The Dogs of War: 1861

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The Dogs of War 1861

The Dogs of War

1861 EMORY M. THOMAS

1

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2011 by Emory M. Thomas Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas, Emory M., 1939– The dogs of war : 1861 / Emory M. Thomas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-517470-0 1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Causes. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Public opinion. 3. Public opinion—United States—History—19th century. 4. Public opinion—Confederate States of America. 5. Sectionalism (United States)—History—19th century. 6. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Political and social views. 7. Davis, Jefferson, 1808–1869—Political and social views. I. Title. E471.T56 2011 973.7′11—dc22 2010042959

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For some Thomases Frances Taliaferro Emory Morton, Jr. John Taliaferro Samuel Taliaferro

Emily Anne Marshall Emory

Laura Leonardy Julia Marlene

Janice Marie

Contents Preface . . . ix

1 The Martial Moment, 1861 . . . 1

2 War Dogs: 1861 and After . . . 21

3 Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of War . . . 37

4 Jefferson Davis and the Coming of War . . . 57

5 Chum: First Blood at First Bull Run . . . 69

Conclusion: Resonance . . . 89 Notes . . . 93 Index . . . 103

Preface product of reflecting upon the compelling drama surrounding the onset of the American Civil War. This is also a short book, a nonfiction novella, Clio laconic. I focus upon the critical events from the election of Abraham Lincoln to the opening battle at Bull Run/Manassas. Here is “revisionist history” in the sense that I ask new questions of essentially well-known facts. It should come as no surprise that new questions provoke new answers. But my principal conclusion is yet another question: What were they thinking? I know and insist here that issues about slavery and race inspired secessions among Southern states. Anyone who still doubts this truth should read Charles B. Dew’s Apostles of Disunion. I contend here that the Civil War happened because nearly no one had a clue about what they were doing. Public and private discourse was loud and long and wrong about what might happen if war broke out. Americans on both sides of the Potomac and Ohio rivers seemed convinced that no war would occur, or that if secession indeed led to conflict, one battle or campaign would ensure victory for “our” side. Some people, mostly in the South, seemed to embrace war as an apocalyptic answer to the sectional quandary. Some people, principally in the North, believed that war would be “good for us.” But most people seemed to believe that war would never happen, or if it THIS IS A

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did, that the worthless cowards on the other side would not fight. Americans with military training and experience for the most part understood what a long and costly war might ensue. But people who made the decisions in the “martial moment” either did not consult those who knew or did not heed their counsel. As a result, Americans were especially vulnerable to “unintended consequences,” so much so that I nominate this species of mishap for inclusion in the military lexicon as a corollary to Murphy’s law. Abraham Lincoln was born in the border South and married into a Southern family. Nevertheless, Lincoln was a long time learning that the majority of white Southerners were willing and able to risk their lives for the Confederacy. I suggest that Lincoln’s failure to understand Southerners influenced public policy during the war and even the policy of Reconstruction. Jefferson Davis was rare among political leaders in his grasp of what was happening. Davis likely knew that he was following a course that would lead to war, and that war would be long and bloody. But he did what he did because he seemed to believe that duty and honor required him to do so. And he believed that in the long term he would win. The first full-scale battle, First Manassas or First Bull Run, developed from many efforts at grand strategy. Combat was fierce and chaotic. The order that most influenced the outcome was “Go to the sound of the firing.” And the side that won that battle lost the war. All of this resonates in the twenty-first century. Of course other learned people have thought and written about this period and these events. I am especially grateful for the

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work and works of Steve Berry, Bill Cooper, Jack Davis, Harold Holzer, Maury Klein, Charles Dew, Kerry Trask, Steve Woodworth (with the late Warren Wilkinson), Jim McPherson, Raimondo Luraghi, David Detzer, Nelson Lankford, William W. Freehling, Chris Phillips, and John M. McCardell Jr. As ever, I thank Frances Taliaferro Thomas, still the first wife, for her friendship and support. She even broke her promise to herself and typed some of this manuscript. At Oxford University Press, my new best friends rendered potential tedium fun. Tim Bent offered indulgence, counsel, and encouragement. Tim’s assistant, Mally Anderson, was very helpful. And Joellyn Ausanka reversed roles, becoming a reader who took pains to save the writer pain.

The Dogs of War 1861

Chapter One Th e

Martial Moment, 1861

What king going out to wage war against another king will not sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. —LUKE 14:31–32

when it did as it did at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, because James Chesnut ordered it so. On April 12, 1861, Chesnut was senior aide to Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard and empowered to decide between peace and war. Chesnut, now best known as the husband of Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, was then forty-six years old and until recently had been a United States senator from South Carolina. He had himself rowed out to Fort Sumter during the afternoon of April 11 to deliver to Major Robert

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Anderson, who commanded the small garrison of Federal troops on the island fort, the demand from Beauregard to surrender. Beauregard promised to transport Anderson and his men “to any post in the United States which you may select” and to permit Anderson to salute his flag “on taking it down.” Anderson termed Beauregard’s terms “fair, manly, and courteous” but declined to comply. Honor and orders compelled him to remain at his post. Then, as Chesnut prepared to carry this written refusal back to Beauregard, Anderson offered a verbal observation that he would have been “starved out” within a few days and thus compelled to evacuate Fort Sumter. Chesnut pondered these words and passed them on to Beauregard, who in turn relayed Anderson’s observation to the Confederate government in Montgomery. Maybe peace was possible, or at least war did not have to commence there and then. Messages moved by telegraph to Montgomery, then back to Charleston, and at 1:00 am on April 12, Chesnut and his entourage rowed again to Fort Sumter. When, Chesnut inquired, would Anderson consider himself “starved out”? Anderson answered that he would have to give that question serious thought and convened with his staff in a gun casemate to frame a response. The Federal officers deliberated for two hours, then returned to Chesnut, to whom Anderson handed over his written reply—he would evacuate Fort Sumter at noon on April 15, if nothing hostile happened before that time.1 ♦♦♦

Chesnut was not the cleverest of people, but he realized immediately that Anderson was simply delaying the inevitable. Anderson knew that his resupply was en route, indeed overdue already. So

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within five minutes Chesnut had dictated his fateful message. At 3:20 am he had the honor to inform Anderson that Beauregard would “open the fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time.” As it happened, the Confederates were ten minutes late. At 4:30 am a ten-inch mortar at Fort Johnson on James Island lofted a signal shell toward the island fort. The missile exploded roughly 100 feet above the fort—a “capital shot.” War had begun. It all seemed so rational. The United States and the Confederate States had policies. The Confederacy could not permit what it had designated as a foreign fort to control access to one of its principal ports; the United States could not surrender federal property to a government that it did not recognize as legally existing. Both wanted some end to the limbo that the secession crisis had generated. So presidents and cabinet secretaries and generals issued orders, and subordinates had to obey them. Anderson and Chesnut were pawns in a monstrous game of chess. When Chesnut chose war, he really believed that he had no option, and very few people in North America at the time would have disagreed with him. The war that Chesnut began had been coming for a long time. Enmity between North and South was profound as well as prolonged. At issue were radically different visions of good and evil, right and wrong. I have said in print about the Southern “cause”: The Southern cause was the transcendent extension of the Southern life style: the cause was ideology. In this context “ideology” is not synonymous with “dogma” or

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“doctrine.” Rather, Southern ideology was a belief system, a value system, a world view, or Weltanschauung. It was the result of a secular transubstantiation in which the common elements in Southern life became sanctified in the Southern mind. The South’s ideological cause was more than the sum of its parts, more than the material circumstances and conditions from which it sprang. In the Confederate South the cause was ultimately an affair of the viscera.2 Certainly slavery and race provoked Southern secession. Those white Southerners who “sold” disunion and the Southern voters and members of what became secession conventions believed that union with the United States and the “black Republican” administration of Abraham Lincoln would soon doom slavery and as a consequence the “way of life” based upon racial subordination.3 About the Northern commitment I have written: The Union was an important abstraction in the American mind. It was the vehicle in which reformers could do good, the only means of eradicating slavery. It was the best hope of liberal democracy in the world. It was the setting for economic enterprise. It was the sine qua non of the American world-view. If the Union fails, then George III will have the last laugh. No one said these things, at least not in these words. They did not have to. Americans in 1861 acted out their success to a perception of reality which seemed to them self-evident.4


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These conflicting visions of the world lay at the base of the conflict that produced the war. But the world has always been full of peoples who profess ideological conflict with other peoples. Sometimes they go to war with each other; most times they choose to live in peace, albeit often an uneasy one. The important question about Northern and Southern Americans in 1861, therefore, is why they elected to fight. What drove them past posing, posturing, and politics into armed conflict? Historian David M. Potter once spoke to this question with uncommon insight: Historians try to be rational beings and tend to write about history as if it were a rational process. Accordingly, they number the alternatives, and talk about choices and decisions, and equate decisions with what the decisions led to. But if we examine the record of modern wars, it would seem that the way people get into a war is seldom by choosing it; usually it is by choosing a course that leads to it—which is a different thing altogether.5 About the Republicans in Washington in 1861, Potter suggested: When they took the steps that led them into a war, they did so not because they had decisively chosen the road to Appomattox or even the road to Manassas, in preference to the other paths; instead they did so precisely because they could not grasp the fearfully

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decisive consequences of the rather indecisive line of action which they followed in the months preceding their fateful rendezvous.6 He might have stated much the same thing about the Confederates in Montgomery. Both sides, it seems, decided to go to war because they could not—or would not—calculate the cost of their decisions. Given this, it is well worth asking why and how Americans plunged themselves into so catastrophic a conflict. Why did it seem so rational and right during those crucial days in April and May 1861 for governments to commit themselves to war, and for peoples on both sides to volunteer to do the fighting for them? More than rationality was at work. Several sorts of fantasy seemed to preoccupy the potential belligerents and incline them toward war. Among the speeches, sermons, editorials, and other forms of discourse, public and private, was an enormous amount of nonsense pretending to truth. The war occurred because leaders and people on both sides made assumptions—tragically erroneous ones—that the conflict would be short, simple, and decisive. This was the major chord one hears when listening to the discourse that inclined toward war. There are at least two minor chords as well. Some people, principally in the South, seemed to subscribe to an apocalyptic vision: better to resolve the issues with a bang rather than with a whimper. Others, principally in the North, seemed to believe that war would produce a cathartic effect, would be “good for us.”


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At one level, the American Civil War is a huge morality tale. It is a “good war,” fought to abolish slavery, affirm industrial capitalism, and establish national sovereignty in “we the people” (as opposed to “we the states”). At another level, however, the American Civil War offers a set of lessons about assumptions, actions, and consequences—erroneous assumptions, rash actions, and unintended consequences. A “martial moment” is that increment of time when nations, peoples, groups, or individuals decide to stop negotiating, posturing, or posing and commit to physical force. The resort to violence may occur in a literal moment; it may take longer. If war is the extension of politics by other means (armed force), then the decision to fight may be as simple as calling the bluff of a schoolyard bully or as complicated as attempting to locate national interest within a set of tangling alliances. However they happen, martial moments are worthy of analysis and understanding. The first paper I wrote in graduate school, half a century ago, concerned the “repressible conflict” school of Civil War revisionism. In the 1950s and 1960s historians and others argued that the war was the result of fanatics—white “fire-eaters” in the South and abolitionists in the North. Committed ideologues stirred otherwise peaceable Americans into frenzy. Instead of slavery, the war was about propaganda. I do not intend to reinvigorate this interpretation, which collapsed under the weight of all manner of sectional, logical, and ideological baggage.7 What I do propose is a fresh look at an old story. When we reflect upon the confrontation at Fort Sumter, it becomes impossible not to conclude that the belligerents were absurdly

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ignorant of the cost of combat. We know why Southerners seceded from the United States—slavery and race. But secession did not necessarily provoke war. To understand why the American Civil War happened, we’re forced to resort to descriptors such as “rash,” “imprudent,” “heedless,” and “foolish.” Within the rhetoric of the martial moment was an astonishing amount of downright stupidity. Let’s begin with Gone with the Wind. An early scene in the novel and the film based upon Margaret Mitchell’s work features “war talk” among hot-blooded Southern males, and one of a series of belligerent boasts is the assertion that a single Southerner can lick twenty Yankees. Scarlett O’Hara pronounces such rhetoric “silly,” and hindsight both in the novel and in reality affirms this judgment. But James Chesnut made precisely the same assertion, assuring his wife that Confederate troops could trounce twice their number of Unionists. A Confederate soldier, having just seen 3,000 of his comrades muster, wrote, “It appeared to me that we could whip the whole . . . forces of the North.” At the time Union volunteers numbered 310,000, a 100-to-1 ratio.8 In Ellen Glasgow’s novel The Battle-Ground (1902), Champe, a young college student, rushes home to volunteer for the fight. Discussion ensues about how much underwear Champe should take with him. His uncle, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, brushes aside concerns that Champe might “run short of things.” “It’s going to be a two weeks’ war, and you shall take an outfit for two weeks, or stay at home! By God, sir, if you contradict me again I’ll not let you go to fight the Yankees.” In the face of this authoritative confidence, Champe relents: “It’s to be a war of two


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weeks, and I’ll come home a Major-general.” A sample of contemporary pundits reveals that most thought the war would be only slightly longer.9 Among Northern newspapers the New York Tribune predicted the conquest of Richmond within “a fortnight” and of Raleigh by August 1, three and a half months after Sumter. Editor Horace Greeley insisted, “Jeff Davis & Co. will be swinging from the battlements at Washington at least by the 4th of July.” The New Haven Daily Palladium predicted victory in six months, the Chicago Tribune said two or three months, and the New York Times projected thirty days.10 Confederate Southerners were similarly sanguine. A woman in Richmond heard a speaker predict that in less than sixty days the Confederate flag would fly over the White House in Washington. The Confederate secretary of war, Leroy Pope Walker, asserted that his flag would fly over the dome of the Capitol in Washington “before the first of May.” South Carolinian politician James Henry Hammond wrote William Gilmore Simms in July 1861 that Confederates would capture the White House “before Christmas.”11 Perhaps anticipating Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, in which a bloodstained bandage becomes an emblem of honor, would-be combatants debated how much blood the war, if it came, might require. In Charleston an Episcopal priest encountered James Chesnut and exclaimed, “These are troublous times, Colonel; we are at the beginning of a terrible war.” “Not at all,” protested Chesnut, “there will be no war, it will be all arranged. I will drink all the blood shed in the war.” Secretary Walker was equally convinced of the bloodless prospect of founding the new

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nation. He insisted that one handkerchief would soak up all the blood spilled in any war that might come.12 One reason Chesnut and Walker were so dramatically wrong about the amount of blood spilled was the nature of the principal weapon combatants employed. In previous wars Americans had fought with muskets, which fired a round ball of lead from a smooth bore. Muskets were accurate and lethal only at less than 100 yards. During the Civil War soldiers fought with rifles, which fired a conically shaped piece of lead from a rifled bore. Spiraled grooves inside the barrel extended range and accuracy to 300–500 yards. Artillery, too, during the Civil War fired explosive shells from rifled tubes, rendering gunners more accurate at greater range. However, infantry rifles, like artillery pieces, were single-shot weapons requiring twenty to thirty seconds to reload. Consequently, soldiers still had to go into battle in dense formations, so that one soldier might fire at the enemy while his comrades were reloading. Dense formations did generate considerable firepower. Yet they generated splendid targets as well. Efficient weapons and massed enemies created enormous casualties in this impending conflict.13 Few if any realized the impact of rifles during the first half of 1861. Even so, the weapons that various combatants planned to use seemed absurd. A visitor in Richmond reported that residents were stockpiling rocks in upper-story rooms along Main Street, proposing to hurl these rocks at any Federal troops who reached downtown Richmond. Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia purchased 7,099 pikes, six-foot-long poles with knives attached, with which to arm troops from his state. A pike, Brown insisted, “never fails to fire, and never wastes a single load.” The


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editor of one of the Confederacy’s most influential newspapers wrote in 1861, “No people on the face of the earth are so much to be feared in hand-to-hand conflict . . . [with] bayonet, small sword, or bowie knife as the defenders of the flag of the Confederacy.” Within a year of writing this boast, the editor, Obadiah Jennings Wise, had marched to war and been killed—perhaps attacking Union artillery with his small sword.14 The editor’s father, Henry A. Wise, former governor and future Confederate general, reportedly declared, “Let brave men advance with flint locks and old-fashioned bayonets, on the popinjays of the Northern cities.” He would, Wise said, “answer for it with his life, that the Yankees would break and run.”15 Another weapon that Southerners believed might be immediately decisive in this war was weather. In late April 1861, the publisher of the New Bern Republican wrote North Carolina governor John W. Ellis from Washington, “The hot season is approaching, and a summer[’]s sun in the South is not agreeable to Northern Constitutions. At the end of three months, the furor in the Northern States will have subsided, and these men cannot be persuaded to enlist again.” In Georgia, delegate Henry L. Benning asserted at what became the secession convention, “Our very climate is a terror to men of northern climate. . . . Who would volunteer for the glory of dying of black vomit?” Even Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who certainly should have known better, wrote his friend Leonidas Polk, then Episcopal bishop of Louisiana and later a Confederate general, “The people of the northwestern States have so great a dread of our climate that they could not be prevailed on to march against us.”16

