan violence kept blacks away from the polls. In fact, Forrest officially called for the Klan to disband in 1869. Although it had achieved its aims, Forrest had also apparently undergone a religious conversion. At the time of his death in 1877, he was supposedly quite repentant. According to his biographer Jack Hurst, the “Devil” Forrest disavowed the Klan and called for the social and political advancement of blacks in his last two years. But the klaverns continued to flourish. In 1872 President Grant ordered the disbanding of illegal organizations, and hundreds of Klansmen were arrested. With the demise of congressional Reconstruction in 1877 and the restoration of prewar white supremacy through much of the defeated Confederacy, the Klan lost much of its urgency, and its role diminished. However, the name, rituals, and tactics reemerged in 1915, when it was reorganized with Jews and Catholics joining blacks as its targets. After World War I, when the perceived threat of socialism grew, the Klan rapidly expanded, becoming more politically influential than ever. Over the next few decades, its membership reached as many as three million. In 1924 a resolution denouncing the Klan was defeated at the Democratic national convention, and membership was a key to holding local political power. Many prominent Southerners continued to join the Klan. In one of the most notorious instances of Klan power, Hugo Black, appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt, admitted that he had been a member of the Klan.
Whatever Became Of?
A summary of the postwar lives of some of the famous and infamous, obscure, notable, and otherwise curious personalities of the Civil War period.
Charles Francis Adams, Sr. Descended from one of America's greatest families, Adams remained in England as America's ambassador until 1868. There he began negotiations regarding Britain's repaying the United States for the losses inflicted on Union merchant ships' commerce by Confederate raiders built in England. Adams played a vital role in the treaty and arbitration that settled these so-called Alabama claims. Never a Lincoln supporter, Adams eulogized Secretary of State Seward in 1873 as Lincoln's superior “in native intellectual power, in the extent of acquirement, in breadth of philosophical experience, and in the force of moral discipline,” making Seward the genius and driving force behind the Union success and Lincoln merely a figurehead. In defense of Lincoln, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles responded with a book, Lincoln and Seward, which presented the case for Lincoln's role as the principal figure in the Civil War government. Adams died in 1886. One of his sons, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had a distinguished Civil War career; another, Henry Brooks Adams, served as his father's unofficial secretary in London and also wrote secretly for The New York Times. He became a prominent historian and is best known for his book The Education of Henry Adams.
Louisa May Alcott Having served as a Union nurse until she fell ill with typhoid, Alcott in 1863 released under her name a collection of wartime letters, published as Hospital Sketches. Although her request to go south to teach the “contrabands”—slaves held by the Union army—was denied, she wrote a story called “My Contraband,” published in The Atlantic Monthly as “Brothers,” in which a captured Confederate soldier is nursed by a contraband servant who is the soldier's mulatto half brother. After the war, Alcott published the first of her most famous books, the autobiographical stories of the March family, Little Women (1868), Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886). Alcott died in 1888.
Robert Anderson Although he had hoped to prevent the war, Anderson had been there at its beginning in his defense of Fort Sumter. When his health failed, he was relieved of field command and given various duties until he retired from the regular army in 1863. After the recapture of Charleston, Anderson took part in the ceremony in which he raised the flag he had lowered four years earlier. Anderson died in 1871.
Clara Barton When her wartime freelance nursing duties ended, Barton spent extensive time and energy at Johnson's request in locating missing soldiers. In that role, she visited the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville and gathered considerable evidence of the inhumane treatment common there. But, apparently for sexist reasons, she was prevented by federal prosecutors from testifying at the trial of Andersonville's commander, Henry Wirz. Following the Civil War, she went to tend the sick in the Franco-Prussian War and eventually returned to the United States to found the American Red Cross in 1881, serving as its president until 1904.
Pierre G.T. Beauregard Anderson's opposite at Sumter, the Confederate “Hero of Fort Sumter” had undergone a serious falling-out with Jefferson Davis as the war went on. Blamed for the defeat at Shiloh, Beauregard had taken sick leave without permission and was relieved of his command by Davis. Although he continued to serve and lead efficiently, his difficult relationship with Davis limited his effectiveness. Offered commands after the war in the Egyptian and Romanian armies, he returned to Louisiana, went into railroading, and was tarnished for his supervising a corrupt Louisiana lottery. Beauregard died in 1893.
