SPECIAL ISSUE
LEE TAKES COMMAND, p. 24 | A CAPITAL IN CRISIS, p. 34 VOL. 2, VOL. 2, NO. 22 NO.
{ A N E W L O O K a t A M E R I C A’S G R E A T E S T C O N F L I C T }
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changed hands between the Union and Confederacy over 70 times. Residents experienced constant uncertainty and turmoil, but life went on even as the cannon blasts of war thundered around them. to the 1860s at the Civil War Orientation Center Follow the trenches at Cedar Creek & Belle Grove National Historical Park
Pedal the trail at the Third Battle of Winchester Walking & Biking Path Imagine the General at his desk in Stonewall Jackson’s Headquarters Tour the Pritchard family’s home on the Kernstown Battlefield See soldiers‘ graffiti at the Old Courthouse Civil War Museum Learn the civilians’ stories at the Newtown History Center Sign up for a Guided Tour of Historic Towns or Battlefields Visit the preserved landscape of historic Rose Hill Farm
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Honor soldiers at the Union and Confederate Cemeteries
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
FEATURES
Lee: Initial Stride to Greatness
Salvo
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 A Visit to New Orleans
VOICES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 General Grant’s Big Year
PRIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Battle of the Ironclads
In his first campaign as Confederate army commander, Robert E. Lee established his reputation as a bold leader—and changed the course of the war in the East. BY JEFFRY D. WERT PAGE
24
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2012
A Capital in
CRISIS PAGE
34
Twelve summer days in 1862 marked the darkest time of the Civil War for Washington, D.C. BY STEPHEN W. SEARS
PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Victory at Shiloh
DISUNION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 A Counterfeiting Conspiracy?
IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 The Dead of Antietam
Columns
CASUALTIES OF WAR . . . 20 William Wallace Lincoln
BATTLEFIELD ECHOES. . .22 Disappointing Victory at Iuka
Faces of 1862
PAGE
The war’s second year forever changed the lives of countless Americans—soldiers and civilians—on both sides of the conflict. BY RONALD S. CODDINGTON
Books & Authors Essential Reading on…
THE WAR IN THE WEST, 1862 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 BY BROOKS D. SIMPSON
THE PENINSULA CAMPAIGN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 BY GLENN DAVID BRASHER
THE BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG . . . . . . . . . . . 71 BY ROBERT K. KRICK
Fighting for South Mountain
On the eve of Antietam, Union soldiers won a decisive victory—then fought again to have it remembered.
BY BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN
Northern Divide
The elections of 1862 seemed to offer a severe rebuke to Abraham Lincoln and his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The president and his allies, however, read the results much differently. BY LOUIS P. MASUR
PAGE
In Every Issue EDITORIAL
.....................
War in Earnest
2
PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 The Monitor’s “Lonely Light” ON THE COVER: A
young Confederate soldier from Virginia. Courtesy of the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Library of Congress
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Editorial VOLUME 2, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2012
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
......
. . . . . . . . Laura June Davis
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
War in Earnest FOR WILDER DWIGHT, 1862 began as it did for many northern and southern soldiers and civilians: full of hope that the still-young conflict might soon be over; the enemy defeated in a single, decisive battle; and the country swiftly reunited. “I wish you all a happy New Year,” wrote Dwight, an officer in the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, to his mother on January 5. “[A]nd for us in the army,” he added boastfully, “I wish us all a fighting New Year.” But by the time the year was over, few would still maintain such thirst for combat or confidence in a speedy reconciliation. Indeed, the events of the war’s second year seemed to move the country farther from, not closer to, a resolution. Larger, longer, and bloodier battles—Shiloh, the Seven Days, Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg—saw Americans killed and injured in numbers never before imagined possible, while controversial policies such as conscription and emancipation produced divisions on the home front and promised to permanently alter the nation and its institutions. It was, in many ways, the year that the war turned serious. To mark this important year’s 150th anniversary, we’re devoting this issue to the events of 1862. And while we can’t come close to covering them all, even the most significant, we hope to provide a sense of how meaningful the year was to the course of the war and how extensively it impacted the lives of Americans, both northern and southern. For Wilder Dwight, 1862 never ended. Nine months after reading that new year’s note, Mrs. Dwight received a much darker missive from her son. While rallying his men during September’s Battle of Antietam, Wilder was struck by a Confederate bullet in the left hip. It was a mortal injury, and the young officer knew it. “I am wounded so as to be helpless,” Dwight wrote his mother for the final time. “Good by[e], if so it must be. I think I die in victory. God defend our country.”
Terry A. Johnston Jr.
TERRY@civilwarmonitor.com
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CORRECTIONS: In our last issue, the caption on page 5 incorrectly described the Salvo
artwork as depicting General Philip Sheridan at the Third Battle of Winchester; it actually shows Sheridan’s ride from Winchester to the battlefield at Cedar Creek. In our lead article on William T. Sherman, we got two things wrong. On page 31, we erroneously introduced Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war, as Edward, and also wrongly described him as secretary of state. We also incorrectly attributed the pull quote on page 67; it was a quote about Jefferson Davis by Sherman, not, as we said, the other way around. Thanks, as always, for your comments and corrections. Please keep them coming.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: LETTERS@civilwarmonitor.com
DISTRIBUTION
Curtis Circulation Company www.curtiscirc.com The Civil War Monitor [ISSN 2163-0682/print, ISSN 2163-0690/ online] is published quarterly (4 times per year) by Bayshore History, LLC (P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ, 08403). Subscriptions: $21.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $31.95 per year in Canada, and $41.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Postmaster: send address changes to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 567, Selmer, TN 38375-0567. Views expressed by individual authors, unless expressly stated, do not necessarily represent those of The Civil War Monitor or Bayshore History, LLC. Letters to the editor become the property of The Civil War Monitor, and may be edited. The Civil War Monitor cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited materials. The contents of the magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of the publisher.
Copyright ©2012 by Bayshore History, LLC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Open June 15, 2012, through January 27, 2013 Meet the people whose lives tell the story of this pivotal moment in American history.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
The “1812: A Nation Emerges” catalog and exhibition are made possible by the generous support of HISTORY® and TD Bank Group.
Eighth and F Streets NW Washington, D.C. npg.si.edu PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE 202.633.1000
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11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Open daily except December 25 Metro: Gallery Place/Chinatown
3
Image: We Owe Allegiance to No Crown by John Archibald Woodside, c. 1814. Photograph by Erik THE CIVIL WAR Arnesen © Nicholas S. West MONITOR
SUMMER 2012
5/23/12 6:41 AM
Salvo
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{ FA C T S , F I G U R E S & I T E M S O F I N T E R E S T }
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IN THIS SECTION Travels
A VISIT TO NEW ORLEANS
.........
6
Voices
GENERAL GRANT’S BIG YEAR . . . . . 10 Primer
THE BATTLE OF THE IRONCLADS . . . 12 Preservation
VICTORY AT SHILOH . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Disunion
A COUNTERFEITING CONSPIRACY? . . 16 In Focus
THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION, ACCESSION NO. 1974.80
THE DEAD OF ANTIETAM . . . . . . . . . 18
In this painting by Mauritz Frederik de Haas, ships of Flag Officer David G. Farragut’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron force their way past the Confederate forts guarding the approaches to New Orleans on the Mississippi River during the early hours of April 24, 1862. Within days, the city would surrender to U.S. forces. FOR MORE ON NEW ORLEANS, TURN THE PAGE.
5 PAINTING BY MAURITZ FREDERIK DE HAAS
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Salvo | Travels
Destination: New Orleans THE EXPERTS
MICHAEL ROSS, as-
sociate professor of history at the University of Maryland, previously taught for 10 years at Loyola University in New Orleans. He has written several articles about Civil War New Orleans, and is working on a study of race relations and justice there during Reconstruction.
JUSTIN NYSTROM
BEST SLEEP
| MICHAEL ROSS | The Omni Royal Orleans is a beautiful large hotel with the best location of any hotel in the French Quarter. Be sure (even if you don’t stay there) to go up to the rooftop pool bar for the spectacular views of the Mississippi River and Quarter. | JUSTIN NYSTROM | Both the French Quarter and the Central Business District feature many fine hotels. If your budget allows, consider the Hotel Montele-
one in the Quarter—one of the few non-chain grand hotels and owned by the same family since 1886. In the CBD, the Roosevelt is perhaps the most iconic and home to the Sazerac Bar. For a change of pace and some real 19th-century grandeur, consider one of two uptown icons located along the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line. One is The Columns Hotel, where the movie Pretty Baby was filmed, and the other is the Park View Guest
is an assistant professor in history at Loyola University and author of New Orleans After the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom (2010). He is writing a book about Sicilian New Orleans.
House, which is located across from Tulane and Loyola universities and borders beautiful Audubon Park. BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
| M.R. | Take the St. Charles Avenue streetcar up to the Audubon Zoo, one of the crown jewels of the city. Older children and teenagers will also enjoy The National WWII Museum and the “4D” film Beyond All Boundaries in its Solomon Victory Theater. | J.N. | Audubon Zoo is a firstclass facility and located between the river and Audubon Park. Parking is plentiful and you can even take a streetcar to the park or a free shuttle to the zoo. The Creole Creamery on Prytania Street would be worth a stop on
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
WHEN NEW ORLEANS fell in April 1862, the Confederacy lost its largest city and a crucial supply port. Union forces, meanwhile, took an important step toward gaining control of the entire Mississippi River—and splitting the rebel nation in two. Although it was spared the destruction of other southern cities captured during the war, New Orleans nevertheless endured a rigorous occupation, one that earned its U.S. administrator, General Benjamin Butler, his infamous reputation and the nickname “Beast.” Abundant evidence of the city’s Civil War history survives to this day. Interested in visiting New Orleans? To help plan your trip, we’ve enlisted a couple of experts—individuals who live in, work in, or are otherwise intimately familiar with the historic city—to offer their personal suggestions for what to see and do.
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK NIDDRIE
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your way back downtown and is just a short walk from the streetcar through a beautiful neighborhood. Fabulous custom ice cream—but bring cash! BEST TIME TO BE HERE
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
| M.R. | New Orleans is best from late October (when the heat breaks) until mid-May. In the spring, the French Quarter Festival is a favorite of locals where top regional acts play for free on multiple stages throughout the Quarter. The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (last weekend in April, first weekend in May) has music on multiple stages for every taste from traditional jazz, gospel, and blues, to major acts (this year’s lineup includes Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and the Eagles). If you come for Mardi Gras, be sure to leave the drunken crowds in the French Quarter and check out the family friendly uptown parades that the locals really attend. | J.N. | It’s always great to come for Mardi Gras, but it’s not the best time to sample what the city has to offer. If you want to com-
Clockwise, from above: The Camellia Grill; a bartender at Napoleon House; The Columns Hotel; Metairie Cemetery; and Louisiana’s Civil War Museum at Confederate Memorial Hall.
bine a trip with music, come for the French Quarter Festival— the music reflects the enormous depth of our local talent; the weather is cooler than it is a few weeks later for Jazz Fest. Best of all, it is free! But my favorite time of year has to be very early spring right before or right after Mardi Gras (depending upon when it falls). Everything is in bloom, the weather is unbelievably pleasant, and the city is never more beautiful. CAN’T MISS
| M.R. | For a classic New Orleans experience, take the St. Charles streetcar to The Columns Hotel and have drinks on the porch of this stately old mansion surrounded by live oaks. It’s also a great spot to stop after touring the Garden District. | J.N. | Visitors with a car should head out old US 90 to see Fort Pike. It and its twin, Fort Macomb, did not see action during the Civil War but guarded the passes between the Gulf and Lake Pontchartrain. While it is like a lot of antebellum brick fortifications elsewhere, it wasn’t mauled by World War I-era modifications. On top of that, getting there is half the fun. Not only will
you see the massive post-Katrina flood control structures built by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, you will pass through the city’s large Vietnamese enclave and can stop at Dong Phuong Bakery to buy a $4 banh mi sandwich that will blow you away. BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
| M.R. | You must visit Louisiana’s Civil War Museum at Confederate Memorial Hall. Founded in 1891 during the great era of Civil War monument and museum building, it is full of Confederate artifacts and lore. Unionists beware—this museum was founded to honor the “lost cause.” From a historian’s perspective, it is a fascinating window into how Confederates and their sons and daughters wanted the Civil War to be remembered. Civil War tourists will also want to tour Metairie Cemetery on the outskirts of the city, which is full of monuments to, and graves of, important Civil War figures such as P.G.T. Beauregard, John Bell Hood, and many others. The most important battle site near New Orleans is Fort Jackson. It has recently reopened after suffering major damage during Hurricane # } CONT. ON NEXT PAGE
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Salvo | Travels
Katrina and is definitely worth the 60-mile drive south from the city if you have a car. | J.N. | Hands down this is the Civil War Museum at Confederate Memorial Hall. With the breakup of the collections previously housed in Richmond’s Museum of the Confederacy, it probably has the single largest collection of Civil War artifacts anywhere. It’s the longest running museum of its kind in the nation, and the architecture of the building itself is worth the admission price. What really sets its collections apart is that most of the artifacts have such provenance and rarity. It will leave your head spinning. BEST-KEPT SECRET
| M.R. | Take a tour bus (or drive) to Vacherie, Louisiana, to Oak Alley Plantation. Its live-oak-lined entrance and grand residence is what many people envision when they think of the Old South. But be sure to also tour neighboring Laura Plantation, where the guides offer a more complex interpretation of planters, slaves, and life in antebellum Louisiana. | J.N. | There are incredible stores all along Magazine Street Uptown and on Royal and Chartres in the French Quarter, but if I could only go into one shop, it would be Lucullus on Chartres Street. They specialize in culinary antiques, which appeal to the amateur chef and professional historian in me. I also love going to the New Orleans Museum of Art in the beautiful Bayou St. John area. And let’s not forget the most awesome free thing you can do in New Orleans: ride the Algiers Point Ferry from the foot of Canal Street. You will get the most amazing view of the French Quarter from the other side.
BEST CIVIL WAR BOOK
| M.R. | Michael Pierson’s Mutiny at Fort Jackson: The Untold Story of the Fall of New Orleans (2008). Pierson skillfully incorporates the latest scholarship into a gripping account of New Orleans’ strategic importance, the reasons it fell so early in the war, and Union general Benjamin “Beast” Butler’s controversial occupation of the city. | J.N. | I guess that I’d have to plug my own book, New Orleans After the Civil War—don’t be fooled by the title, there is a bit on the war in it too! Pierson’s Mutiny at Fort Jackson is also definitely worth your time. Reconstruction is so important to the Civil War story in New Orleans that you can argue that the war here lasted until 1877.
NEW ORLEANS NAVIGATOR
BEST EATS
" LODGING
| M.R. | Built 200 years ago, the Napoleon House in the French Quarter serves tasty and reasonably priced gumbo, jambalaya, cheese boards, and a signature drink (the Pimm’s Cup) in an atmosphere that is quintessential New Orleans. Author Andrei Codrescu once wrote that “a summer afternoon at the Napoleon House can stretch into infinity over a few beers.” Ask for a table in the front room or on the patio and you will see what he means. For a great breakfast, take the St. Charles Avenue streetcar to The Camellia Grill, a New Orleans landmark since 1946. Everyone sits at the counters, and waiters in white jackets serve up the largest and tastiest omelets you will ever have. Galatoire’s on Bourbon Street is a New Orleans
The Columns Hotel (3811 St. Charles Ave.; 504-899-9308)
" PLACES OF INTEREST
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Audubon Zoo (6500 Magazine St.; 504-212-5301) Canal Street!/!Algiers Ferry (1 Canal St.; 504-376-8180)
Fort Jackson (LA Highway 23, 60 mi. south of New Orleans; 504-394-0018) Fort Pike State Historic Site (27100 Chef Menteur Hwy; 504-255-9171) French Quarter Festival (www.fqfi.org/frenchquarterfest/; 504-522-5730) Laura Plantation (2247 Highway 18, Vacherie, LA; 225-265-7690) Louisiana’s Civil War Museum at Confederate Memorial Hall (929 Camp St.; 504-523-4522) Lucullus (610 Chartres St.; 504-528-9620) Metairie Cemetery (5100 Pontchartrain Blvd.; 504-272-2871) The National WWII Museum (945 Magazine St.; 504-528-1944) New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (www.nojazzfest.com; 504-410-4100) New Orleans Museum of Art (1 Collins C. Diboll Circle; 504-658-4100) Oak Alley Plantation (3645 Highway 18, Vacherie, LA; 225-265-2151)
4
Hotel Monteleone (214 Royal St.; 504-523-3341) Omni Royal Orleans Hotel (621 St. Louis St.; 504-529-5333) Park View Guest House (7004 St. Charles Ave.; 504-861-7564) The Roosevelt New Orleans (123 Baronne St.; 504-648-1200) " DINING
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Angelo Brocato Ice Cream & Confectionery, Inc. (214 N. Carrollton Ave.; 504-486-1465) Boucherie (8115 Jeannette St.; 504-862-5514) Café Du Monde (800 Decatur St.; 504-525-4544) The Camellia Grill (626 S. Carrollton Ave.; 504-309-2679) The Creole Creamery (4924 Prytania St.; 504-894-8680)
Commander’s Palace (1403 Washington Ave.; 504-899-8221) Dong Phuong Bakery (14207 Chef Menteur Hwy; 504-254-0214) Eleven 79 (1179 Annunciation St.; 504-299-1179) Galatoire’s Restaurant (209 Bourbon St.; 504-525-2021) La Petite Grocery (4238 Magazine St.; 504-891-3377) Liuzza’s Restaurant & Bar (3636 Bienville St.; 504-482-9120) Lilette (3637 Magazine St.; 504-895-1636) Maple Street Patisserie (7638 Maple St.; 504-304-1526) Martinique Bistro (5908 Magazine St.; 504-891-8495) Napoleon House (500 Chartres St.; 504-524-9752) Patois Restaurant (6078 Laurel St.; 504-895-9441) Port of Call (838 Esplanade Ave.; 504-523-0120) The Ruby Slipper Cafe (200 Magazine St.; 504-525-9355) Vizard’s Restaurant (5015 Magazine St.; 504-895-2246)
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the crowds. | J.N. | There are so many incred-
Above: Café Du Monde. Opposite page: The Commander’s Palace restaurant.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
restaurant wonderfully frozen in time. Locals and tourists lunch for hours, sipping martinis and eating old Creole dishes. Go early, they don’t take reservations. For dinner, it is hard to beat Commander’s Palace, the grand dame of New Orleans restaurants for service, quality, and atmosphere. Ask to sit in the main dining room. But there are countless hidden gems in New Orleans. Uptown on Magazine Street, Lilette, La Petite Grocery, and Vizard’s are three of my favorites for sophisticated dining without
ible restaurants in the city, but I can think of few places that aren’t chains that are open all the time except The Camellia Grill and Café Du Monde, both institutions that are worth your time despite the crowds. For very late nights, go to Port of Call on Esplanade to eat a giant hamburger and it just might ease you through the next morning. There are lots of fancy places to get brunch, but I love The Ruby Slipper Cafe, which is very representative of some of the newer energy fueling our restaurant scene. If you want a bakery, hit up Maple Street Patisserie in the Carrollton/University area. Go to Liuzza’s on Bienville in Mid City for a roast beef poor boy sandwich and an ice-cold schooner of draft Abita Amber, then walk a little bit of it off by
going around the corner to Angelo Brocato’s for the most incredible gelato on the planet. Liuzza’s only takes cash but has been there since the 1940s. Brocato’s started in the French Quarter in 1906 and is still run by the family. My favorite “nice” dinner places are the smaller Uptown establishments like Patois Restaurant or Martinique Bistro, which, if the weather is cooperative, has one of the most heavenly dining courtyards. If you are in the Carrollton area, go to Boucherie and have brilliant bistro dining on a budget. People also forget how Italian New Orleans is, and for some truly incredible “Creole Italian,” go to Eleven 79, run by Joe Segreto. Gentlemen should consider bringing a sport coat on this trip. Dress codes aren’t what they used to be, but people here appreciate dressing right for dinner more so than other cities.
BluegrassKentucky.com
Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War in the Bluegrass Region.
$!"#$$%&'!&%(!)&&*#+$,&*$-!#*(!./-$01/+!201$-!$!3/4/%!5#1!61#/%-!#*(!6071-! $!.0,&-!08!9*/0*!#*(!30*8&(&1#$&!:1&#$-!$!./-$01/+!3&,&$&1/&-!#*(!;0*7,&*$PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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Salvo | Voices
General Grant’s Big Year “[T]HE ART OF WAR IS SIMPLE ENOUGH; FIND OUT WHERE YOUR ENEMY IS, GET AT HIM AS SOON AS YOU CAN, AND STRIKE HIM AS HARD AS YOU CAN, AND KEEP MOVING ON.” “[Grant] has none of the soldier’s bearing about him, but is a man whom one would take for a country merchant or a village lawyer. He has no distinctive feature; there are a thousand like him in personal appearance in the ranks…. A plain, unpretending face, with a comely, brownish-red beard and square forehead, of short stature and thick-set. He is we would say a good liver, and altogether an UNPRONOUNCEABLE MAN; he is so like hundreds of others as to be only described in general terms.”
—A CORRESPONDENT FOR THE NEW YORK WORLD, MAY 1862
“[Grant] is not a brilliant man ... but he is a good & brave soldier ... is —ULYSSES S. GRANT sober, very industrious and as kind TO UNION ARMY SURGEON as a child. Yet he has been held up JOHN H. BRINTON, 1862 as careless, criminal, a drunkard, tyrant, and everything horrible.” “I think that Grant could get more votes than any other man for commander of the army…. [He] is not so popular among the general officers, as far as I know, but the whole line believe in him, mostly, because he is for going ahead and will fight his men.”
—WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, ELLEN, DATED JUNE 6, 1862
“No terms except an
UNCONDITIONAL AND IMMEDIATE SURRENDER can
—ILLINOIS OFFICER CHARLES WRIGHT WILLS, NOVEMBER 15, 1862
“I am looking for a speedy move, one more fight and then easy sailing to the close of the war. I really will feel glad when this thing is over. The battle at this place was the most desperate that has ever taken place on the Continant and I dont look for another like it.” —GRANT IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, JULIA, DATED APRIL 15, 1862, A WEEK AFTER THE BATTLE OF SHILOH. AFTER THE WAR, GRANT WOULD DESCRIBE THE TWO-DAY STRUGGLE AS “A CASE OF SOUTHERN DASH AGAINST NORTHERN PLUCK AND ENDURANCE.”
SOURCES: PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF JOHN H. BRINTON (NEW YORK, 1914); BRUCE CATTON, GRANT MOVES SOUTH (BOSTON, 1960); ULYSSES S. GRANT, PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF U.S. GRANT, VOL. 1 (NEW YORK, 1885); JOHN Y. SIMON, ED., THE PAPERS OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, VOL. 5 (CARBONDALE, IL, 1973); ARMY LIFE OF AN ILLINOIS SOLDIER (WASHINGTON, DC, 1906). WITH THANKS TO BROOKS D. SIMPSON FOR HIS ASSISTANCE.
be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”
—GRANT TO SIMON BOLIVAR BUCKNER, IN RESPONSE TO THE CONFEDERATE GENERAL’S REQUEST FOR AN ARMISTICE AND APPOINTMENT OF COMMISSIONERS TO NEGOTIATE TERMS OF SURRENDER OF FORT DONELSON, FEBRUARY 16, 1862. BUCKNER, WHO CHARACTERIZED GRANT’S TERMS AS “UNGENEROUS AND UNCHIVALROUS,” NEVERTHELESS ACCEPTED THEM LATER THAT DAY.
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PAINTING BY CHRISTIAN SCHUSSELE/ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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MODERN WAR STUDIES Corinth 1862
Siege, Battle, Occupation 4IMOTHY " 3MITH â&#x20AC;&#x153;A splendid blending of military and social history that brings to life the tragedies and humanity of a war-torn town.â&#x20AC;?â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Michael B. Ballard, author of Vicksburg: The Campaign that Opened the Mississippi â&#x20AC;&#x153;Here at last is a first-rate history of the dramatic struggle for Corinth, one of the few truly decisive campaigns of the Civil War. Smith deftly fills in the crucial gap between Shiloh and Vicksburg and does it in grand style. His richly textured narrative illuminates the quality of leadership on both sides, as well as the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians caught up in an extraordinary trial by fire.â&#x20AC;?â&#x20AC;&#x201D;William L. Shea, author of Fields of Blood: The Prairie Grove Campaign PAGES PHOTOGRAPHS MAPS #LOTH
Warâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Desolating Scourge
The Unionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Occupation of North Alabama *OSEPH 7 $ANIELSON â&#x20AC;&#x153;Danielsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thought-provoking study shows this supposedly unionist region of the Deep South to have been sharply divided, and to have boasted a Confederate population that persevered far longer than might be expected against the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;punitiveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;hard warâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; policies of Union occupation.â&#x20AC;?â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Daniel E. Sutherland, author of A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War â&#x20AC;&#x153;Essential reading for anyone interested in the experience of the Southern people under Union military occupation.â&#x20AC;?â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Stephen V. Ash, author of When the Yankees Came PAGES PHOTOGRAPHS MAPS #LOTH
U.S. Army War College Guides to Civil War Battles
Guide to the Battle of Gettysburg Second Edition, Revised and Expanded %DITED BY *AY ,UVAAS (AROLD 7 .ELSON AND ,EONARD * &ULLENKAMP This long-anticipated revised edition boasts double the number of maps, as well as new sections highlighting the strategic and operational context for the Gettysburg campaign. â&#x20AC;&#x153;These guides bridge the gap between sound military history and battlefield touring literature. They can be enjoyed without ever leaving the easy chair or they can become indispensable companions on tramps over the scenes of the greatest engagements of the Civil War.â&#x20AC;?â&#x20AC;&#x201D;William C. Davis, author of Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour and former editor of Civil War Times Illustrated PAGES PHOTOGRAPHS MAPS 0APER
University Press of Kansas 0HONE s &AX s WWW KANSASPRESS KU EDU
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Salvo | Primer
Battle of the Ironclads “FOR HOURS THE conflict
lasted. Sometimes so near were the vessels they appeared in contact, and again three miles apart; but all the while vomiting forth seeming destruction with frightful rapidity, looking, as a gentleman near me observed, like very ‘hell cats.’” So noted Roland Greene Mitchell, one of the spectators crowding the beach outside Fortress Monroe, Virginia, on March 9, 1862, to watch the first-ever combat between ironclad vessels. The previous day, the CSS Virginia, an ironclad ram constructed from the salvaged remains of the sunken frigate USS Merrimack, had engaged the Union’s wooden ships blockading the southern coast, destroying two. On the 9th, the Virginia met a more formidable opponent, the USS Monitor, the U.S. Navy’s first commissioned ironclad warship, which had arrived overnight from its Brooklyn base. The hourslong fight between the ironclads, while inconclusive (neither ship inflicted serious damage on the other), was nevertheless significant—one that, as Mitchell observed, “has no precedent in history, and from which dates a new era in naval warfare.”
