Civil War Stories

A 150th Anniversary Collection

The Washington Post

Copyright

Diversion Books
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Copyright © 2013 by The Washington Post

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First Diversion Books edition June 2013

ISBN: 978-1-62681-059-4

Table of Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE: Prelude to War: The Election of Abraham Lincoln

Painful lessons the Civil War taught us

The speech that sold Candidate Lincoln

A less-than-monumental city

The photographer who went to war: Matthew Brady was famous for his portraiture. Then the fighting started.

Emancipating the narrative: Ed Ayers wants the country to remember that the war was about more than battlefields

Out of Virginia's attics, voices from the past

Cast of Characters: The stories behind the Civil War's famous names

Editorials: Reaction to Lincoln's win

If Lincoln had lost the election, would there have been a war? A panel of Civil War experts -- from academia, the world of letters, archives, museums and assorted other sources -- answer questions posed by The Washington Post and readers.

CHAPTER TWO: Onset of War

Fort Sumter's fateful moment: People watched the shot arc overhead. Few grasped the ultimate meaning of what had just unfolded. They could not imagine the bloodshed to come, or the end of slavery.

War sounded glorious--until people started dying

A war of all heroes and no villains: The eagerness to forgive and forget has obscured the reason the nation took up arms

West Virginia: The state that said no

Hunting for the Confederacy in D.C.

Alexandria: A city invaded, a city spared

Cast of Characters: At the onset of war

By attempting to resupply Fort Sumter, did President Lincoln deliberately provoke the war?

Editorials: Reaction to War

Everyone's an expert when it comes to the Civil War

Civil War soldier's heartbreaking farewell letter was written before death at Bull Run

CHAPTER THREE: Ripples of War

A war shaped by rivers: Union rout at Ball's Bluff showed waterways were not to be ignored

Deemed a savior, then a failure: McClellan zoomed up the Union ranks--and fell just as quickly

The wrenching road to freedom: In D.C., bonds of slavery broke early, but plenty of obstacles remained

In Washington, raising an army of bureaucrats: Greenbacks, income tax, female workers -- war drove federal expansion

A death that cast a pall over the White House: Lincoln, resolute in the face of war, buckled under loss of his son

A descendant battles for a corporal's recognition

Cast of Characters

What is the greatest overlooked story of the Civil War for the period between the battles of Ball's Bluff and Shiloh?

CHAPTER FOUR: Innovations of War: Technology takes a great leap forward during the war

Technology and mayhem: Innovations in weaponry, transportation and communications increased the efficiency and brutality of battle

The Monitor's secrets

Washington's press corps: Blame it on the Civil War

My God, what a slaughter' Lee's Army of Northern Virginia never again came as close to destroying a Federal army as it did at Second Manassas

In defense of McClellan: A contrarian view

The 'she-devils' of the Shenandoah Valley held their own

Cast of Characters

An audacious escape to freedom: Robert Smalls seized a ship and piloted it to a new life -- and proved that blacks could fight for the Union

Which event in the period between Shiloh and Antietam did not receive the attention it deserves?

Lincoln and Abolition: Two Views

Crewmen of USS Monitor are buried at Arlington

CHAPTER FIVE: Emancipation

The Freedom Conundrum: While writing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln confronted the limits of democracy

Freed from shackle but still bound: For millions of African Americans, emancipation came with no helping hand

The late-blooming activist: Frederick Douglass's great-great-great grandson played down his heritage--until it forced him into action

Was Anna Ella Carroll the forgotten heroine of the Civil War?

Antietam's bloody, defining day

At Harper's Ferry, a prelude to slaughter

In defense of McClellan at Antietam: A contrarian view

Confederate raider Mosby was a master of surprise

Cast of Characters

CHAPTER SIX: Gettysburg

Gettysburg: A furious battle and a fatal mistake lead to an epic slaughter

The Confederate soldier in the family tree

The shifting strategy of preservation: How Civil War battlefields have changed

For Stonewall Jackson, a final victory that led to Confederate catastrophe

Cast of Characters

Women soldiers fought, bled and died in the Civil War, then were forgotten

The draft begins, sparking deadly riots

Washington's Civil War madam could keep a secret

A blueprint for America takes shape

Panelists

Editorials

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Legacy

Montgomery Meigs's vital influence on the Civil War - and Washington

A Tragedy's Second Act

Restored Civil War flag resurrects some rebel Greys'

Man in Civil War photo, long unidentified, finally gets his name back

Invalid boy's diary focus of Library of Congress Civil War exhibit

Civil War faces live again at Library of Congress

Alexander Gardner: The mysteries of the Civil War's photographic giant

How Julia Ward Howe wrote "Battle Hymn of the Republic" - despite her husband

Ghosts of the Union's black soldiers rise from Loudoun County's past

D.C. emancipation tallied the price of freedom

Lee's surrender sword, and echoes of the Lost Cause, at new Appomattox museum

Faces of the Civil War, staring out across the decades

CHAPTER EIGHT: U.S. Grant: History’s incredible shrinking man

U.S. Grant was the great hero of the Civil War but lost favor with historians

At Battle of the Crater, black troops prove their courage

Arlington National Cemetery, and the fight over Robert E. Lee's home

The Battle of Bethesda: A daylong firefight in Jubal Early's march into Washington

Washington Revels' "Voices of the Civil War"

8 overlooked Civil War moments from 1864 that could have changed history

Cast of Supporting Characters

After Spotsylvania, Grant and Lee waged relentless warfare through Virginia

CHAPTER NINE: The Unions's Restless Warrior

Gen. William T. Sherman, the restless warrior who led the ‘March to the Sea’

Sherman’s March to the Sea: A military triumph left a bitter legacy

Flames consume Shenandoah Valley in Union campaign

Civil War massacre launched reparations debate

The election of 1864 and the last temptation of Abraham Lincoln

Years later, discovering a family split by the Civil War

Civil War experts weigh in on what story lines get overlooked

CHAPTER TEN: War's End

No closure after Appomattox

‘Richmond at last!’: The final, fiery days of the Confederacy

Great joy, then a gunshot, and a nation mourns

The towns built by freed slaves

The victors turn on one another

War over, they died going home

The greatest overlooked stories from the end of the war

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Introduction

The enduring fascination of the Civil War to not only our readers but our writers was never so clear as at the first meeting we held at The Washington Post to prepare for the 150th anniversary of the war.

Every seat at the table was taken, and reporters, editors and graphic artists spilled out the door, straining to hear. Story ideas poured in. A handful of staffers turned out to be experts, able to reel off battle dates and casualty figures, and to analyze troop movements with the authority of war historians.

One wrote an homage to his state of West Virginia, which deserted its mother state of Virginia in opposition to secession. Another tracked down an ancestor who had lost a leg at Gettysburg, and didn’t much like what he found. Others dug in to detail famous battles or uncover fascinating bits of trivia. We all learned about the hundreds of women who fought in the war disguised as men; the great-great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass who, late in life, picked up his ancestor’s cause to fight modern-day slavery; and the evolving philosophy of how to best preserve Civil War battlefields.

We are delighted to bring our Civil War sesquicentennial coverage to a larger public with this ebook.

—Mary Hadar
Washington Post Projects Editor

CHAPTER ONE

Prelude to War: The Election of Abraham Lincoln

A campaign poster for Abraham Lincoln, Republican candidate for president in 1860. (Library Of Congress)

Painful lessons the Civil War taught us

By Philip Kennicott

Twice before, the United States has celebrated major anniversaries of the Civil War, and twice before, a nervous sense of reticence governed the events. Fifty years after the guns fell silent at Appomattox, there were still living Civil War veterans, racial antagonism was virulent throughout the country, and segregation was both pervasive and institutionalized. Fifty years later, when the nation commemorated the centennial of the war, communism loomed as an outside threat, while many believed that the civil rights era was creating instability from within. In both cases, official policy was to stress reconciliation rather than reopening old wounds.

Now we have come to the 150th anniversary, and the habits of treading lightly on the old divisions that caused the Civil War are thoroughly engrained. Interest in the war remains vital — the Library of Congress estimates that it has about 26,000 volumes about the war, twice as many as about the Revolutionary War. In a nation that frets about historical illiteracy, we congratulate ourselves on our passion for the Civil War, even as politicians and self-appointed cultural defenders regularly obfuscate its causes and allow essential chapters to be distorted or discarded from the annals.

As the 1968 Civil War Centennial Commission report to Congress described the state of American history before the last big anniversary, “The social, cultural and economic history of the war era were neglected in favor of drum, bugle, and cannon smoke.” We are not much better off today.

And so some of the most powerful lessons of the war years, and the events leading to the election of Abraham Lincoln, remain elusive. The Civil War taught us, as a nation, our patterns of argument, our impatience with hypocrisy, our sense that every election is an apocalypse. It taught us how to be stupid, how to provoke our enemies, how to resist modernity, how to fight on after logic and argument have failed. Even the central idea upon which Lincoln ran for office, and which governed his decisions over the course of his presidency, is still painful for many people to accept.

Lincoln, who was elected the 16th president of the United States on Nov. 6, 1860, came to office believing history was on his side.

Two Americas

Shortly after he was elected president, Lincoln had a vision: He looked in the mirror and saw his face twice, one image “reflecting the full glow of health and hopeful life” and the other “showing a ghostly paleness.” According to his friend Ward Lamon, Lincoln believed this was a premonition of the future, that he would die during a second term in office.

There is a simpler and less superstitious reading. For years, Lincoln and his Republican allies had argued that there were two Americas — a house divided — in the young republic: a vital, strong and growing North, and an enervated South, doomed by slavery to failure. Republicans were more than capable of what Southerners decried as arrogance and “insolence” in their sociology of the South. But the Republican view was based on ineluctable fact: The North had more and better railroads, canals and schools; its economy was more diverse; its population was growing. Some strata of Southern society flourished when cotton prices were high — the average white male was richer in the South than the North — but by almost every social and economic metric, the South was behind and falling more so.

But Lincoln’s view of two Americas was also based on an idea which we might call History, with a capital H. This was a 19th-century understanding of history, which included and transcended religion, economics, politics and morality. The idea of History as an upward spiral of progress is out of fashion today. But for Lincoln, it was everywhere, including in the books in his Springfield, Ill., law office, and on the north pediment of the U.S. Capitol, where a sculpture finished in 1863 shows America embodied as a woman in flowing robes, flanked by figures of progress, with a sun rising at her feet.

History, with a capital H, could be read even in the smallest details of daily life. When Northerners toured the South, they saw fences in disrepair. William Seward, who would be Lincoln’s secretary of state, wrote in 1846 that in the South “the land was sterile, the fences mean.” The broken fence, like an unmowed lawn, was a visual metaphor for a broken society in which slavery was dragging an entire culture into barbarism.

Frederick Law Olmsted, who as a father of American landscape design would create refuges for the huddled, wage-earning, urban masses common in the North, visited the South and compared the two regions, asking, “Why it is that here has been stagnation, and there constant, healthy progress…?”

His answer: “It is the old, fettered, barbarian labor-system.”

Fences were an ideal image to explain the “Free Labor” ideal of Northern Republicans. A multiplicity of fences on the landscape suggested a community of prosperous small entrepreneurs, invested in property; and a well-maintained fence demonstrated a man’s commitment to self-improvement and prosperity. The broken fence proved that the laborers of the South — slaves — would never be emotionally invested in their work, and by extension in economic progress.

The broken fence had no place in Lincoln’s greatest, and perhaps most flawed, idea: that there was a nascent middle-class utopia rising in the North, a mix of small farms and industry, in which work invested citizens in community and labor wasn’t just about survival but a positive process of education. He seemed to envision Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer educated in a land grant university. In an 1859 speech, Lincoln described what he called “thorough work,” which meant not just productive farming, but mental and intellectual engagement with labor. He praised the effects of “thorough cultivation upon the farmer’s own mind,” and by extension, he argued that by “the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward.”

Lincoln had a fatalistic side, a belief in deterministic forces that were more powerful than free will. But he also believed in progress. A European intellectual listening to his speeches would hear dim but clear echoes of the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that there was a pattern and a progress to history, rather than endless cycles of growth, violence and decay. And perhaps also Hegel, for whom history involved epic conflicts and assimilation of past accomplishment into a grand “progress of the consciousness of Freedom.”

Whether Lincoln, whose law partner William Herndon said “read less and thought more than any other man” (in America), had direct contact with these authors’ work doesn’t matter. Their ideas were everywhere densely interwoven with the narcissistic certainty that America was the future of the world. The North was bustling with new technologies and with what Isaiah Berlin would call a “new race of propagandists — artists, poets, priests of a new secular religion, mobilizing men’s emotions, without which the new industrial world could not be made to function.”

Among those propagandists was Carl Schurz, a German revolutionary who would serve Lincoln as an ambassador and a general and who said to slaveholders in 1860: “You stand against a hopeful world, alone against a great century, fighting your hopeless fight . . . against the onward march of civilization.”

Slavery, abolished in Mexico in 1829, throughout the British Empire beginning in 1833, and much of South America by the 1850s, stood athwart that onward march, that powerful, determining force of History.

The Southern argument

Against this idea, what could the South oppose? “Of 143 important inventions patented in the United States from 1790 to 1860, 93 percent came out of the free states,” historian James McPherson wrote in “Battle Cry of Freedom.” The South had less than a fifth of the country’s industrial capacity, and despite periodic wake-up calls and exhortations to invest in infrastructure, it was greatly deficient in canals and railroads. Its “defensive-aggressive” temper in the 1850s, McPherson wrote, “stemmed in part from a sense of economic subordination to the North.”

The South could appeal to the Constitution, which protected slavery. But Lincoln — who had repeatedly said that although he abhorred slavery, he opposed only its extension — had already assured them he wouldn’t violate that protection. They could claim that slaves, as property, were better treated than Northern workers who were at the mercy of the market; but that meant that slaves were merely tools and less than human. They could appeal to Southern Honor, which seemed to mean the right to be left alone, but even that idea of honor was outdated. Southern Honor was hierarchical, almost feudal, and increasingly arcane in a world that, as Kwame Anthony Appiah demonstrates in his recent book, “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen,” had come to base honor more on merit, esteem and shared human dignity.

The South did, however, have anger, and as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “angry parties went from bad to worse.” Frequently in the writing of Lincoln, a lawyer, logician and the only president with a registered patent, one senses that he was arguing into the void. Shortly after the 1860 election, Lincoln’s friend Joshua Speed, a Southern sympathizer (though ultimately loyal), wrote, “The eyes of the whole nation will be upon you, while unfortunately the ears of one half of it will be closed to any thing you might say.” Lincoln, quoting the biblical book of Ezekiel, said the South “has eyes but does not see, and ears but does not hear.” Before he even took office, the South had become “a whirlwind” of secession fever, and History was in motion.

Bravery and bromides

Every politician wants the mantle of Lincoln, but few would wear it entire. Conservatives resist his focus on federal power, while liberals are embarrassed by his devotion to the untrammeled market. After the war, the Gilded Age showed the fault lines in his middle-class utopia. Lincoln was also an enthusiastic proponent of shipping liberated slaves to Africa, a necessity he premised on consciousness of his own racism. He also died before he wrote a definitive explanation of his thinking, unlike Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who wrote a book asserting that “the existence of African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict.”

One might easily believe that, given how irrelevant African Americans and their history were to the first major anniversaries. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson attended the Great Reunion of Northern and Southern veterans at Gettysburg — and then allowed the segregation of federal offices. A glance at the annals of Congress during the 50th anniversary reveals how much the war was still an open wound. There were dozens of bills still dealing with the human wreckage of war — “Bills relative to issue of artificial limbs to officers, soldiers, sailors, and marines” and “Bill to pay claims for use, occupation, or destruction of churches, libraries, etc. . . .”

In the late 1950s, with the congressionally established Centennial Commission planning what its chairman, Ulysses S. Grant III, called “the greatest pageant in our history,” one legislator called for the suppression of any lingering resentments about the war while “America’s survival is being challenged by communist ideology.” But that didn’t stop organizers of a commission meeting in Charleston, S.C., a few years later from choosing a segregated hotel, which in turn caused “a Northern state commission with a Negro member” to protest. President John F. Kennedy proposed a compromise: The commission would meet on a desegregated naval base near the city. A congressional move to defund the commission unless it guaranteed future meetings would be desegregated failed by a lopsided vote.

It seems there’s never been a good time to consider properly what Lincoln really accomplished, which was to lead the country during its primal encounter with modernity. The country is again polarized, and the easy default will be to fall back on the bromides of the war: that it brought suffering to all, that all were complicit in the sin of slavery, that no matter the causes or the ideas behind them, we always have the comforting narratives of bravery and leadership.

If one reads the annals closely, however, it becomes clear that the Civil War legitimized something essential, and dark, that remains with us. Ultimately, the South was fighting for the right to be wrong, for the right to retain (and expand) something ugly and indefensible. It lost the war, and slavery was abolished. But the right to be wrong, the right to resist the progress of freedom, the right to say “no, thank you” to modernity, to leave the fences in disrepair and retreat into a world of private conviction, remains as much a part of the American character as the blood spilled to preserve the Union. Nothing great has been accomplished in America since the Civil War — not footsteps on the moon, or women’s suffrage, or the right (if not the reality) of equal, unsegregated education — without people also passionately fighting for that dark right, too.

The speech that sold Candidate Lincoln

By Sally Jenkins

The candidate stood uneasily on the rostrum, his black suit still creased from the valise he had carried on the three-day train trip from Springfield, Ill. As Abraham Lincoln began the speech intended to launch his presidential campaign, his voice was strained and piercing, his accent backwoods. “Mister Cheerman,” he said, in a scratchy high timbre. It sounded like a chair leg being dragged across the floor.

Many of the 1,500 members of Northern elite who packed the Cooper Union in New York on Feb. 27, 1860, were shocked by the “involuntary comical awkwardness” of the speaker, as the New York Herald put it. Was this the political phenomenon they had heard so much about? He was a shambling figure of 6-foot-4 with a concave chest and thin neck. His sleeves were too short, one leg of his trousers rode up, and the left side of his collar had a tendency to flap. His black hair was disheveled, his gray eyes melancholy.

Lincoln was visibly nervous under the gas chandeliers. This was his crucial test as a presidential aspirant. In the glittering audience was every important Republican “wire puller” and political operative in the Northeast, including William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, and Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and a founder of the young party, which was barely five years old. The Republican nominating convention would be held in Chicago in just 10 weeks, and Lincoln’s ability to challenge the polished front-runner, William H. Seward, depended on the impression he made.

First, Lincoln had to convince his listeners that he was “a finished statesman” like the New Yorker Seward, despite what publisher George H. Putnam called Lincoln’s “weird, rough and uncultivated” appearance. That proved the easiest challenge. As Lincoln warmed to his subject, it was apparent he was no rube. He might be informal, and say “reckon,” but any man who mistook him for simple “would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch,” said Lincoln’s friend Leonard Swett. Lincoln had given his powerful Illinois rival Stephen A. Douglas the political fight of his life in the 1858 Senate election. Douglas won, but their debates over slavery had vaulted Lincoln to national prominence and brought about his invitation to New York. Whoever won the Republican nomination would have to face Douglas, known as the Little Giant because he combined diminutive stature with great political clout and oratorical ability. Douglas was the author of the nation’s most controversial compromises on slavery and the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.

Slavery was the “living issue of the day,” as Lincoln put it, and the political landscape was splintering because of it. Every current event seemed to further fracture political parties and push men to one side or another; the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision appalled slavery’s opponents, while John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., incensed its supporters and frightened its apologists.

The new Republican Party had been founded on antislavery principles in 1854 as a direct response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Devised by Douglas that same year, the act allowed settlers in the new territories to vote whether to permit slavery within their borders. Now some Republicans wondered if the party should de-emphasize its antislavery values in an effort to attract voters. Not Lincoln. Though he was a comparative moderate who would not abolish slavery where it already existed, Lincoln believed the Republicans must have a man “who does not hesitate to declare slavery a wrong; nor to deal with it as such; who believes in the power and duty of Congress to prevent the spread of it.”

The stakes were high. Slaves constituted a larger piece of the American economy in terms of capital than even the railroads or manufacturing. The richest town per capita in the nation was Natchez, Miss. There were 4 million American slaves, the vast majority of them in the South, and a single field hand was worth anywhere from $1,100 to $1,500 — roughly $75,000 to $135,000 in today’s money. Small wonder Southern barons were so vociferous in defense of the “peculiar institution.”

Northerners, on the other hand, were proud to be free laborers, and mass producers. The two cultures were so different that the Charleston Mercury said in 1858 that “the North and South . . . are not only two peoples, but they are rival, hostile Peoples.”

For Lincoln, the issue was not cultural or economic but constitutional. He ticked off facts to his Cooper Union audience: 23 of the 39 men who signed the Constitution registered votes reflecting their belief that slavery should be federally regulated, and eventually extinct. George Washington himself said, “There is no man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” In seeking to contain the spread of slavery, Lincoln implied, he was simply following the path laid down by the Founders.

His voice mellowed and his eyes brightened. When he made an important point, he jabbed a long finger in the air, as if to “dot his ideas on the minds of his hearers.” He mocked Douglas and rebuked those Southerners who would “rule or ruin” through their threats to secede. In a soaring conclusion, Lincoln contended that if slavery was wrong, no expediency could justify its spread. “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it!”

Applause broke over him. New York’s largest papers all carried the full text of his words — Lincoln made sure they had copies. In just 90 minutes, he had made himself a formidable candidate.

A month later, the Democratic convention was held in Charleston, S.C. It proved to be an unfortunate site for Douglas, who was struggling to hold together a badly riven party. The Little Giant was doomed by the location. The Deep South saw his compromises as too weak in protecting of slavery. Alabama delegates called him “a dodger, double tongued,” and derided him as a “bob-tailed pony from Illinois.” Delegates from seven Southern states walked out when they lost a bid to have the party platform include federal protection of slavery.

With the party impossibly split, Northern Democrats reconvened in Baltimore in June and nominated Douglas. The Southern bolters convened a “rump” convention in Richmond. They adopted a “Southern rights” platform and nominated John Breckinridge of Kentucky, the handsome young sitting vice president. Breckinridge, a reluctant candidate pushed forward by the fire-eaters, understood he was strictly a sectional choice. “I trust I have the courage to lead a forlorn hope,” he wrote.

In contrast, the Republicans presented a united front when they convened in Chicago on May 16. On the floor of the Wigwam, an immense convention center built for the occasion, thousands of black stovepipe hats waved, making “a black, mighty swarm — flying with the velocity of hornets over a mass of human heads,” wrote a correspondent. Although the silken-mannered Seward remained the favorite to win the nomination, he was not invincible. He had denounced the South as backward, claimed there was a “higher law” than the Constitution that justified slavery’s removal, and warned of an “irrepressible conflict.” He thus came off as both radical and negative.

Lincoln’s handlers, led by Illinois Judge David Davis, steadily undermined Seward. They conducted a brilliant propaganda campaign, the emblem of which was the split rail paraded by supporters, which Lincoln purportedly had hewn himself. Lincoln didn’t have Seward’s reputation as an extremist, or other flaws either. He seemed to personify the new Republican platform, which emphasized self-making and upward mobility. It called for protective tariffs, the opening of federal land for homesteads, and federal sponsorship of a transcontinental railroad. The platform opposed the extension of slavery but left existing slave owners alone, and condemned Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. For Republicans, Lincoln emerged as the voice of the middle.

Lincoln’s operatives labored all night persuading delegates and striking deals. “Make no contracts that will bind me,” Lincoln had instructed. Davis ignored the directive. “Lincoln ain’t here,” he said.

Seward gained a plurality on the first ballot but lacked the 233 votes needed to be nominated. On the second ballot, Lincoln gained New Hampshire, then all of Vermont. There was a sudden stricken quiet in the Seward camp. Then several Pennsylvania delegates went for Lincoln. On the third ballot, the wave crested. A delegate from Ohio rose and cleared his throat, and for a moment the Wigwam lapsed into near silence. “I rise, Mr. Chairman, to announce the change of four votes of Ohio from Mr. [Salmon] Chase to Mr. Lincoln.” As Lincoln went over the top, bedlam broke out.

The general election would be anticlimactic. Joining the fragmented field was another third-party candidate, the impeccably conservative John Bell of Tennessee. Electoral math all but predetermined the outcome: Lincoln would win. His victory seemed so safe, in fact, that he did not deliver a single speech; his Cooper Union address remained his most significant words of the campaign.

By October, even the indefatigable Douglas conceded defeat. “Lincoln is the next President,” he said. “We must try to save the Union. I will go South.” The Little Giant spent the last months of 1860 traveling across the South, giving two or three speeches a day against the breakup of the government. He was slurred, pelted with eggs and threatened with death.

On Election Day, Lincoln sank into an armchair in the Springfield State House to await the results. About 9 p.m., he walked to the telegraph office as the decisive returns spat out rapidly. Lincoln carried just 39.8 percent of the popular vote and did not gain a single elector in the South. But he carried 18 of 33 states, all of the free states except New Jersey, for an overwhelming margin in the electoral college, with 180 of 303 possible votes, to just 72 for Breckinridge. Douglas carried only Missouri.

Fifty-four days later, on Dec. 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded.

The information and quotations in this article were taken from: “Battle Cry of Freedom,” by James McPherson; “Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President,” by Harold Holzer; “The Emergence of Lincoln: Prologue to Civil War, 1859-1861,” by Allan C. Nevins; “The Civil War Archive, The History of the Civil War in Documents,” edited by Henry Steele Commager; “Three Against Lincoln: Murat Halstead Reports the Caucuses of 1860,” edited by William B. Hesseltine; and “Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life,” by William H. Herndon and Jesse William Weik.

A less-than-monumental city

By Brady Dennis

On the cool autumn Tuesday that Abraham Lincoln would be elected president, the Washington Evening Star reprinted on its front page a dispatch from a British reporter covering a recent visit by the prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII.

“The Prince has arrived in this strange city, whose streets of ill-built houses connect to the most noble public buildings, and where one has to admire the city as a city always in the future tense,” the London Times correspondent wrote of Washington. “It will and must in history be one of the greatest capitals the world has seen, but as yet it seems to want a deal of building, alterations, and improvements, before it can be a worthy legislative center of this great empire.”

If anything, the reporter was too sanguine in his description. The city that awaited Lincoln that fall remained a far cry from the populous, gleaming capital that it would become after — and largely because of — the Civil War. It was, as authorMargaret Leech wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865,” “a mere ambitious beginner, a baby among capitals.”

“Built to order at the dawn of the century, it gave after sixty years the impression of having been just begun,” she wrote. “Washington was merely a place for the government. It was an idea set in a wilderness.”

That wilderness was a dirty and disagreeable swamp of a place, where pigs and cattle roamed freely, where alleys reeked with the stench of raw sewage, where dysentery and diarrhea inflicted their annual toll, where saloons and brothels and gambling parlors easily outnumbered restaurants and theaters. The unpaved streets stayed muddy in the winter and dusty in the summer, always marked with ruts from wagons and carriages and always littered with the manure of the horses that pulled them.

The Capitol dome was three years from completion, and herds of cattle grazed at the stump of the Washington Monument, which sat less than a third finished. The handful of grandiose structures, among them the White House, the Treasury Building and the Smithsonian Institution, sat amid vast open spaces largely unpopulated and uncultivated.

There were islands of social life, such as dinner parties in the dignified mansions of Georgetown and grand cotillions on Capitol Hill and by the Navy Yard. At Willard’s Hotel at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, society women and boisterous men mingled in the smoke-filled bar, and much of the business of government took place in hushed conversations. But mostly, Washington remained a backwater. Diplomats from Europe considered it a hardship post.

“It was a Southern town, without the picturesqueness, but with the indolence, the disorder and the want of sanitation,” Leech wrote. “Its lounging Negroes startled Northern visitors with the reminder that slaves were held in the capital. Hucksters abounded. Fish and oyster peddlers cried their wares and tooted their horns on the corners. Flocks of geese waddled on [Pennsylvania] Avenue, and hogs, of every size and color, roamed at large, making their muddy wallows on Capitol Hill and in Judiciary Square. People emptied slops and refuse in the gutters.”

The 1860 Census counted 75,080 souls in the District of Columbia, including 61,000 in the city proper, 8,700 in the separate village of Georgetown and the remainder in the rural areas of the district, which began just north of Florida Avenue. Nearly a quarter of Washington’s residents came from Virginia or Maryland, and even the city’s natives often had strong ties to families from the surrounding Southern countryside. Most of the city’s 12,484 immigrants came from Ireland and Great Britain, although a few had ventured from as far as Australia, Russia and Turkey. The vast majority of residents were white, though more than 3,000 slaves and more than 11,000 “free colored” people called Washington home.

“Poverty, squalor, prejudice, and violence” existed in abundance, author Constance McLaughlin Green wrote in her exhaustive history, “Washington: Village and Capital, 1800-1878.” “Class distinctions were clear-cut, but a family’s place in the social structure of the city rested less upon money than upon accomplishments and manners . . . Whatever the community’s vices, pretentiousness was not one.”

The fledgling city consisted of bakers and blacksmiths, fishermen and farmers, carpenters and government clerks. There were three veterinarians, six undertakers, 17 milkmen, 67 innkeepers, 148 doctors, 180 lawyers and 242 tailors. Smith’s on Seventh Street sold the season’s latest hats and caps. Charles Shafer worked in his watch shop, not far from the Washington Carriage Factory, which was on D Street between Ninth and 10th. Benter’s Restaurant on C Street advertised its fish and oysters, as well as its wine, liquor and cigars. The studio in which Mathew Brady would photograph the most famous faces of the Civil War was already up and running in a building on Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the Capitol.

But despite the growing bustle, it remained “a pretty sleepy place,” said Ernest B. Furgurson, a former Baltimore Sun correspondent and author of 2004′s “Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War.” “It really was not as cosmopolitan as a lot of other cities in the country. It was still very much a place under development.”

In the years ahead, according to Senate historian Donald A. Ritchie, that development would come rapidly. The city’s population swelled as the war deepened. The government grew exponentially. The number of hospitals multiplied. Houses rose on once-empty blocks. Soldiers flooded the city and its surrounding areas, even sleeping inside the Capitol and drilling on the grounds as they rehearsed for the bloody battles ahead.

Washington would emerge from the Civil War a transformed city, significantly larger and more populated than before. But the transformation went beyond bricks and mortar. The war solidified Washington’s role as the symbolic heart of the country, the permanent capital of a united nation.

“It made it pretty much what it is today,” Furgurson said. “If there was going to be a slow metamorphosis, the war sped that up by many decades.”

The inhabitants of Washington that fall of 1860 could not have grasped the change and upheaval ahead. But they did know that the papers brimmed with talk of secession, and fiery debates raged in the halls of Congress, and a cloud of uneasiness and anxiety loomed over the city.

In her house near Lafayette Square, Elizabeth Lindsay Lomax fretted over the prospects of war as the snow blanketed Washington that December. The descendant of an old Virginia family, she was the daughter of a Revolutionary War veteran and the mother of a son four years out of West Point.

“In the background is the terrible feeling of uncertainty — and fear. Fear of separation, fear of danger to those we love, fear for our beloved country,” she wrote in her diary.

On a cold Christmas Day, her family gathered over a dinner of a magnificent wild turkey, which had been delivered from Virginia. The young people opened presents and danced deep into the night.

“I do not think that [they] realize as yet ‘The sword of Damocles’ hanging over our heads,” Lomax wrote. “Perhaps it is just as well.”

The photographer who went to war: Matthew Brady was famous for his portraiture. Then the fighting started.

By Jacqueline Trescott

In 1860, Mathew Brady was one of the world’s best-known photographers.

His book, “The Gallery of Illustrious Americans,” published 10 years earlier, had made him famous. Those who had sat in his studio and faced the large box on the wooden tripod included Daniel Webster, Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Clay.

So when Republican operatives wanted the perfect picture of presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, they took him to Brady’s studio on Broadway in New York City. Brady looked at the tall, gangly man with the rugged, clean-shaven face. He pulled up his shirt collar so his neck wouldn’t look so long. He brushed down his hair and placed his hand on a book. Later, as Brady developed the photo, he retouched it so Lincoln’s facial lines wouldn’t be so harsh.

Brady produced a remarkable image. At that time most Americans hadn’t seen Lincoln, and his opponents had caricatured him as a wild frontiersman. Yet here he was — extremely tall, standing erect, an imposing gentleman in a long frock coat. The Brady photo was used for engravings and reprinted in the major weeklies of the day, Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. It also appeared on a campaign button.

The same day he sat for Brady — Feb. 27, 1860 — Lincoln gave one of his most important speeches, the Cooper Union address. He spoke 7,000 words to an audience of influential businessmen, ministers, scholars and journalists. The speech was front-page news the next day. In an interview years later, very aware of his role in history, the photographer repeated what Lincoln reportedly said about the confluence: “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president.”

Brady was born in Warren County, N.Y., in 1823. As a young man in New York City, he studied photography with Samuel Morse. (In addition to inventing the electric telegraph and Morse code, Morse is credited with bringing the daguerreotype process from France to the United States.) When Brady was introduced to daguerreotypes in the 1840s, photography was still a new art form and — at a time when most newspapers still relied on sketches — an extremely uncertain business venture. Nonetheless, Brady opened his first photography studio in 1844; by the following year he had won a national competition for the best colored and best plain daguerreotypes.

He operated his studio like a painter’s workshop, assigning colleagues and apprentices to various tasks. Studio personnel operated the cameras after Brady set up the shot, a practice he may have adopted because of the poor eyesight that had plagued him since childhood. The photographer and his assistants posed their subjects. They became skilled at injecting personality into the images, much like formal portrait painters. Brady’s artistry was leavened with promotional acumen. As was the custom of the times, the studio’s photographs were reprinted on tiny cards called “cartes de visite,” making his work greatly accessible.

“Brady developed a reputation because of his quality and his marketing skills,” said Ann M. Shumard, curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. “He was a good promoter and supplied images that could be reproduced. He adapted to the times.”

Edward McCarter, supervisory archivist for still pictures at the National Archives, concurred.

“Brady was the best-known entrepreneur of the day,” McCarter said. “You might get an argument on whether he was the best photographer.”

In 1858, Brady set up a second studio on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, across the street from the present location of the National Archives. (He did his printing on the roof.) He came to the city seeking greater proximity to the power brokers of the day, and his subjects included John Quincy Adams, Dolley Madison, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Jenny Lind, Sojourner Truth, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, William Cullen Bryant, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. He even photographed the actor Edwin Booth and his brother John Wilkes Booth. His interest in documenting the era’s notables foreshadowed the art of celebrity portraiture.

“From the first I regarded myself as under obligation to my country to preserve the faces of the historic men and mothers,” Brady said in a 1891 article in the New York World. (Historians think the interview, one of the few given by Brady, is greatly embellished. It also includes a rare physical description of the aging photographer: “Mr. Brady is a person of trim, wiry, square-shouldered figure, with the light of an Irish shower-sun in his smile.")

When the Civil War began in 1861, Brady decided to step outside the formal setting of his studio. Because he was the first photographer to actually go to a battlefield and document what he found there, he is widely considered the father of modern photojournalism. He later attributed his decision to destiny. After he returned from the first Battle of Bull Run, Brady recalled, “My wife and my most conservative friends had looked unfavorably upon this departure from commercial business to pictorial war correspondence, and I can only describe the destiny that overruled me by saying that, like Euphorion, I felt that I had to go.”

Brady seemed intent on establishing his legacy from the outset, in some cases even inserting himself into the studio’s wartime photographs.

“He’s in one taken at Gettysburg,” said Carol Johnson, a photography curator for the Library of Congress’s Civil War collections. Johnson said her staff still occasionally finds the photographer in the images, particularly as they are digitized.

Brady realized early on that the pictures were not mere memorabilia but were footnotes to history. In 1862, he displayed gruesome battlefield scenes taken by his studio colleagues Alexander Gardner and James Gibson in his New York gallery. The images of decaying corpses after the Battle of Antietam appalled viewers and galvanized the anti-war movement.

After the war, the demand for Brady’s work waned. Photography was changing rapidly, incorporating new equipment and techniques, and the public no longer wanted the Civil War images for which Brady was best known. A skilled promoter but an inept businessman, Brady had invested much of his capital in the studio’s war coverage. Ultimately it proved his financial ruin.

In late 1864, Brady began selling off his assets, including a half share in his Washington gallery. He sued his business partner when it fell into bankruptcy in 1868, then bought it back at public auction. But his affairs continued to spiral downward. The courts declared him bankrupt in 1873, and by 1875 his New York studios were closed. Brady petitioned Congress to buy his collection, which it did, for $25,000, in 1875. Despite his political associations, he failed to get a hall of prominent Americans — with his work as a critical source — started. His last known Washington address was 484 Maryland Ave. SW.

Brady died an indigent in New York on Jan. 15, 1896. His funeral was paid for by friends and a veterans association. He is buried in Congressional Cemetery in Washington.

Today, Washington is the epicenter of Brady scholarship. The National Archives and Records Administration, the Library of Congress and the National Portrait Gallery — where two walls of his work are on permanent display — house thousands of photographs and glass plates that have survived for more than 150 years. Taken together, they provide a haunting glimpse of the city and its nearby battlefields during the Civil War and an illuminating history of early photography.

That fateful sitting with Lincoln remains a pivotal departure point for the study of Brady and the Civil War. Even then, copies of the photo were scarce and quickly became collector’s items.

In a letter written on April 7, 1860, to a person requesting the Brady photo, Lincoln wrote: “I have not a single one now at my control; but I think you can easily get one at New York. While I was there I was taken to one of the places where they get up such things, and I suppose they got my shadow. . . . Yours truly, A. Lincoln.”

Emancipating the narrative: Ed Ayers wants the country to remember that the war was about more than battlefields

By Frederick Kunkle

When the young Edward Ayers left his Tennessee home for Yale to study history, his mama asked him why. “You already know what happened,” she said.

But history, Ayers already knew, is best understood through the lens of time. History is always changing.

Now that he’s president of the University of Richmond, he’s become an agent of that change. As a leader of Richmond’s sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War, he hopes to reshape America’s understanding of the bloodiest conflict in its history.

Ayers wants Americans to see beyond the battlefield maneuvers and battle flags, the pat narratives of brothers reluctantly taking up arms against brothers and the kitsch of Stonewall Jackson bobbleheads, and reimagine the conflict from the perspective of its most important consequence: the emancipation of 4 million slaves.

“I am trying to get us to rethink what the war is about, and what we’ve being doing in Richmond is instead of talking of one sesquicentennial, one anniversary, it’s really two: One’s the Civil War, and the other’s Emancipation,” Ayers says, with the faintest drawl. “The main thing that happened, the consequence of the war, was freedom for 4 million people who had been held in bondage for over two centuries in this country.”

His broader approach has earned him praise in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederate States of America, but also denunciations from some whose ancestors fought on its behalf. To those who accuse him of politically correct revisionism, Ayers points out that Americans have always interpreted the Civil War to reflect their times.

In the late 19th century, W.E.B. Dubois argued that the war, and its enormous death toll, had been a necessary sacrifice to end slavery. That view changed after World War I’s horrors encouraged revisionists who questioned whether the Civil War had been unavoidable or worth the price. The literary critic Edmund Wilson went so far as to compare Lincoln to Lenin in using violence to reshape the world according to his politics.

Then came World War II, which seemed to teach again that some causes are worth dying for. By the time of the Civil War centennial in 1960, the war’s legacy had been reshaped by the struggle for civil rights, with Southerners emphasizing the centrality of states’ rights and Northerners the need for federal intervention to right an enduring wrong.

Even this year, when Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) issued a proclamation honoring Confederate History Month that omitted any reference to slavery, the widespread outrage demonstrated once again that the past is not yet past. After apologizing, McDonnell pledged that from now on the state would commemorate the Civil War in all its complexity, not just the Confederacy.

That is almost exactly the approach Ayers has championed for Richmond. As a member of the leadership team of “The Future of Richmond’s Past,” he has helped bring together blacks and whites, historians and lay people, to plan events for the next five years. Among the first was last April’s “Civil War and Emancipation Day” which drew 4,000 people to explore the history of slavery and the Civil War, from the grounds of the city’s former slave market to various museums in the city.

But Ayers, who often talks of going against the grain, of resisting the smugness that comes of judging dead people, can also frustrate those who insist that the Civil War was fought over slavery alone. He sees slavery as the primary cause, but he also wants to move beyond the notion that the explanation for the most important conflict in American history, one that claimed 620,000 lives and rededicated the republic to its founding principles, could fit on a bumper sticker.

“People will spend more time and energy explaining a car wreck than they will that: ‘It was just states’ rights.’ Or, ‘It was just slavery.’ Any answer we give ‘just’ to explain the actions of 40 million people is wrong,” he says. “We have to have the courage to say: No, it’s complex, and it’s changing.”

A history guy

Ayers, 57, brings to the task a Southerner’s perspective and impressive Civil War credentials. He has examined the conflict in several books and a groundbreaking online project called “The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War.”

Born and raised in the South’s mountain culture, he was the son of textile workers who settled in Kingsport, Tenn. Like the rest of the South, his town was deeply racist and segregated by law.

Rock and roll music, and magazines such as Rolling Stone, opened a window on the ferment of the broader culture. He toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist like Tom Wolfe, but instead, after a degree in American studies at the University of Tennessee, headed to postgraduate studies at Yale.

Ayers, who began teaching at the University of Virginia in 1980, has written or edited 10 books, including “The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. But he’s hardly the supercilious scholar of stereotype. Chatty, affable and self-deprecating, with a head full of gray curls, for the last couple of years he’s been one of the American History Guys on public radio’s “BackStory,” a sort of “Car Talk” for history buffs.

“He’s an amazing guy, the amount of energy he has to do what he does,” said James M. McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.” “And he’s always chipper and cheerful. I’d be exhausted.”

One thing Ayers never tires of discussing is slavery and its role in U.S. history. “I say that slavery is more central to the nation than we recognize, not less,” he says. “But the thing is that, very often, people will say, ‘Okay, that answers it. It was disputes over slavery.’ But how did disputes over slavery turn into a war that ended slavery? Nobody thought that was possible at the start. Slavery is at the core of everything, from start to finish, but I think, ironically, just the assertion of it prevents us from understanding all its dimensions.”

Ayers delights in challenging every simple theory of the war. To those who blame slavery alone, he responds that only 2 percent of Northern whites were abolitionists. Had the war ended at First Manassas, slavery would likely have remained intact, because ending it was not yet the Union’s goal. As to the theory of modernism — that an industrial economy built on wage labor was destined to collide with an agrarian feudalist economy based on slave labor — he points out that the South had railroads, telegraphs and cotton, which was like the petroleum of the 19th century. If the South had achieved independence, it would have joined the ranks of the top four economies in the world. To those who argue states’ rights, Ayers acknowledges that even Thomas Jefferson believed states might have the right to leave the union. But what’s the one right that most divided North and South? The right to own slaves. Just look at the secession proclamations. In recent years, Ayers has been respectfully critical of the reigning view of the war, as presented by Ken Burns’s PBS documentary series “The Civil War,” McPherson and others. He expresses discomfort with an Olympian good-vs.-evil narrative of the war that can sometimes seem self-congratulatory and triumphant.

“It may be . . . that we like the current story too much to challenge it very deeply and that we foreclose questions by repeating familiar formulas,” Ayers wrote in an essay. “The risk of our apparent consensus is that we paper over the complicated moral issues raised by a war that left hundreds of thousands of people dead. The risk is that we no longer worry about the Civil War.”

Instead, he prefers to explain the war’s cause by “deep contingency,” or the notion that every element of social life is contingent, unpredictable, and intertwined with others in ways that can work together mysteriously, even improbably, to cause surprising and earthshaking events. “The shortest way to understand it,” he says, “is that it’s a perfect storm.”

It is a compelling answer in the post-modern era of nonhierarchical thinking, chaos theory, Wikipedia, the Internet and collective intelligence — or collective folly. His answer, critics say, is an evasion itself.

“I was never able to grasp what he was driving at there,” McPherson says. What else is history but the imposition of pattern, order — in short, a story — on a universe of seemingly random and interconnected events? McPherson asks.

Ayers has heard this criticism. But if no one has ever been able to bind the nation’s wounds from the Civil War, Ayers says, it’s perhaps because the Civil War presents a paradox: Although the conflict did not begin as a war to end slavery, that is what it became. And that itself was a new beginning.

“The Civil War is at the heart of what this nation is about,” he says. “Freedom, and respect, and possibility for all Americans.”

Out of Virginia's attics, voices from the past

By Tara Bahrampour

Salvaged from dusty basements and attics, scrawled on timeworn paper that has been folded and refolded, the long-silent voices emerge:

M. Brock, a Union soldier stationed in Leesburg, watched in 1863 as three of his fellow soldiers, seated on the edges of coffins, were shot. “They all fell backward into their coffins and remained as they fell until the whole Column passed them,” he wrote. “Melancholy sight to Witness — shot for Deserting.”

John Keefer, perhaps the original helicopter parent, followed his soldier son, George, from one encampment to the next between 1861 and 1863, bringing along extra goodies for the troops. And A.S. Billingsley, a U.S. Army chaplain, wrote at the end of the war to tell Delilah Reed of her husband’s death from chronic diarrhea. Reed, he wrote, had read his Bible up to the end, and his remains could “be procured by simply leaving an order with the nearest Express office, whose Agent here will forward the body.”

Letters like these, along with photographs, draft cards, maps, sketches and military passes, have been emerging across Virginia like buds after a long freeze, thanks to the state’s Civil War 150 Legacy Project, which over the next two years will sweep through 126 cities and counties, scanning images of Civil War memorabilia provided by local residents for an archive project that coordinators hope will eventually hold hundreds of thousands of items.

“They’re all so excited about it,” said Renee Savits, the project’s coordinator for the eastern part of the state. “We had one gentleman in Virginia Beach and he had a military draft card of his great-great-grandfather and a picture of him, and he was just so thrilled to share it with us.”

Savits and her colleague, Laura Drake Davis, who coordinates the western part of the state, announce the dates and locationswhere people can bring items, and scan them on the spot.

For much of the material, the archive will be the public debut. “People don’t often have an opportunity to share these items,” said Davis. “They can share it with their family, but there doesn’t seem to be much opportunity outside the family.”

The items can be fragile, and the scanning process grueling. One man brought 50 letters, which took Savits a few hours to scan. They must also be flat. “I’ve had people bring in a whole bunch of stuff, including buttons, and that’s not part of our scope,” said Davis.

Sometimes, people bring in old items unrelated to the Civil War — 18th-century documents, for example — which Savits and Davis must refuse. “People want to contribute, they want to be helpful,” said Davis, “but they’re not really part of our project.”

Amid the memorabilia, glimpses of everyday life rub up against historic events. In one letter, William H. Billings, a prisoner of war in Annapolis, informed friends of his slight cold and cough and also of his sorrow at the “Gallant Chief Magistrate,” Abraham Lincoln, “who was so Cowardly Assassinated a few days ago.”

Brevet-Major Henry Cranford couldn’t wait to write to his “darling precious wife” in New York after the Second Battle of Manassas/Bull Run. Amazed to have emerged from the bloody clashes unscathed, he wrote from astride his horse.

“Oh! how my heart yearns to fold you in my arms and feel your heart beat in extacy [sic] against mine, which has been saved almost by a miracle for you my love,” he wrote. “Oh! Lord hasten hasten the time.”

Cast of Characters: The stories behind the Civil War's famous names

By Michael E. Ruane

1. Ulysses S. Grant
The military architect of the Union’s triumph

In 1860, he was a 38-year-old West Point graduate and veteran of the Mexican War, but he had resigned from the Army six years before, lonely, depressed and alcoholic. A failed farmer who had once built a house called Hardscrabble, he had lately sold firewood on the streets of St. Louis and worked as a rent collector. He was now clerking in his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Ill., where he did not own a horse.

2. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson
One of the Confederate army’s most brilliant generals

He was a 36-year-old, deeply religious and somewhat quarrelsome West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran who had left the Army to take a job as a professor at the Virginia Military Institute. In 1859, he led a contingent of VMI cadets to provide security at the hanging of the Harpers Ferry abolitionist John Brown. Jackson noted that Brown behaved with “unflinching firmness.”

3. Robert E. Lee
The legendary commander of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia

A colonel in the United States Army, he, too, was a veteran of the Mexican War, in which he had been wounded. A former superintendent at West Point, he had led the government forces that captured John Brown at Harpers Ferry. But in 1860 he was stationed in far-off Texas, where he chased bandits and Indians and missed his large family back home at Arlington House, across the Potomac from Washington. He was 53, believed that his career had stalled and saw himself as a failure.