Judah Benjamin Known as “the brain of the Confederacy,” the secretary of state escaped after the fall of Richmond, going first to Cuba, then London. After a period of living from hand to mouth, he began a new law career in London, eventually gaining fame and fortune. Befriended by British politician Benjamin Disraeli, he began an international law practice and wrote a definitive text that became a standard law treatise used well into the twentieth century. He died in honor and wealth in 1884.
Ambrose Everett Burnside Bedeviled by one disaster after another during the war, Burnside was relieved of command after the deadly Crater explosion at Petersburg. After the war, he served as governor of Rhode Island from 1866 to 1869 and then as U.S. senator from 1875 to 1881. He is best remembered for introducing the word sideburns into the language.
Benjamin Butler The notorious “Beast” of the Union, tarnished by charges of wartime corruption, Butler joined the Radical Republicans in Congress and was a leader in the impeachment movement against President Johnson. In 1868 he was given a bloodstained nightshirt belonging to A.P. Huggins, a Northerner who claimed that klansmen in Mississippi had whipped him bloody in the night. During a House speech, Butler waved “the bloody shirt” as he spoke, and from 1868 through the end of the nineteenth century, waving “the bloody shirt”—which also came to be associated with Lincoln's assassination—was standard propaganda for Republicans who wanted voters to punish Democrats and the South for the Civil War.
Christopher “Kit” Carson The fabled “mountain man” who led John C. Frémont's famed expeditions to the Rockies, Carson served with the Union in the Southwest, becoming a brigadier general. He was troubled by the harsh government treatment of Indians both during and after the war, and as an Indian agent Carson was one of a handful of whites who attempted to deal honestly and humanely with the tribes.
“Albert J. Cashier” Unremarkable in any way for serving with the Illinois Volunteers, this pensioned soldier was involved in an automobile accident in 1911. Only at the hospital did it become apparent that “Albert Cashier” was a woman, whose fellow veterans said they never suspected the truth.
Joshua L. Chamberlain One of the heroes of Gettysburg, Chamberlain received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Twice wounded and suffering from malaria, he was given lighter duties but returned to his command. At Petersburg he was wounded again and carried to the rear, where General Grant promoted him to brigadier general on the spot. He took part in the siege of Petersburg and the Appomattox campaign and was given the honor of commanding the troops that formally accepted the surrender of the Confederate army. Returning to Maine, he later served as governor of the state and as president of Bowdoin College.
Salmon P. Chase Although Lincoln had refused to acknowledge an earlier resignation by Chase, he had accepted the secretary's letter of resignation submitted in 1864. After Chief Justice Roger Taney died in October 1864, to the surprise of many, Lincoln appointed Chase to replace him. As Chief Justice, Chase presided over the 1868 impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. His support of Johnson angered his former Radical Republican colleagues in the Senate. As a result, Chase's name was put forward as a possible Democratic candidate in 1868.
Johnny Clem President Grant appointed “the drummer boy of Chickamauga” to West Point, but he failed on several occasions to pass the entrance exam. In 1871 Grant made him a second lieutenant, and Johnny began a second army term that continued until he retired in 1915 with the rank of brigadier general. He was the last Civil War veteran on the army rolls at the time of his retirement. He died at the age of eighty-five in San Antonio, Texas, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (“Mark Twain”) This great American writer's Civil War career was distinguished by a brief stint with a band of Missouri Volunteers, which later took shape in a short story, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” He also befriended a sick and poor Ulysses Grant, becoming the publisher of his Memoirs, a huge financial and critical success.
Boston Corbett The man who claimed to have killed John Wilkes Booth was arrested for disobeying orders not to shoot at Booth. But War Secretary Stanton ordered his release and praised him. Corbett became a hero in the North, received a share of the reward money, and even lectured. Increasingly eccentric over the years, he was given a job as doorkeeper in the Kansas house of representatives but was later determined to be insane. Committed to an asylum, he escaped, turned up briefly at a friend's house, then disappeared without a further trace.
George Armstrong Custer Had it not been for his later exploits, the name Custer might have been forgotten or relegated to a Civil War footnote as a rather vain and eccentric cavalry commander. Graduating at the bottom of his West Point class of 1861, Custer joined the cavalry, serving under McClellan. At Gettysburg, wearing a lavish uniform of his own design, he helped defeat Jeb Stuart, although he had actually ignored orders in doing so. At the Grand Review, Custer was notable for “losing control” of his horse and riding past the reviewing stand twice. Remaining in the army after the war, he rose to lieutenant colonel of the Seventh Cavalry and met his grim fate at Little Big Horn on the nation's centennial in 1876. (His younger brother, Thomas Custer, the only soldier to win two Congressional Medals of Honor during the war, joined his brother's regiment and also died at Little Big Horn.)