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The ship’s armored casemate consisted of four inches of iron over 24 inches of timber.
A grated upper deck allowed air and light in to the gunners below.
The bulk of the Virginia’s armament consisted of six 9-inch Dahlgren smoothbore guns, three port and three starboard.
A removable grating allowed easy access to the propeller for maintenance and repairs.
Two air intake vents and two exhausts from the ship’s boilers were normally fitted with removable extensions that improved airflow. These were dismantled and struck below (as seen here) during battle.
An armored, 360° rotating turret housed two 11-inch Dahlgren guns and a crew of 19. Its iron roof contained two hatches and a series of ventilation holes, which allowed in fresh air. ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANDY HALL
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% IRONCLAD COMPARISON
A series of hatches in the upper deck allowed access to the top of the casemate.
Ventilators atop the Virginia’s casemate provided fresh air to the engine spaces below deck, to feed the furnaces under the boilers.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
The pilothouse was constructed of 9-by-12-inch wrought iron blocks and equipped with a viewing slit.
Two hatches (one forward of the turret, one aft) provided access to the interior of the ship from the main deck.
CATEGORY
USS MONITOR
CSS VIRGINIA
172'
275'
Length
This lightweight chimney vented the exhaust from the ship’s galley up and away from the crew inside the casemate.
Draft
10' 6"
22'
Beam
41' 6"
38' 6"
Speed
8 knots (9.2 mph) 5-6 knots (5.8 – 6.9 mph)
Crew
A 6.4-inch rifled gun occupied either side of the forward part of the casemate.
58
Two ship’s boats, held by brackets, were used to carry the crew between the ironclad and other ships or the shore.
This circular plate covered the Monitor’s anchor well and allowed access to the anchor from the deck for maintenance or other routine work.
A conical pilothouse, built of 12-inchthick cast iron, contained four vision ports to allow the ship’s commander to see out.
320
The casemate’s fore and aft ends were fitted with 7-inch Brooke rifles. Mounted on pivots, each of the guns could fire out of one of three gun ports cut in the casemate.
A 1,500pound, castiron, wedgeshaped ram extended three feet beyond the ship’s bow.
13 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SOURCES: Roland Greene Mitchell, Soldiers’ Letters, from Camp, SUMMER Battle-field and Prison (New York, 1865). With thanks to Andy Hall 2012 and The Mariners’ Museum’s Anna Holloway for their assistance.
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Salvo | Preservation
Victory at Shiloh By O. James Lighthizer, PRESIDENT, CIVIL WAR TRUST Civil War Trust president James Lighthizer hopes the purchase of this 491-acre parcel on the Shiloh battlefield will soon be a reality.
clashed briefly with the rearguard of the retreating Confederate army the day after the battle. The land transfer we completed that morning is symbolic of our strong, longstanding partnerships with state and local governments, as well as the National Park Service. In fact, the transfer is part of a larger effort by the Department of the Interior to acquire historic properties at battlefield parks as part of the sesquicentennial commemoration. During the past year, the federal government has set aside more than $5 million to transfer battlefield lands into national parks. When all is said and done, more than 536 acres will have been added to battlefield parks at Manassas, Richmond, Fort Donelson and Shiloh as a tangible legacy of the anniversary period. The second part of our an-
*** Look for regular preservation news and updates from the Civil War Trust in future issues. To learn more about the organization and how you can help, visit www.civilwar.org
nouncement is an ambitious new project—one that, if successful, would be the largest single acquisition of land at Shiloh since the park’s establishment in 1894. For decades, this 491-acre parcel, which completes the battlefield’s southeastern corner, has topped the park’s acquisition wish list, as it represents the final unprotected portion of the eastern edge of Shiloh Hill. Befitting its size, history, and frontage on the Tennessee River, the price for this land is not inexpensive: $1.25 million. Still, the Trust expects to apply a $1 million government matching grant, leaving just $250,000 to be raised from private donations. And, based on the reaction of the crowd in Tennessee, I’m sure we can do it. To learn more about how you can help, please visit www.civilwar.org/shiloh2012.
P H O T O G R A P H C O U R T E S Y T H E C I V I L WA R T R U S T
DURING THE FIRST year of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial commemoration, I’ve had the honor of attending many outstanding anniversary events. Without fail, I’ve been impressed with the excellent exhibits, lectures, and other presentations by groups big and small all across the country. But as memorable as these gatherings are, they are always fleeting. That’s why I think the Civil War Trust’s work during the sesquicentennial is so important. There can be no more lasting and fitting tribute than protecting the sites where the war’s outcome was decided—the battlefields themselves. We believe that every acre we save from development is an investment in our country’s future, a gift to our children and grandchildren so that they can walk these same fields unblemished and undisturbed. Of course, sometimes these goals align perfectly. In early April, I went to Tennessee for the 150th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Shiloh. As part of the Tennessee Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission’s annual signature event, the Trust was able to make announcements regarding the permanent preservation of a whopping 925 acres of Shiloh battlefield land: the transfer of 167 acres from the Trust to the park; the launch of a $1.25 million campaign to preserve an additional 491 acres inside authorized park boundaries; and the purchase of 267 acres at Fallen Timbers, where Union forces
14 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2012
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Salvo | Disunion
A Counterfeiting Conspiracy? By Ben Tarnoff IN MARCH 1862, an unusual ad began appearing in northern newspapers. Among the shops selling pianos and patent medicines, sheet music and sewing machines, this one stood out: It promised “perfect fac-similes” of Confederate currency. There were seven kinds of notes for sale, and testimonials from The New York Tribune and others praising the replicas for their high quality and low prices. Five cents bought you one. Two dollars bought a hundred. Fifteen dollars bought a thousand. The word “counterfeits” never appeared. These were “Mementos of the Rebellion,” sold by a Philadelphia shopkeeper named Samuel Curtis Upham. ¶ Upham didn’t look like a counterfeiter. He was a respectable small-business owner and devoted northern patriot. He ran a store that sold stationery, newspapers, and cosmetics. But he was also an entrepreneur with an eye for easy profit, and the Civil War offered the business opportunity of a lifetime: the ability to forge money without breaking the law. Confederate currency, issued by a government that was emphatically not recognized by the Union, had no legal status in the North, which meant Upham could sell his “fac-similes” with impunity. Over the next 18 months he built the most notorious counterfeiting enterprise of the Civil War—one that also happened to be perfectly legal. His forgeries flooded the South, undermining the value of the Confederate dollar and provoking enraged responses from southern leaders. He waged war on the enemy’s currency, serving his pocketbook and his country at the same time. Upham first got the idea the month before, on February 24, 1862. That day, customers kept coming into his shop to buy The Philadelphia Inquirer. Puzzled, he asked one of them what made that particular edition so popular. The answer was on the front page: The Inquirer’s editors had
printed a copy of a $5 Confederate note. Philadelphians had never seen Rebel money before and were fascinated by it. Upham saw a chance to cash in. He raced to the Inquirer’s offices, bought the plate of the note, and printed 3,000 copies on French letter paper. They sold extremely well. Along the bottom of each bill, he included a thin strip that read, in small print, “Fac-simile Confederate Note,” with his name and address. The tags could easily be clipped off, transforming the “fac-simile” into an excellent counterfeit. After his first print run, Upham rapidly expanded his inventory. He took out ads in newspapers, promising to pay in gold for more specimens of southern money. At first, it seemed possible that he sincerely thought of his reproductions as souvenirs. In early 1862, most northerners still expected the war to be brief and glorious. They wanted “mementos of the Rebellion” before the Union crushed it. By the time Upham launched his publicity campaign in March, however, his business had clearly evolved from a modest retail operation into a high-volume wholesaling enter-
This article is excerpted from Disunion, a New York Times online series following the course of the Civil War as it unfolded. Read more at www.nytimes.com/ disunion.
prise. No one needed 1,000 souvenirs: People were clearly using his products for a less innocent purpose. By April, Upham’s fakes began appearing in Richmond, the Confederate capital. They caused a sensation at the Confederate Treasury Department, and a Treasury officer persuaded the editors of the Richmond Daily Dispatch to inform the public about the new threat. “This note is well calculated to deceive, and in nearly every particular is a fac-simile of the original,” they wrote, condemning the forgeries as “Yankee scoundrelism.” In May, the Dispatch discovered one of Upham’s notes with the margin bearing his name and address still attached. “Who is this man Upham?” they asked. “A knave swindler, and forger of the most depraved and despicable sort.” By then, Upham had grown his business considerably. He now offered 14 varieties of Confederate notes, postage stamps, and “shinplasters”—fractional bills worth anywhere from 5 to 15 cents—and printed his fakes on real banknote paper. Southerners responded with outrage. They became convinced that Upham belonged to a covert Union plot to devalue the Confederate dollar. For the Philadelphia shopkeeper to be able to advertise his counterfeits openly and send them through the mail meant the authorities must have given him permission or, possibly, material support. Moreover, Union troops spent counterfeit
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COURTESY MICHAEL HOLLEY
Confederate cash in large quantities—evidence of “a deep laid scheme on the part of the thieving, counterfeiting North … to undermine the Confederate currency,” in the eyes of the Daily Richmond Examiner. In the summer of 1862, Upham’s notes inundated northern Virginia, brought by Union forces marching south from Washington. A southern journalist observed men “fortified with exhaustless quantities of Philadelphia Confederate notes,” which they used to buy everything from horses to sugar to tobacco. The shopkeeper’s counterfeits appeared “wherever an execrable Yankee soldier polluted the soil with his cloven foot,” fumed the Richmond Daily Dispatch. By the summer of 1862, as fake cash flowed across the border in ever greater quantities, the Confederate leadership took notice. On August 18, President Jefferson Davis discussed the threat in a message to the Confederate Congress. Counterfeit Confederate notes were “publicly advertised for sale” and furnished to “the soldiers of the invading army” with the full “complicity”
Above: A genuine $100 Confederate note. Samuel Upham’s counterfeits, strikingly similar in appearance, fooled many.
of the Union government, Davis declared. Later that day, Confederate Treasury Secretary Christopher Memminger submitted a report to the House of Representatives that reiterated Davis’ concerns and singled out Upham’s role in the crisis. By then, forged bills had been found far from the Union border, in Atlanta, Savannah, Montgomery and other cities of the Deep South. Hamstrung by a disorganized government and mounting logistical challenges, the Confederacy couldn’t stanch the surge of counterfeit currency. Despite southern claims, however, it’s unlikely that the Union government ever actively promoted the forging of Confederate money. Federal authorities most likely found it easier to ignore the forging of southern bills than to take a position either for or against it. They certainly never interfered with Upham, who freely continued forging Confederate cash until August 1863. By that time, the value of the southern dollar had fallen so low that it was hardly worth counterfeiting. During the 18 months that Upham operated his venture, the value of Con-
federate paper money fell by 90 percent. Upham wasn’t the only reason behind this collapse. Fake cash plagued the Confederacy from the beginning, supplied by northern and southern counterfeiting gangs. Gross mismanagement of southern finances led to runaway inflation, which posed an even greater danger to the Confederate dollar. But Upham’s impact was significant. He later estimated that he had produced $15 million worth of Confederate bills. If all of that ended up in the South, it would have made up almost 3 percent of the total money supply—a large amount for a single counterfeiter. In March 1862, his business had only just begun. Over the next year and a half, he would become one of the strangest success stories of the Civil War: a legal counterfeiter, driven by patriotism and personal gain, who struck at the financial heart of the Confederacy from the safety of downtown Philadelphia. Ben Tarnoff is the author of A Counterfeiter’s Paradise: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers (Penguin, 2011), now in paperback.
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Salvo | In Focus
The Dead of Antietam “MR. BRADY HAS DONE something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.” So wrote a correspondent for The New York Times after visiting Mathew Brady’s Manhattan gallery in October 1862 to view the famed photographer’s latest exhibit, “The Dead of Antietam.” The series of grisly images of the devastation wrought by the great battle, taken by Brady associate Alexander Gardner, attracted throngs of curious New Yorkers, drawn in by a “terrible fascination,” as the Times reporter observed. “You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage,” his review noted, “bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes.” This image, which appeared in that shocking exhibit, was taken along Hagerstown Pike on the part of the battlefield known as the Miller farm. On September 20, three days after the fighting had ended, Gardner captured a Union burial crew digging graves for soldiers killed in action. Beside the tree on the far left, a wooden headboard marks the spot of a recently completed grave, while another headboard lies across the chest of the man at far left, whose grave it will mark. Between the trees in the distance lies the body of another soldier, stretched out on Contributed by Bob Zeller, president of his back. the Center for Civil This crew, and others like War Photography, a them, would have much work to non-profit organizado; in all, some 3,650 men died at tion devoted to collecting, preserving, Antietam, a statistic that helped and digitizing Civil make September 17, 1862, the War images for the bloodiest day in American history. public benefit. To learn more about the CCWP and its mission, visit www. civilwarphotography.org
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PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDER GARDNER/ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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Casualties of War
William Wallace Lincoln
BY STEPHEN BERRY
BRAHAM AND MARY Lincoln had four children: Robert, Eddie, Willie, and Tad. Robert grew up while his father meandered the legal circuit, and their bond was never perfect. Eddie died before the age of four. Tad was perhaps adorable but certainly ungovernable; his cleft palate and speech impediment were excuse enough for the Lincolns to let him run a little wild. ¶ Willie was another story. Family friends described him as an old soul—self-possessed and substantive, though still full of mirth. He was like “a wild flower transplanted from the prairie,” noted the poet Nathaniel Parker Willis, “willing that everything should be as different as it pleased, but resting unmoved in his own … single-heartedness.” Willis was particularly impressed as he watched Willie playing on the White House lawn on August 3, 1861. Secretary of State William Henry Seward pulled up in a carriage with Prince Napoleon, who was on a two-month tour of the United States. Playfully, Seward doffed his hat to Willie by way of salute, and Prince Napoleon, perhaps thinking this was the protocol, did the same. Though only 10, Willie very gracefully “drew himself up to his full height, took off his [cap] and bowed down formally to the ground, like a little ambassador.” As soon as Seward and the prince had passed, Wil-
lie fell back to playing as if nothing unusual had happened. “Genial … ingenuous and fearless for a certain tincture of fun,” Willis noted, “it was in [the] mingling of [these] qualities that [the boy] so faithfully resembled his father.”¹ In early February 1862, Willie fell ill with what was probably typhoid fever contracted from fecally contaminated drinking water. (In those days, water from the Potomac River—the city’s septic tank and the Union army’s latrine—was piped directly into the White House.) Whatever the source, the bacteria multiplied in Willie’s bowel, causing his intestines to cramp, ulcerate, and then hemorrhage. After a few weeks of excruciating pain, Willie mercifully slipped into a coma and died. Mary was inconsolable,
WILLIAM WALLACE LINCOLN BORN:
December 1850 Springfield, Illinois DIED: February 1862 Washington, D.C. WHO: Third son of Abraham and Mary Lincoln “My poor boy. He was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!” —ABRAHAM LINCOLN
convulsive, hysterical. From the manic high of her early months as the White House’s “queen,” she plummeted into a despair so black that Lincoln worried for her sanity. Her 18-year-old son Robert worried for her too. Though less forbearing than his father, he had the older man’s intuitive grasp of Mary’s nature. She would need help getting hold of herself, he knew. Once she lost her tether, it wasn’t the work of a moment to find it again. With his father’s permission, he invited his aunt Elizabeth to visit from Springfield. Elizabeth was shocked by her sister’s condition. Mary had confined herself to her bed, refused to dress, and left to others the care and comfort of eight-yearold Tad, himself broken-hearted and sick with the same disease that had killed Willie. Elizabeth gently coaxed Mary into her mourning clothes, but her letters home betray her strong disapproval. “[Today] I persuaded [your aunt] to put on [her] black dress,” she wrote her daughter, “[but it] painfully reminded her of the loss that will long shadow her pleasures. Such is her nature that I cannot realize that she will forego them all or even long under existing circumstances.”² Elizabeth took a softer line with her brother-in-law. She had always thought Lincoln an odd fellow. It bothered her, for instance, that he would sit down to dinner and then forget to eat, or that he didn’t seem to appreciate how much she and her husband had done to further his career back in the early days in Illinois. But she had for Lincoln some-
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thing she didn’t have for her sister: respect. And she utterly understood that Lincoln’s heart had been unstrung. Willie had been considered—and had considered himself—“mama’s boy.” Tad was Lincoln’s charge—they could make mischief together, and Lincoln had a weakness for things with weaknesses. But of all the boys, Willie had the most promising mind and forgiving heart—and his father knew it. In Willie, Lincoln found a kindred spirit, and he had no hope to find another. “This is the hardest trial of my life,” Lincoln kept saying, as if to convince himself that it was really happening.³ Attempting to cheer Lincoln up, Elizabeth took him first to the White House conservatory, which she thought the most magical place in Washington. “[Here] the world is represented by flowers,” she said, “[flowers] that Speak.” Lincoln didn’t really hear them, though. “I never was in here before,” he told Elizabeth. “[H]ow Spring like it looks.” A few days later, Elizabeth tried again, taking him on a stroll through Lafayette Park. Lincoln was just beginning to open up about Willie when Tad, who had come along, locked the garden gate and hid the key. After a fruitless search, Lincoln, as usual, favored the boy by finding the trick clever.⁴
LINCOLN WAS NEVER the same after Willie’s death. “There was a new quality in his demeanor,” noticed artist Alban Conant. “I sat in the fifth pew behind him … in Dr. Gurley’s church, and I saw him on many occasions, marking
William “Willie” Lincoln, as he appeared in 1861. The following year, at age 11, Willie died of disease, most likely typhoid fever contracted from contaminated drinking water.
the change in him.” Lincoln had never been a regular churchgoer or a devout Christian, but he had been impressed with Phineas Gurley from the time Gurley delivered Willie’s eulogy. God himself has killed your son, Gurley told him. “Disease and death are His messengers, they go forth at His bidding…. [And it is only for us] to bow in His presence with an humble and teachable spirit … and by and by we shall have occasion to say, with blended gratitude and rejoicing, ‘It is good for us that we have been afflicted.’”⁵ Lincoln took the message to heart, especially because he knew he was not alone. God was killing a lot of men’s sons in the war, and most were dying as his son had, of exposure to camp diseases. “I will try to go to God with my sorrows,” Lincoln had promised himself at Willie’s deathbed, and so he did: Binding his son up with the rest of the war’s dead, he re-crafted Gurley’s gospel and hurled it at the world. “The Almighty has His own purposes,” he told a nation of grieving parents in 1865. “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue … until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall # } CONT. ON P. 79
21 PHOTOGRAPH BY MATHEW BRADY/EON IMAGES
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2012
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Battlefield Echoes
Disappointing Victory at Iuka
B Y C L AY M O U N T C A S T L E
NION SOLDIERS WITH THE ARMY of the Tennessee should have been celebrating their hard-fought victory for the small town of Iuka, Mississippi, on the night of September 19, 1862. After a largely idle summer, the army had gone on the offensive, engaging in a tough brawl with nearly 15,000 Rebels under the command of Major General Sterling Price. After two hours of intense combat, the Confederates withdrew under darkness, leaving Iuka to the Union force of 16,000 commanded by Major General William Rosecrans. But although the Federals had scored a tactical win, all was not well. “I was disappointed at the result of the battle of Iuka,” Union general and overall army commander Ulysses S. Grant would later write.¹ His frustration stemmed not from anything Rosecrans had done in battle, but from what he failed to do afterward. Five days earlier, on September 14, Price, who commanded the Confederate Army of the West, had captured the Union garrison at Iuka, which lay along the Memphis and Charleston Railroad in the far northeastern corner of the state. After a quick fight on the night of September 13, the three Union regiments guarding Iuka set fire to their supply stores and quickly withdrew. Almost immediately, Price’s lead element dashed into town and saved what one
historian called “an immense bonanza of supplies” from the conflagration.² Not only had the Rebels gained control of muchneeded supplies and a rail depot, but Price now threatened to move north, to reinforce General Braxton Bragg in Kentucky, or possibly to attack the Union post 15 miles away at Corinth. This alarmed Grant, who decided to move against Price at Iuka before the Confederate general could take the offensive or be reinforced by Major General Earl Van Dorn’s Army of West Tennessee, whose approximately 16,000 men were only about 40 miles away.³ Grant’s plan involved moving his army in two columns. The left wing, consisting of 8,000 troops under Major General Edward O.C. Ord, was to march
THE BATTLE OF IUKA DATE:
September 19, 1862 LOCATION: Iuka, Mississippi !
MISSISSIPPI
RESULT:
Union victory COMMANDERS: William S. Rosecrans (USA) Sterling Price (CSA)
northwest along the rail line from Corinth. The right wing, totaling 9,000 men and led by Rosecrans, would be the anvil to Ord’s hammer, coming at Price from the southwest, by way of the town of Jacinto. Price would have no escape route. Grant fully believed that as long as his columns reached Iuka before Price withdrew, “his annihilation was inevitable.”⁴ The movement began September 18, but rain-soaked roads bogged down Rosecrans’ column immediately. When reports of the delay reached Grant, he ordered Ord to halt within striking distance of Iuka and wait for Rosecrans. Ord was to move on Iuka when he heard Rosecrans initiate the attack, hopefully by early afternoon the next day.⁵ Rosecrans kept struggling, though, and Grant doubted whether he could get his force to Iuka before nightfall on the 19th. Despite the uncertainty, the lead element of Rosecrans’ column drove into the first line of Confederate defenses in the late afternoon. For 90 intense minutes, two Union brigades clashed with a pair of Confederate brigades on a thorny hillside on the outskirts of town. Ord never joined the fight; strong winds had drowned out the sound of Rosecrans’ guns. When nightfall stopped the fighting, more than 1,300 from both sides lay dead or wounded. Upon learning about the battle early on the 20th, Grant sent orders for Ord to attack immediately. Unfortunately, Rosecrans had failed to cover all roads approaching the town from the south, allowing Price
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I U K A D R AW I N G : H A R P E R ’ S W E E K LY ; P R I C E : L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S ; R O S E C R A N S : B AT T L E S A N D L E A D E R S O F T H E C I V I L WA R
to pack up his wounded army and escape Iuka in the middle of the night. When Ord’s column arrived early on September 20, the Rebels were gone. Rosecrans pursued Price, as Grant had ordered upon reaching the town, but gave up the chase after a few hours.⁶ The trap had failed. Price’s Army of the West, while smarting, was on the march and still posed a threat. Grant’s generally positive report on the battle at Iuka did not hide his irritation. “Our only defeat was in not capturing the entire army or in destroying it, as I had hoped to do,” he wrote.⁷
WHAT HAPPENED AT Iuka illustrates a frustrating truth about the Civil War, one that the participants were just recognizing by the summer of 1862. As historians Allen Millet and Peter Maslowski rightly note, “The inability to follow tactical success with effective pursuit
Top: A Union officer’s sketch of Iuka, Mississippi, as it appeared at the time of the battle. Above: Major General Sterling Price (left) and Major General William S. Rosecrans.
characterized almost every Civil War battle.”⁸ Certainly, the days following the Battle of Antietam in Maryland highlighted the incredible importance of pursing the enemy and the painful lesson of not being able, or willing, to do so. This message was echoed the following summer as Robert E. Lee’s army slipped back into
Virginia after its loss at Gettysburg. There were many reasons the enemy usually lived to fight another day. Often, armies failed to pursue their opponent simply because they were in no condition to do so, as seen at First Bull Run and Shiloh. Other times, a com# } CONT. ON P. 78
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ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
In his first campaign as Confederate army commander, ROBERT E. LEE established his reputation as a bold leader— and changed the course of the war in the East. BY JEFFRY D. WERT
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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and Lieutenant Colonel E. Porter Alexander had concerns about the recent appointment of General Robert E. Lee to temporary command of the newly designated Army of Northern Virginia. Alexander, the chief of ordnance, had been with the army for more than a year. The native Georgian questioned whether Lee possessed audacity, the attribute that he called an “absolute requisite” if the Confederacy had “any chance at all” of securing independence given its limited resources and manpower.¹ Alexander spoke with Captain Joseph C. Ives, a member of President Jefferson Davis’ staff. Ives had worked with Lee since March 1862, when Davis selected Lee as his military advisor. When Alexander inquired if Lee had the audacity to take the fight to the Federals, Ives gave an unqualified endorsement: “Alexander, if there is one man in either army, Federal or Confederate, who is, head & shoulders, far above every other one in either army in audacity that man is Gen. Lee, and you will very soon have lived to see it. Lee is audacity personified. His name is audacity, and you need not be afraid of not seeing all of it that you will want to see.”² As Ives predicted, the wait would not be long for Alexander and thousands of his comrades in the army’s lines outside of Richmond, Virginia. To their front lay Major General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, its ranks creeping closer almost daily to the Confederate capital. By June’s final days, however, the Yankees were in retreat, driven away from Richmond in a bold, even audacious, Rebel offensive whose outcome reshaped the war’s course in the East. The Seven Days Campaign was a critical turning point that heralded the emerging combat prowess of Lee, his lieutenants, and the army’s common soldiers.