4. Walt Whitman
The poet of the Civil War

The former printer and newspaper editor was 41 and an established writer and commentator living in Brooklyn. In 1860 the third edition of his book “Leaves of Grass” was published, expanded from 12 poems to more than 150. Drawn by the great cataclysm of his generation, he would soon move to Washington, minister to the wounded and steep himself in the war’s grandeur and suffering.

5. Frederick Douglass
The renowned abolitionist and former Maryland slave

Age 42 in 1860, he was back home in Rochester, N.Y., after fleeing to Canada and England in the wake of John Brown’s doomed raid on Harpers Ferry. Brown had been Douglass’s friend and confidant and had written his revolutionary “constitution” in Douglass’s home. Lincoln’s election, Douglass later wrote, was “a glorious assertion of freedom and independence on the part of North.”

6. Jefferson Davis
Soon to be the Confederacy’s first and only president

In 1860 he was a former secretary of war and a former regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and was serving as a U.S. senator from Mississippi. A graduate of West Point and a combat-wounded veteran of the Mexican War, at 52, he believed in states’ rights but thought secession would be reckless.

7. Clara Barton
Pioneering battlefield nurse and later head of the Union’s “missing in action” bureau

She had suffered a breakdown after the loss of her job in the U.S. Patent Office. The election of Lincoln, a fellow Republican, promised a return to Washington and gainful employment for the 38-year-old Barton. On the eve of the Battle of Fredericksburg, she would write: “Oh northern mothers, wives and sisters, all unconscious of the hour, would to Heaven that I could bear for you the concentrated woe which is so soon to follow.”

8. William T. Sherman
The hard-driving, red-haired Union general who would conquer Atlanta and help bring the Confederacy to its knees

He was 40, asthmatic, a West Point graduate and a former Army officer. Ten years before, he had been married in Washington in a ceremony attended by President Zachary Taylor and Sens. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Unsuccessful in banking and business, he had just gone to Louisiana to run a new military academy. His view of the crisis was simple: Secession was treason.

9. John Wilkes Booth
President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin

Booth, 22, was a new acting sensation and a Southern patriot. A member of an acclaimed family of actors, he was on tour in Alabama on Election Day; for the first time, he had leading roles and was packing theaters. He was also recovering from an accidental gunshot wound a few weeks earlier that might have killed him — and changed history.

Editorials: Reaction to Lincoln's win

The Kansas Chief, (White Cloud, Kan.)
Thursday, Nov. 8, 1860

WHOOP-EE

President,

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Vice President,

HANNIBAL HAMLIN

THE MILLENIUM COME!

We have the glorious tidings to proclaim, that Lincoln and Hamlin are our next President and Vice President, by overwhelming majorities. They have carried every Free State this side of the Rocky Mountains, except, perhaps, New Jersey, where the vote is close. Douglas will probably carry “nary one!”

Richmond Dispatch
Thursday, Nov. 8, 1860

The Presidential Election.

The returns received and published yesterday left little or no doubt of the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency. Today we publish enough to make it certain. The event is the most deplorable one that has happened in the history of the country. The Union may be preserved in spite of it. We think it will; but we are prepared to expect trouble. We have already one sign from South Carolina, and this may be followed by others of more serious character.

The Daily Spy, Worcester, Mass.
Friday, Nov. 9, 1860

THE DISUNION OUTCRY

The election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency is the first triumph of a great political revolution. It does not mean evil to any section of the country. It is not only regular and lawful, but is necessary to restore the old spirit and policy of the country, and give peace to the land. It comes hard for those Southern extremists to be driven from power without any hope of returning to it; but they will submit to necessity and become less dangerous, for the sentiment of the Southern people will constrain them to good behavior. Mr. Lincoln will be inaugurated peacefully, and we believe confidently that his administration will reproduce the era of good feeling.

The Courier (A New Orleans paper published in English and French editions)
Friday, Nov. 9, 1860

THE CRISIS

The election of Abraham Lincoln to the chief magistracy of the country by the hordes of fanatics and negrophilists who have been flocking to his standards since the opening of the Presidential canvass has awakened throughout the South a spirit of stubborn resistance which it will be found is impossible to quell. . . .

The crisis now impending upon the whole country is a necessary consequence of the abnormal condition into which our dearest and most sacred institutions have been plunged by the success of our avowedly unrelenting enemies. . . .

The unmistakable fact stares us in the face that we are now in a state of danger unparalleled in the annals of our history. . . . Of one thing, however, the whole South may rest assured — that the sons of Louisiana will not remain indifferent spectators of the drama about to be enacted, and if the sword is to be drawn, they will be . . . found in the vanguard of the Southern phalanx. . . .

Morning Courier and New York Enquirer
Wednesday, Nov. 7, 1860

The returns before us indicate the election of ABRAHAM LINCOLN President of the United States. The result anticipated has become a gratifying reality. . . . It is enough that the great fact stands out clearly . . . that LINCOLN is elected president, and that the principle of intimidation, so persistently and wickedly brought to bear on this election by Southern extremists and their allies the Northern Democratic panic makers, has signally failed. . . .

All honor to freemen of this Republic; congratulations warm and hearty be theirs, for the great principle of the defence of freedom within the free territories of the United States, to establish which the Republican Party entered upon this canvass, has its complete vindication in signal victory. . . .

Stretching out our hands to the South over this victory, we have no word of taunt to utter for the threats of disunion which were raised for our defeat. Let those threats be buried in oblivion; for through the long vista of this success we see a reign of peace from Slavery agitation, established simply by that circumscribing of Slavery within its local bounds, and that firm defence of the integrity of National Freedom, which this triumph of the Republican party on the 6th of November, 1860, seals now and henceforth.

The Semi-Weekly Mississippian Jackson, Miss.
Friday, Nov. 9, 1860

THE DEED’S DONE — DISUNION THE REMEDY

The outrages which abolition fanaticism has continued year by year to heap upon the South, have at length culminated in the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, avowed abolitionists, to the presidency and vice presidency — both bigoted, unscrupulous and cold-blooded enemies of the peace and equality of the slaveholding states, and one of the pair strongly marked with the blood of his negro ancestry. . . . In view of the formal declaration, through the ballot box, of a purpose by the northern states to wield the vast machinery of the federal Government as now constituted, for destroying the liberties of the slaveholding states, it becomes their duty to dissolve their connection with it and establish a separate and independent government of their own.

Compiled by Michael E. Ruane

If Lincoln had lost the election, would there have been a war? A panel of Civil War experts -- from academia, the world of letters, archives, museums and assorted other sources -- answer questions posed by The Washington Post and readers.

Harold Holzer
Author or editor of 36 books, many on Lincoln, and chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation

This age-old question assumes a chain of events with a big missing link: disunion. Abraham Lincoln’s election provoked secession all right (unjustifiably, one might persuasively argue), but it was secession that provoked the standoff at Fort Sumter and, ultimately, triggered rebellion and war. What happened in between Lincoln’s November election victory and March inauguration — the Great Secession Winter — ought to have mollified Southern extremists and empowered Southern Unionists, but the truth is that the election of any presidential candidate pledged to halt the expansion of slavery would have incited slaveholding states determined to expand their power base and, with it, their longtime control over the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. In other words, the die was tragically cast.

As for Lincoln, he was meticulously careful during the long interregnum between his election and inauguration to walk a fine line between conciliation and coercion — insisting that he had earned the right to govern but assuring Southerners that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed. “The South would be in no more danger in this respect, than it was in the days of Washington,” the president-elect assured Georgia Sen. Alexander Hamilton Stephens — for whom such reassurances typically proved insufficient (a pro-Unionist at first, Stephens ultimately supported Georgia’s secession and became the Confederate vice president). During the last weeks in his home town of Springfield, Lincoln wrote an inaugural address designed to formally assert his policy of noninterference — a manuscript whose every hint of bellicosity he successively toned down over a succession of rewrites based on advice from others. By the time he spoke its final passage on March 4, 1861 — all but imploring those who would not listen that “we must not be enemies” — it was too late for compromise.

Without real provocation, the Deep South had decided to defy the will of the voters and create a separate nation. Meanwhile, Lincoln had proven remarkably open to compromise except on the issue on which he had built his national political reputation — limiting the extension of slavery. And on this issue, as provocative as it may have been to slave owners with eyes on expanding their base into the southwest, Mexico and even Cuba, can we doubt but that he was politically and morally right to hold firm on this point? Of course, as Lincoln readily admitted when he gave his second inaugural address four years later, “neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it . . . attained.”

Would Lincoln have drawn a line in the sand if he knew it would cost 600,000 American lives in the next four years? Hard to say. So let’s always keep in mind not just what Lincoln knew, but what he could not have known. And to have expected the president-elect to bow to Southern pressures in anticipation of a magnitude of bloodshed he could not possibly have imagined in advance asks modern readers to turn history head over heels to prove a conclusion that can only be known in hindsight.

But to return to the original question: Was it the election of Lincoln in particular that brought on the Civil War? No, not really. Remember, the Virginia extremist Edmund Ruffin had only recently published a novel called “Anticipations of the Future” in which, Jules Verne-like, he predicted the election of a Republican president not in 1860 but in 1864, thrilled that “the obscure and coarse Lincoln” would undoubtedly provoke a Southern war for “independence” — which is precisely what radical slave owners wanted. They got their wish four years early — and to paraphrase Lincoln, the tug had to come — better then than later. Ruffin, according to tradition, ordered the first shot on Fort Sumter a month after Lincoln’s inauguration. So perhaps we should really consider whether Ruffin and the Ruffinites bore more responsibility for war than the constitutionally elected 16th president of the United States.

Mike Musick
Retired subject area expert for the U.S. Civil War at the National Archives

Some historians run screaming from the prospect of hypothetical questions. Perhaps less judicious than they, I will try to respond to this one.

Abraham Lincoln’s election precipitated the attempt at secession by the Southern states. Those who held power in those states declared that the survival of their vital institution of slavery would be placed in jeopardy if an avowedly anti-slavery man — such as Lincoln certainly was — were to take the nation’s helm. Without Lincoln’s election, those states would have been deprived of their loudly proclaimed reason for leaving the Union. Thus, no President Lincoln meant no secession. It was secession that gave birth to the war, when cannons were fired in defending that alleged right at Fort Sumter, S.C. Therefore, the conclusion is inescapable that without secession there would have been no war. So my answer is a resounding yes: A defeat for Lincoln would have been a victory for peace.

But not for long. Few could envy whoever would have become chief executive instead of Lincoln. Tensions over the expansion of slavery had grown so great that eventually war had to come. Over the years, Southern threats of secession had been trumpeted with such frequency that they would have become a mockery if not one day acted on, and that day was not far distant. No president with an ounce of grit could have continued to abide the kinds of provocations with which he would have been assailed. In 1864? In 1868? In 1900? No one can say. Add to this the steadily increasing lethality of the world’s weaponry, and we can envision an even more bloody “irrepressible conflict” than what took place in 1861-65.

History brings with it a large dose of irony. As an example, consider that the legitimacy of the doctrine of secession was the main point at issue in our Civil War. That legitimacy was emphatically denied by the war’s outcome. And yet today, almost without exception, chroniclers state that in 1860-61 “the Southern states seceded.” This strange form of posthumous vindication is the unconscious tribute we lay on the graves of those who died for the Confederacy.

Joan Waugh
Professor of history at UCLA

If Abraham Lincoln had lost the election to the (Northern) Democratic candidate Stephen A. Douglas, I do not believe that seven states of the Deep South would have seceded so quickly or formed a government in Montgomery, Ala., by February 1861. A wholly sectional party had come to power that threatened the slaveholders’ social and economic security, and that fact spurred secessionist action. But even if Douglas had won in 1860, would secession have come eventually, as so many Northern Democrats were in favor of limiting slavery’s expansion in the western territories? Maybe, but I suspect that Democrats would have found a way to compromise to at least delay it for a while.

Chandra Manning
Associate professor of history at Georgetown University

As we prepare to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, one of the things we must do is rid ourselves of the notion that it was somehow inevitable or even foreordained, or we have no hope of ever understanding it. What we can say, grounded firmly in evidence, is that without a Lincoln victory in November 1860, war would not have broken out exactly when and how it did.

Abraham Lincoln won the presidency after running on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery into federal territories. That victory did not touch slavery in any state, but it did signal that the federal government was now headed not, as it normally had been, by someone interested in promoting slavery, but by someone hostile to it. In a matter of weeks, delegates met in South Carolina to leave the Union, and they published a Declaration of Causes explaining why. Two of the three causes (Northern non-compliance with the Fugitive Slave Law and increasing anti-slavery sentiment nationally) were not dependent on Lincoln’s election, but the election of a president pledged to stop the expansion of slavery was also a major cause, and that was dependent on Lincoln’s election, because none of the other three candidates supported such a platform. The secession of South Carolina was quickly followed by the secession of six more states, all of which cited the same basic provocations.

Before secession, residents of Northern states had no interest in a war (Why rock the boat?), but secession in response to Lincoln’s election changed everything: Allowing any state simply to leave when its voters did not like the results of an election undercut any basis for self-government (elections only work, after all, if we all agree to abide by them even when we don’t like the results), and therefore could not be countenanced. And so, as Lincoln would put it, the war came.

Which is not to say it was inevitable no matter who won. Nor is it to say that no conflict would have erupted if anyone else had won. But it is to say that war coming exactly when, where and how it did was the product of long-term causes and immediate triggers, and the election of Lincoln was, without question, an immediate trigger.

Waite Rawls
President and chief executive of the Museum of the Confederacy

The Civil War started because a match lit a fuse on a keg that was filled with powder. Let’s look at each ingredient.

Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party built the keg. The wood for the keg was shaped by the inability of the founding fathers to solve the two big problems of state sovereignty and slavery in the shaping of the Constitution. In a complex but steady course, the economics of taxes and the politics of control of the westward expansion were added to those two original issues as the keg was filled with powder.

By the time of the creation of the Republican Party in 1856, the powder keg was almost full and waiting for a fuse. And the election of any candidate from the Republican Party — a purely sectional party — put the fuse in the powder keg, and the Deep South states seceded. But there was still no war. Two simultaneous mistakes in judgment brought the matches out of the pocket — the Deep South mistakenly thought that Lincoln, now elected, would not enforce the Union, and Lincoln mistakenly thought that the general population of the South would not follow the leadership of the Fire Eaters.

Lincoln struck the match when he called the bluff of the South Carolinians and attempted to reinforce Fort Sumter, but that match could have gone out without an explosion. Lincoln struck a second, more fateful match, when he called for troops to put down the “insurrection.” That forced the Upper South and Border States into a conflict that they had vainly attempted to avoid.

In short, the election of Lincoln did not start the Civil War all by itself. But it certainly was a critical ingredient.

Gary Gallagher
Professor of history at the University of Virginia

Given the realities of electoral politics in 1860, it is almost impossible to imagine how Abraham Lincoln could have lost. It is even more difficult to say what the election of Stephen A. Douglas — the only one of the other three candidates who stood even a remote chance of success — would have elicited in the way of responses across the nation.

Rather than try to answer a question that cannot be answered, it is worthwhile to remember that Lincoln’s election did not trigger the war. More than six months elapsed between the casting of ballots in November 1860 and the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861. Only seven of the 15 slaveholding states deemed Lincoln’s triumph sufficient cause to secede; four others followed suit only after Sumter and, more especially, the new president’s call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion. Four slaveholding states remained loyal to the Union, a fact that should remind us why describing the war as North against South is misleading and why we should never use “Confederacy” and “the South” as synonyms.

We always should resist what might be called the Appomattox syndrome, that is, reading back from what we know happened to understand how that end came about. We know that Lincoln won the election and that a war eventually came, so we often assume that a Republican victory inexorably led to military conflict. In fact, only a fascinating and complex series of decisions and events, some centered in Washington but many played out elsewhere, finally brought a war that rapidly escalated to a level of bloodshed far beyond what anyone at the time could imagine.

Additional Content

Honest Abe: Take the Lincoln Quiz

Timeline: The Road to War

CHAPTER TWO

Onset of War

Capt. Tate and militia troops at the U.S. Capitol in May 1861, which became a temporary barracks in the first few months of the Civil War. (Library of Congress)

Fort Sumter's fateful moment: People watched the shot arc overhead. Few grasped the ultimate meaning of what had just unfolded. They could not imagine the bloodshed to come, or the end of slavery.

By Michael E. Ruane

CHARLESTON

The Civil War began here shortly before dawn when a mortar on the starlit beach fired a single shot high into the sky over this proud and elegant city.

From Fort Sumter, the gun’s target out in the harbor, and from points ashore, people watched the shell arc overhead, the path marked by its burning fuse.

It was a fateful moment — one of the most profound in U.S. history — and in many ways the moment modern America was born.

Turn back the pages of the nation’s story, chapter by chapter, decade by decade, across the past century and a half, and you eventually get here: a place of pilgrimage today, where 700,000 people come every year to imagine what it was like.

April 12, 1861. Capt. George S. James of the South Carolina battalion of artillery, standing by his stubby gun on the beach, holding his pocket watch, waiting to open fire

In town, on Meeting Street, the bells of white-steepled St. Michael’s church strike 4 a.m. The minutes pass. At 4:30, there is the distant flash of James’s gun. A delayed boom, like a firework on the Fourth of July.

And the single shell fired by the fledgling Confederacy is lofted toward the Union garrison holed up in the brick fort. The last few seconds of the old America seem suspended for an instant before the shell explodes, changing the nation forever.

“I sprang out of bed,” wrote the diarist Mary Chesnut, who was in Charleston that night, “and on my knees . . . prayed as I never prayed before.”

From dozens of Confederate guns, shot and shell now rained on Fort Sumter, “as if an army of devils,” a soldier inside recalled later.

Few people grasped the ultimate meaning of the crisis that had just unfolded.

Some sensed it would bring war. Many did not. They still believed the South would be permitted to peacefully separate from the Union.

Only a handful realized it might mean freedom for the slaves. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass was one.

“We have no tears to shed . . . over the fall of Fort Sumter,” he wrote later. “God be praised.. . . The dealers in the bodies and souls of men . . . have exposed the throat of slavery to the keen knife of liberty.”

There was, indeed, more at stake than the “momentous issue of civil war,” as Abraham Lincoln had said in his inaugural address six weeks earlier.

Would the United States be one country or two?

How would the outcome affect history 50 years hence, a hundred years hence?

What would be the fate of the 4 million enslaved African Americans and their descendants?

Here, with townsfolk watching from rooftops, the opening act of the Civil War played out, beginning a drama that would claim the lives of 2 percent of the American population — the equivalent of 6 million people today.

The dead would include Capt. James — killed at the Battle of South Mountain, in Maryland, in 1862.

Fort Sumter is still perched on its shoal at the entrance to Charleston’s shimmering harbor as modern container ships the size of buildings glide by, headed to sea.

The city, which the late historian Bruce Catton called “the past incarnate,” feels like a polished antique jewel. In early spring, it is cooled by the ocean wind, which rustles ancient live oak trees much older than the Civil War.

On Tuesday morning, 150 years to the minute after James’s gun was fired, a somber candlelight concert is scheduled to begin in Charleston’s waterfront White Point Garden. Out in the darkened harbor, the fort will be illuminated and marked by a vertical shaft of light from inside that will split in two at 4:30 a.m.

“No fireworks, no celebration,” said Charleston lawyer Robert N. Rosen, president of the Fort Sumter-Fort Moultrie Historical Trust. “It’s probably the most tragic moment in American history.”

In Charleston, as the militant capital of slavery, secession and southernism, jubilant crowds thronged the streets that day.

“We, perhaps, may have just commenced the opening of events that may not end in our . . . generation,” Francis W. Pickens, South Carolina’s governor, said proudly from the balcony of a Charleston hotel.

Eight months later, much of the joyous city — including the hall where the secession ordinance passed — was destroyed by a wind-blown fire that left it looking like a bombed-out wasteland for the rest of the war.

In the North, the Sumter attack galvanized a divided, indifferent population for “war, vigorous war, war to the bitter end,” as Douglass put it.

Inside Sumter, its commander, Maj. Robert Anderson, 55, who had desperately sought to avoid conflict, was broken by his ordeal.

“God grant that neither I nor any other officer . . . may again be placed in a position of such mortification and humiliation,” he had written a week earlier.

It is likely that no American officer has ever been in such a political, diplomatic and military pressure cooker for so long, with so much in the balance, and so little guidance from his government.

Anderson, a native of Kentucky who was wounded during the Mexican War and detested the brutality of combat, had been ordered to take command of Union forces at Charleston five months earlier, on Nov. 15, 1860.

This was nine days after the election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery and was determined to block its extension. South Carolina, where more than half the population was enslaved, had vowed that Lincoln’s election would mean its secession from the Union.

Anderson was first sent not to Fort Sumter, which sat unfinished and unoccupied, but to a sleepy, shore-side installation called Fort Moultrie outside the city.

Moultrie had a complement of about 80 men. And when Anderson arrived Nov. 21, he realized it had gone to seed.

Fort Sumter, on the other hand, was “the key,” he wrote. Although incomplete, it had 12-foot-thick brick walls that were 50 feet high, and it sat like a blunt arrowhead pointed straight at the shipping channel into the city.

As the crisis deepened, Anderson begged Washington for reinforcements. “The clouds are threatening,” he wrote, “and the storm may break upon us at any moment.”

On Dec. 20, 1860, South Carolina delegates, meeting in Charleston, voted to secede. And the major now found himself manning an isolated outpost in a hostile country.

“If attacked in force, headed by any one not a simpleton,” he wrote a friend, there was little chance he could hold out.

But the weak lame-duck administration of President James Buchanan feared that any reinforcement might spur “a collision,” as the newspapers delicately put it.

Anderson was on his own. Menaced by the growing Confederate forces, ordered to avoid provocation, he wrote that he felt like a tethered sheep “watching the butcher” sharpen his knife.

All this time, he had been eyeing Fort Sumter. He had clearance to move his command there if attacked or if he had “tangible evidence” of a coming attack.

By Christmas, he had made his decision.

Sumter, with its 60 guns, would provide security for his command. Occupied, its strength might give the enemy pause and might even defuse the crisis, he hoped.

As night fell on Dec. 26, 1860, Anderson slipped his garrison across the channel and into Fort Sumter.

There, the next morning, after kneeling in prayer, he raised Fort Moultrie’s giant, 36-foot-long garrison flag, which he had brought with him.

Ashore, Charlestonians were enraged. They thought they had an understanding with Buchanan that no such move would be undertaken.

“We have been treacherously dealt with,” one resident wrote, according to historian David Detzer’s account of the crisis. “The die has been cast and we may now look for civil war.”

The next three months saw a steady escalation of the tension.

Anderson’s provisions dwindled as the South Carolinians ringed Sumter with weaponry and Washington fumbled.

On Jan. 9, 1861, the Star of the West, a resupply and reinforcement ship Anderson didn’t know was coming, approached the harbor and was driven off by enemy gunfire while the Sumter garrison watched, afraid of sparking hostilities.

A story is told that a Union soldier’s wife, incensed at the timidity, lunged forward to fire a gun at the rebels and was restrained by an officer. Not all historians accept the account, however.

On March 1, the newly minted Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, 43, a former student of Anderson’s at West Point, took command of the Charleston forces, with orders to seize Fort Sumter as soon as possible.

Three days later, in Washington, Lincoln was inaugurated, declaring secession “void” and promising to “hold, occupy and possess” all government property.

The collision seemed inevitable.

By April 3, Anderson was down to a few days’ worth of bread. He pleaded for orders: “I . . .most respectfully and urgently ask for instructions what I am to do as soon as my provisions are exhausted.”

The same day, there was suddenly more shooting from the rebel batteries. A mystery ship showing the stars and stripes was entering the harbor. The fort went on alert. Anderson again held his fire.

But it was another bungle. The ship was the Rhoda H. Shannon, a schooner bound from Boston to Savannah with a cargo of ice.

Her clueless skipper, Joseph Marts, got lost in the weather, thought Charleston was Savannah — 100 miles to the south — and sailed into the middle of the standoff, almost igniting the Civil War.

The tension in Charleston was now unbearable. “One’s heart is in one’s mouth all the time,” Chesnut wrote.

Yet the city was also giddy. One woman told Chesnut that she felt sorry for those who were not present.

On April 6, Lincoln, determined to make the Confederates back down or fire the first shot at the fort, sent a messenger to Pickens and Beauregard, saying that a relief expedition was going to Fort Sumter.

Anderson got a similar message and was urged to hold out. But, he was told, if capitulation seemed necessary, he was authorized to surrender.

In light of Lincoln’s ultimatum, the Confederate government ordered Beauregard to demand the fort’s evacuation and, if refused, “reduce” it.

On April 11, Beauregard sent to the fort a delegation headed by Chesnut’s husband, James, a former U.S. senator, to call for its surrender. Anderson declined but added that if not attacked, he would be “starved out” in a few days.

At 12:45 the next morning, April 12, the Confederates returned for a final parley. They wanted to know when, exactly, Anderson planned to leave.

The major was evasive and seemed to be stalling. At 3:20 a.m., James Chesnut, on behalf of Beauregard, informed Anderson that the Confederates would open fire in an hour. It took a little longer.

Capt. James’s shot signaled the general bombardment, which went on for 34 hours. More than 3,300 shells were fired from the ring of enemy batteries, and the fort suffered 600 direct hits.

Its flag was shot down and raised again. Its barracks caught fire. Its walls were cratered.

By 1 p.m. April 13, it was a smoking inferno, and, amid overtures from three Confederate delegations, Anderson gave up.

He and his command left the fort at 4 p.m. the next day after firing a long artillery salute. And on April 15, as a ship bore the garrison out of the harbor, rebels lined the shore, with their hats off.

Already, though, the war’s first fatality had occurred. During the artillery salute, a premature explosion had accidentally killed Union gunner Daniel Hough. He was buried somewhere on the parade ground, where he might still rest.

Today, guides tell visitors who take the sightseeing boat to Fort Sumter that the grave of Hough — the first of the war’s 620,000 fallen — has been lost.

And so has the anguish that once defined the name Sumter.

Charleston’s longtime mayor, Joseph P. Riley Jr., whose great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy and walked home from Virginia in 1865, said the fort has long existed at the back of the city’s mind.

Growing up, he said, you knew it was there, off in the distance, a place of tragedy and beauty.

“It was a part of our city’s history,” he said. “Rising out of our beautiful harbor . . . part of our community. You probably took it for granted. . . . You accept it as being there. It was always there.”

A few weeks before Sumter fell, Samuel Wylie Crawford, the fort’s assistant surgeon, had predicted what he believed would happen when it was assaulted.

“The first gun fired at our fort will call the country to arms,” he wrote to his brother in February. “The bugle that sounds that attack . . . will echo along the slopes of the Alleghenies amid the granite hills of the North, along the shores of the Great Lakes, and far away on the rolling prairies of the West — and the earth will shake with the tread of armed men.”

War sounded glorious--until people started dying

By Sally Jenkins

(Library of Congress)

For some reason death hardly occurred to the acrid-breathed proponents of war until a bullet actually hit them, or someone they knew. At which point they realized what a crude lead ball, fired at 950 feet per second from the muzzle of a Springfield, could do. Survivors explained the sensation as being hit by a club, followed by scalding water. But of course it was far worse than that. As the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described the trajectory of a Civil War gunshot, it could soar over the warm fields of the South and icy streams of the North and strike a woman in Boston squarely in the heart.

At first, to so many on both sides in the spring and summer of 1861, the idea of casualties was impersonal and abstract. The South Carolina senator James Chesnut promised to drink all the blood spilled as a result of secession. In Mississippi a young lawyer named William Nugent, a limpid-eyed sort who kept a violin in his saddlebag, wrote to his wife, “I feel that I would like to shoot a Yankee,” as if he were discussing quail.

It was so easy to talk war. The most intelligent and feeling people did so blithely. Even the philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked, “Sometimes gunpowder smells good.”

One of the few people who understood what carnage was being invited was William T. Sherman. “You people of the South don’t know what you are doing,” he wrote to a Louisiana friend. “This country will be drenched in blood and God only knows how it will end. . . . You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The earliest casualties were like faint flashes of lightning on the horizon, as historian Bruce Catton described them. Two of the first Union soldiers to die were volunteers from the textile mill town of Lowell, Mass.: Luther C. Ladd, 17, and Addison O. Whitney, 21. They were slain just five days after the surrender of Fort Sumter, when angry secessionist mobs set upon the 6th Massachusetts Militia with bricks and gunshots as it tried to make its way through Baltimore to Washington in response to President Lincoln’s call for troops.

The town of Lowell was so stricken that its markets and workshops closed, and municipal bells tolled all day. In Boston, Gov. John Andrew paid tribute to their biers, canopied with flags, while a brigade band played a dirge.

These first deaths were labeled “murders” by the national press. So, too, was the death a month later of Elmer Ellsworth, an ambitious young colonel who was a personal friend and former law clerk of the president.

Still, the reality of war hadn’t fully struck the populace. Just three weeks later, the death of Maj. Theodore Winthrop was deemed such a shocking occurrence that hostilities were called to a halt to collect his pocket watch.

Winthrop fell in the first major battle of the war, at Big Bethel on June 10, shot in the chest leading a charge on a Confederate line after leaping on a log and waving his sword. He was an aide to Gen. Benjamin Butler as well as a connected intellectual, a descendent of Gov. John Winthrop and a Yalie making a name for himself as a writer for Harper’s Weekly. The entire Yale student body would attend his service.

Winthrop’s family was stupefied by his demise. “So full of vitality that when the telegram came — Missing — it seemed incredible; it seemed impossible in those living, glowing June days,” wrote his sister Laura. His parents pleaded for the return of his body as well as his watch, which had been stripped by a Rebel soldier as a souvenir.

Confederate Gen. D.H. Hill courteously complied, allowing the corpse to be collected under a flag of truce. He mailed the timepiece back to Butler with a note. “I have the honor herewith to send the watch of young Winthrop, who fell while gallantly leading a party in the vain attempt to subjugate a free people.”

The delusion that there could be war without wholesale destruction was finally cured at First Manassas on July 21, 1861, with combined casualties of 900 killed and 2,700 wounded. Chesnut’s wife, Mary, was ill in bed in Richmond and awaiting word of her husband’s fate when Jefferson Davis’s wife stepped into the room to tell her the news.

“Mrs. Davis came in so softly that I did not know she was here until she leaned over me and said: ‘A great battle has been fought. . . . Your husband is all right. Wade Hampton is wounded. Colonel Johnston of the Legion killed; so are Colonel Bee and Colonel Bartow. Kirby Smith is wounded or killed. . . .’

“She went on in that desperate, calm way, to which people betake themselves under the greatest excitement . . . to read from a paper she held in her hand: ‘Dead and dying cover the field.’ ”

Francis Bartow was a favorite son of Savannah, a lawyer who personally led Georgia to secession and helped select the Confederacy’s military uniforms. He died from a bullet in the chest, after supposedly saying, “They have killed me, but, boys, never give up.” The Confederate Congress adjourned its session in “unfettered sorrow” when it heard of his death.

In Richmond, the Chesnuts attended Bartow’s funeral with a terrible sense of foreboding. “As that march came wailing up, they say Mrs. Bartow fainted,” she wrote in her journal. “The empty saddle and the led war-horse — we saw and heard it all, and now it seems we are never out of the sound of the Dead March in Saul. It comes and it comes, until I feel inclined to close my ears and scream.”

At Forts Moultrie and Sumter, 21-gun salutes were fired, hourly, from 6.a.m. to sunset, in honor of Barnard Bee, a distinguished career military officer from Charleston killed by grapeshot in the stomach. City hall was draped with funeral crepe, which made the statue of John C. Calhoun gleam unnaturally white. Dragoons escorted the bodies of Bee and two other Charleston casualties through crowds so immense that the military units could hardly turn the street corners.

Northerner Jacob William Schuckers wrote of the psychological effect of the battle: “Though the fall of Sumter had been followed by a great uprising of the Northern people, and the determination to suppress the rebellion was universal and sincere, yet there was really no serious apprehension of a prolonged and calamitous war. The shooting of Col. Ellsworth at Alexandria curiously illustrated the prevailing general incredulity. The news excited in the North an astonishment and indignation so wide-spread and profound as to indicate clearly enough how remote from the popular mind the tremendous reality of the impending conflict was. The battle of Bull Run put an end to delusion.”

After Bull Run, there was an awful sense of acceleration. Hardly a person would be untouched by the war in some way. Today, our volunteer armed forces come from less than 1 percent of the population. Back then, everyone knew someone who died in battle or succumbed to the other great killer, disease, which felled twice as many men as combat. Connecticut sent more than half its eligible males into the Union Army. An estimated 50,000 to 60,000 South Carolinians fought, and at least 13,000 died of wounds. Nor was it strictly a poor man’s fight. The 2nd Massachusetts comprised mostly college boys. Of its 16 officers lost in battle, 13 were from Harvard.

There would be no more pausing to return a pocket watch. Just flashing scenes of destruction:

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a 19-year-old Harvard dropout, awakening from a wounded stupor after the battle of Ball’s Bluff to hear a doctor murmur, “He was a beautiful boy,” and realize his friend in the next bed was dead.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the facile essayist transformed into a frantic father as he hunted the gory fields of Antietam by wagon, looking for his son like “a precious pearl.”

Wilky James, younger brother of author Henry James, wailing on a stretcher not just from his wounds but from the loss of friends, after being brought home from Fort Wagner by a stricken Cabot Russell, a neighbor who had failed to find “his own irrecoverable boy” on the field, and so had “merged the parental ache in the next nearest devotion he could find.”

The mounting grief in Charleston, where society was so closely intertwined that a diarist named Emma Holmes wrote in her journal: “Every paper contains the intelligence of the death of someone we know or feel interested in. . . . The roll of death is fearful — the cruel monster is insatiable.”

A similarly agonized minister in Boston, presiding over the coffin of Charles Russell Lowell, husband of Robert Gould Shaw’s sister Josephine, and asking the congregation, “Is it too much?”

Longfellow, hunched by the bed of his son Charley, who had run off to war without permission and been wounded, nursing him at Christmastime, and conceiving a poem:

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South
And with the sound
The carols drowned

The first casualties taught civilians the grievous difference between the idea of war and the actuality of it. But there remained one psychological impasse. Much as people at home felt the war, they couldn’t know the horror of fighting it. Only the participants could know what it was to wield bayonets like pitchforks, to feel a boot slip on a dead man’s body, and to fight so furiously past nightfall that the gun bursts seemed to bleach the dark.

Henry James didn’t serve in the war; he only observed intensely two valiant younger brothers who did and came home shattered veterans. It was James who best expressed the gap that no anniversary or commemorative can bridge. Those who fought the war demanded by others, he wrote, stand, “facing us out, quite blandly ignoring us, looking through us or straight over us at something they partake of together but that we mayn’t pretend to know.”

Sources: “This Republic of Suffering” by Drew Gilpin Faust, “The Metaphysical Club” by Louis Menand, “The Coming Fury” by Bruce Catton, “Battle Cry of Freedom” by James McPherson, “Notes of a Son and Brother” by Henry James, “Touched with Fire: (Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.),” “The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes,”“Mary Chesnut’s Civil War” and “The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase” by Jacob William Schuckers, as well as contemporary articles in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated.

A war of all heroes and no villains: The eagerness to forgive and forget has obscured the reason the nation took up arms

By Philip Kennicott

In “The Conspirator,” a new film by Robert Redford that dramatizes the trial of a woman executed for allegedly participating in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, there are some notable missing characters. Lincoln himself is seen, but not heard, and then not even seen whole: The camera focuses on his head, the target for the assassin’s bullet, and his feet, when he was laid out to die on a bed across the street from Ford’s Theatre. There are also no African American roles, except for a doorman outside an exclusive Washington club. Scrubbed from the film is the man who articulated the evolving purpose of the Civil War, first preservation of the Union and then liberation of the slaves, and the former slaves whose freedom has redefined the United States unto the present day.

The film, which opens April 15, uses the Civil War as an excuse to tell a different story, about what the director sees as the injustice of contemporary military tribunals, indefinite detention and the legal ambiguities of prosecuting the war on terror. The movie’s archfiend, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, even looks a bit like former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But Redford’s opus, which argues passionately that a Southern-sympathizing woman was unjustly convicted of involvement in the Lincoln conspiracy, asks viewers to do something that has become almost a cliche of art and literature of the Civil War: to set aside judgment on the war itself, to rise above sectional sympathies or thoughts about the causes and purpose of the war and participate in a long history of forgetting and oblivion. And this in a film by a director known for his liberal politics.

That history of oblivion has taken many forms, and it continues today. When Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) announced Confederate History Month last year, he not only forgot to mention slavery but also forgot that earlier governors hadn’t always been so forgetful. When one predecessor, James S. Gilmore III (R), issued a Confederate History Month proclamation, he acknowledged that “the practice of slavery was an affront to man’s natural dignity, deprived African-Americans of their God-given inalienable rights, degraded the human spirit and is abhorred and condemned by Virginians, and likewise that had there been no slavery there would have been no war.”

McDonnell apologized, but the damage was done, because for a state governor to forget something as elemental as the manifest cause of the Civil War isn’t like forgetting one’s keys, or blanking on the name of a book you once read. In the symbolic landscape of Civil War memory, selective amnesia is an act of rebellion, a rear-guard repetition of ritualistic forgetting that keeps the war alive in all its ambiguity, distorted meaning and misapprehension.

Memory and revisionism

A passion for reconciliation (often premature) and selective forgetting have gone hand in hand, even from before the end of the war. Last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York displayed a painting called “The Consecration” by George Cochran Lambdin, part of the exhibition “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life.” For most of Lambdin’s career, the popular and successful Philadelphia artist painted trivia, little girls with dolls, dogs and kitties, and some decorative but insignificant images of flowers. But during the Civil War, he rose from polished mediocrity to paint several strikingly powerful images, including “The Consecration,” which shows a woman in gray kissing the sword of a handsome young Union soldier. The standard reading is one of farewell, a maiden reenacting an ancient gesture of fidelity to her beloved as he heads off to war.

Margaret C. Conrads, who wrote about the painting in the exhibition catalogue, suggests that there may be more going on, however. With its woman in gray and soldier in blue, it was, perhaps, also an image of potential reconciliation between North and South. “The reconciliation of the two sides was commonly equated with the institution of marriage, in which the North was the husband and the South the wife.” If Conrad’s reading is plausible, then Lambdin was already participating in an industry of reconciliation even before the war was over.

Reconstruction blunted the language of reconciliation for a decade, but it, too, fell victim to what historian Eric Foner has called “the rush to forget.” By 1877, when a former Confederate brigadier general spoke to an audience in New York, the war and its causes had been subjected to radical revisionism, and it was almost entirely a revisionism that favored the Southern view of things. Roger A. Pryor, who in the years before the Civil War was a representative from Virginia and a passionate advocate of secession, appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to deliver a speech titled “The Union: A Plea for Reconciliation.” His argument in favor of new comity between the North and South placed the blame for the war on mid-level bureaucrats and military leaders, absolved soldiers on both sides from any blame for the war and transferred the question of slavery from man to God: “No, people of the North, impartial history will record that slavery fell not by any effort of man’s will but by the immediate intervention and act of the Almighty himself.” If the war brought forth atrocities or other stains upon the national conscience, it “behooves both [sides] to drop the veil of oblivion” on them.

Even in 1877, you can hear a strategy take form: The heroism of the common soldier compelled speakers to rhetorical circumspection. In 1913, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, President Woodrow Wilson gave a speech that included a common trope of forgetting, and one that echoed in perverse ways Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “In their presence,” Wilson said of the dead buried around him, “it were an impertinence to discourse upon how the battle went, how it ended, what it signified.”

It was, paradoxically, white America’s duty to forget and remember at the same time, which led to the odd coexistence of a language of reconciliation and an industry of monument-making that kept the war alive. By the time Wilson, the first president elected from the South since the war, gave his Gettysburg speech, Southern states, primarily led by women’s Confederate groups, were in the middle of a frenzied campaign to clutter the landscape with memorial statuary in celebration of the humble foot soldier. Between 1900 and 1913, by one accounting, the South was unveiling Civil War statues at twice the rate of the North. And these statues had become more, rather than less, bellicose in posture, with a once popular image of a soldier at “parade rest” yielding to more aggressive and animated statues, depicting troops with guns at the ready.

Monument makers and other cultural producers were also memorializing a sentimentalized view of reconciliation between African Americans and whites, a vision that banished any trace of the reality of relations between the races. Paralleling the literary efforts of popular hack writers who wrote nostalgic “plantation” stories in the 1880s and ’90s, there was a proposal in the 1920s for a monument to “the black mammy” in Washington. It wasn’t built, but other monuments to “faithful slaves” were, including one underwritten by a Confederate veteran, Samuel White, in Fort Mill, S.C. In his history of post-war iconography, author Kirk Savage describes the unveiling, in 1896: “Ex-slaves pulled the cord to unveil the shaft, spoke in gratitude to Captain White, and sang an ‘old plantation song.’ ” African Americans were often enlisted in the pageantry of nostalgia for an era of white dominance, including at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the state of Virginia erected a full-scale reproduction of Mount Vernon and hired black actors to “staff” it. And just last year, a group near Charlotte petitioned the Union County commission to install a memorial plaque to honor slaves who may have fought (supposedly and willingly) for the Confederacy, although the county’s historic preservation commission rejected the request.

Reconciliation images, in particular, often seemed designed, consciously or not, to perpetuate antagonism. If it seems farfetched to consider Lambdin’s “The Consecration” as a reconciliation image — with its suggestion of wifely Southern submission to the masculine North — consider a novel by John William De Forest called “Miss Ravenel’s Conversion,” finished in 1865. It follows the courtship of a proper Southern belle from New Orleans by two Northern men. “Portraying the South as a woman to be courted and won to loyalty became a common figure in postwar fiction,” writes historian Reid Mitchell in “The Vacant Chair.” But could any figure be more insulting to the South than one that diminished its masculinity?

A gesture from a former slave

Lost in this strange history were genuine acts of reconciliation, encounters that look like what students of contemporary “truth and reconciliation” processes would recognize as authentic acts of healing. Paramount among these is one that has an operatic grandeur but little currency in American memory. In 1877, the abolitionist and civil rights leader Frederick Douglass, who had been born into slavery, visited the man who had once owned him. By the time Douglass returned to St. Michaels, Md., the “scene of some of my saddest experiences of slave life,” he had served as an ambassador to Haiti and as a U.S. Marshal, and yet he accepted an invitation from a man who, Douglass said, “had subjected me to his will, made property of my body and soul, reduced me to a chattel, hired me out to a noted slave breaker to be worked like a beast and flogged into submission.”

Miraculously, Douglass held no personal grudge toward Captain Auld. He even considered “the conditions favorable for remembrance of all his good deeds, and generous extenuation of all his evil ones.” The two men, one a lion of abolition, the other an octogenarian close to death, met, shook hands and talked over the past. Douglass apologized for making a mistake in his memoirs that reflected poorly on the old man, and the former slave owner said of Douglass’s escape to the North: “Frederick, I always knew you were too smart to be a slave, and had I been in your place I should have done as you did.”

Douglass was mocked for making the gesture, even by allies in the abolition and civil rights movement. But it’s one of the rare moments in the history of Civil War memory in which one senses a spontaneous, honest reflection upon the past, and a movement toward reconciliation that isn’t formulaic or, worse, a thinly veiled furthering of antagonism. The memory of the event was entirely in Douglass’s control, committed to the public record by one of the most eloquent men of his age. But it was a memory of reconciliation from an African American man, and African Americans were being systematically excluded from the public process of memory. Which is why, perhaps, it has been mostly forgotten.

West Virginia: The state that said no

By Preston Williams

West Virginia is the only state formed because of the Civil War. Just as North battled South in the country, West confronted East in Virginia. The two regions formed a single state in name, but not in geography, economy, climate, descent of its residents or way of life.

Faced with what they considered an overbearing and neglectful state government, and after years of simmering resentment toward their eastern neighbors, citizens in the mountainous western regions of Virginia refused to take part in secession — “the crowning act of infamy,” thundered one politician from that part of the state. They stood up for the Union and declared themselves independent.

Did you know all that?

Neither did I, and I grew up there.

Oh, I knew the basic facts, taught in my state history class in eighth grade. What didn’t register was the revolutionary spirit it took to separate from a state that had produced seven presidents. Or the questionable legality of West Virginia’s origins. Or the handwringing Virginia’s split caused President Lincoln (“the division of a State is dreaded as a precedent”). All these were curiously and unfortunately underplayed during my 22 years in the state sometimes referred to as “the child of the rebellion.”

“It requires stout hearts to execute this purpose; it requires men of courage — of unfaltering determination,” declared Arthur Boreman, president of the convention that oversaw the formation of the new state and and also West Virginia’s first governor (and, I learned many years later, the man after whom my freshman dorm at West Virginia University was named).

If they did not spurn the Old Dominion, “the soil upon which we stand will be no longer the soil of the United States,” warned another separatist.

All this, of course, is in the history books. The problem for me, and I would imagine for generations of West Virginians, was that that’s where it remained: in books, and not planted in our malleable psyches by family members or our state history teachers.

Instead, we grappled with hillbilly stereotypes.

“I don’t think you’d find too many people who think about [our history] much in West Virginia,” state archivist Joe Geiger said. “I don’t know that everyone’s aware of the process that we went through.”

Hunting role models

Not only was I born in West Virginia, but I was also named for my parents’ home county, Preston. Throughout my youth, I was eager to discover Mountain State success stories. (College athletes — those four-year mercenaries from Florida or New Jersey who slipped on WVU uniforms — didn’t count. I was looking for true natives.)

I scanned the backs of baseball cards for West Virginia birthplaces (Chicago Cubs catcher Steve Swisher is from Parkersburg!) and was pleased to find out that “Hollywood Squares” host Peter Marshall hailed from Huntington. Such things should not have mattered all that much, but they did. Imagine my deep disappointment when I discovered that one of my favorite bands at the time, AC/DC, was not screeching “West Virginia brandy” in the tune “Have a Drink On Me” but “whiskey, gin and brandy.” That was a downer.

Now, with the Civil War sesquicentennial ramping up, I realize that I shouldn’t have needed to work so hard to justify being proud of my home state.

The audacious — some would say illegal — manner in which West Virginia went its own way was not emphasized during my upbringing. It should have been then, and it should be now. For one thing, it’s a way to immunize the state’s young citizens against the unflattering West Virginia stereotypes awaiting them, particularly if they move away.

Since the 35th state was formed, we’ve largely let outsiders, folks who don’t know Charleston from Charles Town, define us. Their rube jokes and unrelenting focus on the state’s most impoverished and uneducated has somehow trumped its knee-buckling beauty, neighborly people and singular history.

Nonnatives have no particular reason to know the state’s origin, but those within her borders should.

“The roots of that period are basically indistinguishable for most West Virginians, and that’s sad,” said Dennis Frye, chief historian at Harpers Ferry National State Park, site of abolitionist John Brown’s raid on a U.S. arsenal, a precursor to the start of the Civil War. “They were a state born of conviction. They were a state born for advocating for and defending the United States of America rather than the seceded states of America. Western Virginians were very committed to the Union in a state that left the Union.

“When secession occurred, Western Virginians felt that they were being told that this is what you’ve got to do, and they rebelled against that. That’s another part of West Virginia’s soul . . . that there is a rebellious nature to them and they exhibited that very, very much with respect to the Civil War. It’s really fascinating how they were willing to declare their own declaration of independence.”

Secession rumblings began long before the Civil War. Rugged Western Virginia was settled largely by Germans and Scotch-Irish. The mountains both isolated them and made them independent. Their communities differed sharply from the more refined eastern part of the state, with its population mostly of English descent.

In the state capital of Richmond, the slave-dependent plantation owners of the eastern territory had far more clout than the small farmers in the mountains. Discord mounted over slavery, voting requirements, allocation of funds and taxation — not to mention respect. A symbolic difference: About 80 percent of West Virginia’s streams flow west to the Mississippi River, not east to the Chesapeake Bay as in Virginia.

“The East has always looked upon that portion of the State west of the mountains, as a sort of outside appendage,” Boreman would later say in his inauguration address as governor. “The unfairness and inequality of legislation is manifest on every page of the statute book.”

As historian Frye says today, “The Civil War was not the cause of the formation of West Virginia. It was the opportunity. They looked at that as a way to get away from what they thought were the shackles of the rest of the state and the monopoly and attitude of Richmond.”