Jefferson Davis After a period of exile in Canada, the impoverished former president finally accepted a job with an insurance company. On Christmas Day, 1868, President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation of general amnesty for the Confederate leaders. Contentious and unapologetic, Davis spent years compiling his version of events. In The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), he refought the war, castigating officers like Beauregard and Johnston for the Confederacy's defeat. He lived out his remaining years in Mississippi, never seeking the restoration of his citizenship. (It was finally restored by President Jimmy Carter.)
Abner Doubleday One of the oldest American myths has been Doubleday's supposed invention of baseball. A West Pointer who fired the first Union shots at Fort Sumter, Doubleday served through much of the war but was eventually removed from command. Born in Ballston Spa, in upstate New York, he had organized baseball games at nearby Cooperstown, leading to the notion that credited him with devising the baseball diamond and basic rules while a student at West Point. This led to the decision to place the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, where Doubleday Field was named in his honor. (The design of the baseball diamond has since been attributed to Alexander J. Cartwright of New York City's Knickerbocker Baseball Club.) Doubleday wrote three books about the war, and his descendants founded the publishing company of Doubleday.
Frederick Douglass One of the most influential men of his century, Douglass rose from slavery to become a counselor to presidents. Having worked hard to raise regiments of black soldiers and then to ensure their equal treatment, he remained loyal to Grant after the war. He was given a number of government posts, culminating with an appointment as minister to Haiti. Following the death of his wife, he stirred more controversy with his marriage to a white woman, a longtime supporter. In response, the uncompromising Douglass said, “My first wife was the color of my mother. My second wife is the color of my father.”
Sarah Edmonds Another of the many women who fought in disguise, Edmonds was an expert at disguises and became a Union spy. Before the war, she had disguised herself as a boy and then a man to obtain work. Having deserted to protect her secret, she revealed her true identity after the war in an attempt to clear the desertion charges and gain a pension.
John T. Ford Arrested in the aftermath of Lincoln's death, the owner of Ford's Theatre was jailed for twenty-nine days. The government threatened to confiscate the theater, which he then sold for $10,000. A year before his death in 1894, Ford learned of another tragedy in the theater bearing his name: a wall collapsed, killing twenty-eight War Department workers.
John Charles Frémont Few men have risen so high to fall so fast and far. Famous before the war as the great explorer of the West, Frémont was the first presidential candidate of the Republican party. The son-in-law of a powerful senator, he later lost his Civil War command for disobeying Lincoln over the emancipation of slaves in his military area. He briefly challenged the president in 1864 but gave up the race. In a postwar railroading career, “the Pathfinder” lost a fortune and, tainted by charges of corruption, died poor and powerless.
James A. Garfield Having served in the defense of Chattanooga alongside George H. Thomas—“the Rock of Chickamauga”—Garfield resigned his commission to take a seat in Congress from Ohio. During his years in the House, he sat on the commission that awarded the disputed election of 1876 to Rutherford B. Hayes. Elected president in 1880, Garfield was shot by a disgruntled office seeker in July 1881 but lingered until his death in September.
William Lloyd Garrison With the outbreak of the Civil War, Garrison had predicted the victory of the North and the end of slavery, and he ceased to advocate disunion. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation removed the last difference between the two men, and Lincoln paid public tribute to Garrison's long and uncompromising struggle to abolish slavery. In 1865 Garrison discontinued the Liberator and advocated dissolving the antislavery societies. He then became prominent in reform campaigns to achieve suffrage for American women and justice for American Indians; to establish Prohibition and eliminate the consumption of tobacco in the United States; and to promote free trade and abolish customhouses on a world scale. He died in New York on May 24, 1879.
Ulysses S. Grant Having negotiated the postwar intrigues of Washington, D.C., Grant was nominated by the Republicans for president and won a close election in 1868, his margin of victory supplied by 300,000 black votes. His two terms were plagued by economic catastrophes, including a stock market crash, created by manipulators who hoodwinked Grant, and widespread corruption culminating in the Credit Mobilier scandal that rocked Congress. His failure as a businessman, including the demise of a brokerage firm, Grant & Ward, left him nearly bankrupt, and it was only the publication of his successful Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, dictated while he was dying of throat cancer, that kept his family afloat. Grant finally succumbed to the cancer at Mount McGregor, near Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York in July 1885.