THE UNPREDICTABLE, IF NOT the ironic, stalks history, and so it would be with Lee’s assumption of command on Sunday, June 1, 1862. At 55 years old, Lee had been a professional soldier for more than three decades, forging an excellent career in the antebellum U.S. Army. After declining command of a Union army at the conflict’s outset, he resigned his commission and oversaw his native Virginia’s preparation for war. His reputation suffered, however, when he led a failed campaign in the mountains of western Virginia during the fall of 1861. At the time newspapers derisively called him “Grammy Lee,” alleging that he had acted with indecisiveness and timidity against the enemy. Following a tour of duty directing the construction of coastal defenses in South Carolina and Georgia, Lee returned at Davis’ request to Richmond, where he worked closely with the president on military matters during the spring.³ On May 31, Richmond’s defenders attacked McClellan’s forces
A N N E S . K . B R O W N M I L I TA R Y C O L L E C T I O N , B R O W N U N I V E R S I T Y L I B R A R Y
It was the first week of June 1862,
at Seven Pines (Fair Oaks). When the Confederate army’s commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, was seriously wounded late in the day, Davis turned to Lee. The president and Johnston had had a contentious and mistrustful relationship for months. To be sure, Davis possessed few, if any, generals, except Lee, who could lead the army, and the men had developed a mutual respect and trust. In time, theirs would be a vital partnership for the Confederate cause. For the present, however, southern hopes for independence appeared dim. During the first several months of 1862, Union forces had captured forts Henry and Donelson and won the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, seized the cities of Memphis, Nashville, and New Orleans, and made inroads along the coast of North Carolina. More ominous was the presence of McClellan’s powerful army within miles of Richmond, with another Federal command posted 50 miles to the north at Fredericksburg. The Confederate policy of passive defense had resulted in the possible fall of Richmond and the end of the southern nation. As Davis’ military advisor, Lee had watched the lengthening shadow of Union might across the Confederacy. In his estimation, a defensive strategy meant awaiting an inevitable onslaught of Federal material and manpower resources. To forestall defeat, Lee believed that the Confederacy had to strike offensively, be aggressive, and incur risks against a superior foe. As he explained to Davis later: “If we can defeat or drive the armies of the enemy from the field, we shall have peace. All our efforts & energies should be devoted to that object.” That was his belief when he rode out Nine Mile Road from Richmond to join the army on the Sabbath morning of June 1.⁴ Unquestionably, Lee possessed a combative temperament. A Texas soldier later compared him to “a game cock” because the “mere presence of the enemy aroused his pugnacity and was a challenge he found hard to decline.” Porter Alexander termed it Lee’s “combative instinct,” while Major General James Longstreet, who would become one of Lee’s finest subordinates, described it as “headlong combativeness.” In his correspondence and reports, Lee strived to “destroy,” “ruin,” “crush,” and “wipe out” his opponent.⁵ Lee’s aggressiveness arose from not only that innate character trait but also from a reasoned assessment of the long odds that faced his army. A strategic or operational offensive would allow Lee to seize and retain the initiative in a theater, to dictate operations, to frustrate enemy plans, and to shape the contours of a campaign. By striking first, he and his army could select the battleground and gain tactical advantage.⁶ Lee crafted an offensive on two established
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military principles: a concentration of forces and a turning movement. In time, he became a master in executing these principles, which defined his generalship for the next two years. Once he had gained a strategic or tactical edge, he was a relentless foe, seeking to inflict a crippling, if not fatal, wound on the enemy. His audacity and willingness to take risks magnified the opportunities for inflicting such a blow.⁷ The order that assigned Lee to command of the Confederate army outside of Richmond granted him broader authority than Johnston had possessed. The new department embraced the troops in eastern Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley, and North Carolina. Within weeks his command counted 112,000 officers and men present for duty. As he fashioned his plans for an offensive, he had at hand 80,000 effectives to oppose McClellan’s 90,000 effectives.⁸ On the day Lee assumed command, he issued an order to the army. He appealed to the rank and file “to maintain the ancient fame of the Army of Northern Virginia” and directed, “Commanders of divisions and brigades will take every precaution and use every means in their power to have their commands in readiness at all times for immediate action.” With his order, Lee gave the army its historic appellation and signaled a change in its expectations.⁹ The army was, in fact, ill-prepared for “immediate action.” The fighting still raged around Seven Pines, eventually ending on the afternoon
of June 1, at a cost of 6,000 Confederate and 5,000 Federal casualties. Johnston, though a capable and popular commander, had been a poor administrator. He had neglected procedures and paperwork, resulting in a lack of arms, equipment, ordnance, and supplies. Illnesses stalked the camps, desertions thinned ranks, and discipline remained lax. Major General Daniel Harvey Hill, a division commander, complained to his wife in a letter at the time, “There are hundreds and thousands of skulkers, who are dodging off home or lying around the brothels gambling saloons & drinking houses of Richmond.”¹⁰ At its core, among the officers and men, however, Lee’s new command possessed qualities of inestimable value. Although Lee never could bend them entirely to his will in camp and on the march, these southerners were devoted to the cause and had shown a prowess and spirit in battle at First Manassas, Williamsburg, and Seven Pines. Writing after the war, Longstreet stated, “I never had any doubt that our people would make good fighters, but I knew that the issue must at least be put upon organization.”¹¹ Building an organization and imposing discipline would rest with Lee and his senior subordinates, a group of varying talents. The forthcoming campaign exposed the leadership shortcomings of major generals John B. Magruder, Benjamin Huger, and Theophilus H. Holmes. But among the other infantry division commanders Lee inherited or promoted, there was a coterie of officers whose prowess on battlefields was arguably unrivaled: James Longstreet, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, Harvey Hill, Richard S. Ewell, Ambrose Powell Hill, and Lafayette McLaws. The army’s cavalry units were led by the talented Brigadier General James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart. From the outset, as would be his method of command, Lee sought advice from his ranking officers. On June 3, he met with several generals and President Davis at The Chimneys, a house on Nine
Union forces advance during the Battle of Seven Pines, also known as Fair Oaks.
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of the army—56,000 officers and men led by the four generals—would advance against Fitz John Porter’s 30,000 Union troops posted behind Beaver Dam Creek near Mechanicsville. The critical, initial movement was assigned to Jackson, who would move beyond Porter’s flank, forcing the Federals to retreat and opening a passage of the river for Longstreet’s and the two Hills’ divisions. If Porter stood and fought, he faced flank and frontal assaults. Lee hoped to clear the river’s north bank of the enemy by maneuver. If the offensive unfolded as planned, McClellan would either have to retreat, abandoning his supply line, or give battle away from his earthworks.¹⁷ Lee excused himself from the room as the four generals discussed details of the offensive. When Lee returned, they agreed to begin the movement at 3 a.m. on June 26. So it was to be, a daring gamble that required timeliness of moveMajor General ments and cooperation between Benjamin Huger, units. If McClellan deciphered among the Lee’s operation, he could adleast capable vance against the Confederate commanders Lee inherited. defenders south of the river in overwhelming numbers, break through the lines, and capture Richmond. But in a first-floor room of Mrs. Mary C. Dabbs’ farmhouse along Nine Mile Road, Lee and four subordinates committed the Army of Northern Virginia forward on a different fork in a road, where no other Confederate army marched. Among the army’s rank and file, a clash had been expected for weeks. The units had been under marching orders for days. Morale seemed high. Brigadier General William Dorsey Pender wrote his wife on June 25: “Our Generals who have access to General Lee are beginning to gain a great deal of confidence in him. Everything, darling, around Richmond looks bright.” On the same day of Pender’s letter, McClellan tested enemy defenses south of the Chickahominy in a reconnaissance-in-force, but the Confederates repulsed the effort. During the night, the troops of Longstreet and the Hills abandoned their camps and marched toward the Chickahominy crossings. To the west, Jackson’s bone-weary veterans stirred and slowly filed into ranks, hours behind schedule.¹⁸ Lee’s risky offensive miscarried at the outset. Jackson had been instructed to make contact with a detached brigade from Powell Hill’s division,
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Mile Road outside of Richmond. Although he had probably already decided to assume the offensive against the Federals—McClellan’s army remained behind its fieldworks several miles outside of the city—Lee wanted their assessment of the army’s condition after Seven Pines and their opinions on whether to assail the Yankees or await an attack. Lee seldom spoke, and the conference, described as “quite protracted,” ended without an agreement.¹² Lee accompanied Davis on the president’s return ride to the capital. Days earlier, the two men had discussed an offensive strategy, and now Davis supported moving against McClellan’s army. Lee proposed an advance on the Federal right flank, north of the Chickahominy River. Davis stated that Lee might need Jackson’s troops, who rested at present in the Shenandoah Valley after their victorious campaign in the region, for the operation. It was settled then and, as Lee wrote to the president two days later, he planned “to bring McClellan out.”¹³ McClellan’s cautious advance toward Richmond presented Lee with an opportunity. Expecting an overland approach of Federal units from Fredericksburg, the Union commander had shifted Major General Fitz John Porter’s V Corps to the north side of the Chickahominy River. Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, which ended at Port Republic on June 9, had forestalled the movement from Fredericksburg, leaving Porter’s units isolated and vulnerable and McClellan’s main supply line exposed. On June 11, Lee dispatched three brigades to Jackson and directed him to march east, “sweep down” between the Pamunkey and Chickahominy rivers, sever the Union army’s supply and communications line, and either force McClellan to retreat or to assail his army. Eight days later, Jackson marched his 16,500-man force toward Mechum’s River Station on the Virginia Central Railroad.¹⁴ On the day Lee issued his orders to Jackson, he instructed Jeb Stuart to conduct a mounted reconnaissance on the Union right flank. Stuart departed with 1,200 horsemen the next day, June 12. Angling northeast, the Rebel column swung beyond Porter’s lines, rode east, and halted at Old Church. Stuart had secured the information desired by Lee. When scouts reported that few enemy troops manned the roads south toward the Chickahominy, Stuart led his troopers deeper into the Union rear, where they burned supplies and bagged prisoners. The Confederates eluded pursuers, forded the river, and entered Richmond to the cheers of residents on June 15. With a loss of just one man, Stuart had thrilled southerners, boosted Confederate morale, and became a public hero. Lee wrote that the expedition, or “ride around McClellan,” “was executed with great address and daring by that accomplished officer.”¹⁵ Stuart’s intelligence confirmed previous reports that the Pamunkey-Chickahominy watershed had not been fortified, opening an avenue of advance against the Federals. On June 23, Lee gathered Longstreet, Harvey and Powell Hill, and Jackson at army headquarters. Preceding his troops, Jackson had traveled by train and horseback to join Lee. He appeared “dusty, travel-worn, and apparently very tired.” When all of them had arrived, Lee ushered them into his office.¹⁶ The Confederate commander presented the plan. While roughly 25,000 southern defenders manned fieldworks south of the Chickahominy, opposite nearly 70,000 northerners, the remainder
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THE SEVEN DAYS CAMPAIGN | RICHMOND, VIRGINIA | JUNE-JULY 1862 Shortly after assuming command of the Confederate army in Virginia, Robert E. Lee opted to go on the offensive against George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, which had slowly been advancing on Richmond. Over the course of a week, Lee’s troops clashed with Union forces in a series of engagements known as the Seven Days Battles, methodically pushing them away from the Confederate capital. When the final fight was over, McClellan decided to withdraw his army to the James River, thereby ending the threat to Richmond.
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command, Major General Richard S. Ewell’s veterans, entered the action and recoiled. Jackson’s efforts had been cursed for a second day by misunderstandings and poor communications. It was not until 7 p.m., with an hour of daylight left, that Lee had all of his divisions on the field, their ranks forming a long arc beneath the plateau. At his orders, officers and men in eight brigades stepped out. As the sun edged into night, onlookers at Gaines’ Mill witnessed the future. With ranks in ragged lines and flags held high, and amid the din of screeching yells, these southerners charged. Major General Fitz John Porter, From the plateau, enemy fire whose V Corps came as a “perfect hail.” “The bore the brunt of dead and wounded marked the the Confederate way of their intrepid advance,” assault at Gaines’ Mill. Lee said of the attackers. Brigadier General John B. Hood’s regiments of Texans and Georgians stormed over the first line of fieldworks and on to the crest. Close behind them came their fellow southerners, shredding the Union lines on the plateau. A wild frenzy of hand-to-hand combat ensued as Federals from across the river arrived and momentarily stiffened the resistance. But they could not stem the surging tide of Rebels, and Porter’s ranks unraveled, his valiant men fleeing south across the Chickahominy. The Confederates seized 2,500 prisoners and 14 cannon.²³ “Nothing could surpass the valor and impetuosity of the men,” asserted Brigadier General Cadmus Wilcox, whose Alabamians participated in the attack. Similarly, Longstreet declared, “There was more individual gallantry displayed upon this field than any I have ever seen.” The price for courage, however, had been steep. Confederate casualties amounted to 8,700 killed, wounded, and missing; Union losses, nearly 6,900. The cost had been staggering, but circumstances had forced Lee to order the assault. Maneuver had failed in dislodging Porter’s command north of the river, and Lee had to keep McClellan’s attention away from the weakened ranks in Richmond’s defenses. Still, Lee had asked much of his officers and men at Gaines’ Mill. They gave him much in blood and in a fighting élan of incalculable worth.²⁴ That night, south of the Chickahominy, George McClellan met with his corps commanders. His army had been on the Peninsula for three months, and had marched to the outskirts of Richmond.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
alert the other generals of his arrival, and then proceed to Pole Green Church beyond the Union position behind Beaver Dam Creek. His late start to the march, felled trees across roads, and delaying tactics by Union cavalry slowed Jackson’s columns to a crawl. He passed the church late in the day and halted at Hundley’s Corner before sundown. An inaccurate map had located the church beyond Porter’s lines when it was actually three miles away. Without orders to attack, Jackson halted. In the words of his chief of staff, the general “appeared to me anxious and perplexed.”¹⁹ Meanwhile, on the north bank of the Chickahominy, opposite Mechanicsville, Lee, Longstreet, and the Hills waited for a report from Jackson through the morning and into the afternoon. With each passing hour, Lee’s concern for the situation south of the river mounted. He recounted in a postwar interview that he finally instructed Powell Hill to cross at Meadow Bridge and to attack Porter’s positions “in order to occupy the enemy and prevent any counter movement [by McClellan].” He added that he felt “obliged to do something.”²⁰ Powell Hill’s troops filed across the river and deployed in the fields west of Beaver Dam Creek. “I determined to cross at once,” he reported later, “rather than hazard the failure of the whole plan by longer deferring it.” Four brigades advanced, most of them regiments that had never seen combat. On the ground above the stream, Union cannon fire and musketry scythed through the Confederate ranks. A few units made it to the swampy ground along the creek and could go no farther. The fighting ended by darkness. The Rebels lost 1,400; the Yankees, fewer than 400.²¹ Learning of Jackson’s presence at Hundley’s Corner, Porter withdrew during the night, halting on a plateau above Boatswain’s Swamp near Gaines’ Mill. The V Corps commander had been informed by McClellan that the army was abandoning its supply base at White House on the Pamunkey River and instructed him to delay the enemy for the passage of supply wagons. McClellan had ceded the strategic initiative to Lee. The Confederates followed on the morning of June 27, with Powell Hill’s troops leading the pursuit. Maneuver and Richmond security shaped Lee’s plans during the day. Once again, an inaccurate map came into play. This one omitted the defensible ground behind Boatswain’s Swamp and led Lee to believe that Porter had halted at Powhite Creek. Consequently, Lee personally directed Jackson and Harvey Hill to swing around the assumed Federal position, while Powell Hill and Longstreet drove the Yankees toward Jackson’s lines. It was 2 p.m. before Powell Hill’s vanguard closed on Porter’s position near Gaines’ Mill. Lee rode up and ordered an attack. What awaited, asserted a Yankee later, was “as terrible as human beings can make it.”²² In succession, the brigades of Powell Hill’s Light Division charged, first South Carolinians, then North Carolinians, followed by Georgians, Alabamians, Tennesseans, Louisianans, Arkansans, and Virginians. On the plateau, Porter had stacked his infantry in three lines, supported by cannon. Valor counted for much, but it could not overcome the fury unleashed from the plateau. For two hours, Hill’s men bled and died before the enemy fire, finally halting the attacks after the loss of 2,000 killed and wounded. Longstreet’s troops and the vanguard of Jackson’s
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Part of the ground held by Union forces during the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, as it appears today.
With his right flank unhinged and his supply line exposed, the Union commander now had come to a fork in a road—he could assault the city’s defenses, a risky operation, or he could abandon his campaign and retreat. The choice might have defined his generalship. Believing that he confronted nearly 200,000 Rebels, he ordered the supply base at White House destroyed and started the army south to the James River. “If we were defeated,” he remarked to his assembled senior officers, “the army and the country would be lost.”²⁵ Lee spent June 28 sifting through conflicting intelligence reports. Union batteries remained on the south bank of the Chickahominy, while dust clouds indicated a withdrawal. Lee could not believe, however, that his opponent would abandon the supply base at White House. He sent Stuart’s cavalrymen and Ewell’s infantrymen east toward the Richmond-York River Railroad, McClellan’s supply line. As more reports of a retreat filtered back to his headquarters, Lee hesitated to commit his army to a movement until the route of the Federal march—either south to the James River or east down the Peninsula—could be confirmed. It was after sunrise on June 29 before Lee learned that the enemy defensive positions south of the river had been evacuated. Lee reasoned that McClellan must be heading for the James. He wrote to Davis that “though not certain” of the enemy’s
route, “the whole army has been put in motion upon this supposition.”²⁶ To Lee, an opportunity beckoned—slow the Federal passage through White Oak Swamp and interdict the enemy retreat the next day. He issued orders and, north and south of the river, Confederate units marched. Longstreet’s and Powell Hill’s divisions angled south and west, crossed the Chickahominy at New Bridge, veered east of Richmond, and halted for the night four miles from the Union withdrawal route. The commands of John Magruder and Benjamin Huger, meanwhile, abandoned the capital’s defenses and marched east on parallel roads toward the Federal columns. Lee ordered Jackson to cross the river at Grapevine Bridge and to press the enemy rear.²⁷ Magruder’s three understrength divisions comprised the key component on this day. Lee crossed the river and spoke personally with the major general, instructing Magruder to act aggressively and engage the Federals. A misunderstanding arose, however, about Huger’s role in the looming action. Magruder expected Huger to support his troops on Williamsburg Road. Instead, Lee directed Huger forward on Charles City Road toward Glendale. As a result, Magruder’s units clashed unaided with McClellan’s rear guard west of Savage Station in two hours of inconclusive combat.²⁸ During the fighting at Savage Station, one of Magruder’s division commanders requested assistance from Jackson across the river. The hero of the recent campaign in the Shenandoah Valley replied that he had “other important duty to perform” and could not send units. Earlier, Jackson had received a copy of a poorly written dispatch from Lee’s chief of staff, Robert Chilton, to Jeb Stuart. In it, Chilton wrote that Stuart should ascertain if the Yankees were moving east while Jackson “will resist their passage until reinforced.” Jackson misin-
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ander after the war, “it is enough to make one cry to go over the story how they were all lost. And to think too that our Stonewall Jackson lost them.” Alexander alleged further that Lee’s finest chance for a victory that would end the war and gain Confederate independence occurred at Glendale, not Gettysburg.³⁴ If Glendale were a beckoning opportunity, Malvern Hill was a tragedy. During the night of August 31, the Federals had resumed their retreat and halted on the broad plateau, with its natural strength heightened by tiers of blue-coated infantry and rows of cannon. Their Confederate pursuers arrived at the eminence during the morning and extended their lines in a broad arc around its base. To their front, the thousands of darkened figures and the mouths of guns, hub to hub, must have unsteadied many in the southern ranks. Lee was ill, exhausted, and irritable on this day. Glendale might have added to his mood, for since McClellan had begun his retreat, Lee sought the overthrow Porter Alexander of the Federal army, not the pre(top) was among vention of its withdrawal to the the many ConfedJames River. On his ride toward erates to blame Stonewall Jackson Malvern Hill, Lee met Harvey (above) for the Hill, who had learned of Malvern missed opportuHill’s terrain from a local resinity to destroy dent. Hill said to Lee, “If General McClellan’s army McClellan is there in force, we at Glendale. had better let him alone.” Longstreet had accompanied Lee and jokingly replied to Hill, an old friend from West Point, “Don’t get scared now that we have got him whipped.”³⁵ The problems that had plagued Lee’s army throughout the campaign all seemingly conspired together at Malvern Hill. Inadequate staff work, inaccurate maps, heavily wooded terrain, faulty troop dispositions, erroneous reports, incompetence on the part of senior officers, and no “concert of action,” in Lee’s words, led to a bloodbath. Lee ordered an artillery bombardment of the Union position, but the superior Federal ordnance silenced the Confederate guns. Late in the afternoon Lee and Longstreet surveyed the enemy lines, and the army commander decided against an infantry assault. Before he issued orders, Lee received a
F R A N C I S M I L L E R ’ S T H E P H O T O G R A P H I C H I S T O R Y O F T H E C I V I L WA R
terpreted the message, concluding that he should guard the river crossings. He did not move south until 2 a.m. on June 30. Lee had expected more aggressive action from Jackson.²⁹ The final contingent of McClellan’s army crossed White Oak Swamp during the night of June 29 and burned the bridge behind it. By the next morning about 55,000 Federal infantrymen and artillerists lay at or around Glendale, where the Charles City, Long Bridge, and Quaker roads intersected. Late on June 29, when a cavalry officer informed McClellan that no enemy troops had been located west of Glendale, the Union commander said, “The roads will be full enough tomorrow.”³⁰ William Allan, a Confederate staff officer, wrote after the war of June 30, 1862, at Glendale, “This day marked the crisis in the Seven Days’ Battles, for it was on this 30th of June that Lee more nearly grasped the full fruits of his strategy and McClellan more narrowly escaped complete overthrow than on any other.” Concurring with Allan, Porter Alexander declared, “Never, before or after, did the fates put such a prize within our reach.”³¹ The “prize” was the Glendale crossroads, where McClellan’s army and its trains were marching south toward the James River. If the Confederates could break through at Glendale, they could sever the Union ranks and possibly wreck them beyond repair. From the west then, as McClellan had predicted, came the Rebels—divisions of Longstreet, Powell Hill, and Huger, supported by the commands of Magruder and Theophilus Holmes. At Glendale the Yankees waited. The combat erupted suddenly in a spasm of fighting and swelled rapidly into a fury. Longstreet committed his six brigades to the attack and then added Hill’s six brigades to the action. Attack and counterattack characterized the struggle. “The volume of fire that … rolled along the line was terrific,” reported Hill. Alexander later said that the engagement had more hand-to-hand combat than any other he experienced or knew about during the conflict’s four years. Union commanders—McClellan had ridden away from Glendale in the morning—drew 10,000 reinforcements from the rear guard, opposite Jackson’s command at White Oak Swamp. Finally, as if willed by an unseen force, the fury ceased as abruptly as it had begun.³² “The troops sustained their reputation for coolness, courage, determination, and devotion so well on many hotly contested fields,” asserted Longstreet. His and Hill’s men captured 18 cannon, a host of prisoners, and a few enemy flags. Their casualties amounted to about 3,500, while the Federals’ approached 3,000. But the Yankees had fought tenaciously, kept the retreat route (Willis Church Road) open, and saved their army from piecemeal destruction.³³ For the Confederates at Glendale, however, the missed opportunity gnawed at them. In their estimation, blame rested with Huger and Jackson. Huger conducted feeble attacks, and Jackson failed to force a crossing of White Oak Swamp, allowing Union reinforcements to withdraw from his front and give their beleaguered comrades at Glendale vital reinforcements. “When one thinks of the great chances in General Lee’s grasp that one summer afternoon,” contended Porter Alex-
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pair of inaccurate reports—that the Yankees were retreating again and that a Rebel brigade had advanced farther against the enemy center. Lee directed Magruder to “press forward your whole line.”³⁶ On Malvern Hill’s crest, the Yankees had not resumed a withdrawal but only had shifted units. Then, minutes past 4 p.m. as the Federals waited, two southern brigades began the ascent. From
Malvern Hill smoke and flame wreathed the hillside and crest. For the next four hours, a succession of Confederate brigades, charging piecemeal, singly or in pairs, entered the cauldron of hellfire. A Yankee private asserted that the Rebels “rushed on in great numbers, seemingly regardless of consequences.”³⁷ Afterward Lee’s officers and men searched for words to describe the slaughter. A Georgia lieutenant confessed to his parents that on “that field a tempest of iron & lead was sweeping # } CONT. ON P. 73
ENDNOTES 1
Quoted in Jeffry D. Wert, A Glorious Army: Robert E. Lee’s Triumph, 1862-1863 (New York, 2011), 10.
2
Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), 91.
3
Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York, 1995), 210, 225.
4
Joseph L. Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861-1862 (Kent, OH, 1998), 56, 57, 58; Charles P. Roland, Reflections on Lee: A Historian’s Assessment (Mechanicsburg, PA, 1995), 89, 90, 97, 99; Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (Boston, 1961), 816.
5
6
7
J. B. Polley, Hood’s Texas Brigade: Its Marches, Its Battles, Its Achievements (reprint, Dayton, OH, 1988), 153; Gallagher, ed., Fighting, 91; Quoted in Jeffry D. Wert, Gettysburg—Day Three (New York, 2001), 43; Joseph L. Harsh, Taken at the Flood: Robert E. Lee and Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862 (Kent, OH, 1999), 20, 490, 492; Quoted in Wert, Glorious Army, 10. Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising, 57, 58, 59, 66, 71, 72; Roland, Reflections, 90, 97; Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 127-30. Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, IL, 1983), 14, 15; Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72; Alan T. Nolan, Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), 77, 78, 79.