After Virginia voted to secede from the Union, Western Virginia delegates, two-thirds of whom had voted against secession, gathered in Clarksburg and later Wheeling and decided to carve out their own territory and create “a new Virginia.”

“People of North Western Virginia, why should we thus permit ourselves to be tyrannized over, and made slaves of, by the haughty arrogance and wicked machinations of would-be Eastern Despots,” asked a committee of Western Virginia politicians in an open letter in the Kingwood Chronicle in May of 1861. “Are we submissionists, craven cowards, who will yield to daring ambition….The Union under the flag of our common country….causes our bosoms to glow with patriotic heat, and our hearts to swell with honest love of country.”

One problem: The U.S. Constitution does not allow a new state to be formed without the consent of the original state.

With Virginia having left the Union, Western Virginia delegates formed a Reorganized Government of Virginia, which was recognized by President Lincoln as the official government of Virginia. That government granted itself permission to form the state of West Virginia. Lincoln reluctantly approved statehood, which became official on June 20, 1863.

“It is said the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only because it is our secession,” stated Lincoln, whose cabinet was split on the issue. “Well, if we can call it by that name, there is still difference enough between secession against the Constitution, and secession in favor of the Constitution.”

That hillbilly image

How did this rich history get buried?

The state later became known for labor strife, natural resources and economic struggles, none of which relates to the Civil War era. And for the waves of immigrants who settled in West Virginia in the early 1900s, the state’s rogue origins were inconsequential. Another reason might be divided loyalties, because Western Virginia provided troops to both the Union and Confederate forces. (I come from Union territory, but it’s also the birthplace of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a statue of whom graces the plaza of the Harrison County Courthouse.)

During my lifetime, it has been defensiveness, not the state’s history, that has bound West Virginians. Put it this way: When I was a kid, a state politician named Manchin was railing against hillbilly portrayals of West Virginians on “Love Boat” and a CBS movie called “Angel City.” In recent years, another state politician named Manchin was railing against hillbilly portrayals of West Virginians in a casting call for a horror movie.

Dick Cheney in 2008 made an inbreeding joke to chuckling reporters at the National Press Club (“So we had Cheneys on both sides of the family, and we don’t even live in West Virginia”). The year before, the WVU student paper denounced nationally syndicated radio host Jim Bohannon’s observation that there’s nothing to do in Morgantown but “mine coal and molest livestock.”

If outsiders want to go for the cheap, ill-informed yuk, or are unaware the state even exists, that’s their business. I for one am hopeful that the current West Virginia students will be more informed about their state heritage than I was. The state’s 150th anniversary in 2013 should spur interest, too.

“Eyes will be open to some of this positive history, and that will be their perspective from then on,” said John Lilly, editor of Goldenseal, a magazine that celebrates the state’s traditions.

A time to celebrate

West Virginians, particularly transplanted ones, are a wistful lot. Our eyes turn misty even before John Denver completes the first verse in the unofficial state anthem “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

A joke we tell on ourselves: How many West Virginians does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to change the bulb, and two to sit around and talk about how much they miss the old one.

In this case, however, a look back might just result in a step forward. Rise up, West Virginians, and embrace the true meaning of state motto “Mountaineers Are Always Free.” Celebrate that rebellious birth.

Not just for the sesquicentennial, but forevermore.

Hunting for the Confederacy in D.C.

By David Montgomery

The ladies sounded like Scarlett O’Hara and identified themselves on formal occasions by their husbands’ first and last names. The gentlemen nursed grudges and missing limbs. Senators and Cabinet secretaries accepted their flowery invitations and joined gallant toasts to the memory of the Lost Cause.

A century ago, an evening at the rowhouse later nicknamed the “Confederate Embassy” was as exclusive as any on Embassy Row.

The Queen Anne-style brownstone at 1322 Vermont Avenue NW in Logan Circle was one of the more counterintuitive addresses in Washington. From 1908 to 1997, Confederate Memorial Hall stood as a refuge for Rebel veterans and their descendants, an unlikely homage to Southern culture flourishing in the heart of the Yankee capital.

The hall was built as a private residence in 1889 and purchased by an umbrella group called the Confederate Memorial Association in 1908, according to city planning and deed records. In the early years, it was referred to as a Confederate “home,” and by some accounts, veterans of the war lived there. A period photo shows men in uniforms lined up out front.

What is certain is that veterans groups, sons and daughters groups, Dixie charities and Southern state societies held meetings and lectures, teas and balls there. The doings were chronicled in newspaper society pages. For a time, the hall was a pillar of Washington’s white social establishment.

It was situated ironically down the avenue from the statue of John A. Logan, the Union general who later led the main Union veterans group. It was two doors away from the house where Mary McLeod Bethune once lived and where she first headquartered the National Council of Negro Women.

Now the hall is defunct, transformed into a private residence once again by an owner with no connection to Confederate nostalgia.

Gone with the wind, it symbolized an interlude in Washington’s social history, after Reconstruction and before the civil rights era, when it became possible and politically correct for the capital of the victorious Union to memorialize — both officially and socially — the vanquished South.

“This was all from the early 20th-century period of reconciliation, let bygones be bygones,” says Gary Scott, regional historian for the National Capital Region of the National Park Service. “Left out were African Americans. It was a reconciliation of the white South and the white North.”

For many years after the Civil War, decorating the graves of Confederate dead in Arlington National Cemetery had been forbidden. In Washington, no bronze likenesses of Southern heroes were granted admission to the pantheon of Northern generals on horses in prominent plazas.

Gradually, attitudes changed. To pick up the Confederate trail today in Washington, you have to know where to look. The principal examples date from that pre-World War II period when Confederate Memorial Hall and its backers were at their social and political peak.

Memorializing Confederates started bashfully, in 1901, with the unveiling of the only outdoor statue in Washington depicting a Confederate general. He was Albert Pike, who organized Indians to fight the Yankees. He also wrote alternative lyrics to the tune of “Dixie” to rally Rebel spirits.

His status as a Confederate commander and lyricist wasn’t the chief reason he earned a statue in Judiciary Square. This was early in the reconciliation period, and his Southern allegiance appears to have been nothing to brag about for members of the Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Masons, which erected the statue. (After the war, Pike went on to become a pivotal Masonic leader.)

The statue on D Street between Third and Fourth streets NW depicts Pike in civilian dress, holding a book. His attributes are listed on the base of the statue — “Philosopher, Jurist, Orator, Author, Poet.” On one side, difficult to see, is “Soldier.”

“We’re not embarrassed in the least that he was a Confederate general,” says S. Brent Morris, managing editor of the Scottish Rite Journal in Washington, who is quick to add exculpatory facts, such as Pike’s stand against secession before siding with the South.

“Even in 1901, I don’t think the United States Congress would have approved honoring a Confederate general, so he was honored for all his other accomplishments,” Morris says.

The following year, the landmark McMillan Commission proposed a Memorial Bridge to symbolically link North and South as part of its vision for monumental Washington. The bridge would run on a line between the projected Lincoln Memorial and the former Robert E. Lee mansion in Arlington.

Soon Congress began welcoming statues of Confederate soldiers and statesmen into the Capitol itself. They came as gifts to the National Statuary Hall Collection. Each state could contribute two. Several Southern states took the opportunity to introduce likenesses of men who once wished to march on the Capitol.

The first, in 1908, courtesy of Alabama, was a statue of Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry, who was a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army, according to the Architect of the Capitol’s notes on the collection.

The most famous is the bronze of Robert E. Lee, donated by Virginia in 1909.

At least half a dozen other Confederate statues in the Capitol include Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States (Mississippi); Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Confederate vice president (Georgia); and Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, one of Lee’s favorite cavalry commanders (Alabama).

As these few institutional acknowledgments of Confederate honor established themselves, the social celebrations at Confederate Memorial Hall continued apace.

In 1910, President Taft’s secretary of war, Jacob Dickinson, visited the hall for a social “smoker” given by the vets, where he reminisced about his service in the Confederate Army. In 1912, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy attended receptions at the hall after hearing Taft praise the “common heritage of courage” of North and South during a speech to their annual convention. In 1914, former Texas Sen. Joseph Bailey warned in a speech at the hall that “if colored men get the vote and the whites are divided, our civilization will be in peril.”

Across town, construction of the Washington National Cathedral was proceeding, and descendants of the rebellion sought inclusion. In the 1930s, the United Daughters of the Confederacy donated half the money for the Lee-Jackson Bay. The stained glass windows depict the lives of Robert E. Lee and Gen. Stonewall Jackson. Confederate flag motifs appear in the colored glass.

“It is unusual that it is here, and yet it is a very important part of American history,” says Anne Harman, manager of visitor programs at the cathedral.

The social whirl of Confederate Memorial Hall involved fundraising, too — both for upkeep of the historic house and for other charitable works. While smaller affairs were held in the hall, the annual ball at the Willard Hotel to support the hall was a highlight of the social season.

In 1938, the ball’s patrons included Speaker of the House and Mrs. William Bankhead, Rep. and Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Sen. Harry F. Byrd, Rep. Sam Rayburn, Sen. and Mrs. Claude Pepper.

The Lee-Jackson Bay was dedicated in 1953, the year before the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Few, if any, more significant memorials to the Confederacy or its heroes were undertaken in Washington.

By the 1960s, Confederate Memorial Hall was losing its momentum, too. The pulse of social Washington beat elsewhere. It was becoming increasingly controversial, if not career-ending, for power-Washington figures to identify with the Confederacy.

The hall had a brief revival as a museum and library in the 1980s, displaying minor artifacts and artworks tied to the South. A nasty and protracted legal battle for control of the hall broke out between the president of the Confederate Memorial Association, John Edward Hurley, and representatives of sons and daughters chapters. When the place was finally sold in 1997 — to pay legal fees, Hurley said at the time — it was a wreck. (Hurley said he was unavailable to be interviewed for this story.)

While tributes to the Confederacy are scarce, Washington can be grateful for statues that did not get built, says Jane Freundel Levey, director of heritage programs at Cultural Tourism D.C. In 1923, Southern society ladies in town were raising money for a “Mammy” memorial statue, and the Senate passed a resolution in support. The proposed design showed an African American nanny holding a white baby while her own children compete for her attention.

Just outside the capital, of course, are a multitude of monuments to Confederate heroism — the statue of a Confederate cavalry private in Rockville; the statue of Lee erected by a neighbor of the Antietam battlefield; the Jefferson Davis Highway in Alexandria, where there also is a statue of a Confederate private.

The most important, with a direct connection to the federal capital, is the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. President Wilson unveiled the 32-foot-tall sculpture in 1914.

Each year on or near Davis’s birthday, June 3, sons and daughters groups hold memorial ceremonies at the monument.

Likewise, the local United Daughters division sponsors an annual commemoration before Lee’s statue in the Capitol on or near his birthday, January 19.

“You don’t want people telling you who you are, you want to know who you are, who went before you,” says Lloyce West, a past president of the Washington division of the United Daughters, who also is a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. “I think all of our ancestors need to have someone remembering them.”

Staff researchers Alice Crites and Eddy Palanzo contributed to this report.

Alexandria: A city invaded, a city spared

By Brady Dennis

When Virginians voted overwhelmingly to secede from the Union on May 23, 1861, the inhabitants of Alexandria — the ones who had not yet fled, leaving it a virtual ghost town — knew that life soon would change.

It changed quickly.

At dawn the next morning, thousands of federal troops poured in from Washington to seize the once-tranquil city, perched on the banks of the Potomac at a literal crossroads between North and South. They came by steamboat down the river. They marched across the Aqueduct (where the Key Bridge now stands) and Long Bridge (now the 14th Street Bridge), working their way south toward Alexandria.

One of the Union officers invading that morning, Col. Elmer Ellsworth, rushed to the top of the Marshall House hotel to remove the giant Confederate flag waving from its roof.

As he descended the stairs, flag in hand, Ellsworth encountered the hotel’s proprietor, James Jackson, a loyal Southerner who had vowed the flag would come down only over his dead body. Jackson killed Ellsworth with a shotgun blast, only to be shot dead moments later by one of Ellsworth’s men, making good on his grim promise.

“News of their fates rocketed throughout the North and the South, and they were seen as exemplars of boldness and bravery in war,” author Charles P. Poland Jr. wrote in “The Glories of War: Small Battles and Early Heroes of 1861.” “They became a rallying point, the martyred sacrifices of war. Their fate was a prelude of things to come.”

The incident put the city in the national spotlight.

“This is a sad day for Alexandria, and whatever may be the issue of this contest, this unprecedented move upon the part of a Republican President will ever linger in the minds of citizens while memory lasts,” Henry B. Whittington, a clerk for a local mercantile business and a Southern sympathizer, wrote in his diary that day. “The usurpations of power indicated by this movement causes the hearts of freemen to shrink with dread from the contemplation of the future of our beloved country.”

Before the war, Alexandria was a quaint and quiet town marked by brick sidewalks, dignified church steeples and stately Georgian residences. In the wooden pews at Christ Church off N. Washington Street, both George Washington and Robert E. Lee had worshiped.

The city had excellent schools and a respectable newspaper, the Alexandria Gazette, edited by Edgar Snowden. The rail lines coming into the city and its spot on the Potomac River made Alexandria a bustling commercial artery, as well as one of the main slave-trading centers in the upper South, as evidenced by the bleak slave pens that stood along Duke Street.

Elsewhere in the city, the Mount Vernon Cotton Manufacturing Co. hummed on Washington Street. The Pioneer Flour Mill joined other local factories and foundries, even a brewery.

“Alexandria was a mid-size city of its day, a prosperous, river port city,” said James Barber, an historian at the National Portrait Gallery and author of “Alexandria in the Civil War.”

The war brought swift transformation.

“The city quickly lost its placid colonial character and became an active federal supply depot, convalescent center and campground,” wrote George Kundahl in his book “Alexandria Goes to War.” “A labyrinth of wharves, quartermaster storehouses, commissaries, marshalling yards, and railroad shops blanketed the area. Churches, public buildings and abandoned mansions were converted into hospitals, prisons and headquarters.”

Many Alexandrians had fled before the conflict began. Those who remained found themselves living under martial law, virtual captives in a city that was now surrounded by a smattering of Union forts.

Mail service came to a halt. Citizens had to have a pass to leave. Those who wanted to run a business had to obtain a proper license, which meant taking an oath of allegiance to the federal government. Churches that agreed to say a prayer for the president of the United States during their services were allowed to continue unimpeded; those that refused often were seized and put to use as hospitals. The Alexandrian men away at war, most of them part of the Confederacy’s 17th Virginia Infantry, could not return home on furloughs for the duration of the war.

“Alexandria is filled with ruined people; they walk as strangers through their ancient streets, and their property is no longer theirs to possess,” George Alfred Townsend, a correspondent for the New York Herald, wrote in 1863, adding that it “has become essentially a military city. Its streets, its docks, its warehouses, its dwellings, and its suburbs have been absorbed to the thousand uses of war.”

Among those uses were “the appetites and needs of these soldiers,” said Barber, the Smithsonian historian. “All of a sudden you see oyster houses and saloons. Houses of ill repute suddenly begin turning up.”

As the war wound down, Alexandria had begun to regain its footing. Its population ballooned to nearly 17,000 residents, though many of its new inhabitants were Northerners and free blacks.

The headaches and heartaches of its four-year occupation came with at least one silver lining: Alexandria never saw a day of combat. The city remained largely intact, as if preserved in amber.

“It was ironically fortunate in many ways,” Barber said. “Union occupation had a lot to do with preserving [Alexandria]. . . . It remained the quaint, 18th-century early Federal period town that is still there.”

Despite the chain stores, traffic lights and other reminders of modern life, the soul and the structure of the old town remain.

At the corner of Pitt and King streets, the Hotel Monaco stands on the site of the Marshall House hotel. A plaque honors James Jackson as “the first martyr to the cause of Southern independence.”

Outside Christ Church, the remains of 34 Confederate soldiers, prisoners of war who died during the federal occupation, lie in a communal grave. Union troops who perished mostly from disease lie less than a mile away at Alexandria National Cemetery. And off Washington Street sits the site of the Freedman’s Cemetery, the final resting place of many former slaves who came from across the South during the war, seeking refuge.

Their graves serve as a reminder of Alexandria’s role as a unique site in the Civil War — a place where Northerners and Southerners coexisted in relative peace; a place that evolved and adapted as the nation around it changed; a place where, even today, the past remains on display, in nearly every churchyard and down nearly every brick-lined street spared by occupation.

Cast of Characters: At the onset of war

By Michael E. Ruane

Winfield Scott, 74, a lieutenant general, was commander of the U.S. Army in 1861. A veteran of the War of 1812 (during which he was a prisoner of war) and the Mexican-American War, he was a national hero. But that April, he was so infirm and, at 300 pounds, so overweight that he couldn’t ride a horse. After Fort Sumter fell, Scott wanted his accomplished subordinate, Robert E. Lee, to command the gathering U.S. forces. When the future Confederate general declined, Scott told him, “Lee, you have made the greatest mistake of your life.”

Abner Doubleday, 43, was a Union artillery captain and second in command at Fort Sumter. His guns were the first to reply to the Confederate bombardment. Historians say the later belief that he invented baseball is a myth. Doubleday, whose grandfather served at Bunker Hill, became a general, fought at Antietam and Gettysburg, and rode on the train when Lincoln traveled to deliver the Gettysburg address.

William Howard Russell, 41, the legendary war correspondent of the Times of London, had just passed through Washington. There, he met Abraham Lincoln, who struck him as a man willing to blend “justice with mercy.” Russell, who had covered the Crimean War in the 1850s, was in Norfolk, Va., headed for Charleston, S.C., when Fort Sumter was surrendered. It was a Sunday, he wrote, and people hurried from their churches, saying, “The Yankees are whipped.”

Mary Boykin Chesnut, 38, was the wife of South Carolina’s James Chesnut Jr., the first southern U.S. senator to resign as secession neared. Her famous diary, later hailed as a literary masterpiece, recorded in epic detail the life and death of the Confederacy. She watched the Fort Sumter attack from one of Charleston’s rooftops, where slaves had set up pre-dawn picnics for their masters and where, she recorded, there were prayers from the women and “imprecations” from the men.

Edmund Ruffin, 67, the white-haired, “fire-eating” Virginia secessionist, was in Charleston to be near the action and “commit a little treason.” He later claimed, erroneously, to have fired the first shot at Fort Sumter. Four years later, with the Confederacy in ruins, he draped himself in a Confederate flag and shot himself in the head, declaring his “unmitigated hatred . . . [of] the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race.”

P.G.T. Beauregard, 43, the Louisiana-born Confederate general in charge at Charleston, had been one of Sumter commander Robert Anderson’s best students when the Union officer was an artillery instructor at West Point. Beauregard had been superintendent at West Point for a few days in late January 1861; he was relieved for his secessionist views. Exotic and dashing, he was said to dye his hair to maintain his looks. On April 11, he demanded the fort’s evacuation. Anderson declined. The bombardment, and the Civil War, began the next day.

Abraham Lincoln, 52, whose election in November 1860 sparked South Carolina’s secession that December, was six weeks into his presidency. In his March 4 inaugural address, he told the South, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen . . . is the momentous issue of civil war.” He then ordered a relief expedition to Fort Sumter and informed South Carolina that it was coming. After the attack on the fort, his call for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion brought the secession of four more states and four years of bloody conflict.

Louis T. Wigfall, 44, the hot-headed South Carolina native, ardent secessionist and former U.S. senator from Texas, was also in Charleston, where he swaggered around wearing a red sash and sword. An unofficial aide to Beauregard, he took a boat to Fort Sumter amid the bombardment. There he announced, “I am Colonel Wigfall,” and, with no authorization, urged its surrender. Confusion ensued when an official Confederate delegation showed up and also demanded surrender. But the fort was ready to capitulate. Wigfall returned to shore, where he waved his hat and shouted from his boat, “Sumter is ours!”

Mary Todd Lincoln, 42, was the president’s wife. Reared in Kentucky, she had relatives in the Confederate army but was devoted to her husband. Refined, high-strung and needy, she would become one of Washington’s most tragic and fragile figures, losing first a son, then her husband and, at times, her mind during her four-year sojourn in the White House.

Adam J. Slemmer, 43, was the now almost-forgotten U.S. Army lieutenant in command of Fort Pickens, Fla., which was also menaced by the Confederates in 1861. The diminutive, bespectacled Pennsylvanian took an aggressive stand against the enemy, rejecting surrender demands and almost daring the rebels to attack. The fort remained in Union hands throughout the war.

By attempting to resupply Fort Sumter, did President Lincoln deliberately provoke the war?

Lonnie Bunch
Founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture

The notion that Abraham Lincoln purposely provoked the Civil War by attempting to resupply Fort Sumter in April 1861 became a cornerstone of the reinterpretation of the Civil War after the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865. Most notably, the memoirs of the president and vice president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens, argued that Lincoln wanted war and maneuvered the Confederacy into a position where it had no choice but to attack the garrison commanded by Maj. Robert Anderson.

How Lincoln responded to the first crisis of his administration reveals a great deal about the newly inaugurated president’s political skills and the complex issues he faced during the secession crisis. One of Lincoln’s aims was to prevent the Border States from leaving the Union. He knew that if the Union undertook military action, it would be seen as the aggressor and as the initiator of a war between the states. Lincoln also worried that England or France might recognize the nascent Confederacy, especially if it was attacked by Northern forces. While Lincoln hoped to avoid war, he knew that if it came, it would be better for the Union to be seen as responding to Southern aggression.

As Lincoln realized the growing need to resupply the soldiers at Fort Sumter, he faced several choices. He could abandon the fort, but that would give legitimacy to the Southern states’ claim that they were no longer part of the Union. Or he could use a naval force to resupply the fort, but this could be used to bolster the claim of “Northern aggression.” Lincoln announced that he would resupply the fort using a naval convoy. While Jefferson Davis also wanted to avoid being seen as the aggressor, orders were issued to commence a bombardment on the fort on April 12. After suffering through the artillery barrage for 34 hours, Anderson surrendered the fort on April 14.

And the war came. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to crush the rebellion. Although several states, including Virginia, joined the ranks of the Confederacy, key Border States did not. While Lincoln did not provoke the war, he shrewdly took advantage of the situation and ensured that the South fired the first shots of the Civil War.

Craig Symonds
Professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy

No. From the first full day of his presidency, Lincoln’s policy was to prevent a war with the seceded states, not to start one. He believed that many Southerners in those states, perhaps even a majority, had been stampeded into secession by the heat of the moment, and that a policy of firmness and restraint might allow time for cooler heads to prevail.

His decision to resupply Fort Sumter was a pragmatic one. Maj. Robert Anderson had reported that he could not feed his dependents beyond April 15, and Lincoln, in an obvious reference to that fort, had pledged in his inaugural address to “hold, occupy, and possess” government property in the seceded States. Lincoln notified South Carolina’s governor, Francis Pickens, of the resupply effort because Secretary of State William H. Seward had promised (on his own authority) that the government would not reinforce Fort Sumter without prior notification.

It is impossible to know exactly what Lincoln thought such a notification would achieve. It is tempting after the fact to conclude that this was Lincoln’s masterstroke - a deliberate ploy to compel the rebel leaders to make a belligerent decision and thereby shoulder the burden of having starting hostilities. To be sure, Lincoln’s note to Pickens might provoke the secessionists to act and, in acting, propel the nation into war. But Lincoln could not count on such a response. More likely, the new president was uncertain what the Southern reaction would be and, as a new president facing an unprecedented crisis, was simply feeling his way. If the supplies could be safely delivered without incident, it would at least prolong the crisis and allow more time to find a peaceful solution. If local authorities resisted, it would cast the secessionists in the role of aggressors. Either way, it was better than letting Anderson’s men starve or abjectly withdrawing them from their post under threat.

So Lincoln sent the relief expedition on its way and notified Pickens that it was en route.In doing so, he put the ball in his opponents’ court and left the decision in their hands. Pickens kicked the decision upstairs, and in the end, it was Confederate President Jefferson Davis who decided to open fire on the fort before the resupply vessels could arrive. He did so mainly because he feared looking weak more than he feared civil war. It was a disastrous decision.

Brag Bowling
Director of the Stephen D. Lee Institute, an educational group established by the Sons of Confederate Veterans

On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln in his inaugural address boldly stated that he would use federal power only to “hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and collect duties and imports.” He publicly had told the world that he would take a military course of action to hold onto forts such as Fort Sumter. Considering the heated atmosphere of the times, the people of the South viewed his saber- rattling speech as a prelude to war. Confronted with massive Southern secession, Lincoln needed time to organize and plan. Lincoln felt that it was too late to bring the seceding states back into the Union peacefully. Despite a split vote and the opposition of his ranking general, Winfield Scott, he chose the military option. What resulted was the cleverest but most deceitful con game in American history, literally forcing the Confederacy to fire the first shot of the Civil War.

In March, 1861, a group of Southern commissioners went to Washington to negotiate a peaceful settlement of all questions arising from secession, to pay for federal property and to arrange for the removal of the garrison in Charleston Harbor. Lincoln refused to meet with them. He employed Secretary of State William H. Seward to obfuscate the situation by maintaining that cooler heads would prevail, that Fort Sumter would be abandoned and that he was working towards a peaceful reconstruction of the Union. Seward continued the deception until April 7, 1861.

On April 8, 1861, President Lincoln sent a letter to South Carolina Gov. Francis Pickens stating that he would resupply Fort Sumter, peacefully or, if necessary, by force. Lincoln realized that if South Carolina and the Confederacy allowed reprovision, it would make a mockery of their sovereignty. If the Confederacy fired on the ships bringing provisions, he would have maneuvered them into firing the first shots of the war, thus rallying the North into a wartime footing and national feeling of patriotism to restore the Union. A perfectly executed ruse. Checkmate.

Lincoln sent a flotilla of fighting ships carrying food, ammunition and troops to Fort Sumter. No longer trusting Lincoln’s words or intentions, and not wishing for an even stronger Federal presence in Charleston, the Confederacy demanded surrender of the fort before the ships could arrive. Sumter’s commander, Maj. Robert Anderson, refused, and firing commenced on April 12, 1861.

Lincoln had totally misjudged the Southern capacity to fight. By choosing war over negotiation, he could realize the economic hegemony he had long sought over the South. Settlement commissions and peace conferences offered in good faith were what the South championed to avoid war. Lincoln ignored them, refusing to meet. He ignored his advisers. His skillful plan to employ Seward to mislead the South had worked, but the results weren’t as planned: A horribly destructive war resulted in which 620,000 people would die and the South would be left in a state of Northern-dominated Reconstruction—economically and politically— for another 100 years.

Harold Holzer
Author or editor of 36 books, many on Lincoln, and chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation

No less resilient than the outrageous myth that Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - and allowed it to happen to incite America to fight in World War II - is the stubborn myth that Lincoln “provoked” the attack on Fort Sumter. In a way, the charge gives the novice president far more credit than he deserves for early strategic brilliance. And it accepts Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens’s absurd argument that an act of aggression can be considered defensive.

Lincoln never made a secret of his insistence that federal property in the South would be held - forts included. While still president-elect, he even came close to breaking his official silence when rumors reached him that the Buchanan administration was considering withdrawing troops from the installations. “I will, if our friends at Washington concur,” he vowed, “announce publicly at once that they are to be retaken after the inaugeration[sic].” He added, “This will give the Union a rallying cry.” Privately, he added that if Buchanan really intended to abandon the forts, “they ought to hang him.”

Lincoln made his position clear at his inauguration. Though he stressed that “there needs to be no bloodshed or violence,” he insisted that the “power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government.”

Over the tense five weeks between the swearing-in and the bombardment of Sumter, Lincoln struggled toward a policy that would enable him to keep that promise without giving tenuously loyal Upper South states an excuse to quit the Union.

But there is no evidence that Lincoln had a sudden flash of brilliance and chose to supply, but not re-arm, the starving fort in order to trigger an attack that could justify a massive response to secession. In fact, he initially allowed underlings, including Gen. Winfield Scott and Secretary of State William H. Seward, to negotiate a range of other options, one of which all but guaranteed Virginians that Lincoln would in fact make no stand in Charleston Harbor.

Good politicians need good luck, and Lincoln could not have predicted a more useful result. The subsequent bombardment took no lives but damaged the American flag. In the North, the image of the desecrated banner inspired indignation at Southern treason. Lincoln called for volunteers and lost Virginia and North Carolina to the Confederacy, but the Union got the “rallying cry” he had hoped for.

“And,” as he said later, “the war came.” But was Sumter part of his master plan to make the Union seem the aggrieved party? All the evidence we have, as convincingly interpreted by scholars from Richard Current to Craig Symonds, suggests otherwise. Jefferson Davis fired the shot that started the Civil War, not Abraham Lincoln.

John Marszalek
Giles distinguished professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State University

When Abraham Lincoln took his oath of office, the last thing on his mind was starting a civil war that would consume his entire presidency. He did, however, believe that he had a constitutional duty to prevent the breakup of the Union, which he and so many Americans viewed in mystic terms.

Preserving the Union meant doing what it took to prevent its dismemberment. Fort Sumter became the symbol of the ability or inability of the national government to maintain control over its territory, and the ability or inability of the Confederates to eject Federals from what they considered to be their land. Lincoln knew he had to hold on to that fort or admit the success of Confederate secession and the dissolution of the Union. Jefferson Davis and the Confederates believed just the opposite.

Ironically, both Lincoln and Davis hoped that the other side would go on the attack first and thus lose the moral high ground. Lincoln held fast, but the Confederacy blinked and Southern cannon opened fire on Fort Sumter.

Did Lincoln’s actions to preserve the Union maneuver the Confederates into going on the attack first? Historian Charles Ramsdell certainly thought so in his famous Journal of Southern History essay in 1937. This was hardly the case, however. Southerners were only too happy to attack the fort on their own. Whether Lincoln tried to resupply Sumter or not, it seems probable that the South would have attacked anyway. The Confederacy had gone too far already in its determination to be a separate nation to do anything less.

A panel of Civil War experts - from academia, the world of letters, archives, museums and assorted other sources - will answer questions posedby The Washington Post and our readers during the war’s anniversary. Watch for more questions or suggestions at washingtonpost.com/civilwar.

Editorials: Reaction to War

The Chicago Tribune
April 13, 1861

WAR INAUGURATED!

By the act of a handful of ingrates and traitors, war is inaugurated in this heretofore happy and peaceful Republic! . . .

The people know the cause of the fratricidal strife. The party, which, in the interests of a barbarous institution, has governed the country for the last forty years, was beaten in the November election. The verdict of the people which does not touch a single one of the rights of any man . . . forbids the extension of that barbarous institution into national territory as yet uncursed by its blighting presence. This is the cause of the rebellion which months of effort has ripened into the bloody strife this day commenced! This and nothing else . . this deification of Human Slavery as the guiding principle and polar star of a free people - are the dragon’s teeth which, sown in a pestilent soil, have produced armed men . . .

The duty of the Government from this moment is plain. The resources of the Republic must be put forth with no grudging or tardy hand. The strife must be short - the war quick, sharp and decisive. . . Our fathers fought seven long years that the Constitution might be framed. We, their descendants, can afford any sacrifices, any exertion that their labor may be preserved to the world for the blessing of mankind. Now, men of the North, for the struggle!

New Orleans Picayune
April 15, 1861

LINCOLN’S WAR TALK.

Lincoln is for war in earnest. The blow which he received at Charleston, in the baffling of his secret plotting to enheart his armies within the Confederate States, has made him throw off all attempts at disguise, and call the North at once to arms. . .

He announces that “there are combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course” of judicial proceedings, and he calls out this vast army to help him put down this formidable combination. He will be very apt to find the combination too powerful for any extraordinary means he may be enabled to bring out.

The combination consists of the united population of seven States, three millions of people organized in seven communities, under Governments of their choice; who have covenanted with each other, and announced with all the solemnities of a deliberate purpose, and under all the sanctions which lead men to the maintenance of their position at all costs and through all hazards, that these laws shall no longer be enforced within their limits.

It is against this majestic revolution of a great population, sovereign communities, and a Confederated Government, that Mr. Lincoln launches the penalties of statutes made for the repression of vulgar rioters, obstructing in some locality, the process of a sheriff or a marshal. He adopts the form, too, of reading them a sort of riot act, warning them to disperse, like a cross-road mob.

He would have the seven State Governments, the one Central Government, the Confederate army, vanish away at his word of command, disperse “to their several abodes,” and give up these States and themselves to the quiet possession of the militia he may send down from the non-slaveholding States to execute the laws, which no man in these States will either execute or obey!

A good time he may have of it if the North abets him in this insane folly, if he can get the men to carry on his will, and if the border States would let them pass, to get the final answer here, which an indignant people will give to such insolent and intolerable aggression.

Cleveland Herald
April 15, 1861

THE DREAD ARBITRAMENT OF WAR.

Were the Federal Government a deadly foe of the revolted States, seeking for an excuse for armed collision with them, it could not, by any agency of its own, have so completely put its foe in the wrong as have these States themselves done. The fratricidal blood spilled at Charleston is but the last and most desperate step that shall bring swift vengeance upon the heads of the madmen, who, by a series of outrages unparalleled in the history of the civilized world, have at last compelled our government to open their batteries upon traitors. And the retribution must be swift, for the existence of the Union is at stake on one side, and the war must be terrible, for on the other side the defeat of the traitors is annihilation or ignominious banishment from their country of the leaders. . .

This last act of treason is so base, that the rebel States will soon wake up to the terrible truth that not only are the Free States a unit in the cause of the Union, but all along on the borders of slavery will spring up armed men to fight the cause of the Union, and even in the heart of the Cotton States will we trust be found a spirit of patriotism that shall put treason under foot.

The Richmond Dispatch
April 15, 1861

The Surrender of Fort Sumter

Great Rejoicing Among the People

Unparalleled Excitement

The interest of our citizens in the exciting events lately occurring in the neighborhood of Charleston, South Carolina, always intense . . . culminated on Saturday evening on the reception of the news of the surrender of Fort Sumter, in one of the wildest, most enthusiastic and irrepressible expressions of heartfelt and exuberant joy on the part of the people generally, that we have ever known to be the case before in Richmond. Nothing else was talked of, or thought of, save the great triumph achieved by the heroic troops of the glorious Southern Confederacy in obliterating one of the Illinois ape’s standing menaces against the assertion of Southern rights and equality. So far as the opinion of the people is concerned, it would have been more to the old rail-splitter’s credit had he ordered Anderson to leave Fort Sumter, as an untenable and undesirable place, than to attempt, as he and his coadjutors did, to make the undoubtably gallant Major the scapegoat of his insidious and damnable views. We repeat, that had wise counsels prevailed, the old ape would have had all the credit between a graceful leave taking and an ignominious expulsion at the cannon’s mouth. . .

The triumph of truth and justice over wrong and attempted insult was never more heartily appreciated by a spontaneous uprising of the people. Soon the Southern wind will sweep away with the resistless force of a tornado, all vestige of sympathy or desire of co-operation with a tyrant who, under false pretenses, in the name of a once glorious, but now broken and destroyed Union, attempts to rivet on us the chains of a despicable and ignoble vassalage.

The Charleston Mercury
Montgomery, April 26, 1861.

The blockade of the ports of the Confederate States, proclaimed by President LINCOLN in his late Proclamation, will certainly be followed by a recommendation, by the President of the Confederate States to the Congress to meet Monday next, to acknowledge the existence of the war against the Confederate States, and to enter upon it accordingly. . .

The effort to subdue the fifteen Slave States of the South will, of course, fail; and it will accomplish that most desirable of all results - the formation of a Slaveholding Confederacy. War, it is to be hoped, will raise such an antagonism between the Slave States and the Free States as to end this peril.

Additional Content

Timeline: Fury Unleashed

Everyone's an expert when it comes to the Civil War

By John Kelly

It is perhaps inevitable that when you walk around the Tidal Basin dressed in the blue woolen uniform of a Union soldier, most people are going to edge away. They will give you a wide berth, convinced you are going to ask them to sign a petition.

But a few are going to approach, intrigued, especially if you’re carrying a placard that reads, “Attention! Take the Civil War Quiz.” They will be people like Granville Harlow.

“Honey!” he announced to his wife, who had wandered ahead with their two children. “I’m taking a Civil War quiz. Washington Post.”

Perhaps it is hard to stump people whose names make them sound like transplants from the 1860s. And so it was with Granville Harlow, a business consultant from Minnetonka, Minn. When I asked him who fired the first shot of the Civil War, he gave me the name of the Confederate general who ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter: P.G.T. Beauregard

I was looking for which side fired first: the South.

“The battle lasted two days,” Granville added, correctly.

The only thing I could fault him for was his pronunciation: Fort “Sumtner.” But that might just have been Granville’s Midwestern accent. An elementary school teacher from Osawatomie, Kan., did the same thing.

That was Christy Levings. Which side fired first, Christy?

“Oh goodness. I have to think about that. I want to say the Confederates fired first.”

You would be right to want to say that.

And which side won that first battle? I’m asking you, Jim Knickerbocker of Michigan.

“I’m going to go with the South,” Jim said. “If the North had won, it would have been over. [The South] would have said, ‘Okay, never mind. We’ll behave.’”

We’re so knowledgeable about the Civil War around here — surrounded by battlefields, caught up in textbook controversies, steeped in what seems like unfinished business — that I sort of figured the reverse must be true: People from the rest of the country must not know anything about it. I mean,Minnesotans didn’t have anything to do with the Civil War, did they?

“Oh, yes, they did,” said Granville. “The 1st Minnesota in Gettysburg, we plugged the hole on day three and saved the day.”

Did Michigan fight?

“Sure, we did,” Jim said.

“Actually,” said his wife, Linda, “if you go to Gettysburg you can see several monuments from the regiments from Michigan that fought there.”

That doesn’t mean that the narrative of the war is the same regardless of where you’re from.

Christy, the teacher, lives three miles from the Kansas cabin that John Brown stayed in when he organized raids against slavery supporters in 1856, killing five.

“We look at John Brown in Kansas as a terrorist,” she said.

Bleeding Kansas. The Sack of Lawrence. The Pottawatomie Killings. Maybe the Civil War didn’t start at Fort Sumter after all.

National Air and Space Museum staffers Mychalene Giampoli and Tim Grove were out for a lunchtime stroll when I badgered them into taking the quiz. Who fired the first shot of the Civil War?

“The South,” Tim said. “I don’t remember the name of the person.”

Tim did just fine on the quiz, but what he and Mychalene really wanted to talk about was something else: This summer, Air and Space will mark the 150th anniversary of the day that “aeronaut” Thaddeus Lowe inflated a gas-filled balloon on the Mall. It was a demonstration for President Lincoln, who immediately grasped its military applications.

“I hope you’ll encourage people to come to our fabulous event in June,” Mychalene said.

Steven Walsh of Long Island, N.Y., came up to me, eager to take the quiz. When I asked him where and when the Civil War started, he said, “I just read this in Smithsonian magazine.”

It’s the cover story in the latest issue.

This is the sort of town Washington is: a place full of people who read Smithsonian, go to the Smithsonian or work at the Smithsonian.

The quiz-takers all wondered what their prize was for doing so well. There wasn’t one. Knowledge is its own reward.

Civil War soldier's heartbreaking farewell letter was written before death at Bull Run

By Michael E. Ruane

In 1986, filmmaker Ken Burns received a copy of a long-forgotten Civil War soldier’s letter that a scholar thought he might find interesting.

Burns, then working on his award-winning PBS documentary about the war, began to read it out loud to his wife, brother and another staff member in his Walpole, N.H., headquarters.

“My dear Sarah,” the letter began, “the indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days … Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines which will fall under your eye when I shall be no more.”

The letter, written in Washington on July 14, 1861, continued, as the author bade a heartbreaking farewell to his wife. Burns could barely finish it, and when he did, he looked up and found the others in tears.

It was the now-famous “Sullivan Ballou letter,” written by the Union officer a few days before his mortal wounding at the Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861 — 150 years ago Thursday.

Later read to the haunting theme song of Burns’s 1990 “The Civil War,” the letter summarized the sacrifice made by the Civil War generation, and struck an emotional note with Americans far removed from the struggle and sentiment of the 1860s.

Viewers clamored for copies of the letter, which closes,

“Sarah, do not mourn me dead — Think I am gone and wait for thee…”

At least one newspaper printed transcripts and quickly ran out. A record label reportedly sold tens of thousands of soundtrack CDs from the series, which included a reading of the letter.

It was read at weddings, funerals and memorial services, Burns said.

In 2006, historian Robin Young published a 700-page book about the letter, Sullivan Ballou’s life, and the grisly postscript to his death, in which his grave was apparently desecrated by angry rebels.

After Burns finished reading the letter aloud, he made two photocopies. He gave one to his staff, for inclusion in the film. He folded the other and put it in his wallet.

Twenty-five years later, as the country marks the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Bull Run, the now-tattered copy of the letter is still in Burns’s beat-up wallet.

“It’s the most beautiful letter I’ve ever read in my life,” he said. “It’s a Grand Canyon of a letter. You can read the strata of meaning. It’s all about love. First and foremost is love of country … It’s about love of government … It’s a love of cause … It’s a love of family.”

Ballou was a 32-year-old major in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry Regiment, which was dispatched to Washington in the early months of the war.

But before the regiment left Washington for Bull Run, Ballou sat down and wrote to his wife and two children back home in Rhode Island.

He wrote of his faith in the Union cause, and his willingness to die for it. He confessed guilt that his death might harm his family but said his love of country.

“comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly … to the battlefield.”

He professed his love for his wife, and hoped to be with her even in death,

“amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours — always, always.”

“If there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.”

The letter was never mailed but was returned to his wife with her husband’s effects.

Ballou was struck in the leg by a cannonball during the battle and died a week later. The battle was a Union defeat.

The letter, a copy of which resides in the Rhode Island Historical Society, is from the “if I do not return” genre, often written by soldiers on the eve of battle.

“What people confront is their own mortality, and immortality … in these letters,” Burns said in an interview.

Andrew Carroll, editor of “Behind the Lines,” a compilation of war letters, said: “It’s the hardest letter … for any service member to write … They’re putting all of their heart and emotion into what they know will be their final words.”

“It’s especially poignant when there are children involved,” he said, “because that letter will become sort of the touchstone to their lives, and how they remember their father.”

Although the letter had been largely forgotten before Burns helped resurrect it, Ballou’s case was a sensation during the war, according to Young’s history.

After the Confederates evacuated the area around Manassas in March 1862, officials from Rhode Island returned to the nearby Bull Run battlefield to retrieve the bodies of the state’s dead.

When they did, they found that, according to witnesses, Ballou’s body had been dug up, beheaded and burned by Confederates.

The rebels supposedly were seeking vengeance against a different Rhode Island officer blamed for inflicting high Southern losses in the battle. They dug up Ballou by mistake.

The incident was widely reported in Northern newspapers. Huge crowds turned out when the remains of Ballou and two other officers were brought to Providence via Philadelphia and New York.

But 1862 quickly turned into one of the bloodiest years of the war, and the cavalcade of battles soon erased Ballou from the headlines.

On Sept. 23, 1990, before a public television audience of millions, Burns returned him to the spotlight, using the letter to climax the opening episode of the series.

In the film, Ballou’s anguished words are read by actor Paul Roebling, a veteran of Burns documentaries and “the only person I ever considered handing the Sullivan Ballou letter to,” Burns said.

Burns remembered that Roebling, “a remarkable person,” had trouble reading the letter, because his wife, actress Olga Bellin, was then dying of cancer.

“That was impending on him at the time he read it,” Burns recalled. “And then it wore heavily on him.”

In July 1994, four years after “The Civil War” first aired, and the nation heard the actor read, “Sarah my love for you is deathless,” Paul Roebling took his own life, Burns said.

His wife had been dead for seven years.

CHAPTER THREE

Ripples of War

Retreat of the Federalists after the fight at Ball’s Bluff, upper Potomac, Virginia originally published in “The Illustrated London News,” Nov. 23 1861. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

A war shaped by rivers: Union rout at Ball's Bluff showed waterways were not to be ignored

By Joel Achenbach

Ball’s Bluff could fit into the back pocket of Antietam or Gettysburg. It’s tucked behind a residential neighborhood in Leesburg, lurking in the woods at the end of a gravel road. Like all Civil War battlefields, it’s dramatically unlike the Civil War itself. It’s quiet. The cannons are harmless, as inert as stumps. The old cowpaths have been converted to hiking trails and dutifully mulched. There’s hardly anyone around. You could nap on a blanket.

It is the visitor’s challenge to figure out how to read this landscape, how to see it the way the generals did. Add people, noise, smoke, wails, the rebel yell, the whistle of bullets. Add mud.

At Ball’s Bluff, you can walk down a trail, past a small national cemetery, and eventually come to a precipice. About 120 feet below, visible through the early fall foliage, is the Potomac River.

Here, on Oct. 21, 1861, the Union engineered an epic fiasco.

The federals crossed the river into Virginia, seeking to make “a slight demonstration” against an unknown number of rebels believed camped nearby. The Union soldiers had only a few skiffs for the crossing. It was an immaculate setup for a tragedy: sketchy information, a river too deep to ford, not enough boats, and soldiers who couldn’t swim.

Ball’s Bluff is the tale of a quick, tidy slaughter. It contains broader lessons about warfare, painfully learned as the bodies floated downstream.

The river factor

We think of 19th-century wars as set-piece battles, with armies colliding in cornfields and peach orchards, the soldiers demonstrating their valor as they charge the opposing line. But the generals knew there was more to it than that. They knew that success or failure in the war would depend on logistics, on supplies, on feeding men and mules, on lines of communication, on knowledge of the landscape and precision of the maps.

What they saw as they examined the Coastal Survey maps was a vast territory dominated by rivers. Much of the war was contested on rivers, along their muddy banks, and at the bottlenecks of their bridges.

Rivers were still thoroughfares in 1861. There weren’t many bridges then, or even decent roads. As John Keegan writes in “Fields of Battle,” during the Civil War “roads were still conceived as part of an internal waterway-portage system, harking back to the wilderness days of the eighteenth century.” Roads often ended at the bank of a river, without a bridge. You were expected to switch to a boat.

Rivers shaped the war both strategically and tactically. The Union’s initial goal was to encircle the Confederacy by blockading the coast with the burgeoning U.S. Navy (the number of naval vessels grew dramatically in the first year of the war) and by gaining full control of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The encirclement strategy came from the old man who initially led the Union military, Mexican War hero Gen. Winfield Scott. “Scott’s Anaconda,” it was sometimes derisively called.

The rivers in the West served the Union well: Not only did the Mississippi cleave the Confederacy and, once controlled, cut off the eastern states from the vast resources of Texas and other western states, but the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers invited invasion of the heart of rebel territory. It was an invitation that Ulysses S. Grant happily accepted when he led his soldiers on steamers up the Tennessee River in early 1862 and, with help from Navy ironclads, took Fort Henry and then Fort Donelson — unmitigated Union victories.

The rivers of the east presented a different story. They were obstacles, as a rule, for maneuvering armies, generally flowing from west to east, and some would loom large in history despite their modest scale (such as the Rapidan, the Rappahannock and the Chickahominy). The historian James McPherson says, “The rivers in the Eastern theater helped the defense, and that means the Confederacy for the most part.”

So central were the rivers to the conduct of the war that military units (particularly on the Union side) were named for them: the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the Cumberland, the Division of the Rappahannock, the Division of the Ohio and so on.

The Potomac was famously eccentric — alternately impassable with floodwaters and dried to a trickle. Low water helped Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Maryland in the late summer of 1862, but floodwaters the next summer nearly trapped his army after the Battle of Gettysburg, and he was lucky to escape across makeshift bridges near Williamsport, Md.

The Potomac carried symbolic importance as the boundary between loyal and rebellious states, and it served as a moat for the U.S. capital, consciously seated by the Founding Fathers in a slaveholding territory, and in 1861 facing a Confederate army just 25 miles away in Manassas.

“As soon as secession happened, the Potomac became the most important river in the Civil War,” said Jonathan Earle, an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. “The Potomac was a psychological border as well as a physical one.”

The bridge over the Potomac at Harpers Ferry, W.Va., was burned repeatedly during the war. Engineers mastered the art of laying a pontoon bridge in a matter of hours — essentially placing planks across boats that had been lashed together. But this proved to be a bloody craft at Fredericksburg, as the rebels mowed down the engineers building the bridges for Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s army.