Horace Greeley The influential editor of the New York Tribune took a gentle approach to Reconstruction, earning him the anger of the Republican party. He went so far as to sign Jefferson Davis's bail bond because he believed that the Confederate president's long imprisonment was a violation of Davis's constitutional rights. In 1870 Greeley, the great prophet of western expansion and exploration, founded a town in northern Colorado as a farm cooperative and temperance colony, which was later named for him. Disenchanted with the corruption of Grant's administration, he ran for president in 1872 and was endorsed by the Democrats but lost to Grant. Having lost his newspaper, the election, and his wife, he died three weeks after the election in New York, on November 29, 1872.
Winfield Scott Hancock Named for America's top military hero, Hancock became a hero himself, particularly in his performance at Gettysburg. Unlike Grant, he was unable to translate his wartime heroics into political victory, and he lost a close election in 1880 to James Garfield.
Benjamin Harrison A lawyer and politician in Indiana before the war, he served with Sherman in the March to the Sea and reentered politics after the war. In 1888 he became one of six Union officers to win the presidency.
Rutherford B. Hayes Born in Ohio, this future president rose to brevet general of volunteers. He served in Congress and then as Ohio's governor before he launched a presidential run in 1876. In the most controversial election in U.S. history, Hayes lost the general election to Samuel Tilden, but a special commission gave him the election after promises to remove federal troops from the South were made to southern legislators in exchange for their switching electoral votes to Hayes. He served a single term but had little support from his own party because of his deal with the southern Democrats.
James Butler Hickock Born in Illinois, Hickock moved to the Kansas Territory as a teenager and was elected a constable at age nineteen. After serving as a stagecoach driver, he became a Union scout during the war, later claiming to have killed fifty Confederates with fifty shots from his special rifle. After the war, he was appointed a deputy marshal in Kansas and fought in several of the major Indian battles. In 1869 he became marshal of Hays, Kansas, and for a brief period in 1871 he was marshal of Abilene, becoming famous as Wild Bill Hickock while touring the country with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. He was shot and killed in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in 1876.
Joseph Eggleston Johnston Along with Beauregard, with whom he commanded at 1st Bull Run, Johnston was the Confederate general who was most at odds with President Davis. Their acrimonious relationship, which began with petty considerations over rank and military etiquette, ended when Johnston was criticized by Davis for his tactics in trying to defend Atlanta from Sherman's advance. Relieved at Atlanta, Johnston was later recalled while Sherman marched through the South, but the Confederacy's military situation was by then hopeless. After the war, Johnston wrote his Narrative of Military Operations During the Civil War (1874), a highly critical account of Davis's handling of the Confederate military as well as other Confederate generals. He represented his native Virginia in the House of Representatives and was then appointed commissioner of Railroads by President Grover Cleveland. While serving as an honorary pallbearer at the funeral services of his wartime rival Sherman, Johnston removed his hat, as other mourners did. Advised to put it back on to avoid the chill, he said, “If I were in his place and he standing here in mine he would not put on his hat.” He caught pneumonia and died a few weeks later.
Robert E. Lee Poor and homeless in the war's aftermath, the great Confederate commander also suffered from a serious heart condition. Declining the offers of businessmen who wanted to capitalize on his name, Lee chose to take a position at tiny Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. At the time, he said, “I have a self-imposed task which I must accomplish. I have led the young men of the South in battle. I have seen them die in the field; I shall devote my remaining energies to training young men to do their duty in life.” As the most popular figure in the Confederacy, Lee was supposedly sought to lead the Klan but declined; while he was a visible supporter of a submissive approach to the new political realities, some historians have argued that his views on the Klan were ambiguous. Avoiding any public posture, Lee focused his energy on building the college (later renamed Washington and Lee). In the spring of 1870 Lee made his only tour of the postwar South, received everywhere he went by adoring crowds, who had elevated him to the heroic pantheon alongside George Washington. Four months later he died; his supposed last words, “Strike the tent,” are probably part of the myth built around him. Although Lee had signed the oath of allegiance necessary for the restoration of citizenship, in 1865, it was never officially recorded. Secretary of State Seward had given Lee's document to a friend as a souvenir. After the discovery of the missing oath in 1970, Lee's citizenship was finally restored by an act of Congress in 1975.