8
Dowdey and Manarin, eds., Wartime Papers, 181; Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising, 180, 181.
9
U. S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 129 volumes (Washington, D. C. 1880-1902), Series I, Vol. 5, p. 913 (hereafter cited as OR; all references to Series I).
10 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 1, p. 81; Stuart W. Smith, ed., Douglas Southall Freeman on Leadership (Shippensburg, PA, 1993), 62, 66, 84, 86; Gallagher, ed., Fighting, 48; D. H. Hill to My Dear Wife, June 10, 1862, D. H. Hill Papers, Army Heritage and Education Center, Carl-
isle, PA (hereafter cited as AHEC).
25 Wert, Sword, 106, quote on 107.
11 James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York, 1997), 91, 95, 98; Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 3, 4, 61; New York Times, July 29, 1879.
26 Douglas Southall Freeman, ed., Lee’s Dispatches: Unpublished Letters of General Robert E. Lee, C.S.A., to Jefferson Davis and the War Department of the Confederate States of America, 1862-1865 (New York, 1957), 21.
12 Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising, 53, 54; Charles Marshall to A. L. Long, April 6, 1880, Armistead L. Long Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (hereafter cited as UNC); Wert, Glorious Army, 22.
27 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, p. 494; B&L, II: 383, 386.
13 Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising, 54, 55, 56; Dowdey and Manarin, eds., Wartime Papers, 184. 14 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, pp. 589-90; James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend (New York, 1997), 458; Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising, 181. 15 Jeffry D. Wert, Cavalryman of the Lost Cause: A Biography of J. E. B. Stuart (New York, 2008), 94-101; OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, pt. 490. 16 Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols. (reprint, New York, 1956), II: 347 (hereafter cited as B&L). 17 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 3, p. 238; Dowdey and Manarin, eds., Wartime Papers, 198-200; Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising, 180, 181. 18 William W. Hassler, ed., The General to His Lady: The Civil War Letters of William Dorsey Pender to Fanny Pender (Chapel Hill, NC, 1965), 158; OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, p. 756. 19 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, pp. 491, 552-53: Robertson, Stonewall Jackson, 472, quote on 473. 20 Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Lee: The Soldier (Lincoln, NE, 1996), 16. 21 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, pp. 491, 835, 841. 22 Ibid., pp. 491, 492, 553, 554, 836, 837; Quoted in Jeffry D. Wert, The Sword of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac (New York, 2005), 104. 23 Thomas W. Cutrer, ed., Longstreet’s Aide: The Civil War Letters of Major Thomas J. Goree (Charlottesville, VA, 1995), 93; OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, pp. 492, 493; Wert, Sword, 105, 106. 24 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, pp. 569, 855.
28 Brian K. Burton, Extraordinary Circumstances: The Seven Days Battles (Bloomington, IN, 2001), 182, 184, 192, 214-21. 29 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, pp. 680, 687; Robertson, Stonewall Jackson, 488-90. 30 Wert, Sword, 112, quote on 113. 31 William Allan, The Army of Northern Virginia in 1862 (reprint, Dayton, OH, 1984), 120; Gallagher, ed., Fighting, 109. 32 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, p. 759; Gallagher, ed., Fighting, 107; Burton, Extraordinary Circumstances, 276-83; Wert, Sword, 114. 33 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, p. 759; Burton, Extraordinary Circumstances, 298. 34 Gallagher, ed., Fighting, 109, 110; Allan, Army, 121. 35 B&L, II: 390, 391; Allan, Army, 136. 36 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, pp. 496, 677, 678. 37 Ibid., pp. 496, 819; Quoted in Wert, Sword, 120. 38 Theodore Fogel to Father and Mother, August 8, 1862, Theodore T. Fogel Papers, Emory University; Gallagher, ed., Fighting, 113; Undated and untitled manuscript, Lafayette McLaws Papers, Duke University; Lafayette McLaws to General, November 30, 1885, James Longstreet Papers, Emory University; B&L, II: 394. 39 Burton, Extraordinary Circumstances, 357, quote on 358. 40 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, p. 519; “Personal Reminiscences,” Charles S. Venable Papers, University of Virginia. 41 OR, Vol. 11, p. 2, p. 497; Walter Taylor, Four Years with General Lee (reprint, Bloomington, IN, 1962), 74. 42 OR, Vol. 11, pt. 2, pp. 498, 502-10; Burton, Extraordinary Circumstances, 386.
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pital in
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E OF ! THE CIVIL WAR FOR WASHINGTON, D.C. ! BY STEPHEN W. SEARS
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L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S ; N AT I O N A L A R C H I V E S
N THIS CLEAR, SUNNY AFTERNOON Lieutenant Charles Francis Adams Jr., 1st Massachusetts WED AUG Cavalry, seated himself at a writing table in Willard’s Hotel 27 in Washington to bring his father, minister to the Court of St. ! James’s in London, up to date on affairs in the capital. His news was abysmal. “Do you know that in the opinion of our leading military men Washington is in more danger than it ever yet has been?” he wrote. “Do you know that Pope is a humbug and known to be so by those who put him in his present place? Do you know that today he is so completely outgeneraled as to be cut off from Washington?” This was more than gossip and speculation, the common currency at Willard’s, central listening post in the capital. Young Adams had the word of Colonel John C. Kelton at army headquarters. “Our rulers seem to me to be crazy,” he continued. “The air of this city seems thick with treachery; our army seems in danger of utter demoralization and I have not since the war begun felt such a tug on my nerves as today in Washington. Everything is ripe for a terrible panic, the end of which I cannot see or even imagine.”¹ On August 27, 1862, and for the 11 days that followed, Lieutenant Adams was hardly the only one in Washington to speak of treachery, crisis, demoralization, and panic. These would be the blackest days of the war for the nation’s capital, darker even than those in July 1861, when the Union army was routed at Bull Run. The Pope that Adams called a humbug was Major General John Pope, recently brought from the western theater by President Lincoln to command the newly created Army of Virginia. Just then General Pope was incommunicado. The evening before, the telegraph line linking him to Washington was cut 25 miles to the west at Manassas Junction, Pope’s main supply base, by enemy raiders who were apparently squarely between Pope’s army and the capital. To War Department observers, the picture out west along the Orange and Alexandria Railroad was hazy and worrisome. It was known that Robert E. Lee with his Army of Northern Virginia was stalking General
Pope, but where or in what manner no one knew. A major reinforcement was due Pope from George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, but to official Washington, that handover was not going well. General McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign against Richmond that spring and summer had collapsed under Lee’s relentless attacks, leaving the Army of the Potomac penned at Harrison’s Landing on the James River. Lincoln called in Henry W. Halleck from the western theater to be general-in-chief, and over McClellan’s fevered protests Halleck ordered him to evacuate the Peninsula and join his army with Pope’s in northern Virginia. While McClellan sullenly made his way north with his army, General Lee leaped at the opportunity to strike at Pope. McClellan had no use whatsoever for John Pope, and in a letter to his wife, he anticipated his defeat: “& very badly whipped he will be & ought to be—such a villain as he is ought to bring defeat upon any cause that employs him.” Alexandria, a half-dozen miles down the Potomac from the capital, was the eastern terminus of the Orange and Alexandria and debarkation point for the last two of McClellan’s army corps not already with Pope: the II Corps (Edwin V. Sumner) and the VI Corps (William B. Franklin), 25,000 men in all. On reaching Alexandria, McClellan observed to his wife, “Our affairs here now much tangled up & I opine that in a day or two your old husband will be called upon to unsnarl them.”² An immediate tangle early on the 27th involved a New Jersey brigade that looked into the reported disturbance at Manassas Junction. Soon enough the Jerseymen were back, badly shot up and their commander mortally wounded, bearing witness that this was no mere cavalry raid but Rebel infantry in considerable numbers. Colonel Herman Haupt, superintendent of military railroads, asked McClellan for a strong force to secure the railroad; Haupt needed to get much-needed supplies to Pope’s army. McClellan refused, saying it “would be attended with risk.” In his memoirs, Colonel Haupt was still angry: “the General would not give his consent, or assume any responsibility, and would give no orders, instructions, or suggestions of any kind!!”³ A picture of growing crisis formed in McClellan’s mind, framed by dispatches from his Potomac army confidant Fitz John Porter, whose V Corps was already in the field with Pope. Porter retained a tenuous, roundabout telegraphic link with Alexandria and Washington that just then furnished the only news from the prospective battleground. Porter said that a battle was imminent, that Pope’s “strategy is magnificent, and tactics in the inverse proportion” and that “I wish myself away from it, with all our old Army of the Potomac, and so do our companions.”⁴ At 10 a.m. Halleck telegraphed McClellan to
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Henry W. Halleck, U.S. Army general-in-chief.
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General George B. McClellan (pictured), recently defeated in his attempt to take Richmond, had little use for newly minted army commander John Pope. “[V]ery badly whipped he will be & ought to be,” McClellan wrote his wife.
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order Franklin’s VI Corps to march out in the direction of Manassas to resolve matters there. In view of Porter’s report, said McClellan, should they not wait “to throw the mass of Sumner’s Corps here to move out with Franklin?” Halleck read Porter’s report as making it imperative that Pope be reinforced, and quickly (“Franklin’s troops should move out by forced marches”). McClellan spoke instead of a new priority: “I still think that we should first provide for the immediate defence of Washington on both sides of the Potomac,” and he wanted “authority to dispose of the available troops according to my judgment.” Halleck, much-tried, replied that he was swamped with other military matters and had no time for details. “You will therefore, as ranking general in the field direct as you deem best.” The VI Corps did not move from its camps on August 27. Franklin wrote his wife, “we are still in status quo, and I hardly think we will move for a while yet.”⁵
of Franklin’s army corps. Then to Halleck came, in the midnight hours, one of General McClellan’s apocalyptic visions: “Reports numerous from various sources” claim “the enemy with 120,000 men intend advancing on the forts near Arlington and Chain Bridge, with a view of attacking Washington & Baltimore.” This was fraudulent intelligence. McClellan told his wife, “A rumor got out that Lee was advancing rapidly on the Chain Bridge with 150,000 men—& such a stampede!” He snatched the rumor out of the air and trimmed the count for Halleck. He posed it as a reasonable figure, from the pool of 200,000 Rebels he had plucked out of equally thin air as defending Richmond during the Peninsula Campaign.⁷
THU THURSDAY SAW A MARKED rise in tensions in the capital. AUG President Lincoln, monitoring the War Department telegraph
FRI MCCLELLAN’S FIRST TELEGRAM of the day AUG to Halleck announced that Franklin’s VI
office, found in Colonel Haupt an officer who at least had some notion of what was going on. Haupt reported that “the rebel forces at Manassas were large, and several of their best generals were in command.” Refugees reported Pope’s great Manassas supply depot a flaming ruin. General Halleck sent an order directly to Franklin “to move with your corps to-day toward Manassas Junction, to drive the enemy from the railroad.” He told McClellan “not a moment must be lost” in advancing as large a force as possible to reach Pope’s army. McClellan insisted that neither Franklin’s nor Sumner’s corps “are now in condition to move & fight a battle—it would be a sacrifice to send them out now.” He knew his wife (if not General Halleck) would understand his thinking that too great a risk was involved: “Pope is in a bad way—his communications with Washn cut off & I have not yet the force at hand to relieve him.” His byplay with Halleck continued through the day, leaving the VI Corps in its Alexandria camps and the general-in-chief angry and frustrated. “There must be no further delay in moving Franklin’s corps toward Manassas,” he insisted. “They must go to-morrow morning, ready or not ready.”6 Alarm was raised in late afternoon by the distant rumble of gunfire from the direction of the old Bull Run battlefield of 1861 that continued until nightfall. (This was Stonewall Jackson, at the hamlet of Groveton, reaching out to pin the Army of Virginia in place for the greater battle to come.) That evening a new player, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, entered the fray. He and his ally, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, were much disturbed at McClellan’s conduct in the present crisis. Stanton prepared a memorandum to Halleck asking hard questions: Had General McClellan obeyed the order to evacuate the Peninsula with the Major General John Pope, commander promptness “the national safety of the Union’s Army required”? He asked the same of Virginia. about the recent non-movements !
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Corps had marched at 6 a.m. He waxed pessimistic about Franklin’s prospects. “I do not think Franklin is in condition to accomplish much if he meets with serious resistance. I should not have moved him but for your pressing order of last night.” “I want Franklin’s corps to go far enough to find out something about the enemy,” Halleck replied. “I am tired of guesses.” But McClellan’s cautious nature led him to halt Franklin’s march at Annandale, hardly seven miles from Alexandria. Franklin’s men remained in their Annandale bivouac the rest of the day, whiling away the hours listening to the growing sounds of a major battle off to the west. A dispatch from Fitz John Porter in the field, sent early that morning, confirmed McClellan in his caution: “It would seem from proper statements of the enemy that he was wandering around loose; but I expect they know what they are doing, which is more than any one here or anywhere knows.” He added, “I hope Mac is at work, and we will soon get ordered out of this.”8 There was considerable upset at the War Department. Adams Hill, Washington correspondent for the New-York Tribune, stopped by the department and spoke to an assistant secretary there, Peter H. Watson. Hill wrote his editor in New York, “Mr. Watson says this morning that if Pope is defeated, McClellan will justly be held responsible, since he received orders to move day before yesterday and had not budged an inch at an early hour this morning.” Secretary of War Stanton went on the warpath. He and Treasury Secretary Chase called on Halleck with Stanton’s memorandum regarding McClellan. As Chase put it in his diary, they demanded “a report touching McC’s. disobedience of orders & consequent delay of support to Army of Va.” Halleck promised them a response the !
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Union and Confederate forces Maximi, ulpa ius clash during the Second Battle volupta turibusof Bull Run involuManassas, Virginia. ame sequae The rumble of cannon and pis debit odiaepe gunfire could be heard miles rundebitas explam away audit in quiWashington. sequ
next morning. Stanton began drafting a “remonstrance” for the cabinet to present to the president accusing the general of just about everything: “the destruction of our armies, the protraction of the war, the waste of our national resources, and the overthrow of the government, which we believe must be the inevitable consequence of George B. McClellan being continued in command.”⁹ The rumble of battle from the 1861 Bull Run field remained constant throughout the day, menacing and unnerving. In midafternoon Lincoln telegraphed McClellan: “What news from direction of Manassas Junction? What generally?” McClellan replied that he had no reliable news, and spelled out his thinking for the commander-in-chief: “I am clear that one of two courses should be adopted— 1st To concentrate all our available forces to open communications with Pope—2nd To leave Pope to get out of his scrape & at once use all our means to make the Capital perfectly safe. No middle course will now answer.” Lincoln responded without heat that aiding Pope was the right choice, but privately he was furious. “The President was very outspoken in regard to McClellan’s present conduct,” his secretary, John Hay, entered in his diary. “He said it really seemed to him that McC wanted Pope defeated.” Particularly offensive was his “leave Pope to get out of his scrape” phrase. “The President seemed to think him a little crazy.”¹⁰ General Halleck’s ire was raised as well. He
telegraphed McClellan that evening, “I have just been told that Franklin’s corps stopped at Annandale…. This is all contrary to my orders; investigate and report the facts of this disobedience.” McClellan was hurt: “it is not agreeable to me to be accused of disobeying orders when I have simply exercised the discretion you committed to me.” He complained to his wife that Halleck “is not a refined person at all.”¹¹
SAT ON SATURDAY MORNING there was no immediate sound of the AUG battle being renewed off to the west, but also nothing by way
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of explanation from Pope. In the capital, tensions remained high. General John Sedgwick, commanding a division in Sumner’s corps, remarked, “Everything is in the utmost consternation, as much so as after Bull Run. Washington people seem to lose their senses at the most unfounded rumours, but there may be some cause for it now.” General Halleck’s response to Stanton’s Friday interrogatory was damning: McClellan’s evacuation of the Peninsula was “not obeyed with the promptness I expected and the national safety, in my opinion, required.” McClellan held Franklin’s corps at Annandale despite knowing “the importance of opening communications with General Pope’s army, and should have acted more promptly.” Stanton and Chase began buttonholing their cabinet colleagues to sign their anti-McClellan remonstrance. Either McClellan must go or the government goes down, they insisted. At Annandale, Franklin and the VI Corps finally set off for the front, which they did not reach until 6 p.m. Sumner’s II Corps followed behind. McClellan was left at his headquarters, alone but for a few orderlies and staff members. “I feel too blue & disgusted to write any more,” he told his wife.¹² !
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At midday the battle erupted anew, the cannonading and musketry even louder than on Friday. The acrid smell of burned gunpowder drifted across the city. At last there came word from General Pope. His dispatch, written at 5 that morning, told of “a terrific battle here yesterday,” of driving the Rebels from the field “which we now occupy,” of suffering some 8,000 casualties but inflicting twice that. Pope closed optimistically: “The news just reaches me from the front that the enemy is retreating toward the mountains. I go forward at once to see.” Secretary Stanton was encouraged. If Pope had indeed gained a great victory, that would dispose of McClellan without need for the remonstrance. Pope’s report impelled him to action. Appeals were posted across the city for volunteer nurses to care for the thousands of wounded on the battlefield. He commandeered transportation for the would-be Samaritans. That evening Lincoln and his secretary, John Hay, dined with Stanton, who was “unqualifiedly severe upon McClellan … nothing but foul play could lose us this battle & that it rested with McC. and his friends.” Hay summed up the day for his diary: “Every thing seemed to be going well and hilarious on Saturday & we went to bed expecting glad tidings at sunrise.” The diarist George Templeton Strong greeted the latest news with some caution: “God grant this may be true and the whole truth. But I am not prepared to crow quite yet. Pope is an imaginative chieftain and ranks next to Cooper as a writer of fiction.”¹³
SUN SUNDAY DAWNED DARK and rainy, and when the news came, it AUG was darker still. A dispatch from Pope written at 9:45 the
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previous evening admitted that after another “terrific battle” on Saturday, his flank had been turned and the army had fallen back to Centreville, 20 miles from Washington. He tried to be !
reassuring: “Be easy; everything will go well.” But daylight on Sunday found Pope despairing. Things might have been different, he reported, if Franklin and Sumner “had been here three or four days ago.” He promised “as desperate a fight as I can force our men to stand up to,” but that might not be enough: “I should like to know whether you feel secure about Washington should this army be destroyed.” “Well John we are whipped again, I am afraid,” Lincoln told his secretary when he heard the news. “The enemy reinforced on Pope and drove back his left wing and he has retired to Centreville where he says he will be able to hold his men. I don’t like that expression. I don’t like to hear him admit that his men need holding.” Fitz John Porter, in a private dispatch to McClellan, detailed the army’s plight and its demoralization. “The men are without heart—but will fight if cornered.”¹⁴ Washingtonians were jolted by reality this day. Elizabeth Lomax wrote of newsboys crying, “General Jackson and sixty thousand rebels taken!” Then later: “The papers were rather premature. The latest news is that the Federals are falling back.” Scores of the volunteer nurses—as many riff-raff as Samaritans—returned to the city bedraggled and wet, and in some cases drunk. Colonel Haupt had them put off at the first stop so he could keep his railroad operating. Sunday too saw the first detritus of the battle reach the capital, the stragglers and the beginning flow of wounded.
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Union soldiers advance during the Battle of Chantilly on September 1.
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Amid all the bungled, amateurish medical care, there was the independent nursing cadre organized by Clara Barton. “I cannot tell you the scenes which awaited our eyes,” Miss Barton wrote of her experiences that Sunday. “The men were brot down from the field and laid on the ground beside the train and so back up the hill till they covered acres, the bales of hay for forage were broken open and the ground was ‘littered’ like ‘bedding’ … all night we made compresses and slings and bound up and wet wounds…. Still the ambulances came down, and the cars went out and we worked on….”¹⁵ Sunday’s revelations broke down General Halleck. Despite his best efforts, Franklin’s and Sumner’s corps had reached the battlefield only in time to pick up the pieces. McClellan’s recalcitrance and hectoring left the general-in-chief in a state of near collapse. That night he telegraphed McClellan, “I beg of you to assist me in this crisis with your ability and experience. I am utterly tired out.” McClellan replied that there was only so much he could do in the “undefined position as I now hold,” and said he would be in Washington in the morning to confer. His final telegram of the day announced yet another apocalyptic vision: “to speak frankly, & the occasion requires it, there appears to be a total absence of brains & I fear the total destruction of the Army…. The question is the salvation of the country.”¹⁶
MON ON MONDAY CORRESPONDENT Adams Hill SEPT wrote his New-York Tribune editor, “For the
01
first time, if I remember, I believe it possible … that Washington may be taken…. I take my duty to be, being accredited near the Gov’t, I stay while it stays and skedaddle when it skedaddles.”¹⁷ On his arrival from Alexandria, McClellan found the president as well as Halleck waiting for him. He described the meeting for his wife: “I received a dispatch from Halleck begging me to help !
him out of the scrape & take command here”—that is, of Washington’s fortifications—“of course I could not refuse, so I came over this morning, mad as a March hare, & had a pretty plain talk with him & Abe.” He took up the task with reluctance for “things are far gone,” but in any case, he saw this as but a first step: “If when the whole army returns here (if it ever does) I am not placed in command of all I will either insist upon a long leave of absence or resign.” John Pope pondered his defeat and composed a bitter dispatch to Halleck laying out what he saw as the causes of it. He centered his attack on “the unsoldierly and dangerous conduct of many brigade and some division commanders” in the Army of the Potomac, who “calculated to break down the spirits of the men and produce disaster.” His particular target was misconduct in battle by a corps commander (easily recognized as Fitz John Porter). Underlying it all, he said, was the demoralization of the Potomac army’s officer corps stemming from the displacement of their favorite, General McClellan. He urged Halleck to bring the army back to Washington “to reorganize and rearrange it. You may avoid great disaster by doing so.” These grave charges caused Lincoln to summon General McClellan back for a second conference. Out of it came a telegram from McClellan to Porter, asking “that you and all my friends will lend the fullest & most cordial cooperation to Genl Pope” and extend to him “the same support they ever have to me.” John Hay described the president that day as being “in a singularly defiant tone of mind,” making it likely that McClellan was ordered, not asked, to send this telegram.¹⁸ Pope’s confirmed defeat in what would be called the Second Battle of Bull Run caused Stanton and Chase to renew their remonstrance efforts. Attorney General Edward Bates persuaded them, instead of detailing all McClellan’s failings, to settle for something simpler: “The undersigned … perform a painful duty in declaring to you our deliberate opinion that, at this time, it is not safe to entrust to Major General McClellan the command of any of the armies of the United States.” They had the signatures or support of a cabinet majority, and determined to present the remonstrance to Lincoln at the cabinet meeting scheduled for the next day.¹⁹ In late afternoon there was a renewed clash of battle from the direction of Chantilly, on the flank of Pope’s forces at Centreville. The gunfire was drowned out for a time by a violent thunderstorm and finally ceased with darkness.
TUE GENERAL POPE’S FIRST dispatch of the day reported the SEPT enemy held the previous evening at Chantilly, but morale was
02
bad and straggling worse, especially in Army of the Potomac units. “Unless something can be done to restore tone to this army it will melt away before you know it.” Colonel Kelton of Halleck’s office (Lieutenant Adams’ informant back on August 27) had gone out to inspect Pope’s army and reported it falling back on Washington, with low morale and heavy straggling.²⁰ At 7 a.m. Lincoln and Halleck walked from the War Department to McClellan’s Washington quarters on H Street. “I was surprised this morning at bkft by a visit from the Presdt & Halleck,” McClellan told his wife, “—in which the former expressed the opinion that the troubles now impending could be overcome better by me than anyone else. Pope is ordered to fall back upon Washn & as he reenters everything is to come under my command again!” In discussing reinstating McClellan with John Hay, the president was blunt: “Unquestionably he has acted badly toward Pope!
N AT I O N A L A R C H I V E S
!
Clara Barton was among the many nurses who cared for the Union soldiers wounded at Second Bull Run.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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General Pope’s defeated and demoralized Union army retreats toward Washington in this sketch by Edwin Forbes.
and recognized McClellan, and next day wrote his wife: “it did my heart good to hear my brigade cheer when I told them he was in command. They were perfectly wild with delight, hurling their caps in the air and showed the greatest enthusiasm right within hearing too of Genl. Pope.” Cox would write that he cringed at this “unnecessary affront” to Pope, but Cox had not fought at Second Bull Run and could not imagine the troops’ hatred toward their commander. That evening cries of “Little Mac is back!” raced like wildfire through the beaten army, igniting one celebration after another. “Such cheers I never heard before, and were never heard in Pope’s army,” a staff officer wrote. “Way off in the distance as he passed the different corps we could hear them cheer him. Everyone felt happy and jolly.”²³
WED “THE MORNING PAPERS and an extra at SEPT mid-day turned us livid and blue,” was how
03
diarist George Templeton Strong appraised the news out of Washington on Wednesday. “Fighting Monday afternoon at Chantilly, the enemy beat back (more or less), and Pope retreating on Alexandria and Washington…. Stonewall Jackson (our national bugaboo) about to invade Maryland, 40,000 strong.” Washingtonian Elizabeth Blair Lee took solace from the troops’ warm welcome to the reinstated McClellan: “So if they have no excuse now for not fighting maybe they will do it little better than they did lately.”²⁴ The president said approvingly, “McClellan is working like a beaver.” The first task was to get the troops back to their old camps around the city and !