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T. S. Eliot concludes “The Hollow Men” with the lines “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” Some involved in the origins of this war seemed resigned to the end of their world but were at least determined to reverse Eliot’s order. They elected to go down in flames in some apocalyptic cataclysm rather than to wither into passivity. At the very least they employed apocalyptic rhetoric to underscore what they felt was at stake in this conflict. William L. Harris of Mississippi pleaded before the secession convention of Georgia that Mississippi “had rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pile, than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race.” Louisiana senator Judah Benjamin, future Confederate cabinet member, told the United States Senate on New Year’s Eve 1860 that the North might “carry desolation into our peaceful land, and with torch and fire you may set our cities in flames . . . but you never can subjugate us; you never can convert the free sons of the soil into vassals, paying tribute to your power; and you never, never can degrade them to the level of an inferior and servile race.” Such statements by people in positions of leadership give ample evidence of the determination to destroy the Old South rather than compromise. As Raimondo Luraghi, the great Italian historian of the Civil War, has written, most members of the leadership class in the South knew their society was doomed. They could only choose “the best way to die.”17 Somewhat akin to the apocalyptic commitment in the Confederacy was the belief in some quarters of the United States that war, should it come, would be “good for us.” Representative of this cathartic conviction is an editorial from the Springfield,


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Massachusetts, Daily Republican on April 20, 1861, written a week after the firing on Fort Sumter: The greatest curse that can befal[l] a country is a peace that fosters corruption. It is pure water that rolls over Niagara; it is bad water that sleeps in the Dead Sea. . . . It is in motion—collision—combat—that power finds development and piety purification. . . . The government has become so corrupt as to fall to pieces of its own rotten weight. . . . Thank God! this is all changed. The Christian church that had grown sleepy, and had gaped in its prayers, has found something to pray for, and is praying for it . . . America has a recognized God to-day; and it is very doubtful whether she would have had one if war had not hurried the nation into His presence. Then, after joyful news that “brokers and bankers, and speculators and scriveners—lank-bellies and big-bellies—start from their chairs in Wall street, put on their hats, and rush out into the open air and shout,” the editor concludes the paean for war. “We believe that when this struggle passes by, we shall be a better and stronger nation for it. The medicine is harsh, but who will dare to say that it is not needful? Let it come, then; and may God in his mercy make it the blessing to us which he means it to be!”18 ♦♦♦

What about the “enemies”? Here follows a sample of the rhetoric on both sides about the other side. One editor of an influential newspaper in Richmond pronounced, “The Yankee is afraid of

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guns and horses, because he has not been taught to shoot and ride in boyhood.” The editor, John M. Daniel of the Richmond Examiner, continued his analysis: Cowardice is carefully inculcated on the Yankee from his birth; and if he be not a coward, he must be a fool who won’t take education. But he is no fool; for, whilst he is taught that fighting is unprofitable, and therefore to be avoided, he is instructed, at the same time, that cunning and sharpness and cheating are very creditable and very profitable; and no one learns these latter lessons more readily and rapidly than he. He is born like other people, but becomes a coward and a knave from severe training and careful education. Every day we hear it said and see it written that the people of the North are personally as brave as the people of the South. It is wholly untrue. Daniel served as a volunteer aide on the staff of a Confederate general for a brief period. He remained active as the editor of his newspaper until very near the end of the war. He died in March 1865, having had ample opportunity to realize the error of his pseudo-sociological foolishness.19 Editors and pundits in the North were, if possible, even more vituperative than their Southern counterparts. Readers learned from the Paris, Maine, Oxford Democrat on May 31, 1861: Travel creation over and you can find nothing in savage or civilized life, that for attrocity [sic], moral debasement, and unmitigated total depravity, will for a moment


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compare with the hell-born confederacy at Montgomery. Sodom, Gomorrah, and the “cities of the plain,” in point of morals, would go into the kingdom of heaven before it: and if the christian men of this nation . . . do not wipe it out, there is not an attribute of the Almighty that does not point directly to its complete and final destruction.20 In Detroit readers of the Daily Advertiser learned about Texas: Every horse thief, murderer, gambler, robber, and other rogue of high and low degree, fled to Texas when he found the United States too hot longer to hold him. The pioneers of that State were cut-throats of one kind or another, with some honorable exceptions. Those of them who have escaped hanging or the State prison, and their descendants, are the men who have led the secession movement in that State.21 The Bellefontaine (Ohio) Republican on December 15, 1860, informed readers about the Carolinas: South Carolina was Tory during the revolution. She had no “revolutionary fathers.” She is bastard—politically speaking. Excepting Marion, and Sumpter [sic], with a handfull of followers, there were no friends of Washington in South Carolina, during the times that tried men[’]s souls. . . . The men of the north conquered the State of Carolina during the war of the revolution.

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We may do so again; and will do so, if there can be any evidence produced, that her people are capable of self government, and are worth the trouble of being licked into decency. North Carolina fared even worse in the editor’s analysis: As for North Carolina, it is known that she is the most ignorant and degraded of all the States. In North Carolina in 1850, there were 73,566 white inhabitants over twenty years of age, who could not read and write. . . . And this is one of those States that purpose to dispense with the schoolmaster altogether, rather than hire one from the north! Their politicians object to the north sending books and newspapers amongst their citizens, to enlighten them. They will soon have no cause of fear from that source, for ere long, there will be no body down there, who can read them. They eat mud in North Carolina. . . . The people are like oysters—without brains, but bellies full of mud. It might be supposed that this habit of dirt eating, had rendered them idiotic, if it were not certain, that they must have been idiotic in the first place, or they would never have begun the practice. . . . They are all fully africanized [sic] in intelligence and morals, and are fast becoming so in blood. The Carolinas may go in welcome, so far as we are personally concerned. But we have no doubt it would be good


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policy, after the niggers are done with them, to drive what may remain into the swamps of Florida, as food for al[l]igators.22 The editor in Ohio was not the only pundit to introduce the prospect of racial violence in the seceded South. The New York World on April 30, 1861, raised the specter of slave rebellion and Federal troops as saviors of white Southerners. They cannot convert bales of cotton into food, nor garments, nor munitions of war. . . . Their inability to procure their accustomed supplies of food from the Northwest will cause gaunt famine to stalk over the plantations, and the pains of unappeased hunger will raise wide-spread negro insurrections and their attendant atrocities, without any aid from the abolitionists. The mind recoils horror-struck from the terrible picture which it requires no prophetic hand to paint. The lurid smoke from a hundred thousand blazing human habitations, set on fire in the night time . . . helpless children butchered by an infuriated and hellish black rabble; half-naked women flying in terror from the lurid light of their own dwellings, panting to escape into the friendly protecting darkness, and rescue themselves from a fate worse than ten thousand deaths, are scenes which would promptly reconcile the surviving white population to any government that could save them.23

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Of course, not all Northern and Southern newspapers were so rabid as those here sampled. But this is indeed a sample, and readers of this confident vitriol confirmed whatever negative stereotypes they held. If the war came, many believed, the “enemy” would hardly be a formidable foe. What about the people in positions of leadership? What about Abraham Lincoln and the men who served in his cabinet? How about Jefferson Davis and his cabinet? These were people who should have known better than to embrace illusions that all Yankees were cowards or that all Rebels were oysters. I believe, with some evidence, that Lincoln never could grasp the depth and breadth of secessionist conviction among the mass of white Southerners, nor quite fathom the deference and allegiance plain folk in the South paid to the planter class. He believed that common white folk in the South were very much like the people with whom he had grown up in Indiana and Illinois. As a result of these assumptions, Lincoln did not take seriously support for secession in the South. During the period between his election to the presidency and his inauguration on March 4, 1861, Lincoln was circumspect about his intentions regarding the seceded states. This was not yet his crisis, after all. But he constantly referred to an “artificial crisis,” as though secession were going to go away and the Confederate States of America collapse by the time he took office. Lincoln could never seem to believe that white Southern folk would follow the planters out of the Union or put their lives on the line for a planter-dominated republic. He was wrong again.24 Nevertheless, throughout the war Lincoln seemed convinced that if he could just communicate with Southern white folk, he


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could make them aware that their interests did not lie with the planter aristocracy. The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, for example, applied only to rebels; if loyal Southerners asserted themselves, they could avoid emancipation. Lincoln was eager to proclaim amnesty and once in 1864 authorized a daring cavalry raid in part to deliver his proclamations behind Confederate lines. And at the heart of Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction was the belief that white Southerners now had to realize the failure of the planter leadership and would embrace the Union if given half a chance. If indeed Lincoln did consistently underestimate the commitment of common white Southerners to the Confederate cause, this factor explains why he accepted war. He did not believe that the South would be able to raise and sustain an army. He, like many others, was convinced that Confederate armies would have generals and perhaps colonels, but no soldiers. Jefferson Davis believed that in the worst case, war, Confederate Southerners would prevail. In the beginning Davis hoped to establish a defensive shield along his borders with the United States. Once invading armies from the North confronted determined Confederate troops and realized the challenge involved in subduing the new republic, and saw firsthand that the South was serious about establishing itself, the Union would abandon any quest for conquest. Failing that, Davis fell back upon the strategic heritage of the American Revolution and the experience of the Continental Army. He believed that he could become the new George Washington. The “offensive defense” became his plan. Confederate forces could permit their enemies to penetrate Southern soil, and then—at a time and circumstance of

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their choosing—strike and defeat the Federals. If all else failed, Confederate Southerners would take to the hills and fight on as guerrillas as long as necessary to achieve independence. Like Washington, Davis would husband his resources and keep the faith. Every day the Confederacy survived was a step toward victory. The Confederacy could win by not losing. Davis’s strategy, as it evolved, depended upon winning a war of wills with the United States. Hindsight demonstrated Davis’s failure to grasp the determination of the Lincoln administration and the American people to fight to a successful conclusion. But in the period when his government committed to conflict, he seemed confident that his potential enemy would not display the will to fight necessary to win.25 The dogs of war, once unleashed, go where they will, and warfare usually defies the efforts of either side to control it. Assumptions about quick and painless victories are often facile and rarely accurate. The experience of the American Civil War still offers lessons: War is very serious. Combat begets chaos.

Chapter Two

Wa r Dogs: 1861 and After

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. —SHAKESPEARE, JULIUS CAESAR

to arms quoted above is Marc Antony, alone onstage in act three, addressing the slain Caesar. Antony predicts “domestic fury and fierce civil strife,” and we know that the play concludes on the plains of Philippi with extremely “fierce civil strife,” in the aftermath of which Brutus (“Et tu, Brute?”) loses the battle and falls upon his sword. The speech is an affirmation that wars, civil and otherwise, run amok. They defy attempts to keep them leashed. Professional soldiers understand this discordant truth even while they try to reduce its risks and exert as much control as they are able. During the period when Americans committed themselves to combat in what became a long and bloody struggle, those in power, those

THE SPEAKER OF THE CALL

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who started the war, seemed oblivious to those who might have offered meaningful insights into what would ensue. During the prologue to the Civil War, precious few military “authorities” had the opportunity to offer counsel. Had the political leaders in the United States and Confederate States heeded them, they likely would have heard truth spoken to power. But in a sad and anachronistic anticipation of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” no one asked those who would have to fight this war what might happen once the dogs of war were let slip. One reason for this silence was the assumption that citizens needed no help from presumed professionals in order to fight for their country. Deep within the American psyche lives a “minuteman” tradition, the populist picture of the citizen soldier setting down the plow and seizing a rifle to answer threats to the community or country. Driving off bears or wolves, overwhelming Native Americans, or sniping at redcoats as they marched through the hinterlands, Americans were supposed to be native-born warriors disguised as civilians.1 And Americans inherited from England a fear of standing armies in peacetime. Professional soldiers mean mischief, whether they serve a king or queen or the ambitions of an “imperial” president. Soldiering should simply be common sense applied to a communal cause. During the nineteenth century, the United States did try to professionalize the military, establishing the Military Academy at West Point in 1802 and the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845, and retaining a small army and navy to patrol the frontier and protect American coasts and waterways. West Point became a preeminent engineering school at a time when the nation still needed

War Dogs: 1861 and After

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forts and was committing to developing roads, canals, and railroads. Private military academies and state-sponsored institutions, too, generated a small cadre of professional officers who made careers of military service, one of the so-called hireling professions. When the United States and Confederate States went to war in 1861, these few soldiers and sailors, some of whom had fought in the war with Mexico fourteen years earlier, were the primary authorities on warfare available.2 It is interesting and certainly significant that practically no one in the administrations of either Lincoln or Davis asked these veterans what might happen as Americans veered toward war. Besides the “minuteman” tradition and populist approach to war, a likely reason was the conviction that this crisis would provoke no war. If war should somehow happen, then combat would last only through one battle or campaign, and “our” side surely would win. Since reality did not conform to such fantasies, it is worth asking what the military experts thought about the impending conflict. Here follows a sample of what those soon in command, and those who would later emerge as consequential commanders, believed they confronted in 1861. ♦♦♦

was the commanding general of the United States Army. His corpulent body was infirm, but his mind was still sharp. Scott’s advice to the incoming administration—to seek compromise at a humbling cost, to anticipate a long and bitter war, or to allow the “wayward sisters” to depart in peace—only provoked derision from politicians who thought Scott’s counsel “too political.” When pressed for a plan with which to prosecute

WINFIELD SCOTT

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the war, Scott offered the Anaconda, the naval blockade of the South’s principal ports. He would take advantage of superior numbers and resources and squeeze the rebellion to death. But the mobilization Scott had in mind would cost time and money, and again the politicians objected. Against his much better judgment, Scott presided over the disaster that was the First Battle of Bull Run/Manassas.3 ♦♦♦

was secretary of war in Lincoln’s cabinet. Cameron represented civilian control over the military and was about as “civilian” as possible under these circumstances. He was secretary of war because the president needed a Pennsylvanian in his cabinet and because Cameron had delivered forty-four crucial votes to Lincoln at a critical moment during the Republican nominating convention in Chicago. A printer by trade, Cameron had been a wheeler-dealer in Pennsylvanian politics for most of his sixty-two years. Twice a United States senator, he may have coined the saying “An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought.” Yet Cameron was supposedly among the principal supporters of William H. Seward for the Republican nomination—until he abandoned Seward for Lincoln on the second ballot. One rival described Cameron as “corrupt as a dung hill.” Cameron had wanted to be secretary of the treasury but accepted the presumed lesser position because he could do no better. Very soon he revealed that in addition to integrity, he also lacked administrative competence. By July 1, 1861, the volunteer army had swelled to 310,000 men. But the president had his treasury secretary, SIMON CAMERON


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Salmon P. Chase, assisted by a couple of generals, draw up a table of organization for the new army. Lincoln found Cameron “incapable either of organizing details or conceiving and advising general plans.” One member of Congress described Cameron’s “system” when queried about an issue: “He would look about, find a scrap of paper, borrow your pencil, make a note, put the paper in one pocket of his trousers and your pencil in the other.” Cameron was able to obtain contracts for the purchase of blind horses, weapons that failed to function, and knapsacks made of shoddy (bits of compressed rags) that dissolved when rained upon. The fact that the Lincoln administration included someone so clueless about the war he was supposed to prosecute is a telling index of the degree of seriousness with which it took the coming conflict.4 ♦♦♦ L E R OY P O P E W A L K E R ,

the Confederate secretary of war, was essentially a more honest version of Simon Cameron. Walker had his job because Jefferson Davis needed an Alabamian in his cabinet and because William Lowndes Yancey and Clement C. Clay, two very prominent Alabamians, turned down the job. Yancey recommended Walker, who was forty-four years old, a lawyer from Huntsville, and very active in Alabama politics as a secessionist Democrat. About military affairs Walker knew almost nothing. But this was the man who offered to soak up in a single handkerchief all the blood shed in any war that might transpire. And the conventional wisdom was that President Davis would be his own secretary of war anyway.