Union Gen. George McClellan discovered, in his Peninsula Campaign of 1862, that a heavy rain — “Confederate weather” — could transform a minor tributary such as the Warwick River, which flows into the James, into an almost insuperable barrier. And here’s McClellan writing of the Chickahominy as though it were the Nile or the Amazon:

“It was subject to frequent, sudden, and great variations in the volume of water, and a single violent storm of brief duration sufficed to cause an overflow of the bottom-lands for many days, rendering the river absolutely impassable without long and strong bridges.”

McClellan was a world-class worrier, always imagining that he was outnumbered and, in this instance, outrivered. Lincoln nearly went mad trying to get McClellan to attack. “But you must act,” Lincoln said in closing one chastising letter in early 1862. McClellan, however, understood the principles of military strategy and was quite correct that attacking without a good plan and proper logistics was a recipe for disaster.

Which was what happened amid the autumn leaves in October 1861 at Ball’s Bluff.

‘A slight demonstration’

McClellan that fall was in the mode of army-building, getting everyone trained, trying to avoid a repeat of the debacle at Manassas in July. One day he learned that Confederates were deployed near Leesburg not far from the Potomac River. McClellan didn’t want to lose control of the upriver Potomac and the critical Baltimore & Ohio Railroad that passed through Point of Rocks, Md., and Harpers Ferry. McClellan wired Gen. Charles P. Stone, camped in Poolesville, Md., suggesting that “perhaps a slight demonstration on your part would have the effect to move them.”

Stone sent three regiments across the river, one at Ball’s Bluff and two at Edwards Ferry a few miles downriver. There wasn’t a bridge anywhere along that stretch of the river, and it was too deep to ford, so they had to rely on boats. Only three were available at Harrison’s Island, a two-mile sickle of land occupying a bend in the Potomac facing Ball’s Bluff. Stone sent a note to McClellan: “We are a little short of boats.”

They were also a little short of professional soldiers. The man who quickly took command on the bluff was a sitting U.S. senator from the young state of Oregon. Col. Edward Baker was an advocate of “bold” and “determined” war and a close friend of the president (Lincoln’s second son was named for him). Baker was gifted at oratory but impoverished in military strategy. That the Union forces were backed up to a bluff above a river, with only a few skiffs available in the event of a retreat, did not faze him.

When a New York regiment ascended the cow path up the bluff, Baker greeted a newly arrived colonel with a quotation from “The Lady of the Lake”: One blast upon your bugle horn/ Is worth a thousand men.

Unbeknownst to Baker, the Confederate commander, Gen. Nathan G. “Shanks” Evans, had sent his men from Edwards Ferry to Ball’s Bluff. The rebels had superior position in the woods, picking off Baker’s men as they struggled to hold their ground. Baker himself began working artillery pieces. The rebels charged, whooping, and the fight was joined hand to hand.

The New York World reported what happened next:

“One huge red-haired ruffian drew a revolver, came close to Baker, and fired four balls at the general’s head, every one of which took effect, and a glorious soul fled through their ghastly openings.”

Historian Shelby Foote writes: “[H]e who called for sudden, bold, forward, determined war received it in the form of a bullet through the brain, which left him not even time for a dying quotation.”

In pell-mell flight, hundreds of Union soldiers scrambled, stumbled and somersaulted down the steep bluff. So many boarded a flatboat that it foundered. Soon all three skiffs had sunk.

Rebels stood atop the bluff and fired at the men below. It was, the rebels would say later, like a turkey shoot.

Whom the bullets didn’t kill, the water did. Dozens of men drowned. Americans, as a rule, couldn’t swim in 1861. They couldn’t have stayed afloat even if they hadn’t been burdened by wool uniforms, boots and heavy weapons.

Of valor the federals had plenty; what they lacked were boats and trained officers who could read a landscape. Ball’s Bluff inspired Congress to create the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. It was a star chamber, secretive, radical, and its first victim was Gen. Charles P. Stone, accused unjustly and irrationally of treason and thrown without formal charges into a prison cell in New York harbor. Stone was eventually released and returned to the Union cause, but his reputation never fully recovered from the Ball’s Bluff calamity.

The battle offered an immediate lesson about the importance of military principles, of logistics, of avenues of retreat. Coming after Manassas, it boded ill for a quick suppression of the Confederacy. Anyone in Washington who remained unclear about the challenge facing the Union needed merely to visit the banks of the river. The bodies were washing up. One at Chain Bridge, one at Long Bridge, one all the way down near Mount Vernon.

This was going to be a very long war.

Deemed a savior, then a failure: McClellan zoomed up the Union ranks--and fell just as quickly

By Michael E. Ruane

(Library of Congress)

Well before dawn on Nov. 2, 1861, an elderly, white-haired general was driven in a carriage through the rain-lashed streets of Washington to the B&O railroad station near the Capitol.

He was a big man: 6-foot-5 and 300 pounds. But he was so infirm that he couldn’t walk more than a few steps unaided and hadn’t been able to ride a horse in years. He had been an Army officer a half-century, a national hero and, once, a presidential candidate.

But at 75, he had been forced by circumstances to resign as the Army’s commanding general. And as he made his way to the waiting room, his handsome young replacement was splashing through the storm with his cavalry escort to bid the old man goodbye.

The farewell meeting that morning between the aged warhorse, Winfield Scott, and his former subordinate, the new national hero, Gen. George B. McClellan, 34, was one of the most poignant of the Civil War.

The two men, who had been feuding since McClellan’s summons to Washington in July, appeared to represent the old and the new, past and present, bygone glory and newfound hope in the current emergency.

Indeed, Scott’s fame stretched back to the War of 1812. But the martial saga of the “Young Napoleon,” as McClellan came to be called, was to last only a little over a year — his tenure in command marked by controversy, infighting and recrimination.

On that rainy Saturday, though — just six months into the war — silence fell over the waiting room when McClellan entered and sat down beside Scott.

McClellan had eased the tension with a conciliatory, and calculated, statement the day before calling Scott a hero. Scott offered best wishes to McClellan’s wife and new baby.

He then rose, shook hands and was helped to the luxury rail car that had been sent for him. McClellan rode back to his quarters and recounted the scene in a letter to his wife.

“It may be that at some distant day I too shall totter away from” Washington, he wrote, “a worn out old soldier. . . . Should I ever become vainglorious & ambitious remind me of that spectacle.”

An army in tatters

Exactly a month before, Scott, McClellan, President Abraham Lincoln and a parade of other dignitaries had attended the funeral at Congressional Cemetery of Gen. George C. Gibson, an old friend of Scott, who had died Sept. 30 at age 86.

There was much pomp as the body of Gibson, the oldest general in the army, was borne along Pennsylvania Avenue, escorted by infantry, cavalry and artillery.

But a newspaper correspondent in the crowd was disturbed by what he saw. “No part of the cortege was in full regulation uniform,” he wrote in the Washington Evening Star. “I doubt if there is such a thing in existence as a full regulation uniform.”

“The officers’ horses were not well-groomed or decently equipped,” the correspondent reported. One horseman “rode past with a parcel in a newspaper strapped behind his saddle.”

And elsewhere across the city, where the broken Union army was being reassembled, he found soldiers “most astonishingly shabby, careless and inexact in every respect.”

In the weeks after the North’s humiliating July 21 defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run, its army was in a state of near collapse. The nation’s survival seemed to rest with McClellan.

The doctor’s son from Philadelphia had finished second in his class at West Point, and he had served under Scott in the Mexican War. He had been part of a small delegation sent to observe the Crimean War in the 1850s. And he had had some modest military success against the rebels in western Virginia.

He was cultured, smart and confident, and seemed to be a winner. Plus, he looked like a general. Dignified, with dark, carefully combed hair and a thick moustache, “he was built for riding a horse,” said biographer Stephen W. Sears. “He was a very good horseman. And he had very good horses.”

McClellan is one of the most fascinating figures in Civil War military history and perhaps one of the most thoroughly known.

Married just over a year when he took command, he wrote to his wife, Mary Ellen — “you, who share all my thoughts” — almost every day. His letters contained his most private musings and often-intemperate opinions, written in haste, anger and chronic exhaustion. They included things a man might only tell his spouse and would never want preserved for posterity.

But they were.

Although scholarship has periodically softened its view, McClellan is generally portrayed as one of the war’s great, failed generals — proud, sensitive, overwrought, tentative, quick to exult and to despair.

He opposed emancipation and had a strained relationship with Lincoln, privately calling him a “gorilla.”

His offensive against Richmond in spring 1862 was thrown back by the Confederates under Gen. Robert E. Lee, and he was shortly supplanted by a rival general, John Pope.

And his Antietam campaign the following September, after his reinstatement, is viewed by most historians as an anemic victory, at best, even though he had numerical superiority and a copy of the Confederate plans.

When Lincoln fired him for good after Antietam, his nemesis, Lee, wrote: “I hate to see McClellan go. He and I had grown to understand each other so well.”

Discipline and direction

McClellan arrived in Washington from Beverly, Va., on Friday, July 26, five days after the rout at Bull Run and four days after he had received a telegram from the Army’s adjutant general: “Come hither without delay.” The order most likely originated with Secretary of War Simon Cameron.

What he found on arrival was “chaos,” he recalled later.

“Not a regiment was properly encamped, not a single avenue of approach guarded,” he wrote. “The streets, hotels, and bar-rooms were filled with drunken officers and men absent from their regiments without leave — a perfect pandemonium.”

McClellan set about the task that became his chief contribution to victory: the construction of the force that would withstand incredible adversity and eventually destroy Lee’s storied Confederates.

On Aug. 20, he issued an order establishing the Army of the Potomac.

“My army,” he called it. He would be its parent, and its soldiers his children. He would build it out of “nothing” and come to love it so much he could not stand to see it injured.

“I ought to take good care of these men,” he wrote his wife later. “I believe they love me from the bottom of their hearts. I can see it in their faces when I pass among them.”

His first challenge was to get them into shape.

What he started with “could not properly be called an army,” he recalled. “It was only a collection of undisciplined, ill-officered and uninstructed men, who were, as a rule, much demoralized by defeat and ready to run at the first shot.”

He set up a provost guard of veteran army regulars and had them scour the bars and hotels for soldiers. Men were sent back to their camps and barred from Washington without a pass.

Mutinies in several regiments were put down and ringleaders sent to prison. Another regiment had its flag taken away.

“I rode everywhere and saw everything,” he recalled. “Not an entrenchment was commenced unless I . . . approved its site . . . almost every man in the army saw me at one time or another, and most of them became familiar with my face.”

In early August, he announced that he had cleaned up the District. “I have Washington perfectly quiet now,” he wrote.

It was not quite accurate, as subsequent news accounts would reveal. Still, he was the hero of the hour.

“By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land,” he wrote his wife July 27. “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator. . . . But nothing of that kind would please me. Therefore I won’t be Dictator. Admirable self denial!”

He sensed that he was awfully young to have such weight on his shoulders. Three days later he went to the Senate on business and was mobbed by legislators.

“Half a dozen of the oldest made the remark . . . ‘Why how young you look — yet an old soldier!!’ ” he wrote his wife. “It seems to strike everybody that I am very young. . . . Who would have thought when we were married that I should so soon be called upon to save my country?”

To that end, he had much more work to do.

On Oct. 10, McClellan’s pronouncements to the contrary, a Washington Star subscriber complained to the editors about the ongoing depredations of Union soldiers.

“We in the District, where the soldiers are camped, are left to the uncontrolled lawless acts of an undisciplined mob,” the reader asserted. “Our places and grounds are run over, our property destroyed, our persons subjected to injury and abuse, our very lives threatened.”

There were other reports — of officers gallivanting around town in army ambulances, of drunkenness, of an accidental ammunition explosion outside the White House.

McClellan told his wife that some of his soldiers, “behaving most atrociously,” had even burned down houses. “I will hang or shoot any found guilty,” he wrote. “Such things disgrace us.”

But he also sought positive methods of cementing the army.

A major tool was the public review of troops. On his Crimean assignment, he had seen the stirring grand review of the French Imperial Guard, and he began to stage a series of such events in an around Washington.

The goal was for the men “to see each other, to give the troops an idea of their own strength, to infuse esprit de corps,” he wrote. Reviews also let the men see McClellan.

The biggest was the so-called Grand Review, held at Baileys Crossroads on Nov. 20, 1861. The president and, reportedly, 30,000 spectators streamed out of the city to watch 75,000 soldiers assembled in a vast semicircle on an open plateau.

McClellan arrived with a huge escort, and band, and was greeted with an artillery salute.

“As he rode along the line in review,” the Washington Star reported, the “cheers that were sent up from the seventy-five thousand throats of his army were nearly as deafening as the thunders of the artillery.”

The pageant went on for hours. There was a huge traffic jam as spectators made their way home and the rebels tried to disrupt things with some distant firing.

Among those headed back to town was the poet and essayist Julia Ward Howe, who was visiting Washington with her husband, the abolitionist physician Samuel Gridley Howe, and her minister, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke.

Crawling through the tangle of soldiers and carriages, the trio joined in singing the popular marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Clarke remarked that Mrs. Howe could surely write better lyrics.

She said she had wanted to.

The next morning about dawn, according to her reminiscences, she awoke in her room in Willard’s Hotel with new words forming in her mind. Lest she forget them, she got up and began to jot them down:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

He is trampling out the wine press, where the grapes of wrath are stored,

He hath loosed the fateful lightnings of His terrible swift sword,

His truth is marching on.

One Union general said McClellan’s army was born that day at Baileys Crossroads, according to U.S. Army historian Kim B. Holien.

With Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” it now had its anthem.

(Library of Congress)

The wrenching road to freedom: In D.C., bonds of slavery broke early, but plenty of obstacles remained

By Jeannine Hunter

(Library of Congress)

Emancipation was in the air, and Elizabeth Keckley knew it. A former slave herself, she had become dressmaker and confidante to first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, and she was well settled in Washington society by the time the Civil War began. But the plight of other African Americans in the city pained her.

“They came with a great hope in their hearts, and with all their worldly goods on their backs,” wrote Keckley, who bought her and her son’s freedom, in her memoir, “Behind the Scenes.” But “the North is not warm and impulsive. The bright joyous dreams of freedom to the slave faded — were sadly altered in the presence of that stern, practical mother, reality. Poor dusky children of slavery, men and women of my own race — the transition from slavery to freedom was too sudden for you!”

Washington in the early war years continued to be riven by the fault lines of race and politics. A decade earlier, Congress had abolished slave trade in the District but not slavery itself. Domestic, governmental and service jobs attracted African Americans from Maryland and Virginia, where restrictions were greater.

“By the time of the war, slavery had been diminished considerably,” said Lincoln scholar Edna Medford of Howard University. “Of the 14,000 people of color in the city, fewer than 3,200 were enslaved.”

Still, in 1861, free blacks — lawyers and laborers, midwives and ministers, doorkeepers and educators — had to navigate past slave pens, and slave catchers patrolled Washington for fugitives.

“Right here, in the bedrock of this great nation, was a contradiction, this horrible situation,” said Frank Smith, director of the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum.

“Free blacks endured injustices such as a 10 p.m. curfew and morality laws, which sought to legislate black behavior — no swearing in public or gambling or card-playing, et cetera, no political rights,” Medford said. “Free blacks had to prove their free status and had to carry certificates of freedom at all times. They also had to enter into bonds with five respected members of the community who were willing to ensure their good behavior. Nor could blacks testify against whites in court.”

The punishments were fines, jail and whippings. If no one came to bail out free arrestees, “they would be sold to pay the cost of their jail fees,” historian C.R. Gibbs said.

A push for emancipation

By the end of 1861, the situation in the capital had become untenable. Escapees from Southern states arrived without housing, jobs or money. While the city wrestled with how to care for them, fugitive slaves from Maryland were being hunted down and locked up, because federal law still protected slavery in states loyal to the Union.

“Union soldiers marching through Maryland to protect the capital in the spring of 1861 — that was destabilizing to slavery,” said Kate Masur, a Northwestern University history professor and author of “An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C.” “A lot of enslaved people took the opportunity to run away.”

Antislavery members of Congress protested loudly about the treatment of escaped Maryland slaves and received support from the Northern press. A movement for emancipation took hold. Over the objections of the Washington city council, all slaves in the District were finally freed in April 1862 — and their owners compensated by the federal government.

In time, the government organized camps to provide shelter — first on Capitol Hill, then Camp Barker in the area that became the U Street corridor, and eventually in a Freedman’s Village in Arlington County. Clergy and volunteers provided services and schooling. And as more black men served in the army, the camps “became points of recruitment,” Masur said. “They were important incubators of freedom.”

In an appeal to Northern sympathizers published in September 1862 in the Boston-based abolitionist newspaper “The Liberator,” Harriet Jacobs, an escaped slave, reported the conditions of the “contrabands.”

“I went to Duff Green’s Row, government headquarters for the contrabands here. I found men, women and children all huddled together without any distinction or regard to age or sex. Some of them were in the most pitiable condition,” Jacobs wrote. “Many were sick with measles, diptheria, scarlet or typhoid fever. Some had a few filthy rags to lie on, others had nothing but the bare floor for a couch. . . . Some of them have been so degraded by slavery that they do not know the usages of civilized life: they know little else than the handle of the hoe, the plough, the cotton pad, and the overseer’s lash.”

It was people such as Keckley and Jacobs who stepped up to help.

“Each one attempted to care for the needs of African Americans in the communities where they lived,” Medford said. “Keckley, for instance, helped to establish the Contraband Relief Fund.” Jacobs established a school for freedmen in Alexandria. Itinerant preacher Sojourner Truth worked first at Freedman’s Village and later at Freedman’s Hospital, the forerunner of Howard University Hospital.

Struggling for equality

At the end of the war, an entire federal agency, the Freedmen’s Bureau, was created to deal with education, welfare and jobs. A special 1867 Census ordered by Congress counted 31,937 free and emancipated blacks in the District, double the number before the war.

Thousands were engaged in loading and unloading supplies from docks and helping to build military hospitals. They were “vital contributors to the war effort,” according to Leslie Rowland, a history professor at the University of Maryland.

While some free blacks devoted themselves to improving life for their newly liberated brethren, others worked to sign them up in the war effort. Men such as the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, pastor of Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, and Gurden Snowden, an early trustee at Asbury Church, rallied black men to enlist in the city’s First Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops.

By spring 1863, the unit had become the first black regiment directly mustered into federal service (as opposed to those bearing state charters), said Gibbs, author of “Black, Copper, and Bright: The District of Columbia’s Black Civil War Regiment.” It drew men from California, Canada and the Caribbean.

Yet, even as they fought for their country and freedom, the men struggled for equal pay and recognition for valor from white officers and fellow soldiers. In summer 1863, abolitionist Frederick Douglass met with the president about their treatment. Lincoln “listened with patience and silence to all I had to say,” Douglass wrote in his autobiography, “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.”

“He began by saying that the employment of colored troops at all was a great gain to the colored people; . . . that they had larger motives for being soldiers than white men; that they ought to be willing to enter the service upon any conditions; that the fact that they were not to receive the same pay as white soldiers, seemed a necessary concession to smooth the way to their employment at all as soldiers; but that ultimately they would receive the same.”

But if Lincoln sometimes disappointed, at other times he demonstrated a powerful kinship.

Mary Dines was a former slave who lived at Camp Barker, on the route between the White House and the Soldiers’ Home where Lincoln stayed during the summers.

Aunt Mary, as she was known, gave several contemporary accounts of her encounters with the president. (Some scholars have doubted her accounts, questioning the frequency of Lincoln’s visits.) Once, at a performance for visiting dignitaries, she said, Lincoln stood not with the visitors but beside the camp’s elders.

As they sang, she saw him “wiping the tears off his face with his bare hands.”

“[M]any of the real old folks forgot about the president being present and began to shout and yell, but he didn’t laugh at them, but stood like a stone and bowed his head.”

In a “sweet voice” that sounded “so sad,” he joined the chorus. “Lincoln did just like everybody else,” Dines said. “He was no president when he came to camp.

“He stood and sang and prayed just like all the rest of the people.”

In Washington, raising an army of bureaucrats: Greenbacks, income tax, female workers -- war drove federal expansion

By Lisa Rein

(Library of Congress)

Almost as soon as he took office in 1862, Francis E. Spinner’s job as U.S. treasurer began to spin out of control.

Many of his employees had resigned to join the Army — just as a revolution in the country’s money system was underway. He clamored for more clerks.

“The work has been performed by devoting not only almost every hour of each day, (Sundays not excepted,) but many hours of night, to continuous labor beyond the endurance of most men,” Spinner wrote in a report.

To help pay for the Civil War, the government had abandoned the gold standard and was printing greenbacks for the first time. The new notes had to be cut and counted, and Spinner, a motivated bureaucrat in tight budget times, turned to an untapped labor pool that would work for less than the going wage: women.

This is how the federal government began to remake itself into a national, wartime force. The Civil War and its wartime Congresses gave birth to many of the pillars of the modern federal government.

The government sold bonds for the first time and Congress approved the first national banking system. The Agriculture Department was born to help farmers. A national cemetery system was created to bury the Union dead.

Congress passed the nation’s first income tax — necessitating a whole new staff that today numbers 93,000.

Government contracting exploded, with private companies supplying weapons and gunpowder, mules and blankets in what would become a model for late 19th-century industrialists.

“Before the war, there was a federal government and a bureaucracy,” said Richard Bensel, an American political historian at Cornell University. “But there was no allegiance to a national government.” After the war, “you have a social base that supports federal power. That’s a big change.”

The Bureau of Pensions, which opened to write checks to wounded soldiers and the families of the dead, did not just grow into one of the country’s biggest bureaucracies and earliest social welfare systems; it became a sort of national retirement system that buoyed the Republican political machine. (The bureau was folded into the new Veterans Administration in 1930.)

Without Southern Democrats to impede them, activist Congresses authorized land grants for new universities, western settlers and a transcontinental railroad. Three key amendments to the Constitution adopted shortly after the war — abolishing slavery, guaranteeing equal protection and giving African Americans the right to vote — further cemented federal power.

There were 5,837 federal employees in 1861, excluding the 30,000 postal workers who represented the largest arm of government before the war and well after. By 1871, based on data from the first census after the war, that number had grown to 15,344.

Today the workforce stands at roughly 2 million.

Jobs as patronage

Who would fill these new jobs? Connections mattered.

Right up to the final hours before his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln was mobbed by crowds at the White House steps. Not all were well-wishers.

They were desperate for jobs in the new government. “I have waited some 6 hours with the view of having a five minute interview with thee,” an irate man wrote, claiming his “rights” to a federal appointment. The spectacle drew this parody from humorist Artemus Ward: “Good God! cride Old ABE, ‘they cum upon me from the skize — down the chimneys and from the bowels of the yearth!’ ”

After decades of mostly Democratic rule, the Republicans had plenty of spoils to dole out, from postmasters to patent examiners. In an era before transition teams, Illinois newspaper editor William O. Stoddard, one of the first to endorse Lincoln, had to appeal directly to a U.S. senator to get himself hired as a clerk in the Interior Department, signing the president’s name on land patents.

The new administration also had to cleanse the government of Southern sympathizers.

“A great many removals in the Pension Office, and a clamorous crowd ready to fill vacancies,” Horatio Nelson Taft, a patent examiner in Washington, wrote in his journal on March 23, 1861.

“Many are trembling expecting decapitation,” he observed a week later.

By August, Lincoln was alarmed that Southern sympathizers were still lurking on the federal payroll. A House Select Committee on Loyalty of Clerks produced enough evidence of subversion that Congress imposed a new oath affirming that all workers would uphold the Constitution and the government.

Once war began, the demands on the government grew quickly. Soldiers streamed into Washington. To supply bread to the troops, the War Department rushed to open a bakery in the basement of the Capitol, seizing flour from the mills in Georgetown.

Preparing the Union army for war overshadowed everything. Uniforms, blankets, gunpowder and other supplies poured in, delivered by Northern companies under contract with the Quartermaster Department.

These military bureaucrats employed more than 100,000 civilians at the height of the war, from seamstresses to gravediggers. Many were free blacks and fugitive slaves. University of North Carolina historian Mark R. Wilson, author of “The Business of Civil War,” described the operation as a sophisticated, massive supply system of depots and arsenals that scrupulously watched over the budget as it managed huge flows of money.

The government put up new warehouses to store supplies. Cattle pens were built on the land that is now the Mall. By 1862, employment at the Navy Yard had swelled to 1,700.

When the war ended, the government’s debt stood at $2.2 billion, an unheard-of sum.

Ms. Smith goes to Washington

“A woman can use scissors better than a man, and she will do it cheaper,” Spinner told Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase when he proposed to ease his labor shortage with women.

At first, they did use scissors to cut the long sheets of money. When machines were introduced to do the cutting, female clerks were transferred to counting the currency. They worked side by side with men, but they were paid $600 a year, half the salary of the lowest-paid male clerks.

“To do this was a huge step and a challenge to the existing order,” said Cindy Aron, a historian who describes the country’s first white-collar experiment with integrating the workforce in “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service.”

To get the jobs, the women needed connections. Grace Bedell, the New York girl who become famous for writing to Lincoln in 1860 to urge him to grow a beard (he did), reached out to him again four years later.

“I have heard that a large number of girls are employed constantly and with good wages at Washington cutting Treasury notes and other things pertaining to that department,” she wrote in a letter discovered by the Lincoln Archives Digital Project in 2007.

“Could I not obtain a situation there?” Her father had lost most of his property.

It is not known whether the president wrote her back or Bedell made her way to Washington. She married and eventually settled in Kansas.

Sexual harassment quickly became an issue in the National Currency Bureau. By 1864, a special committee of Congress was investigating rumors that supervisors were extracting sexual favors from female employees. The possibility — confirmed in testimony by women and their fathers — confirmed many Americans’ worst fears about introducing women into the bureaucracy: Either the women were loose, or they were innocent and the government was corrupting them.

The stigma of the “Treasury Courtesans” persisted for years.

Questions of competence

The Civil War government was limited to eight departments: State, Treasury, War, Navy, Attorney General, Interior, Post Office and Agriculture. Hours were 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The quality of the workforce shortly became a subject of controversy.

“Poets, preachers, lawyers, doctors, artists, authors, merchants, mechanics and loafers are represented in the various departments,” John Ellis wrote in 1869 in “The Sights and Sounds of the National Capital.” “You may know them as a general rule by their affectation of superiority to the townspeople, their general seedy appearance, and their imitations of the air and style of the first men in the Government.”

He believed that the patronage system reeked of incompetence: “Two-thirds of the men holding office under the Government are incapable of discharging their official duties.”

Walt Whitman tried to dispel the image of the lazy bureaucrat based on his experience during the war as a low-level copyist in three government departments, according to Kenneth Price, co-editor of the Walt Whitman Archive.

“I do not refer to swell officials — the men who wear the decorations, get the fat salaries,” Whitman told biographer Horace Traubel when reminiscing about his experience. “I refer to the average clerks, the obscure crowd, who after all run the government: they are on the square. . . .

“I found the clerks mainly earnest, mainly honest, anxious to do the right thing — very hard working, very attentive.”

The jobs were routine, though, and that led to boredom.

“Business in the Patent office is very dull this winter as might be expected,” Taft wrote in his journal in early 1861. By spring, there was little work to do because of the war, and by summer he had been riffed. Too few people were applying for for patents.

Taft eventually landed another job as a clerk in the Land Department (part of Interior), filling out land certificates to buyers. “That is certainly better than no business in this extravagant city and I shall take it till I can do better,” he wrote in November 1861.

Counterfeiting and corruption

In spite of their efforts to suppress counterfeiting, Treasury officials had trouble on their hands once greenbacks were issued. A congressional investigation revealed some big inside jobs: Employees were taking impressions of the lead currency plates, which bore an image of Lincoln and a bald eagle, to pass on to outsiders.

At the end of the war, it was estimated that as much as one-third of the nation’s currency was counterfeit.

The imbroglio led in 1865 to creation of the government’s first investigative agency, the Secret Service. (Its role of protecting the president was not added until 1901.)

Other scandals shook the multimillion-dollar military supply machine, led at the war’s start by Simon Cameron. Lincoln’s first War Secretary wasted money on inferior supplies and rewarded dozens of friends with jobs. Contracting irregularities were legendary as companies took advantage of the Union’s ballooning needs. Shoddy, the respun wool material used to make uniforms, overcoats and blankets, tended to dissolve into rags. The term remains a symbol of poor quality.

Leading the effort to stop the corruption was a federal employee, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs. Lincoln appointed the West Point graduate to mobilize an unprecedented logistical machine to support the Union armies, an effort that would prove crucial to victory.

Meigs defended the varied appearance of some Union soldiers after the shoddy scandal.

“The troops were clothed and rescued from severe suffering, and those who saw sentinels walking post in the capital of the United States in freezing weather in their drawers, without trousers or overcoats, will not blame the Department for its efforts to clothe them, even in materials not quite so durable as Army blue kersey.”

In the end, along with the valiant soldiers and canny generals, it was a bureaucrat who helped win the war.

A death that cast a pall over the White House: Lincoln, resolute in the face of war, buckled under loss of his son

By Brady Dennis

The wind and rain swirling outside the White House on Feb. 24, 1862, seemed fitting given the darkness that had descended inside its walls.

The Civil War was gathering steam. Jefferson Davis had just been inaugurated president of the Confederacy. Bloody battles and long months of uncertainty lay ahead. On that dreary Monday afternoon, however, those troubles took a back seat to a more personal tragedy that had befallen the first family.

The body of Willie Lincoln, 11 years old, blue-eyed and good-natured, the most treasured child of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, lay downstairs in the Green Room. He had died days earlier after a struggle with typhoid fever, probably contracted from contaminated water that supplied the White House.

It had been an agonizing stretch for the president and his wife, who had kept vigil day after day after Willie and his younger brother, Tad, fell ill. (Tad eventually would recover.) “The days dragged wearily by, and he grew weaker and more shadow-like,” Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who had become Mary Lincoln’s seamstress and confidante, later wrote. “He was his mother’s favorite child.”

Keckley recalled one particularly poignant evening when the president and Mrs. Lincoln hosted a lavish reception in the White House. The first lady repeatedly left the party and traipsed upstairs in her white satin dress to check on her dying son. The worried president forbade dancing. Keckley, who sat by Willie’s bedside, recalled how “the rich notes of the Marine Band in the apartments below came to the sickroom in soft, subdued murmurs, like the wild, faint sobbing of far-off spirits.”

Within days, Willie succumbed to the disease.

Gone was the only Lincoln child who possessed the amiable demeanor of his father, the one a family friend called “the most lovable boy I ever knew, bright, sensible, sweet-tempered and gentle-mannered.”

Gone was the boy who had shown his father’s command of language in a poem he had submitted to the National Republican newspaper about the death of a family friend who had died in battle. Gone was the boy who had romped around the White House with his younger brother, devising mischievous pranks and building a play fort on the mansion’s roof.

The Lincolns had lost another son, Edward, in 1850, just before his fourth birthday and only months before Willie was born. But the loss of Willie plunged them into an altogether deeper grief and cast a pall over the White House that would linger throughout the war. President Lincoln often turned inward, concealing his sadness and carrying on with the job at hand. Mary Lincoln wore her pain outwardly, like an albatross.

Upon first seeing his dead son, President Lincoln murmured, “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!”

He buried his head in his hands, Keckley recalled, and his tall frame convulsed with emotion. “I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder,” she wrote. “His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved.”

The first lady fared even worse.

“Mrs. Lincoln’s grief is inconsolable,” Keckley wrote. During one of her fits of grief, the president led her to a window and pointed toward the insane asylum, later known as St. Elizabeths Hospital. “Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder?” he said. “Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”

On the day of the funeral, “a great many friends of the family called to take a last look at the little favorite, who had endeared himself to all guests of the family,” reported the Washington Evening Star. “The body was clothed in the usual every-day attire of youths of his age, consisting of pants and jacket with white stockings and low shoes — the white collar and wristbands being turned over the black cloth of the jacket.”

His right hand held a small bouquet of flowers that later would be given to his mother, who remained upstairs to grieve in solitude. His plain metallic coffin bore a simple inscription on a square silver plate: William Wallace Lincoln. Born December 21st, 1850. Died February 20th, 1862.

At 2 p.m., the crowd gathered for the funeral in the East Room, where the mirrors had been covered and the frames draped with black mourning crepe. Government offices were closed. Cabinet secretaries filed in, along with generals and foreign dignitaries, members of Congress and family friends. They stole glances at Willie’s weary father.

“There sat the man, with a burden on his brain at which the world marvels — bent now with the load at both heart and brain — staggering under a blow like the taking from him of his child,” recalled the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis. “Men of power sat around him . . . all struggling with their tears — great hearts sorrowing with the president as a stricken man and a brother.”

In his eulogy, Phineas D. Gurley, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, called Willie “a child of bright intelligence and of peculiar promise. . . . His mind was active, inquisitive and conscientious; his disposition was amiable and affectionate; his impulses were kind and generous; and his words and manners were gentle and attractive. It is easy to see how a child, thus endowed, would, in the course of 11 years, entwine himself around the hearts of those who knew him best.”

Afterward, the mourners joined the long procession through unpaved streets and up a slope to Oak Hill Cemetery, off R Street in Georgetown, with two white horses pulling the hearse. Willie’s body was placed in a vault belonging to the family of William Carroll, a clerk of the Supreme Court, who had offered to let the Lincolns use the tomb as a temporary resting place until they returned to Illinois.

The remains of Willie Lincoln lay in the marble vault, locked behind an iron gate, for more than three years. On numerous occasions, author James L. Swanson wrote, “his ever-mourning father returned to visit him, to remember, and to weep,” even as he tried to hold the country together.

After Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Willie’s casket was exhumed and placed aboard the presidential funeral train for the journey back to Illinois. Father and son headed home together.

To walk through the gates of Oak Hill today is to slip back in time. Down the winding stone paths, past towering oaks and faded headstones, on a hilltop overlooking Rock Creek sits the weathered vault in the farthest corner of the cemetery. There is no sign that Willie Lincoln ever was here, no name carved into the marble, no marker to commemorate the dark days of winter 1862.

But the black iron gate still guards the entrance, and just beyond it lies the darkened vault where a president dealing with a nation’s sorrows could come and be a father dealing with his own.

A descendant battles for a corporal's recognition

By Linda Wheeler

For Frank E. White Jr., it’s personal.

Lots of people are fanatics about some aspect of the Civil War, but White has maintained a singular focus for 35 years. Now the subject of his research is before an Army review board that could recommend a Medal of Honor for his great-great-grandfather, a Civil War soldier. The original application made for Cpl. David D. White was rejected in the 1890s.

Such passion for the tiny slices of Civil War history is not unusual. It often starts with a youngster visiting a battlefield or reading a particularly good book. For White, it was a chance visit to a Massachusetts library as a young man in which he read that his ancestor had captured Gen. Robert E. Lee’s eldest son, Maj. Gen. George Washington Custis Lee, on April 6, 1865, at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek.

“Wow! How cool is that?” he remembers thinking. But then he discovered someone else had not only received the credit for arresting Custis Lee but had also received the Medal of Honor for it.

White, an informational technology consultant living in Lebanon, N.J., said that from then on he was hooked. He had to settle “this unresolved historical event. Who captured Lee? Who should get the credit?”

There are many reasons for confusion over what exactly happened during the war. Government bureaucracy, political favoritism and human egoism all play a part. Add to that the rush by veterans to get a Medal of Honor in the 1890s, when the already vague rules were relaxed; a soldier could apply for himself and little documentation was needed.

At the time, capturing an enemy flag even at a mass surrender was considered worthy of a Medal of Honor, a creation of Congress during the Civil War. The standards now are much higher and involve “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of [one’s] life above and beyond the call of duty.”

At Sailor’s Creek, 56 medals were approved, eight for “gallantry,” many for seizing a Confederate regimental flag and one for the capture of an enemy general.

All of this played into why White of the 37th Massachusetts Infantry did not get a Medal of Honor and Cpl. Harris S. Hawthorne of the 121st New York Infantry did. Hawthorne applied for and received the medal in 1894. Three years later, colleagues of White protested the Hawthorne medal and applied for White, to no avail. An appeal of that rejection was also turned down.

Although many of the Civil War-era medals would be withdrawn in a 1916 review of the awards process, Hawthorne’s was not.

This Virginia battle, three days before Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, is a particularly difficult one to document. It was one of the more vicious battles. Not content with just shooting at the enemy from a distance, Union and Confederate soldiers slugged it out. Rifle stocks were swung as clubs. Knives were stuck in guts. Ears and noses were bitten. Thousands of soldiers were involved.

When the melee was over, the Confederates realized that no matter how good they were at landing a punch, they were still greatly outnumbered. About 8,000 Confederates eventually surrendered, as did eight of their generals, including Custis Lee.

Later on, White would claim that he saw Lee trying to escape from the battlefield and grabbed him, sending him to the rear. Hawthorne would say he saw Lee trying to escape from a group of prisoners, seized him and sent him to the appropriate official.

Chris Calkins, executive director of the state-owned Sailor’s Creek Battlefield, said both could be right.

“It’s like a police arrest and someone is handed over for processing,” he said. “Prisoners were sent to the rear and would pass through a lot of hands.”

In 2008, Frank White published a 300-page book, “Sailor’s Creek: Major General G.W. Custis Lee, Captured With Controversy,” in which he included every scrap of his research. It became the basis of a request for reconsideration of the denial of the Medal of Honor for David White that was submitted to the Army’s War Decorations Board a year ago. The appeal was written by former college history professor and Civil War historian Sharon MacDonald.

She concluded that Hawthorne lied in his application and that the medal should be withdrawn. She hopes that this will be obvious to the board and that they will act on it. As for White, she said she is not advocating for him but thinks that he was unfairly treated and that his case deserves reconsideration.

A spokesman for the U.S. Army Awards and Decorations Branch at Fort Knox, Ky., said the Army cannot comment on pending cases. If that board approves the medal for White, it would be only the first of eight reviews before a final decision is made, including a vote by Congress and approval of the president.

Cast of Characters

By Michael E. Ruane

Col. Edward D. Baker

A native of England, Baker was the picture of the elegant Victorian politician. He was a U.S. senator from Oregon and good friend of Abraham Lincoln. The two were so close that the president named his son Eddy for Baker, and Baker introduced Lincoln at his inauguration in March 1861. Seven months later, on Oct. 21, Baker was killed at age 50 during the disastrous Union defeat at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, on the Potomac River near Leesburg. He is the only U.S. senator ever killed in battle. Lincoln is said to have remarked that Baker’s death hit him “like a whirlwind from a desert.”

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant

On Nov. 7, 1861, the then-obscure Union commander led a few thousand men in an attack on Confederate forces at Belmont, Mo., on the Mississippi River. The Yankees overran the rebels but in the delirium of victory were surrounded by Confederate reinforcements. Grant coolly directed his men to safety, recalling, “We had cut our way in and could cut our way out.” He barely escaped, riding his horse aboard a departing riverboat just as the enemy closed in. “The National troops acquired a confidence . . . at Belmont that did not desert them through the war,” the future general in chief wrote.

Edwin M. Stanton

The proud, asthmatic, high-octane lawyer was U.S. attorney general under President James Buchanan before becoming Lincoln’s gruff secretary of war in January 1862. Initially dismissive of Lincoln, Stanton, with his wire-rimmed glasses and salt-and-pepper beard, became one of the president’s most loyal and hardworking allies. He kept the death vigil after Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in 1865. Lincoln said of him: “He is the rock on the beach of our national ocean against which the breakers dash and roar.” Stanton died after an asthma attack on Christmas Eve 1869. He is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown.

Navy Capt. Charles Wilkes

The irascible former explorer was reportedly raised by a future Roman Catholic saint, his mother’s sister, Elizabeth Ann Seton. But the then-63-year-old almost sparked war with Great Britain during the Trent Affair in fall 1861. Wilkes, whose house on Lafayette Square was used by Union Gen. George B. McClellan, seized two Confederate envoys, James Mason and John Slidell, from a British mail ship in the Caribbean. Although Wilkes was hailed by Congress, Britain was outraged, and Lincoln freed the diplomats, saying, “One war at a time.”

Sally Louisa Tompkins

Known as the Angel of the Confederacy, she got an officer’s commission in the Confederate army on Sept. 9, 1861, the only woman to do so during the war. A member of a wealthy Tidewater family, she established a hospital in Richmond that, because of her obsession with cleanliness, had the lowest rate of fatalities of any military hospital, North or South. Her staff included her slave, “Mammy” Phoebe, who had raised her, and the noted Washington physician A.Y.P. Garnett. An Episcopal church in Richmond has a stained glass window bearing her likeness.

Gen. William T. Sherman

The “war is hell” Union commander, whose 1864 Georgia campaign made him one of the chief architects of the Confederacy’s defeat, had a nervous breakdown in fall 1861. Contemplating suicide, he went home to Ohio to recover. He had performed well at the First Battle of Bull Run in July. But he was overwhelmed by larger responsibilities at a new post in Kentucky and by media reports that he had gone insane. He recuperated quickly, went on to watch his victorious troops march down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1865 and came to detest reporters.

Harry Macarthy

The immigrant entertainer and songwriter sparked a near riot in New Orleans in September 1861 when he and his wife performed his new hit song, “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” Confederate soldiers heading for the front reacted with such wild enthusiasm that they had to be restrained by police. The song and its author became wildly popular across the South. Set to the jaunty music of an older Irish tune, the chorus goes: Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights, hurrah! Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.

Belle Boyd

A budding Confederate espionage agent, the then-17-year-old shot and killed a drunken Union soldier who had menaced her mother in their Martinsburg, W.Va., home in July 1861. Exonerated, she was working as a rebel courier by October and went on to supply Confederate commanders with crucial intelligence she had charmed out of Union officers or picked up eavesdropping behind the lines. The legendary Confederate general Stonewall Jackson once thanked her for “the immense service that you have rendered your country.” Boyd was arrested several times, imprisoned twice and eventually exiled to England. She later penned her memoirs, worked as an actress and lectured about her wartime life as a spy.

What is the greatest overlooked story of the Civil War for the period between the battles of Ball's Bluff and Shiloh?

A crucial bond for Grant and Sherman
John Marszalek
Giles distinguished professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State University.

When the war began in April 1861, two men who would play major roles in the eventual victory were hardly known outside the circle of the prewar army.

Both had resigned their West Point-earned commissions to try to make it as civilians and had found little success. Instead, Ulysses S. Grant failed as a farmer, gained the untrue reputation of being a drunkard and was stuck behind the counter of his demanding father’s tannery business. William T. Sherman was the manager of two banks when they collapsed and then had to fight his father-in-law’s insistence that he supervise the family salt works.

When the war began, Grant spent the early months shuffling paper in Illinois and then getting command of a regiment of unruly volunteer civilians. At that time, Sherman was president of a St. Louis street railway company. He thought the Union cause was very shaky but, at the insistence of his wife and relatives, rejoined the military.

Grant quickly took hold, but Sherman did not. Sent to Kentucky, he underwent a period of anxiety and depression so severe that he contemplated suicide. The result was that he gained the false reputation of being insane.

There it was: By 1862 two men destined to become heroes of the federal effort were both labeled with major negative characterizations. Grant was called a drunk, and Sherman was called crazy.

Fortunately for both of them and for the Union effort, they were thrown together. As Grant pressed forward to take forts Henry and Donelson and then defeated the Confederates at Shiloh, the two men came to know, help and depend on each other. Sherman gave Grant men, supplies and encouragement when Grant was undergoing intense criticism from Henry W. Halleck, his superior officer. Grant, in turn, had unwavering confidence in Sherman when Sherman had little himself. Both came to see each other as individuals they could trust implicitly, no matter the crisis. A strong bond was formed.

All this happened quietly, behind the scenes, yet it was as important as almost anything else going on at that time. The press did not talk about it, the public hardly knew who Grant and Sherman were, and the common soldier only came to understand it later. In fact, though, the bond between Grant and Sherman formed in early 1862 was crucial to the ultimate Union success in the Civil War.

The death of Willie Lincoln
Harold Holzer
Author or editor of 40 books, many on Lincoln, and chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation.

Perhaps the most overlooked story — if you calculate its transformative impact on the most important figure of the war — was the tragic death of William Wallace Lincoln, the 11-year-old son of the president, in February 1862.

After the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Willie composed a remarkably mature poetic tribute to family friend Edward Dickinson Baker, who lost his life there. The ode even appeared in a Washington newspaper. Baker was the second intimate of the Lincolns to die in the young war: E.E. Ellsworth fell first, and the death of Baker (for whom the Lincolns’ late son Eddy had been named) intensified their pain.

Understandably, no blow hit them harder than the death of Willie — reportedly his father’s favorite and much like him in temperament. The child succumbed to typhoid fever, caused by water pumped into the White House through an indoor plumbing system whose source was the fetid Potomac. He suffered an agonizing death.

After sobbing in front of his private secretaries, the president said little about his loss. But his wife, Mary, perhaps spoke for both of them when she exclaimed that “the serpents” had “crossed our pathways.” The word “serpents” carried a decidedly religious connotation in those days: The grieving mother was clearly expressing her belief that she and her husband had been repaid for their sins. Mary would later elaborate: “I had become so wrapped up in the world, so devoted to our own political advancement that I thought of little else besides. Our Heavenly Father sees fit, oftentimes to visit us, at such times for our worldliness.”

Mary never escaped what she described as the “fiery furnace of affliction” of grief. But Willie’s death never melted Abraham Lincoln, dimmed his resolve — or, for that matter, reduced his devotion to his own political advancement, which he came to see as inseparable from the goals of Union and freedom. In fact, Lincoln emerged from his mourning a tougher commander-in-chief than before, willing to deploy deadly weaponry, sacrifice unimaginable casualties and lay waste to acres of property in pursuit of victory.

Thousands of fathers had lost sons without losing their love of country or dedication to its preservation. A tougher-than-ever Lincoln now identified with such fathers, emerging from his testing loss a warrior. Willie’s death might have been, in its way, the turning point of the Civil War. After he was gone, his father buried his pain and inflicted it as needed to guarantee victory. In a way, Willie Lincoln’s passing also doomed the age of Victorian innocence and gentlemanly fighting. The age of modern war had arrived.

The Potomac blockade
Waite Rawls
President and chief executive of the Museum of the Confederacy.

The most important, yet overlooked, story of the period did not happen in the Deep South, or the Western Theater, or the Atlantic, but very close to Washington. From October 1861 to March 1862, the Confederates effectively blockaded the U.S. capital with artillery batteries that closed off the Potomac River to Union ship traffic while allowing supplies to cross the Potomac to Virginia from Confederate-sympathizing Charles County in Maryland.

The Confederates had earlier thought to build their batteries at Mathias Point, just upriver from the current Route 301 bridge, but they abandoned that effort because it was too far from a supply base to support infantry forces. Instead, they worked frantically, and in secrecy, during August and September 1861 to build batteries between the Occoquan River and Quantico Creek, with the biggest batteries at Evansport and Shipping Point, near current-day Quantico, and Cockpit Point, just north of Quantico Creek. The batteries were supported on shore by two Confederate units stationed in Dumfries, each of which would became famous later in the war: the Texas Brigade and Wade Hampton’s Legion.

Ready for action and opening fire in mid-October, these Confederate batteries forced the Union Navy to redirect all ship traffic out of the Potomac and to use Baltimore instead of Washington, much to the embarrassment of President Abraham Lincoln, his Navy and his Army. By that time, never-ready-for-action Gen. George B. McClellan refused to send Union land troops down the southern side of the river from Alexandria to dislodge the Confederates. In protest of what he considered Lincoln’s meddling, he dispatched a division to the Maryland side opposite the Confederates, where they could do the Confederates no harm, nor the Union any good. The Union soldiers noticed that there were few men around in the Maryland homes and assumed that the women were widows, only to discover later that the ladies had husbands who were very much alive and had gone South to fight with the Confederacy.

It was curious. The North had blockaded the Southern ports, and the South had used its artillery to blockade Washington, where supplies withered and prices soared, as the overwhelmed Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was its only supply link with the rest of the world. This condition lasted through December, January and February as Northern impatience with McClellan’s intransigence built.

The breakthrough finally came March 9, 1862, but not from any Northern action. In February, Confederate President Jefferson Davis gave Gen. Joseph Johnston permission to pull back from Centreville, Dumfries and the Potomac River. Wasting no time, Johnston burned his supplies, exploded extra ammunition and moved farther south in the direction of Fredericksburg, giving up the blockade.

Goodbye, gold standard
William Blair
Director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Pennsylvania State University.

One under-appreciated story concerns something very familiar to Americans today: the national debt. By December 1861, the Union faced a financial crisis that could have hurt its ability to prosecute the war. Finding solutions for the problem led to a revolutionary change in the nation’s monetary structure and eventually to the establishment of the Internal Revenue Service.