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
He wanted him to fail. That is unpardonable. But he is too useful just now to sacrifice.” McClellan knew Washington’s fortifications for he had planned them; he was an expert organizer and military executive. Most important, he had the army with him—an army that, it was feared, might refuse to fight again under John Pope. The fear persisted that the capital would be invaded or invested. It was announced that arms from the arsenal would be distributed to government clerks for a last-ditch defense, and the surplus armaments, and specie from the Treasury, sent north if need be. War Department clerks bundled up key documents for evacuation. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles ordered a flotilla of gunboats up the Potomac to add to the city’s defenses.²¹ The cabinet convened at the White House at noon, and before the president entered, Secretary Stanton, barely containing his rage, announced that General McClellan was restored to command—of both armies. “General surprise was expressed,” Welles told his diary. “Much was said. There was a more disturbed and desponding feeling than I have ever witnessed in council….” Shown or read the remonstrance, Lincoln was greatly distressed, Attorney General Bates reported: “he was so distressed, precisely because he knew we were earnestly sincere.” But the president defended his decision. McClellan might have the “slows” in offensive operations, he said, but no one was better at defense and organizing troops, skills that right now were paramount. This high-command debate embittered Bates, who that night wrote a friend, “The thing I complain of is a criminal tardiness, a fatuous apathy, a captious, bickering rivalry, among our commanders who seem so taken up with their quick made dignity, that they overlook the lives of their people & the necessities of their country.”²² In late afternoon McClellan rode out to Washington’s outer works to (as he told his wife) “pick up the Army of the Potomac.” He greeted local commander Jacob D. Cox, “Well, General, I am in command again!” A column of troops soon appeared, headed by a wearylooking General Pope. McClellan rode out to him and they briefly discussed the change of command. General John Gibbon was nearby
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to restore order and discipline and routine, and this was rapidly accomplished. By afternoon McClellan could write, “All is quiet today, & I think the Capital is safe.” There was a great deal more to do, and little time to do it. That evening Lincoln wrote out for Stanton’s signature an order to Halleck to “imme-
diately commence, and proceed with all possible dispatch, to organize an army for active operations….” Ignoring the invitation that he assume this command, the general-in-chief revised it as an order for McClellan: “There is every probability that the enemy, baffled in his intended capture of Washington, will cross the Potomac, and make a raid into Maryland or Pennsylvania. A movable army must be immediately organized to meet him again in the field.”²⁵ # } CONT. ON P. 74
ENDNOTES 1
2
Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), 1: 177-78. McClellan to his wife, August 10, 27, 1862, George B. McClellan, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860-1865, Stephen W. Sears, ed. (New York, 1989), 389, 406.
3
Herman Haupt, Reminiscences of General Herman Haupt (Milwaukee, 1901), 96-99.
4
Porter to Burnside, August 27, 1862, U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, 12.3: 700 (hereafter OR; all references to Series I).
5
6
7
8
9
Halleck to McClellan, August 27, 1862, OR, 11.1: 94, 95, 12.3: 691; McClellan to Halleck, August 27, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 407, 409-10; Franklin to his wife, August 27, quoted in Mark A. Snell, From First to Last: The Life of Major General William B. Franklin (New York, 2002), 161.
Ettlinger, eds. (Carbondale, Ill., 1997), 37. 11 Halleck to McClellan, August 29, 1862, OR, 12.3: 723; McClellan to Halleck, McClellan to his wife, August 29, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 417-18, 418-19. 12 Sedgwick to his sister, August 30, 1862, John Sedgwick, Correspondence of John Sedgwick, Major-General (New York, 1903), 2: 7879; Halleck to Stanton, August 30, OR, 12.3: 739-41; McClellan to his wife, August 30, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 419. 13 Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865 (New York, 1941), 188-90; Pope to Halleck, August 30, 1862, OR, 12.3: 741; September 1, Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 37; August 30, George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong: The Civil War, 1860-1865, Allan Nevins and Milton Hasley Thomas, eds. (New York, 1952), 249. 14 Pope to Halleck, August 30, 31, 1862, OR, 12.2: 78-79, 80; September 1, Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 37-38; Porter to McClellan, [August 31], OR, 12.3: 768-69.
Haupt to Lincoln, August 28, 1862, OR, 12.3: 719; Halleck to Franklin, August 28, ibid., 707; Halleck to McClellan, August 28, ibid., 709, 710; McClellan to his wife, McClellan to Halleck, August 28, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 411, 413.
15 Elizabeth Lindsay Lomax, Leaves from an Old Washington Diary, 1854-1863, Lindsay Lomax Wood, ed. (New York, 1943), 211; Clara Barton to John Shaver, September 4, 1862, Barton Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Stanton to Halleck, August 28, 1862, OR, 12.3: 706; McClellan to Halleck, August 28, McClellan to his wife, August 29, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 415-16, 418-19.
16 Halleck to McClellan, August 31, 1862, OR, 11.1: 102-3; McClellan to Halleck, August 31, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 425, 426.
McClellan to Halleck, August 29, 1862, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 415; Halleck to McClellan, Porter to Burnside, August 29, OR 12.3: 722, 733. Adams Hill to Sidney H. Gay, August 29, 1862, Gay Papers, Columbia University Library; August 29, Salmon P. Chase, The Salmon P. Chase Papers, John Niven, ed., (Kent, Ohio, 1993), 1: 366; Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York, 1962), 220.
10 Lincoln to McClellan, August 29, 1862, Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953), 5: 399; McClellan to Lincoln, August 29, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 416; September 1, John Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner
17 Hill to Sidney H. Gay, September 1, 1862, Gay Papers, Columbia University Library. 18 McClellan to his wife, September [1], 1862, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 428; Pope to Halleck, September 1, OR, 12.2: 82-83; McClellan to Porter, September 1, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 427; September 1, Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 38. 19 Edward Bates, remonstrance and notes, September 2, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; September 1, Chase, Diary, 1: 101-2. 20 Pope to Halleck, September 2, 1862, OR, 12.3: 796-97; Franklin to Porter, July 7, 1876, George B. McClellan Papers, Library of Congress. 21 McClellan to his wife, September 2, 1862, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 428; September [3], Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 38-39;
Leech, Reveille in Washington, 193; August 31, Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Howard K. Beale, ed. (New York, 1960), 1: 93. 22 September 2, 1862, Welles, Diary, 1: 104-6; Bates, remonstrance and notes, September 2, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; Bates to Francis Lieber, September 2, Lieber Papers, Huntington Library. 23 Jacob D. Cox, Military Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York, 1900), 1: 243-44; Gibbon to his wife, September 3, 1862, John Gibbon Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Stephen M. Weld, War Diary and Letters of Stephen Minot Weld, 1861-1865, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1979), 136. 24 September 3, 1862, Strong, Diary, 251-52; Elizabeth Blair Lee to her husband, September 8, Elizabeth Blair Lee, Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee, Virginia Jeans Laas, ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 177. 25 September [3], 1862, Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 38; McClellan to his wife, September 3, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 431; Stanton to Halleck, Halleck to McClellan, September 3, OR, 19.2: 169. 26 Louis M. Starr, Bohemian Brigade (New York, 1954), 135; McClellan to his wife, September 5, 1862, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 435; September 4, Welles, Diary, 1: 109-10; 3, September 8. 27 November 29, 1862, Orville H. Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds. (Springfield, Ill., 1925), 1: 589-90; September [3], Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 38; Halleck testimony, Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (Washington, 1: 1863), 451; McClellan to his wife, September 5, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 435; Halleck to Pope, September 5, 1862, OR, 19.2: 183; Special Orders No. 223, September 5, ibid., 188. 28 McClellan to Halleck, McClellan to Lincoln, September 6, 1862, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 436, 436-37; September 6, Welles, Diary, 1: 111. 29 Alpheus S. Williams, From the Cannon’s Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus S. Williams, Milo M. Quaife, ed. (Detroit, 1959), 120-21; McClellan to his wife, September 7, 1862, McClellan, Civil War Papers, 437-38; September 7, Welles, Diary, l: 114-15.
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OLIVER DENNETT HUTCHINSON ! CIVILIAN 1862 MOMENT: PERFORMANCE Hutchinson, known as “Little Dennett,” was part of the Tribe of Asa, a wildly popular musical group led by his father, Asa Hutchinson. Little Dennett and the rest of the family performed for President Lincoln in January, singing “The Ship on Fire” at Lincoln’s request. The lyrics included “Alone with destruction, alone on the sea, Great Father of mercy, our hope is in thee.”
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BY RONALD S. CODDINGTON
{of }
The war's second year forever changed the lives of countless Americans—soldiers and civilians—on both sides of the conflict.
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James Porter Parker ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: BATTLE
George Armstrong Custer’s West Point roommate, Parker was dispatched to the Mississippi River stronghold of Vicksburg with the stars of a Confederate lieutenant colonel on his uniform collar in May. As commander of the 1st Mississippi Light Artillery, he and his gunners successfully defended the key bastion against Union ironclad warship attacks that summer.
JAMES WHEATON CONVERSE ! SOLDIER
ALGERNON MARBLE SQUIER
1862 MOMENT: BATTLE Converse distinguished himself in combat at New Bern, North Carolina, in March, “his fearless gaze and steady step keeping his men well in hand as they swept forward to the charge,” as one comrade noted.
! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: NURSING
faces
Squier found his true calling at Harpers Ferry in 1862, when he was detached for duty as a steward at the regimental hospital. He went on to become a nurse and, after the war, a contract surgeon for the regular army. His first assignment as a surgeon, at Fort Larned in Kansas in 1867, was his last. He died of cholera after saving many men from the dreaded disease.
Richard Mason Waterman ! SOLDIER
o f 1862
1862 MOMENT: BATTLE
At Stones River, Tennessee, Captain Waterman of the 31st Indiana Infantry laid down his saber, picked up a musket, and opened fire against charging Confederates. Waterman was captured and later released. Nineteen years later, in 1881, Waterman’s sword was discovered beneath bushes on the Stones River battlefield.
HENRY NEWTON COMEY ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: BATTLE
Elizabeth & John Green ! CIVILIANS 1862 MOMENT: IMPRISONED SONS
After the fall of Fort Donelson in February, Mr. and Mrs. Green of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, learned that their boys, William and Edward, had been captured by Union forces. Both were eventually released and returned to the army. Three more Green boys—Thomas, Lucius and Memucan—would also serve the Confederacy. All survived the war except Memucan, who died at the Battle of Brices Cross Roads, Mississippi, in June 1864. On the back of this image, “The Parents of 5 Ragged Rebs” is written in period pen.
Upon learning that his 2nd Massachusetts Infantry would be held in reserve at the First Battle of Kernstown in March, Comey left his regiment and ran to the front looking for a fight. He joined up with the 5th Ohio Infantry and survived his baptism of fire.
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Henry Howard Huse ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: CAMPAIGN
Huse and his comrades in the 8th New Hampshire Infantry participated in an expedition into Louisiana in the fall of 1862. At one bivouac, he sat cross-legged and scribbled a note home: “In an enemy’s country, fighting, marching and stealing our living with nothing but the broad canopy over us, and only a blanket and one extra shirt.”
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ALEXANDER LOWRY ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: ENLISTMENT
faces
Daniel Waldo ! CIVILIAN
o f 1862
1862 MOMENT: CENTENARIAN
Rev. Waldo, chaplain of the House of Representatives, celebrated his 100th birthday in September. The Revolutionary War veteran had lived during the terms of all United States presidents. A fellow minister remembered their conversation about the current occupant of the White House: “President Lincoln he deemed honest, but not decided enough. He thought that the leaders of the rebellion should be dealt with in such a manner that no one would dare, in the future, to repeat the experiment.”
Sixteen years old in the summer of 1862, Lowry had no business in the army. “I was young and small and delicate in appearance, but perfectly sound,” he declared. Despite his age and size, recruiters in Jamestown, New York, allowed him to sign up. He rapidly rose in rank to lieutenant on the regimental staff. His comrades called him “our little adjutant.”
James Blake Dailey & Mary Ann Hough ! SOLDIER; LOCAL BEAUTY 1862 MOMENT: MARRIAGE
The men of the 6th New York Cavalry celebrated New Year’s Day in York, Pennsylvania, where they were stationed for 10 weeks while awaiting orders to head south. There, the regiment’s major, Dailey, met a local beauty, Mary Ann “Mattie” Hough. Dailey resigned his commission before the end of the year, returned to York, and married his sweetheart.
ABRAHAM P. HART ! CIVILIAN 1862 MOMENT: REBUILDING Hart lost his Elmira, New York, photography studio to fire in May. Within a month he established a new gallery complete with a sun roof, and got back to the business of taking photographs of citizen-soldiers heading off to war.
WASHINGTON WATKINS ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: CAPTURE In May, Union forces in Missouri captured Watkins and a number of his Confederate comrades. A family friend sought to free him, explaining that if Watkins had the opportunity to pledge his loyalty to the Stars and Stripes, he’d take it. The friend was wrong. Watkins remained loyal to the Confederacy.
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ROBERT DEMPSEY
JAMES McBETH
! SOLDIER
! SOLDIER
1862 MOMENT: WOUND
1862 MOMENT: BATTLE McBeth wondered whether he would fight or flee when his time came to see the elephant. A man of few words, he found out at Gaines’ Mill, Virginia, on June 27, when he and his nattily attired fellow Zouaves in the 5th New York Infantry distinguished themselves by battling enemy forces for hours. “My most earnest prayer was that I should have courage to fight & if need be die like a man and I am sure my prayer was answered for I hadnt any fear whatever,” McBeth wrote to a friend.
Charles de Choiseul
Irish immigrant Dempsey vowed to get back into the war after he was disabled by a gunshot wound to the left shoulder in battle on James Island, South Carolina, in June. He pledged to return and fight to ensure “many days of happiness and prosperity when rebels and rebellion are no more.” He did return to his regiment, the 7th Connecticut Infantry, and was killed in action at Olustee, Florida, in 1864.
ANDREW STALEY MILICE ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: ENLISTMENT
The rank and file of one company in the 12th Indiana Infantry hated their second lieutenant, Milice. The regiment mustered out after its one-year term ended in the summer of 1862. Milice reformed his ways and raised a company of volunteers for a new regiment, the 74th Indiana Infantry, where he earned high marks for his leadership in battle.
! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: DEATH
De Choiseul, lieutenant colonel of the 7th Louisiana Infantry, wrote to a friend in January with a flourish of his native French, “I have made up my mind to leave my bones on the ‘sacre’ soil of Virginia.” He suffered a fatal wound on the Virginia battlefield of Port Republic six months later.
Charles Abbott Butts ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: ENLISTMENT
Butts suspended his studies at Hamilton College in New York during the summer of 1862 and helped raise a company with the promise of an officer’s commission. He didn’t get the commission, but enlisted anyway as a private. Butts explained his actions: “I came feeling that it was an earnest call of my country in an hour of peril, I knew I was not strong like some, but I gladly [and] freely gave all I was to a country I loved & felt proud of."
FREDERICK BEALL !"SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: BATTLE Private Beall of the 10th Mississippi Cavalry had a memorable baptism of fire at Iuka, Mississippi, in September. “The first sergeant of the company was demoted while the battle was raging, when [my captain] ordered me to take charge of the company as first sergeant,” recalled Beall. He did, and continued to fight throughout the rest of the war.
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CHARLES AUGUSTUS GARDNER JR. ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: TRANSFER
Gardner joined the 2nd Maine Infantry and might have served his entire enlistment with the regiment. But when the navy sought ablebodied men to serve on gunboats in early 1862, Gardner, a peacetime mariner, volunteered to transfer. He served the rest of the war on the Mississippi River as part of the crew of the USS Cincinnati.
faces PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
o f 1862
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John Smarr ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: CAPTURE
JOHN PIERSON
FULLER LEWIS
! SOLDIER
! MISSIONARY
1862 MOMENT: ESCAPE
1862 MOMENT: TEACHING
Private Pierson of the 7th Iowa Infantry escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Tennessee on April 6, as fighting raged nearby at Shiloh. He had been captured a year earlier at the Battle of Belmont.
After New Orleans fell to Union forces in May, Fuller, a free man of color, became a missionary and traveled to the city to teach freed slaves how to read and write. He enlisted in the army in 1863 and ended the war as a sergeant major in the 92nd U.S. Colored Infantry.
At Shiloh on April 6, Union forces captured Private Smarr of the 9th Kentucky Infantry. He remained a prisoner of war at Camp Douglas in Chicago until his exchange that summer. He returned to his regiment and served through the rest of the war.
Robert Jones ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: CAPTURE
“My men were fighting like Tigers. Every man was a hero,” wrote Colonel Cullen Battle of his soldiers in the 3rd Alabama Infantry who fought on Maryland’s South Mountain on September 14. One of his men, Corporal Jones, was wounded after a bullet ripped into his foot. He fell into enemy hands and spent the rest of the year imprisoned in Baltimore, where he posed for this photograph.
LORENZO DOW BROOKS ! SOLDIER
Isaiah Goddard Hacker ! SOLDIER 1862 MOMENT: ENLISTMENT
After being turned down twice because of his short stature, Hacker tried once more to join the Union army in the summer of 1862—and this time he succeeded. He became a respected soldier in the 38th Massachusetts Infantry. He went on to suffer a serious wound after being struck by a shell fragment at the Third Battle of Winchester, or Opequon, in 1864. PHOTOGRAPHS: JAMES PORTER PARKER IMAGE COURTESY JOHN SICKLES; ALL OTHER CONFEDERATE IMAGES COURTESY BILL TURNER; ALL UNION IMAGES COURTESY RONALD S. CODDINGTON
1862 MOMENT: DEATH In July, Captain Brooks and his regiment, the 7th Vermont Infantry, came under enemy fire. Lorenzo and his younger brother, Delos, were standing side by side when Lorenzo was struck and killed by a cannonball. Delos was unharmed.
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On the eve of Antietam, Union soldiers won a decisive victoryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;then fought again to have it remembered. By Brian Matthew Jordan
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Fighting for South Mountain
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DRAWING BY A.A. FASEL LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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A century and a half later, the word
Antietam still causes Americans to shudder.
A dozen hours of combat in the cornfields, woods, and farm lanes near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on one unassuming September day in 1862 added some 23,000 men to the Civil War’s grisly register of killed, wounded, missing, or captured. Within a few days both George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had abandoned the battlefield, leaving a chilling panorama of stiffened, bullet-riddled and torn bodies. For weeks, vultures circled in merciless eddies in the sky above, charmed by Antietam’s harvest of death. In the battle’s aftermath, celebrated photographer Alexander Gardner and his assistant, James Gibson, descended upon the wartorn landscape and captured in syrupy collodion these haunting images. Later that autumn, the photographers assembled these ghastly plates into a temporary exhibition entitled “The Dead of Antietam” at Mathew Brady’s noted New York City photography studio and gallery. Such glimpses of war etched themselves into the minds of all who viewed them. As The New York Times noted on October 20, the exhibition had “a terrible fascination,” with scenes that made viewers “loth to leave” the photographs behind.¹ Historians, much like those New York spectators who wandered through the exhibit gallery, have been loath to leave behind the enormity of Antietam’s carnage. Consigning ultimate significance to ultimate slaughter, historians have belabored their arguments for Antietam as a genuine turning point in the Civil War. They’ve even harnessed Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, issued shortly after that fight, to the story of the battle in an effort to find redemption among the slain piled in rows.² Fixing their gaze on Antietam, chroniclers of the Maryland Campaign have virtually neglected the sharp fighting that erupted three days before the armies’ titanic showdown at Sharpsburg. Historians cast aside these clashes for the stubborn passes of South Mountain as a series of inconsequential skirmishes with little strategic significance to the larger campaign. Today, Fox’s Gap, Turner’s Gap, and Crampton’s Gap are thus virtually unknown to even the most experienced Civil War battlefield explorers, and, until last year, only one book-length treatment of the fighting at South Mountain had appeared in print.³ But this was not always the battle’s reputation. For a generation, Union veterans fought to safeguard the legacy of the battle as one of their crowning achievements— even as their Confederate counterparts did everything in their power to deny what happened when a loathsome rain of grape and canister spoiled the serenity of the Sabbath on September 14, 1862.
IN 1912, HISTORIAN Isaac Heysinger remarked that no Civil War campaign was “so little understood” as the Maryland Campaign of 1862. The story of the first rebel invasion of the North, he insisted, “bristle[d] from end to end” with curious omissions and unquestioned assumptions.⁴ That orthodox tale goes something like this: Flushed with success following a string of impressive eastern theater victories, Lee audaciously determined to splash across the Potomac and invade
Maryland with an anemic army, setting his sights on the federal capital. Pursued by the characteristically cautious McClellan, Lee staked his campaign on a risky plan that divided his army across a 35-mile-wide front along the mountains of western Maryland. Recognizing the strategic significance of the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, situated at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, Lee ultimately shuttled General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and six of his nine divisions off to the federal garrison in an effort to force its surrender. His other divisions held Hagerstown, Maryland, and two passes through South Mountain, a spur of the Blue Ridge extending between Harpers Ferry and Frederick, Maryland. On September 13, the familiar story continues, the lazy Union columns finally ambled into Frederick. Carelessness by a Confederate courier resulted in a stray copy of Lee’s orders for his campaign falling into McClellan’s hands. Despite possession of the enemy’s strategic schematic, McClellan continued to move with his characteristic caution. He settled upon a design to push through the South Mountain gaps on September 14, where the Union army scored a tactical victory in heavy skirmishing. Strategically, the Confederate defenders won the day—holding McClellan’s army at bay for 24 precious hours and sealing the fate of the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, which a hapless and hungover Colonel Dixon Miles surrendered to Jackson on Monday, September 15. Two days later, after both armies recuperated and reorganized, they met at Sharpsburg for their inexorable showdown. Damaged by his heavy losses on September 17, Lee reluctantly ended the campaign and retired to Virginia to lick his wounds.
DOES SOUTH MOUNTAIN really deserve the cloak of historical obscurity that has shrouded its bloodied passes? To consider this question, one needs to recall that Lee had neither bargained for nor anticipated a battle at South Mountain. He had instead hoped to wage a sustained northern offensive. “Should the results of the expedition justify it, I propose to enter Pennsylvania,” Lee wrote to President Jefferson Davis on September 4, 1862, as the Army of Northern Virginia began fording the Potomac.⁵ “Lee’s grandiose plans were fueled by a string of stunning battlefield victories in the spring and summer and, moreover, by the reasoned assumption that the Federals would be lackadaisical in their pursuit. But much to Lee’s disbelief, McClellan, in an uncharacteristic display of cunning and aggression, moved his army against the Confederate-held passes of South Mountain on September 14. Using a strategy of divide and defeat in detail, McClellan
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In this sketch by Alfred Waud, elements of the Union army pass through Middleton, Maryland, on their way toward South Mountain.