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Even before the Confederate government moved the capital from Montgomery to Richmond during the spring of 1861, Walker was in trouble. He and an undersized staff worked hard and constantly but never seemed to accomplish anything. Walker read letters and official paper and then tossed the material onto a chair, where the pile rose to half-bushel proportions. Sometimes Davis had to come in person into Walker’s office and root through the stacks of documents to find one that he needed. Delegation was not among Walker’s talents. Of course Walker had a horde of people who needed to see him. However, the principles of triage seemed beyond his understanding. Consequential visitors waited for days, while folk there on trivial matters interrupted Walker at will. He walked to and from his office by a circuitous route designed to avoid mendicants as much as possible. People in a position to know about Walker’s performance used words like “at best inefficient,” “utterly incompetent,” “feeble,” and “unfit” to describe the secretary. And Davis’s vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, commented, “He’ll do and do and do and at last do nothing.”5 Thus in the beginning neither the Union nor the Confederacy had in place a secretary of war capable of managing a war. Cameron and Walker were creatures of peacetime politics; neither of them expected to encounter anything more hostile than an offyear election. ♦♦♦

probably possessed the best credentials among active American soldiers in 1861. Winfield Scott famously said of

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Lee that he “was the very best soldier I ever saw in the field.” A graduate of West Point (1829), Lee had been an outstanding engineer and had served on Scott’s staff during the Mexican War. He also had commanded the two companies of Marines that stormed the fire engine house at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, captured John Brown, and rescued Brown’s thirteen hostages unharmed. Scott had offered Lee active command of the Union army in April 1861, prompting in part Lee’s agonizing decision to resign from that army and subsequently join the Confederate army. Lee had no illusions about the war he volunteered to fight. He realized what course lay ahead. To his wife, Mary, he wrote, “I take it for granted that our opponents will do us all the harm they can. They feel their power & they seem to have the desire to oppress & distress us. I assume therefore they will do it.” Lee’s son Robert was at that time a student at the University of Virginia and eager to join the army. Lee did not approve. “I wrote to Robert that I could not consent to take boys from their school & young men from their colleges & and put them in the ranks at the beginning of a war when they are not wanted & when there were men enough for the purpose. The war may last 10 years. Where are our ranks to be filled from then?”6 ♦♦♦

was the officer in command at Charleston who fired on Fort Sumter and so became the first Southern “hero.” Called to Richmond to command the principal army defending the Confederate capital, Beauregard offered a “farewell address” to the people of Charleston in late May of 1861. Among other sentiments, he said:

P I E R R E G U S T A V E T O U T A N T B E A U R EG A R D

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Whatever happens at first, we are certain to triumph at last . . . a gallant and free people, fighting for their independence and firesides, are invincible against even disciplined mercenaries, at a few dollars per month. What, then must be the result when its enemies are little more than an armed rabble, gathered hastily on a false pretence, and for an unholy purpose, with an octogenarian [Scott] at its head? None but the demented can doubt the result.7 Beauregard seems to anticipate a struggle like the Revolution, which of course lasted more than six years. What lay ahead was, in his mind, no one-punch fight. ♦♦♦

would soon succeed Winfield Scott as military “savior of the Union.” McClellan had attended West Point, served in the Mexican War, and observed the Crimean War. He resigned from the army to manage a railroad in Ohio. When war broke out, McClellan returned to the military and conducted successful campaigns in western (now West) Virginia. His addresses to his troops as he commenced these campaigns reveal McClellan’s huge ego—and limited vision of this war. On May 26, 1861, he said that his mission was “to rescue our brethren [in western Virginia] from the grasp of armed traitors.” And he exhorted his men to “show mercy even to them when they are in your power, for many of them are misguided.” A month later, McClellan informed his men, “Bear in mind that you are in the country of friends, not of enemies; that you are

GEORGE BRINTON McCLELLAN


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here to protect, not to destroy.” Then he waxed Napoleonic: “Soldiers! I have heard that there was danger here. I have come to place myself at your head and to share it with you.” Here was a queer amalgam of martial bombast and the sort of limited war Abraham Lincoln imagined: show the flag, and watch the mass of white Southerners flock to salute it.8 ♦♦♦

graduated from West Point in 1840, served in the army for thirteen years, resigned to pursue what became failed ventures in banking and law, and then in 1859 was named superintendent of the academy that later became Louisiana State University. Intensely loyal to the Union, Sherman left Louisiana and rejoined the United States Army in May 1861. He believed the war might well last thirty years; indeed, it might consume a half century and “involve the destruction of all able-bodied men of this generation and go pretty deep into the next.” Sherman estimated casualties totaling 300,000 per year for quite some time. He saw the conflict as one of order versus anarchy.9 WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHER MAN

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would soon become “Stonewall”— hero, then martyr, of the Confederate cause. In January 1861, Jackson was professor of natural and experimental philosophy (physics) and artillery tactics at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. Jackson once asked a cadet to name the three simple machines. The student responded, “The inclined plane, the lever, and the wheel,” the correct answer. But Jackson said, “No, sir.” The correct answer was the precise order in which the THOMAS JONATHAN JACKSON

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textbook listed the three simple machines: “the lever, the wheel, and the inclined plane.” Small wonder that he was widely regarded as eccentric; one cadet at VMI described Jackson as “a hell of a fool.” During the secession winter of 1860–61, Jackson wrote his nephew, “I am in favor of making a thorough trial for peace, and if we fail in this and the state is invaded to defend it with terrific resistance—even to taking no prisoners. . . . [I]t becomes us to wage such a war as will bring hostilities to a speedy close. People who are anxious to bring on war don’t know what they are bargaining for; they don’t see all the horrors that must accompany such an event.”10 ♦♦♦

was only days short of his fortieth birthday when the Confederates fired upon Fort Sumter. A graduate of West Point and a veteran of the war with Mexico, Grant resigned from the army in 1854 and then failed as a farmer, salesman, candidate for county engineer, and customhouse clerk. In April 1861 he was working in a leather store and facing dim prospects for improving his lot. In his memoirs Grant recalled, “My own views at that time were like those officially expressed by Mr. [William H.] Seward at a later day, that ‘the war would be over in ninety days.’ I continued to entertain these views until after the battle of Shiloh.” Of course, the Battle of Shiloh happened on April 6–7, 1862, almost a year after the firing on Fort Sumter—nearly four times those “ninety days” Grant projected the war would last. In the spring of 1861, Grant’s actions seemed to support a belief in a long war. He took care to wait for his best opportunity to serve U L Y S S E S S. G R A N T


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conspicuously and became a colonel in mid-June. After chairing a meeting of Unionists in Galena, Illinois, called to respond to the president’s call for volunteers, Grant never returned to the leather store, either “to put up a package or do other business.”11 ♦♦♦

led the initial attempt to thwart the Southern rebellion in 1861. He was forty-three years old, a graduate of West Point, a veteran of the Mexican War, and the consummate staff officer. In contrast with Scott, McDowell was physically capable of taking the field, and he had an influential patron in the secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase. But in twenty-three years in the army, McDowell had never commanded anyone in combat.

I R V I N M c D OWE L L

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This is a mere sample of military opinion on the eve of the war. Some of those cited were acknowledged authorities, or as nearly so as existed on either side (Scott, Lee, McClellan, and Beauregard). Others would emerge as important generals in the course of events (Grant, Sherman, and Jackson). Still others were unavailable to advise their governments even had anyone asked for their counsel. For example, Albert Sidney Johnston, Henry Halleck, and James Longstreet were all in the far West when the war began and had yet to make their way across the country to join the conflict. In effect, those possessed of the power to start the war were not those who would actually do the fighting. In fact, most of those who began the American Civil War had little or no experience with combat and compounded their deficiency by failing to consult those who had.12

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Jefferson Davis should have been the exception here. Davis had commanded a regiment in Mexico and served as secretary of war in the administration of President Franklin Pierce. But the striking fact about Davis’s active military career was its brevity. At the Battle of Buena Vista in 1847, his unit routed a body of Mexican cavalry several times larger than his force. In the course of the action Davis suffered a wound that allowed him to return home a hero. Perhaps Davis was the exception that proved the rule.13 No naval officers are included in this sample. Secretaries of the navy Gideon Welles and Stephen R. Mallory and future naval commanders such as David G. Farragut, Franklin Buchanan, John Dahlgren, John L. Porter, David Dixon Porter, and Samuel Francis DuPont all had little to say about the length and extent of this war. For the most part, they pressed on with their duties during the spring of 1861. These duties primarily involved fitting, refitting, and constructing ships—activities that seem to indicate the expectation of a conflict considerably longer than one campaign. In his book Plan of Attack, journalist Bob Woodward tells a story about Colin Powell involving the origin of the Iraq War. Powell, then secretary of state, was increasingly troubled about the administration’s plans to attack Iraq. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, Powell had sat alone in his office at the Pentagon, Room 2E878, remembering the famous remark by Robert E. Lee: “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” The Confederate general knew the horror of war. Now in 2001 . . . war seemed antiseptic, and at times like a great game.


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Powell knew deeply, intimately, that war is fought by kids, even teenagers who would die because of decisions made in Washington. The top echelon of the Bush administration was noticeably free of those who had seen combat. Bush had served in the Texas Air National Guard but had not been in combat. Cheney had never served in the military himself, though he was defense secretary during the Gulf War. Rumsfeld had been a Navy fighter pilot in the 1950s but not during wartime. Rice and Tenet had not seen military service. Only he had been in combat.14 It is significant that Powell should think about Lee, and by extension about the American Civil War, when on the brink of war more than a century later. The Civil War offers parallels and lessons that should still resonate in public policy but which all too often remain unknown and unlearned. James M. McPherson, in his splendid work Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, introduces the concept of “contingency” in human events—“the recognition that at numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently.” He suggests that “four major turning points defined the eventual outcome.” At each of these turning points, events might have gone a different way and so changed the outcome.15 I wish to add to McPherson’s contingency litany the notion of “unintended consequences.” They are what happens when the dogs of war go their random ways, beyond control, once the war begins. For example, those who deployed U.S. troops in Iraq in 2003 expected a replay of what occurred when the Yanks marched

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into France in 1944. Instead, the deployment more closely resembled General William T. Sherman’s Yankees marching through Georgia in 1864. Ponder prisoners. In the Civil War, prisoners were a surprise; the war was supposed to be over in one campaign. In Iraq in 2003 the locals were supposed to be on “our” side. Why should we expect prisoners? Insurgents? In both cases prisoners materialized, and Abu Ghraib and Andersonville are monuments to unintended consequences. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski’s explanations for the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib prison sound frighteningly familiar. Here are some passages from Karpinski’s book about her experiences in Iraq and elsewhere: The prison was just barely fit for habitation. We lacked running water, and though we pumped out the outdoor latrines twice a day, that did not make them pleasant. Garbage piled up despite our efforts to remove it all daily, and vehicles raised a constant cloud of dust. Living conditions were terrible for detainees and soldiers alike. . . . The prison population was exploding and our manpower was melting away. We needed cells and we needed guards, but the system that was supposed to provide them was, to put it politely, dysfunctional. . . . I had to play the hand I was dealt. The 800th MP Brigade had been stuck together with bubble gum and bailing wire in order to make it deployable from the States. The Brigade was given rewritten orders for a


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mission it had never anticipated, then it was handed to me just as it marched into a war zone, short of personnel and equipment, and far beyond its normal field of operations.16 Compare this (admittedly cobbled-together) summary with a letter written by Henry Wirz on August 1, 1864: We have an inadequate supply of tools to put the interior of the prison in a proper condition. We need axes, wheel-barrows, and other similar supplies. We need lumber, lime, iron and sheet-iron for baking pans. The prison, although a large addition has recently been made to it, is still too crowded. Almost daily large numbers of prisoners arrive, and before two weeks it will be in the same condition it was before the addition was made. . . . As long as 30,000 men are confined in any one inclosure the proper policing is altogether impossible. . . . The rations are mostly the same as for our own men, one-third of a pound of bacon, and one-fourth pound of corn-meal. . . . Vinegar and soap, both very important articles, are very seldom issued, as the commissary says he cannot get them. Scurvy is the principal disease. . . . The guard which I require for safe keeping of the prisoners is entirely insufficient, simply because the men have to perform guard duty every other day. This . . . is too much. With the exception of a portion of the Fifty-fifth Georgia, the balance are militiamen, and are undrilled and undisciplined.17

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The American Civil War and the Iraq War have huge differences. Abu Ghraib makes Andersonville seem like summer camp. The common thread in these wars 142 years apart is the truth that Shakespeare proclaims in the sixteenth century about events in 42 bc. Here is the larger context of Marc Antony’s speech: Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy; Blood and destruction shall be so in use And dreadful objects so familiar That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war, All pity choked with custom of fell deeds; And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.18

Chapter Three

Ab ra h am Lincoln and the Coming of War

man and an extraordinary president. One reason for his greatness was his capacity to learn and to grow in ways both superficial and profound. He was six feet four inches tall, impressive in any time but enormous in Lincoln’s day. And he lived out the great American success story, rising from humble beginnings to the height of power. Consider Lincoln’s response to slavery and race. Lincoln’s opposition to slavery often cloaked Negrophobia. Barring slavery prevented African Americans from moving onto the frontier and challenging the white majority’s monopoly of land and wealth. Lincoln made some public statements about race that marked him as very much like his contemporaries in holding stereotypical racial assumptions. He once believed in compensating slaveholders for their “property” and then transporting freed individuals to some distant colony. Yet he grew to become the “Great Emancipator” and used his considerable influence to advocate civil equality and suffrage for African Americans, finally accepting that the United States would become a biracial society. ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS A G REAT

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In 1861 Lincoln’s military experience consisted of a fourmonth march and no combat during the Black Hawk War in May 1832, almost thirty years earlier. Yet he became the commander in chief in the largest conflict the United States has ever fought. Lincoln won not because he learned very much from the tomes on military science he checked out of the Library of Congress but because he eventually found effective commanders and grasped the strategic wisdom they advocated. “Those not skinning can hold a leg,” he said regarding Ulysses Grant’s plan to assail as many enemy armies as possible at the same time.1 But however much Lincoln grew in wisdom and insight about all manner of topics and issues, he failed to grasp one significant factor in his public and private lives. Lincoln never seemed to understand the American South, and this failure was enormously ironic, for Lincoln was born in the South. As a youth he had twice floated down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, in 1828 and 1831. In 1841, during one of his dreadful depressions, his “blues” periods, he spent almost a month at his friend Joshua Speed’s home, Farmington, located outside of Louisville, Kentucky. While he served in Congress during the 1840s Lincoln grew to respect and admire fellow Whig Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, who later became vice president of the Confederacy. Lincoln married into a Southern family at a time when he had no other family himself. Nevertheless, perhaps because he thought he knew so much about the South, Lincoln never quite arrived at some essential insights about those who became his enemies. Lincoln seemed to believe that the mass of white Southerners were just like the frontier farmers he had known growing up in Indiana and Illinois. They wanted nothing so much as to prosper,

L i n c o l n a n d t h e C o m i n g O F WA R

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to live out the American dream. A tiny tier of lordly planters depended upon the labor of slaves to maintain their wealth and status but the vast majority of Southern white people did not share this dependence on slavery. Indeed, the high cost of slaves kept them from becoming planters themselves. Lincoln assumed that his Southern neighbors subscribed to the Protestant economic ethic: work hard, save money, and secure wealth. Of course black Southerners did not have the same opportunities to dream the American dream that their white neighbors had. Lincoln could not have known many African Americans, Southern or otherwise, until he became president. During his sojourn in Farmington in 1841, the Speed family had given their guest a “body servant” to see to his needs. In Springfield, Illinois, the Lincolns had a black laundress, Mariah Vance, work for them two days per week. And Lincoln did some legal work for William de Fleurville (“Billy the barber”). But Lincoln never really knew African Americans of his class and status until he encountered individuals such as Frederick Douglass during the war. Lincoln understood how large planters might have convinced their white friends not to vote for him in November 1860. Nonetheless, he found it difficult to believe that the mass of Southern whites were serious about abandoning the United States, forming another republic for the sake of slaveholders, and especially risking their lives and the lives of those they loved to sustain something called the Confederate States of America.2 So on receiving the news that a convention of delegates in Charleston, South Carolina, had voted unanimously to secede from the United States, Lincoln dismissed this as “some loud threats and much muttering in the cotton states” and continued

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to focus his attention upon cabinet appointments for his administration. His law partner William Herndon remembered that Lincoln “apprehended no such grave danger to the Union as the mass of people supposed would result from Southern threats.” Further, “he could not in his heart believe the South designed the overthrow of the Government.”3 On December 22, 1860, two days after the South Carolinians seceded, Lincoln wrote his onetime friend Alexander Stephens, “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves?” If they did, he insisted, “I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.” Then Lincoln seemed to make light of the slavery issue: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.” Despite Lincoln’s letter to Stephens, the Georgian was soon busy seeking to oppose or at least delay secession fervor in his state. In a short time, though, slavery indeed proved the “rub” and the “substantial” difference between Lincoln and Stephens.4 David Potter’s Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis contains the best chronicle of Lincoln’s journey to war. Published in 1942, the book began as a doctoral dissertation. Much later Potter summarized his conclusion: To Lincoln, in short, secession as a mass movement was incredible. He could understand it only as the conspiratorial action of a slaveholding minority, whose early advantage, he hoped, would eventually be offset by an


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ebullition of southern Unionism, and whose true purpose, he suspected, was not so much separation as blackmail. In his view, the question was not compromise but government by minority coercion. Most likely Lincoln really believed his public assessment of the secession crisis as “artificial.”5 When he said goodbye to those who came to see him off from Springfield on February 11, 1864, the president-elect announced that he had “a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.” Hindsight suggests that this comparison was only slightly hyperbolic. Yet Lincoln soon settled into a rhetoric of denial as he made the nearly 2,000-mile journey from Springfield to Washington. Lincoln told the Ohio legislature in Columbus, “There is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering.” At Steubenville, Ohio, he insisted that “the devotion to the Constitution is equally great on both sides of the [Ohio] River.” At Pittsburgh he labeled the crisis “artificial,” and he repeated this judgment in Cleveland, adding, “Let it alone, and it will go down of itself.” In Buffalo, New York, the president-elect calmly predicted, “The clouds now on the horizon will be dispelled.” At Troy, New York, he said that he thought the country “will save itself.”6 As Lincoln’s train neared Baltimore rumors converged, suggesting a plot to kill him when he changed trains. Allan Pinkerton, director of the detective agency that still bears his name, became convinced that his operatives had uncovered an assassination scheme. Winfield Scott, who commanded the United States Army, and William H. Seward, Lincoln’s chief rival for the