Very early in the conflict, the Union faced the need for a then-staggering amount of resources. The United States in 1860 had a gross public debt of $64.8 million; by December 1861 it had ballooned to $270 million. Without a national paper currency, the government funded the war to that point primarily through bonds and Treasury notes.

The disaster at Ball’s Bluff and friction with Great Britain over the United States seizing the British ship Trent helped erode public confidence and, coupled with financial insecurity, eventually sparked a run on the banks. In response, the banks of New York on Dec. 30 suspended the payment of the gold and silver that backed various financial vehicles.

One solution to the crisis involved taking the country off the gold standard and creating a national paper currency. The Legal Tender Act of Feb. 25, 1862, put into circulation what became known as greenbacks — fiat money that was considered as good as gold. Republicans who had doubts about the constitutionality of the measure realized that the alternative of an empty treasury was far worse.

This was not the only strategy adopted to stabilize the finances of the country. In August 1861, the Republican-dominated Congress enacted an income tax. It was progressive in that it exempted people with lower incomes. However, it became clear that neither this policy nor the new paper currency would offset the ever-increasing debt load of the North. On July 1, 1862, lawmakers passed the Internal Revenue Act, which also launched the IRS. The law allowed for taxes on a range of items such as liquor, tobacco, playing cards, billiard tables, jewelry, newspaper advertisements and even licenses on professions. The policies fed discontent in the Democratic Party, which at that time advocated small government and fiscal conservatism. All told, the debt expanded from about $90 million to $2.68 billion during the four years of the conflict.

Most general works focus on these acts and the bond drives by the government, but the concern over the national debt outlasted the war. It became an important political issue in Reconstruction. Vigorous debate occurred over whether to repudiate the obligation — essentially, to default on the loans — or to honor the arrangement. In the end, the government paid up, and it became a point of national pride that the United States could carry and retire its war debt, providing a symbol that the country was ready to take a more expansive role on the international stage. By the late 19th century, the government was running a surplus.

Additional Content

Timeline: Northern Resurgence

CHAPTER FOUR

Innovations of War: Technology takes a great leap forward during the war

Rear Adm. John A. Dahlgren standing by a Dahlgren gun on deck of USS Pawnee during the Civil War. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Technology and mayhem: Innovations in weaponry, transportation and communications increased the efficiency and brutality of battle

By Joel Achenbach

It was the war of the future, and it was the war of the past. The combination was brutal, a recipe for slaughter.

The Civil War brought into existence new techniques of killing even as generals followed the tactics of the Napoleonic wars. The rifled guns, exploiting the physics of a spinning bullet, were far more accurate, and an infantryman could drop an enemy soldier hundreds of yards away.

The Gatling gun introduced the world to the concept of a machine gun. Now came, too, the trench warfare, the land mines, the sea mines. The spring of 1862 saw the famous battle of the ironclads, the CSS Virginia vs. the USS Monitor. The railroads, a young technology, enabled the rapid transport and resupply of vast armies.

The rise of American industry in the first half of the century meant factories could mass-produce clothes, boots, weapons. Telegraph lines enabled commanders to direct armies over multiple theaters. The wires carried bulletins from the front lines to distant newspaper presses. The public followed every battle, and, thus, the grand strategy of war had to factor in the shifts in public opinion — the perception of the war in the North, the South and across the Atlantic, where the traditional Great Powers weighed their options.

And yet as modern and fantastic as it was, there was still something medieval about the Civil War. Soldiers fought with bayonets and carried swords to battle. Their weapons included lances and pikes. They relied on horses, mules, wagons. Medicine remained borderline barbaric. Amputations were conducted on the battlefield without anesthesia, and soldiers died in droves not of combat injuries but of ancient diseases — hewing to a grand tradition of warfare.

Wars are always a product of current technology and past strategy. The Civil War was to some extent the first industrial-age war, says historian Bart Hacker of the National Museum of American History. But it was also the last of the preindustrial wars, he says. A conference this fall at the Smithsonian, organized by Hacker, will seek to sort it out.

One of the most important innovations was one that no one could see directly. As Robert V. Bruce reports in his book “Lincoln and the Tools of War,” ordnance officers at the start of the Civil War had at their disposal a huge stockpile of smoothbore weapons. Such guns fired a round bullet that tended to tumble through the air, destination never entirely certain.

But there was a better technology in the wings. It wasn’t new (Lincoln knew all about it from his days on the frontier), but it hadn’t been widely adopted by militaries: the rifle.

A “rifled” gun has spiraling grooves (rifling) inside the bore. The grooves impart a spin to an elongated bullet, making it fly much farther.

The drawback with rifles had always been that they were hard to load at the muzzle, because the bullet had to fit tightly in order to benefit from the rifling. Soldiers labored to cram the bullet down the bore.

But as the war neared, technology found better ways to load and fire a weapon. For example, the Minie ball had become popular with the War Department. Named for the Frenchman who invented it, the small, easy-loading Minie ball had a concave base that would expand under the force of the exploding gunpowder, enabling it to take the rifling and spin.

Gradually, rifled weapons replaced smoothbore guns, and soldiers could inflict death at a distance, which vastly expanded the killing ground between opposing lines.

“Instead of a couple hundred yards, you’re talking about crossing 1,000 yards under fire,” said Hacker, a curator of armed forces history. “You’re just taking a whole lot more fire — and, in general, more accurate fire. You could actually hit something you aimed at several hundred yards away with a rifle musket. With a smoothbore, you were lucky to hit your target beyond 50 yards.”

The generals had learned their craft at West Point, where they had read Antoine-Henri Jomini’s theories on the science of warfare. They knew about the importance of the turning maneuver and of interior lines of supply and communication. They learned the virtues of concentrating forces and sending masses of men into the enemy’s weakest point. This was the Napoleonic orthodoxy. But in practice in the Civil War it could be suicide.

The masses of men charged into a meat grinder.

Technologist-in-chief

Lincoln was keenly aware that he lived in a technological society. He was a modern man, knifing into the future. He experienced the acceleration of technological progress more than most Americans because of the primitive nature of his birth in a log cabin on the frontier.

The telegraph came along in 1844, and information suddenly no longer moved at the speed of a horse. Since earlier in the century, the ancient sources of power — wind, water, human and animal muscle — had been to a great extent supplanted by the miracle of steam. Lincoln saw these changes and approved. He was a technophile, curious about contraptions, a student of machines. He became a promoter of railroads and an eager user of the telegraph.

He was even an inventor himself. He owned a U.S. government patent, which no other president before or since could boast. He had designed a mechanism for assisting a boat across shoals. He was quite obsessed with the importance of what people called “internal improvements,” meaning the building of roads, railroads, canals, harbors. He once told his best friend, Joshua Speed, that he wanted someday to be the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois – Clinton being the New Yorker behind the Erie Canal.

By 1858, the year of the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, Lincoln had developed a traveling lecture about the history of technology.

“Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship,” Lincoln declared in his lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions.”

As president, he was technologist-in-chief. Inventors banged on his door, wrote him letters, begged him for investment capital for their new weapons. “People knew that Lincoln was a technology geek,” says curator David Miller, who works in the gun room at the American History museum. Lincoln would test-fire rifles sent to the White House.

The telegraph office was Lincoln’s second home, and he would linger late into the night, hectoring generals to pursue the enemy. A president who controlled multiple theaters of war through the clipped diction of the telegraph mastered the art of the compressed message, which may help explain why the Gettysburg Address is not only short but impossible to cut.

Even with the rise of a wired society, information remained sketchy. Entire armies still managed to move undetected behind mountain ranges. Reliable information could be elusive in crucial moments.

A trip the battlefield

Consider the story, available online at the Atlantic Web site, written in 1862 by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., an editor for the (yes, very venerable) magazine. In September of that year he learned, via a telegram delivered to his Boston home, that his son Oliver Jr. had been wounded in the battle of Antietam. The message went:

“Hagerstown 17th
To H
Capt H wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at Keedysville”

Holmes sets out to find his son. The narrative is extraordinarily long and digressive, and at times it feels like a shaggy dog story, but it offers a great deal of texture of American life in 1862 across a variety of landscapes.

Holmes, for example, opines about what a nuisance it is to have an overly talkative neighbor during a train ride. It’s a comment that easily could have been written in the 21st century rather than the 19th.

Out the window, he sees canal boats, and for a moment, he dreams of being the captain of one, enjoying a tranquil, prelapsarian existence — “who has not often envied the cobbler in his stall?” This is the lament of the overly busy modern person.

After much travel, Holmes reaches the Monocacy River, but the rebels have blown up the railroad bridge. He must switch to a horse-drawn wagon. Such is life in a between age: The pre-industrial past is never far away.

He eventually makes his way to the scene of the great battle:

“The whole ground was strewed with fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of bread and meat. I saw two soldiers’ caps that looked as though their owners had been shot through the head. In several places I noted dark red patches where a pool of blood had curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured his life out on the sod.”

He can’t find his wounded son. He hears all kinds of rumors. He retraces his route, all the way back to Philadelphia, and still can’t find him. He goes to Harrisburg, Pa., and still can’t find him. It turns out (eventually, many thousands of words later, when they finally reunite in Harrisburg) that his son had been holed up in Hagerstown, under the care of some angelic women, just 10 miles from the Antietam battlefield when his father visited.

And, thus, one sees the frustrations of life in a partially technological world. Information isn’t reliable. Everyone is still a little lost. You can’t find your wounded son to save your life.

We know how the narrative turns out, because Oliver Jr. goes on to become a celebrated Supreme Court justice. He lives to the age of 93.

But no one in 1862 knew how the terrible drama of the Civil War would play out. And they didn’t realize that they were nowhere near the end of the story.

The Monitor's secrets

By Michael E. Ruane

(Library of Congress)

One sailor remembered that the clouds parted late that night and an eerie half moon illuminated the ship’s death struggle in the Atlantic gale.

Towering waves broke over the turret. Water gushed through the hatches and knocked men down. Several were swept overboard and vanished into the blackness.

Below deck, the rising water sloshed almost waist deep. Several members of the crew were paralyzed by seasickness or fear. And a master’s mate gave a watch away, sensing his doom.

It was a “panorama of horror,” a survivor recalled, one that “would have appalled the stoutest heart.”

And as the USS Monitor was pounded by the ocean, the skipper signaled to his escort ship to send the lifeboats: He was sinking.

It was Dec. 31, 1862, and as the moon set over the North Carolina coast, the strange iron-covered vessel — the ship that had so recently saved the Union — vanished, leaving behind only an eddy on the surface.

The engine room clock was later found stopped around 1 a.m., marking the moment of one of the great naval tragedies of the Civil War.

A battle for the ages

Ten months earlier — 150 years ago this month — the Monitor had become the nation’s salvation and had altered the course of the war.

Armed with only two guns and powered by a single-cylinder engine, the vessel steamed into Virginia’s Hampton Roads and interrupted the destruction of a Union flotilla by a powerful iron-clad Confederate warship.

The Confederate vessel, the CSS Virginia, had rampaged among the Union’s wooden ships on March 8, as Yankee shot bounced off its greased iron sides.

One Union warship was rammed and sunk. Another was set ablaze, and surrendered. A third was heavily damaged. More than 200 Union sailors were killed.

It was the worst defeat in U.S. Navy history up to that time, according to John D. Broadwater, a long-time Monitor scholar. And it threatened to break the Union’s crucial naval blockade of the South.

Fear of the rebel war machine — “the horrid creature of a nightmare” — reached as far away as Washington, where it was hourly expected to steam up the Potomac, shell the Capitol and scatter Congress.

It made for a fearsome sight, with its slanted black silhouette, menacing guns and smoke billowing from its stack.

Adding insult to apprehension, it had been built on the burned remains of a United States Navy ship, the Merrimack, which the Navy thought it had destroyed.

But the next day, March 9, as the Virginia returned to finish off the Union ships, the Monitor, which had arrived the night before, steamed out to give battle.

As 20,000 spectators watched from shore and other ships, one of history’s most important naval engagements unfolded.

The Monitor was an almost laughable contrast, with a deck just above the waterline and a solitary revolving iron turret — a “cheesebox,” as the reporters would call it.

The Virginia outgunned the Monitor, with 10 weapons firing from ports in its blockhouse on deck.

But the Monitor’s twin eight-ton smoothbores were bigger, and the spinning turret allowed the guns to be fired without maneuvering the ship into shooting position.

Both ships had mechanical problems. Neither could do the other much damage. And the slugfest, which went on for four hours, ended in a draw.

The encounter — the first ever between ironclad warships — changed naval warfare forever.

“There will be other battles,” novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne later wrote, “but no more such tests of seamanship and manhood as the battles of the past.”

The age of the wooden warship was over. But the future of the Union was preserved.

The Monitor and its crew became national heroes. The ship was swarmed with visitors who begged for autographs. One woman, given a tour, kissed the guns.

An emotional President Abraham Lincoln went aboard and reviewed the assembled crew, hat in hand.

But before the year was out, the celebrated Monitor would blunder into the gale 16 miles off Cape Hatteras and sink in 220 feet of water.

Sixteen men were lost, including two who were entangled in the ropes, guns and coal that piled into the turret when the vessel capsized.

One of the survivors later described the disaster to his wife, saying: “The Monitor is no more. What the fire of the enemy failed to do, the elements have accomplished.”

The past, reconstructed

But the death of the Monitor also led to a modern maritime saga as bold, ingenious and improbable as the life of the pioneering warship.

Lost for more than a century, the ship was located by scientists in 1973, upside down but mostly intact just off Cape Hatteras.

(The Virginia was blown up in Hampton Roads in 1862 to keep it out of the hands of encroaching Yankees. Little of the ship has ever been found.)

In 2002, the Monitor’s 120-ton turret — its guns still inside — was lifted to the surface with the help of the Navy and taken to the Maritime Museum in Newport News, Va., for preservation.

The museum has the state-of-the art Monitor Center for the display and conservation of the ship’s artifacts.

Scientists have also recovered the ship’s 20-ton engine, its anchor, sailors’ shoes, a boot, part of a wool coat, silverware, rubber buttons, lanterns, the engine room clock and the skull of a rodent.

And they found the almost complete skeletons of the two sailors who were trapped in the turret.

Last month, forensic technicians at Louisiana State University, working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, began trying to re-create their faces.

Using exact models of the two skulls, the scientists applied clay to try to reconstruct how the sailors might have looked.

One was a younger man, about 21, whose skull showed he had suffered a broken nose, and whose feet were still clad in a pair of beat-up, mismatched shoes.

The other was that of an older salt, about 35, whose bones showed he may have had a limp from a prior injury.

He also had a groove in his left front teeth, probably from clenching his pipe. And he wore a gold ring with a crude swirling pattern on a finger of his right hand.

The complete reconstructions are scheduled to be unveiled this week at the Navy Memorial in Washington.

Experts have also extracted DNA, studied the skeletons — which are in a military laboratory in Hawaii — and narrowed down to a few the possible identities of the two.

And although both remain officially unidentified, NOAA experts believe the current sesquicentennial of the Civil War is a perfect time for the two sailors to be buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

“Let’s put these two men to rest . . . as a group burial representing all of the men who lost their lives that night,” said David W. Alberg, superintendent of NOAA’s Monitor Marine Sanctuary. “These men belong to history and the nation, and it’s time that the nation honors them.”

A crash construction job

The day that changed naval warfare began shortly after sunrise as Monitor steamed out of the shadow of the USS Minnesota, one of the Union ships battered by the Virginia the day before.

The Monitor’s bespectacled paymaster, William F. Keeler, was up on deck with the captain and a ship’s doctor. Keeler spotted the Virginia in the distance through the morning fog.

Suddenly a puff of smoke appeared from the Virginia, and a shell shrieked overhead, crashing into the wounded Minnesota.

“Gentlemen,” said the Monitor’s commander, Lt. John L. Worden, “you had better go below.”

Keeler later wrote his wife: “We did not wait [for] a second invitation.”

He recalled that as the trio descended into the turret, and the hatch was closed, crewmen were hoisting a 175-pound shot into one of the guns. “Send them that with our compliments, my lads,” the captain ordered.

The scene seems like one from a World War II submarine movie rather than one from the Civil War.

That was because the Monitor looked like, and was in many respects, “a submerged iron fortress,” as Hawthorne called it. “She burrows and snorts along, oftener under the surface than above.”

The ship had been built in Brooklyn during a crash construction program after Union officials discovered that the Confederacy was rebuilding the Merrimack.

When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, the U.S. Navy was forced to abandon its venerable Gosport shipyard in Portsmouth. Departing Union officers tried to destroy anything that might be of use to the rebels.

That included the USS Merrimack, a large steam- and sail-powered frigate that was in for repairs.

But the Merrimack was only partly destroyed. And the ingenious Confederates, eager for a weapon to counter Union naval power, salvaged its hull and engine, and built on its deck the iron- and timber-covered block house.

Informed about the Virginia, Washington frantically sought its own ironclad, even advertising in newspapers for “Iron-Clad Steam-Vessels-of-War.”

The Navy was directed to the imperious John Ericsson, a Swedish-born, New York-based ship architect who seven years before had pitched the French a Monitor-like vessel called “Ericsson’s Impregnable Battery and Revolving Cupola.”

Although the French did not take up his offer, Ericsson wrote later that he “was fully prepared to present plans of an impregnable steam battery” to Washington.

And the Navy did not have much time. Although his design was alien — “like nothing in the heaven above or on the earth beneath,” one officer said — Ericsson got the contract on Oct. 4, 1861.

He was given 100 days to deliver the ship.

Much of the work was subcontracted. The Navy borrowed two guns from another vessel. Ericsson supplied the cutting-edge technology and design.

Most of the Monitor rode below the surface, which made it a small target. Its deck rose only 18 inches above the waterline. Indeed, the Monitor was so strange a ship that several sailors deserted on being assigned to it, according to historian John V. Quarstein, who has authored a study of the crew, “The Monitor Boys .”

The ship used a single four-blade propeller, and an unusual four-pronged anchor that was carried and deployed internally to avoid exposing the crew to gunfire.

The Monitor had a surprisingly elegant interior, and the world’s first on-board toilets that could be flushed underwater — although they would backfire if not operated properly.

The guns had special brakes to reduce recoil in the confines of the turret. And the turret was sheathed in eight layers of thick iron plate.

Ericsson pushed the construction, visiting the shipyard almost every day. And when the Monitor was launched on Jan. 30, 1862, he had missed his deadline by only 18 days.

The crew, up close

Four months after the battle at Hampton Roads, a photographer named James F. Gibson hauled his camera equipment aboard the Monitor while it was anchored in the James River, and took the only known images of the crew.

In the photos, groups of sailors congregate on the sun-baked deck, and officers pose with the Monitor’s dented turret in the background.

The sailors are a weathered-looking, sinewy bunch.

In one shot, several are in bare feet. Two are smoking pipes. There are what seem to be two games of checkers underway. One sailor, wearing a Navy tam, is intently reading what may be a newspaper.

In another shot, crewmen lounge while pots cook over a deck oven. Atop the turret, a crewman stands holding a spyglass.

The Monitor had a complement of 58 men during the battle and 63 when it sank, according to Anna Holloway, vice president of the Mariners Museum’s collections and programs.

There were coal heavers, boilermakers, former slaves, natives of Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Wales. One had his initials tattooed on his right forearm. Another was the son of a Union general. Several enlisted under false names.

Two members of the crew, including an officer who was haunted by criticism of his performance at Hampton Roads, would later take their own lives.

Most of those aboard escaped in the lifeboats the night the Monitor sank.

Among those who perished was acting master’s mate George Frederickson of Philadelphia, who had given a friend a pocket watch, saying, “Here, this is yours. I may be lost.”

Frederickson is pictured in two of Gibson’s photos of the officers — a short man with a thick goatee and an intense look on his face.

Near Frederickson in both photos is the boyish third assistant engineer Robinson W. Hands, who wears his cap at a jaunty angle and, in one shot, holds a cigar. He, too, died.

Also lost was engineer Samuel Augee Lewis, who was last seen seasick in his bunk. He had called out to a comrade: “Is there any hope?”

Almost a century and a half later, curators found in the rusted turret silverware bearing the initials “S A L” inscribed above the letters “USN.”

Washington's press corps: Blame it on the Civil War

By Paul Farhi

The life of a newspaper correspondent in pre-Civil War Washington was marked by insultingly low wages, uncertain job security and frequent charges of inaccurate or biased reporting.

So, in a way, not much has changed in 150 years.

But the onset of the conflict in 1861 acted like a spike of adrenaline for the city’s journalists. The hostilities generated a flood of news and rumor in a city suddenly bursting with wartime energy. With Union newspapers hungry for any information about the unfolding catastrophe, newspapermen, and a few newspaperwomen, flocked to the capital.

The new arrivals — many of them young, most quite inexperienced — set up shop in one- and two-man news bureaus between the Capitol and the White House, selling their dispatches to whoever would buy in the north and west. So thick were the scribes clustered around 14th Street NW near the Willard and long-gone Ebbitt hotels that the stretch became known as “Newspaper Row.”

Reporters were nothing new in Washington in the 1860s, but the Civil War influx of newcomers established the hazy outlines of the permanent reporter-political-industrial complex that we know today. Many of the new correspondents stayed to establish permanent news bureaus. European correspondents, fascinated by the war’s massive scale, settled in, too; among them was a young French journalist named Georges Clemenceau, destined to become France’s prime minister during another great conflict — World War I.

The journalistic epicenter, around 14th and F streets NW, later became the site of the National Press Building, home to numerous national and international bureaus. An inebriated politicians-and-correspondents party for a new speaker of the House of Representatives in 1864 may have been the model for Gridiron and White House Correspondents dinners to come.

The city was the logical place for a war correspondent.

Most of the major battles of the eastern campaign were fought within a day’s ride of the capital and some were literally within earshot of it. Congress and the burgeoning federal bureaucracy were here, as was the commander in chief. A surprisingly accommodating President Abraham Lincoln regularly chatted up the newspapermen in informal, off-the-record meetings; the Associated Press’s senior man, Lawrence “Pops” Gobright, occasionally accompanied Lincoln when he went from the White House to the War Department to read communiques from the battlefields.

The reporters were an educated group — schoolteachers, lawyers, small-town editors and, later, wounded war veterans, said Donald A. Ritchie, Senate historian and author of “Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents.” Some of the journalism of the day holds up, he says.

“There’s a lot of good shoe-leather work involved,” Ritchie says. “The job hasn’t changed much. You get the facts and you tell people about them.”

But the wartime city buzzed with rumor and gossip, and sensation often appeared as news. The New York Herald, under its storied editor and proprietor James Gordon Bennett, gained a reputation for wildly speculative stories; just before the war’s outbreak, the newspaper reported that armed gangs in Maryland and Virginia were preparing to descend on Washington to prevent Lincoln’s inauguration.

“They printed almost every rumor you can imagine,” says Mark J. Stegmaier, a historian at Cameron University in Oklahoma.

By the beginning of the war, the Washington press corps had become a partisan bunch, “openly rooting for a Union victory, as were their newspapers,” Ritchie says. Southern correspondents had “seceded” from the city, along with their state delegations.

The reporters established close — and by contemporary standards, corrupt — relationships with the people they covered. They courted and wrote flattering accounts of political players. Horace White, the Chicago Tribune’s man in town, actually shared a boardinghouse with the congressmen he covered, Ritchie says.

The cozy connections between the press and the politicians enhanced the newsmen’s chances of gaining not only news leads but also insider investment tips, and of winning “patronage” jobs. Thanks to their friends in office, correspondents for the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune and other leading papers secured jobs as clerks on House and Senate committees, earning paychecks from the government and their newspapers simultaneously. The reporters, naturally, repaid their sponsors with favorable coverage, leading one senator, James Doolittle of Wisconsin, to complain that “great men and heroes are manufactured here” by blatant press bribery.

A few reporters, such as the Inquirer’s Uriah Painter, grew wealthy by trading on the inside information they gleaned from their work as journalists. By the end of the war, the profits from Horace White’s wartime speculation enabled him to buy a controlling stake in the Tribune. He immediately booted the paper’s legendary editor, Joseph Medill, and installed himself as editor in chief. (Medill returned to the job in 1874.)

Lincoln did his part to keep the press happy. One newspaper, the Washington Sunday Chronicle, lived off government printing contracts and bulk sales to the Army of the Potomac, and it “became as close to an official organ as the Lincoln administration would have,” according to “Press Gallery.” The president also spread printing contracts and advertising among other pro-Republican papers and handed out diplomatic and postal jobs to their correspondents. After two New York papers, the World and Journal of Commerce, unknowingly printed a fallacious story planted by conspirators to manipulate gold prices in 1864, Lincoln ordered the papers’ owners arrested and the papers closed. The proprietors were released, however, when detectives tracked down the actual perpetrators.

All told, modern readers might be a bit skeptical of how the Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin characterized early war reporting from Washington in 1861:

“We are living history in these exciting times, and the historians are the newspaper writers, reporters and correspondents. To be sure, some of them make mistakes at times, and each day’s paper is not always an exactly accurate record of each day’s events. But the future historian will be able to winnow the solid grains of fact from the chaff of fancy and rumor, and the very sheet which we print today, may at a future time be closely scanned by some patient student, in his search for the actual facts concerning the mad attempt at revolution got up by some of the Southern States of the American Union in the year 1861.”

Among those who came to town in that bustling era was 22-year-old Henry Adams, the grandson of a president (John Quincy Adams), and great-grandson of a Founding Father (John Adams). The young Adams served as an unpaid, unsigned correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser, the largest newspaper in that city at the time, according to Stegmaier, whose forthcoming book, “Henry Adams in the Secession Crisis,” dissects Adams’s previously uncollected “letters” from Washington.

Adams, who would later distinguish himself as a leading intellectual and historian (“The Education of Henry Adams”), had some good contacts, too. His father, Charles Francis Adams, was a congressman from Massachusetts and a moderate Republican who led a faction that maneuvered to keep border states such as Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia and Maryland from seceding in the months before the war. Henry Adams — whose newspaper pieces mirrored his father’s political positions — served as his father’s private secretary in Congress while he did his newspaper work.

News reporting had been revolutionized more than a decade before the war by the advent of the telegraph. The technology loomed even larger as the war spread. It also became a convenient means to control the boisterous Washington correspondents.

Since daily dispatches from Washington had to pass through telegraphs operated by war censors, the Union government found it easy to suppress stories unfavorable to the North’s cause. As a result, the day after the first battle of Bull Run in Manassas in July 1861, some Northern newspapers got the story wrong. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it “A Great Union Victory” in its first edition. Reports of Union successes in the morning made it onto the wire, but not news of the arrival of Confederate reinforcements in the afternoon.

Journalists employed by Republican newspapers were more fortunate than those employed by Democrats; the latter often saw their work land at the bottom of a government wastebasket. The AP’s Gobright, whose wire service served Republican and Democratic papers alike, had no such trouble. “My despatches [sic] are merely dry matters of fact and detail,” he said of his success in beating the censors.

Ritchie calls Gobright one of the earliest “objective” journalists — impartial, unbiased, apparently untainted by fear or favor. In a city boiling with war, and frenzied news about it, the seeds of modern journalism had begun to sprout.

My God, what a slaughter' Lee's Army of Northern Virginia never again came as close to destroying a Federal army as it did at Second Manassas

By Steve Vogel

(Library of Congress)

The hardened armies that would meet at the Second Battle of Manassas in late August 1862 had none of the naive enthusiasm of the men who a year earlier had joyously marched to the fields around Bull Run for a battle they believed would put a quick end to the young war between the states.

If the stunning Confederate victory at First Manassas in July 1861 had shown that a long, hard road lay ahead in this war, Second Manassas would show how bloody it would be.

The nation had been shocked by the toll at the First Battle of Manassas, which saw more than 5,000 casualties, including nearly 900 dead — the bloodiest battle in American history, to that point.

But as the Civil War stretched into its second year, the battles had become deadlier. The armies had grown much larger, the officers more competent, their tactics more proficient. The weapons were deadlier — more rifles with better accuracy and more precise artillery. As much as anything, it was this: The men had become expert at killing and remorseless about it.

In the western theater in April, Union troops under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant clashed with a large Confederate force at Shiloh, leaving more than 20,000 casualties, an unprecedented number. That grim mark was about to be matched on the familiar swales of farmland around Bull Run, 26 miles west of Washington.

‘An ungovernable mob’

In the summer of 1862, as Union Gen. George McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign bogged down in front of Richmond, President Abraham Lincoln pinned his hopes on another commander who might bring victory. Gen. John Pope, who had achieved modest success in the west, was given command of the newly created Army of Virginia.

Pope quickly earned the enmity of his new army in his first address to the troops when he snidely suggested they lacked the courage of the western soldiers. But Pope had something McClellan lacked: an aggressive streak. The new commander was determined to seek out and destroy the Confederate Army.

In early August, McClellan was ordered to send his troops to Northern Virginia, where they would unite with Pope’s army and create an overwhelming force that could crush Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. But McClellan, jealous of Pope’s new prominence, delayed his departure for 10 days.

In the division of the Union armies, Lee saw opportunity. Lee would defeat Pope before he could be reinforced.

After several weeks of maneuvering, Lee’s and Pope’s armies were poised across from each other on opposite sides of the Rappahannock River. Lee developed a bold plan to split his own army.

Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson — his nickname earned by his tenacious stand at First Manassas — would take one wing around Pope’s right flank to get behind the enemy. The second wing, under Gen. James Longstreet, would stay at Pope’s front — but not for long. Once Pope turned his troops around to chase Jackson, Lee and Longstreet would follow Jackson’s path to reunite the army and try to inflict a decisive defeat on the Union force. The Confederate plan carried great risk, presenting Pope with an opportunity to destroy each wing of Lee’s army in succession.

On Aug. 25, Jackson launched his 24,000 men on one of the war’s great marches, covering more than 50 miles in 34 hours. At dawn Aug. 26, his lead elements passed through the Bull Run Mountains at Thoroughfare Gap and into the rear of Pope’s army.

Jackson had an open path to Manassas Junction, the critical railroad hub that gave the ground around Bull Run such strategic importance. Jackson’s men, lean, hungry and wide-eyed, fell upon an enormous, undefended federal depot, with warehouses and boxcars filled with rations, helping themselves to cigars and whiskey and wolfing down lobster accompanied by Rhine wine.

“Just imagine about 6000 men hungry and almost naked, let loose on some million dollars worth of biscuit, cheese, ham, bacon, messpork, coffee, sugar, tea, fruit, brandy, wine, whiskey, oysters, coats, pants, shirts, caps, boots, shoes, blankets, tents, etc.,” wrote a horrified chaplain from Louisiana. “I saw the whole army become what appeared to me an ungovernable mob.”

Union Brig. Gen. George Taylor led more than 1,000 New Jersey troops to the scene, confidently expecting to scatter some Confederate raiders. Instead, they met an explosion of fire from Jackson’s army. A quarter of the Union men were lost, and the mortally wounded Taylor urged his officers “for God’s sake to prevent another Bull Run.”

Pope saw no such danger. He withdrew his 66,000-man army from the Rappahannock and sent them northeast to hunt down Jackson’s army. “We shall bag the whole crowd,” he declared.

But Jackson was not trapped or trying to escape, as Pope assumed. He moved a few miles northwest and took up a strong position on Stony Ridge, hidden in woods above the Warrenton Turnpike — modern-day Route 29 — along the likely avenue of Union approach. Late in the day, Aug. 28, a Federal column came marching east on the turnpike, in front of his concealed troops.

To the horror of his staff, Jackson rode across broom sedge fields to within musket range of the passing Union troops, who paid no mind to the lone rider. Satisfied that a large Federal force was within his sights, Jackson rode back to the Confederate line and issued orders to his officers: “Bring out your men, gentlemen.”

The ensuing fight at Brawner’s Farm — which marked the beginning of Second Manassas — was one of the most brutal of the war. It pitted one of the best Union units — Wisconsin and Indiana troops soon known as the Iron Brigade — against the most storied Confederate outfit: the Stonewall Brigade.

Moving up the slope into withering fire, the Union troops almost overran the Confederates, but when the fighting stopped after dark, the Federals had been held off. Almost one-third of the troops engaged had been killed or wounded in the bloody standoff.

“My God, what a slaughter,” wrote Pvt. George Fairfield of the 7th Wisconsin.

But worse was to come.

‘Like chaff before the tempest’

On the morning of Aug. 29, Jackson placed his troops along a stretch of unfinished rail bed roughly parallel to the turnpike, a well-protected position. Despite the heavy losses, Jackson was sanguine. He knew Longstreet was on his way.

Several times, the Union troops briefly breached the Confederate line, but each time they were pushed back. By the end of the day, four massive but disjointed Union assaults had failed to break through Jackson’s left flank, leaving bodies piled before the railroad bank.

“My brave lads were dashed back before the storm of bullets like chaff before the tempest,” reported Brig. Gen. Robert Milroy, a Union brigade commander.

An even greater danger lay off Pope’s exposed left flank, where Longstreet’s wing was taking position, leaving the Union army squeezed inside a giant vise.

Night fell and fighting ended for the day with Pope still unconcerned about the threat, despite warnings from commanders in the field.

Behind Confederate lines, Jackson listened to a lengthy casualty report without comment. Some believed the general was beyond remorse a year into the war. But when surgeon Hunter H. McGuire disclosed that among the dead was 19-year-old Willie Preston, the gentle-natured son of close friends from Lexington, Jackson’s muscles twitched and his eyes glowed. “He gripped me by the shoulder till it hurt me, and in a savage, threatening manner asked why I left the boy,” McGuire recalled. “In a few seconds he recovered himself, and turned and walked off into the woods alone.”

Hurling rocks at Union troops

Saturday, Aug. 30, the final day of the battle, dawned hot, dry and quiet. Though Pope had finally recognized Longstreet’s arrival, he ignored the threat and prepared to attack. He sent a wire to Washington reporting the enemy had been “driven from the field” and his expectation that a glorious victory was at hand.

It was almost 3 p.m. when a single Union cannon fired a shot, the attack signal for 12,000 Union soldiers in 37 regiments, lined up in assault formation that stretched more than a mile. In the desperate close-quarters fighting that ensued along the railroad bank, Confederates who had expended all of their ammunition were reduced to hurling rocks at the Union troops.

With his entire line in danger, Jackson sent a message to Lee asking for reinforcements. Now Longstreet opened up with 18 cannons sighted on the open ground where the Federals were advancing. Next he unleashed his five divisions, 25,000 soldiers, stretching nearly a mile and a half. It was the largest single mass assault of the war. With frightful screams, the rebel troops swept forward through fields, streams and woods.

Two New York regiments of Zouaves, who wore gaudy uniforms with baggy red trousers and tasseled fezzes modeled after the French, were the first to pay the price, overrun by Gen. John Bell Hood’s Texans. In 10 minutes, the 5th New York lost more men than any regiment would in any other battle of the war — 124 killed and 223 wounded out of 490. To one of Hood’s men, the bodies of the Zouaves sprinkled across the slope gave the appearance of “a Texas hillside when carpeted in the spring by wild flowers of many hues and tints.”

At last, Pope grasped his ghastly miscalculation and rushed to save his army. He sent troops to occupy the strategic high ground at Henry Hill. A brigade of Ohioans, reinforced by artillery and followed by others, bought time for their comrades with a stand on Chinn Ridge, which lay between Henry Hill and the advancing Confederates. They slowed the Confederate advance, buying 90 precious minutes, but at fearful cost.

Capt. Mark Kern, the commander of a Pennsylvania battery, was one of many who sacrificed his life. “I promised to drive you back, or die under my guns, and I have kept my word,” he told the Texans.

Henry Hill was secured, enabling Pope’s army to retreat in darkness across Bull Run and eventually to the safety of Washington’s fortifications.

“We are whipped again, I am afraid,” Lincoln sadly told his secretary, John Hay.

Second Manassas left 3,300 dead, more Americans than have died in a decade of war in Afghanistan. Although it lies just minutes from Interstate 66, the rolling landscape of Manassas National Battlefield Park has a peaceful beauty far removed from 150 years ago, when the mangled and bloody remains of thousands of young men lay in fields and streambeds, on hill slopes and in piles at the foot of the unfinished railroad grade.

Never again would Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia come so close to destroying a Federal army as it did at Second Manassas.

But the Federal army had escaped, and within days, Lee made the fateful decision to invade Maryland. Less than three weeks later, his troops would meet the Union army at Antietam, where a sad new standard of American bloodshed would be set.

In defense of McClellan: A contrarian view

By Gene Thorp

(Library of Congress)

(The Washington Post)

In May 1862, the one-year-old Confederacy appeared to be on the brink of collapse. The Union had produced a string of victories from the coast of North Carolina to the far West, and a massive Federal army had just reached the outskirts of Richmond, the rebel capital, ready to destroy the nerve center of the rebellion.

Since the fall, the Confederates had lost some 40,000 men, double that of their Union counterparts. The Confederacy, with less than half the population of the North, could ill afford to take such losses.

Then the tables turned.

By the end of August, the Confederates were in central Kentucky driving hard for Louisville. In the East, not only had the Federal army been thrown back from Richmond, but it also had been driven all the way to the Washington defenses.

Who or what was responsible for such a startling reversal?

Besides the brilliant maneuvering of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, conventional wisdom has pinned the blame mainly on Gen. George B. McClellan, who led the Union offensive on Richmond.

His over-cautious approach, the story goes, kept him bottled up at Yorktown for a month conducting siege warfare on a rebel army one-fifth the size of his. He vastly overestimated the strength of the enemy and made irrational calls for reinforcements. When the rebels finally retreated to Richmond, he did not pursue quickly enough. After Jackson joined Lee in Richmond and drove back the Union soldiers, McClellan withheld reinforcements from Gen. John Pope for petty political reasons, contributing to his army’s defeat.

But there is another way to look at the spring and summer of 1862, and in this version, the strategic mistakes are Lincoln’s.

In early March, McClellan told the president of his plan to capture Richmond. His offensive force would steam down the Chesapeake Bay to the peninsula between the York and James rivers and assault the rebel capital. His defensive force would man the forts surrounding Washington and guard the two main approaches from the south — the Piedmont and the head of the Shenandoah Valley. At the start of the campaign, McClellan had almost 190,000 men at his disposal.

How much of McClellan’s army should be allocated to defense became a serious point of contention with Lincoln, who was fixated on Washington’s security. McClellan’s lieutenants recommended 55,000 men, leaving the main assault force with 135,000 soldiers. The number could always be adjusted by McClellan, depending on Confederate actions. On April 1, McClellan sailed down the Potomac to prepare his assault.

Three days later, without McClellan’s knowledge, Lincoln held back an additional 33,000 men from McClellan’s attacking force. McClellan, who had already written orders for those men, was not aware of the new arrangement until he had reached the front.

He pleaded with Lincoln to release the troops. “I beg that you will reconsider the order . . . the success of our cause will be imperiled by so greatly reducing my force when it is actually under the fire of the enemy and active operations have commenced.”

Lincoln was adamant: “You now have over 100,000 troops with you. . . . I think you better break the enemy’s line from Yorktown to Warwick River at once.”

At the time, though, McClellan had only about 58,000 soldiers, since many of his troops were either awaiting embarkation back in Washington or still in transit. In a private note to his wife, McClellan fumed, “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.”

He hesitated. Although the rebel force that McClellan faced was far smaller, about 11,000 men, it held an excellent defensive position, most of it behind an impassable swamp and river, 100 to 300 feet wide. To break the Confederate line, McClellan’s men would have to funnel into a two-mile stretch of fortified land, swept from three sides by heavy artillery, without the benefit of their own heavy guns.

Fearing a slaughter, McClellan settled in for a siege. Over the next two weeks, the remainder of his force arrived, but so did another 40,000 Confederates.

He learned then that the 88,000 men left behind had been removed from his control and put under the direct command of Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, a lawyer with no military experience. McClellan could no longer control the relegation of troops between his defense and offense.

Then, in a blow that affected Union commanders on every front, Stanton closed down all recruiting stations in the North. From this point on, each Union soldier who was lost — whether from combat or disease — would not be replaced. Four days after the order, 13,047 Federals fell at Shiloh. More than 70,000 would be lost before Stanton’s order was rescinded three months later.

The new strategy played directly into Confederate hands. The horrible reversals over the winter forced the Confederacy to initiate a draft, which prevented those already in the army from leaving and brought into their fold most of the remaining southerners from the ages of 18 to 35. So as the Union Army shrank, the Confederate Army grew.

Confederates also were retooling their strategy. Instead of defending every locale throughout the South, they concentrated their armies on the most important strategic points, Richmond in particular.

After one month, on the night of May 4, the siege forced the rebels to retreat, and McClellan resumed his march on Richmond. Lee stripped troops from the Atlantic coast to the Shenandoah Valley to defend his capital. Confederate records show that in one month, the number of men in front of McClellan’s now-95,000-man army swelled from about 56,000 to more than 115,000. McClellan, who thought that additional Confederates had arrived from the western theater to expand the total to 200,000, anxiously telegraphed Lincoln for reinforcements. He had been promised another 35,000 men when he reached Richmond, but barely 10,000 would ever arrive.

Lincoln and Stanton, meanwhile, failed to take advantage of the newly weakened Confederate fronts. Instead, they spent their time directing the Washington defense force as it got tangled up in a wild-goose chase pursuing Jackson’s small army through the Shenandoah Valley. Even McClellan’s rival, Gen. Irwin McDowell, could see the folly of the venture. Pleading with Lincoln not to redirect his troops from reinforcing McClellan, McDowell wrote, “I shall gain nothing for you there, and shall lose much for you here . . . it throws us all back, and from Richmond north we shall have all our large masses paralyzed.”

Lincoln would not budge. When Jackson slipped away to join Lee at Richmond, more than 60,000 Union troops sat idle in the valley without an enemy to fight.

On Jackson’s arrival, the great Confederate offensive to relieve Richmond began. Without reinforcements, McClellan found his supply line exposed. In seven days of bloody assaults, Lee hammered McClellan’s line back to the James River between Richmond and Petersburg. There, Union gunboats prevented further pursuit. McClellan’s army was defeated, but not destroyed.

Finally, Lincoln and Stanton gave up their roles as strategists and pulled Gen. Henry Halleck from the West to take over as general in chief.

Still within striking distance of Richmond, McClellan now suggested that his army be sent south to take the critical railroad junctions at Petersburg, Va., a strategy that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant would use two years later to win the war. But Halleck ranked the security of Washington higher and decided to advance on Richmond from the north with both Pope’s and McClellan’s armies. On Aug. 3 McClellan was ordered to withdraw from the Peninsula and join Pope.

McClellan has been accused of stalling, but moving a large army without notice is a complex undertaking. McClellan first had to bring back part of his army, which had advanced toward Richmond under Halleck’s orders. He also had to evacuate some 12,500 sick, but few transports were available, most already in use moving another command or transporting prisoners of war. Some of the largest transports could not reach his army because the James River was too shallow. When the army did move on Aug. 14, they had to march 40-55 miles to port.

McClellan sent his infantry before his artillery and cavalry, because the latter two required more time to ship. Almost half of his army got there before they were stopped by Jackson’s men who, unbeknownst to Union generals, had slipped around behind Pope.

As 1,200 of McClellan’s infantry rode the train to reinforce Pope, they found Jackson’s rebels with ample artillery waiting for them. Without cannons, the Federals were sitting ducks and lost a quarter of their men before they could escape. For the next two days, McClellan refused to send the remainder of his forces forward until his artillery was ready to accompany them. A frustrated Halleck overruled McClellan and ordered his troops forward, leaving McClellan without an army. (When Pope was defeated, Lincoln returned the army to McClellan.)

After the battle of Second Manassas, Lee marched north into Maryland and Lincoln called on McClellan to stop the invasion. More accusations of slowness and stupidity were leveled against him, even though he became one of the few generals to defeat Lee, in the battle of Antietam [to be addressed in the next Civil War section in September.] Finally, after the November elections, Lincoln cashiered McClellan.

Two years later, McClellan became the Democratic candidate for president. An army of newspaper writers and politicians sympathetic to Lincoln went after McClellan’s character, questioning and condemning every military action he had taken in his career.

Obscured by all this were some truly great accomplishments. Perhaps the most impressive was building an army from scratch and advancing it to within six miles of the Confederate capital at a cost of 10,000 men — all within the first year of the war. That same feat was only accomplished by one other Union commander — Grant, who lost six times as many men fighting a rebel army half the size and worn out by two years of fighting and attrition.

Perhaps the greatest testament came from Lee. According to Lee’s son, on the afternoon of July 15, 1870, Lee visited his first cousin and lifelong friend, Cassius Lee. When the general was asked which of the Federal generals he considered to be the greatest, “He answered most emphatically ‘McClellan by all odds.’ ”

The 'she-devils' of the Shenandoah Valley held their own

By Linda Wheeler

For Lucy Rebecca Buck, a 19-year-old living in Front Royal, Va., liberation came on May 23, when Maj. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and his troops swooped into Front Royal and sent the Union forces running for the hills.

“I cannot forget that sight, the first glimpse caught of a grey figure upon horseback seemingly in command, until then I couldn’t believe our deliverers had really come, but seeing was believing and I could only sink to my knees with my face in my hands and sob for joy,” she wrote that day in the diary she kept through the war years.

The hated Union troops had occupied her town a month earlier to protect the main camp at Strasburg. By then, Front Royal’s men were largely gone, as brothers, cousins and neighbors had all joined the Confederate army. The Union forces set up camp in her family’s front yard, pulling down fences, chopping down fruit trees for firewood and seizing their horses. What had been a beautiful, manicured estate turned into muddy fields.

Buck and several other well-educated women in the Shenandoah Valley kept daily records of their lives as the war unfolded. The joy she felt that day in May was short-lived; once Jackson had driven the Yankees out of Front Royal, he quickly moved north, and the occupiers returned.

The women did their best with defiance and insults to keep the “creatures in blue,” as they referred to the Union men, away from them and out of their houses. Stories circulated before the occupation that Union men grew horns and were evil and vile. Many a child was surprised to see they looked like ordinary men who sometimes gave them treats and shared photographs of their own children.

About 25 miles away, in Winchester, where Jackson and his troops had spent the winter, occupation came earlier, in March. As soon as Confederate forces moved out, Union troops marched in with bands playing and flags flying. The few supporters living in Winchester met them with cheers and waved handkerchiefs.

“All is over and we are prisoners in our own homes,” wrote 42-year-old widow Mary Greenhow Lee. “My first Sunday in captivity has been a long, long day; I believe I am loosing my mind, for I find it impossible to fix it on any subject, but the one dreadful idea that we are surrounded by these very enemies who have for months kept us in a state of terror . . . ”

Things got worse. Soon after the first battle of the Valley Campaign at Kernstown on March 23, wounded soldiers in both grey and blue began to fill the public buildings in Winchester, then the churches, and sometimes homes. The women, already living in relative privation, were thrust into roles as nurses and caregivers.

“The dead, the dying, the raving maniac, and agonizing suffering, in its most revolting forms, were all before us; our men and the Yankees, all mixed up together, in the same rooms,” Lee wrote. “I have found myself down on the floor, by the Yankees, feeding them; you remember how I always said, I would not go to their Hospitals, but I never thought of our men being at them, nor could I give to one sufferer, and pass another by in silence.”

Her niece, Laura Lee, described her own mixed feelings. “Two other of our men have died as have many of the Yankees,” she wrote on March 26. “There are many more who must die. They are very patient and uncomplaining and grateful for kindness. Before they came here, we thought nothing would induce us to enter the hospitals, but we never thought of having our own troops and their wounded and dying together.”

They shared what they had, homemade soup and bread, but a town once filled with markets now had almost no food for sale. And with no firewood, Mary Lee begged her diary to forgive some missed days in the winter because her hands were too cold to write.

By then, the faltering Confederacy had suffered a string of defeats in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Arkansas. So when Jackson turned his small, underdog army into a fighting machine that racked up a string of victories, the diary writers swooned. They had found their savior. There was real hope the Confederacy would not only survive but triumph.

Forced to live in the company of their enemies, the secessionist women of Winchester came up with a plan to wage their own war. They knew the soldiers were starved for female attention and companionship because they often tried to get them to stop and talk.

In a concerted effort, the women shunned them. They began by turning their faces away. Next they began wearing “Jefferson Davis bonnets,” large sun bonnets with veils that concealed their faces. When the Provost Marshal outlawed the bonnets, more women wore them. Next came parasols, which women could artfully twist to obscure their faces.