had dispatched Major General Jesse Lee Reno’s IX Corps and Major General Joseph Hooker’s I Corps to storm Fox’s Gap and Turner’s Gap, respectively, while ordering Major General William Buel Franklin’s VI Corps to press through Crampton’s Gap, the so-called “back door” to Harpers Ferry. While the 28,000 men of the Army of the Potomac faced a force of only 18,000 Confederates, the Rebels nonetheless held the valuable high ground along South Mountain’s rugged spine. Pitched, confused, and particularly vicious fighting despoiled each of the mountain passes. After a nearly 12-hour struggle in the thick brambles straddling the Old Sharpsburg Road, the Union IX Corps decimated the contingents of Daniel Harvey Hill’s division defending Fox’s Gap, though at the cost of its beloved commander, Major General Reno. Just to the north, George Gordon Meade’s Pennsylvania Reserves scaled the steep mountainsides at Turner’s Gap, beating back Brigadier General Robert Rodes’ Alabamians. Meanwhile, Colonel Alfred Colquitt’s Georgians made a desperate attempt to maintain possession of the macadamized National Turnpike, though they would abandon their works after dusk to four Midwestern regiments ever after known as the Iron Brigade. Six
miles away, when Franklin’s VI Corps moved through the hamlet of Burkittsville, they decisively cleared Crampton’s Gap of portions of Major General Lafayette McLaws’ division. In a single day, not only had 2,300 Federals and 2,700 Confederates been counted as casualties, but McClellan had decisively wrested the initiative—and South Mountain—from his opponent. “We yesterday gained a glorious and complete victory,” McClellan wrote to his wife, Ellen, on September 15. “Every moment adds to its importance.”⁶ Darkness blanketed South Mountain that night as the sounds of battle gave way to horror and suffering. “The road was completely blocked up with army wagons and ambulances,” Connecticut soldier B.F. Blakeslee recalled. “[O]n both sides of the road, shot and shell had pierced the trees and houses. The fences were riddled with bullets, telegraph poles were down, and the earth was ploughed with solid shot. The dead lay by the road-side, and the ambulances were scouring the mountainsides with men detailed to pick up the wounded.”⁷ “On the battlefield, bodies of the dead lay about in every direction, and in every imaginable position,” wrote New York surgeon Thomas Ellis. “Here fell an officer, sword in hand, urging on his men; one was drinking from his canteen when the fatal bullet pierced his brain; another, in the act of discharging his piece; and others, while loading their muskets. Most of the killed were shot in the head, which is owing to the elevated position on which the enemy was posted.”⁸ On Monday, September 15, squads of Federals fanned out to bury the dead, a task that would not be completed until September 18. “This was my first experience in gathering wounded from a battlefield
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after it was won,” admitted Wilson Hopkins of the 16th New York InMcClellan, having achieved his most complete fantry, who commanded the ambulance corps of Henry Slocum’s divibattlefield victory of the war, wired Henry Halleck, sion. “Many have visited such places and reported the sickening sights, the Union army’s general-in-chief: “After a very but I cannot describe their ghastly realities. Later I became more fasevere engagement the Corps of Hooker and Reno miliar with such scenes, yet I can never forget that dreadful night; its have carried the heights commanding the Hagerhorrors overshadowed all spectacles I witnessed on other battlefields, stown road. The troops behaved magnificently.” In and the memory of what I there saw will remain with me to the end.”⁹ another wire, this one to Lieutenant General WinThe cheerless scenes of the battlefield and field hospitals mirfield Scott, McClellan confirmed that the morale of rored the dismal mood at D.H. Hill’s headquarters at the old Mountain his troops had been restored. “We attacked a large House. After an entire day of reverses, the Rebel force of the enemy yesterday … leaders were, as Union veteran and Antietam Battleour troops, old and new regifield Board historian Ezra Carman described them, ments, behaved most valiantly “an anxious and disheartened group.”¹⁰ Confederand gained a signal victory. The ate brigadier general John Bell Hood suggested that rebels routed, and retreating in the cadre abandon the mountain. The grim situadisorder this morning.”¹⁷ tion was inscribed on Robert E. Lee’s solemn face. McClellan’s initial reports “General Lee inquired of the prospects for continumay have exaggerated the Coning the fight,” General James Longstreet recalled federate death toll at South in his memoir, but D.H. Hill “explained that the enMountain, but he did not overesemy was in great force with commanding positions timate how his army understood on both flanks, which would give a cross-fire for the engagement. The gloom his batteries, making the cramped position of the of the fighting on the Virginia Confederates at the Mountain House untenable.”¹¹ peninsula, followed by the horAfter nightfall, when Lee realized the day had gone rendous defeats that were the against him, “[he] took immediate measures to Seven Days Battles and Second reunite with McLaws and recross the Potomac in Manassas, had Federal soldiers Virginia.”¹² Lee’s dispatch addressing the dire situdisillusioned on the eve of the ation went to McLaws at 8 p.m. “The day has gone Maryland invasion. “After the deagainst us, and this army will go by Sharpsburg and pressing scenes, weary marches, cross the river,” Lee wrote. “It is necessary for you and fierce battles of August, the to abandon your position tonight.”¹³ veterans were inspired with new Rutherford B. Hayes It was the first time Lee had issued a call for life by the attractions on evretreat as a Civil War field commander. Gone were the ebullience, the ery side as we forced our way towards the enemy pomp, the pageantry, the proclamations, and the poised confidence holding the passes of the South Mountain range,” of Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. South Mountain opened a former lieutenant colonel of the 23rd Ohio and fuseason of opportunity for McClellan’s army, and the Rebel ebb had beture president of the United States Rutherford B. gun. “The victory is theirs,” asserted a Virginian from James Kemper’s Hayes later explained to a regimental historian, enbrigade. “The remnant of our little army began its retreat in silence.”¹⁴ couraging him to underscore the significance of the Lee would not learn of the successful siege and surrender of the Harp- fight for Fox’s Gap in his narrative.¹⁸ “You may not ers Ferry garrison until eight o’clock on the morning of September remember, but after the defeats which were inflict15—long after he had already decided to reunite his army at Sharpsed upon McClellan by Lee, in the Seven Days camburg. Many historians, excising the tortuous and apprehensive hours paign and at Bull Run, everywhere throughout the following the Confederate defeat at South Mountain from their narracountry, the confederates were victorious and were tives, depict the surrender of Harpers Ferry as the turning point of the in the highest spirits,” echoed William Brearly of campaign. With the news of Stonewall Jackson’s victory, they argue, the 17th Michigan Infantry. “With the full belief Lee regained his momentum and made a bold strike to salvage the that they would be successful, and that there was campaign with “a stand in these hills [at Sharpsburg].” But this analyno army that could seriously obstruct their way, sis underestimates the deleterious effect that South Mountain had on [the Rebels] entered upon their first Maryland camLee. “The moral effect of our movement into Maryland had been lost paign. Unexpectedly to Lee, he was thrown upon by our discomfiture at South Mountain, and it was then evident that the defensive, and the results you know as well as we could not hope to concentrate in time to do more than make a reI do.”¹⁹ spectable retreat,” Longstreet explained after the war.¹⁵ Union veteran Adoniram Judson Warner of the 10th PennGeorge B. Davis concurred. “Until the passes of the South Mountain sylvania Reserves likewise articulated the psychic were forced,” Davis wrote, “General Lee does not appear to have seriimportance of the South Mountain victory for the ously contemplated a battle; in which, from the scattered condition of discouraged ranks of Union enlisted men. Warner his command, he had nothing to gain and everything to lose.”¹⁶ observed that when he threw his Pennsylvania ReAs might be expected, the strategic view of the unfolding Maryserves into the engagement north of the National land campaign looked rather different from northern eyes. General Pike, they instinctively hesitated. “This was the
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THE BATTLE OF SOUTH MOUNTAIN | MARYLAND | SEPTEMBER 1862 In early September 1862, Robert E. Lee launched his first invasion of the North, leading his Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River and into Maryland. Lee then divided his army, sending Stonewall Jackson with the bulk of his force to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry (which Jackson would accomplish on September 15), while the remainder of his men guarded the passes in South Mountain. On September 14, Union forces under George McClellan, who had fortuitously obtained a copy of Lee’s plans, attacked the Confederate-held passes. That night, weary and outnumbered, Lee withdrew his men from South Mountain toward the town of Sharpsburg.
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effect of the defeat at [Second] Bull Run,” Warner reasonably concluded. “I did all in my power to push them rapidly forward and soon nearly all were in the ravine and beyond it and the rebels were running…. I never felt before as then. The skies never seemed so near or so clear.” Because the Army of the Potomac had “been baffled on the Peninsula [and] had been beaten and discomfited at Bull Run,” Warner argued, the result of South Mountain was particularly affecting for its blue-coated participants. “The consciousness that we had[,] by sheer hard fighting, beaten the enemy and driven him from his strong positions filled me to overflowing,” he admitted, and “gave me confidence that we
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would finally win and the country be safe.”²⁰ In the leaves of their diaries and letters home, Union soldiers recorded this newly born confidence. For many, the victory was a peculiar new experience that began with resting under arms on a battlefield won from the enemy. “At sundown we held the Pass, and last night, for the first time, we slept on the field of battle,” Joel J. Seaver of the 16th New York explained in a letter home.²¹ “We laid on our arms in line of battle on the place where [we] fought all night,” Lyman Holford, a private in the 6th Wisconsin, boasted.²² William Todd of the 79th New York marveled at the phenomenon. “The weather was cold and as we stood in line shivering and wishing for morning, we conversed in low tones with each other, congratulating ourselves on this our first victory in the new campaign.”²³ Observing so many dead Confederates on the field aided the
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complete Union victory,” Sergeant Alonzo Hill of the Pennsylvania Reserves determined.²⁸ The lieutenant colonel of the 21st New York State Militia, Theodore Gates, called the victory at South Mountain “one of the most brilliant achievements of the Federals during the war.”²⁹ While immediate post-battle accounts in northern newspapers hailed South Mountain as a great victory, southern newspapers avoided addressing South Mountain altogether, dismissing it as an inconsequential obstacle on the road to Sharpsburg. These journalistic impressions were the precursor of more than a generation of unapologetic Confederate revisionism. In the pages of veterans’ periodicals, magazines, newspapers, and other outlets of the Lost Cause, ex-Confederates spilled ink in their efforts to diminish the significance of the sharp defeat at South Mountain. “The battle of South Mountain was one of extraordinary illusions and delusions,” began the principal Confederate account of the battle in Century magazine’s enormously popular Battles & Leaders of the Civil War series. “The Federals were under the self-imposed illusion that there was a very large force opposed to them, whereas there was only one weak division until late in the afternoon. They might have brushed it aside almost without halting, but for this illusion. It was a battle of delusions, also,” continued the writer, “for, by moving about from point to point and meeting the foe wherever he presented himself, the Confederates deluded the federals into believing that the whole mountain was swarming with rebels.”³⁰
Because the Confederate forces were so heavily outnumbered, the battle became a ready-made target for exponents of Confederate mythology, who were always ready to point out the numerical superiority of the Federal armies and navies. Moreover, the prominent battlefield role played by D.H. Hill—who, as editor of The Land We Love, a popular postwar magazine devoted to preserving the memory of Confederate soldiers, was one of the ablest advocates of the Lost Cause—gave many unreconstructed Rebels a motive for wielding pens in defense of their version of events. Hill described the Confederate defenses on South Mountain as “a thin curtain of men extending for miles along the crests of the mountains on that bright Sabbath day in September,” while facing what he described as “a vast, perfectly organized and magnificently equipped [federal] army…. Lee’s army was never so small.”³¹ This assessment conveniently overlooked the Rebels’ infinitely superior defensive perch atop South Mountain, as well as the rugged heights the Federals scaled to achieve their victory. Perhaps the most substantial revision by Confederate apologists concerned the objective of Lee’s operations north of the Potomac River. Insisting that the reduction of Harpers Ferry was always a key goal of the invasion, some ex-Confederates refused to concede that Lee had surrendered any initiative on the bloodied mountain passes. In this revised narrative, the Rebel stand at South Mountain became at worst Confederate dead litter the ground at a trifling skirmish, and at best a Fox’s Gap. boldly calculated holding action that sealed the fate of Harpers Ferry’s federal garrison. “If the battle of South Mountain was fought to prevent the advance of McClellan, it was a failure on the part of the Confederates,” Hill conceded. But, he continued, “if it was fought to save Lee’s trains and artillery, and to reunite his scattered forces, it was a Confederate success.” In the future, concluded Hill, the Battle of South Mountain would be of interest to the military reader, as it showed “the effect of a hallucination in enabling 9,000 men to hold 30,000 at bay for so many hours…robbing victory of its fruits.”³² Sentiments such as these raised a storm of indignation among hardened Union veterans of the battle. Ohio veteran Eliakim Scammon later explained that the South Mountain fight was something that he and his comrades could “never forget.”³³ Caught between their horrific knowledge of the war and an emerging culture of sectional reconciliation, these men already felt # } CONT. ON P. 77
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Federals in sizing up the exact dimensions of their hard-fought victory. “The dead rebels are lying around us thick as gooseberries,” recalled James Jenkins Gillette of the 4th Maryland in a letter to his mother on September 16.²⁴ For J.D. Brougher of the 130th Pennsylvania, South Mountain was “where the enemy had made a stand, where fought and they were compelled to retreat off the field leaving their dead and wounded on the field.”²⁵ Such debris rendered the Rebel defeat indisputable. Indiana cavalryman Samuel J.B.V. Gilpin, who didn’t fight at South Mountain but did traipse across the battlefield only a few days later, determined “the principal feature of the morning was the dead, dying, wounded, prisoners, stragglers, skirmishers, abandoned artillery, dust, and excitement.”²⁶ The wreckage littering the battlefield animated the Federal survivors simply because it was a visible validation of their hard-fought victory. Indeed, according to 16th New York Private Ozro N. Hubbard, the Confederates “could not have selected a more fitting place for a battle as nature had done more than enough to have made it almost impregnable for men to ascend without additional obstacles in the form of armed men…. They could not withstand such furious onset and they fled up and over the mountain having their dead and wounded in our lines.”²⁷ “If there was ever a victory gained, in any way, in any campaign, The Battle of South Mountain resulted in a most decided and
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ENDNOTES 1
2
New York Times, October 20, 1865; William A. Frassanito, Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day (New York, 1978), 14-15. Edward L. Ayers, “Worrying About the Civil War,” in What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York, 2005), 103-130; Drew Gilpin Faust, “We Should Grow Too Fond of It: Why We Love the Civil War,” Civil War History, 50, no. 4 (December 2004): 368-383.
3
John Michael Priest, Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain (Shippensburg, PA, 1992).
4
Isaac Heysinger, “Introductory: Inaccuracy of All the Current Histories,” in Antietam and the Maryland and Virginia Campaigns of 1862 (1912), 19.
5
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of Union and Confederate Armies 129 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880- 1901), Series I, Volume 19, 2:592 (Hereafter cited as OR. Unless otherwise noted, all references are to Volume 19, “South Mountain and Antietam.” The part numbers will be noted with each citation).
6
George B. McClellan to Mary Ellen McClellan, Bolivar, Maryland, September 15, 1862, as quoted George B. McClellan, The War for the Union (New York, 1887), 612.
7
B.F. Blakeslee, History of the 16th Connecticut Volunteers (Hartford, 1875), 9-11.
8
Thomas T. Ellis, diary, September 1862, in Leaves from the Diary of an Army Surgeon: or, Incidents of Field, Camp, and Hospital Life (New York, 1863), 312.
9
Wilson Hopkins, as quoted in John W. Schildt, Roads to Antietam (Hagerstown, MD, 1985), 107.
10 Ezra Carman, The Maryland Campaign of September 1862, ed. Joseph Pierro (New York, 2008) 165. 11 James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America (Philadelphia, 1896), 227. 12 OR 1:840; Carman, The Maryland Campaign, 169. 13 The Wartime Papers of R.E. Lee, Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds. (New York, 1961), 307-308. 14 John Dooley, John Dooley Confederate Soldier: His War Journal, ed. Joseph T. Durkin, S.J. (South Bend, IN, 1963), 36-38. 15 Joseph L. Harsh, Taken at the Flood (Kent, OH, 1998), 305; Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (Boston, 1983), 150-151; Battles & Leaders of the Civil War, eds. Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Buel, 2:666-667. 16 George B. Davis, “The Antietam Campaign,” in Papers of the Military Historical Society
of Massachusetts (reprint, Wilmington, NC, 1989), 3:53. 17 McClellan to Halleck, September 14, 1862, in McClellan Papers; OR 2:294-295. 18 Hayes, undated letter fragment [remainder missing], in Charles Richard Williams, ed., Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States (Columbus, 1922-1926), 5:154-155. 19 William Brearly to Century magazine, July 29, 1886, in Century Collection, Civil War Correspondence, Box 117, Rare Book and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library. 20 Adoniram Judson Warner, as quoted in James B. Casey, ed., “The Ordeal of Adoniram Judson Warner: His Minutes of South Mountain and Antietam,” Civil War History 28, no. 3 (September 1982). 21 Joel Seaver to Howland, letter, September 15, 1862, in Newton Martin Curtis, ed., From Bull Run to Chancellorsville (New York, 1906), 171. 22 Lyman Holford, diary entry, pp. 113-114, in Lyman Holford Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter MD/LOC). 23 William Richard Todd, as quoted in Schildt, Roads to Antietam, 94-95. 24 James Jenkins Gillette to his mother, September 16, 1862, in Gillette Papers, MD/LOC. 25 J. D. Brougher to William Oland Bourne, November 23, 1867, in William Oland Bourne Papers, MD/LOC. 26 Samuel J.B.V. Gilpin, 1st Indiana Cavalry, diary entries, September 14 and 15, 1862, in E.N. Gilpin Papers, MD/LOC. 27 Ozro N. Hubbard to William Oland Bourne, July 6, 1867, in Bourne Papers, MD/LOC. 28 Alonzo F. Hill, Our Boys (Philadelphia, 1864), 398. 29 Theodore B. Gates, The Ulster Guard (New York, 1879), 301. 30 Battles & Leaders 2:559-560. 31 Southern Historical Society Papers 13 (Richmond, 1885), 268-271. 32 Battles & Leaders, 2: 580. 33 Eliakim Scammon to James M. Comly, May 5, 1864, in James M. Comly Papers, microfilm reel 1, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio. 34 John Hughes to Mary Bickerdyke, February 3, 1899, Bickerdyke Papers, Box 3, General Correspondence, MD/LOC. 35 Gilbert Thompson Papers, MD/LOC. 36 William Brearly to Century magazine, July 29, 1886, Century Collection. 37 Rutherford B. Hayes, diary entries, Septem-
ber 13, 1863, September 14, 1881, September 14, 1884, September 14, 1885, September 14, 1891, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes. On Hayes’ personal memory of the Civil War, see Brooks D. Simpson, “The Good Colonel: Rutherford B. Hayes Remembers the Civil War,” 14th Hayes Lecture on the Presidency, February 16, 2003, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center. 38 This widespread but overlooked phenomenon is encountered in various veterans’ writings, regimental histories, and Grand Army of the Republic record books. For only a few examples, see Private W. Treadwell, notation in Memorials of Hours Among the Brave, Central Park Hospital, vol. 3, in William Oland Bourne Papers, MD/ LOC; “Monthly Record of Events,” Harper’s New Monthly magazine, 25 (November 1862), 837; Israel N. Stiles, “On to Richmond in 1862,” paper read March 10, 1887, in Military Essays and Recollections: Papers Read Before the Commandery of the State of Illinois, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, vol. 3 (reprint, Wilmington, NC, 1992), 53; Douglas A. Brown, “The Commemoration of the Lincoln Centenary by the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States at Their Headquarters, February 12, 1909,” in Sketches of War History 1861-1865: A Compilation of Miscellaneous Papers Compiled for the Ohio Commander of the Loyal Legion, February 1885-February 1909 (reprint, Wilmington, NC, 1993), 293. 39 Harpers Weekly, June 25, 1865; New York Tribune, May 24, 1865. 40 Russel Hastings’ Civil War memories are found with the Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, “R.B. Hayes and the 23rd O.V.I. Folder 1,” Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center. 41 John T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities (reprint, New York, 1969), 49. 42 History of Antietam National Cemetery (Baltimore, 1869), 19-20. 43 George Hess, Battle-Field Guide of the Battles of South Mountain and Antietam (Hagerstown, 1890). Compare these early interpretive tools with the National Park Service’s map and guide printed in 2006. In the latter, the actions on South Mountain are rendered utterly insignificant in a single sentence. A map outlining a driving tour of Maryland Campaign points of interest conveniently leads visitors to Shepherdstown and the Pry House Field Hospital, but does not offer directions to the South Mountain passes. 44 John Watts de Peyster, “The Maryland Battles in September, 1862,” The Decisive Conflict of the Late Civil War, or Slaveholder’s Rebellion, no. 1 (New York, 1867), 38-39. 45 Horace Greeley, “The American Conflict: Lee’s Invasion,” National Tribune, September 15, 1898.
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NORTHERN
DIVIDE
P IHBORTAORGYROAFP C L H OCNRGERDEI T S SH E R E
THE ELECTIONS OF 1862 SEEMED TO OFFER A SEVERE REBUKE TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND HIS PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. THE PRESIDENT AND HIS ALLIES, HOWEVER, READ THE RESULTS MUCH DIFFERENTLY.
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In this 1863 painting, a woman (Columbia) holds a declaration of emancipation while flanked by two slaves, one carrying and one draped in the American flag. President Lincolnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 became a divisive issue in that yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fall elections.
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N SEPTEMBER 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and declared that on January 1, 100 days away, he would sign a final decree to free the slaves in any part of the Confederacy still in rebellion. During those 100 days the document would be vigorously debated. Some would hail its arrival as the measure needed to win the war and transform it into a struggle for freedom, while others condemned it as an unconstitutional abuse of authority that would lead to racial atrocities. Most Republicans would pressure Lincoln to stand fast by his decision, whereas northern Democrats, by and large, implored him to retract it. Most political and military events that fall were analyzed through the lens of what it meant for the fate of the Emancipation Proclamation. The fall elections—congressional, legislative, and gubernatorial—seemed especially to serve as a referendum on the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The elections arrived in two waves. In October, voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana went to the polls; in November, there were critical contests in Illinois, Missouri, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. In the aftermath, commentators offered interpretations of the results, and Lincoln dedicated himself to discerning their meaning and offering his own understanding of why they turned out as they did. Going in, the Republicans expected the worst. Writing to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase in September, Senator John Sherman stated that “the election this Fall is feared by all our friends.”¹ When all the votes were tallied, the Democrats had gained 28 seats in the House of Representatives. Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and New York all sent majority Democratic delegations to Congress, with Republicans losing five seats in Pennsylvania, eight seats in Ohio, and nine in New York. In Illinois, Democrats captured nine of 14 seats, including Lincoln’s home eighth district. Democrats gained in Wisconsin as well. State legislatures in Indiana and Illinois came under Democratic control, and New Jersey and New York elected Democratic governors. Following the first wave of results in October, John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s secretary, wrote, “We are all blue here today on account of the election news.”² Still, things could have been much worse for Lincoln and his party: Pennsylvania and Ohio elected their governors in odd-numbered
years, and Illinois and Indiana had elected governors to four-year terms in 1860. Republicans still controlled Congress and the vast majority of governor’s mansions and state legislatures. Where they lost, the margins of defeat were slim: 4,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 6,000 in Ohio, and 10,000-11,000 in New York and Indiana.³ The meaning of the elections, however, rested not in numbers but in the varying perceptions and reactions. Many northern Democrats portrayed the results as a repudiation of Lincoln’s policies, particularly the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and, two days later, the suspension of habeas corpus, which allowed for the widespread arrest and detention of persons accused of disloyalty. Confederates certainly embraced this view. “This news produces great rejoicing, for it is hailed as the downfall of Republican despotism,” wrote John Beauchamp Jones, a clerk in Richmond’s war department, of the results. “[S]ome think it will be followed by a speedy peace, or else that the European powers will recognize us without further delay.” The Charleston Mercury exulted that “we do not see how the defeat of the Administration can do otherwise than paralyze the war” and asked whether Lincoln and his secretary of state, William Seward, “would dare carry into effect their Emancipation Proclamation, and thus persist in urging on upon the people the ruin which they have, by their votes, declared shall not prevail.”⁴ By contrast, Republicans explained their defeat at the polls by focusing on military missteps and popular dismay that General George B. McClellan had not vigorously pursued Robert E. Lee’s army after repulsing its invasion of Maryland. Lincoln himself well understood this. By October, he had become so disgusted with McClellan’s inertia that he responded to a dispatch about “sore tongued and fatigued horses” by inquiring, “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the Battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”⁵ A closer examination of the elections of 1862 suggests that, in at least several states, military developments, not emancipation or other concerns, were a major factor in the Republican defeat. In Pennsylvania, for example, on October 9, just five days before state elections, Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart launched a sensational reconnaissance mission in which he and some 1,800 troopers rode completely around McClellan’s immobile army. On the 11th, they occupied Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, cutting telegraph lines, seizing horses, and demolishing railroad machine shops, a depot, and several trains before returning to Virginia on the 12th unscathed, save the wounded trooper who was their sole casualty. Northern civilians blamed the Union army, which not only failed
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Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan confer in thegeneral’s tent near the Antietam battlefield on October 3, 1862. Many Republicans blamed the Democratic gains in the 1862 elections on McClellan’s failed pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia after the epic engagement there.
to protect citizens against incursions, but also seemed, since Antietam, unwilling to fight at all. As Pennsylvania congressman James Moorhead informed the president, “[T]he tardiness of our Army movements had more to do with our political defeat in Penna than the Proclamation.”⁶ In other states, such as Illinois, it was not the direct Confederate threat but the Union inertia that aggravated voters. Horace White, correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, informed the president in late October, “[I]f we are beaten in this State two weeks hence, it will be because McClellan & [Don Carlos] Buell [commanding Union forces in Tennessee and Kentucky] wont fight.”⁷ By November, Lincoln’s administration was especially anxious about the elections in New York, in particular the gubernatorial race, which pitted Republican James Wadsworth against Democrat Horatio Seymour. Wadsworth was an affluent New Yorker who had been with the Republican Party from its start. When war erupted, he was commissioned a major general in the New York State Militia, and then became a brigadier general of U.S.