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Republican nomination for president and designated secretary of state, also believed that one or more people in Baltimore planned to murder Lincoln. With reluctance Lincoln agreed to alter his plans. On February 22 (George Washington’s birthday) he spoke at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and then went to Pennsylvania's capital, Harrisburg. That evening, wearing a cap instead of his signature top hat, Lincoln slipped out of his hotel and boarded a train back to Philadelphia. With him were Pinkerton, who had formulated the altered travel plan, and Ward Hill Lamon, a friend and associate from Lincoln’s time on the Illinois legal circuit. Pinkerton thought the self-styled bodyguard “a brainless, egotistical fool” and a large, crude, boozing brawler. However, Lamon idolized Lincoln and was committed to keeping him alive. He was also carrying two revolvers, two derringers, and two large knives. This unlikely trio traveled from Harrisburg to Philadelphia (a little over 100 miles), then transferred to another train bound for Baltimore. Pinkerton had booked a berth in a sleeping car. The berth was too short for Lincoln, who was forced to fold himself into the space and endure the journey to Baltimore. There, at Camden Station, sometime around three in the morning, the trainmen uncoupled Lincoln’s car to await the train bound for Washington. Eventually that train arrived, took on the sleeping car in which Lincoln was not sleeping, and steamed along to the capital. Within the narrative of Lincoln’s transit to the martial moment, his journey from Harrisburg into Washington rates as comic relief (for everyone but Lincoln, of course). When the sleepless president-elect arrived in Washington at dawn on February 23, 1861, believing that he had made the final portion of his trip in


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secret, the first voice he heard was that of an old friend, Elihu B. Washburne, a congressman from Illinois, who had learned about Lincoln’s “clandestine” arrival and had come to greet him. “Abe, you can’t play that on me,” Washburne told him. A reporter from the New York Times enhanced the story of the last segment of Lincoln’s trip to his capital by describing him as dressed in a Scottish plaid cap and long military overcoat, and editorial cartoonists embellished these details by clothing him in a tam and kilt.7 Once recovered from sleepless stiffness, Lincoln went to work writing his inaugural address, assembling his administration, and trying to frame a policy with which to confront the Confederate States of America. Among those politicians he drew closest to him as advisors, Lincoln found that many, if not most, of them seemed to share his opinion that secession was a bluff, hatched by a few members of the planter elite. Disunion had no broad-based support among Southern white people, and this crisis would most likely lead to “voluntary reconstruction.”8 Most prominent among the insiders was the man who had been his chief rival for the nomination for president and now was his nominee for secretary of state. Indeed, Seward believed that he would be an éminence grise, the power behind the throne, in the new administration. Lincoln allowed Seward to edit and significantly soften his inaugural address, and it was Seward who made the most conspicuous Republican statements regarding secession during the five-month period between Lincoln’s election (November 6, 1860) and his inauguration (March 4, 1861). On December 22, 1860, two days after South Carolina seceded, Seward addressed the New England Society at the Astor House in New York City. He had just come from a visit to the

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president-elect, and although Lincoln’s offer to make him secretary of state was not yet general knowledge, people believed that Seward spoke for Lincoln. If anyone or any nation were to attack New York, Seward posited, “all the hills of South Carolina would pour forth their population for the rescue of New York.” So, he concluded, “they do not humbug me with their secession. And I do not believe that they will humbug you; and I do not believe that . . . they will much longer succeed in humbugging themselves.” Seward suggested that everyone remain “cool,” “calm,” and “kind” and engage any grievances that the “Southern brethren” may have. On January 12, 1861, Seward made a more formal speech in the United States Senate chamber. He had announced his intention to speak, and again the conventional wisdom was that his was the voice of the incoming administration. Hours before Seward took the floor, spectators packed the galleries. In the crush a young man fainted, and those in the crowd anticipated a “mosh pit” by passing the fellow over their heads to get him some air outside. Seward spoke for two hours and said much the same things he had said at the Astor House three weeks previously. The core of his message was that the United States was forever whole; separation was impossible. “We have, practically, only one language, one religion, one system of Government, and manners and customs common to all. Why, then, shall we not remain henceforth, as hitherto, one people?”9 Most telling among reactions to Seward’s speech was that of Senator John Hemphill of Texas: “That would have been a fine address for the Fourth of July, but we are going to secede.” Texans did in fact secede, and Seward’s rhetoric and logic did little to impede the process.10


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Lincoln seemed to have approved of Seward’s speech. Indeed, he incorporated much of Seward’s message into his inaugural address. As Stephen Berry has observed, “Seward . . . had tried to save the national family by saying that its members ought to love one another. In his first inaugural, Lincoln reminded the national family that whatever they ought to do, there were certain things they could not help but do. They were a family, whether they liked it or not.” It was not a question about whether North and South “shouldn’t separate . . . they couldn’t.” But of course they did separate. Even as Lincoln spoke, delegates from seven disunited states were meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, framing the permanent constitution of the Confederate States of America. Lincoln knew about the machinations in Montgomery but hoped that he could set matters right—with one speech. Stephen Berry also writes, “Like most Americans of his age, Lincoln believed that words could change the world. The country’s great speeches were sacred texts—and, like all politicians, Lincoln dreamed of making just such a speech himself. As William Seward later noted, Lincoln truly believed it would be possible to turn back the tide of secession with one address.”11 However, a close reading of the first inaugural address reveals the new president all but obsessed with accommodating the Southerners, who he believed could not leave the Union. Lincoln’s zeal for reconciliation was best assessed by David Potter: He would assert the Federal authority vigorously—but he would not exercise it. He would enforce the laws—where an enforcement mechanism existed. He would deliver the mails—unless repelled. He would collect the duties—

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offshore. He would hold the forts—at least the ones which Buchanan had held, and which seemed capable of holding themselves. It was a superb pattern for reconstruction, one which seemed to eliminate every possibility of a clash.12 The first conflicts Lincoln faced in his new administration did not involve Southern Confederates. The new president and his party (which was barely seven years old) confronted the fights and squabbles involved in distributing the loaves and fishes of patronage. Generations of historians, however, have made symbolic use of two documents: a plaintive letter from Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter, stating that he could not hold out unless massively reinforced, and a memorandum from Winfield Scott that was sitting on Lincoln’s desk when he occupied his new office in the White House. Scott had addressed his letter to Secretary of State Seward in response to Seward’s query about the emerging crisis at Fort Sumter and secession in general. But the person who most needed Scott’s counsel was Lincoln. At six feet four and a quarter inches tall, Scott was one of very few men who could look Lincoln in the eye. He had risen to prominence during the War of 1812, been commanding general of the United States Army since 1841, and “won” the Mexican War with his campaign against Santa Anna and capture of Mexico City in 1847. Moreover, Scott was, like Lincoln, a Whig, the party’s candidate for president in 1852. But Scott was now ancient, often ill, unable to walk very far or ride a horse at all. He weighed about 300 pounds and genuinely possessed the pomposity associated with his nickname, “Old Fuss and Feathers.”


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Scott’s counsel to Seward, and through Seward to Lincoln, was not what the new president especially wanted to read. Scott offered four options: 1. Change the name of their party to “Union Party” and adopt the compromise advanced by Senator John J. Crittenden, which would ensure the sanctity of slavery forever. 2. Avoid confrontation with the seceded states—for example, by collecting tariffs offshore. 3. Go to war and win it. Scott believed doing so would require three years, huge expense, and 300,000 troops. The cost in lives and property “would be frightful,” and to what good? “Fifteen devastated Provinces! . . . held for generations by heavy garrisons, at an expense quadruple the net duties or taxes which it would be possible to extort from them.” 4. Say to the seceded Southerners, “Wayward sisters, depart in peace.” When pressed for specific opinions regarding Forts Sumter and Pickens, Scott favored abandoning both posts. He estimated that the relief of Anderson at Sumter would require more resources than the government could muster before Anderson and his garrison were starved out.13 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Lincoln and others in the administration dismissed Scott’s counsel as “too political”— not at all what they wanted to hear. So Lincoln effectively ignored

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the advice of the only military expert he consulted about going to war. To be sure, Lincoln’s cabinet was a political construction. But it is indeed telling that his secretary of war, Simon Cameron, was a talented political tactician who knew almost nothing about warfare. So the United States lurched toward war, all but innocent of the consequences. Nevertheless, the president did test his assumption that the majority of white Southerners had serious second thoughts about leaving the Union. On March 21 he dispatched Stephen A. Hurlbut, an Illinois friend who had been born in Charleston, to his native city to feel the pulse of the place. With Hurlbut went Ward Lamon, who later arranged with South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens to visit Anderson at Fort Sumter. Lamon left impressions in Charleston that he spoke for the president and that the evacuation of Fort Sumter was imminent. Hurlbut went to church and visited with old friends at his sister’s home. He saw only one flag of the United States, the one fluttering over Fort Sumter near the entrance to the harbor. Elsewhere, ships and public buildings flew Confederate or South Carolina colors. Hurlbut met with prominent Unionist James Petigru and learned that Petigru was the only white Unionist left in Charleston. Everyone else, it seemed, had succumbed to the secessionist fervor. After two full days in Charleston, Hurlbut and Lamon boarded a train for Washington, where, on March 27, Hurlbut wrote down his impressions in a letter to Lincoln.14 Still the president persisted in his belief that secession was ungrounded in the South. Perhaps Lincoln had some deep and abiding phobia about violence or conflict, or about the South.


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Historian Robert V. Bruce has written that Lincoln “seems to have had a mental block, an avoidance mechanism. Why? Something innate in his temperament? Fond memories of his Southern childhood? Or on the other hand, some childhood trauma?”15 As the crisis at Fort Sumter continued to build, Seward made his move. He composed a memorandum, “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration,” delivered to Lincoln, appropriately enough, on April Fools’ Day. Seward began his “Thoughts” with the assertion that the administration had no policy and that it was well past time to conjure a plan. He proposed to provoke a war with Spain and France at least and maybe England and Russia as well. Perhaps revisiting his conviction (expressed in New York City in December) that South Carolinians would in a crisis rescue New Yorkers, Seward hoped that a foreign war or wars would rekindle American patriotism and reunite the United States. And in the event that Lincoln was too busy to attend to all these machinations, Seward volunteered to oversee the adventure himself. Lincoln responded—the same day, April 1—with amazing self-control. He informed Seward that his administration did indeed have a policy and that he, as the president, would execute it. Then he thanked Seward for his thoughts. By the time Lincoln read Seward’s memorandum he had already decided, at least tentatively, to resupply Fort Sumter. Scott’s counsel may have been realistic, but it struck the president as more political than he wanted. On March 29, 1861, Lincoln had ordered preparations made to relieve Fort Sumter. By April 4, he had decided to send the relief expedition, and on April 6

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Lincoln ordered ships to set sail. He also sent R. S. Chew as an emissary to South Carolina governor Francis Pickens with the message that the administration intended to resupply, not to reinforce or rearm, the garrison on Fort Sumter.16 At this point, Lincoln had merely done what he had promised to do—maintain government property. The Confederacy would have to begin the shooting. And the Confederates did so. The bombardment of Sumter was the result of an enormous narrowing of focus. Sectional rancor had developed over generations until the question of peace or war hung upon how many days’ rations remained for a small body of soldiers who occupied a tiny artificial island in Charleston Harbor. Yet the war did not really begin until Lincoln called for volunteers to “suppress . . . combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” It is significant that Lincoln asked for only 75,000 men and that he asked them to serve for only ninety days. An act of Congress from 1795 limited militia service to no more than thirty days after Congress assembled, and Lincoln called a special session for July 4, 1861. Had he believed that the conflict begun at Sumter would be consequential, he might have asked for more volunteers and postponed calling Congress into session to prolong their service. When Congress did convene, Lincoln asked for more troops and the appropriations appropriate to support them. But he also said in his first message that he doubted “whether there is, to-day, a majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South Carolina, in favor of disunion.”17 To conduct the war, Lincoln relied upon Scott’s so-called Anaconda Plan. Scott proposed to blockade Southern ports and


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employ combined army and navy forces to control the Mississippi River. The goal was to seal the rebellion within its borders and squeeze it into submission. Most likely Lincoln believed that Southerners would soon see the error of their separation. Scott hoped Lincoln was correct, but in the event he was not, the Union would do well to take advantage of its superior resources and confront Confederates on as many fronts as possible with advantageous numbers. This eventually happened. But by the time it did, Scott was long gone.18 Although Southern rebels proved his assumptions about Southern loyalty wrong, Lincoln persisted in believing that the majority of Southerners were uncommitted Confederates. As late as February 1864, for example, he authorized a daring raid upon the Confederate capital at Richmond, at least in part to distribute proclamations of amnesty designed to communicate directly with the Southern people. If only the president could speak with his enemies, he thought, he could make them see the error of their ways.19 Later, as his armies advanced on several fronts and victory seemed certain, Lincoln planned a generous reunion. As historian Kenneth M. Stampp has suggested, the president seemed to believe that now white Southerners would see the light. They would turn on the planters who had led them into disaster and embrace the Union of their grandparents. After all, the Whig Party had been quite viable in the South before the war. With the appropriate incentives, those Southern Whigs might join with the new freedmen and disaffected Confederates to create a powerful Southern wing of the Republican Party. This did not happen.20

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What did happen was Reconstruction without Lincoln’s leadership. As president and victorious commander in chief, Lincoln might have done wonders to remake the vanquished South. But of course Lincoln never had the chance to do such things. After most civil wars, scores of losers also lose their lives: Charles I and the Royalists in 1649, the White Russians after 1917, and the Chinese on the wrong side in 1949. After the American Civil War, the losers went home, most of them as paroled prisoners of war who were to remain undisturbed so long as they did not again take up arms against the United States. President Andrew Johnson compelled ex-Confederates who owned property worth $20,000 or more to petition him for pardon. But then Johnson granted pardons freely and assumed contrition on the part of those who swore allegiance to the United States and requested pardon from the president. Most white Southerners seemed to accept the verdict of arms. They conceded defeat and the consequence of reunion. Many former Confederates seemed to believe that these concessions were sufficient. Reconstruction was essentially resurrection of the Union as it had been in 1860–61. But the war had wrought significant change within the Union, most notably regarding race and the growth of industrial capitalism. This was not the same Union from which white Southerners believed they had seceded four years ago.21 In the immediate aftermath of the war, ex-Confederates attempted what historian John Hope Franklin called “Reconstruction Southern-style.” White Southerners fulfilled the generous terms of reunion, prescribed by Lincoln and endorsed by Johnson. But then they elected members of the old planter elite (including Lincoln’s “friend” Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens) to state and


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national offices and passed Black Codes to impose racist “discipline” upon freed people. With good reason did people in the North wonder who had won the war. Had all the sacrifice of blood and treasure simply resulted in the restoration of the Old South?22 Then began “congressional Reconstruction,” the attempt to salvage victory on the part of the Northern people through their representatives in the national government. White Southerners felt betrayed and bitter, and their bitterness lasted for a long time. Indeed, the myth of Reconstruction as the “tragic era” for white Southerners persists even now. In truth, the victims of Reconstruction were not white Southerners from the plantation elite but black Southerners and their white neighbors of modest means. So-called Radical Republicans in Congress established new and in some ways more rigorous conditions for the former Confederate states to rejoin the Union, and Congress tried to ensure civil and political rights for the freed people. These efforts primarily proved effective in inciting resentment among white Southerners. African Americans more than anything else needed land and wealth or credit, economic assistance—some boots to assist them in pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. But that far Congress was unwilling to go. During the war, humanitarian reform (emancipation) and the sponsored expansion of industrial capitalism complemented each other. Captains of industry, along with their lieutenants and enlisted men, could unite in raising “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” When peace broke out, however, humanitarian reform became the antithesis of enterprise. Enabling freed people to earn a share of the American dream required redistributing wealth—most logically, appropriating land from “traitors” (ex-Confederates) and

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giving a stake to former slaves. Such radical reform flew in the face of classical capitalism. If property rights were not sacred in South Carolina, how safe could property be in Boston, or Cincinnati, or Philadelphia? So Congress stopped well short of reconstructing the rebellious South. To make a long and sometimes complex story short and overly simple, and to quote myself: The North was willing to dominate and exploit the South economically, but not to tamper with property rights. Work and wealth had moral connotations. The rhetoric of industry and capitalism made thrift and the work ethic a kind of secular gospel. Material success was evidence of secular “election.” Later the Social Darwinists would codify the doctrine and speak of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest.” The point is that the same “mind” which demanded that men and labor be free, also insisted upon an unrestrained operation of the marketplace. And in the Reconstruction South of poor whites and penniless freedmen, laissez-faire capitalism, economic democracy, and racial justice proved mutually exclusive.23 Had he lived, Lincoln might have redeemed the peace of Reconstruction and made unnecessary the so-called Second Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, one hundred years later. As it happened, Lincoln’s beliefs about his birthplace had much to do with the origin and conduct of the American Civil War. If there be a lesson here, it likely counsels caution about


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getting into wars. Resist facile assumptions about the potential enemy and count, or at least reasonably estimate, the cost of resorting to combat. In the longest of runs, however, later generations of white Southerners did vindicate Lincoln’s confidence in their loyalty. Contrary to Winfield Scott’s fears, the American South did not require eternal occupation and legions of pacifiers. White Southerners may have formed the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens’ Councils, but they did not raise and sustain an Irish Republican Army or imitate Afghanistan in receiving invaders. Southern evangelicals have on occasion lapsed into fanaticism. But only in the wildest fictive imaginations—such as Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood—have they rivaled the Taliban.