The women also refused to walk under a U.S. flag, stepping into the muddy street instead. The soldiers added more flags and watched to see what the women would do. When there was no way to avoid walking under a flag, the women, who seemed to enjoy this game immensely, went out their back doors and got around town by using the alleys.

One evening Mary Lee and some family members sat on the porch as a military funeral procession passed. They listened to the band play but were careful to show no interest. A corps of Union officers followed the band, and the soldiers stared at the women until they jumped up and ran into the house.

“They are so annoyed by the ladies secluding themselves, being so closely veiled when on the street, that when they have an opportunity of seeing ladies, on their own premises, they . . . throw aside every feeling of delicacy,” she wrote that night, describing how the men stared.

By then, the occupiers had a name for the female residents of Winchester. They called them she-devils.June 8-9: Jackson and Union forces clash in the Battle of Port Republic. After Jackson’s victory, the Union withdrew from the Valley.

THE FIRST VALLEY CAMPAIGN

Stonewall Jackson’s assignment was to keep several divisions of the Union army tied up in the Shenandoah Valley so they could not reinforce Gen. George B. McClellan for his siege of Richmond, the Confederate capital. Jackson’s underdog campaign, which succeeded in routing forces three times his size, is still taught by the military.

Feb. 28, 1862: Union Gen. Nathaniel Banks crosses the Potomac River into Virginia and advances on Winchester.

March 11: Jackson abandons Winchester, where he and his men had spent the winter.

March 23: Jackson attacks Union forces at Kernstown, near Winchester. The Union victory in First Kernstown is Jackson’s only loss in battle of the Civil War.

May 8: Jackson and the Union clash at McDowell, which results in a Confederate victory.

May 23: Jackson attacks Union occupiers at Front Royal, and the Battle of Front Royal goes down as another Confederate victory.

May 25: Jackson attacks Union forces as they reach Winchester after abandoning Strasburg. The First Battle of Winchester results in a Confederate victory.

June 8: Jackson and Union forces clash at Cross Keys, resulting in a Confederate victory.

Cast of Characters

By Michael E. Ruane

Albert Sidney Johnston

At 59, he was one of the Confederacy’s best and most experienced generals. He had been secretary of war for the short-lived Republic of Texas and was a friend of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Commanding rebel forces in the western theater, he led the assault on Union troops at Shiloh, Tenn., on April 6, 1862. He was wounded in the leg and bled to death. His loss to the Confederacy was irreparable. “The West perished with Albert Sidney Johnston,” a comrade wrote, “and the Southern country followed.”

Samuel M. Pook

A Union naval architect, he designed the fleet of weird-looking, stern-wheel, ironclad river boats that became known as “Pook’s Turtles.” Seven were delivered to the government in early 1862. They were protected by 2.5 inches of armor and could operate in shallow water. In February 1862, they pounded the Confederate Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, into submission. The “turtles” would serve with distinction for much of the war.

David G. Farragut

The intrepid Union Navy admiral who had been a sailor since childhood was a native of Tennessee and longtime resident of Norfolk. But he remained loyal to the Union Navy and headed the stunning capture of New Orleans - the South’s largest city - in April 1862. He was one of the North’s first war heroes. A statue of him, dedicated in 1881, stands in Washington’s Farragut Square.

Turner Ashby

The dashing Confederate cavalry commander from Fauquier County was known as the “knight of the valley,” for the Shenandoah Valley, where he fought. Seeking revenge for the death of his brother, Ashby was reckless in battle. His death on June 6, 1862, outside Harrisonburg - possibly by friendly fire - made him a Southern martyr. His body was taken to a nearby house, where it was washed, dressed and propped in a chair. Ashby was then captured in one of the Civil War’s best-known postmortem photographs.

Thaddeus Lowe

Balloonist extraordinaire, he had twice attempted transatlantic crossings that fizzled before takeoff. But in April 1861 he made a 900-mile flight from Ohio to South Carolina. Arriving right after the attack on Fort Sumter, “Professor” Lowe was arrested as a Northern spy. Upon his release, he offered his services to the Union. And in 1862 during the Peninsula campaign, he made valuable daily reconnaissance flights and took aerial photos.

Simon Bolivar Buckner

The handsome Confederate general and West Point graduate had the misfortune to be trapped in Fort Donelson, Tenn., in February 1862. His superiors had fled, leaving him to surrender the garrison. He asked his opponent, former West Point classmate and Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, for an armistice to discuss capitulation. “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender,” Grant famously replied. Buckner, who had once helped Grant financially, called the response “ungenerous and unchivalrous,” but the exchange gained the Union victor the nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.

George Frederick Root

A well-known prewar composer, Root was probably the Civil War’s most prolific and influential songwriter. In 1862 he published his biggest hit, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” which by war’s end had sold 350,000 copies of sheet music. Its rousing chorus - The Union Forever! Hurrah, Boys, Hurrah! - boosted flagging morale across the North. Root wrote dozens of wartime tunes, including “Just Before the Battle, Mother,” “Just After the Battle” and the music to “The Vacant Chair.”

James Ewell Brown Stuart

The South’s most renowned cavalry commander, Stuart began building his legend in June 1862 when he and 1,200 rebel horsemen rode on a 100-mile reconnaissance around the Union army facing Richmond. The feat boosted Southern morale. Stuart lost one man and did not encounter Union cavalry commanded by his father-in-law, Gen. Philip St. George Cook.

An audacious escape to freedom: Robert Smalls seized a ship and piloted it to a new life -- and proved that blacks could fight for the Union

By Avis Thomas Lester

(Library of Congress)

He sat at the conference table next to Frederick Douglass as they tried to convince President Abraham Lincoln that African Americans should be allowed to fight for their own freedom. He served five terms in Congress. He ran a newspaper and helped found a state Republican Party.

But first, he had to win his freedom.

To do that, he conceived a plan that struck a blow against the Confederacy so significant that he was heralded across the nation. Carrying out his mission required bravery, intelligence and precision timing — attributes that many whites at that time thought blacks didn’t possess.

Robert Smalls proved them wrong and changed history in the doing.

* * *

Smalls was born in Beaufort, S.C., on April 5, 1839, the son of Lydia Polite, a slave who was a housekeeper in the city home of John McKee, owner of the Ashdale Plantation on Lady’s Island, one of the Sea Islands. Though he never knew the identity of his father, it was widely believed that Smalls was the progeny of McKee’s son, Henry.

“There was a distinctly fatherly relationship between [Henry McKee] and my great-grandfather,” said Helen Boulware Moore of Lakewood Ranch, Fla., who grew up hearing stories about Smalls from her grandmother, Elizabeth Lydia Smalls Bampfield, his daughter.

Growing up at the McKees’ place, Smalls played with both black and white children, ate food cooked in the kitchen where his mother worked and slept in a bed in a small house that was provided for her. Polite had been taken from her family on the island plantation at age 9 to work as a companion to the McKee children in Beaufort.

Because of his connection to Henry McKee, Smalls was allowed “to go places and do things others couldn’t do. That could cause problems with blacks . . . and could be a dangerous thing with whites, as well,” said Michael Allen of the National Park Service’s Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which runs through South Carolina.

The town of Beaufort maintained a 7 p.m. daily curfew for blacks, but on many occasions young Smalls ignored the bell and continued to play with white children. Several times, he was taken into custody. Henry McKee paid a fine to retrieve him, Moore said.

When he was 10, his mother sent him to the plantation to learn the reality of slave life. He came back defiant, not willing to comply, as she had hoped.

“He acted as if he could do what the white children did, and that frightened her,” Moore said. “She wanted to educate him about the whole issue of slavery to save his life.”

Worried that her son would suffer consequences for his bold behavior, Polite asked McKee to rent out Smalls at age 12 to work in nearby Charleston. Each week, he was given $1 of his wages; the rest went to the McKees. He supplemented his income by purchasing cheap candy and tobacco and reselling them.

At age 18, Smalls met Hannah Jones, an enslaved hotel worker who had two daughters. He sought permission to marry and live with her in an apartment in Charleston, Moore said.

“He was smart enough to know that at any moment, she and any children they had might be sold, so he asked her enslaver,” who agreed, Moore said.

Smalls became skilled at working on ships, eventually advancing to the position of pilot. In 1861, he was hired to work on a steamer called the Planter, which was used to transport cotton to ships headed to Europe. But once the Civil War started, the Confederates seized it for use as an armed transport vessel.

Smalls knew how to navigate. He knew that the white crew trusted him. He had his eye on freedom, and all he needed was an opportunity.

* * *

“They were going to seize the ship,” said Lawrence Guyot, a black-history expert in Washington. “It was dangerous. It was daring. It was unprecedented. And when they accomplished it, it was used to demonstrate that blacks could be brave and strategic in pulling off military maneuvers. Because of what happened on the Planter, Abraham Lincoln decided to let African Americans join the fight in the Civil War.”

Moore, a retired professor, pointed out that “a lot is said about [Smalls’s] patriotism, but it was not simply patriotism that led him to act. His priority was his family.”

Smalls had sought to purchase his wife, his two young children and his wife’s daughters, but the price of $800 was too steep.

In the early hours of May 13, 1862, the Planter’s crew took an unapproved furlough into town, leaving Smalls, 23, and several other black crew members aboard. Wearing a captain’s coat and hat and taking care to hide his black face, Smalls steered the ship toward a rendezvous spot to pick up the men’s families.

“It was really dangerous because they were flying the Confederate flag,” Moore said. “They made a decision that they wouldn’t be taken alive. . . . If they had been caught, they were going to ignite the explosives and die on the ship.’”

Through Charleston Harbor and past several Confederate lookouts, the ship steamed. Smalls signaled at the appropriate points, as he’d seen the captain do.

By dawn, the Planter had reached the federal blockade of the harbor. The crew lowered the Confederate flag and hoisted a white sheet that Hannah had brought from the hotel where she worked, Moore said.

“One of the most heroic and daring adventures since the war commenced was undertaken and successfully accomplished by a party of negroes in Charleston,” trumpeted the June 14, 1862, edition of Harper’s Weekly.

Commodore S.F. DuPont, the commander of the federal fleet barricading Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, wrote to the Department of the Army that Smalls provided information “of the utmost importance” to the Union, such as the location of mines he had helped lay in the harbor while working for the Confederacy, news accounts show.

* * *

This May marks the 150th anniversary of the seizure of the Planter. A commemoration is scheduled for May 12-13 in Charleston.

“Somebody should make a movie about this guy,” said Frank Smith, founding director of the District’s African American Civil War Memorial Museum, which includes an exhibit about Smalls. “If you are looking for a heroic character, it would be hard to invent one with better qualifications than Robert Smalls.”

Smalls became a ship pilot for the Union, serving as a volunteer until he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in Company B of the 33rd Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops. He fought in 17 battles and is credited with recruiting 5,000 blacks. He was later designated a major general in the South Carolina militia.

In April 1865, Smalls returned to Beaufort and the McKee house, which he had purchased in a tax sale, using part of a $1,500 appropriation he received for taking the Planter. Back home, he was reunited with his mother — and one of his former owners.

“Mrs. McKee, after the war was over, came wandering to the house one day,” Moore said. “Because of her dementia, she didn’t realize the house was no longer hers. . . . Given her illness, Robert allowed her to stay.”

Smalls, who had learned to read and write while serving in the military, went into business and then politics. He served in both houses of the South Carolina Legislature and in 1874 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, beating a white Democrat in a district that was almost 70 percent black. (The 15th Amendment had given African Americans the vote in 1870.)

But his later years were plagued by racism as white-supremacist Democrats stepped up efforts to unseat Reconstruction legislators. He was accused of bribery but later cleared, historical accounts show.

In his personal life, Smalls lost a son in infancy and Hannah in 1883. Seven years later, at the age of 51, he married Annie Wigg, who bore him a second son, William Robert. Annie died a few years later.

Smalls himself died in 1915 at what is now called the the Robert Smalls House, at 511 Prince Street in Beaufort. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is currently for sale for $1.2 million.

Other structures and streets have been named for Smalls. The African American Museum in Philadelphia is currently displaying “The Life and Times of Congressman Robert Smalls: A Traveling Exhibition.” The highest honor, though, was the commissioning in 2007 of the Maj. Gen. Robert Smalls, an Army logistics support vessel, in a ceremony at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor attended by several of his descendants. It is the only Army ship named for an African American.

Moore said Smalls’s direct descendants number about 75, the youngest of whom is her 3-month-old granddaughter, Maya Helen Jenkins. Moore’s son, Michael, 49, the chairman of Glory Foods, which sells Southern-style dishes, said his great-great-grandfather’s story is an inspiration for his four young sons, as it was for him. As a child, he said, he would search bookstores for books about Smalls.

“I didn’t think about Robert Smalls as history,” he said. “I thought of him as family.

“The thing that I’m proudest of is his mind-set that he was going to be free, when he had no rational or logical reason to think that he would be. It was all or nothing. I’m proud and intrigued by his moxie and audacity not only to think about freedom, but to conceive and execute a plan to make it happen.”

Which event in the period between Shiloh and Antietam did not receive the attention it deserves?

Jim Campi
Policy and Communications Director at Civil War Trust
The fall of New Orleans

In the spring of 1862, public attention was fixated on the war in Virginia and Tennessee. Union offensives that began at Fort Donelson and Yorktown became bogged down on the bloody fields of Shiloh and the muddy roads of the Virginia peninsula. Meanwhile, farther to the south, a decisive battle was brewing that would transform the conflict.

At the time of secession, New Orleans was both the largest city and the busiest port in the Confederacy. Four masonry fortifications — including Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip on the Mississippi River — defended the water approaches to the city.

The Confederate Navy was also preparing a nasty reception for any Union fleet that dared challenge the city’s defenses. As 1862 began, the naval squadron protecting New Orleans was makeshift at best. Its most formidable vessel was a tiny, tortoise-shaped ironclad ram armed with a single cannon. However, two fearsome ironclads, the CSS Mississippi and CSS Louisiana, were under construction in Jefferson City, just north of New Orleans. If completed in time, they would make any Federal attack a bloody affair.

Union Flag Officer David G. Farragut, commander of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, was determined to attack before the new ironclads were ready. In mid-April, he led a combined fleet of wooden warships and mortar gunboats up the Mississippi. A week-long bombardment of the two forts did little to subdue the Confederate defenses. On April 24, Farragut ordered his ships past the forts in a bold maneuver that eliminated them as a factor in the battle. The Rebel flotilla was quickly dispatched, with the unfinished Louisiana tied up along shore, unable to contribute much to the fight.

Once the forts were bypassed, New Orleans was all but lost. When Farragut’s fleet reached the city on April 25, the unusually high level of the river meant the Union warships dominated the town. The Confederate army quickly evacuated, leaving the city administration to dicker with Farragut over terms of surrender. The Louisiana state flag flying over City Hall was finally hauled down on April 28. Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip, left to die on the vine, surrendered the same day.

Although often overlooked in the whirlwind of events that occurred in 1862, the fall of New Orleans was decisive to the outcome of the war. It doomed the Confederacy by opening the lower Mississippi to Union forces and depriving the Southern war effort of foodstuffs and other supplies abundant in the Trans-Mississippi. Noted diarist Mary Boykin Chestnut wrote, “New Orleans is gone, and with it the Confederacy! Are we not cut in two?” The capture of New Orleans began the slow strangulation of the Confederacy that ended at Appomattox three years later.

Frank Williams
Founding chairman of the Lincoln Forum
The Second Confiscation Act

While much attention is paid to President Abraham Lincoln’s steps toward an emancipation policy, many ignore or do not appreciate the importance of Congress’s Second Confiscation Act. The legislation declared all rebels to be traitors and mandated confiscation of their property, including their slaves, within 60 days. It was passed July 11 and 12, 1862. Four days later, Lincoln, under increasing pressure from the Radical Republicans in Congress and now convinced that he had to adopt an emancipation policy, told Secretary of State William Seward and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles “that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”

Although Lincoln signed the bill, he sent objections to Congress as he believed that only he, as commander-in-chief, possessed the war power to emancipate. He also believed the act seized property (and the slaves were property), beyond the life of the owner in violation of the Constitution. This prohibition against bills of attainder, as they were called, was intended to benefit heirs of these property owners so they could acquire the forfeited property on the death of the original owner.

Many have argued that the Second Confiscation Act did not free a single slave because it could not be enforced until the Confederate territory was occupied. It also required a cumbersome judicial process. However, what those arguments ignored was that slaves were freed under the act’s Section 9, which declared all rebel-owned slaves who escaped to Union lines were “forever free of their servitude.” Therefore, the act was self-executing, since the Army was now prohibited from returning fugitives to disloyal owners.

Congress, through this legislation, pressed Lincoln to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, as the act mandated that he seize the property of those still in rebellion after giving them a 60-day notice. Following the recommendation of Seward to wait for a Union victory, which finally came with the Battle of Antietam, he signed the proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862, with a final proclamation of emancipation to be issued on Jan. 1, 1863 for those areas still in rebellion. By doing so, Lincoln not only complied with the act but trumped the Radicals and abolitionists by making emancipation his policy.

Dennis Frye
Chief Historian at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park
It’s September 11th, 1862

Terror grips the United States. Abraham Lincoln’s country is under attack. Washington is worried. Philadelphia is panicked. New York is nervous. Cincinnati is quaking.

Confederate armies are advancing along a 1,000-mile front. From Pennsylvania to Ohio, Mississippi to Maryland, and Kentucky to western Virginia, coordinated Confederate offensives are threatening the United States. The largest cities in the Quaker State and Buckeye State appear to be the targets.

“Their destination is Harrisburg or Philadelphia,” exploded Pennsylvania Gov. Andrew Curtin in a distressed message to President Lincoln on September 11th. “Send here not less than 80,000 disciplined troops,” he demanded of the President. The governor issued this challenge to the President: “The time for decided action by the National Government has arrived. What may we expect?” Curtin’s plea ended with passion. “It is our only hope to save the North and crush the rebel army. . . . Do not suppose for one instant that I am unnecessarily alarmed.”

Five hundred miles west, Cincinnati prepared for Confederate attack. Ohio Governor David Tod’s emergency proclamation pounded with urgency. “Our Southern border is threatened with invasion,” he announced. “]Have] all the loyal men in your counties at once form themselves into companies and regiments, to beat back the enemy.”

Into this dire situation arrived Union Gen. Lew Wallace. Eighteen years before authoring “Ben Hur”, Wallace was writing orders to save Cincinnati from the Confederates. His first words were not poetic, but portending. “]It] is but fair to inform the citizens that an active, daring and powerful enemy threatens them with every consequence of war.”

Advantaged by a fermentation of fear, Wallace impressed all local citizens into fortification construction. “None are exempt, from the millionaires to the beggars,” revealed a correspondent. “This, of course causes some little grumbling among the upper classes.” He noted “their threats and growls do no good; go they must. . . . [T]hey who, perhaps never worked before, must work now.”

Back in Pennsylvania, a newspaper editor pondered the panic in Philadelphia, where no forts and no army existed to halt the surging Confederates. “Herein we discover one of the latent reasons why we have allowed this Rebellion to linger so long. We have not thought ourselves to be in danger.”

On September 11th, Confederate peace terms suddenly and dramatically appeared in Northern newspapers. What did this portend? Was the country on the verge of permanent division? Six days shy of the Constitution’s 86th birthday, were its opening words about to become an artifact? “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…”

Robert Lee Hodge
Civil War researcher, filmmaker and reenactor
Three battles

There are numerous “black holes” of Civil War history (military and otherwise) in the period between Shiloh and Antietam. However, three battles or campaigns come to mind that do not get the attention they deserve.

The siege of Corinth, Miss., that took place in May 1862 is at the top of my list in the west. The railroad hub of Corinth was the reason Shiloh was fought. President Abraham Lincoln’s military advisers felt that Corinth was as important as taking the Confederate capital at Richmond. Moving troops and supplies fast by the new technology of railroads made Corinth a military magnet. About 120,000 Union troops laid siege to Corinth for over a month against 70,000 rebels – no small affair. Corinth was one of the largest military operations of the war. Rebel forces eventually abandoned Corinth, leaving the Confederacy further severed.

Close to the same time as Corinth, back east in Virginia, The Seven Days battles for Richmond were fought between Union commander George McClellan’s 120,000 soldiers and Robert E. Lee’s 90,000 Confederates. Lee launched savage and desperate attacks on McClellan’s Northerners, resulting in a Union retreat, leaving 36,000 casualties in their wake. The Seven Days battles consist of some familiar names — Beaver Dam Creek (Mechanicsville), Gaines Mill, Savages Station, Frayser’s Farm (Glendale) and Malvern Hill. One reason these battles are so overlooked is that they were so massive and complicated that there is a tendency to simplistically give broad brush strokes of that information.

The Southern success in The Seven Days gave Lee the opportunity to face another advancing Northern army led by John Pope, culminating in the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862, which may be the true “High Tide” of the Southern Confederacy. One reason Second Manassas is somewhat lost to history is because it is simply the second battle fought at Bull Run — thus overshadowed by the first battle. The truth is it may be the most underrated major battle of the war. The engagement was a Confederate avalanche that sent Pope’s troops reeling and threatened the nearby U.S. capital once again. The stunning Southern victory at Second Manassas would launch Lee’s army across the Potomac River to “liberate” slave-holding Maryland from Lincoln’s control, leading to the deadliest day on American soil – Antietam.

Juxtapose Second Manassas with what was happening across the South in the late summer of 1862; Confederates were advancing toward Missouri, Maryland, Kentucky, western Virginia and even Ohio. Rebel forces were attempting to recapture Baton Rouge and Corinth. At that moment you had the most coordinated effort by the Confederacy to win its independence. The High Tide crests with Southern defeats on all fronts – thus giving Lincoln the ability to announce the Emancipation Proclamation.

William Blair
Director of the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University
A blow to free speech

Everyone knows about President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, but fewer people appreciate that this famous edict of the president constituted but one of two important pronouncements by the chief executive in the fall of 1862. Both of them had a large impact on the political situation.

Two days after his Sept. 22 warning that emancipation would come for the enslaved in the Confederacy in 90 days, Lincoln issued a proclamation that gave the federal authorities wide powers to arrest civilians without the need for trials or even the filing of charges. Since mid-summer, the administration had conducted a recruitment drive referred to as the Militia Draft because it relied on the states — and not the national government — to meet federally established quotas for furnishing troops. Because resistance had occurred, and some people openly argued against these efforts, the government in August had begun arresting individuals who spoke out against the draft or tried to influence others from enlisting. Lincoln’s Sept. 24 waiving of habeas corpus sanctioned what had been happening around the Union for a number of weeks, with an untold number of civilians swept into prison via arrests often conducted by the military.

The period from August to November has been characterized as “the low point of civil liberties in the North during the Civil War.” Free speech was abused as civilians faced arrests for speaking out against the draft. Excessive arrests inevitably occurred as low-level functionaries settled personal scores with rivals. After the midterm congressional elections took place, the administration seemingly acknowledged the policy had gone too far by ordering a general release of the prisoners of state.

At the time, the policy worried some Republicans because it added fuel to a surging Democratic opposition in the North. Emancipation angered many who considered the policy revolutionary and ignoring property rights. A general unhappiness with the progress of the war and the use of arrests helped feed momentum. In New York, George Templeton Strong — a supporter of Lincoln — hoped the period did not signal the coming of a national calamity. “If it come,” he wrote in his diary, “it will be due not so much to the Emancipation Manifesto as to the irregular arrests the government has been making.” Strong exaggerated to an extent, but the arrests then and later did give Democrats a consistent critique that found its way into their 1864 presidential platform.

Overall, Lincoln’s handling of civil liberties — while overbearing at times — has been mostly forgiven by scholars. Traitorous plots did exist and the arrests of prisoners of state occurred primarily in the sensitive Border States and occupied Confederacy. And as the country became more secure late in the war, the president eased his foot off this pedal. But this moment in 1862 remains one of the more under-appreciated parts of his administration by the public.

John F. Marszalek
Giles distinguished professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State University
The Homestead Act

When Civil War enthusiasts consider this war, they usually think only of its military battles. During 1862, for example, such events like Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, and Antietam followed by Lincoln’s promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation come to mind. Between Shiloh and Antietam, however, there is no major battle, so enthusiasts see little to study. Yet during that period, Congress passed and President Lincoln signed important legislation which reflected an issue separating the nation before the war began and one which was influential long after the war was over.

Early in the nation’s history, Thomas Jefferson insisted that the nation would only survive if it was based on the small landholder. As the 19th century progressed, however, industrialization and urbanism developed rapidly so the Jeffersonian dream seemed to be deteriorating. Instead of being based on the independent freeholder, American society was increasingly being divided into the wealthy haves of the industrial elite and the downtrodden have-nots of the factory worker. To rescue the American dream, the working class needed a chance to live an economically, politically, and socially valid life.

The answer, northern reformers believed, was to create more landholders, by opening acreage in the empty West to eastern workers. As early as the 1840s, Congress worked on legislation to allow federal land to be sold for low prices. By 1852, however, proponents called for land to be available for free. Congress passed such homestead legislation in 1860, but President James Buchanan vetoed it in response to southern opposition. Like so much else in the years leading to war, this idea was caught up in the slavery issue. Southerners opposed it because they worried that homesteading would build up the anti-slavery states and become a threat to the southern slavery system.

The Homestead Act did not have the effect expected. Most western land ended up in the hands of speculators and railroads, not Jeffersonian freeholders. The Act did move eastern population west and helped finance the building of railroads linking the nation, fueled the exchange of huge sums of money among speculators who purchased the land from those who gained it under the law, and served as an idyllic image of the possibilities of American life. It remained in effect until the 1970s.

A view of the Civil War from a strictly battlefield perspective, then, ignores the major impact of such events like the 1862 Homestead Act. This law does not have the romantic appeal of troops charging into battle, but it had a major impact on the growth of the nation. Like other non-military matters, between 1861-1865, it deserves interest and study.

Waite Rawls
President and chief executive of the Museum of the Confederacy
Jackson’s Maneuvers

John Mosby was the man who earned the nickname “Gray Ghost,” as he seemed continually to appear where he was least expected, and usually behind Federal lines. But he got this nickname during the last two years of the war. Between March and September 1862, it was Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s men who were rumored to be everywhere and who continued to appear where least expected. Because they were often seen near Washington city, they struck fear into the people of the North, not least of whom was Abraham Lincoln.

Although Jackson had won fame at the first big battle at Manassas, he was not in the limelight in the spring of 1862, as all eyes had turned to George McClellan on the Virginia Peninsula. In their first cooperative effort, Robert E. Lee and Jackson mounted an effort to distract the Federals from their Richmond objective. Jackson’s small army earned its sobriquet as the “foot cavalry” by marching rapidly down (northward) the Valley to strike the Federals near Winchester at Kernstown, two weeks before Shiloh. Jackson’s men were defeated in this battle and retired quickly only to reappear a month later and strike again with a vengeance, defeating two different Federal armies at McDowell, Front Royal, and Winchester, alarming Lincoln and forcing him to recall troops from McClellan in order to defend Washington City.

Jackson headed south toward Richmond but not before defeating two more Federal armies at Port Republic and Cross Keys in early June. The leadership in Washington began to speculate about where Jackson’s men would strike next, but no one thought that they would reappear on June 26th, back east with Lee at Mechanicsville. Their mere arrival, seemingly from nowhere, unnerved George McClellan; and, despite Jackson’s disappointing tactical performance, McClellan began his retreat from the outskirts of Richmond.

Both armies took a couple of weeks to rest and refit, but Jackson moved his men rapidly in early August and again struck from nowhere, this time at Slaughter Mountain, effectively stopping John Pope’s new Federal army in its advance on Richmond. As Lee moved the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia to join Jackson, Stonewall’s men did it again. Moving very rapidly around Pope’s flank, they struck his rear at Manassas Junction, capturing an enormous supply depot. A day later, they sprang a surprise attack on Pope’s retreating columns, precipitating the Second Battle of Manassas.

Lee’s army then moved into Maryland, but Jackson’s men did it again — suddenly appearing on the hills around Harpers Ferry and forcing the surrender of more than 12,000 Union troops.

No one thought foot soldiers could move that quickly and appear that suddenly at a critical point. They were the true Gray Ghosts who were the most feared in Washington.

Lincoln and Abolition: Two Views

Harold Holzer
Preparing for emancipation

Between Shiloh and Antietam, Abraham Lincoln did nothing less than transform the war for the Union into a war for abolition-the first time in history a commander-in-chief changed the rationale for a war in progress. Lincoln lost the credit he deserved for boldness during this period because of the way he introduced this second American Revolution. His stumbling summer deserves to be re-interpreted as a season of triumph for a master politician.

Lincoln told his Cabinet of his emancipation plan on July 22. But he blinked. Convinced by Secretary of State Seward that such a transformative act could only be announced after a battlefield victory, Lincoln tabled his order until the Union army could notch a win. The problem is, it did not. In fact, it lost a second major battle at Manassas in August.

Lincoln decided he must prepare white Northerners for emancipation - far more controversial at the time than modern observers appreciate. Among other efforts aimed at winning the public heart and mind, the President wrote his famous letter to the New York Tribune, declaring that his “paramount object” was not either to save or destroy slavery, but to save the Union - and assuring Americans that whatever he did about the issue was designed only to win the war. He did not reveal that he had already written a proclamation and was waiting only for the right moment to release it.

Around the same time, Lincoln welcomed a delegation of black freedmen to the White House. Rather than use the occasion to hint at his plan to free slaves, the president told his startled guests he believed their people were the cause of the war, urging them to consider leaving the country to colonize territory in Africa or the Caribbean. This was not the great emancipator at his finest, but there was method to Lincoln’s insensitivity, for the exchange was promptly published in the press. He was preparing the vast, mostly racist, white population for freedom based on military necessity, not philanthropy.

What history recalls as timidity and cold indifference should in fact be chalked up to political genius. After all, Lincoln’s fears proved justified. He issued the preliminary proclamation five days after the Battle of Antietam. While many progressive Americans thought it was about time, troop desertions quickly increased and stock prices plummeted. A few months later, voters expressed their disapproval at the polls by dealing heavy blows to Republicans.

Lincoln’s clandestine, unappreciated handling of public relations in the run-up to his most historic act may not have staved off losses on Election Day. But it may well have prevented a far larger outcry that might have fomented another rebellion, sunk the Union, and ended the war before it could be won with slavery destroyed.

Harold Holzer’s most recent book is “Emancipating Lincoln.” He is the author or editor of 40 books and chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation.

Brag Bowling
No abolitionist he

On Aug. 20, 1862, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, published a sharply critical and passionate editorial titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions” which took President Abraham Lincoln to task for his failure to free the slaves in Union-occupied territory.

Greeley felt he spoke for the millions of Northerners who were angry at Lincoln’s conduct of the war and his failure to aggressively move forward by his half-hearted use of the Confiscation Acts. Greeley should have known better. Lincoln, throughout his political career, had steered clear of radical abolitionists like Greeley, but felt he needed to answer the powerful editorial.

On Aug. 22, 1862, Lincoln responded in a famous open letter to Greeley and the Tribune: “My paramount object in the struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”

Nobody should have been surprised by Lincoln’s letter. He had made his position known many times. He was quite willing to leave slavery in place and allow it to die a natural death. His strong support of the Corwin Amendment, a measure which would permanently allow slavery in the states where it was presently legal, illustrates Lincoln’s slavery position both pre-war and well into the war. The Corwin Amendment would have forbidden any attempt to amend the Constitution “to abolish or interfere” with the “domestic institutions” of the states, including “persons held to labor or service” (a reference to slavery). In Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, he said he had no objection to the Corwin Amendment being made “express and irrevocable.” It also begs the question - if the South was seceding to keep slavery, all that was needed to avoid war and preserve the Union would be for the Southern states to accept the Corwin Amendment. This offering did not move the South. The South fought for a higher purpose, their political independence.

The First Inaugural Address as well as the Lincoln-Douglas debates illustrated Lincoln’s constitutional limitations regarding slavery when he stated “I have no purpose directly or indirectly of interfering with slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Lincoln regarded the Constitution as a brake on abolition. In tune with the feelings of most Americans, Lincoln’s solution to ending slavery was through colonization to Liberia and other countries.

However, on Aug. 22, 1862, the furthest thing from Abraham Lincoln’s thoughts was the ending of slavery. Preservation of the Union was his goal.

Brag Bowling is director of the Stephen D. Lee Institute, an educational group established by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Crewmen of USS Monitor are buried at Arlington

By Michael E. Ruane

A century and half after their deaths aboard one of history’s most famous warships, two sailors from the USS Monitor were laid to rest at sunset Friday on a hillside in Arlington National Cemetery.

In what might be the last funeral of the American Civil War, the two shipmates were buried with elaborate military honors, their flag-covered caskets carried on horse-drawn caissons as a throng of dignitaries, crew descendants and bystanders looked on.

The burial came on a blustery afternoon that was one day short of the 151st anniversary of the Union ship’s legendary battle in Hampton Roads, Va., with the Confederacy’s CSS Virginia, formerly the USS Merrimack.

It followed a crowded religious service at the Ft. Myer chapel adjacent to the cemetery, where eulogists called them brave sailors and noble souls and sang them a Navy hymn. A painting of the Monitor sinking stood in the front of the chapel, flanked by two tall candles.

The battle at Hampton Roads was history’s first between ironclad warships, and perhaps the most important naval battle of the Civil War.

The sailors were two of the 16 men who perished when the Monitor sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras in 1862. The Navy said a gravestone bearing the names of all 16 men will be erected later.

The bodies of the other 14 crewmen were not recovered. Most of the 62-man crew survived.

Friday’s ceremonies came after a reunion of sorts in an Arlington hotel of crew descendants, scientists, government officials and historians.

“It’s a very solemn occasion,” said James M. McPherson, professor emeritus of American history at Princeton University and a leading Civil War scholar. “These sailors deserve just as much praise for their contribution to saving the Union as the soldiers that Lincoln acknowledged at Gettysburg.”

The funeral “is a recognition of their contribution and importance,” he said. “It’s a chance for Americans today, 151 years later, to pay their respects to people who died to save the country.”

Numerous family descendants of the Monitor crew attended.

Andrew Bryan, of Holden, Maine, said he was a descendant of Monitor yeoman William Bryan, who died when the ship sank. The sailor appears in one of the old photographs of the ship’s crew, Bryan said.

“This was a story my grandfather told when I was really young,” he said. “I think it’s great. The moving part, the emotional part for me is my family … This will carry on the family history … This a part of our heritage. This is how we got here.”

Anna Holloway, curator of the USS Monitor Center of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, said the gathering was like a family reunion.

“We are like this whole big Monitor family,” she said, referring to the Navy, the museum and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “And all these descendants. It is like old home week.”

Robert Sheridan, 72, was a University of Delaware scientist on board the research ship that found the Monitor in August 1973. “I saw it on a sonar device that we had,” he said. “The first sign of it. I just went, ‘Whoa.’”

“This is what we always thought should happen,” he said of Friday’s burial. “To do any less would be a shame.”

NOAA’s David W. Alberg, superintendent of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, said Thursday: “It’s been very emotional … very satisfying … and very peaceful, I think.”

The lost 16 sailors were a kind of cross section of mid-19th-century America: three African Americans, two natives of Ireland, one each from Scotland, England, and Wales, and a coal heaver from Maine, among others.

The burial marks 40 years of research into the Monitor by the Navy, NOAA, the Mariners’ Museum and other organizations.

And it will lay to rest perhaps the last of over 600,000 soldiers, sailors and Marines who perished in the long-ago Civil War, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Juan M. Garcia III said Thursday.

The nation is currently commemorating the sesquicentennial of the war, which ran from 1861 to 1865.

Almost 10 months after the March 9, 1862, Hampton Roads battle, the two sailors buried Friday were aboard the Monitor when it sank in a gale off the North Carolina coast on Dec. 31, 1862. The ship capsized and settled on the bottom upside down.

The wreck of the Monitor was located in 1973 by a Duke University research ship in a stormy region off the North Carolina coast called “the graveyard of the Atlantic.”

In 2002, more than a century after the ship sank, the almost-complete skeletons were found, one on top of the other, amid a tangle of huge guns and debris in the turret.

“I think … one was helping the other” in the ship’s last moments, said James P. Delgado, director of NOAA’s Maritime Heritage Program. “Seasick, hurt, whatever.”

“Those two guys together were trying to get out,” he said Wednesday. “There but for the matter of a few moments, they might have made it out onto that deck; they might have made it onto that last (rescue) boat.”

“But the Monitor finally slips,” capsizing, under the waves, he said. “It tumbles. They go head over heels. They land on the roof of the turret upside down. Everything comes down on them. The cold sea pours in and they’re gone.”

“I think we can all picture ourselves caught up in something like that,” he said.

The study of the sailors’ bones yielded DNA but few other clues: the younger man’s broken nose, and indications of a limp in the older man, the ring on a finger of his right hand and a groove in his front teeth where he bit down on his pipe.

The turret today resides in a state-of-the-art exhibit and research facility at the Mariners’ Museum.

“This a powerful moment,” Delgado said. “This is so gratifying to see, that after this time these men &hellip interred in this hallowed ground, that they will be honored by the nation.”

Additional Content
Timeline: Rebellion Rebound

CHAPTER FIVE

Emancipation

Thomas Nast envisions a somewhat optimistic picture of the future of free blacks in the United States. The central scene shows the interior of a freedman’s home while on either side are scenes contrasting black life in the South under the Confederacy (left) with visions of the freedman’s life after the war (right). Below is an oval portrait of Lincoln and above it, Thomas Crawford’s statue of “Freedom.” (Library of Congress)

The Freedom Conundrum: While writing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln confronted the limits of democracy

By Philip Kennicott

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war,” said Lincoln at Gettysburg, “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Lincoln was fond of drawing attention outward, from local events to world import, from the crisis in America to the larger question of whether any democracy could survive the test the divided United States then faced. The Civil War, he argued, “embraces more than the fate of these United States.”

Before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation — which would free slaves only in the seceded states that remained beyond the president’s immediate control — he fretted about “a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet,” referring to Callixtus III, who supposedly excommunicated Haley’s Comet because it was a bad war omen.

And when he had finally signed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862, he spoke to celebratory crowds gathered outside the White House: “It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment.”

This was more than a rhetorical trope, and not just a reminder that the world was watching. Lincoln’s agonizing over the proclamation reflected a host of worries about self-government, practical politics, the future of the newly free African Americans and very possibly his own racist misgivings.

But foremost among these was the question of legitimacy and the constitutionality of the document. Even if issued as a war measure, a mere confiscation of enemy property, it was sure to be seen by many — perhaps even by Lincoln himself — as extraordinary medicine, even extra-legal. His Hamlet-like vacillating and deception during that period 150 years ago, when he pondered the document, wrote it, hid it in a drawer and finally issued it can best be understood in terms of Lincoln’s deep-seated fears about the viability of democracy: Was it capable of fixing itself?

In the late 19th century, as white Americans tried to exorcise the memory of slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation lost luster, replaced in the popular imagination by the more eloquent Gettysburg Address (which didn’t even mention slavery). And today it seems strange that we celebrate the proclamation at all, except as a precursor to the far more sweeping and triumphant accomplishment of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which two years later banned slavery everywhere in the country, without qualifications or geographical exceptions. We have mostly forgotten the reality of the document itself, its ignominious origins in military crisis, its lack of moral certainty, its dull rhetoric and all the other faults that led historian Richard Hofstadter to complain that it “had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.”

And yet this document of war remains a sacred document of democracy, testament to the messiness rather than the ideals of governing. In an age when Western democracies are confronted by new forms of authoritarianism, which offer prosperity and security in exchange for political quiescence, the Emancipation Proclamation forces us to think about the fundamental vexations of representative government: Is democracy capable of resolving grand crises? Can we defend against terrorism without compromise to liberty? Can we reform our economies and free ourselves from crippling debts? Can we stave off environmental apocalypse? In short, is democracy capable of great things?

Both celebrated and condemned

If you can make your peace with the Emancipation Proclamation, you can make your peace with Lincoln. The president claimed it as the signal accomplishment of his administration, and it established him in the minds of free slaves and the annals of popular history as “the Great Emancipator.” Parsing the document may be the most productive and inconclusive franchise in Lincoln scholarship. Over the past 150 years, it has been celebrated as the death knell of slavery yet condemned as an unconstitutional usurpation of power, a capitulation by the president to his radical left flank, proof of Lincoln’s slow and inadequate evolution toward racial justice, a mere tool in the prosecution of the war, a political gambit to demoralize the South, a reckless invitation to race war, and both the least and the most that a cautious, deliberate leader could manage at the moment.

During his presidential campaign, Lincoln promised that his personal opposition to slavery wouldn’t affect the institution where it was legal. And while the Civil War was first prosecuted with assurances that the goal was the restoration of union, not abolition, Lincoln began dropping hints of of a general emancipation in the summer of 1862.

His record on slavery up to that time had been mixed. He had countermanded or discouraged orders by Union generals freeing slaves in Missouri, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, citing presidential prerogatives and the necessity of placating the slave-holding but still-loyal border states. But he had also signed an April 1862 bill that abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, and a few months later he freed slaves throughout U.S. territories.

His rhetoric was equally ambivalent. Lincoln’s opposition to slavery often seemed lukewarm. As Frederick Douglass said years after the war, “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent.”

Historians have attempted to square these apparent contradictions in different ways. John Hope Franklin, in his 1963 history of the Emancipation Proclamation, gave Lincoln the credit of most doubts, depicting the president besieged on all sides, from radical abolitionists who denounced an urgent moral evil to slaveholders still loyal to the Union who constantly threatened to join the South if Lincoln wavered on his promise to pursue only reunification. “The pressure of individuals and groups added to the President’s woes without contributing to a practical solution of the problem,” wrote Franklin.

No matter his feelings on slavery, Lincoln felt compelled to present and defend the Emancipation Proclamation as a military necessity — a strategic blow to the South, where the economy and thus the war effort depended on slave labor — rather than a moral statement. When it came, it was essentially two documents, beginning with a threat issued on Sept. 22, 1862, that he would emancipate slaves in any state still in rebellion on Jan. 1, 1863. He shared the preliminary proclamation with his Cabinet on July 22 but withheld it on the advice of Secretary of State William H. Seward, who feared it would look desperate to issue it in the midst of the summer’s military disasters. Lincoln waited two months, until after the battle of Antietam — by no means a decisive Union victory, but at least not a disaster — to make it public. The actual proclamation, greeted by ecstatic Jubilee celebrations on New Year’s Day by African Americans and abolitionists in the North, made good on the earlier threat.

Version one

The first proclamation wasn’t universally popular in the United States or abroad. It angered abolitionists for its half measures, for being merely an instrument of military policy, for its vague promise of compensation to slave owners and for its mention of colonization — Lincoln’s scheme to send freed blacks to other countries after liberation. The working class in England loved it, but their leaders, deeply embroiled in Colonial projects, saw it as a dangerous invitation to black-on-white war and fundamentally hypocritical. “The principle asserted,” said the Spectator, “is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.” Between the preliminary threat and the actual emancipation, however, feelings softened, especially among abolitionists.

Yet nothing that troubled Lincoln in the first document was cleared up by the second. Lincoln repeatedly said he believed that the proclamation was constitutional, but it was immediately declared not so by editorialists throughout the North and the South. Even former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin R. Curtis, who had dissented in the notorious 1857 Dred Scott case and resigned from the court in part because of the decision, attacked Lincoln’s proclamation as an unjust extension of executive power. When Lincoln had a chance to appoint a new chief justice in 1864, he chose the stalwart anti-slavery Republican Salmon Chase, in part because Chase could be counted upon not to overturn the proclamation.

Regardless of Lincoln’s motivations and true feelings, his delay and mixed messages had a serious impact on African Americans, according to some scholars.

“There is no making sense of such a perverse record,” writes historian Mark Neely Jr., who has convincingly demonstrated the miserable effect Lincoln’s equivocating had on free blacks. The nation was riven by race riots, and some African Americans in the North were seriously considering leaving the country: “A truthful revelation of the government policy embodied in a document in Lincoln’s desk might have changed the course of their lives.”

But likely, Lincoln was no less consistent than any other man, and though a gifted logician in argument, he was not necessarily logical in his own views on race and slavery. If he could be transplanted from his age into ours, his racial views would sound like the soft-core animus of a genteel “Bell Curve” racist: Intent on basic fairness, but convinced that whites are more civilized and better adapted to self-governance than blacks. His view on abolition might remind us of the sincerely halfhearted way that many people today embrace environmentalism or vegetarianism, convinced of their moral necessity yet unwilling to zealously oppose an entrenched way of life. This is either hypocrisy or moderation, depending on one’s perspective.

In fear of great power

Throughout his career, Lincoln was haunted by an almost superstitious fear of executive fiat, which may best explain his anguish before signing the proclamation. It showed up early, in an 1838 speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Ill., in which he imagined a Nietzschean superman rising up within American democracy and threatening it with dictatorial ambition: “Is it unreasonable, then, to expect that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us? And when such an one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.” This “towering genius,” Lincoln feared, might exploit the demagogic potential of slavery: “It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.”

This was Lincoln in fear of a man just like himself. The idea of great power often seemed to flummox him. “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution,” he said, as preamble to some of his more overtly racist and despairing remarks about slavery. His comparison of emancipation to a papal “bull,” and his frequent reference to it as a “thunderbolt” suggest how keenly he felt it might set a dangerous precedent for a nation of laws, even if limited in scope and justified as an act of war. Perversely, he yielded often enough to the temptation he abhorred, suspending habeas corpus and arresting a political opponent for giving a speech that might discourage the war effort.

And yet there is almost universal agreement — and Lincoln felt so, too — that while the 13th Amendment abolished slavery legally, the Emancipation Proclamation had killed it symbolically, and, short of a Southern victory, in all practical senses. So while a magnificent act of human justice, it was hardly an accomplishment of democracy. By the summer of 1862, Lincoln had despaired of a purely democratic process to abolish slavery, through compensation, containment and a natural withering away. Slavery would require an extraordinary response, a “thunderbolt” from outside the system of laws and representative government. He himself would have to hurl that bolt.

A crisis he envisioned

The unruliness of democracy, bitter sectional feeling, entrenchment of the slave system and Southern moral defensiveness had led America to the place of crisis Lincoln so feared in his Lyceum speech. Secession and war were failures of the democratic system, and the emancipation order underscored that failure.

This was not the way things were supposed to work in the City on a Hill, which looked impotent and broken in a world still full of vigorous autocrats. In 1861, a year before the American emancipation, Alexander II of Russia freed more serfs, and promised them more opportunities, than Lincoln did the slaves. In 1879, as Reconstruction was failing, the czar compared his thoroughly authoritarian solution with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, saying he could not “understand how you Americans could have been so blind as to leave the Negro Slave without tools to work out his salvation.”

Lincoln was long dead. But he might have said it wasn’t a matter of being blind to the problem or unaware of the dangers. He had done what he could, which might be more than the Constitution allowed. And in so doing he had righted a great wrong, paved the way for the union to survive and set a precedent that deeply troubled him.

We can sympathize today, living in a democratic system that is even larger and more unwieldy, and growing more polarized. It is a common theme of political speculation that large, Western democracies may be endangered, today: by the lethargy with which they respond to crises, the half measures and sausage making that vitiates most efforts at reform, and the sheer accumulation of threats — environmental, political and social. The Emancipation Proclamation is a terrifying reminder that sometimes the only way to fix the system is to let it break down and then hit the reset button.

Freed from shackle but still bound: For millions of African Americans, emancipation came with no helping hand

By Lonnie G. Bunch

I was free, but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.

— Attributed to Harriet Tubman

(Library of Congress)

As soon as Hawkins Wilson, an enslaved African American from the region outside of Galveston, Texas, realized that he was free, he knew exactly what he would do. He would begin a search to find his family — a family he had not seen or heard from since he was sold from a plantation in Caroline County, Va., 24 years earlier. To facilitate his search, Wilson sent a letter seeking assistance from the Richmond office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a crucially important, though short-lived, federal agency created to assist the newly freed in this moment of challenge and possibility.

“I am anxious to learn about my sisters, from whom I have been separated many years,” Wilson wrote. “I am in hopes that they are still living.” He then explained that he “was sold at a Sheriff’s sale to a Mr. Wright of Boydtown Court House,” and that he hoped an additional letter that he enclosed could be delivered to his sister.

The pain of his separation and the strength of his desire to reclaim his family are evident in this second letter. “Your little brother Hawkins is trying to find out where you are and where his poor old mother is,” he wrote. “I shall never forget the bag of biscuits you made for me the last night I spent with you.” He added that he had lived an honorable life, so that if they did not “meet on earth, we might indeed meet in heaven.” He ended his letter by asking his sister to write back quickly and said she should not be surprised if “I drop in on upon you some day.”

Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Wilson’s letter was delivered or that he ever reconnected with his family.

To the newly emancipated such as Wilson, freedom was never all that they had hoped, but it was much more than they had ever had.

Nearly 150 years have passed since the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment, the law that formally prohibited slavery in the United States. It is difficult to imagine the enormity of this change for those who suffered generations in bondage. With the joy of emancipation came a dizzying array of concerns and questions. What did freedom mean for the nearly 4 million African Americans who were enslaved when the war began? How would the freedmen and freedwomen find economic stability? Should they stay on the land they knew or seek the possibilities of new places? How would white Southerners react to their freedom? And would the nation embrace or ignore them now that the war was over?

What is clear is that emancipation was a long process, a process that is still unfolding — not simply a day or a moment of jubilee. The changes wrought by emancipation took generations to reveal, and more than a century would pass before African Americans began to reap the full benefits of freedom. While almost all formerly enslaved African Americans remembered the circumstances when they gained or seized their freedom, there was no single emancipation experience. Some self-emancipated by escaping to the Union lines or by joining the army; others learned of their new condition when former owners, often prodded by Union officers, announced that they were free; and others found the promise of freedom clouded by racial hatred, disease and death. Yet there is no denying the impact and emotion that accompanied emancipation.

Interviews with historians hired during the Depression to record the experiences of former slaves show the gamut of emotions they felt. “After surrender, I can remember the negroes were so happy,” recalled Hamp Santee, who had been enslaved in Mississippi. “They just rang bells, blowed horns and shouted like they were crazy. Then they brought a brand new rope, and cut it up into little pieces and they gave everyone a little piece. And whenever they look at the rope they should remember that they were free from bondage.” To Lafayette Price of Morgan County, Ala., the jubilation of emancipation meant that “I’m free as a frog because a frog had freedom to jump when [and where] he please.” Yet many newly freed realized that this was a time of great uncertainty and danger. To W.L. Bost, freedom meant being “just like a turtle,” cautiously peeking out of the shell to “understand the lay of the land.”

It is that sense of caution, that sense of the unknown that shaped the experiences of most African Americans when freedom came. While many defined freedom as a chance to reunite with kin, to ensure the education of their children and then themselves, to never again experience the violence and sexual exploitation that was so much a part of the institution of slavery and to have the economic wherewithal to provide for their families’ well-being, they also realized the limits of freedom and the vulnerability that accompanied emancipation. As the daughter of a freedman explained, “Daddy said he was proud of freedom but afraid to own it.”

To some, owning freedom meant embracing change. Many enslaved African Americans did not wait for freedom to come. Thousands took advantage of the war and self- emancipated by escaping to the Union lines whenever Northern troops appeared in their region. The sheer numbers forced the Union army and later the federal government to grapple with the question of what to do with those who demanded their freedom with their feet. Ultimately this migration forced the government to develop policies that culminated in the Emancipation Proclamation. Many who fled to freedom saw serving in the Union military as both a way to earn a living and to guarantee the freedom of those still held in bondage. Of the more than 200,000 African Americans who served in the Northern army and navy, the overwhelming majority were formerly enslaved.

Many who self-liberated found themselves in camps, called contraband camps by the military but labeled freedmen villages by more sympathetic people. Callie Washington from Mississippi described the lives of many when she remembered that “after the war, my mother came to get me. We lived where the soldiers camped and my mother worked and washed for them.” There were dozens of these camps located throughout the border states, in areas in the South that Union troops had recently liberated and in urban areas such as Arlington and Washington. While conditions varied, life in these refugee camps was difficult and tempered the joy of freedom.

True, some in the camps found work (usually menial or day labor), and various families were able to use the camps as a transition from bondage to freedom. But many more suffered from disease and malnutrition because the government and the nation were unprepared to grapple with the integration of millions of newly free men and women into a changing America. At the freedmen’s village on the site of the former plantation of Robert E. Lee, hundreds who escaped slavery could not escape the ravages of disease. When they died, they were buried in mass graves on land that is now part of Arlington Cemetery and that was, until recently, an unacknowledged and unappreciated part of that much-visited site.

As for those who stayed close to the farms, plantations and communities that they called home, the question facing them was how to make a living, how to earn enough to enjoy the benefits of freedom. The recently freed Jennie Webb captured the essence of the problem as she told historians years later that “when the war came on to set us free, we was told that we would get 40 acres and a mule. We never did. . .”

Not providing for the economic independence of the formerly enslaved ensured that most would be confined to a new form of servitude: sharecropping. While there were examples of those who leveraged an education into middle-class status and of former slaves whose creativity and luck enabled them to open businesses, the overwhelming number of those just out of bondage grappled with the challenge of being landless. Many followed the pattern of the Mason family who said, “When freedom came, mother and father stayed with master. [They] farmed for shares. During the next 15 years, we moved from farm to farm” trying to earn a living. The lack of viable economic alternatives ensured that many freedmen and women would find that their hold on freedom was tenuous at best.

Part of that uncertainty was a result of a new, evolving racial paradigm in which the promise of emancipation encountered the unwillingness of many whites to relinquish, or even to share, the authority and control that had been central to the social and political structure of the antebellum South. While Reconstruction provided glimpses of a changed South — with a black male electorate, African American elected officials, and military and legal protections, much of the hope spawned by this brief period of federal attentiveness was fleeting or deferred. The failure to protect black suffrage and to ensure some sense of economic equity guaranteed that there would be a great chasm between the promise of reconstruction and the realities of life for the freedmen and freedwomen. This chasm was reinforced by the extensive violence and intimidation that cast such a shadow on black life. Confrontations large and small were a daily occurrence. In the years immediately after the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau recorded what it labeled racial “outrages.” These records are replete with assaults, arsons, riots, murders and sexual assaults, all of which suggest how violence was a key weapon in the attempt to limit the opportunities and aspirations of the recently freed.

More than anything else, the period immediately after the Civil War was a period of uncertainty. As Tony Cox, a newly freedman from Mississippi remarked about emancipation, “Us had a hard time getting adjusted and making a way for us selves.” Yet despite the difficulties one must never undervalue the impact and the importance of freedom. Rachel Adams of Georgia summed up the feeling of many formerly enslaved people when she said she could “live on just bread and water as long” as she was free. Despite the challenges, the men, women and children who emerged from bondage built schools, developed communities and “made a way out of no way.” Their struggle reminds us that change does not come without courage and without loss.

During the depression, an elderly African American man was asked by a WPA historian if slavery should still matter in the United States. Cornelius Holmes, who labored most of his life on rice plantations in South Carolina, said, “Though the slavery question is settled, the race issue will be with us always. It is in our politics, in our courts, on our highways, in our manners, in our religion, and in our thoughts, all the day, every day.”

As a nation, we have been made better by the lives of those whose experiences took us from slavery to freedom, all the day, every day.

The late-blooming activist: Frederick Douglass's great-great-great grandson played down his heritage--until it forced him into action

By Avis Thomas Lester

From the time he was a very young child, the portrait made Kenneth B. Morris Jr. uncomfortable. The piercing eyes of the handsome African American man with the shock of gray hair that hung over the staircase of his great-grandmother’s Capitol Hill townhouse seemed to follow him.

“It was as if I could hear this voice booming down on me saying, ‘You will do great things, young man!’ ” Morris said.

He was 5 before he knew that the man in the painting, Frederick Douglass, was his great-great-great-grandfather and he was grown before he realized the significance of the legacy he had inherited from the great abolitionist and orator. If being a male descendant of one of the most respected men in American history had been be daunting, Morris would have faced twice the challenge. He is also the great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington, the illustrious black educator and statesman.

“I never found it intimidating because, when I was younger, I was so far removed from it,” said Morris, 50, of Corona, Calif., a public speaker who teaches a course in “liberation theology” at the University of La Verne near Los Angeles. He spent much of his adult life as an entrepreneur, specializing in travel and entertainment marketing. “I was able to go about my life and not even think about it, really.”

But then he read a magazine story that lit the fire that had lain dormant in him for 45 years. It set him on a course that would link him to his famous forefathers’ work and make him a part of their legacies.

Finding his passion

Morris came to know his famed ancestors through their images. There was the portrait of Douglass and there were photos of Washington.

“My grandmother, Nettie Hancock Washington, Booker T. Washington’s granddaughter, lived on Massachusetts Avenue in Bethesda, and I spent a lot of time with her,” he said. “There were all types of pictures of him at her house, but I was much older when I really started to take a look at who he was.”

The Douglass connection also was forged through time he spent at his great-great-great-grandfather’s summer home in Highland Beach on the Chesapeake Bay.

“From the front yard, you looked out at the Chesapeake Bay. Across the bay, you could see land on the other side. That land was the Eastern Shore, where [Frederick Douglass] was born,” Morris said.

Born in Washington in 1962, Morris was the oldest of three children of Nettie Washington Douglass III and Kenneth B. Morris Sr., an insurance broker.

Though he didn’t make an issue of it, people found it incredible when Morris told them he was related to the two famous men. He was called a liar more than once — by students and teachers. “As a child, when somebody doesn’t believe you, you stop talking about it,” he said.

He was a good student and athlete and lettered in football and track in high school. After a few years at California State University at Fullerton, he left to travel the world. He also worked as a singer, performing and touring with the international music outreach group the Young Americans. Once he was the star singer and dancer in a performance with Liberace.

He was just Kenny Morris, and he made no fuss about his heritage.

“I just didn’t know that much about it,” he said. “I remember being in high school history classes and we’d get to chapters on Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, and I didn’t know exactly what they had done. I remember those chapters being very short.”

It was his mother who taught him about his lineage. Frederick Douglass, she told him, was born a slave, escaped to freedom in the North and was still so hunted that he headed to Europe to remain free. He lobbied President Abraham Lincoln to allow blacks to fight in the Civil War. He wrote prolifically — his book “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” is on almost every student reading list. He is considered one of the best orators in the history of the spoken word.

Booker T. Washington, the “Wizard of Tuskegee,” also was born a slave but was freed at age 9 with the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation. He was a great champion of education and so impressive as a teacher and leader that he was tapped at age 25 to head the Alabama teaching college that would become Tuskegee University. He was the first African American to dine at the White House; another would not follow for 30 years. He drew fire from some other prominent blacks of his day for his stand that segregation was acceptable if blacks could excel in their own communities. His book, “Up From Slavery,” was a bestseller for decades.

His mother also told him about her parents, descendants of the two great men. Her father, Frederick Douglass III, a surgeon, had met her mother, Nettie Hancock Washington, walking across the campus at then-Tuskegee Institute one day in 1941.

“It was love at first sight,” Nettie Washington Douglass III told Morris and his siblings. “They got married three months later.”

They were happy, but his lineage always weighed heavily on Frederick Douglass III, Morris learned. His grandfather took his own life while his wife was pregnant with Morris’s mother.

“People were always comparing him and asking what he was going to do,” Morris said. “He was a brilliant man, but he just couldn’t handle the weight of the expectations.”

What happened to the father she never knew made Nettie Washington Douglass III cautious about her own children. She never compared them to their forefathers or led them to think she had expectations. Though she spoke at black history events and they accompanied her to openings and dedications of structures named for Douglass and Washington, his family was “pretty low key” about their lineage, Morris said.

Their lack of a place on the national stage, however, provided an opportunity for imposters to step in. At least twice a year, they are alerted that someone is committing fraud in Douglass’s name.

A few years ago, he and his family were successful in exposing a Maryland man, Frederick I. Douglas Jr., who traveled the nation for 20 years performing as Frederick Douglass and pretending to be his great-great-grandson.

“It was out-and-out fraud,” Morris said. “Both of these men are heroes and prominent, so a lot of people named their kids for them. You will have Frederick Douglass Joneses and Booker T. Washington Smiths. Some people just took advantage of that.”

The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site at Douglass’s last home, Cedar Hill in Anacostia, holds the records of the orator’s descendants. After the births of his two daughters, Jenna, now 17, and Nicole, 14, Morris and his wife of 28 years, Diana, provided documentation to show the link.

Morris had recently returned from a trip to Washington to attend a birthday celebration at Cedar Hill when a close friend, Robert Benz, showed him the magazine that changed his life. “It was a National Geographic and the cover story was called ‘21st Century Slaves,’ ” Morris said. “I looked at the headline and was shocked. I thought slavery had ended with the work of Frederick Douglass and the Emancipation Proclamation.”

He started to do his own research and was deeply disturbed by what he found. Human beings were being bought and sold all over the world. Girls his daughters’ ages were being sexually exploited.

“I was reading one night as Diana was putting the girls to bed. They were 12 and 9 at the time,” he said. “I heard them laughing . . . I went into the room, and I wasn’t able to look them in their eyes. I realized that I had this platform that my ancestors had built through struggle and through sacrifice. I knew I could stand up and do something about this crime.”

Like Frederick Douglass, he would work to abolish slavery. Like Booker T. Washington, he would use education to forge a solution to a problem.

Finally, the link was made that had eluded him his entire life.

‘Agitate for change’

The last words of wisdom imparted by Douglass, according to many historical accounts, were “Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!” Depending on who told the story, 77-year-old Douglass uttered the words on the day he died to a boy who asked advice on how he should live his life or to a group of suffragettes he addressed before returning to Cedar Hill and having a heart attack on Feb. 20, 1895.

The words are considered Douglass’s rallying cry.

In 2007, his great-great-great-grandson took up the challenge by co-founding the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation with Benz to “create awareness about modern-day slavery in an effort to expedite its demise.” Last week, the foundation, based in Atlanta, launched a national human-trafficking education program to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation called “100 Days to Freedom.”

“The foundation has partnered with 10 schools across the country and the students have been asked to collaborate on creating a new proclamation of freedom addressing today’s slavery,” said Morris, who donates his time to the group. At the request of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the organization will also work with the New York City public schools this fall.

The education program’s credo is “Abolition Through Education.” Its goal: “To agitate for change,” Morris said.

As did Douglass and Washington.

“I appreciate this ancestry now,” Morris said. “I wake up each day and pinch myself and wonder why I was chosen by God to have this incredible lineage. I feel blessed that I do because it allows me to do the work that I do. The blood of two of the greatest heroes of this country is running through my veins. I feel like my ancestors would be very proud and feel very connected to what we are doing. They guide me every day in what I do.”

Was Anna Ella Carroll the forgotten heroine of the Civil War?

By Caitlin Gibson

They gathered in the banquet room of a waterfront hotel on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, more than 1,000 people assembled to celebrate one woman.

She waited in a chair, petite and poised in a plum-colored dress, hidden from the crowd by a curtain of red cloth. Her fans circulated among the tables as Civil War-era music filled the air.

At precisely the right moment, after the praise-filled speeches and the proclamation of a day dedicated in her honor, the red cloth was pulled away, and there she was: Anna Ella Carroll, captured in brush strokes of oil paint on linen and surrounded by members of President Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet as he prepared to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

There was a sparkle in Carroll’s hazel eyes, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips. She was the star of a new painting by Easton artist Laura Era — an updated version of the original “First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln,” painted by Francis Bicknell Carpenter in 1864.

In the original painting, which hangs in the U.S. Senate, Anna Carroll is nowhere to be found; there is only an empty chair with a red scarf draped on the seat.

The new version, titled “Maryland’s Version of the ‘First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation,’ ” was commissioned by a small group in Dorchester County known as the Friends of Anna Ella Carroll. Its 15 members, most of whom are elderly, lifelong Dorchester residents, have doggedly championed the legacy of a woman who hailed from their home county and who they contend played a pivotal, unsung role in the Union’s survival. The Friends of Anna Ella Carroll were the hosts of the grand event at the Hyatt Regency resort in Cambridge last November, where Era’s work of art was first displayed.

To the audience at the painting’s unveiling, Carroll is a local heroine finally taking her place at a table where she always belonged.

Her admirers want this painting to go on tour, to circulate among galleries and government buildings across the Washington region and beyond, to educate the public about Carroll’s accomplishments.

But depending on one’s interpretation of records and events, there is another, very different portrait of Carroll — one that suggests that the throngs of admiring fans were, in fact, honoring a fraud.

It’s fair to say that Anna Ella Carroll has been largely lost to history. Most Americans are unlikely to know her name, and she is not a part of classroom history lessons. The question is why.

Carroll was born in 1815 on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the daughter of Maryland Gov. Thomas King Carroll, who helped her gain entry to the male-dominated world of politics.

A gifted writer, Carroll authored a series of pamphlets on issues of constitutional theory in the 1860s — among the most notable were comprehensive arguments against Maryland’s secession from the Union, and several supporting Lincoln’s Constitutional authority to quell rebellion in the South. One early pamphlet, which presented a thorough legal rationale for Lincoln’s actions, was so influential that the U.S. War Department distributed copies of it to members of Congress.

During the Civil War, Carroll traveled west to St. Louis, where her research and an interview with a riverboat captain named Charles M. Scott led her to conclude that the Tennessee River — not the Mississippi — was the key to the Union’s control of the South.

Carroll said she submitted a plan for the Tennessee River Campaign to the War Department in 1861. Though she initially gave credit for the strategy to Scott, she later claimed the idea as hers and petitioned Congress for formal recognition and a proper pension for her service. It was a battle she fought for the remainder of her life and didn’t win.

Carroll’s admirers take the story several steps further, conjuring a woman who was among Lincoln’s closest advisers and who was sent west by the government to spy on the Confederates.

To her champions, Carroll was a brilliant strategist who wrote the plan calling for the Union to invade the South via the Tennessee River. They argue that Carroll’s work helped doom the Confederacy and that her writing laid the legal foundation for the Emancipation Proclamation.Lincoln knew this, they say, and pledged to give her the formal acknowledgment that she’d earned. But he was assassinated before he could fulfill that promise, denying a trailblazing woman of her proper place in history.

“Hands down, she was the most important political woman of the 19th century, suffragists aside,” said C. Kay Larson, an independent scholar who self-published a 2004 biography of Carroll titled “Great Necessities: The Life, Times and Writings of Anna Ella Carroll, 1815-1894.” “Very few can compete with her in terms of political influence, legal influence, intellectual influence and military influence — male or female.”

But some historians describe her differently — as a mercenary self-promoter who did not hesitate to lay claim to a place in history that simply is not hers.

“It really makes me sad that people waste so much time on Anna Ella Carroll, on something she did not do, and try to give her a status that she does not deserve,” said Janet Coryell, a Western Michigan University history professor and author of a 1990 Carroll biography titled “Neither Heroine Nor Fool.”

Jean Baker, a women’s history expert and professor at Goucher College, boiled the debate over Carroll’s legacy down to this:

“There are facts in history, but they are boring.” The heart of history, she said, lies in the interpretation of facts, “and with interpretation, you can also believe what you want to believe.”

Frank Bittner, 58, a retired telecommunications specialist from Baltimore and the founder of the Friends of Anna Ella Carroll, first learned about Carroll through local oral history when he moved to Dorchester County in 1997.

Then he did some reading of his own, including an 1891 biography of Carroll by Sarah Ellen Blackwell, a suffragist, and a 1952 volume by married historians Sydney and Marjorie Greenbie. Both books drew conclusive connections among Carroll, the Tennessee River Campaign and Lincoln. Bittner was impressed.

“I am not a historian, and I was never digging deep into the details,” Bittner said. “What touched me here in Dorchester is that there were many people who knew of her and were always irked by the dirty politics of Washington, and how the Washington establishment basically took her credit.”

The Friends of Anna Carroll commissioned the painting, Bittner said, to provide a “storybook ending” to the tale of a wronged woman.

“We have always believed that the empty chair was Lincoln’s way of including her or making reference to her involvement,” he said. That conviction is bolstered by generations of local folklore and the belief that the documents proving Carroll’s role were deliberately lost or destroyed.

“We know that she was not a fraud,” Bittner said. “That is what some folks have made her out to be, but we know better. All we’re looking for in Dorchester County is the truth.”

If the new painting reignites the debate over Carroll’s claim and draws more attention to her story, “this is serving our purpose,” he said. “The feeling always was that some day, somebody’s going to take notice.”

Kay Larson took notice of Anna Ella Carroll as a high school student in the mid-1960s after picking up a copy of “Woman with a Sword,” a 1948historical novel by Hollister Noble based on Carroll’s life. Larson said she never forgot Carroll.

Larson is not sure that Carroll belongs in Era’s painting of the Emancipation Proclamation. “It is possible, but I’m not entirely convinced,” she said.

Carroll’s thoughts on emancipation were complex, Larson said. Though she freed her own family’s slaves, she also argued in favor of establishing a freedmen’s colony, and voiced concern that forcing Confederate states to surrender their slaves might cost Lincoln the support of Southern Unionists.

There is also no evidence suggesting that Carroll was present at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation — nor did Carpenter, the original painter, mention Anna Carroll in his book chronicling the six months he spent in the White House working on the portrait.

But Larson, who spent years researching Carroll’s life, has no similar doubts about her proposal to launch a Union campaign on the Tennessee River. She maintains that Carroll delivered a memo to Assistant Secretary of War Thomas A. Scott in November 1861 detailing her plan, and that Lincoln appointed Edwin Stanton as secretary of war in January 1862 to execute the strategy.

Larson’s conclusion is based largely on the testimony of Ohio Sen. Benjamin F. Wade and Thomas Scott, as well as the testimony of Judge Lemuel D. Evans, with whom Carroll traveled to St. Louis. The three men supported Carroll’s claims, as did four separate congressional committees who voted in her favor, Larson noted.

Among the most convincing evidence is a letter from Sen. Wade written in 1876, when Carroll was in the midst of a futile, decades-long appeal to Congress to acknowledge and pay her for her contribution:

If ever there was a righteous claim on earth, you have one. I have often been sorry that, knowing all this, as I did then, I had not publicly declared you as the author. …

As the expedition advanced Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Stanton, and myself frequently alluded to your extraordinary sagacity and unselfish patriotism, but all agreed that you should be recognized for your most noble services, and properly rewarded for the same.

“She was instrumental in seeing that the Tennessee campaign was mounted and came to a victorious conclusion,” Larson said. “I think she was the most important woman to the Union cause in the Civil War and one of the most important women in American history.”

“Believe me, I wanted it to be true.”

This is Janet Coryell, the history professor who wrote the entry on Carroll for the authoritative “Encyclopedia of the American Civil War.”

“I was really disappointed when I found out it was a myth,” Coryell said.

Like Larson, Coryell also spent years researching Carroll, initially with the belief that she’d uncovered one of the great, lost women of the Civil War. What she found instead was that Carroll may well have been the principal architect of her own claims to history, aided and abetted over more than a century by a steady stream of well-meaning advocates.

The problem, according to Coryell: A couple of months before Carroll said she submitted her report to the War Department, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had advanced his troops to the mouth of the Tennessee River, a clear sign that he already understood its strategic significance. Also problematic: There is no concrete evidence proving that Carroll did, in fact, deliver a memo to Assistant Secretary of War Scott, nor has any copy of Carroll’s actual plan been found. And two weeks before Carroll allegedly delivered her report, a letter from a Tennessee resident laying out the same plan was published in the New York Times.

Then there’s the fact that Carroll initially gave credit for the plan to Charles Scott, the riverboat captain she’d interviewed in St. Louis, in a 1865 letter to the National Intelligencer newspaper — an assertion that Carroll only recanted years later, “when she needed money,” Coryell said.

In Lincoln’s papers, Carroll’s name is mentioned only once in passing, Coryell said, and she is notably absent from the diaries of Lincoln’s Cabinet members and presidential secretaries. Most of the evidence suggesting that Carroll was particularly close to the president comes from her own written recollections.

And the letter from Wade, supporting Carroll’s claim?

Coryell acknowledges that Wade backed up Carroll’s assertions but notes that the most emphatic of Wade’s letters, dated 1876, was not published until 1881 — three years after Wade’s death — and no original has been found. The only reprinted copy is part of a report by a House committee on military affairs.

Larson argues that the committee members would not have reprinted the letter as part of a government report if they didn’t trust its authenticity; Coryell is unconvinced.

“What they have is that this was a letter printed in a pamphlet that Carroll wrote to support her claim,” Coryell said. “If you look at the Wade collection of letters, it doesn’t exist there. It doesn’t exist in Carroll’s papers, either. So, you have to ask yourself: What evidence do we have that this letter existed in the first place?”

Yes, Coryell is suggesting that Anna Carroll might have forged the letter. And, yes, she understands that some people will view this as just one more smear campaign against a female war hero. As a female historian who champions women in history, Coryell said, the situation frustrates her profoundly.

“I just wrote a textbook for McGraw-Hill, a history of women in America. And there are so many stories out there of women who have done wonderful things and have been completely ignored by historians and the general public,” Coryell said.

Carroll doesn’t deserve to be dismissed entirely, Coryell said.

“She was one of the earlier constitutional theorists who said, ‘This is why it’s okay for Lincoln to do what he needs to do,’ ” she said. “In that sense, as a historic figure, that’s where her importance lies. But the problem is that it’s not sexy. Whereas being a lone woman with a game-changing strategy — that’s sexy.”

When it comes to Carroll’s presence in the new Emancipation Proclamation painting and the idea that the portrait might be used to teach the public about Carroll, Coryell has harsher words.

“I am appalled,” she said. “To try to promote this nonsense through legitimate venues is just embarrassing.”

Jean Baker, the Goucher College women’s history expert, agrees that teaching false history isn’t something to be applauded, but she admires Carroll’s supporters in Dorchester for their determination to remember her.

“They are reenacting the past from their present-day, local patriotism,” Baker said. “And they do have a body of information that, to some extent, supports their position. This is a woman who became a lobbyist even before there were lobbyists, who really spoke out of conviction for what she believed in.”

While it’s “ludicrous” for her champions to add Carroll to the Emancipation Proclamation painting, Carroll was “an important political woman, which is a huge contradiction in the 19th century,” Baker said.

Carroll “was very single-minded about what it was that she wanted to do, and did it,” Baker said. “I wish they would dial it back a bit and focus on that.”

In other words: Those accomplishments should be enough.

In the most literal terms, no one really knows Anna Carroll’s face.

If you believe the etched portrait that is most commonly associated with her name, she was a rather modest-looking woman, somewhat pudgy-chinned, with formal ringlets framing an inscrutable stare.

Former Ohio representative Albert Gallatin Riddle described Carroll in his 1895 memoir as “a short, stout, middle-aged maiden lady” who listened to congressional debates through an ear trumpet.

Then there’s the cover of the historical novel“Woman with a Sword,” where Carroll is a sultry blonde with high cheekbones and crimson lips, her arms crossed in a provocatively defiant pose.

Descriptions of her personality have been more consistent. Carroll was bold, intelligent and deeply passionate about politics. According to a quote from Winifred Gertrude Helmes’ 1977 volume “Notable Maryland Women,” Carroll could “scheme, connive, and maneuver as well as any man.”

Frank Bittner describes her with admiration: “She was not reverent to men, and she could actually match wits with the most intelligent of them.”

Laura Era painted and re-painted Carroll’s face more than a dozen times. She shifted the line of her mouth, adjusted the style of her auburn-brown hair, lightened the color of her eyes. She made Carroll pretty but not too pretty.

“I made her looking at you, the observer,” Era said. “I thought that was a poignant thing to do. This is her time. The look on her face, I wanted it to be a look of confidence. I wanted it to say: It’s about freakin’ time.”

The Friends of Anna Ella Carroll are preparing for the next annual Anna Ella Carroll Recognition Day, which will be celebrated Aug. 27 in Dorchester County. The event will begin with a wreath-laying at Anna Carroll’s grave, in the historic cemetery of Old Trinity Church. The epitaph reads: “A woman rarely gifted; an able and accomplished writer.”

There will be an afternoon tea and a screening of “The Lost River,” a film based on Carroll’s life that was premiered in November in Cambridge. Once again, the Anna Ella Carroll of the “Maryland’s Version of the ‘First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation’” portrait will be presented before a gathering of admirers.

Laura Era and the Friends of Anna Ella Carroll would love to see the painting travel to the National Portrait Gallery or to the Maryland statehouse in Annapolis. Maybe even to the Capitol. But there have been no takers, not yet.

So Anna Ella Carroll still sits in the studio at an Easton gallery, propped on a table surrounded by art supplies and other commissioned portraits, her firm gaze fixed on the opposite wall.

She’s been waiting 150 years for wider recognition, Era said. She’ll just have to wait a little longer.

Antietam's bloody, defining day

By Michael E. Ruane

SHARPSBURG, Md. — A spine of gray limestone runs north and south through the legendary cornfield here, just breaking the surface and leaving a path where no corn can grow.

For a century and a half, the elements have scoured the dirt, and crops have come and gone. But the stone has remained, scarred and smoothed by the plow and the weather.

On the morning of Sept. 17, 1862, the feet of thousands of desperate soldiers hurried across the ancient rock. Some men fell and bled on it. Bullets and shells flew over it. And somewhere nearby toppled the Lone Star flag of the 1st Texas Infantry Regiment.

In this stony cornfield, the doomed 1st Texas lost, along with its flag, 82 percent of its men. Here, the Civil War’s Battle of Antietam exploded in fury, and here, a crucial, bloody step was taken toward the end of slavery in America.

“Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any measure” was here at Antietam, historian Stephen W. Sears wrote in his classic 1983 study of the battle.

In the late summer and fall of 1862, as the Civil War moved through its second year, it had reached frightful new levels of violence, which would grow as the war went on.

But the fight along Antietam Creek, 150 years ago this month, would endure as its bloodiest single-day battle, and its horrors would haunt the soldiers who fought there for years.

Packed into 12 hours of conflict that began under the stars before dawn and that ended around sunset were three different phases — morning, midday and afternoon — and more than five different sub-battles.

Six generals were killed, three on each side. Almost 4,000 men were killed outright and 17,000 more were wounded. Of those, thousands would succumb to their injuries in the following months. Still more were reported missing.

There was at least one suicide, one Union officer who fled from his command in terror, and one dog slain beside its dead master, a Union officer.

A Union regiment, the 15th Massachusetts, lost many of its 606 men to friendly fire.

The more than 23,000 killed, wounded and missing from both sides “were the highest casualties of any one-day battle in our entire nation’s history,” said historian Tom Clemens, a retired professor at Hagerstown Community College and a student of the battle.

About three times as many Americans were casualties outside Sharpsburg as were killed or wounded in the landings in Normandy on D-Day in 1944.

The battle of Antietam, (pronounced an-TEE-tam) took place about 19 miles west of Frederick, just north of where the creek flows into the Potomac River, 54 miles northwest of Washington.

The clash pitted Gen. George B. McClellan’s roughly 86,000-man Union army against Gen. Robert E. Lee’s roughly 40,000 Confederates.

It is considered by many historians to be a tactical draw but a vital, strategic victory for the North.

The battered rebels were forced to retreat back across the Potomac, ending a string of triumphs and their first major incursion into Union territory in the East.

President Abraham Lincoln seized on Antietam to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which declared millions of slaves in the South free and elevated the war to a new moral plane.

And the victory probably denied the Confederacy coveted recognition by European countries who were on the verge of such action.

It was “a game changer,” Clemens said.

For the soldiers who fought there, Antietam was a nightmarish struggle that made such place names as “the cornfield,” “the Sunken Road,” “the Dunker church” and “the Burnside bridge” infamous.

The roller-coaster terrain, with dips and hills and patches of woods and cultivated fields, resulted in opposing soldiers colliding at extremely close range, with deadly consequences.

In one part of the battlefield, the tide of fighting swept back and forth — across the turnpike to Hagerstown, around the tiny whitewashed Dunker church and in the trampled scrabble of the cornfield.

Washington photographer Alexander Gardner, who was there two days after the fighting, took grisly pictures of a line of dead Louisiana soldiers in rigor mortis strewn along the turnpike fence. He photographed the bodies of others gathered near the Dunker church, and still others scattered around a rocky outcrop near the 30-acre cornfield.

Elsewhere, the contest was more stubborn. South of the cornfield, rebels hunkered in a sunken lane called Hog Trough Road and blasted away at waves of Yankees who came over a ridge 50 yards away. The Federals blasted back.

Gardner captured the aftermath of that, too — the road, forever after called Bloody Lane, littered with what one Union soldier called a “ghastly flooring” of the dead.

And then southeast of town, in some of the battle’s later phases, Union soldiers spent much of the day trying to cross the placid creek in the face of Confederates who were hidden on a bluff across the creek and shot them down in midstream.

“Antietam stands among the foremost of all Civil War battles for the intensity of its combat,” said historian James M. McPherson, author of a 2002 study of the campaign, “Crossroads of Freedom.”

“Soldiers who experienced several battles — Antietam, Gettysburg and many others in the eastern theater — often looked back upon Antietam as by far the most horrible,” he said.

Sears, the historian, quoted a diarist from the 9th Pennsylvania, who wrote, “No tongue can tell, no mind conceive, no pen portray the . . . sights I witnessed.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, who went to the battlefield while searching for his wounded son, remembered: “It was like the table of some hideous orgy left uncleared, and one turned away disgusted from its broken fragments.”

And years later, Rufus R. Dawes, who had been a 24-year-old major with the 6th Wisconsin, reflected on all the battles he had witnessed:

“The ‘angle of death’ at Spotsylvania . . . the Cold Harbor ‘slaughter pen’ . . . the Fredericksburg Stone Wall . . . were all mentally compared by me,” he wrote. But the scene at Antietam’s Hagerstown Turnpike “surpassed all in manifest evidence of slaughter.”

A stumbling start

It had drizzled the night before, and the two sides had jousted in the dark until they wound up facing each other on Sept. 17 along a zig-zag, four-mile front that ran north and south parallel to the creek.

Lee, the Confederate commander, had decided to invade Maryland after his rout of a befuddled Union army at the Second Battle of Bull Run two weeks before.

Aware of upcoming elections in the North and the prospect of European recognition of the Confederacy, Lee believed the South could demonstrate its power and demand its independence, McPherson wrote in his book.

Lee also expected a warm welcome in Maryland, a slave state that had not seceded, and proclaimed that the Confederates would help throw off the “foreign yoke.”

But his enterprise stumbled from the start. He wrote later that thousands of his men — some from exhaustion, some from “unworthy motives” — absented themselves.

As a result, he recounted, his invading army consisted of fewer than 40,000 worn-out soldiers.

In addition, the ragged Confederates were greeted coldly by local Marylanders, who had few slaves and a strong loyalty to the Union.

“Dirty, lank, ugly specimens of humanity,” a woman in Frederick wrote of them. “Shocks of hair sticking through the holes in their hats, and the dust thick on their dirty faces.”

Finally, Lee fell prey to one of the biggest intelligence blunders of the war. Days before the battle, a copy of his marching orders — wrapped around three cigars — was discovered in a field by an alert Yankee corporal.

Upon receipt of Lee’s orders, McClellan, the Union commander, reportedly exulted: “Now I know what to do!”

But in the end, most historians agree, the hapless “Little Mac” didn’t know what to do.

Carnage in the corn

The battle opened around dawn with a series of back-and-forth thrusts on the northern end of the field, as the sides fought over woodlots, the Dunker church — named for its full-immersion Baptist congregants — and the cornfield.

The corn in those days was far more scraggly than the lush crop that grows there today, notes the National Park Service’s chief Antietam historian, Ted Alexander. This made for less cover and deadlier shooting.

One Union commander wrote later that most of the stalks were cut so close to the ground that it looked as though they had been chopped down with a knife.

“The bullets began to clip through the corn, and spin through the soft furrows — thick, almost, as hail,” recalled Maj. Dawes, whose regiment chased the rebels into the field.

“Shells burst around us, the fragments tearing up the ground, and the canister whistled through the corn above us,” he wrote.

“Our lines on the left now came sweeping forward,” he recalled. “I ordered my men to join in the advance, and commanded: ‘Forward — guide left — march!’ ”

He could see the little church of the pacifist Dunkers in the distance, but as the Yankees approached, a long line of rebels who had taken cover on the ground jumped up and fired.

“Men, I can not say fell; they were knocked out of the ranks by dozens,” Dawes recalled.

Then the Confederates counterattacked. The depleted Federals fled — “back to the corn, and back through the corn,” Dawes remembered.

As they ran, they left behind the fallen commander of the regiment’s F Company, Capt. Werner Von Bachelle, a former officer in the French army.

Von Bachelle’s Newfoundland dog would not leave his body, though, and two days after the battle the dog was found dead atop the captain, Dawes wrote. “We buried him with his master.”

Lone Star loss

Now it was the rebels plunging into the shredded corn, with a brigade made up mostly of regiments from Texas — the “Ragged Old First,” carrying a red, white and blue Lone Star regimental flag.

“I entered a corn-field and soon became engaged with a force of the enemy, driving them before me to the farther side,” Lt. Col. Philip A. Work, commander of the 1st Texas, reported after the battle.

“As soon as the regiment became engaged. . . in the corn-field, it became impossible to restrain the men, and they rushed forward,” he recounted. But they quickly got too far ahead and became isolated.

Work was unable to slow his men until they had reached the far side of the field and became exposed to intense Yankee gunfire from his flank and rear.

Work realized his precarious position, and with only a “handful of men” left, he ordered retreat.

As they did, the regimental flag bearer was hit. Another man grabbed the banner, but he, too, went down. In the chaos, no one noticed. Work reported that when they emerged from the corn, he realized they’d lost the flag.

No one knew where it had fallen. The corn was dense enough that no one could spot the banner. And a Federal counterattack was closing in.

“I entered the engagement with 226 men, [and] officers . . . of which . . . 170 are known to have been killed and wounded,” he reported. Twelve others were missing “and, doubtless, also killed or wounded.”

The 1st Texas, historians say, sustained at Antietam one of the the highest casualty rates of any regiment on either side on a single day during the war.

Company F was wiped out, historian Jerry W. Holsworth wrote in a 1996 study of the Texans in Blue & Gray magazine. Only one man was left from Company A, two from Company C and three from Company E.

“It is hard to imagine Col. Work’s feelings as he gazed at what was left of his regiment,” Holsworth wrote.

Work was further dismayed by the loss of the flag — the white star is said to have been made from the wedding dress of the wife of its first commander, the rabid secessionist Louis T. Wigfall.

“It is a source of mortification . . . that . . . our colors were not brought off,” Work lamented.

“Some degree of odium must attach under the most favorable circumstances,” he wrote afterward. “And although such are the circumstances surrounding the conduct of this regiment, the loss of our flag will always remain a matter of sore and deep regret.”

After the rebels retreated, Samuel Johnson, a Union private from the 9th Pennsylvania Reserves, found the Texas regimental flag, and another flag, in the cornfield, according to Holsworth.

And in an account penned 40 years later, an old rebel who had been captured in the battle heard Johnson say that 13 dead Confederates were sprawled around the lone star flag when he found it.

(In 1905, the flag was returned to Texas by President Theodore Roosevelt and today resides in the state archives building in Austin.)

Despite all the bloodshed in the cornfield, it was still only about 7:30 a.m. The thunder of the battle rolled south to the church, the Sunken Road and the bridge in what one veteran called a “carnival of death and suffering.”

In the end, the Federals seized the Sunken Road and eventually got across the bridge, only to be stymied by late-arriving rebel reinforcements.

More than 12 hours after it started, the fighting finally ceased, in a stalemate.

“As the sun sank to rest . . . the last sounds of battle along Antietam Creek died away,” Francis W. Palfrey, a historian and a wounded veteran of the battle, wrote in 1889.

“The corn and trees, so fresh and green in the morning, were reddened with blood,” he wrote. “The blessed night came, and brought with it sleep and forgetfulness . . . but the murmur of the night wind . . . was mingled with the groans of the countless sufferers of both armies.

“Who can tell?” he wondered. “Who can imagine, the horrors of such a night, while the unconscious stars shone above, and the unconscious river went rippling by?”

At Harper's Ferry, a prelude to slaughter

By Joel Achenbach

One of the most beautiful Civil War sites, at Harpers Ferry, W.Va., commemorates an unsightly and chaotic battle that led to the capture of more than 12,000 Union soldiers and set the stage for the wholesale slaughter of rebels and federals at Antietam two days later.

Thomas Jefferson rhapsodized about the beauty of this slice of America, saying the view through the water gap in the Blue Ridge where the Potomac meets the Shenandoah was worth a voyage across the Atlantic. This is a place of complex geography, of rivers and mountains and mountain gaps that preoccupied the generals on both sides.

Bottom of Form

Robert E. Lee, taking the war across the Potomac into Maryland, assumed that the large Union garrison at Harpers Ferry would be withdrawn in an attempt to head off his advance. But the Union strategists ordered the garrison to stay put. That meant more than 10,000 federals remaining in Lee’s rear, potentially cutting off his supply line in the Shenandoah Valley.

He broke his army into five pieces and sent three to surround Harpers Ferry. The Union soldiers were green and not ready to fight.

“They were in wild confusion and dismay,” one Union lieutenant later testified about the initial battle for Maryland Heights, the mountain that overlooks Harpers Ferry from the northeast.

“Nobody had any command over them. They were worthless; not worth anything,” a Union captain reported.

From the west came Stonewall Jackson. He had the Union garrison surrounded. The federals took up position on Bolivar Heights, just up the hill from the village of Harpers Ferry. But they were sitting ducks. Jackson’s forces unleashed an artillery bombardment from seven locations. The noise was fearful.

“[T]he sight of orange-centered puffs of smoke on every side, the sound of explosions bouncing back and forth in the triple water gap, the feel of trembling earth, a handful of gruesome casualities, and a shortage of long-range artillery ammunition finished the garrison in an hour,” wrote Joseph L. Harsh in his book “Taken at the Flood: Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862.”

The Union forces waved white flags. While the surrender was being sorted out, one of the final shells mortally wounded the Union commander, Gen. Dixon Miles.

The three days of fighting at Harpers Ferry left 39 Confederates dead and 247 wounded, while the Union casualties totaled 44 killed, 173 wounded, and an astonishing 12,737 captured – the largest number of Union troops captured during the war.

Lee had vowed to retreat to Virginia and call off his Maryland campaign, but when he heard from Jackson on the morning of Sept. 15 that victory was at hand at Harpers Ferry, he changed his mind. He was at that point in Sharpsburg, near Antietam Creek.

“We will make our stand on these hills,” Lee declared.

In defense of McClellan at Antietam: A contrarian view

By Gene Thorp

On Sept. 17, 1862, Gen. George B. McClellan stopped Gen. Robert E. Lee’s first Confederate invasion of the North at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day of warfare in American history. This narrow victory changed the course of the war.

Yet history has not been kind to McClellan. Politicians from the 1860s onward and countless historians have claimed he could have easily destroyed Lee’s army during the campaign and ended the war in 1862, sparing the country another two and a half years of bloody conflict.

Their criticism stems from the belief that McClellan moved too slowly and cautiously to attack Lee. They assert that when a copy of Lee’s plans fell into McClellan’s hands, the Union general wasted precious hours before advancing. They declare that McClellan’s forces outnumbered his foe’s by more than two to one and by that metric alone, he should have decimated Lee’s army. They are wrong.

Contrary to what most of the literature will tell you, McClellan was not a hesitant fool. He did his best under challenging conditions.

Scarcely two weeks before the Battle of Antietam, he was a general without a command. He had once held sway over all the Federal armies, but during the previous six months every unit under his control had been transferred to other generals.

Most had been sent to reinforce Gen. John Pope as he fought Lee on the plains of Manassas. Pope, however, was thoroughly defeated, and his demoralized troops streamed back to the capital with the Confederates close behind.

In a moment of desperation, Lincoln returned the shattered remnants of Pope’s army to McClellan, hoping its former commander could reinstill the high morale the troops had possessed a year earlier.

When McClellan took charge of the Union forces on Sept. 1, he inherited four separate armies, thousands of untrained recruits and numerous other small commands that needed to be made ready in a hurry. To further complicate matters, three of his senior commanders had been ordered relieved of duty, charged with insubordination against Pope.

Acting quickly

Unbeknownst to the Federals, Lee had struck north into Maryland. The cavalry was the arm of the service most likely to discover Lee’s change of direction, but when McClellan took over, there was virtually none available to him.

On paper, McClellan commanded some 28 cavalry regiments. But the disastrous Manassas campaign had worn out the horses of almost half the Union regiments, while most of the remainder were stranded at Hampton Roads by gale-force winds. For the first week of the campaign, McClellan could only count on perhaps 1,500 cavalry from two regiments and a few scattered squadrons from his old army to challenge some 5,000 Confederate cavalry soldiers screening Lee’s army.

Despite these handicaps, in the week it took for Lee’s army to march to Frederick, McClellan’s army traveled an equal distance to redeploy on the north side of Washington. This was accomplished as he reshuffled commands, had his officers under charges reinstated and prepared to fill out his army with untrained recruits.

These new men, organized into 1,000-man regiments, would account for about a fifth of McClellan’s force at Antietam. Northern recruiting booths had only reopened in July, and the first of these regiments were not assembled in their home states until mid-August. Before officers learned how to issue orders or their men learned to follow them, they were sent by train to Washington and immediately marched to the front. They would learn how to fire a musket as they marched to battle.

In the second week of the campaign, Lee’s army suddenly left Frederick and marched west.

As McClellan’s army advanced on Sept. 13, Union soldiers stumbled upon a four-day-old copy of Lee’s orders in an abandoned rebel camp. Known as Special Order No. 191, this paper revealed that Lee had dangerously split his army into five parts. Three columns had converged on Harpers Ferry to capture the Federal garrison there, a fourth column was in Hagerstown, and a fifth column was acting as a rear guard near Boonesboro, Md. Historians have debated fiercely over when the Lost Order was delivered to McClellan.

In his landmark 1983 book, “Landscape Turned Red,” Stephen Sears asserts that McClellan verified before noon that the papers were legitimate, then exhibited his usual excessive caution and failed to move his army for 18 hours. To back up this theory, Sears cites a telegram that McClellan sent to Abraham Lincoln at “12 M” — which Sears says stands for meridian or noon — in which McClellan confidently informs the president that he has the plans of the enemy and that “no time shall be lost” in attacking Lee.

After the book’s publication, though, the original telegram receipt was discovered by researcher Maurice D’Aoust in the Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress. It shows that the telegram was sent at midnight (the word was written out) — a full 12 hours later than Sears thought. D’Aoust points this out in the October 2012 issue of Civil War Times in an article entitled “ ‘Little Mac’ Did Not Dawdle.”

The sequence of events most likely went like this: The Lost Orders were found “about noon,” as confirmed by the unit commander, and reached McClellan shortly before 3 p.m., which is when he ordered his cavalry chief to verify that the paper was legitimate, and not some ruse planted by the rebels. Even before the orders could be verified, McClellan had the vanguard of the army, Burnside’s 9th Corps, on the move at 3:30 p.m.These men filled the road west to Lee’s rear guard at South Mountain well into the night. Near sundown, at 6:20 p.m., he began to issue orders for the rest of his army to move, with most units instructed to be marching at sunrise. (They were roused from sleep at 3 a.m.) In the midst of this activity, at midnight, the general telegraphed the president to tell him what was going on.

No dilly-dallying there.

By 9 a.m. on Sept. 14, the first troops had climbed South Mountain and met the Confederate rear-guard in battle. By nightfall, McClellan’s army carried the heights and forced a defeated Lee to find a new defensive position along Antietam Creek. McClellan pursued the next morning and within 48 hours initiated the Battle of Antietam, which forced Lee back across the Potomac River.

Underestimating the damage?

In his after-action report, McClellan claimed that his men buried 2,700 Confederates on the Antietam battlefield and captured 6,000 more. He could only guess at the number of wounded, but he estimated it was 18,742 men, using the ratio of killed to wounded for his own troops.

This stands in stark contrast to Confederate reports, which claimed losses of 1,674 dead, 2,292 missing and 9,451 wounded — a total of 13,417. Even discounting the wounded, the discrepancy between the two reports is almost 5,000 casualties.

Which is right? The burial grounds would indicate that McClellan’s number is closer to the truth. More than 3,300 dead rebels specifically associated with the Antietam campaign can be found buried in the Confederate cemeteries in Hagerstown, Frederick, Shepherdstown and Winchester. This number is larger than McClellan’s because it includes bodies buried by the Confederates themselves as well as those who died shortly after the battle.

As for the captured Confederates, McClellan’s medical director, JonathanLetterman, reported 2,500 wounded under his care following the fight. At least another 2,500 unwounded prisoners of war were transferred from the battlefield to Forts Delaware and McHenry, bringing the number of captured rebels to more than 5,000 — much closer to McClellan’s figure than Lee’s. This would make what is already America’s bloodiest day even more horrific than previously thought, and it would mean McClellan did more damage than he is credited with.