Volunteers and commanded a brigade in General Irvin McDowell’s corps of the Army of the Potomac. Through much of 1862, he commanded the military district of Washington. Seymour, his conservative Democrat opponent from upstate New York, had already served a term as governor in 1853-1854. During the campaign, Seymour defended himself against charges that he was a “Peace Democrat,” or one who favored a compromise that would leave slavery intact to bring the war to an end, and would not, if elected, send more troops into the field. The rhetoric of the campaign played heavily on the questions of emancipation and civil liberties. Wadsworth had endorsed the Emancipation Proclamation, and he argued that once freedom came, New York would not be inundated with freed blacks competing with recent immigrants for work. Rather, he predicted, the free black population in the city would “drift to the South where they will find a congenial climate and vast tracts of land.” Democratic opponents, however, called the proclamation a “barbarous, disgraceful, hideous violation of the morality of Christendom,” and denounced “sudden, secret, lawless arrests” and the infringement of free speech that they believed accompanied the suspension of habeas corpus. The prosecution of the war, however, most likely played a greater part than the proclamation did in New York’s election results. William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, wrote
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to Lincoln on October 22 that “we are distressed and alarmed at the inactivity of our armies in putting down the rebellion…. These inopportune pauses, this strange sluggishness in military operations seem to us little short of absolute madness. Besides their disastrous influence on the final event of the war they will have a most unhappy effect upon the elections here, as we hear they have had in other states. The election of Mr. Seymour as Governor of New York would be a public calamity. A victory or two would almost annihilate his party and carry General Wadsworth triumphantly into office.”⁸ Those victories did not arrive, and Seymour was elected by a margin of some 10,000 votes (out of 600,000 cast). The election could have gone another way had those who were away in the army been allowed to vote (turnout was 70,000 below 1860’s election), but there was no provision for absentee balloting. The Tribune, choosing not to mention that the influential New York Republican Thurlow Weed did not support Wadsworth, concluded that the Republican nominee had lost because of “general dissatisfaction with the slow progress or no progress of our Armies, and a wide-spread feeling that, through the incapacity of our military leaders, the blood and treasure of the loyal Millions are being sacrificed in vain.”⁹ Not surprisingly, northern Democrats, looking beyond the specific circumstances in Pennsylvania and New York, tried to define the fall elections as a complete repudiation of administration policies, particularly the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Representative Samuel S. Cox of Ohio thundered that “the people have registered their oaths at the ballot-boxes, that no infraction of the Constitution shall be suffered.” What baffled him was the administration’s response. Rather than withdrawing the Emancipation Proclamation and restoring the writ of habeas corpus, it had offered “mockery, defiance, and persistency in wrong doing.” Cox’s Democratic colleague in Congress, William Richardson of Illinois, insisted that “the people are sick and tired of this eternal talk upon the negro, and they have expressed that disgust unmistakably in the recent elections.”¹⁰ The press fell along party lines as it debated the Emancipation Proclamation’s influence on the results. The New York Herald keyed on the proclamation in its analysis of the elections, insisting that “it is now made plain to the President that the people do not desire to see the proclamation carried out, and that declarations of their will in the recent elections will enable him to postpone action on the proclamation.” But pro-administration papers such as the Evening Post responded that “it is more ingenious than ingenuous in the opposition prints to argue that the results of the late elections are a specific popular rebuke of the principles under the President’s Proclamation. They have hitherto represented that document as a mere dead letter, without validity or effect, and they cannot now affect to regard it as an agency so living and real as to have been capable of working a serious revolution in public sentiment.” The Illinois Daily State Journal, the Republican paper in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, speculated that the results might have been taken as a referendum, but only if the opposition party had articulated some sort of alternative policy. Rather, “the opposition was a mere opposition. It had no line of policy, and was careful to enunciate none.” As a result, the administration was free to interpret the results as they saw fit. William Owner, a southern sympathizer living in Washington, realized that although “the Presdt is grieved at the result of the elections…. [I]f any believe that he will change his course or policy because of the result they are woefully mistaken.”¹¹ After the fall elections, Lincoln received numerous letters, none
of them longer than the 22-page missive that arrived from Isaac N. Morris, a former Democratic congressman from Illinois. Morris offered his assessment of the president’s policy failures, writing that “the Democratic triumphs … as I interpret them, do not mean a condemnation of the war” but a repudiation of the Emancipation Proclamation, which “alarmed the Union men of the South, and led the conservative men of all parties in the North to believe that your object was more to overthrow the Institutions of the South, than to restore the Government…. The war must be fought through with arms and not with proclamations. I am firmly convinced that if no proclamations had been issued by yourself or by your Generals since it commenced we would be in a much better condition today than we are.”¹² Some of Lincoln’s friends were just as harsh as his political opponents. On November 29, close
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Abraham Lincoln reviews the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation with members of his cabinet on September 22, 1862.
friend and former senator Orville Browning called on the president. “We had a long familiar talk,” Browning wrote, relieved that Lincoln “was apparently very glad to see me.” They spoke about the recent elections and Browning told him “that his proclamations [the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and the suspension of habeas corpus] had been disastrous to us. That prior to issuing them all loyal people were united in support of the war and the administration. That the masses of the democratic party were satisfied with him, and warmly supporting him, and that their disloyal leaders could not rally them in opposition—They had no issue without taking ground against the war, and upon that we would annihilate them. But the proclamations had revived old party issues— given them a rallying cry—capital to operate upon and that we had the results in our defeat. To this he made no reply.”¹³ If Lincoln did not respond, it
was not because he agreed with Browning. The two friends had diverged in their views months earlier, and Lincoln had likely felt no need to reargue the issues during a cordial visit. Other politicians offered alternative explanations for the Republican defeats, although no one blamed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and some even suggested that without it, the Republicans might have fared worse. If the decree was to be blamed for defeats in states such as Illinois and Ohio, they argued, it needed to be credited for victories in Massachusetts and Michigan. When Senator Zachariah Chandler asked Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois to campaign for the party in Michigan, Trumbull replied, “I do not believe there is the least danger in Michigan. Lincoln’s Proclamation should do the trick to swing the election to Michigan.” Chandler and Jacob Howard, both radicals, were elected to the Senate, and Austin Blair was re-elected governor of Michigan. In Iowa, attorney Francis Springer reported to a local official that “the canvas on the republican side dragged, not because of the emancipation proclamation of the president, but because of the lamentable want of vigor and energy in the conduct of the war.”¹⁴
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Commenting on the elections in New York, the diarist George Templeton Strong reasoned simply that the state’s citizens were “impatient, dissatisfied, disgusted, disappointed. We are in a state of dyspepsia and general, indefinite malaise, suffering from the necessary evils of war and from irritation at our slow progress. We take advantage of the first opportunity to change, for its own sake, just as a feverish patient shifts his position in bed, though he knows he’ll be none the easier for it.”¹⁵ David Dudley Field, a prominent New York attorney and leading Republican, claimed that “the elections are very significant; nobody who observes carefully can fail to understand them. The people are dissatisfied. What they are dissatisfied with, is the question you & every Statesman will desire to have answered, for upon that answer depends the future.” Field thought the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was not the central issue: “it lost us some votes, but it gained us more.”¹⁶ John Hutchins, a Republican congressman from Ohio, tried to put the overall results in historical perspective. “There is no cause for discouragement in the recent elections,” he argued, because “it has generally happened that the elections of the second Congress after the advent of a new Administration have resulted in the defeat of the party electing a President. That was the case in 1827, 1835, 1839, 1843, 1847, 1851, 1855, and 1859.” If this was the situation in ordinary times, he explained, there was no reason to think that the pattern in extraordinary times would be any different.¹⁷ In a letter to his brother, General William Tecumseh Sherman, Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio blamed the defeats on two factors. First, “the people were dissatisfied at the conduct and results
of the war. The slow movements on the Potomac and worse still in Kentucky dissatisfied and discouraged people. It was a little singular that the Democrats some of whom opposed the war should reap the benefit of this feeling, but such is the fate of parties.” He was especially peeved with the president, whom he thought had “voluntarily abandoned” the Republican organization for a “no-party Union … to run against an old, well-drilled party organization.” Forsaking ward meetings, committees, and conventions was as ridiculous politically as spurning drills and marches militarily, thought Sherman, and the results in both cases were defeat.¹⁸ Carl Schurz, former ambassador to Spain and now major general of volunteers, also faulted the administration. Schurz wrote Lincoln that “the defeat … is owing neither to your proclamations, nor to the financial policy of the Government, nor to a desire of the people to have peace at any price. I can speak openly, for you know that I am your friend. The defeat of the Administration is the Administration’s own fault.” Schurz went on to criticize Lincoln’s decision to place opposition party members in key military roles. He had strengthened his enemies “by placing them on an equality with your friends.” For all the effort and sacrifice, there had been few positive results, and “the people felt the necessity of a change.”¹⁹ Schurz’s letter received a pointed response from the president. “We have lost the elections,” Lincoln began, “and it is natural that each of us will believe, and say, it has been because his peculiar views was not made sufficiently prominent.” Lincoln attributed the defeat to “three main causes [that] told the whole story. 1. The democrats were left in a majority by our friends going to the war. 2. The democrats observed this & determined to re-instate themselves in power, and 3. Our newspapers, by vilifying and disparaging the administration, furnished them all the weapons to do it with. Certainly, the illsuccess of the war had much to do with this.” Lincoln then took a scalpel to Schurz’s arguments, refuting all the opinions and assertions that the general had presented as indisputable facts. The president had his own reading of “the plain facts, as they appear to me,” including that the administration came into power with “a minority of the popular vote,” that “the war came,” and that it “was mere nonsense to suppose a minority could put down a majority in rebellion.” He had appointed Democrats to army command, argued the president, because of their military knowledge and experience. “I have scarcely appointed a democrat to a command,” Lincoln noted, “who was not urged by many republicans and opposed by none”—including Schurz. He concluded by observing that the army’s Republican generals had had no greater success than Democratic ones.²⁰ # } CONT. ON P. 75
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
Carl Schurz, Union general and former ambassador to Spain, blamed Lincoln for the Republican electoral defeats in 1862.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
This early 1864 lithograph commemorated the Emancipation Proclamation with images of the journey from slavery to freedom.
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Books & Authors
ESSENTIAL READING ON THE WAR IN THE WEST, 1862 BROOKS D. SIMPSON FOR ALL THE attention lavished upon the Civil War in the eastern theater, many scholars believe the war was won (and lost) in the West, defined loosely as the region from Georgia and the Appalachian Mountains west to the states bordering the Mississippi River. Several fine works help elucidate the events of 1862, the first full year of campaigning, when Union forces penetrated the Confederacy. They seized control of important segments
of the Mississippi River (including New Orleans and Memphis) and eventually put themselves in position to take Vicksburg and advance toward the gateway of the Confederate heartland at Chattanooga. At the same time, they consolidated control over much of eastern Missouri and entered Arkansas. These operations paved the way for the unionist governments in Tennessee, Louisiana, and eventually Arkansas, and the emancipation of thousands of slaves. They also brought Ulysses S. Grant to national attention, although by year’s end he was fighting to remain commander of the Army of the Tennessee. That army’s baptism of fire was in February 1862, when Grant’s army and Andrew Hull Foote’s gunboats ventured south to capture a brace of forts guarding the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. Benjamin Franklin
Cooling’s Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland (1987) remains the most detailed narrative of this critical campaign, which opened Tennessee to invasion and catapulted “Unconditional Surrender” Grant to national prominence. Within weeks, though, he nearly lost his command due to the machinations of his superior, Henry W. Halleck, who seemed more interested in disciplining an unlikely hero’s administrative shortcomings than capitalizing on Union success. Cooling’s assessments are judicious, and he explains why the battles were overshadowed by subsequent events. One could say that the Battle of Pea Ridge is also overlooked, but a masterful account by William L. Shea and Earl J. Hess, Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West (1992), does much to rescue it from obscurity by arguing forcefully for its importance in securing Union control of parts of Missouri and Arkansas. History has not always given the victorious commander, Samuel Curtis, his due, but this book commends him and the soldiers on both sides who struggled under less-than-ideal conditions. In contrast, Earl Van Dorn and his fellow Confederate generals turned in a poor performance. Inevitably Shiloh draws readers’ attention, and it remains the most written about of the 1862 battles in the West. Larry J. Daniel’s Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War (1997) best places the battle in broader context, arguing that the Confederacy’s failure to destroy Grant’s army proved decisive. Daniel recounts the wrangling between political and military leaders in the weeks leading up to the battle, reminding us not to discount policy and politics in the course of military events. He also explores how various parties interpreted the outcome and impact of the battle, no minor mat-
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ter given the interplay between battlefront and home front as both sides sought to sustain the will for war. Two other volumes focus on the battle itself: O. Edward Cunningham’s Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 (2007), edited by Gary D. Joiner and Timothy B. Smith, a carefully researched account that challenges standard arguments, and Wiley Sword’s classic Shiloh: Bloody April (1974; reprint edition, 2001), which offers compelling descriptions of combat. Although the battle itself was a close call for Grant, he survived and began forging his relationship with William T. Sherman, an alliance that proved invaluable for Union fortunes. As Grant later observed, for the Confederates, Shiloh remained a battle of “ifs,” with the initial promise of success frittered away as both sides mauled each other that spring Sunday. Smith’s own account of the ensuing Corinth campaign will doubtless prove a welcome addition to an understudied operation, much as Daniel shed much-needed light on John Pope’s biggest success in Island No. 10: Struggle for the Mississippi Valley (1996). The most comprehensive overview of the fighting from February through May remains Stephen D. Engle’s Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth (2001), which integrates military, social, and political history; Charles Dufour’s The Night the War Was Lost (1960) is still the standard study of the capture of New Orleans in April 1862. After the fall of Corinth, the war in the West appeared to slow down for several months: A decision to disperse the Union forces that had captured that city forfeited much of their momentum. Confederate counteroffensives in September and October threatened to roll back Union gains in northern Mississippi and Kentucky. In The Darkest Days
of the War: The Battles of Iuka & Corinth (1997), Peter Cozzens skillfully recounts those two engagements, although some may question how he handles the relationship between Grant and William S. Rosecrans. Both sides missed opportunities for decisive blows, although the frustration of Confederate hopes to turn back the wave of Union successes proved more important. The Confederate thrust into Kentucky, best followed in James Lee McDonough’s War in Kentucky: From Shiloh to Perryville (1994), culminated in a much-overlooked battle, but Kenneth W. Noe’s Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle (2001) is a model battle study, weaving an account of how generals led (or tried to) and how soldiers fought. Noe examines the impact of the clash on both participants and place, and considers the legacy and memory of the battle in a way that other historians would do well to emulate. By year’s end Confederate forces had turned back Grant’s first effort to take Vicksburg and blocked Sherman’s attempt to take the bluffs overlooking Chickasaw Bayou. Elsewhere, however, Union forces enjoyed a measure of strategic success. William L. Shea’s Fields of Blood: The Prairie Grove Campaign (2009) is a marvelous account of an oft-ignored campaign that ended in a drawn battle followed by Confederate withdrawal, thus keeping much of Missouri in Union hands. Weeks later, as 1862 drew to a close, Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee missed a similar opportunity to smash Rosecrans’ newly christened Army of the Cumberland. In No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River (1990), Peter Cozzens details the fighting with his trademark approach to narrating combat. If the battle promoted Rosecrans’ fortunes, it continued the downward slide of Bragg’s career, complete with ongoing wrangles with his com-
manders, which Cozzens describes. One may also want to consult James Lee McDonough’s Stones River: Bloody Winter in Tennessee (1983) for a general overview. Readers can look elsewhere for additional insight into the campaigns of 1862, from biographies of leaders to examinations of various armies (and the Union navy), as well as broader accounts of Civil War military history, but these volumes provide one way to embark upon reading about the war in the West in 1862. BROOKS D. SIMPSON is ASU Founda-
tion Professor of History at Arizona State University and the author most recently of The Civil War in the East: Struggle, Stalemate, and Victory (2011).
ESSENTIAL READING ON THE PENINSULA CAMPAIGN GLENN DAVID BRASHER IN THE SPRING and early summer of 1862, Union general George B. McClellan’s attempt to capture the Confederate capital by advancing up the Virginia Peninsula involved the largest amphibious operation of the war, saw perhaps Robert E. Lee’s best chance to destroy the Army of the Potomac, and included frontal assaults that dwarfed the size of Pickett’s Charge. Its results led to President Lincoln’s decision to use emancipation as a means of saving the Union, and thus the event merits as much attention, if not more, than such battles as Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. While writers have relatively neglected the Peninsula
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Campaign, there are several essential works that provide solid analysis of the event. The classics are the best place to begin, and luckily two of the most colorful “old school” Civil War historians tackled the Peninsula Campaign. Clifford Dowdey, in The Seven Days: The Emergence of Lee (1964), uses a conversational style to provide a good overview of McClellan’s bold maneuver. However, Dowdey mainly focuses on Lee’s command of the Army of Northern Virginia after Joseph E. Johnston was wounded in battle at Seven Pines. Dowdey is unafraid to deliver sharp judgments of both Union and Confederate commanders and is particularly critical of Johnston and John Magruder (describing the former as a “dandified little general” who was a “lazy, hazy thinker” with battle plans that were “deranged”). Dowdey’s familiarity with the terrain and the often-confusing roads over which the armies fought is a particular strength of the work. The book casts Lee as its hero, and makes the case that the campaign’s largest impact was his rise as a commander whose future successes would allow the Confederacy to fight on for three bloody years. A similar take can be found in the first volume of Douglas Southall Freeman’s classic Lee’s Lieutenants, A Study in Command (1942). Freeman needs no introduction to students of the Civil War. Along with the works
of Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote, the Richmond journalist’s writings are among the most readable of all Civil War histories. In Lee’s Lieutenants, Freeman provides an elegantly written narrative of the campaign. His focus is the leadership of the Army of Northern Virginia, and thus his work’s most interesting interpretive points involve Lee’s struggle to weed out ineffective commanders and to weld together an efficient staff. In 1992, Stephen W. Sears provided the first truly comprehensive narrative of the operation with To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign, which remains the single best work on the subject. He examines the campaign from both the Union and Confederate perspectives, provides more than just an evaluation of Lee’s emergence, and deals objectively with the performances of Magruder and Johnston. Sears also offers a wellsupported analysis of McClellan, showing him as politically at odds with the Lincoln administration, delusional in his overestimation of the number of Confederate troops he faced, and possessing a bizarre skill for being absent from the battlefield during combat. Yet the work’s greatest strength is that Sears does not focus exclusively on leadership. He turns his lens on the rank and file, skillfully integrating their diaries, letters, and memoirs. All Civil War enthusiasts should delve into such extant primary sources, and fortunately a wealth of them exist that deal with the Peninsula Campaign. One of the best is Katharine Prescott Wormeley’s The Other Side of War: With the Army of the Potomac, a collection of the nurse’s letters written from the Virginia Peninsula. Published in 1888 (and full text now available online at Google Books), Wormeley’s letters provide an engaging account of her transformation from a young, pampered
New England woman to a hardened war nurse. Her writings illuminate the journey that many women took as the conflict challenged and altered Victorian gender roles. Most compelling, they graphically strip away the romanticized image of war with which her generation went into the conflict, and which too often clouds our impressions today. Wormeley maintains that no one can understand war without witnessing the horror of thousands of suffering soldiers. “It is a piteous site to see,” she observed. “We may all sentimentalize over [war’s] possibilities when we see regiments go off [to fight], or when we hear of battle, but it is … far from the reality.” Worse still were “the screams of the men. It is when I think of it afterwards that it is so dreadful.” Relying more on secondary than primary sources, Kevin Dougherty and J. Michael Moore’s The Peninsula Campaign of 1862: A Military Analysis (2005) nevertheless offers a fascinating approach to the campaign. Less a history lesson than a military analysis, this concise, tightly focused work uses several historians’ interpretations to cogently analyze the campaign’s most important strategic questions. Its most intriguing contributions are its emphasis of McClellan’s failures to coordinate his efforts with the Union navy (compared to Ulysses S. Grant’s successful joint army-navy operation against Fort Henry a few months earlier) and how it introduces modern concepts of military terrain analysis. In doing so, the authors demonstrate that today’s military officers could learn much from the Peninsula Campaign. But while the campaign’s military questions have received solid treatment, few works have effectively revealed the event’s larger importance. One exception is The Richmond Campaign of 1862: The Peninsula & the Seven
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Days (2000), a collection of essays by notable historians, edited by Gary Gallagher. Some contributors consider the typical military questions surrounding the campaign (such as Magruder’s ineptitude, McClellan’s failures, and the strangely ineffective performance of Stonewall Jackson), while essays by Gallagher, James Marten, and William A. Blair provide a broader social and political context to the fighting. The authors demonstrate the campaign’s impact on the direction of the war, the southern loyalty of both black and white Virginians, and the growing political influence of those northerners who pushed for more radical means for saving the Union, including emancipation. There are other fine studies of the Peninsula Campaign (especially in regards to the Seven Days Battles), but collectively these six provide highly readable narratives, dig deep into its military questions, and scratch the surface of its broader implications and meanings. Hopefully they will entice other historians to further examine the campaign’s social and political aspects, giving it the attention that it deserves as one of the war’s major events. GLENN DAVID BRASHER is an instructor
A N N E S . K . B R O W N M I L I TA R Y C O L L E C T I O N , B R O W N U N I V E R S I T Y L I B R A R Y
of history at the University of Alabama and the author of The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans & the Fight for Freedom (2012).
ESSENTIAL READING ON THE BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG ROBERT K. KRICK
Above: Glenn David Brasher’s recently released book on the Peninsula Campaign. Below: George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac on the move during the campaign.
IN 1867, A SIGNIFICANT book about Chancellorsville reached print, replete with an array of huge, valuable, fold-out maps, written by William Allan and Jedediah Hotchkiss of Stonewall Jackson’s staff. Several other serious studies on that battle followed promptly. Gettysburg of course began consuming ink and paper in monstrous gulps soon after the last gun was fired, and that flood tide never since has paused for an instant. The Battle of Fredericksburg, for some reason, did not generate a substantial hardcover book, worthy of being called a monograph, until 1886. Perhaps the events of December 1862 seemed less dramatic than the other campaigns in the war’s eastern theater. Surely they were less complex or debatable than most. The 1886 book, published in London, appeared anonymously: The Campaign of Fredericksburg, Nov.-Dec., 1862: A Study for Officers of Volunteers, by a Line Officer. At 145 pages, it qualifies for designation as a battle monograph, but obviously not one of comprehensive scope. Later editions clarified the book’s origin as one of many products of the fertile mind of G.F.R. Henderson, the British officer who became famous for his classic biography of Stonewall Jackson a dozen years later. Henderson also wrote an interesting and significant—but virtually unknown—pamphlet, Review of General James Long-
street’s Book. With fewer than 150 pages, Line Officer Henderson did not have space to be anything like definitive. He waxed technical about the uses, and misuses, of cavalry and artillery; discussed the impact of rifled musketry upon tactics; made repeated comparisons to the Franco-Prussian War (about which he had written two books); and drew lessons for the use of his own British forces. A sentence in his final paragraph reflects the tenor, suggesting that there existed “no reason why … if knit together by strict discipline and led by welltrained officers, our own civilian troops, home and colonial,” could
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Author and Confederate veteran Alfred M. Scales.
topical dichotomy. Rable spends 128 pages covering military operations from first fire on the morning of December 11 to General Ambrose E. Burnside’s forlorn return to the left bank of the Rappahannock on the night of the 15th. O’Reilly’s book devotes nearly 400 pages to that interval. Both books exceed 600 pages; both boast handsome production values; both print thorough notes and bibliography. For a nationwide context on December 1862, turn to Rable. For events on the battlefield itself, O’Reilly answers wonderfully well. Anyone who cares about Fredericksburg must own both. Fifteen years ago, this column surely would have concluded in bemusement, marveling at the inexplicable absence of anything approaching the status of a definitive Battle of Fredericksburg book. The publication of O’Reilly and Rable mandates a very different conclusion: Now, there is no likelihood of a further important book about the battle for many years to come. Given the unceasing interest in the American Civil War, Fredericksburg books will continue to appear, but without any real need or purpose. ROBERT K. KRICK, chief historian (re-
tired) at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, has written 20 books on the Civil War, including Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain (2001) and The Smoothbore Volley That Doomed the Confederacy (2004).
THE CIVIL WAR SPECIALIZING IN CIVIL WAR AUTOGRAPHS, LETTERS, DIARIES & DOCUMENTS
Price list upon request. Want lists invited. Top Prices paid for quality material. Member: MSS, UACC, CSA, SCV, APS BRIAN & MARIA GREEN P.O. Box 1816, CWM Kernersville, NC 27285-1816 ψ *E\ www.BMGCivilWar.com
Letter from General “Stonewall” Jackson pertaining to death of valued officer of Battle of Kernstown.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
not do as well as Robert E. Lee’s men (italics in the original). To be comprehensive, one very early publication deserves mention, although it did not have enough bulk (44 pages) to warrant full monograph status. In 1866, ex-Confederates Lieutenant Colonel Carter M. Braxton and Lieutenant Benjamin Lewis Blackford collaborated on Map of the Battle Field of Fredericksburg, Explained by Extracts from Official Reports. Both men had lived in Fredericksburg and knew the terrain intimately. A sketchbook full of Fredericksburg-area engineering field drawings by Blackford survives at the National Archives, demonstrating his impeccable background for the job. The map of the title, beautifully created by Blackford, constitutes a fabulous relic, bound into the text but folding out to 20 by 27 inches. The modest dimensions of the pamphlet did not afford space for much narrative of importance. In fact the advertisements at the end—including a full-page announcement of the sale of Chancellorsville Farm (864 acres)—are more interesting today than the other content. Typical of numerous brief battle summaries by veterans was 1884’s The Battle of Fredericksburg: An Address by Alfred M. Scales of the 13th North Carolina. Scales (a colonel in 1862 who ended the war as a brigadier), and others in the same mode, offer interesting and useful content, but in very modest doses,
focused on their own corners of the battlefield. Many centennial-era Americans first read about the battle in Edward J. Stackpole’s The Fredericksburg Campaign: Drama on the Rappahannock (1957). Stackpole owned the publishing company, Stackpole Books, which thoroughly greased the authorial skids. The book features no scholarship and little else to commend it. Fiasco at Fredericksburg (1961) by Vorin E. Whan Jr. advanced the topic by means of thoughtful analysis of Federal command decisions, but did not cite manuscripts nor adduce new evidence in any volume. Whan, a serving U.S. Army officer, died in combat in Vietnam and is buried amid the southern dead in the Fredericksburg Confederate Cemetery. The Battle of Fredericksburg finally received the attention it deserved with the publication of two genuinely first-rate books in 2002 and 2003, both of them classic studies in somewhat different genres. In Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!, George C. Rable of the University of Alabama deployed massive fresh research, thoughtful analysis, and superb prose styling to produce a study not only of the battle itself—in fact, not primarily of the battle itself—but, more extensively, of its very broad context across the country. Francis A. O’Reilly, in The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock, sets the battle’s stage, and carries beyond the immediate denouement. (Both titles reach the Mud March to conclude.) O’Reilly’s work, however, focuses directly on the fighting of December 11-15, 1862: commanders’ decisions; the ordeal of infantrymen facing a merciless storm of lead; all things tactical, operational, strategic. Fifteen maps illustrate the text impeccably. The books’ configurations display clearly the extent of the
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over it cutting down every living thing…. Nothing but a kind Providence saved any of us alive.” Porter Alexander recalled “the rivers of good blood that flowed that evening all in vain.” Division commander Lafayette McLaws called it “a slaughter pen,” and in a postwar letter to Longstreet, declared: “As for Malvern Hill, who is going to tell the truth about it, the whole truth. If I ever [were] to write what I saw … I would be denounced by our own people as a caluminator.” In a published account, Harvey Hill said it bluntly, “It was not war—it was murder.³⁸ When it had ended, mercifully and with the night, 5,650 Confederates had been killed, wounded, or missing, compared to 2,100 Federals. That night Lee met Magruder while riding through the camps and inquired, “General Magruder, why did you attack?” He replied, “In obedience to your orders twice repeated.” The exchange revealed the tragedy of Malvern Hill. More terrible days lay ahead for the Army of Northern Virginia, but perhaps only one other, July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg, lingered uneasily in the memories of the army’s veterans for many years.³⁹ Early on July 2, reconnaissance parties confirmed that the Yankees had fled during the night toward Harrison’s Landing on the James River and the protection of Union gunboats. Stuart’s cavalry rode in pursuit as a steady rain began falling. The horsemen gathered up enemy stragglers
before halting for the night. The next morning Stuart arrived at Evelington Heights and below him sprawled the campsites of the Army of the Potomac. Behind him, Lee’s infantry and artillery were slogging through muddy roads to join the cavalry. Instead of waiting for the rest of the army, however,
report, “Under ordinary circumstances the Federal Army should have been destroyed.” Staff officer Walter Taylor described the weeklong campaign as “a record of lost opportunities.” The reality on the field, however, precluded the destruction of McClellan’s formidable army, whose rank and file fought bravely and
reinvigorated. It had come at a dear price for Lee’s army, with 20,614 casualties, while exacting 15,849 Union losses. The Rebels had captured 52 cannon, nearly 31,000 firearms, 10,000 sets of accoutrements, and 6,000 knapsacks, all vitally needed ordnance and equipment.⁴² These captured items
Union forces surge forward during the Battle of Malvern Hill. Confederate general D.H. Hill would later say of the fight, a resounding Rebel defeat, “It was not war—it was murder.”
stubbornly. A decisive victory was simply beyond the capabilities of the Confederates, whose operations were plagued by command problems. Lee wrote in a postwar letter, “Every movement of an army must be well-considered and properly ordered.” Lee’s bold offensive had been wellplanned but, at this stage in the war and his accession to command, the timeliness of movements and the cooperation between units were beyond the capabilities of Lee, his lieutenants, and staff officers. The still-young army had been a clanging machine.⁴¹ Still, the campaign represented a major strategic victory for the Confederates. Richmond had been secured for the present, and southern civilian morale had been
could be measured; what remained immeasurable lay within Lee’s army. During the Seven Days, he and his subordinates had begun the forging of an unrivaled weapon. A Union soldier admitted to folks at home that his foes “fought more like demons, than men.” Lee’s audacity and his army’s prowess had changed the war’s course in the East. Soon, he would turn his attention to a Union army in central Virginia. When his officers and men headed north toward this opponent, it was to be another stride toward greatness.