Chapter Four

Je ffe rs on Davis and the Coming of War

on Yankees at a very young age. At West Point, when he was sixteen, he made a request for money from his older brother. Like all the other undergraduates, Cadet Davis received a standard allowance from the government, but only parsimonious Yankee boys could exist on the meager sum provided. No Southern gentleman could subsist on such an amount. “As you have never been connected with them,” Jefferson wrote to his brother, “you cannot know how pittiful [sic] they generally are.” Whatever extra money Davis had he often spent at Benny Havens, an “off-limits” tavern near the academy.1 Cadet Davis had a checkered career at West Point. He was fortunate to escape death or dismissal for a series of escapades, one of which confined him to the cadet hospital for almost four months and all of which left him ranked 163rd in conduct among 208 cadets. Nevertheless, somehow, Davis emerged a soldier in 1828. J E F F E R S O N D A V I S B EG A N C A S T I N G A S P E R S I O N S

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Lieutenant Davis had an equally checkered career in the United States Army. He rose to some tasks and challenges very well; but he was easily bored with bureaucracy, and he was especially sensitive regarding matters of pride and honor. For example, he once courted court-martial to prove himself blameless for remaining in his tent during roll call in the rain and saying “Hum!” in a stage whisper in a “highly disrespectful, insubordinate manner.” To assuage his honor Davis endured weeks of arrest and eight long, tense days of testimony about trivia rendered regal (e.g., the meaning and context of “Hum!”), and although the court found Davis not guilty, it failed to endorse his conduct in the case. So Davis resigned from the army. Well, he intended to resign anyway to marry Sarah Knox Taylor, but this incident does offer some hint about the extent to which Davis “played well with others.” Sarah Knox Taylor was the daughter of Colonel (later General, later still President) Zachary Taylor, who did not want his daughter to marry an army officer. However, he reconciled with Davis soon after the marriage. Three months after they wed in June 1835, both Jefferson and Sarah contracted malaria, and Sarah Davis died. Davis grieved for a decade. He went to work on land his brother gave him, created a plantation, and acquired a reputation as a prosperous, progressive slaveholder. Davis lived an uncheckered life at Brierfield on Davis Bend on the Mississippi. A mature Jefferson Davis emerged in 1845. In that year he married Varina Howell, a belle from Natchez; he was thirty-six, she eighteen. He also won election as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives and thus plunged into public service.

D av i s a n d t h e C o m i n g o f W a r

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In 1846 the former lieutenant became Colonel Davis of the First Mississippi Volunteers, for whom he secured rifles instead of muskets, thus enabling his men to shoot with greater range and accuracy. Davis joined the army commanded by his former father-in-law, Zachary Taylor. And he also became a hero in Mexico at the Battle of Buena Vista on February 23, 1847. At a critical moment in the battle Davis formed his 400 Mississippians into a vee and faced about 2,000 mounted Mexican lancers. Davis and his men stood their ground, fired a volley, and watched the lancers retreat in confusion. Davis had been injured in the foot earlier in the day and so returned home not only a hero but also a wounded one. He subsequently served as the United States senator from Mississippi, and in this role in time Davis took up the mantle of John C. Calhoun as principal Southern advocate on the national stage. As mentioned, Davis was secretary of war during the Pierce administration and among many other creative ideas introduced camels into service on American deserts. Back in the Senate during the late 1850s, Davis tried to be firm about Southern rights (meaning slavery) and advocate the sanctity of the Union at the same time. When Mississippi seceded from the United States in January 1861, Davis left the Senate with a heavy heart. But unlike his colleague Andrew Johnson from Tennessee, Davis did actually leave Washington. In Jackson, the state capital, he accepted a commission as major general of Mississippi troops, and then he and Varina went to Brierfield to attend to personal affairs but also to be available in the event the delegates from the seven (at the moment six) seceded states meeting in Montgomery wanted Davis to serve the Southern nation.

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When asked about the situation in his old Union and new republic, he said, “God help us,” and added, “War is a dreadful calamity even when it is made against aliens and strangers. . . . They know not what they do.”2 ♦♦♦

Davis was pruning roses on February 9 when the messenger arrived with a telegram informing him that he had been made provisional (and presumably permanent) president of the Confederate States of America. Varina remembered that he looked “grieved,” and she feared a calamity in the family. He shared the news as though speaking about a “sentence of death.” But then he went to Montgomery and became the president.3 Like Abraham Lincoln’s, Jefferson Davis’s journey from his home to the seat of his government was longer than it had to be. Lincoln traveled via population and political centers to “show the flag” and shore up his presidency. Davis did considerable showing and shoring too. He made perhaps twenty-five speeches to assure his listeners that the Confederacy was for real—not some bluff to win concessions within a reunited Union—and to rattle his saber in such a way as to warn friends and foes of “war, long and bloody.” To get from Brierfield to Montgomery, Davis had his slaves row him three miles down the Mississippi to the steamboat landing. There he hailed the Natchez and sailed about twenty miles farther south to Vicksburg, where he encountered marching bands and soldiers bearing the flag of the First Mississippi Volunteers from the Mexican War. Then he boarded a train to Jackson, where he made another speech and resigned his


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appointment as major general in the state militia. By this time it was February 12 (Lincoln’s birthday). Davis left Jackson on February 14 and traveled by train north to Grand Junction, Tennessee, then east across northern Alabama to Chattanooga, south to Atlanta, and finally west to Montgomery. He logged almost 700 miles to go 200 miles as the proverbial crow flies from Jackson to Montgomery. This looping trajectory enabled Davis to make more speeches and receive more cheers (except in eastern Tennessee, where he met a cool reception), but it boded ill for a nascent nation confronting a modern war with such poor modern transportation. In Montgomery, William Lowndes Yancey, one of the most extreme Southern radicals, met Davis’s train and proclaimed to an assembled crowd, “The man and the hour have met.” Then Yancey predicted “prosperity, honor and victory.” It was nearly perfect symbolism—Yancey the “fire-eater” yielding the leadership of the revolution to a more moderate founding father.4 Davis indeed hoped that he might preside over a peaceful separation and get on with building his Southern republic. But he had to think about the worst that might happen: war with the United States. And he planned for that. Davis wrote to John A. Campbell, then associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, that he wished the Union would accept Confederate independence before a war costing “thousands of lives and millions of Treasure” compelled such acceptance. He informed Varina in the same letter in which he described his inauguration that he saw “troubles and thorns innumerable. We are without machinery, without means and threatened by powerful opposition.”5

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While Lincoln was trying to convince himself and others that the mass of Southern white people would not follow the planters out of the Union, Davis believed they would and acted on this belief. He believed that he led a nation and faced a war. He was provisional president of the Confederacy for several reasons, some of them purely circumstantial, but three were important. First, the delegates at Montgomery believed they needed a moderate who would appeal to white Southerners less rabid for secession. Second, they thought they needed someone possessed of military experience. And third, the delegates believed their president should be a person who was creative, resourceful, and a practical statesman, a man of substance and stature. Davis did not have all of these qualities and virtues, but he was likely the best person available. For his part, Davis realized that his nation would probably live or die by the sword. He also realized that he faced adverse odds in any war with the United States. He himself had lengthened those odds during his service as secretary of war. A significant feature of Davis’s active military experience, as I’ve suggested, was its brevity. He had served in the army during the Black Hawk War in 1832 but probably not fought. In Mexico he had certainly fought with gallantry and distinction, but briefly. Davis led his regiment in two days of ferocious action at Monterrey, after which he went home to Mississippi on leave. He returned just in time to fight with courage and brilliance at Buena Vista, where he sustained his wound and so earned another trip home. Davis had served his country with limited distinction as a cadet at West Point and as a lieutenant on what was then the


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frontier. He had served with huge distinction as a colonel of volunteers, on the other hand, and he was one of the most effective secretaries of war who ever served. But he confronted a desperate struggle for Southern independence, and he was not George Washington—at least not yet—though he had determined to adopt Washington as his model and to replay the American Revolution.6 At Fort Sumter, however, Davis blundered. He allowed Lincoln to make him fire the first shot. In effect, Davis accepted war then and there. If he believed that he was “without means and threatened by powerful opposition,” he should have prolonged the impasse and given peace some chance. The Confederates did not have to be the villains in this tale; Davis forced them into that role, and in the process stirred up a hornet’s nest of pro-Union sentiment in the North. For a short while Davis attempted to defend every inch of Southern soil against Yankee invasion. He tried to create a cordon, a curtain of soldiers, at his borders. This strategy failed. Davis had too many inches to defend and never enough soldiers. It is true that he won the first major battle, First Manassas/ Bull Run. But unlike many of his compatriots, Davis realized that this would not be the only battle. He knew it had not won the war. At the martial moment—that moment of truth when individuals and peoples commit to armed force, to conduct politics by physical violence—Davis was almost savvy. He seemed to realize, more than anyone else in a position of power, what was at stake. He might allow himself to hope that the United States would permit peaceable secession, but he knew better. Davis also under-

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stood his enemies; he knew that Yankees were not “pittiful.” He was aware that Yankees were not cowardly by nature and that there were lots of them. So why did Davis fight? Why did he not, in the words of Luke’s gospel, “while the other is still far away” send a delegation and ask for the terms of peace? I think the answer is simple. Davis believed he could win. Maybe it was all about honor, the prickly characteristic that compelled him to seek court-martial in 1835 and debate the meaning of “Hum!” Perhaps it was a sad, romantic death wish: Davis chose to go down in flames rather than wither away in impotence. But I believe that Davis thought he could win in the same way his father and those of his father’s generation had defeated Great Britain. Here in précis is how Davis attempted to win Southern independence. First Manassas/Bull Run was a missed opportunity to march on to Washington and perhaps dictate some terms of recognition of the Confederacy. However, the likelihood of that happening was slim. There followed a “winter of discontent” for Davis and the Confederacy. By the spring of 1862 it seemed only a matter of weeks before Federal armies would put an end to anything resembling a Confederate government in Richmond and a Southern nation anywhere. Then desperation began to transform the Southern republic. The Richmond government enacted the first draft law in North America, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, authorized the imposition of martial law, and attempted broad economic management to sustain the war effort. The Davis administration embarked upon other adventures in statecraft that ultimately invoked state


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socialism, the recruiting of African Americans as Confederate soldiers, and thus emancipation of these Southern slaves.7 While all this transformation was taking place, Davis adopted a military strategy of “offensive defense.” In large measure the Confederates were attempting to rerun the American Revolution: allow the enemy to penetrate Southern borders, then, in circumstances of Confederate choosing, when logistics, geography, and numbers favored a Southern army, attack and destroy the enemy. This is what Robert E. Lee was attempting in the Seven Days’ campaign at Second Manassas/Bull Run, with Ambrose E. Burnside’s help at Fredericksburg, and at Chancellorsville. P. G. T. Beauregard, ever the grand strategist, advocated a “western concentration”: do the same thing Lee was attempting, only do it west of the Appalachian Mountains. Beauregard led what became a “western concentration bloc” among Confederate generals and politicians. Their principal activity was carping about whatever Davis was trying to do.8 Among advocates of the “offensive defense” was a subtle difference of emphasis—so subtle most people did not realize it existed. Lee especially emphasized offense; he believed that only a “decisive” battle, the annihilation of a Federal army, would produce victory. Hence he invaded Maryland in September 1862 and Pennsylvania in June 1863. Lee also believed that this decisive battle had better come sooner rather than later. The Confederacy had a brief window of opportunity before Northern might and men became overwhelming. Davis and most American historians never grasped Lee’s intentions or the degree to which he deceived Davis into believing that the president and his commander of the Army of Northern

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Virginia were in perfect accord. Had Davis understood Lee’s strategic intent, Lee probably would not have remained in command. Lee was well aware that the president was “prickly,” and he knew all about the politics within the Confederate high command. Lee never could win a “decisive” battle or annihilate an enemy army. Consequently, Confederate hopes hinged upon Davis’s emphasis on defense in the “offensive defense.” Davis, like George Washington and the Continental Congress, planned to husband resources, never risk anything vital, and win a war of wills. Failing that, Davis was prepared to undertake a guerrilla phase of warfare, and wage it as long as it took to wear down the Federals and achieve independence.9 Davis’s final formal address to the people of his nation, written and somehow promulgated from Danville, Virginia, on April 4, 1865, while he and his government were on wheels, was his announcement of a “new phase” of the war. He wrote this address having abandoned his capital. He and such officials of his government who chose to ride along together with the archives (the records and correspondence of the Confederate States of America) were in railroad cars. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox was only five days away. Joseph E. Johnston confronted—more like fled from—the armies of William Tecumseh Sherman with the remnant of the Army of Tennessee. By this time they were near Durham, North Carolina. Davis said to however many people read his address (a few thousand? It is impossible to know) words to the effect of “We’ve got them where we want them now.” We have now entered upon a new phase of a struggle the memory of which is to endure for all ages. . . . Relieved


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from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free.10 Guerrilla tactics had been successful in Spain in 1807 and of course have become common in the recent past in various parts of the world in the form of the Irish Republican Army, the Viet Cong, Al Qaeda, and others. On April 25, 1865, Davis went so far as to order Joseph E. Johnston to disband his infantry and appoint a future rendezvous from which the troops would continue the struggle. Johnston was to mount as many soldiers as possible, join Davis at Charlotte, North Carolina, and then ride to meet Edmund Kirby Smith and his army (if they still existed) somewhere west of the Mississippi River. Johnston thought very briefly about this order from his commander in chief, then disobeyed it, surrendering to Sherman on April 26, 1865. Davis continued his flight until a body of Federal cavalry overtook the small party that remained to be the Confederate government and captured the president without much of a fight.11 The point of this extended analysis of Davis’s strategy throughout the Civil War is to illuminate the assumptions and

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convictions that guided his actions at the war’s outset. Davis hoped for better; but he believed all along that there would be a long and bloody conflict and that it was ultimately a test of wills. Davis lost, but at least he seemed to know what he confronted. Jefferson Davis seems one of the least fun-loving people in the nineteenth century. He was the essence of prickliness. In the midst of his capture in south Georgia on May 10, 1865, for example, he seemed helpless because he was so obsessed with how he looked, how he seemed, how this or that course of action might appear. The wonderful irony was that Yankee cavalrymen captured Davis in his wife’s shawl, and he suffered the ignominy of being eternally portrayed as a cross-dresser. Nonetheless, far more than most people in authority during America’s martial moment in 1861, Davis got it. He understood what was at stake. He knew the odds. Yet he played the game anyway, most likely because he believed he could win. Davis lived in a century that began to define modern war. Yet he tried to fight his war in ways that were premodern—in the ways that his father’s generation had fought the Revolution. But the United States was not a wide ocean away, and “God, as usual, was on the side of the largest battalions.” After exhausting themselves fighting a modern war, Confederate Southerners ultimately possessed no stomach for a postmodern guerrilla struggle.

Chapter Five

Chum: First Blood at First Bull Run

And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. —MATTHEW ARNOLD, “DOVER BEACH”

three months, the American Civil War was parades and picnics—a “phony war.” Then on July 21, 1861, the “ignorant armies” of the United States and the Confederate States did “clash by night” (metaphorically) on a “darkling plain” near Manassas, Virginia, across the banks of Bull Run. Before any battle occurred, however, the armies had to assemble amid “confused alarms.” After the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter in midApril, both sides continued to posture and plan as well as they could. The Confederate Congress decided in May to move the capital of the nascent Southern nation from Montgomery to Richmond. The I N T H E B EG I N N I N G , F O R A B O U T

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move made sense in several ways. The “coercion” policy of the Lincoln government triggered secession in Virginia as well as in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Good political manners inclined the Confederates to reward Virginians for their timely alliance with the Deep South. Richmond was home to a significant iron industry, and the Tredegar Iron Works was the only facility below the Potomac and Ohio rivers capable of fashioning railroad rails and cannon barrels. Richmond was (and is) only 100 miles from Washington, D.C., where Federal troops were gathering and training. If there was to be some kind of war, why not locate the seat of government near the theater of war? So volunteer soldiers flocked to Washington and Richmond while Americans wondered what would happen next. Governments in Washington and Richmond began, at last, serious thinking and planning about how to employ the thousands of men who were trying to be soldiers in the suburbs of the two capitals. The war that most people believed would never occur had somehow begun—maybe. Quid nunc? Here I propose to use two case studies of local response to the impending conflict to reveal how men and women on both sides of the American Civil War committed themselves to war. In précis, here are the origins of two contending regiments of volunteer soldiers—the Fifth Wisconsin Volunteers and the Eighth Georgia Infantry Regiment. I draw from two outstanding studies/narratives of their service in the war.1 ♦♦♦

In Manitowoc, Wisconsin, it seemed that everyone in this village of just over 3,000 inhabitants located on the shore of Lake

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Michigan became obsessed with the coming conflict. One diarist announced, “The cloud at last burst, and the storm came with all its fury . . . all classes quit their business and rushed to arms.” Gathering on street corners and at meetings in the courthouse, citizens responded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter with righteous rage. Charles Fitch proclaimed in his newspaper, the Manitowoc Herald, that secession was “a heresy that must be drowned in blood.” Sewell Smith, editor of the Manitowoc Tribune, ranted, “The rebels have boldly thrown off all claims of humanity, Christianity, and civilization and now stand before the world in the garb of brutal murderers, thieves, and outlaws who seek by intimidation to accomplish what they have not the courage to attempt otherwise. Men of Manitowoc must overthrow those who would deluge the land with blood. . . . The feeling of opposition to traitors is shared by almost everyone.” Jeremiah Crowley, Irish Catholic Democratic editor of the Manitowoc Pilot, softened his usual antipathy toward Republicans