Mary Todd Lincoln Few figures of the Civil War era are more tragic than Lincoln's wife. The daughter of a wealthy Kentucky family, she was devoted to her husband during his life and had to survive the political insults hurled at him. She had created a few problems for Lincoln with her intemperate spending as first lady. In serious financial trouble after his death, she was forced to sell furniture and jewels. The death of her third son, Tad, in 1871 from tuberculosis sent her into a serious decline. Mary Lincoln's surviving son, Robert Todd, had her committed to an asylum after a humiliating arrest and public hearing in 1875. She won her release and spent her last years in the home of her sister, wearing black, until her death in 1882.
Robert Todd Lincoln Never close to his father, the only surviving son of Abraham Lincoln became the keeper of the Lincoln myth, supervising the publication of all his father's papers and official biographies. He was ruthless toward his mother, his attempts to have her judged insane apparently motivated by greed. Although he failed to become a major power broker in Republican politics, he did be come secretary of war under President Garfield, and there were often murmurings of a Robert Lincoln candidacy for president. In 1889 he became ambassador to England under President Benjamin Harrison and later became one of America's wealthiest men as president of the Pullman Car Company, which manufactured almost all the railroad cars in America. Curiously, he witnessed two other presidential assassinations, being present at the shootings of both Garfield and McKinley. He died in Vermont at his estate, Hildene, in 1926.
Arthur MacArthur, Jr. Born in Massachusetts, this future general joined the 24th Wisconsin at age seventeen, becoming its adjutant. He saw action at Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. The father of General Douglas MacArthur, of World War II fame, he earned the Medal of Honor for his heroism at Missionary Ridge, an award later given to his son; they are the only father-son winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
George B. McClellan Broken by his failure early in the war, the man called Young Napoleon challenged Lincoln as a Democrat in 1864 but was done in by the improving fortunes of the Union armies. He later served as New Jersey's governor and died in 1885.
William McKinley Born in Ohio, McKinley served throughout the war, fighting at South Mountain, Antietam, and in Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley campaign. After his discharge, he went into law and politics, backing his comrade in arms Rutherford B. Hayes, who became president. In 1896 McKinley was elected president, the last of six Union officers to reach the White House, but was assassinated in 1901, elevating Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. Roosevelt was the nephew of James D. Bulloch, who had purchased many of the Confederate commerce raiders used against the Union blockade.
John Singleton Mosby One of the most skillful Confederate partisan fighters, this young lawyer opted not to surrender his command at the end of the war. He simply disbanded the unit and let its members make their own peace. Only thirty-one years old, Mosby reopened his law practice in Virginia, the heart of the territory in which his rangers had operated during the war. Despite his efforts in the war, Mosby earned the enmity of many Southerners when he became a scalawag, supporting Ulysses S. Grant for the White House. Though he was ostracized, Mosby and Grant became friends. In the summer of 1878, Mosby accepted an appointment as consul to Hong Kong, where he discovered corruption and embezzlement of government funds in the Asian consulate. His investigation brought on reform in the Far East region foreign service. When Mosby was replaced in 1885, he found that Grant, on the day before his death, had secured him a job with the Southern Pacific Railroad in San Francisco.
In California, Mosby became friends with a young boy named George S. Patton, with whom he would ride while relating Civil War stories. In 1897 he lost an eye and sustained a fractured skull when kicked by a horse. Four years later he lost his job with the railroad, and President McKinley found him a job with the Department of the Interior, enforcing federal fencing laws in Omaha. Mosby was as relentless in his job as he had been in the war, and local politicians had him recalled. He was sent to Alabama to chase trespassers on government-owned land before taking a job in the Justice Department, a post he kept until 1910. He died in Washington on Memorial Day, 1916.
Allan Pinkerton During the Maryland campaign, Pinkerton continued to serve McClellan; after the Battle of Antietam, he posed for a photograph with his two former colleagues from the Illinois Central, Lincoln and McClellan. But when his chief was removed from command, Pinkerton returned to his agency in Chicago and confined his military work to investigating frauds in the army supply departments and among government contractors. After the war, he continued to build his agency and became associated with the interests of “big money.” He was hated in much of the South for his role in the killing of Jesse James's eight-year-old half brother and the wounding of his mother in a bombing of the family home. His actions against the Younger Brothers did not help his reputation in the region. In the North, he was hated by the labor movement for his union-busting activities and support of the railroads and major industrial corporations. His nickname, “the Eye,” eventually came to identify all members of his profession.
Henry Riggs Rathbone The young officer who was with Lincoln at his assassination later married his fiancée, Miss Harris. Appointed a diplomat by Grover Cleveland, Rathbone went to Germany with his family but became mentally ill and murdered his wife. He was committed to a German insane asylum and died there in 1911.