Stuart rolled forward a howitzer and shelled the enemy. Alerted to the danger on the heights if held by the Confederates, McClellan sent infantry to seize the elevation. Major Charles Venable of Lee’s staff later termed Stuart’s rash action “a grave error.” When Lee and Jackson joined Stuart the next morning, the two generals examined the Union position on Evelington Heights and decided not to attack. The Seven Days Campaign had ended.⁴⁰ LEE STATED IN his campaign
JEFFRY D. WERT is an award-
winning Civil War historian and the author of nine books. His latest work is A Glorious Army: Robert E. Lee’s Triumph, 18621863 (Simon & Schuster, 2011).
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THU AS IF TO underline SEPT the need for a
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movable army, Thursday afternoon witnessed a rustic Paul Revere gallop down Pennsylvania Avenue shouting that Rebels “by the thousand” were crossing the Potomac into Maryland at Edwards Ferry. McClellan’s monumental task was to absorb the Army of Virginia, plus several independent units, into the Army of the Potomac, to assign 36 new regiments to the various commands, and to unsnarl a tangled command structure. McClellan also set out to restore the army’s morale. He toured the camps to see and be seen. “It makes my heart bleed to see the poor shattered remnants of my noble Army of the Potomac, poor fellows!” he told his wife. “I hear them calling out to me as I ride among them—‘George, don’t leave us again!’” Washington was invaded by an army of wounded men. They filled the military hospitals and overflowed into City Hall and the Patent Office and other public buildings. Congress was not in session, so cots were set up for the sufferers in the House and Senate chambers and the Capitol Rotunda. Competent nurses arrived to help from as far away as Boston. A bitter General Pope presented his after-battle report to the president. Gideon Welles described it as “not exactly a bulletin nor a report, but a manifesto, a narrative, tinged with wounded pride and a !
General McClellan with his wife, Ellen Mary Marcy McClellan
F R I ORDERED TO organize SEPT a movable army,
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McClellan was told only to prepare, not to march. For that next command step, the president determined to make a change. Following McClellan’s defeat on the Peninsula, Lincoln had offered command of the Army of the Potomac to Ambrose Burnside, a stranger to the Potomac army. Burnside declined the post, insisting he was not qualified. In this new crisis Burnside was again called to Washington, and early Friday morning Lincoln repeated the offer. Again Burnside declined, for the same reason. Resigned to using “what tools we have,” Lincoln went with Halleck to McClellan’s quarters on H Street and told him, “General, you will take command of the forces in the field.” McClellan wrote his wife, “Again I have been called upon to save the country.” With McClellan settled in the top command, John Pope was relieved and sent to contend with the rebellious Sioux in Minnesota. Pope did not go dutifully, leaving behind charges against corps commanders Fitz John Porter and William Franklin. They were relieved of duty to await a court of inquiry.²⁷ !
SAT GENERAL MCCLELLAN SEPT spent another
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crowded day organizing his forces and preparing for campaigning. His first need was to retrieve his two favorites, Porter and Franklin, from Pope’s last !
fling at the Army of the Potomac. After treating with both Halleck and Lincoln, he had the court of inquiry postponed “until I have got through with the present crisis.” (In time Pope would gain revenge on Fitz John Porter, instigating his court martial on charges of disobeying orders and misbehavior before the enemy, and seeing him cashiered.) Recognizing McClellan’s new eminence, Secretary of War Stanton swallowed his gall and (as McClellan described it) “promised me that he would cheerfully agree to anything … that I regarded as necessary.” The Confederates were reported at Frederick in Maryland, and the Army of the Potomac stirred itself to follow. “The army is passing north,” Navy Secretary Welles noted in his diary for Saturday. “There was design in having them come up through H Street, and pass by McClellan’s house which they cheered lustily, instead of passing by the White House, and honoring their President.”²⁸ SUN WASHINGTONIANS SEPT lined the avenues to 07 see the Army of the ! Potomac off to war.
On the solid ranks marched, through Georgetown heading toward Tennallytown and Leesborough and Offut’s Crossroads and Rockville in Maryland. “There will be a great battle or a great skedaddle on the part of the Rebels,” General Alpheus Williams predicted. “I have great confidence that we shall smash them terribly if they stand, more confidence than I have ever had in any movement of the war.” As he prepared to join the advance, McClellan wrote his wife in like confidence: “I think we shall win for the men are now in great spirits—confident in their General & all united in sentiment…. I have now the entire confidence of the Govt & the love of the army—my enemies are crushed, silent & disarmed—if I defeat the rebels I shall be master of the situation.” Early that Sunday evening Gideon Welles was out for a stroll along Pennsylvania Avenue when McClellan’s entourage came along. McClellan recognized the navy secretary and rode over to bid him farewell. Welles asked where he was headed, and McClellan replied that he was taking command of the forward movement. “Well, onward General is now the word—the country will expect you to go forward.” That was his intention, McClellan said. “Success to you, then, General with all my heart,” Welles said, and general and staff rode off to war.²⁹ STEPHEN W. SEARS is the
author or editor of a dozen books on the Civil War, the latest being The Library of America’s The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It (2012).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A CAPITAL IN CRISIS
keen sense of injustice and wrong.” Pope demanded its publication; when refused, he leaked it to the press to embarrass the administration.²⁶
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Pamplin Historical Park’s Seventh Annual
Members’ Tour: Sept. 25 - Oct. 2, 2012
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Remarkably, Schurz, who never lacked for gall, wrote back to continue the argument and tell Lincoln he was mistaken for blaming the losses on the fact that Republican soldiers couldn’t get home to vote. “The result of the election was a most serious and severe reproach administered to the Administration,” he repeated, adding that “the result of the election has complicated the crisis.” Displaying infinite patience, Lincoln replied one final time. He informed Schurz that he had read his latest missive and that “the purport of it that we lost the late election, and the administration is failing, because the war is unsuccessful; and that I must not flatter myself that I am not justly to blame for it. I certainly know that if the war fails, the administration fails, and that I will be blamed for it, whether I deserve it or not. And I ought to be blamed, if I could do better.”²¹ A number of commentators agreed with Lincoln that a major reason for the Republican losses was that too many of the party’s supporters were in the army and thus unable to go to the polls. Politician turned Union general Benjamin Butler received a letter informing him that “the administration has been defeated in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, in the first-named as well as in the latter two states by majorities which would probably have been overcome had the Volunteers from there been allowed to vote.” Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts agreed. He informed John Bright, the foremost liberal reformer in
the British House of Commons, that the election losses for the administration “may be explained by the larger proportion of Republicans who have gone to war.” One analyst asserted that in Pennsylvania, “a hundred thousand men … go out in the proportion of about three Republicans to one Democrat, an excess of fifty thousand men from the side which those who stay at home say is beaten in the election which follows.”²² One of the most intriguing analyses of the 1862 elections came from overseas. German philosopher and economist Karl Marx noted how much had changed since the beginning of the war: “If Lincoln had had Emancipation of the Slaves as his motto at that time, there can be no doubt that he would have been defeated.” But now, the administration’s policy had support from majorities in many states and significant minorities in the states where Republicans were defeated.²³ The message to Union supporters was not to read the results as a referendum on emancipation, because they weren’t, but rather to embrace the war effort, which had evolved to include the emancipation of the slaves as critical to the defeat of the rebellion. Republican leaders immediately seized upon this opportunity. As Senator William Pitt Fessenden of Maine reflected, “I am not clear that the result of the elections is not fortunate for the country, for it has taught the President that he has nothing to look for in that quarter [i.e., among northern Democrats].” Charles Sumner took a similar view. In his letter to Bright, he wrote about seeing “consolation even in our disasters, that they have brought the Presdt to a true policy…. [T]he elections will # } CONT. ON P. 76
Join Pamplin Historical Park executive director A. Wilson Greene and guest guides for a tour of Civil War Kentucky. Headquartered in Lexington, Somerset, Campbellsville, and Frankfort. Tuesday evening through the following Tuesday morning. Sites include:
Registration Fees range from: $1,699 $2,199 Park Membership: Individual: $42.65 Family $100 Supported in part by the: Don O. Neufeld
CIVIL WAR EDUCATIOn ENDOWMENT
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V I S I T T H R E E G R E AT S I T E S ! B&O RAILROAD MUSEUM IN BALTIMORE
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Stories of small town life during the Civil War 2711 Maryland Ave. Ellicott City, MD 21043 410.461.1945 www.ecborail.org
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BUY ONE ADMISSION GET ONE FREE! One Coupon per visit, not valid with any other offer. Expires 12/31/12
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World’s Largest Civil War Railroad Exhibit 901 W. Pratt St. Baltimore, MD 21223 410.752.2490 www.borail.org
Site of Camp Carroll, Baltimore’s largest Union Civil War encampment 1500 Washington Blvd. Baltimore, THE MD, 21230 CIVIL WAR 410.837.3262 MONITOR www.mountclare.org SUMMER
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doubtless encourage the Rebellion; but their contrecoup on the Administration has been good. The President is immensely quickened, & the War Department is harder at work than ever.”²⁴ The new resolve, dating from September 22, would show results, thought Sumner—although he wished the president had acted earlier. “The hesitation of the Administration to adopt the policy of Emancipation,” he argued after the October elections, “led democrats to feel that the President was against it & they have gradually rallied. I think a more determined policy months ago would have prevented them shewing their heads.” The senator then referred to a fable with which, no doubt, the president was also familiar: One winter, a farmer found a stiff and frozen snake. Showing compassion, he took it in, and held it by the fire to warm it. The snake revived, and reverting to its natural instincts, bit the farmer and inflicted a mortal wound. With his last breath the farmer cried, “Oh, I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.” “The President himself,” concluded Sumner, “has played the part of the farmer in the fable who warmed the frozen snake at his fire.”²⁵ Immediately following the November elections, Lincoln decided to remove George McClellan, who had slithered around too slowly for too long. Perhaps he had kept him on in hopes that having a Democratic general at the head of the Army of the Potomac would pay divi-
dends at the polls. It did not, and regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats had emerged victorious, McClellan’s handling of the war effort in the weeks after Antietam had doomed him. The administration also began to prosecute the war more forcefully. “New vigor has been infused into all departments of the military service,” reported the editor at Lincoln’s hometown newspaper. “Inactive commanders have been relieved by those who are believed to possess the elements necessary to insure success. Along our whole line, from the Potomac to the western frontier of Missouri, our armies have been advancing. This may not have been just what the leaders of the opposition desired, but in the absence of more explicit instructions (which they carefully avoided to give), the Administration had the right to assume” what it wanted. Furthermore, with a majority of the popular vote still in the administration’s favor, and with an estimated 80% or 90% of the absent voters supporting it, one could plausibly claim, after a few months’ time, that “the fall elections of 1862 provided unmistakably, that the loyal sentiment of the nation, instead of being against the Administration policy, was overwhelmingly in its favor.”²⁶ Lincoln regretted that his party had not fared better in the elections, but he came away energized, determined to take bold steps to win the war. Not only would he issue the Emancipation Proclamation, but the document he signed on January 1, 1863, went further than the preliminary decree— he abandoned the idea that freed slaves be colonized and authorized the enlistment of
ENDNOTES 1
John Sherman to Salmon P. Chase, September 28, 1862, in John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers: Correspondence, 1858-March 1863 (Kent, OH, 1996), 3: 287.
2
Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House (Carbondale, IL, 2000), 89.
3
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 561-62.
4
J. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary (Philadelphia, 1866), I: 185; Charleston Mercury, November 5, 1862.
5
Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953-55), 5: 474-475 (hereafter cited as CW ).
6
CW, 5: 474; James K. Moorhead to Abraham Lincoln (hereafter AL), October 24, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter ALP).
7
Horace White to AL, October 22, 1862, ALP.
8
William Cullen Bryant to AL, October 22, 1862, ALP.
9
Sidney David Brummer, Political History of New York State During the Period of the Civil War (New York, 1911), 239-40; 252; Chicago Evening Journal, November 5, 1862.
10 Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 3rd Session, pp. 94-100; CG, 37th Congress, 3rd Session, Appendix, p. 39. 11 New York Herald, October 19, 1862; New York Evening Post, November 7, 1862; Illinois Daily State Journal, November 29, 1862; Owner quoted in Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York, 2004), 190. 12 Isaac N. Morris to AL, November 20, 1862, ALP. 13 Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning (Springfield, 1925), 588589. 14 Richard P.L. Baber to AL, November 22, 1862, ALP; Mark
Krug, “Lincoln: The Republican Party and the Emancipation Proclamation,” The History Teacher 7 (November 1973): 60; Francis Springer to Hawkins Taylor, October 19, 1862, ALP. 15 John Cochrane to AL, November 5, 1862, ALP; Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., War Letters, 1862-1865 of John Chipman Gray and John Codman Ropes (Boston, 1927), 19; Allan Nevins, ed., Diary of the Civil War: George Templeton Strong (New York, 1962), 268, 272. 16 David D. Field to AL, November 8, 1862, ALP. 17 CG, 37th Congress, 3rd Session, p. 78. 18 Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters (New York:, 1894), 167-168. 19 Carl Schurz to AL, November 8, 1862, ALP. 20 CW, 5: 493-496. 21 Carl Schurz to AL, November 20, 1862, ALP; CW, 5: 509-511. 22 Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (privately issued, 1917), 2: 534; Charles Sumner to John Bright, October 28, 1862, in Beverly Wilson Palmer, ed., The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston, 1990), 2: 127; North American, October 25, 1862. 23 Karl Marx, [The Election Results in the Northern States], Die Presse, November 23, 1862 (http://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1862/11/23.htm). 24 Fessenden to J.M. Forbes, November 13, 1862, in Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes (Boston, 1899), 1: 365; Sumner to John Bright, November 18, 1862, Letters, 2:131. 25 Sumner to John Bright, October 28, 1862, Letters, 2: 127. 26 Illinois Daily State Journal, November 29, 1862, January 6, 1863. 27 CW, 5: 503.
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black soldiers. His opponents had hoped that the 1862 elections would end talk of emancipation. Instead, they had the opposite effect. Meeting after the elections with a group of Unionist Kentuckians, Lincoln declared “he would rather die than take back a word of the Proclama-
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marginalized, and believed they had a moral obligation to ensure that the historical record stood corrected. “This we did consider a grand affair, and rightly too, as our Six Regiments whipped Longstreet’s thirty thousand men,” John Hughes of the 23rd Ohio wrote to the famous Union nurse Mary Ball Bickerdyke after the war.³⁴ “Lee had only gained a short interval of freedom of movement to end at Antietam,” Gilbert Thompson of the U.S. Engineer Battalion maintained, and “came near losing his army.”³⁵ In 1885, William H. Brearly, a veteran of the 17th Michigan Infantry, complained that Century magazine had unjustly overlooked the South Mountain fight, which he deemed “one of the great critical points in the history of the war.” “I think you have done the Union side of this matter an injustice, by allowing this to be all passed over in absolute silence,” he fumed. “Considering all of the circumstances,” he continued, “I consider South Mt. as a crisis to the Confederates, and indeed to us, no small importance, and one deserving of more mention,” and recounted how the Michiganders “utterly routed” the Rebels at Fox’s Gap.³⁶ Although the battle had many Union defenders, none
tion of Freedom.” Regardless of the results at the polls, the promise made, it would be kept.²⁷ LOUIS P. MASUR is the author of
The Civil War: A Concise History (2011) and Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for Union (forthcoming, 2012).
was more vocal than Rutherford B. Hayes, who never missed an opportunity to reflect upon what he called “South Mountain Day.” “Sunday a year ago was the fourteenth,” he penned in his diary in 1863. “South Mountain and its losses and glories. How the sadness for the former fades and the satisfaction with the latter grows!” In 1881, Hayes, as president of the United States, remembered “the anniversary of South Mountain” by removing “the old coat which I wore when wounded” from its “anti-moth box.” Three years later, September 14 was again the Sabbath. “Our little squad remembered to talk over the battle at South Mountain, fought on such a day as this twenty-two years ago today.” His tribute was even more effusive the following year. “The battle of South Mountain was fought twenty-three years ago today! I think of it with great satisfaction…. What a flood of recollections comes to me!” The battle had left an indelible impression on his mind. “This is South Mountain Day,” he recorded in his diary in 1891, two years before his death. “Twenty-nine years ago this morning we marched up the old National Road…. We had gained the victory!”³⁷ Perhaps most tellingly, whenever Union veterans listed the important engagements in which they had participated, they consistently ranked South Mountain along with the war’s # } CONT. ON P. 78
Custom Tours with Expert Guides
Unseen Vicksburg September 15-16, 2012
Vicksburg National Military Park Chief Historian Terry Winschel will guide us to Pemberton's HQ, the remaining vestige of Grant's Canal in Louisiana, Earl Van Dorn's home and burial site, Grant's landing site at Bruinsburg, and the skirmish site at Willow Springs. Seating is limited—we're only taking a 15passenger van, in order to travel where large buses dare not venture.
Unseen Antietam October 6-7, 2012 — 150 years ago
Dr. Thomas Clemens, editor and annotator of Carman’s, The Maryland Campaign of September 1862, will show us, among other things, historic river fords and lines of march, including the path of the Cox Farm Expedition, and sites associated with the Shepherdstown battlefield. Go one level deeper in your study of Lee’s Maryland Campaign.
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visit woodburyhistoricaltours.blogspot.com THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR or email for more info: whtours@me.com SUMMER 2012 Ask about Unseen Gettysburg, Oct. 20-21
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most storied and recognized battles, including Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg.³⁸ And on May 23, 1865, when Federal soldiers strode down Pennsylvania Avenue as part of the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, D.C., they marched past a wooden reviewing stand decorated with 12 banners celebrating the most notable and “gigantic” battles of the war: Atlanta, Wilderness, Stone’s River, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Richmond, Petersburg, Cold Harbor, Savannah—and South Mountain.³⁹ Rather than focusing on Antietam, writers of Federal regimental histories and memoirs of the Maryland Campaign routinely considered, as did Russell Hastings of the 23rd Ohio Infantry, the “two great and glorious battles” fought to repel Lee’s invasion.⁴⁰ Likewise, when novelist and poet John W. Trowbridge made his celebrated journey to the seminal sites of the late rebellion, he inspected Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg; walked amongst the ruins of Chambersburg, torched by a Confederate raid in 1864; and, in his first stop below the Mason-Dixon Line, hired a local guide named Lewy Smith to take him across the South Mountain battleground. “The Mountain rose before us, leopard-colored, spotted with sun and cloud,” announced Trowbridge.⁴¹ The insistent voices of these Union veterans were not entirely lost on their contemporaries. The earliest Antietam guidebooks made interpretive links between South Mountain and Sharpsburg. The very first guide to Antietam National Cemetery, printed in 1869, noted that “the Cemetery itself is located on a gentle rise, from whence a survey of almost the entire battlefield may be enjoyed, while within the scope of the eye’s range lies an unobstructed tract of country, miles in extent akin in the distant South Mountain, memorable as the spot where Lee received his first check during the invasion of Maryland, and which caused him to gradually fall back with his army until it rested on the waters of the Antietam and made a final stand only to be again defeated.”⁴² George Hess, the superintendent of Antietam National Cemetery and a veteran of Company I, 28th Pennsylvania Infantry, published another early tourist guidebook in 1890. His booklet, “Battle-Field Guide of the Battles of South Mountain and Antietam,” argued for the equal significance of both engagements.⁴³ Faced with the inexorable deaths of its staunchest advocates, however, South Mountain gradually but surely slipped into historical oblivion. Professional chroniclers of the conflict, captivated by Antietam’s carnage, accepted without hesitation the Lost Cause revisionism that dimin-
ished the battle’s significance— underestimating the ability of small ripples to alter the course of history’s stream. IN 1867, JOHN Watts de Peyster, a veteran of the U.S. Army in both the Mexican War and the Civil War, as well as one of the nation’s first military scientists, contributed a selection on Antietam to a series of essays collectively titled “Decisive Battles of the War.” His essay, “The Maryland Battles in September 1862,” begins by arguing that “it was impossible to treat of Antietam without devoting a large space
BATTLEFIELD ECHOES CONTINUED FROM P. 23
mander was hesitant or unable to grasp the operational urgency (Antietam, Iuka, Gettysburg). Regardless of the reason, the inability of commanders on either side to win decisively or pursue wholeheartedly underscored the sobering fact that the Civil War could be won only through attrition. Annihilation would become the coveted, ever-elusive strategic goal of American armies of the modern age. Whether it was the German army escaping across the
to South Mountain or Boonsboro,” for “whatever was won in the cornfields and woods of Antietam was decidedly initiated in the gaps of South Mountain.” When one considered the performances of the Union troops in the “bloody gorges of the Blue Ridge,” he argued, it was rather effortless to conclude that the Battle of South Mountain was “a very remarkable event, and a decisive demonstration of the enormous capabilities and striking characteristics of our Northern people.”⁴⁴ By seizing the initiative from Lee at South Mountain, the men Straits of Messina in 1943, or the Iraqi Republican Guard limping back into Iraq in 1991, the U.S. Army has had ample reminders of the strategic cost of allowing the enemy to get away. Ultimately, the Battle of Iuka ended like so many American battles before and after—a tactical success but an incomplete victory. CLAY MOUNTCASTLE , a lieutenant
colonel in the U.S. Army, currently serves as the Professor of Military Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Duke University and is the author of Punitive War: Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals (University Press of Kansas, 2009).
ENDNOTES 1
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (New York, 1984), 214.
2
Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 18611865 (New York, 2005), 218.
3
Grant, Personal Memoirs, 214.
4
Ibid., 213.
5
Russell F. Weigley, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865 (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 156.
6
Woodworth, Nothing but Victory, 224.
7
Report of U.S. Grant, September 20, 1862, in United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, Vol. 17, part 1, p. 68.
8
Allan Millet and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York, 1994), 187.
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of the Army of the Potomac had done more than achieve a simple tactical victory. Now, as famed newspaper editor Horace Greeley reflected in 1898, “our soldiers, flushed with unwonted victory, and dull in the faith that they had just wrested two strong mountain-passes from the entire rebel army, were ready for any effort, any peril.”⁴⁵ BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN is the author
of Unholy Sabbath: The Battle of South Mountain in History and Memory (2012), which was a selection of the History Book Club. He lives in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he is finishing his doctoral degree in history and writing a book on the lives of Union veterans.
from the university of
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PRESENTING THE FIRST TWO VOLUMES IN
UNCIVIL WARS A SERIES DEDICATED TO NEW WAYS OF SEEING AND TELLING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
CASUALTIES OF WAR
WEIRDING THE WAR
CONTINUED FROM P. 21
Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges Stephen Berry, ed. $24.95 paperback “Read this book and you will never be able to imagine again whatever Civil War you imagined before.” —Edward L. Ayers, winner of the Bancroft Prize for In the Presence of Mine Enemies
be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”⁶ STEPHEN BERRY is associate professor
of history at the University of Georgia. He is the author or editor of four books on America in the Civil War era, including House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007).
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ENDNOTES 1
Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (Champaign, IL, 2001), 76-78.
2
Elizabeth Edwards to Julia Baker, March 1862, Elizabeth Edwards Papers, Abraham Lincoln Library, Springfield, Illinois.
3
Francis F. Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1886), 465.
4
Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Champaign, IL, 1997), 445.
5
Alban Jasper Conant, “A Portrait Painter’s Reminiscences of Lincoln,” McClure’s Magazine, vol. 32 (1909): 516.
6
Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln, 465.
CWM04-BOB-Jumps.indd 79
WAR UPON THE LAND
Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War Lisa M. Brady $24.95 paperback “Clearly written, fascinating in its details, and convincing in its arguments.”—J. R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires
THE CIVIL WAR IN GEORGIA
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A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia Barry L. Brown and Gordon R. Elwell $22.95 paperback “An indispensable traveler’s companion.” —Brandon H. Beck, Shenandoah University
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Parting Shot
C
SHORTLY BEFORE midnight on December 30, 1862, the Union ironclad Monitor encountered a gale and began to sink in the treacherous waters off the coast of North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras. Aided by this red signal lantern, which had been hoisted to the top of the Monitor’s turret, crews from the USS Rhode Island saved all but 16 of the Monitor’s 63 men. Among the survivors was surgeon Grenville Weeks, who recalled that “for an hour or more we watched from the deck of the Rhode Island the lonely light upon the Monitor’s turret; a hundred times we thought it gone forever,—a hundred times it reappeared, till at last … it sank, and we saw it no more.” A team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recovered the lantern on August 2, 1977, 115 years after the crew watched it disappear. It was the first major Monitor artifact to break the ocean surface.
COURTESY OF NOAA’S MONITOR NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY AND THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM
The Monitor’s “Lonely Light”
80 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2012
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USS Monitor Center A major exhibition opening May 26, 2012. iii
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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100 Museum Dr., Newport News, VA 23606
THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2012
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