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and insisted, “Men and means must be furnished, and the government sustained at all hazards.” He also observed that war offered “a glorious opportunity for . . . young men to distinguish themselves.” Mass meetings at the county courthouse resembled evangelical revivals. Young men responded to the secular “altar-calls” with patriotic testimony. “I do not court death,” avowed one bank teller, “but I do feel as if to die in vindication of my whole country’s honor, it would be a glorious death.” Soon the volunteers numbered ninety-six, most of them “the sturdy rugged, daring lumber of the region.” The men gathered each afternoon and drilled before large crowds of onlookers. In May a group of women went to Chicago (150 miles away) to purchase silk from which to sew a flag for the company. The shoppers could find no white silk, so a soon-to-be bride contributed fabric meant for her wedding gown, which she “laid” “upon the altar of patriotism.” When completed, the flag, which read manitowac county wisconsin volunteers, was presented to Captain Temple Clark by Mrs. Gideon Collins, wife of the village president. She addressed the men as a “gallant band” and charged them to “buckle on their armor,” “go forth to battle for the right,” and return “laden with honor.” About a week after the flag ceremony, on June 23, 1861, the company followed a band to a pier where the side-wheel steamship Comet waited to transport the men on the first leg of their journey to war. Thousands of citizens were on hand to cheer their warriors off to battle, “a dense mass of human beings.” One diarist recorded, “Wives wept over husbands, mothers blessed their sons and [while] weeping told them to do their duty to their God


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and Country; sisters hung over brothers as though they could not let them go, [and] fathers and brothers, though far less demonstrative in their grief, felt deeply the sad passing; . . . [and] it was to many the last farewell.” Aboard the Comet the men broke into song; most remained awake throughout the night. They stopped briefly at Sheboygan and reached Milwaukee about 3:30 am, where they went ashore, marched to breakfast at a hotel, and thence to the railroad station to board a train for Madison and Camp Randall, the former fairground converted into a rendezvous for volunteers from all over Wisconsin. At Camp Randall the men from Manitowoc became Company A of the Fifth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The novelty of military service and leaving home did wear thin. Manitowoc’s first action in anger was a riot that broke out in response to an interminable Fourth of July “celebration” that became a five-hour forced march in unbearable heat and dust, followed by a supper of cold and inedible “hard bread and stinking beef.” Then they were soldiers. After a month of training, the troops from Manitowoc drew their first pay, struck their tents, and boarded another train—this time bound for Washington, D.C. Already they had missed the first major battle at Manassas/Bull Run. But that fact only seemed to intensify their zeal to save the Union. En route to war, the men still remarked about the cheers and good things to eat they received along the way. When they left Madison people lined the tracks and cheered. In Janesville a crowd greeted them with goodies. In Chicago, as they

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marched from one railway station to another, “the balconies were crowded with Ladies who waved flags and handkerchiefs and the men clapped their hands and cheered like madmen.” Throughout Ohio, “at every little station the people would come on board the cars with baskets of Biscuits, Cakes and Cans of hot coffee.” In time the volunteers from Wisconsin reached the scene of the war and learned full well about boredom. They did see and share some of the “sidebars” of war—a dress parade of 100,000 men; an actual visit from their commander in chief, President Lincoln; and a formation to witness the execution of a young private from Vermont for falling asleep while on picket duty (the lad received a last-minute reprieve). On October 14, 1861, the company encountered the enemy and engaged in a sharp though bloodless skirmish over possession of at least eighteen cows and “one fine horse.” But after that, the men from Manitowoc endured the mud, fevers, gloom, cold rain, lethargy, freezing rain, depression, animosity, idleness, tasteless hard crackers, rancor, and other ills associated with winter quarters. The cheering had stopped, and Christmas packages from home arrived in January.2 ♦♦♦

On Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1861, three companies of volunteers assembled in Rome, Georgia, for competitive drilling and target shooting. A boy who was on the scene recalled politicians assuring the troops and onlookers that “one Southerner could whip ten Yankees” and “the war would only be a picnic for the soldier boys who went to the front.” On other occasions in


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Rome, one volunteer remembered, “Marching in the streets filled our bosoms to overflowing patriotism, and especially as the pretty girls threw flowers and kisses to us.” Gatherings of volunteer units during that spring in Georgia were the scenes of, in the words of one participant, “a good time generally of wit and repartee, conversation, mirth, and song.” Festivities continued as men and boys girded for war. At least two weddings of departing soldiers took place in Rome, and when Captain Edward Jones Magruder married Florence Fauche on May 14 at the First Baptist Church, eighty members of the groom’s company formed an archway with sabers for the happy couple. As it happened, the would-be soldiers (who should not have had sabers, a weapon of cavalry troops) at that time had no rifles. About a week after his wedding, Magruder was able to secure seventy U.S. model 1841 weapons from the state arsenal in Augusta. But then came an order from Governor Joseph Brown forbidding

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Georgia volunteers from taking state-issued arms out of Georgia. Brown believed in states’ rights—even if he was forced to disarm the men who fought for his belief. On Sunday, May 26, two companies of volunteer soldiers filed into the Presbyterian Church. The choir sang, and Pastor John A. Jones preached a farewell sermon to his son, who was a member of the Light Guards; the rest of the volunteer soldiers; and the eight hundred other citizens who packed the space. Jones expanded upon 1 Corinthians 16:13 —“Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong”—and exhorted the young men to act with manly courage. He also spoke to the possibility that some of them might not come home and expressed the evangelical hope that they were prepared for the next life. At this point, according to one witness, “there was just one convulsive sob from one end of the church to the other, for the congregation was composed of the mothers and wives, and sisters and daughters of the soldiers who were marching away.” The day following Jones’s baccalaureate sermon the Light Guards formed and marched to the railroad station. All of Rome seemed to have come to see them off. With the departing soldiers was Florence Magruder, recent bride of the company’s commander. She wore a brown dress with a scarf inscribed the rome light guards, and she packed a pistol on one hip and a dagger on the other. Florence Magruder traveled with her husband to the war zone and spent most of the war with family in Orange County, Virginia. Members of the Rome Light Guards brought other important baggage to the depot with them—trunks, slaves as body servants— and their girlfriends added slippers, pincushions, and baskets of


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food. These men and boys were the “elite of the town,” the most privileged young men in the community, and they were going off to fight for Southern rights. The Light Guards from Rome reached Richmond on May 30, after three days on the train. The company joined other Georgians on the eastern side of town on the Mechanicsville Turnpike at Howard’s Grove, soon known as Camp Georgia. There other companies of Georgians rallied to become the Eighth Georgia Regiment. For a time living was easy. “We have crowds of ladies out to see us every afternoon,” wrote one Georgian. Another estimated that “ladies of Richmond by hundreds” came to see their “dress parade.” And still another new soldier wrote home, “Thare is more prity Girls in the city of Richmon than thare is in the [whole] of Georgia.” Then the Eighth Georgia left Richmond for what they believed was the war. They went to Harpers Ferry and then to Winchester. From Winchester on July 18 the Georgians marched to Piedmont Station to board a train for Manassas. They were going to help General Beauregard whip the Yankees. As the men marched, women kept coming with food and good cheer to sustain them.3

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Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis had to confront constituents who were eager to fight the war that most people believed would never happen, and to win the simple victory their presumed superiority promised.

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The situation in Virginia between the rival capitals evolved fairly simply, all things considered. Each side assembled two armies, one large and one small. The two smaller armies essentially contested the lower Shenandoah Valley, where the Shenandoah River meets the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry. The larger armies seemed intent upon the more or less direct line between Washington and Richmond, eventually focusing upon the railroad junction at Manassas, Virginia, and an oversized creek, Bull Run. Robert Patterson, an aged major general and friend of Winfield Scott, commanded the Union force that would soon occupy Harpers Ferry. His rival was Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston, who pronounced Harpers Ferry indefensible and marched his men to Winchester in mid-June. Patterson wrote and spoke a lot about attacking Johnston’s force, but he never did anything very aggressive. At Manassas, behind Bull Run, which flows roughly west-east, Beauregard commanded a Confederate army that numbered eventually 20,000 men. At Washington, Union general Irvin McDowell prepared to lead an army of about 35,000 “on to Richmond.” Winfield Scott did not want to fight at Manassas or Bull Run, or anywhere else. That was why he had proposed the Anaconda Plan. But Scott’s scheme was complicated and time-consuming, and thus out of the question. George B. McClellan had a plan too. McClellan was in command of a body of troops in Ohio, and he proposed to lead them across the Ohio River, up the Kanawha River, and over the Appalachian Mountains to Richmond. McClellan estimated


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that 80,000 men would be sufficient for the task. Two words rendered McClellan’s plan impractical—“Appalachian Mountains.” And no American had ever commanded 80,000 men anywhere (Scott had captured Mexico City with about 5,000). On the other side, Beauregard had plans every bit as grandiose as Scott’s or McClellan’s. He wanted Johnston’s army to join his, smash McDowell’s invading columns when they came near Manassas, then turn west to dispose of Patterson’s force and McClellan’s folks in turn. This victorious host would then reverse course and march on Washington. All these conquests and all this marching and maneuvering would take, in Beauregard’s estimate, less than a month. Beauregard posed variations of this grand scheme from June 10 to July 17. By the latter date the government in Richmond had rejected all these fantasies, and a Federal army commanded by McDowell was en route to attack the Confederates at Manassas/ Bull Run. The dogs of war were straining at their leashes. Irvin McDowell stalled as long as he was able; he knew that his army lacked training and organization. But those in charge kept reminding him that the enemy was no more ready than he was. On June 24, 1861, McDowell responded to Winfield Scott’s request for some statement of his intentions. He proposed to advance upon Beauregard’s position on Bull Run and depend upon Patterson to keep Johnston’s Confederates “engaged.” McDowell hoped to “turn” Beauregard’s position—that is, to attack his flank and capture his supply line, the railroad linking Beauregard’s army with Richmond. The Federal army marched south on July 16, conducted a “reconnaissance in force” at Blackburn’s Ford on Bull Run on

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July 18, and girded for the decisive assault on July 21. By this time McDowell had decided to “demonstrate”—make a show of force where a decision is not sought—at the stone bridge over Bull Run and thus occupy Confederate troops in that vicinity. The main Union attack would take place beyond the Confederate left flank via Sudley Springs Ford. McDowell wanted to sweep down the enemy defensive line and presumably thence “on to Richmond.” He was aware that the consequences of that battle “will be of the greatest importance in the country, as establishing the prestige in this contest on the one side or the other.” He ordered that once the advance began, “no step be taken in retreat.” On the other side of Bull Run, Beauregard had other ideas. He did receive reinforcement from Johnston’s army; the entire force slipped away from Patterson’s notice, marched about twenty miles to Piedmont Station, traveled by train to Manassas Junction, and arrived just in time for the battle on July 21. By then Beauregard had decided to attack his enemies as they advanced from the north toward Bull Run. Accordingly, Joe Johnston received a wake-up call in the wee hours of July 21 and a request to sign his assent to Beauregard’s order for the attack. Johnston outranked Beauregard but yielded command to the general who had been on the ground for months. Beauregard’s order was indeed ambitious. For example, here are the instructions for two brigade commanders, each in charge of 2,000–4,000 soldiers: Brigadier-General Longstreet’s brigade, supported by Brigadier-General Jackson’s brigade, will march via


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McLean’s Ford to place itself in position of attack upon the enemy on or about the Union Mills and Centreville road. It will be held in readiness either to support the attack at Centreville or to move in the direction of Fairfax Court House, according to circumstances, with its right flank towards the left of Jones’ command, more or less distant, according to the nature of the country. The order to advance will be given by the commander-in-chief. The contingencies were rife. Fortunately for Beauregard, no one had to attempt to follow this order: the commander in chief never gave the order to advance. Couriers spurred their horses up and down the 8-mile Confederate line along the southern bank of Bull Run. Yet as some of Beauregard’s subordinates were trying to decipher his order, a Federal artillery shell crashed into the kitchen of Wilbur McLean’s farmhouse, where Beauregard had established his headquarters. Beauregard soon discovered that the Federals were threatening his lightly defended left flank. He wrote out a supplemental attack order and tried to distribute this document to subordinates. Some Confederate commanders received both sets of orders; some received one and not the other; and some received neither. The only order from Beauregard, and Johnston as well, that made any impact upon the battle was spoken, more likely screamed: “Go to the sound of the firing!” ♦♦♦

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Here in brief is what happened on July 21, 1861, near the banks of Bull Run. McDowell’s Federals demonstrated at the stone bridge and drew Confederate response. Meanwhile, the main column of McDowell’s army crossed Bull Run at Sudley Springs Ford and marched into the flank and rear of the Confederate battle line. McDowell had difficulty moving enough troops fast enough, and so Beauregard’s Confederates went toward “the sound of the firing” in sufficient strength to stop the Federal advance and generate a battle on the slopes of Henry House Hill. The battle line ebbed and flowed throughout the middle of the day and into the afternoon. Groups of troops charged and countercharged as they arrived at the action. The Confederates seemed to be losing. At one point Beauregard had a message in a courier’s hand directing a general retreat in hopes of saving his army and Richmond. But he stayed the courier until he discovered the identity of a body of troops on his left. Beauregard feared they were the vanguard of Patterson’s army, who had finally figured out what had happen to Johnston’s army and followed them to Manassas. But at the last possible moment, a puff of wind revealed a Confederate flag at the head of advancing troops. Soldiers bound for “the sound of the firing” had found the battle and were marching to join the fight. What happened next was about as random as the other things that had been happening all day. Weary Confederates saw comrades coming to save the day and spontaneously began to advance. And as they advanced, they let loose a high-pitched scream that became the “rebel yell.”

From Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Used with permission.

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Federal troops, having marched and fought all day, broke ranks and ran to the rear—across Bull Run and eventually all the way back to Washington. The Confederate troops, who could and should have followed their enemies and sealed the victory and maybe the war, yielded place to the buzzards.4 The men from Rome and other members of the Eighth Georgia Regiment were in the thick of the fighting on July 21, 1861. They were among those troops who went to “the sound of the firing” that morning. Theirs was one of the charges that kept the Federals at bay until more Confederates could rally to the battle. The regiment lost 208 men killed and wounded. Among the dead was the commanding officer, Francis Stebbins Bartow, whose brief gallantry and dying utterance—“Boys, they have killed me, but never give up the field”—earned him a county named for him in Georgia. One soldier from the Eighth Georgia, Berrien Zettler, later remembered thinking, “Surely, surely, there will never be another battle.” Yet he knew, or feared, that there would be more battles, and that he would fight them, “but only as a duty that pride and honor would not let him openly avoid.” Zettler remained in the war until a Federal artillery shell took his legs very near the scene of his first battle. He survived.5 The men of Manitowoc reached the theater of the war and had a full course, from the Seven Days’ Battles before Richmond in 1862 to the trenches around Petersburg in 1864. Their term of service expired on July 13, 1864, and those who had survived believed that they had done their duty. The war was not over; fighting ground on for nearly another nine months. But Company A of the Fifth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment came home


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anyway. By this time, the 104 men of the regiment (96 from Manitowoc) were reduced to 28 according to one authority and to 15 according to another. Local civilians put on a pro forma celebration. In the analysis of their recent chronicler, “It was not much more than ordinary. There was a concert and a reception for them that next Thursday at Glover Hall, then it was done. Their war was over.” Little more than three months after that, the citizens of Manitowoc County voted for George B. McClellan over Abraham Lincoln by a margin of almost two to one and thus repudiated the administration, if not the war, that had seemed such a crusade in April of 1861.6 Meanwhile, back at the battlefield on July 21, 1861, a thunderstorm erupted in the summer sky. Jefferson Davis arrived on the field in the wake of Beauregard’s victory. He found the victors almost as confused as the vanquished and discussed pursuit with Beauregard and Johnston at the headquarters while rain pelted down outside. They decided to call off immediate pursuit, to try to rein in the dogs and not risk overextending Confederate forces. ♦♦♦

Subsequently participants, interested parties, casual observers, and historians have questioned this decision. Here was a contingency. Had the Confederates pressed their advantage and captured Washington, events might have been different. But such speculation is counterfactual. The picnic war was over. In fact, some of the last picnickers were caught up in the Federal rout at Bull Run: some members of

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Congress, other government officials, and denizens of Washington society had packed their hampers and loaded them and themselves into their carriages and buggies and come to watch their army thrash the Rebels. As Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body (1928) has it: The congressmen came out to see Bull Run, The congressmen who like free shows and spectacles. They brought their wives and carriages along, They brought their speeches and their picnic-lunch . . . Some even brought a little whiskey, too.

Into the midst of the retreat these civilians attempted to steer their carriages. They merely compounded the confusion and became part of the detritus left in the receding Union tide. The bridge over Cub Run, a creek roughly two and a half miles in the Federal rear, became a bottleneck when Confederate artillery shells exploded on the span and wagons stalled there and accelerated the panic. Henry Wilson, senator from Massachusetts, lost his buggy and had to “commandeer” a horse and ride bareback back to Washington. Alfred Ely, congressman from New York, suffered capture and became one of the first inmates of Libby Prison in Richmond. General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker once asked sarcastically, “Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?” Stephen Vincent Benét appropriated the line: “Who ever saw a dead congressman?” ♦♦♦

On July 21, 1861, Jefferson Davis sent a telegram to his wife that became the official announcement. “Night has closed on a hard fought field. . . . Our forces have won a glorious victory.”