William Henry Seward One of those targeted in the plot to kill Lincoln, Seward was attacked by Lewis Powell, who seriously wounded the secretary of state. Although he was very nearly president, Seward thought he could control Lincoln behind the scenes, but Lincoln soon mastered him. Seward's name might well be forgotten if not for his most notable postwar achievement, known then as Seward's Folly: In 1867 he purchased Alaska from Russia. Seward served out his Cabinet post during Johnson's term, then retired from public life.
Philip H. Sheridan One of Grant's most important lieutenants, Sheridan was long detested for his destruction of the Shenandoah Valley. He headed the Reconstruction government in Louisiana and Texas and was later involved in the creation of Yellowstone Park.
William T. Sherman After the devastating March to the Sea, Sherman's name acquired a kind of infamy. Once nearly declared insane and having contemplated suicide at a low point in the war, Sherman was one of the greatest Union heroes. Uncompromising in war, he got into political hot water when the terms of surrender he offered to a Confederate general were considered too lenient, the beginning of a bitter feud with Washington's politicians. After the war, he replaced Grant as commander of the army and was a sought-after candidate who disdained politics and politicians, perhaps because of his run-ins with them during the war. His famous response to one invitation to run, often misquoted, was, “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.” His other famous attribution, “War is Hell,” has also never been documented, but Sherman said that he had said it many times before, during, and after the war. He published his memoirs, which were nearly as successful as Grant's. He died in 1891.
Henry Morton Stanley Born John Rowlands in Wales, he came to America as a cabin boy and adopted the name of a New Orleans benefactor. While in training as a plantation manager, he joined the “Dixie Gays” in 1861 and fought at Shiloh with an ancient musket until he was captured. A Union officer released him after he took an oath of allegiance. He was then sent to join a Union artillery unit but fell sick and was discharged. After a trip to Cuba in search of his adopted father, who had died, Stanley returned to New York and enlisted in the Union navy, from which he later deserted. After the war, he became a journalist and African explorer famed for his trek to locate the British physician whom he discovered on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and greeted, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
Edwin Stanton After the battle with President Johnson over the Tenure of Office Act, Stanton left the Cabinet he had served so ably as war secretary. Grant named him to the Supreme Court, but he died before being sworn in.
Alexander Stephens The Confederate vice-president, a ninety-pound thorn in Jefferson Davis's side throughout the war, was jailed briefly. He was returned to the Senate but denied his seat. One of his lasting contributions was to write a highly successful book, in which he gave the Civil War the name most Southerners used for generations, A Constitutional View of the War Between the States. He later returned to the House and was governor of Georgia when he died in 1883.
Sojourner Truth The outspoken evangelist who was a pioneer of both abolition and women's rights, Truth advocated a “black State” in the West. A celebrated lecturer despite being illiterate, she had a charismatic style that drew large crowds until she gave up speaking tours in 1875.
Harriet Tubman The onetime slave who had returned to the Confederacy repeatedly to bring out hundreds of other slaves, including her own parents, served as a cook, nurse, laundress, spy, and scout during the war, operating on the South Carolina coast. After the war, she maintained a home for aged freedmen in Auburn, New York, until her death in 1913.
Lew Wallace After a somewhat mixed military performance during the war, General Wallace's greatest claim to fame might have been that he presided over the trials of the Lincoln conspirators and Henry Wirz, the Andersonville prison camp superintendent. Wirz was tried by a military court, convicted, and hanged, the only Confederate officer to be executed after the war. Wallace turned to writing fiction after his military days and is famous as the author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century and the source of two films.
Gideon Welles Along with Seward the only Cabinet member to serve through both of Lincoln's terms, Welles was a journalist in Connecticut before the war. Having served in the Navy Department, he was given the assignment of building a navy that could sustain the blockade, a mammoth effort he carried out with remarkable efficiency. After Lincoln's death, he became outspoken in his defense of Lincoln, contradicting a view that Seward had held the power and made the decisions.
Joseph Wheeler Having survived the war and vainly battled Sherman during the March to the Sea, this Georgia-born West Pointer was captured and held in prison after the war. He later served in Congress, and when the war with Spain broke out, he rejoined the federal army as a general of volunteers; occasionally he would forgetfully urge his troops to fight the Yankees. This service entitled him to be buried in Arlington, one of few Confederate soldiers so honored.