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In Richmond, one resident recalled “men drunk with glory.” One newspaper called Manassas/Bull Run “the greatest battle since Waterloo.” And another paper proclaimed, “This day our freedom and independence stand secure!”7 July 21, 1861: mission accomplished?

Conclusion

Re s o nan ce ♦

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History is nothing more nor less than experience. All people, except recent amnesiacs and victims of Alzheimer’s disease, are historians. Because we act out of our experience, history is very important. History is about human drama; history is dull only if we are. The past tends to enslave us—to bind us to convention, wisdom, expectations, and norms. The study of history can liberate us. The end of history is freedom. The past does not change. But the questions we ask about the past change considerably, and so all history worthy of the name is revisionist.

and Montgomery in April 1861, the actors seemed to sleepwalk through the plot of a melodrama. James Chesnut, Robert Anderson, P. G. T. Beauregard, Abraham Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis all stepped to their

A T F O R T S U M T E R, C H A R L E S T O N , WA S H I N G T O N ,

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marks and delivered their lines as they supposed they were supposed to do. Lincoln had to deny the legitimacy of secession and thus retain the public property of the United States, Fort Sumter. Davis had to act out the independence of the Confederate States and thus take possession of a military installation at the mouth of a major seaport, Fort Sumter. Beauregard had to prepare to blast the fort into submission if ordered. Ultimately he had thirty cannons and eighteen mortars trained on the fort from four separate locations. Anderson had twenty-one guns, most of which were too small to do much damage to the forts he faced. He had no orders to leave his post, so he stayed. Chesnut was Beauregard’s errand boy, one whose tasks were pro forma, at least until Anderson introduced the prospect of being “starved out.” Then the question became when. So at 1:00 am on April 12, 1861, Chesnut clambered into a rowboat and had himself and some of his aides rowed out to Fort Sumter. After his two hours of deliberation with his subordinates in that gun casemate, Anderson answered the question of when with a date and time that surely would have been after the relief expedition arrived. Chesnut considered the “starvation moment” too distant, so he fixed the “martial moment.” All of this action in Charleston took place in the midst of a flood of rhetoric assuring all concerned that war was doubtful, and that even if it happened, it would be short and sweet. Some seemed to believe that war would be a righteous catharsis, would be “good for us.” Some saw war as a romantic apocalypse, an opportunity to embrace Armageddon. But most Americans

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seemed to believe that their enemies were of no account, and so war would be principally picnics and parades. So sure in these matters were those who would decide between peace and war that they either failed to ask those military authorities what might happen or ignored counsel when offered. Hence both sides encountered unintended consequences of their war. Abraham Lincoln, although born in the border South and married into a Southern family, could never seem to understand the tenacity with which white Southerners bonded with the Confederacy. This failure certainly affected his decision to send supplies to Fort Sumter and so triggered the bombardment there. Lincoln’s assumptions about the mass of white Southerners also led him to call for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to put down the rebellion. And Lincoln seemed to believe that if he could just communicate with the Southern plain folk, he could win their allegiance to the Union, in spite of evidence to the contrary. Lincoln’s assumptions even had an impact on Reconstruction. Jefferson Davis seemed the most aware that the war might well be prolonged and bloody. He also knew that the Confederacy confronted long odds. But he believed that he could win a test of wills, and he was prepared to take to the hills if necessary and fight on as a guerrilla for as long as it took to achieve independence. Davis knew the gamblers’ spread but played the game anyway. So the makeshift armies collided near Manassas, across Bull Run, after a season of “phony war.” Grand plans and righteous rhetoric produced armed mobs on July 21, 1861. The parades and picnics came to a halt. Out of a plethora of plans and orders only one proved important: “Go to the sound of the firing.”

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The Confederates won decisively; Federal troops ran in a rout, and Washington was in serious peril. But the battle only fired the Federal will to save the Union. The side that won the opening engagement lost the war. What does all this mean? Three of the most dangerous words in the English language are “History teaches us . . .” There usually follows some overly simple pretension that has little or no relation to truth. I believe that the American Civil War offers insight and enlightenment about the human condition to inform this present. Those dogs of war, once loosed, seldom go where we want them to go. Once slipped, they run wild. Perhaps there is a parable here. I believe in redemption.

Notes 1: The Mar tial Moment, 1861 1. This narrative follows fairly closely my account in The American War and Peace, 1860–1877 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973), 1–5; The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York, 1979), 90–92; and “Secession, Succession, and Sumter: The Crisis of 1860–1861,” in The David A. Sayre History Symposium: Collected Lectures, 1985–1989, ed. F. Kevin Simon (Lexington, KY, 1991), 199–208. Among detailed studies of the crisis at Fort Sumter are Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1997); David Detzer, Alliance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001); and W. A. Swanberg, First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter (New York, 1957). 2. Thomas, Confederate Nation, 4. 3. The best statement of this truth, that concerns over slavery and race provoked secession, is Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2001). 4. Thomas, The American War and Peace, 86. 5. David M. Potter, “Why the Republicans Rejected Both Compromise and Secession,” in The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge, 1968), 262. 6. Ibid. 7. Significantly better than my paper for Frank Vandiver’s graduate course is David M. Potter, “The Literature on the Background of the Civil War,” in The South and the Sectional Conflict, 92–103.

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8. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York, 1936), 105; Mary Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, 1981), 75; W. J. Underwood to B. Y. Hunter, July 9, 1861, UnderwoodKey Family Papers, Atlanta Historical Society, cited in Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York, 1988), 20–21. 9. Ellen Glasgow, The Battle-Ground (New York, 1902), 280. 10. New York Tribune, June 8, 1861, New Haven Daily Palladium, April 29, 1861; James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1982), 164; Allan Nevins, The War for the Union: The Improvised War, 1861–1862 (New York, 1959), 87, 95–96, 151; William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley (New York, 1950), 243. 11. Sallie Brock Putnam, Richmond During the War: Four Years of Personal Observation (New York, 1867), 21–22. Walker’s estimate is from The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, ed. Frank Moore (New York, 1861–68), 1:188; Hammond to Simms, July 17, 1861, in Carol Bleser, The Hammonds of Redcliffe (New York, 1981). 12. A. Toomer Porter, Led On! Step by Step (Charleston, 1898), n.p.; William C. Davis, “A Government of Our Own”: The Making of the Confederacy (New York, 1994), 198. 13. Concerning the significance of the rifle, see Thomas, Confederate Nation, 107–8, and McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, 193–95. 14. Catherine C. Hopley, Life in the South (London, 1863), 1:278; Joseph H. Parks, Joseph E. Brown of Georgia (Baton Rouge, 1977), 186, 242; Daily Richmond Enquirer. 15. Quoted in John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, ed. Howard Swiggett (New York, 1935), 1:18. 16. William B. Gulick to John W. Ellis, Washington, D.C., April 29, 1861, in The Papers of John Willis Ellis, ed. Noble J. Tolbert (Raleigh, NC, 1964), 2:693; Secession Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860, ed. William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson (New York, 1992), 133:

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Davis to Polk, Montgomery, May 22, 1861, in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, ed. Linda Lasswell Crist and Mary Seaton Dix (Baton Rouge, 1992), 7:174. 17. Harris’s speech reprinted in Dew, Apostles of Disunion, 89; Judah Benjamin speech in Southern Pamphlets on Secession, ed. Jon L. Wakelyn (Chapel Hill, 1996), 114; Raimondo Luraghi, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South (New York, 1978), 88–89, and see 145–52. 18. Springfield, Massachusetts, Daily Republican, April 20, 1861, reprinted in Northern Editorials on Secession, ed. Howard Cecil Perkins (New York, 1942), 2:1064–7. 19. About Daniel, see Emory M. Thomas, “A Virginian Ambassador in Torino: John Moncure Daniel, Witness to the Italian Risorgimento,” in Atti del I Congresso Internazionale di Storia Americana (Genova, 1978), 55–63. The quotation is from the Richmond Examiner, July 2, 1861, printed in Frederick S. Daniel, The Richmond Examiner During the War (New York, 1868), 16–17. 20. Paris, Maine, Oxford Democrat, May 31, 1861, in Northern Editorials, 1:535. 21. Detroit Daily Advertiser in ibid., 1:524. 22. Bellefontaine, Ohio, Republican, December 15, 1860, in ibid., 1:516–17. 23. New York World, April 30, 1861, in ibid., 815–16. 24. This paragraph is a summary of the thesis advanced in my essay on Lincoln and the coming of the war. 25. I also intend an essay/chapter about Davis and the coming of the war. Some of my ideas about Davis and strategy are in my essay “Ambivalent Visions of Victory: Davis, Lee, and Confederate Grand Strategy,” in Jefferson Davis’s Generals, ed. Gabor S. Boritt (New York, 1999), 27–45.

96

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2: War Dogs: 1861 and After 1. Daniel Boorstin, Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1958). 2. For studies of the American military in the nineteenth century, see two books (and bibliographies) by Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York, 1973) and History of the United States Army (New York, 1967), and Paolo Coletta, A Selected and Annotated Bibliography of American Naval History (Lanham, MD, 1987). 3. Winfield Scott needs another biography that connects his life to questions appropriate to the twenty-first century. In the meantime, John S. D. Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott (New York, 1997) is very good, and the two volumes of Scott’s Memoirs (New York, 1864) are vital. 4. Eisenhower, Scott, 382–83; Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2005), 216–17, 248, 290–93, 313, 403–4. 5. William C. Davis, A Government of Our Own: The Making of the Confederacy (New York, 1994), 173–74, 31–64; see also John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1866). 6. Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York, 1995), 140, 179–83, 187–88; Lee to Mary Lee, May 2, 1861, in The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee, ed. Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin (New York, 1961), 18; Lee to Mary Lee, April 30, 1861, ibid., 18. 7. Charleston Mercury, May 30, 1861, quoted in T. Harry Williams, P. G. T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray (Baton Rouge, 1955), 64–65.

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8. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC, 1880–1901), Series I, 2:49, 196–97. 9. Lee Kennett, Sherman: A Soldier’s Life (New York, 2001), 110. See also John Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (New York, 1993). 10. James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (New York, 1997), 120–21, 206–7. 11. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters, ed. Mary Drake McFeely and William S. McFeely (New York, 1990), 148, 153. 12. William C. Davis, Battle at Bull Run: A History of the First Major Campaign of the Civil War (Garden City, NY, 1977), 9–14. 13. The best biographies of Jefferson Davis are William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour (New York, 1991) and William J. Cooper Jr., Jefferson Davis: American (New York, 2000). 14. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York, 2004), 78. 15. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 857–58. 16. Janis Karpinski with Steven Strasser, One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story (New York, 2005), 201, 173, 212. About Iraq and Abu Ghraib, see also Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York, 2004) and Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York, 2006). 17. H. Wirz to D.T. Chandler, Camp Sumter, Andersonville, GA, August 1, 1864, in James Madison Page, The True Story of Andersonville Prison: A Defense of Major Henry Witz (New York, 1908), 137–38. 18. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Bevington and David Scott Kastan (New York: Bantam, 2005), 107.

98

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3: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of War 1. The literature about Abraham Lincoln is indeed vast. I rely here upon the following major works: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (London, 1995); Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1977); Phillip Shaw Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence, KS, 1994); Lincoln the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures, ed. Gabor S. Boritt (New York, 1992); and Stephen Berry, House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War (Boston, 2008). The Lincoln quotation is in Paludan, Presidency, 261. 2. See Berry, House of Abraham, 24–53; Donald, Lincoln, 167, 633–34n; Oates, Malice Toward None, 59–60, 106–7, 14–16, 36–38; John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2008); and Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Expansion Controversy (Champaign, IL, 1967). 3. David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, ed. Daniel W. Crofts (Baton Rouge, 1995), 247. 4. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, Marion Dolores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dunlap (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953–55), 4:160. 5. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York, 1976), 558. 6. Donald, Lincoln, 273; Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 316–18; Oates, Malice Toward None, 209. 7. Donald, Lincoln, 277–79; Oates, Malice Toward None, 211–13; Kristen M. Smith, The Lines Are Drawn: Political Cartoons of the Civil War (Athens, GA, 1999), 19. 8. Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 219–48.

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99

9. Ibid, 242–43, 285–88; Harold Holzer, Lincoln, President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860–1861 (New York, 2009), 214–15. 10. Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 288. 11. Berry, House of Abraham, 53–61. 12. Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 329. 13. Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1997), 116–19; John S. D. Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott (New York, 1997), 357–65; Winfield Scott, Memoirs (New York, 1864), 2:627. 14. Klein, Days of Defiance, 354, 341–44; Alan Nevins, The War for Union, vol. 1: The Improvised War, 1861–1862 (New York, 1959), 53–54. 15. Robert V. Bruce, “The Shadow of a Coming War,” in Lincoln, the War President, ed. Gabor S. Boritt (New York, 1992), 24–25. 16. One source of Seward’s “Thoughts” and Lincoln’s response is Documents of American History, ed. Henry Steele Commager, 3rd ed. (New York, 1946), 392–93; see also Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 59–63; Donald, Lincoln, 289–92. 17. James M. McPherson, “Lincoln and the Strategy of Unconditional Surrender,” in Lincoln the War President, 41; Donald, Lincoln, 296; Nevins, War for Union, 53–54. 18. McPherson, “Lincoln and Strategy,” 39–45. 19. See Duane Schultz, The Dahlgren Affair: Terror and Conspiracy in the Civil War (New York, 1998), and Samuel J. Mertin, Kill-Cavalry: The Life of Union General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick (Mechanicsburg, PA, 2000). 20. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction: 1865–1877 (New York, 1965), 24–49.

100

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21. See Emory M. Thomas, The American War and Peace, 1860–1877 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973), 176ff. 22. John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War (Chicago, 1961); Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867 (Baton Rouge, 1985); and George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens, GA, 1984). 23. Thomas, American War and Peace, 190n. The quotation is from 208–9.

4: Jef fer son Davis and the Coming of War 1. Davis to Joseph Emory Davis, January 12, 1825, in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, ed. Haskell M. Monroe Jr. and James I. McIntosh (Baton Rouge, 1971), 1:17–18. 2. I rely upon two outstanding biographies of Davis by good friends: William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour (New York, 1991) and William J. Cooper Jr., Jefferson Davis: American (New York, 2000). The material quoted here is cited in Davis, The Man and His Hour, 301–4. 3. Cooper, Davis, 335. 4. Davis, The Man and His Hour, 305–7. 5. Davis to Campbell, March 6, 1861, in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, ed. Lynda Lasswell Christ and Mary Seaton Dix (Baton Rouge, 1991), 7:92–93; Davis to Varina Davis, February 22, 1861, Papers of Jefferson Davis, 7:53–54. 6. See Emory M. Thomas, “Jefferson Davis and the American Revolutionary Tradition,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 70, 1 (February 1977): 2–9.

Notes

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7. See Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971). 8. Starting blocks for understanding Davis and strategy are Frank E. Vandiver, Rebel Brass: The Confederate Command System (Baton Rouge, 1956); Vandiver, Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy (New York, 1970); and Thomas L. Connelly and Archer Jones, The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy (Baton Rouge, 1973). 9. About Lee, Davis, and the offensive defense, see Emory M. Thomas, “Ambivalent Visions of Victory: Davis, Lee, and Confederate Grand Strategy,” in Jefferson Davis’s Generals, ed. Gabor S. Boritt (New York, 1999), 27–45, and Steven E. Woodworth, Davis and Lee at War (Lawrence, KS, 1995). 10. Davis to People, April 4, 1865, quoted in Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York, 1979), 301–5. 11. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 301–5.

5: Chum: Fir st Blood at Fir st Bull Run 1. Kerry A. Trask, Fire Within: A Civil War Narrative from Wisconsin (Kent, OH, 1995); Warren Wilkinson and Steven E. Woodworth, A Scythe of Fire: Through the Civil War with One of Lee’s Most Legendary Regiments (New York, 2002). 2. Trask, Fire Within, chapter 1, offers an outstanding introduction to Manitowoc. Most of the material cited here comes from chapters 2 and 3 of that book. 3. Wilkinson and Woodworth, Scythe, 1–57. I focus upon the Rome Light Guards, which became Company A of the Eighth Georgia, but some of the material cited applies to other companies of the regiment.

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4. I deal with these events in The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865 (New York, 1979), 98–119, and in The American War and Peace: 1860–1877 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973), 71–74. See also especially William C. Davis, Battle at Bull Run: A History of the First Major Campaign of the Civil War (Garden City, NY, 1977); John S. D. Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott (New York, 1997), 381–90; and Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command (New York, 1942–44), vol. l. 5. Wilkinson and Woodworth, Scythe, 51–91. 6. Trask, Fire Within, 228–32. 7. Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital (Austin, TX, 1971), 60–61, 49, 54; Davis, Bull Run, 239. The quotations from Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown’s Body (New York, 1927), are on 79 and 81.

Index Abu Ghraib, 34–35, 36 Afghanistan, 55 African Americans as Confederate soldiers, 65 Lincoln’s friendships with, 39 and Reconstruction, 53 See also racial conflicts; slavery Al Qaeda, 67 American Revolution impact on American psyche, 22 as model for Confederate war strategy, 19, 63, 65, 66, 68 Anaconda plan, 23–24, 28, 50–51, 78 Anderson, Robert, 1–3, 46, 89–90 Andersonville, 34, 35–36 Antony, Marc, 21, 36 Apostles of Disunion (Dew), ix Appomattox, Lee’s surrender at, 66 Arkansas, secession of, 70 Army of Northern Virginia, 65–66 Army of Tennessee, 66 Arnold, Matthew, 69 artillery, 10 See also weaponry Bartow, Francis Stebbins, 84

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (McPherson), 33 Battle-Ground, The (Glasgow), 8–9 Battle of Buena Vista, 32, 59, 62 Battle of Shiloh, 30 Battles of Manassas/Bull Run. See First Battle of Manassas/ Bull Run; Second Battle of Manassas/Bull Run Beauregard, P. G. T. (Pierre Gustave Toutant) beliefs about war, 27–28, 31 and Fort Sumter crisis, 1–2, 27, 89–90 at Manassas/Bull Run, 78, 80–82, 85 war strategies of, 65, 79 Bellefontaine Republican, 15–17 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 86 Benjamin, Judah, 12 Benning, Henry L., 11 Berry, Stephen, 45 Black Codes, 53 Black Hawk War, 38, 62 Brierfield plantation, 58, 59 Brown, John, 27 Brown, Joseph, 10, 75–76 Bruce, Robert V., 49

104

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Buchanan, Franklin, 32 Buena Vista, Battle of, 32, 59, 62 Bull Run, 69, 78 See also First Battle of Manassas/ Bull Run Burnside, Ambrose E., 65 Bush administration, 32–33 Bush, George W., 33 Calhoun, John C., 59 Cameron, Simon, 24–25, 48 Campbell, John A., 61 Champe (fictional character), 8–9 Chancellorsville, Va., 65 Charles 1, 52 Charleston, S.C., 1, 48 See also Fort Sumter, S.C. Chase, Salmon P., 25, 31 Cheney, Dick, 33 Chesnut, James and Fort Sumter crisis, 1–3, 89–90 war predictions of, 8, 9, 10 Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 1 Chew, R.S., 50 Chicago Tribune, 9 Chinese Civil War, 52 civil rights movement, 54 Civil War as apocalyptic answer to sectional quandary, ix, 6, 12, 90 causes of, ix–x, 3–8 concept of “contingency” in, 33

index

concept of “unintended consequences” in, x, 33–34, 91 failure of decision-makers to seek or accept advice, x, 21–22, 23, 31–32, 91 lessons of, 20, 33, 54–55, 92 opening of, 1, 3 “repressible conflict” theory of, 7 See also Civil War rhetoric; First Battle of Manassas/ Bull Run; Fort Sumter, S.C.; martial moment; weaponry Civil War rhetoric belief in cowardice or weakness of other side, x, 11, 13–14, 20, 74, 90–91 belief in superiority of own side, 8, 13–18, 77 belief it would be “good for us,” ix, 6, 12–13, 90 belief it would be short, 8–10, 23, 90 belief it would never happen, ix–x, 23 Clark, Temple, 72 Clay, Clement C., 25 Collins, Mrs. Gideon, 72 Confederate army draft for, 64 rebel yell, 82 recruitment of African American soldiers, 65 surrender of, 66, 67, 68

index

war strategies, 64–68 See also Confederate States of America; First Battle of Manassas/Bull Run Confederate States of America: formation of, 45 habeas corpus in, 64 martial law in, 64 Montgomery as capital of, 2, 59, 69 president of, 60 Richmond as capital of, 26, 27, 51, 69–70 secretary of war for, 9–10, 25–26 vice president of, 26, 38 See also Confederate army; Davis, Jefferson; First Battle of Manassas/Bull Run; Fort Sumter, S.C.; Reconstruction; secession; South Corinthians, 76 Crane, Stephan, 9 Crittenden, John J., 47 Crowley, Jeremiah, 71–72 Dahlgren, John, 32 Daily Advertiser, 15 Daily Palladium, 9 Daily Republican, 13 Daniel, John M., 14 Davis, Jefferson American Revolution as model for, 19, 63, 65, 66, 68

♦

105

belief that South would win, x, 19, 20, 64, 68, 91 capture, 67, 68 at First Manassas/Bull Run, 85, 86 and Fort Sumter crisis, 63–64, 89–90 guerrilla strategy envisioned by, 20, 66, 68, 91 inaugural trip to Montgomery, 60–61 marriage to Sarah Taylor, 58 marriage to Varina Howell, 58, 59, 60, 61, 86 in Mexican War, 32, 59, 62 military experience prior to Civil War, 32, 58, 59, 62–63 miscalculations about Lee, 65–66 miscalculations about North, 11, 20 naming as provisional president, 60 personality, 58, 64, 68 planning for war, 61–62 plantation of, 58, 59 as secretary of war for Pierce, 32, 59, 62, 63 on slavery and Southern rights, 59 understanding of realities of war, x, 60, 61, 62, 63–64, 68, 91

106

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Davis, Jefferson (continued ) in U.S. Congress, 58, 59 war strategy, 19–20, 63–68, 91 at West Point, 57, 62 Davis, Sarah Taylor, 58 Davis, Varina Howell, 58, 59, 60, 61, 86 Dew, Charles B., ix Douglass, Frederick, 39 “Dover Beach” (Arnold), 69 DuPont, Samuel Francis, 32 Durham, N.C., 66 Eighth Georgia Infantry Regiment at First Manassas/Bull Run, 84 formation of, 70, 77 Eliot, T.S., 12 Ellis, John W., 11 Ely, Alfred, 86 Emancipation Proclamation, Preliminary, 19 Examiner (Richmond), 14 Farragut, David G., 32 Fauche, Florence, 75 Fifth Wisconsin Volunteers battles fought by, 74, 84 formation of, 70, 72–74 return home, 84–85 First Battle of Manassas/Bull Run battle summary, x, 78–84 Confederate victory, x, 63, 64, 84, 86–87, 92

index

decision not to pursue Union, 64, 84, 85 and Eighth Georgia Infantry Regiment, 84 maps of, 83 picnic observers at, 85–86 Union resolve strengthened by, 92 First Mississippi Volunteers, 59, 60 Fitch, Charles, 71 Fleurville, William de, 39 Fort Johnson, S.C., 3 Fort Sumter, S.C. Anderson’s request for resupply, 2, 46, 47, 49–50 Davis’s role in, 63–64, 89–90 Lincoln’s role in, 47, 48, 49–50, 89–90, 91 as martial moment, 3, 7–8, 63, 90 negotiations and bombardment, 1–3, 90, 91 surrender of, 63, 69 Franklin, John Hope, 52 Fredericksburg, battles of, 65 Georgia naming of Bartow County, 84 secession of, 11, 12 See also Eighth Georgia Infantry Regiment; Rome Light Guards

index

Glasgow, Ellen, 8 Gone With the Wind (Mitchell), 8 Gospel of St. Luke, 1, 64 Grant, Ulysses S., 30–31, 66 Greeley, Horace, 9 guerrilla tactics employed in other wars, 67 envisioned in Civil War, 20, 66, 68, 91 Gulf War, 32 Halleck, Henry, 31 Hammond, James Henry, 9 Harpers Ferry, 27, 78 Harris, William L., 12 Hemphill, John, 44 Henry House Hill, 82 Herndon, William, 40 history revisionism in, ix, 89 study of, 89, 92 “Hollow Men, The” (Eliot), 12 Hooker, Joseph, 86 Howell, Varina. See Davis, Varina Howell Hurlbut, Stephen A., 48 Iraq War, 32–34 Irish Republican Army, 55, 67 Jackson, Thomas Jonathan (Stonewall) beliefs about war, 30, 31

♦

107

career before war, 29–30 at First Manassas/Bull Run, 80–81 James Island, S.C., 3 John Brown’s Body (Benét), 86 Johnson, Andrew, 52, 59 Johnston, Albert Sidney, 31 Johnston, Joseph E. in closing days of war, 66, 67 at First Manassas/Bull Run, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85 Jones, John A., 76 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 21, 36 Karpinski, Janis, 34–35 Ku Klux Klan, 55 Lamon, Ward Hill, 42, 48 Lee, Mary, 27 Lee, Robert E. capture of John Brown, 27 joining Confederate army, 27 in Mexican War, 27 military acumen, 26–27, 31 offensive strategy of, 65–66 offer of Union army command, 27 at Second Manassas/Bull Run, 65 surrender to Grant, 66 understanding of war, 27, 32 at West Point, 27 Lee, Robert E., Jr., 27

108

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Light Guards. See Rome Light Guards Lincoln, Abraham ability to learn and grow, 37–38 beliefs about secession, 18, 39–41, 43, 45–46, 48–49, 62, 90 beliefs about slavery and race, 37 birthplace in South, x, 38, 91 desire to communicate directly with Southerners, 18–19, 51, 91 1864 presidential election, 85 failure to understand South, x, 18–19, 38–41, 43, 48–49, 51, 54, 91 Fort Sumter crisis, 47, 48, 49–50, 89–90, 91 friendships with African Americans, 39 inaugural address, 43, 45–46 inaugural train trip, 41–43, 60 inauguration, 18, 43 marriage into Southern family, x, 38, 91 military advice received by, 23–24, 38, 46–48 military experience prior to presidency, 38 physical description, 37 Reconstruction plans of, x, 19, 51–52, 91

index

Republican nomination, 24, 41–42 secretary of state, 42, 43, 44, 49 secretary of treasury, 24–25 secretary of war, 24–25, 48 Southern opinion of, 4 Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (Potter), 40–41 Longstreet, James, 31, 80–81 Louisiana State University, 29 Luke, Gospel of, 1, 64 Luraghi, Raimondo, 12 Magruder, Edward Jones, 75, 76 Magruder, Florence Fauche, 75, 76 Mallory, Stephen R., 32 Manassas, Va., 69, 78 See also First Battle of Manassas/ Bull Run Manitowoc Herald, 71 Manitowoc Pilot, 71–72 Manitowoc Tribune, 71 Manitowoc, Wisc. and 1864 presidential campaign, 85 war frenzy in, 70–73 See also Fifth Wisconsin Volunteers martial moment of Civil War, x, 7–8, 90 defined, 7, 63 McClellan, George Brinton 1864 presidential election, 85

index

as successor to Winfield Scott, 28 thoughts on war, 28–29, 31 war strategy, 78–79 McDowell, Irvin beliefs about war, 31 at First Manassas/Bull Run, 78, 79, 80, 82 McLean, Wilbur, 81 McPherson, James M., 33 Mexican War Battle of Buena Vista, 32, 59, 62 capture of Mexico City, 46, 79 and First Mississippi Volunteers, 59, 60 and George McClellan, 28 and Irvin McDowell, 31 and Jefferson Davis, 32, 59, 62 and Robert E. Lee, 27 and Ulysses Grant, 30 veterans as primary authorities for Civil War, 23 and Winfield Scott, 46, 79 military. See Confederate army; Union army; U.S. military military academies. See United States Naval Academy; West Point Mississippi, secession of, 59 Mississippi River, 51 Mitchell, Margaret, 8 Montgomery, Ala.

♦

109

as capital of Confederate States, 2, 59, 69 Davis’s inaugural trip to, 60–61 muskets, 10 See also weaponry Naval Academy. See United States Naval Academy New Bern Republican, 11 New England Society, 43–44 New York Times, 9, 43 New York Tribune, 9 North belief that war would be “good for us,” ix, 6, 12–13, 90 ideological “commitment” of, 4–5 See also Union North Carolina secession of, 70 war rhetoric about, 16–17 O’Connor, Flannery, 55 O’Hara, Scarlett (fictional character), 8 Oxford Democrat, 14–15 Patterson, Robert, 78, 79, 82 Petersburg, siege of, 84 Petigru, James, 48 Pickens, Francis W., 48, 50 Pierce, Franklin, secretary of war for, 32, 59, 62, 63

110

♦

pikes, 10–11 See also weaponry Pinkerton, Allan, 41–42 Plan of Attack (Woodward), 32–33 Polk, Leonidas, 11 Porter, David Dixon, 32 Porter, John L., 32 Potter, David M. Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, 40–41 on Lincoln’s inaugural address, 45–46 on paths to war, 5–6 on secession, 40–41 Powell, Colin, 32–33 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, 19 prisons Abu Ghraib, 34–35, 36 Andersonville, 34, 35–36 racial conflicts after war, 52–53, 55 as cause of secession, ix, 4 See also slavery Radical Republicans, 53 Rebels war yell of, 82 See also Confederate army; Confederate States of America Reconstruction and African Americans, 53

index

congressional strategy for, 53–54 Lincoln’s plans for, x, 19, 51–52, 91 property rights in, 52, 54 Second, 54 South’s response to, 52–53 Red Badge of Courage (Crane), 9 Rice, Condoleezza, 33 Richmond, Va. as Confederate capital, 26, 27, 51, 69–70 iron industry in, 70 rifles impact on how war was fought, 10, 59 for Rome Light Guards, 75–76 See also weaponry Rome, Ga., war frenzy in, 74–76 Rome Light Guards formation of, 76–77 See also Eighth Georgia Infantry Regiment Rumsfeld, Donald, 33 Scott, Winfield advice to Lincoln regarding war, 23–24, 46–48 Anaconda war plan, 23–24, 28, 50–51, 78 and assassination plot against Lincoln, 41–42 as commander of Union army, 23–24, 41, 46

index

and First Manassas/Bull Run, 24, 78, 79 in Mexican War, 46, 79 military career prior to Civil War, 46 physical description, 46 on Robert E. Lee, 27 successor to, 28 secession of Arkansas, 70 of Georgia, 11, 12 Lincoln’s views of, 18, 39–41, 43, 45–46, 48–49, 62, 90 of Mississippi, 59 of North Carolina, 70 reasons for, ix, 4 Seward on, 43–45, 49 of South Carolina, 39–40 of Tennessee, 70 of Texas, 44 of Virginia, 70 Second Battle of Manassas/Bull Run, 65 Second Reconstruction, 54 Seven Days’ campaign, 65, 84 Seward, William H. beliefs about war, 30 bid for Republican nomination, 24, 41–42 as Lincoln’s secretary of state, 42, 43, 44, 49 plan to reunite United States, 49

♦

111

relationship with Lincoln, 41–42, 43 on secession, 43–45, 49 Shakespeare, William, 21, 36 Shenandoah Valley, 78 Sherman, William Tecumseh beliefs about war, 29, 31 career before war, 29 Johnston’s surrender to, 67 march through Georgia, 34 pursuit of Johnston, 66 Shiloh, Battle of, 30 Simms, William Gilmore, 9 slavery as cause of secession, ix, 4 Davis’s beliefs about, 59 Lincoln’s beliefs about, 37 Smith, Edmund Kirby, 67 Smith, Sewell, 71 South belief in war as apocalyptic answer, ix, 6, 12, 90 ideological “cause” of, 3–4 Lincoln’s failure to understand, x, 18–19, 38–41, 43, 48–49, 51, 54, 91 rehabilitation of, 55 See also Confederate States of America; Reconstruction; secession South Carolina secession, 39–40 war rhetoric about, 15–16

112

♦

Spain, guerrilla warfare in, 67 Speed, Joshua, 38 Stampp, Kenneth M., 51 Stephens, Alexander H. friendship with Lincoln, 38, 40 and Reconstruction, 52 as vice president of Confederacy, 26, 38 Sudley Springs Ford, 80, 82 Taliban, 55 Taylor, Sarah Knox, 58 Taylor, Zachary, 58, 59 Tenet, George, 33 Tennessee, secession of, 70 Texas, secession of, 44 Tredegar Iron Works, 70 Union changes after war, 52 and industrial capitalism, 7, 52, 53 symbolic meanings of, 4 See also Fort Sumter, S.C.; Lincoln, Abraham; North; Union army; U.S. Congress; U.S. military Union army commanding general for, 23–24, 41, 46 See also First Battle of Manassas/ Bull Run

index

United States. See American Revolution; Civil War; Mexican War; Union; U.S. Congress; U.S. military United States Military Academy at West Point. See West Point United States Naval Academy, 22 U.S. Congress Jefferson Davis as member of, 58, 59 picnic observers at First Manassas/Bull Run, 85–86 and Reconstruction, 53–54 U.S. military opinions on eve of war, 23–31, 46–48 professionalization of, 22–23 Vance, Mariah, 39 Vicksburg, Miss., 60 Viet Cong, 67 Virginia secession of, 70 See also Richmond, Va. Virginia Military Institute (VMI), 29–30 Walker, Leroy Pope, 9–10, 25–26 wars lessons about entering, 5–6, 54–55 uncontrollability of, 20, 21–22, 92

index

See also Black Hawk War; Civil War; Iraq War; Mexican War Washburne, Elihu B., 43 Washington, George, 19, 20, 63 weaponry artillery, 10 impact on how war was fought, 10, 59 pikes, 10–11 rifles, 10, 59, 75–76 unusual, 10–11 Welles, Gideon, 32 West Point (military academy) as engineering school, 22–23 and George McClellan, 28 and Irvin McDowell, 31 and Jefferson Davis, 57, 62 and Robert E. Lee, 27

♦

113

and Ulysses Grant, 30 and William T. Sherman, 29 Whig Party, 51 White Citizens’ Councils, 55 White Russians, 52 Wilson, Henry, 86 Wirz, Henry, 35 Wisconsin. See Fifth Wisconsin Volunteers; Manitowoc, Wis. Wise Blood (O’Connor), 55 Wise, Henry A., 11 Wise, Obadiah Jennings, 11 Woodward, Bob, 32–33 World (newspaper), 17 Yancey, William Lowndes, 25, 61 Zettler, Berrien, 84

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