Underestimated strength

Perhaps the most important misconception is the number of troops Lee brought with him during his invasion. Most historians cite McClellan as having had 87,000 men and Lee around 40,000. These numbers are often used for the entire three-week campaign, with the Confederates sometimes credited with as many as 55,000 men, 15,000 of whom straggled off before the battle. But there are no complete returns for Lee’s army until Oct. 10, 1862. Every historian’s count is merely a best-guess estimate.

Lee filed his first return five days after the battle, noting the count is “very imperfect” and does not include cavalry or artillery. It states that on Sept. 22, he had at least 36,418 infantry. Adding a conservative number of 5,000 for the missing cavalry and artillery units would bring his total to about 41,000 troops at the end of the campaign.

Eighteen days later, on Oct. 10, Lee filed his first complete report, which showed 64,273 present for duty. This number is significant because Lee had not received a single new regiment to replace his losses; nor did he receive many, if any, recruits because the February draft law had already pulled every eligible man into the army by early summer.

If we add Lee’s reported campaign losses of 13,417 (which, as already noted, are too low), it would show that Lee started the campaign with at least 75,000 men.

Most historians will explain this away by citing the Confederate claim that almost half of Lee’s army — 30,000 soldiers — straggled behind. Where is the corroborating evidence? The Official Records show that some 5,000 rebels moved to Winchester at the start of the campaign, then on to Lee’s army after Antietam, but what about the rest? How could any rebel straggle in Maryland — as many Confederates claimed — and not be captured by the Union army, which immediately occupied every post the retreating Confederates vacated? If the straggling took place in Virginia at the start of the campaign, who fed these 25,000-plus soldiers? Who led them? How did they all get back into Lee’s army so quickly through countryside most had never been in?

The simple answer is that that Confederates had suffered a major loss and needed some way to explain it. While straggling undoubtedly occurred in the last few days before Antietam, 30,000 men were not missing for most of the campaign.

Plenty of eyewitness accounts support the 75,000 figure for Lee’s army. Perhaps the most detailed comes from Dr. Lewis Steiner of the Sanitary Commission, who happened to be in Frederick on Sept. 10-11 as most of the Confederate army marched out of town. Steiner tried to count every rebel that passed him and concluded by the end of the two days that he had seen some 69,000 Confederates. However, he did not witness any cavalry or a division south of town that was also part of Lee’s army. When the most conservative estimates for these troops are added to Steiner’s numbers, they bring the total to well over 75,000.

So much for McClellan’s outsized numerical advantage. The army he drove back was not much smaller than his own. He did it without proper cavalry support, with his superiors hoping to oust him and with a significant portion of his army untrained. And as it turns out, he inflicted more damage on Lee’s army than anyone suspected.

Confederate raider Mosby was a master of surprise

By Linda Wheeler

(Library of Congress)

(Library of Congress)

(Library of Congress)

Partisan ranger John Singleton Mosby is a most enduring Civil War character in a crowded field. He operated outside the usual chain of military command and became famous for his lightning strikes against unsuspecting Union troops followed by an equally rapid disappearance. The “Gray Ghost,” as he was known, was a showman, wearing a scarlet-lined grey cloak and plumed hat, and he reveled in his notoriety. His assignment was to harass, delay and demoralize Northern troops occupying central and western Virginia and he did it well.

The South called him a hero. The North called him a guerrilla and thief.

He was all three. Mosby and his men were rough and tough heroes to residents who felt protected by them and offered them places to stay, and to the South in general for their successful raids. Although officially volunteers in the military, as partisan rangers they were obligated to supply their own needs. They made good use of the plunder taken in frequent raids, including the finest horses and guns.

Uniforms weren’t a concern because Mosby told his men to wear any piece of gray clothing.

In a time when men still camped in large numbers and marched as a unit directly into enemy fire, Mosby’s methods were revolutionary. His headquarters were in the saddle; there was no place for the enemy to attack. His raids occurred when the time was right and no one knew his plans until they met at the appointed place.

He modeled his operation on Continental Army Brig. Gen. Francis Marion, known as the Swamp Fox, who ambushed the British and then disappeared into South Carolina woodland or swamps during the American Revolution. Marion, in turn, had learned the technique from the Cherokees during the French and Indian War.

Mosby, a lawyer, joined the Confederate army when he was 28 and married with two children. He served under cavalry commander Capt. J.E.B. Stuart, a man his own age and one he came to idolize. He was Stuart’s scout on his famous 100-mile ride around Union Gen. George B. McClellan’s army in June 1862.

It was Stuart who acquiesced to Mosby’s request in December 1862 to give him a few men and allow him to try out his Swamp Fox-inspired plan to disrupt Union activity in Loudoun County. The men often met at Rectors Cross Roads, near Middleburg, at the start of a raid because of the easy access, friendly residents and good spring for watering the horses.

By late February, Mosby’s Raiders had scored three successful hits on Union outposts. In response, Union Col. Sir Percy Wyndham, stationed at Fairfax Court House, dispatched 200 troops under Maj. Joseph Gilmore on March 2 to find Mosby and arrest him. Gilmore headed to Middleburg, a town suspected of harboring the raiders, but en route the officer and his troops got drunk when several bottles were passed around. When they reached Middleburg, they tore up the town, searched every house and then arrested all the old men of Middleburg — the only men around — and took them as prisoners of war.

Mosby, hearing of the mayhem, gathered 17 of his men and rode after the Union troops, hoping to catch up with them either in Middleburg or at Aldie on the road back to Fairfax Court House. They missed Gilmore but did find other Union troops at Aldie getting horse feed at the mill. The raiders charged with wild whoops, bearing down on the surprised soldiers who seemed unable to move. Mosby captured 19 soldiers and 23 horses. He had again embarrassed the Union.

Adding to his luster, the elderly men who had been dumped by Gilmore outside town and left to walk home assumed Mosby was their rescuer and referred to him as a hero.

Mosby did not fit the image of the brawny, military superstar. Born near Richmond on Dec. 6, 1833, he wasn’t expected to live through childhood. Always a sickly and frail child, he was often bullied by classmates. As an adult, he was shorter than average and weighed about 125 pounds. In group photos, he is the thinnest man in the picture.

Wyndham lashed out at Mosby, calling him nothing but a horse thief. Mosby responded that the only horses he had taken had riders on them, armed with sabers and guns. It was then that Mosby began plotting his revenge for the insult by kidnapping the Englishman from his heavily guarded headquarters at Fairfax Court House.

On the cold winter night of March 8, 1863, the 29 raiders Mosby had handpicked for the assignment showed up at the meeting place. As he described the events, there was still snow on the ground and rain began to fall as the raiders picked their way through wooded sections, avoiding regularly traveled roads. At one point a Union scout hailed them, and after assuring him they were Fifth New York Cavalry, they promptly arrested him. Working their way carefully around Union camp sites, they reached Fairfax Court House at 2 a.m. where all was quiet with only a few sentries on duty. No one was expecting any trouble this far inside the lines.

Mosby cautioned his men to be quick as they had to be back to their own base by dawn. The men began gathering horses from every stable. Discovering that Wyndham was in Washington for the night, Mosby chose a new target: Brig. Gen. Edwin H. Stoughton.

Mosby knocked loudly on the house where he was staying, a window opened and someone asked who was there. “Fifth New York Cavalry with a dispatch for General Stoughton,” Mosby replied. The door was opened by Stoughton’s lieutenant and Mosby and his men pushed their way in, demanding to be taken to the general’s bedroom. He was found sleeping heavily under a pile of quilts with several empty champagne bottles near the bed.

Mosby pulled the blankets back and slapped Stoughton’s naked behind. The general sputtered awake and Mosby told him he was under arrest. Then he asked him if he had ever heard of Mosby and the general said he had.

“I am Mosby,” Mosby said, obviously enjoying the moment. “Stuart’s cavalry has possession of the Court House; be quick and get dressed.”

Outside, the raiders had gathered every horse available and about 60 prisoners including two captains, seven couriers and the camp telegraph operator. Carefully, quietly, they left Fairfax Court House without firing a shot and returned home. They had done what had been considered impossible.

In his memoirs, published posthumously in 1917, Mosby reflected on that morning as they reached safety at Centreville.

“The sun had just risen and in the rapture of the moment, I said to [ranger] Slater, ‘George, this is the sun of Austerlitz,’ ” referring to one of Napoleon’s greatest victories at the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz, when the sun broke through heavy mist at just the opportune moment. “I knew I had drawn a prize in the lottery of life and my emotion was natural and should be pardoned.”

In June 1863, at Rector’s Cross Roads, Mosby’s Rangers got the official military designation of Company A, 43rd Battalion, 1st Virginia Cavalry. By then, Mosby had been promoted to major.

They operated in a large swath of Virginia that became known as Mosby’s Confederacy and the name lives on today. It has a triangular shape and is bordered by the Shenandoah Valley to the west, the Potomac River to Alexandria on the east and the Rappahannock River on the south. Most of his operations were centered in Fauquier and Loudoun counties.

At the end of the war, Mosby disbanded his rangers rather than surrender as a unit. Many of his men got their parole, after signing a statement vowing not to take up arms against the United States again, and returned home. Mosby did not do the same. He was awaiting advice from his commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee, but it never came. He tried to work out his personal surrender with Maj. Gen. W. S. Hancock, headquartered in Winchester, but Hancock refused and instead offered a reward of $5,000 for Mosby’s arrest.

Mosby was no longer an active combatant. Instead, he was a man on the run. It was Gen. Ulysses S. Grant who finally stepped in and arranged his parole.

Much of Mosby’s Confederacy looks as it did in the 1860, thanks to efforts by preservation groups, and his name is attached to an elementary school and the section of Route 50 between Paris and Lenah. Warrenton has a monument and a museum honoring him.

Rector’s Cross Roads, now named Atoka, is still a tiny place with few buildings, one of which is the location where the 43rd Battalion was officially organized. It is now the headquarters of the Mosby Heritage Area Association.

Cast of Characters

By Michael E. Ruane

George W. Smalley

The New York Tribune reporter wrote a sweeping first-person account of the Battle of Antietam that historians consider the Civil War’s greatest single piece of journalism. Smalley, a former lawyer with poor eyesight, headed a team of four Tribune reporters covering the battle. As the fighting ended, he hurried by horse and train to New York, writing his story by oil lamp. When he arrived at 5 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1862, the presses were waiting, and the Tribune had his account on the street two days after the battle.

Dr. Jonathan Letterman

The medical director of the Union’s Army of the Potomac became one of the fathers of modern battlefield medicine in 1862, bringing order to the bloody chaos of the combat zone. After the Battle of Antietam, he helped organize the removal of thousands of wounded soldiers. He also helped establish and staff nearby military hospitals, including two 1,000-bed tent camps. It was “a great deal of labor,” he wrote later. “But it was done, and done promptly and well.”

Alexander Gardner

The pioneering photographer, while in the employ of fellow photo trail blazer Mathew B. Brady, reached Antietam shortly after the fighting and took history’s first pictures of dead Americans on the battlefield. His photographs mesmerized the public when they were exhibited in Brady’s gallery in New York. “There is a terrible fascination . . . that draws one near these pictures,” the New York Times wrote at the time, and one is “chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes.”

Gen. Philip Kearny

A dashing, one-armed Union officer, he was a member of a wealthy New York family. Although Kearny inherited a fortune after the death of his grandfather, he was bent on a military career and joined the Army. He lost his left arm during the Mexican-American War. A superb division commander , he was killed at the Battle of Chantilly, Sept 1, 1862. In an earlier battle, he is said to have encouraged his troops by shouting, “Don’t worry, men, they’ll all be firing at me!”

Mary Ann “Mother” Bickerdyke

The widowed “botanic physician” went to the war early and served Union soldiers for the duration - as a nurse, nutritionist, organizer and enemy of red tape. Dedicated to the welfare of the common Billy Yank, she became chief of nursing under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, was present for 19 battles and got as close to the fighting as she could. Once asked by what authority she acted, she replied, “the authority of Lord God Almighty.”

William B. Mumford

A citizen of New Orleans, he was hanged June 7, 1862, on the orders of federal Gen. Benjamin F. Butler for tearing down a U.S. flag that had been raised as the city was being occupied by federal forces. Outraged, Confederate President Jefferson Davis decreed that Butler, “an outlaw and common enemy of mankind,” be hanged if he was ever captured. He never was, and later, as a powerful congressman, Butler helped author civil rights and anti-Ku Klux Klan legislation.

Henry David Thoreau

The antislavery transcendentalist and author of “Walden” died of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862, in Concord, Mass., his words eclipsed by the tumult of the war. Sickened by slavery, he had written in 1854, “I dwelt before . . . in the illusion that my life passed somewhere only between heaven and hell, but now I cannot persuade myself that I do not dwell wholly within hell. . . . It is not an era of repose. We have used up all our inherited freedom. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.”

Ambrose E. Burnside

The bewhiskered Union general replaced his old friend, Gen. George B. McClellan, when the latter was fired as commander of the Army of the Potomac after the Battle of Antietam. Burnside, for whom a bridge on the battlefield is named, had twice before refused command, saying that he did not feel up to the job. This time he reluctantly accepted. Three months later he directed the army in its disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg, and was himself replaced.

Additional Content
Timeline: A new birth of freedom

CHAPTER SIX

Gettysburg

Gettysburg: A furious battle and a fatal mistake lead to an epic slaughter

By Joel Achenbach

It was the biggest battle of the war, unequaled in scale and violence by anything seen before or since on this continent. Two immense armies collided in the fields and orchards and woods around Gettysburg, Pa., on July 1, 1863, and fought for three days, full-bore, no quarter given, a massive smash-up that was arguably the pivotal moment of the great conflict that sits at the heart of American history.

Abraham Lincoln called what happened in Gettysburg “a new birth of freedom,” a phrase that chiseled its way into our national civic poetry and the wall of his memorial. The battle was also an epic slaughter, the bloodiest chapter in a fratricidal war. The National Park Service records 3,155 Union and 3,500 Confederate deaths over the three days, but some students of the battle believe that the Confederate death toll was much higher. Thousands more were mortally wounded. Casualties — including wounded, captured and missing — topped 50,000 for the two armies combined. By a wide margin, Gettysburg spilled more blood than any other Civil War engagement.

Lincoln’s famous address that November honored the men who stood their ground against a furious assault. But the story of Gettysburg, as we usually tell it today, wheels back to the other side of the field, to the Army of Northern Virginia, and its revered, almost sainted commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee. Because Gettysburg was Lee’s fatal blunder.

He ordered repeated assaults on fortified Union positions on high ground. What was Lee thinking? Could it have worked? Who was to blame for the failure? For a century and a half, historians and Civil War buffs have been gnawing on these questions.

This summer, the Park Service will not permit a reenactment of the battle as part of the sesquicentennial celebration. Park officials don’t want a replay of the events of 50 years ago, when reenactors tore up the battlefield and left it a mess. But they also think it would send the wrong signal and celebrate too much the martial element of the anniversary. Instead, there will be commemorative speeches and candle-lighting ceremonies, and on July 3, the public will be invited to walk in an orderly procession where Pickett’s division charged Cemetery Ridge.

The culmination of the battle will be marked not by fanfare but by a bugler playing a tune composed during the Civil War. The tune is known today as taps.

The first day

In June 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River and kept going, through Maryland, into Pennsylvania. Lee had 75,000 men, eager to feast on the comparative bounty of Pennsylvania after so many months scavenging for food in war-torn Virginia. Beyond the need to find fresh supplies for his army and give Virginia agriculture a chance to recover, Lee had strategic goals. An invasion of the North might persuade northern Democrats to push for a peace treaty. Most of all, he was spoiling for a fight, hoping to lure the Union army into a confrontation in the North. He thought he could destroy that army and end the war.

Where would this great battle occur? No one knew — until it was already underway.

Lee’s mercurial head of cavalry, Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, had a tendency to wander off, and once again he’d gone gallivanting across the countryside, leaving his commander blind to the movements of the enemy. Unbeknown to Lee, the Army of the Potomac, with 90,000 men, had moved quickly north, headed his way.

On June 28, Lee learned from a spy about the Union advance. He also learned that Lincoln had changed generals again, putting the Army of the Potomac under Gen. George Meade. Lee ordered his scattered corps commanders to converge, but they weren’t supposed to bring on a major battle. A relatively small number of rebel soldiers looking for supplies — shoes, famously, though like so much else that’s a subject of debate — ventured toward the little town that served as the seat of Adams County. Gettysburg radiated roads to all points of the compass, and those roads became like plumbing that sluiced the two armies toward each other.

Union cavalry under the command of Gen. John Buford spotted a detachment of rebels coming east toward Gettysburg. Buford eyeballed the terrain, with several ridges running parallel. Buford decided to hold the ridges until he could be reinforced. Thus, it was Buford, thinking on his feet — or on his horse — who selected Gettysburg as a field of battle.

The first shot rang out at 7:30 a.m. July 1. The dismounted Union soldiers were on the verge of being overrun when help arrived under the command of Maj. Gen. John Reynolds. Today one of the most magnificent equestrian statues at Gettysburg shows Reynolds, facing west, near where a bullet killed him soon after he arrived at the scene.

This started to look like another rebel victory, a fitting follow-up to Lee’s smashing triumph at Chancellorsville two months earlier. Union forces fled through the town and regrouped on the high ground beyond, including Cemetery Hill. Lee hadn’t ordered up a major battle, but when he arrived at the edge of Gettysburg late in the day, he saw his opportunity. He ordered one of his three corps commanders, Gen. Richard Ewell, to press the attack and take the hills beyond the town “if practicable.” It was a discretionary order. Ewell decided that his men had fought enough for the day, and he did not try to take the high ground. This was a fatal hitch in the Confederate step. The Union soldiers dug in at Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill and along Cemetery Ridge.

That night, the campfires flared around Gettysburg as two huge armies tended to their dead and wounded and prepared to resume their war in the morning.

The second day

The battle, as it unfolded, was a sprawling affair, too big for anyone to keep track of it all. But in some ways, it was a simple set-piece battle, fairly easy to diagram after that first day. The Union line was shaped like an upside-down fishhook, relatively compact, with interior lines of movement that enabled rapid reinforcements from one side of the battle to the other. The rebels were stretched around that position in a looping, thin, five-mile line that made communication and reinforcement more difficult. And the Southerners would have to fight uphill much of the time.

Lee’s ace lieutenant, Gen. James Longstreet, recognized that his men had the inferior position, and he advised Lee to maneuver away from Gettysburg, to the south, toward Washington, where the rebels could take up a more favorable, defensive position and force Meade to attack.

Lee wouldn’t think of it.

“The enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there,” Lee said.

Longstreet obeyed orders, but he took his time organizing his men to attack the Union left. For decades thereafter, Lee’s defenders blamed Longstreet for tarrying and letting the Union army strengthen its line. The fighting on the second day — at the Peach Orchard, the Wheat Field, Devil’s Den, and Little Round Top — was some of the most furious of the war.

Late in the day, Union Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock realized that the center of his line on Cemetery Ridge was about to be overrun by Alabamians. Short of options, he ordered the 1st Minnesota, some 262 men, to charge the oncoming Confederates. More than four out of five of the Minnesotans were killed or wounded in the charge, but it was a tactical success, halting the rebels until the Union line could be reinforced.

On the Union left, rebels moved toward Little Round Top. A Union brigade, outnumbered, fought off repeated waves of rebels. Among the heroes of the battle were the men of the 20th Maine, led by a Bowdoin College professor, Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. When Chamberlain saw that his men had nearly run out of ammunition, he ordered them to fix bayonets. The Maine men charged the surprised rebels, many of whom surrendered on the spot. Thus, the Union held on to Little Round Top, which would factor into the final day of battle.

The third day

Lee had pounded the Union left and right on the first two days. On the third day, he decided to strike the Union center. His battle plan called for a charge against the center, under Longstreet’s command, plus another attack on the Union right by Ewell’s corps and an attack on the Union rear by rebel cavalry. If numbers were not in his favor, he could count on Southern ferocity and valor.

Longstreet thought otherwise. Years later, in a memoir, he wrote: “[Lee] knew that I did not believe that success was possible; that care and time should be taken to give the troops the benefit of positions and the grounds; and he should have put an officer in charge who had more confidence in his plan.”

At the point of the spear would be a division led by the dashing Gen. George Pickett. When Pickett asked, “General, shall I advance?” the despondent Longstreet couldn’t speak. He could only nod his head.

At 3 p.m. the charge began. The men did not run. They marched, in a line roughly a mile long, almost as if performing a parade drill. At first, the Union soldiers held their fire.

Then the guns opened up — first the cannons, then the muskets. From Little Round Top came an enfilading fire. Perhaps in an earlier age such an advance could have succeeded, but the weapons of the Civil War were more accurate and devastating, and the rebels were shredded. Some units reached the crest of Cemetery Ridge and briefly pierced the Union line — the so-called High-Water Mark of the Confederacy — but the federals proved too strong. Of 13,000 men who charged that ridge, half were killed, wounded or captured. All of Pickett’s 15 regimental commanders were killed or wounded, as were all three of his brigadier generals. When Pickett returned to the Confederate line, Lee told him to organize his division.

“General Lee, I have no division now,” Pickett said. Later in life, he would say bitterly that his division had been destroyed by Lee.

“It was all my fault,” Lee said as his men stumbled back to the rebel line.

That night, he was heard to say, “Too bad! Too bad! Oh, too bad!”

And the skies opened, a torrential rain that washed the blood into the soil.

The aftermath

With a third of his army killed, wounded or captured, Lee ordered a retreat. The wagon train of exhausted soldiers and wounded men stretched for 17 miles while the Potomac swelled with the summer monsoon.

News of the Union victory thrilled Lincoln, who had spent days hovering in the telegraph office, following the bulletins. But the president was astonished when, days later, he realized that Meade had not yet gone on the attack against the weakened and fleeing enemy trapped by the high water of the Potomac.

After Lee managed to slip his army across the river to the safety of Virginia, Lincoln wrote a furious letter to Meade:

“I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war.” Lincoln decided not to send the letter.

Soon thereafter, Lee tried to resign in a letter to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

“I am becoming more and more incapable of exertion, and am thus prevented from making the personal examinations and giving the personal supervision to the operations in the field which I feel to be necessary,” Lee wrote. “I am so dull in making use of the eyes of others I am frequently misled.”

Davis, of course, refused to accept the resignation. The war ground on for nearly two years.

Could the battle have played out differently? What if Stuart had not gone astray, rendering Lee blind? What if Ewell had pushed forward to take Cemetery Hill on the first day? What if Longstreet had been quicker to attack on the second day? What if Lee had listened to Longstreet’s advice to find a more favorable place to fight? What if Meade had pursued Lee more aggressively after Gettysburg?

Such scenarios remain conjectural. And even many of the basic facts of Gettysburg remain subjects of debate and revisionism. A century and a half later it’s hard to say, with great confidence, exactly what happened, when, and why. This remains contested ground.

History isn’t the thing itself, but rather a story we tell, and the story changes, new elements are added, others forgotten, myths invented, causes imagined, facts debunked. History is a process of imposing order on a chaotic process, inventing causality and finding meaning in something that others might argue was senseless.

The consecration

The effort to consecrate this battlefield is a story unto itself, a shadow narrative. There are layers of memory here. Private citizens began trying to preserve portions of the battlefield as early as 1864.

Veterans of Union regiments showed up on anniversaries in later years to place monuments. The federal government decreed Gettysburg a national battlefield in 1895, under the War Department, which placed markers describing the actions of individual units. The language is factual, precise, with the occasional flourish.

Gradually, more Confederate monuments, markers and statues joined the mix. And veterans of both sides came for the big anniversaries. In 1938, about 1,800 veterans of the battle, most in their 90s, came to where they had fought 75 years earlier. Former enemies clasped hands and pledged allegiance to the same flag.

“In great deeds, something abides. On great fields something stays,” Chamberlain said in 1886 at the dedication of the monument to the 20th Maine. “Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate the ground for the vision-place of souls.”

The Gettysburg gift shop at the Visitor Center has hundreds of books for sale, dealing with the battle and the war generally, but up front, right where you walk in, is Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels,” the book that more than any other has shaped the way many people view Gettysburg.

The novel, published in 1974, won the Pulitzer Prize. Shaara’s masterpiece — which inspired Ken Burns to make his acclaimed Civil War documentary and then served as the basis for the movie “Gettysburg” — helped rehabilitate Longstreet’s reputation and made Chamberlain one of the superstars of the battle.

Shaara had the wisdom to understand that the quiet moments are as important as the violent ones, that much of warfare involves waiting — and not knowing what’s happening next or who exactly those soldiers are in the distance or how many columns of infantry may be coming up behind them.

Today you can walk the battlefield with your GPS-equipped smartphone, with an app that tells you exactly what happened in the place you’re standing.

The government has managed over the years to expand the boundaries of the park and restore much of it to the way it used to look. Gone is the Home Sweet Home motel, and the Stuckey’s restaurant and the privately owned observation tower. The Park Service is replanting orchards where they were during the battle. The goal is to make the battlefield like it was.

And yet a Civil War battlefield is always going to be fundamentally different in the modern era. Gettysburg today is breathtakingly serene. Plus there are informational signs and restrooms and parking lots and a museum and a gift shop.

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground,” the great man said that November, dedicating the national cemetery. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

Lincoln was onto something. There are moments in history that cannot be packaged in a container of words. The words fail us. All we can do is stand there, in awe. And think: This was the place. These were the rocks. This was the view. And the rest — the smoke and dust, the chaos and noise, the violence and the gore — we struggle mightily to imagine.

The Confederate soldier in the family tree

By Neely Tucker

The sun was blazing overhead, and the horses and the men were waiting in the woods. They could see the Union cannons across the open field near the peach orchard.

The men were staking out a Confederate line along Seminary Ridge. It was July 2, 1863, the second day at Gettysburg.

Among the Confederates was Company F of the 21st Mississippi Regiment, the Tallahatchie Rifles, and among them was an 18-year-old buck private named John Thomas Neeley. He was my great-great-great-uncle, whose last name I carry as my first, and to whom I am connected down the daisy chain of history.

Just before dark, John’s regiment charged out of Pitzer’s Woods and into American history and Southern folklore, taking the Confederacy to its highest point that day, which is to say the second highest point the Confederacy ever reached. Only Pickett’s Charge the next day would seize a further point into Union lines at Gettysburg, the fabled “high water mark” of the Confederacy.

These two afternoons would form a key part of the Lost Cause mythology that fueled white Southern culture for the next century — the idea that noble Confederate soldiers came within a few hundred yards of a victory against overwhelming odds.

It’s a key part of the Southern mind, and no iteration is more impressionistic and haunting than William Faulkner’s, writing 85 years after Pickett’s Charge:

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods,” he wrote in “Intruder in the Dust.” “[I]t’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory.”

I was born 119 years after John and just 71 miles due south — the family didn’t move around much — and for me, John Neeley (the family dropped the last “e” shortly after the war) was always just a bit of family lore — your ancestor who lost a leg at Gettysburg, he’s part of where your name comes from — might actually be so much bourbon-fueled hokum. I mean, more than 3.2 million men fought in the war, and this guy really was at one of the decisive moments of the decisive battle of the war?

So I tried to reconstruct his life. Census data, regimental documents, letters from contemporaries, books, the U.S. National Archives, antebellum tax records, cemetery plots, family papers, county paperwork. I walked the battlefield, retracing his steps as best I could.

I finally found a picture of him a few weeks ago on the wall of the Tallahatchie County chancery clerk’s office (he held that position after the war). It’s a formal portrait, taken late in life, and he’s wearing a button-up, collarless coat. His chest-length beard dominates the image, but there’s a stern look to the dark eyes, beneath the receding hairline and the gray hair. I found his eerily beautiful handwriting, all looping curls and straight lines, on a document he signed and dated Nov. 13, 1900.

After all this research, I still don’t know what to make of the man. He’s troubling, and that flat gaze has started to bother me.

You’ll see why.

On Aug. 15, 1862, John enlisted in a group of about 100 volunteers in Charleston, Miss., deep in the northwestern part of the state. Half of the county is in the Delta, which is usually known as “the most Southern place on Earth.” It was fitting he would join up — two of his brothers, including my direct ancestor, Allen Gattis Neeley, were already off fighting.

John was a 17-year-old orphan. On the regimental muster rolls, now on microfilm at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, his period of enlistment reads, “War.”

By December, the Tallahatchie Rifles had joined Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. John’s first engagement was at Fredericksburg, and his first taste of combat turned into a lopsided Confederate victory.

He must have thought war a glorious thing.

Born the eighth of 10 children, he was the latest in a line of Irish immigrants who had 1st landed in Philadelphia before the country was founded. His father, Cicero, came to Tallahatchie County in the 1830s, according to family papers. It was frontier territory, heavily forested, lightly populated, with most roads not much more than deer trails.

It was also a land of slave labor.

The University of Virginia’s 1860 Census analysis counts 495 white families in Tallahatchie County — among them 360 slaveholders. Blacks outnumbered whites nearly 2 to 1.

The Neeleys appear to have been small-timers who likely did not own slaves, and most certainly didn’t own any sort of plantation. Cicero lists himself as a “farmer” in the 1850 Census, but the tax rolls don’t count him as a land or slave owner (who had to pay 60 cents tax on each slave). In the 1844 and 1851 county tax rolls, he is listed as a land owner, but still without slaves, and his taxes were a trifle. It seems clear he was not a rich man.

He died late in 1851, at the age of 43. His widow, Nancy, died five years later. John was 12 when his mother died, and the family seems to have come apart.

In the 1860 Census, he is shown living with another family, identified as a “farm laborer.” His 13-year-old brother, Pallas, is shown living with yet another family. His big brother, Allen, at 24, is married with a child, listing himself as a farmer. It’s worth noting that he did not or could not make room for his younger siblings.

For young John, the war must have seemed a world of possibility.

The Army of Northern Virginia marched north in the early summer of 1863, crossing into Union territory. Lee was looking for the Army of the Potomac so he could destroy it. He finally stumbled across the Yankees at the road and rail depot of Gettysburg. Fighting broke out July 1. Tens of thousands of troops from each army poured into the area, taking up positions on opposing ridges that were about a mile apart. The Rebels were on the western ridge, the Yankees on the eastern.

On July 2, Brig. Gen. William Barksdale brought his Mississippi brigade to its assigned spot on the Confederate line about a mile south of town, in Pitzer’s Woods. There were a few thousand Confederates farther to their right, marking the extreme bottom edge of the battlefield.

Six hundred yards in front of Barksdale, across an open field, were Union guns, massed at their most forward point near a peach orchard.

At about 3:30, the Confederate artillery started bombarding Union positions, which drew Union retaliation. Plumes of smoke swayed in the heat. Neither side could see the other clearly.

The Confederate attack started at 4 p.m., with the far right side of the line charging toward a rocky hill called Little Round Top and a field of wheat. The rest were to follow in staggered succession, a rolling attack from the Confederate right to left. Barksdale’s Mississippi brigade would be among the last to go.

An hour passed, then two. Barksdale chafed as shells rained down on his men. “I wish you would let me go in, General,” he said to James Longstreet, the corps commander, as quoted in historian Shelby Foote’s classic account of the war. “I will take that battery in five minutes.”

“Wait a little,” Longstreet replied. “We are all going in presently.”

The battery Barksdale was referring to was almost certainly the cannons of the First Rhode Island Light Artillery, according to several histories, including “Gettysburg: The Second Day,” by historian Harry W. Pfanz. The unit had six Napoleon cannons, set over a space of about 150 yards along the Emmitsburg Road.

Around 5:30 p.m., one of those Rhode Island guns fired long. The shell — probably a basic round ball, about 12 pounds and 4.6 inches across — arced over its intended target, the Confederate artillery positions, and into Pitzer’s Woods. It detonated into the 21st Mississippi.

“The shell exploded in the ranks of my company, near me,” soldier J.B. Booth later wrote, as quoted in “The Key to the Entire Situation: The Peach Orchard, July 2, 1863,” a seminar paper by Eric A. Campbell, a historian and ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park.

“J.T. Worley was killed and Capt. H.H. Simmons, John H. Thompson and John T. Neely each lost a leg. . . . By the same shot there were other casualties.”

John’s left leg was blown apart below the knee, the hot shrapnel shattering the bones.

Minutes later, Barksdale finally led the Mississippi Brigade out of the woods at a run. The field was uneven and slightly uphill.

They overwhelmed Bucklyn’s Battery, they fought past infantry regiments from Pennsylvania. The 21st cleared a small rise, wiping out another Union line. They whipped down on the Trostle farmhouse, the fighting now hand to hand.

They got to a creek called Plum Run in a bushy swale, took it and made it further toward Cemetery Ridge.

Col. Benjamin Humphreys, leader of the 21st, was euphoric. “No other guns or a solitary soldier could be seen before us. The Fed Army was [cut] in twain,” he later wrote, as quoted by Campbell.

But Humphreys soon noticed Union troops cutting him off to the rear. Campbell writes that he retreated to the Trostle farmhouse and sat there in disbelief, amid the dead and dying men and horses, when, at dark, he was ordered all the way back to the Peach Orchard.

Barksdale was mortally wounded, and about half of his 1,400 men were dead or injured.

Somewhere behind them in the darkness, John wavered near death.

A brief word about Civil War medicine: No antiseptics, no sterile instruments, no hand washing.

Surgeons were proficient at amputations, because they did so many — more than 30,000 in the Union army alone.

They knocked you out with chloroform, cut through the skin and muscle with a scalpel and used a saw to hack through the bone. Then they pulled a loose flap of skin over and sewed it up, leaving a hole for pus and drainage. It took about 15 minutes. They tossed the dead limbs in a pile.

This is what happened to John Neeley.

They left him behind, too.

Day 3 of the battle was a war-changing disaster for the Confederates. Lee retreated in a driving downpour the night of July 3. They took most of their injured — the wagon train of the maimed was 17 miles long — but John and other critically wounded soldiers were left at the Lutheran Seminary, which had been converted into a field hospital. It was about a mile from where had fallen.

“Amputation of left leg,” reads a prisoners-of-war roll at Seminary Hospital, dated Aug. 10, 1863. His date of capture is July 4.

This is confirmed by his regimental history. “Wounded and capt. at Gettysburg, Pa.” reads the first Company Muster Roll after the battle, Sept. 1, 1863. “Wounded at Gettysburg Pa and left in hands of enemy,” reads another.

By that time, POW records show he was admitted to Camp Letterman General Hospital in Gettysburg. “Fracture of left Tibia — ampt. leg,” reads the notation. After he was shipped to another hospital, a note specifies his leg had been amputated at the “middle third.”

A final prisoner-of-war card noted he was sent to City Point, Va., on March 16, 1864, as part of a prisoner exchange.

The last war record shows him admitted to Yandell Hospital in Meridian, Miss., on April 2 or 4, 1865.

Lee surrendered a few days later. The war was over. John Neeley was 20 years old.

For a one-legged orphan with no prospects, it must be said he did okay.

He went home and married Margaret Brunson, a girl two years his junior. Their first child, James, was born 16 months after the war ended. The child died before he was 2.

John drove a hack for a while, then was elected as the county’s chancery clerk in 1868, and was elected to that post three more times over the coming decades. The 1876 county tax roll lists him as having three cows, two knives, a pistol and $500 worth of “merchandise/property,” which seems to be solidly middle class. Margaret gave birth to four children by the time of her death in 1882, but he soon remarried and fathered more children.

He co-founded and was co-editor of a tiny newspaper, the True Democrat, and by 1890 ran a small inn in Charleston, the county seat (a bit of county doggerel describes him as “A Rebel with but one leg/and another on a wooden peg”). For years, a relative wrote in a family history, he “led the Confederate Memorial Day parade.”

He died in Charleston, the same town in which he was born, on June 5, 1913. He was 68.

Sounds almost bucolic, doesn’t it? Young soldier returns to small town, settles in, builds a family. But Confederates like John Neeley did not come home filled with peace and mercy.

They were seething.

Reconstruction — the freeing of slaves, the granting of civil and human rights to them, the dismantling of slavery — was violently opposed across the South, but nowhere more so than in Mississippi. It took sharp political lines. The Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, was peopled by blacks and supportive (or opportunistic) whites. Democrats were the party of angry white men.

Humphreys, who led John’s Mississippi 21st, was elected governor. Federal officials removed him from office because of his resistance to Reconstruction. The state legislature’s “Black Codes,” passed six months after the war ended, kept blacks in near bondage. Black leaders were shot, beaten and lynched.

This culminated in the “Mississippi Plan,” an orchestrated reign of terror to intimidate freed blacks and their white cohorts. Democrats swept back into power in 1875. They put in place a brutal minority-rule system of oppression, based on sharecropping, that formed the segregated South of the next century.

Here’s how that white return to power was remembered in Charleston:

“In the glorious year of 1875 came redemption and relief . . . from confusion and misrule, these men of Tallahatchie recreated the county’s government, reestablished its affairs and built anew the county. . . . Through their toil, their sacrifice and endurance . . . we now enjoy the blessings of civilization.”

That’s from “A History of Tallahatchie County,” compiled by John’s daughter, Lillie, herself the chancery clerk for 16 years. I don’t think it’s hard to figure out where she might have gotten that historical viewpoint.

So, on this recent afternoon, I am walking through Pitzer’s Woods, over the ground where John fought and nearly died, and I can’t find it in my heart to think much of the man. That flat gaze, the stern look — it seems more chilling than somber, for he, like most of his peers, failed to accept the most basic outcome of the war: They lost. Slavery lost. Black people were peers, not property. John and his compatriots dug in and doomed their Delta-born descendants, both white and black, to decades upon decades of racial fear, loathing and violence.

Those personal failures, even in that little place, a million miles away from almost anywhere, would not be lost on the nation, in ways large and small.

Here’s one: 14-year-old Emmett Till was beaten, tortured and killed near Money, Miss., in 1955, for allegedly whistling at a white woman. His killers, two white men, were acquitted by an all-white jury in . . . Tallahatchie County, in one of the courthouses where John once conducted business.

Today, Tallahatchie County still hangs on the edge of the Delta, it’s still predominantly black, it’s still small and it still isn’t anyplace you get to going anywhere else. But like the rest of the region, it has morphed into the modern world.

Mississippi usually has the most black elected officials of any state in the nation, and that representation is based in and around the predominantly black Delta. Tallahatchie County went for Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, at 60 percent in the 2012 election.

That political and social reality is not a place John T. Neeley would recognize, and that is why, getting back in the car after a hike across the battlefield that defined him, I am glad to try to leave him and his stern gaze here, in the past, in a place of lost memories and lost causes.

The shifting strategy of preservation: How Civil War battlefields have changed

By Philip Kennicott

In 1988, Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas pleaded with his colleagues to pass legislation that would prevent a new shopping mall on land integral to the Second Battle of Manassas. He imagined a future in which ever more commercial development encroached on land preserved by the National Park Service, eating up the fragile buffer between the modern world and the carefully preserved 19th-century landscape that memorializes two bloody battles.

“I can see a big, granite monument inside the mall’s hallway right now: ‘General Lee stood on this spot,’ ” he the Democrat said.

The speech was a critical moment in what has been called “The Third Battle of Manassas,” an effort by preservationists, historians and Civil War enthusiasts to keep Manassas from becoming an isle of memory in a sea of big-box retail. In the end, Congress acted to save a large tract of private land — important to history but not part of the park — from the fate Bumpers imagined, and more than 500 acres were added to the park. But it was an all-too-rare victory in a war that, like the Civil War itself, is full of thousands of small and mostly forgotten battles, with only a few contentious enough to rise to public attention.

Despite 150 years of preservation efforts, with major victories in the 1890s that saved five of the most important battle sites, the dilemma challenge of Civil War heritage is that we are still connected by the same roads and rivers that connected Civil War America, and in many ways, we are still divided by the same cultural lines that helped precipitate the war. Interstate 95 is the fastest way to get from Washington to Richmond, Interstate 66 is the fastest way to get from Washington to the Shenandoah Valley, and both highways have spurred development along the same strategic corridors that witnessed so many bloody confrontations.

Culturally, we are still divided by basic disagreements about the meaning of the war, a division that often parallels, in uncanny ways, debates between private property rights and a federal interest in preservation. And even the look and layout of our Civil War battlefields track some of our most bitter political and cultural divisions. Study the way the war’s history is taught at almost any National Park Service site today and you see two different wars. One was fought between brothers, full of blood and heroism, with desperate charges, wily feints and daring flanking actions. The battlefield, with its landscape of fences, roads, barns and old stone houses, serves to clarify this war like an illustration in a book. The other was a war of politics and economics, ideas and cultural heritage, playing out on a more abstract, national landscape. The battlefield relates to this war as a mere locus for salient tales of slavery, identity and personal sacrifice.

To understand how we got to this point, there’s no better place to study than Gettysburg, the most famous and yet strangest of all our battlefields. Today, it seems almost surreal: a landscape of gently rolling fields cluttered with ornate marble interventions, as if some frugal farmer had decided to open an outdoor market for high-end funerary architecture. Perhaps more than any other battle site, Gettysburg preserves not just the field of battle but the history of how that field of battle has been memorialized. It is the quintessence of what John Hennessy, an author of the Park Service’s plan for the current sesquicentennial celebrations, calls a “museum of commemorative expression.”

In the beginning, however, there was just death, fields of human wreckage and an urgent need to put bodies under ground. Like the battlefield parks at Antietam, Shiloh and Vicksburg, preservation at Gettysburg began with the creation of a cemetery. Lincoln spoke at its opening, in November 1863, saying that it was “far above our poor power to add or detract” from how the dead had already consecrated the ground. And yet history paid no heed, and Gettysburg has seen 150 years of adding and detracting from the fields where so many thousands of men died.

The cemetery proved insufficient to carry the full burden of memory. Cemeteries were neat and orderly, geometric and rational, and as grass and trees took root, they became parklike and peaceful, an ideal city for the dead. They were necessary to do honor to the dead, but they were also discordant with how veterans of the battle remembered the bloody back-and-forth. As interest turned toward preserving more of the land where the fighting took place, a different aesthetic emerged. A battlefield, said one veteran, should not be “a park for health-seekers, for esthetics or pleasure-seekers, with fine drives and shady walks.” Those who most intimately possessed the trauma of battle were laying claim to intimate control over the landscape of death, which they argued shouldn’t be prettified and improved but preserved just as it was during the war.

Except for the monuments, which arrived piecemeal, honoring individuals, military units and the contributions of different states. The bulk of them were built in the late 1880s and ’90s, as the nation put the ideals and rancor of Reconstruction in the rearview mirror and embraced a grand reconciliation that reunited North and South, with African Americans mostly shut out of the American dream for another century of segregation and second-class citizenship. By 1922, there were more than 800 monuments, plaques and markers at Gettysburg, with glorious follies erected by Pennsylvania in 1910 and Virginia in 1917.

That might seem a wanton violation of the pervasive belief that battlefields should be preserved with immaculate fidelity to the original fields, groves, fences, stone walls and trenches. But as Timothy B. Smith writes in “The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation,” the monuments weren’t so much accretions to the landscape as stand-ins for the soldiers who fought there. “To the veterans, these monuments, tablets and artillery pieces represented the soldiers that had fought those battles, and thus were an inherent part of returning the battlefields to their war-time look and feel.”

The goal, made explicit in the congressional language that created the original Civil War military parks, was to mark the lines of battle, where the North faced the South, and where each individual military unit stood when the fight was engaged. This focus on the choreography of battle also explains why ugly observation towers — by 1896, there were several of them — also grew on the site. As the federal government expanded its interest from cemeteries to whole battlefields, the sites themselves were generally maintained by the Army as national military parks. The battlefields weren’t just sacred ground to veterans but living laboratories for the study of military history. Even Gettysburg was in use as a place for encampment and training well into the 20th century. Capt. Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded a camp there in 1918.

The emphasis on the lines of battle led to a philosophy of preservation that plagues Civil War sites to this day: the “Antietam plan,” which was proposed as a pragmatic way to balance the needs of preservation with the cost and complexity of managing large tracts of ground. As Civil War veterans grew older, they argued for more and more battlefield parks, and with more than 10,000 battles in the war, it became obvious that there would have to be limits on what was preserved. Battlefields such as Vicksburg and Chickamauga and Chattanooga were preserved on a grand scale. But others, especially Antietam, were initially preserved mainly along the lines of battle. So long as the landscape nearby was still rural and agricultural, Antietam still looked like Antietam even if the land all around was privately owned.

That became the governing philosophy of many other battlefield parks, including Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, which often feels like a ribbon of National Park Service road threading through a quiet, exurban neighborhood.

“That was a great assumption in 1894 or 1927,” Hennessy, who also serves as chief historian at Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania, says of the Antietam approach. “But it didn’t work out so well.”

The perils of a minimalist, laissez-faire preservation policy were already apparent at Gettysburg by the mid-1890s, when a plan to run a private rail line through the battlefield led to a Supreme Court decision that established the government’s right to acquire and condemn land in the interest of historic preservation. Again and again, including during the Third Battle of Manassas in the late 1980s, and the debate over a proposed Disney theme park in Haymarket, Va., in the 1990s, it has taken egregious threats to the landscape to spark popular outrage. Most of the time, say Park Service officials, the threats are small but cumulative, so they must remain vigilant and engaged with the local community.

Although the Antietam plan was popular and pervasive, the Park Service over the years has moved away from a focus on battle lines, which is clear if one studies the sesquicentennial observance plan. The document divides the past 150 years of history into four main periods: Commemoration (in the decades just after the war), Reconciliation (as veterans aged out of old animosities and stressed an apolitical, heroic vision of the war), Patriotism (in the middle of the past century, when the military parks passed into National Park Service control and became places for celebrating American values) and the Modern Era, which is where we are now.

“We did and continue to do a very good job talking about the military history,” says Robert Sutton, chief historian of the Park Service. “Where we didn’t do as good a job was in talking about the broader story of the Civil War era. Clearly, there was a reason why they were shooting each other. That was a major emphasis, to try to expand the interpretation, to talk about what caused the war, the aftermath of the war, the impact on families.”

At Gettysburg, the battle lines still stand, but the visitors center — which once sat on Cemetery Ridge, some of the most contested land of the entire three-day battle — was moved in 2008 to a more remote site. Power lines along one of the main historic roads have been buried underground, and a particularly noxious tourist trap, an observation tower, was removed in 2000. The 1962 Cyclorama building, designed by Richard Neutra, was also demolished in March after a protracted and rancorous debate about its architectural value. But moving the visitors center wasn’t just about returning the land to its 1863 look; it was an opportunity to stress a new, thematic, more socially contextual approach in presenting the battle.

When it comes to the battlefield itself, the emphasis today is on what is often called “a sense of place.” It is an amorphous term, but it seems to mean something like a landscape that is so detached from the ordinary hodgepodge of suburbia that it has an almost mystical power to inspire emotion and curiosity. But to create a “sense of place,” you need to make the modern world disappear for a bit, and that is almost impossible to do. On a sunny afternoon at Manassas not so long ago, you could stand in a thicket near the bloody ground of Henry Hill and almost believe that you were seeing what the soldiers saw there when the First Battle of Manassas was fought. And then a young man in brightly colored spandex and orange running shoes came jogging by, an intruder from the present.

Despite the fear of Civil War veterans that hallowed ground might become simply another pleasure park, many sites are exactly that: refreshing landscapes with an optional history lesson. The danger, as some critics of the Park Service have suggested, is that the fantasy 19th-century landscape becomes the main attraction and history takes a back seat.

The custodians of our battlefields might well take advice from people who run more-traditional museums, where the challenge is to engage visitors with the history of objects. The best museums assume that visitors want to see details, understand interrelations and dig into history. The objects are the focus of the experience and, to use Civil War terms, the best museum experience is as much about tactics as strategy.

Despite admirable efforts to connect Civil War battlefields to the larger history of the Civil War, the one thing that battlefields can teach very well is the history of what happened there in a particular place. If the goal is simply to inspire thoughts about the larger social history of the Civil War, one battlefield is pretty much the same as the next — and it becomes difficult to explain why we need to preserve so many of them, and with so much land taken off the tax rolls. If the goal is to make people passionate about battlefields and their preservation, then visitors need to engage with the actual place to understand its strategic importance and the tactical back-and-forth.

As the nation continues to mature, as it continues to digest the larger context of the Civil War, it seems likely that there is yet another era to come in the way we relate to Civil War these sites. The old veterans, long gone but having left an indelible mark on the landscape, will be heard again as Civil War cultural stewardship incorporates the best of all that has gone before, including the passion to know exactly where men were standing, how they moved, why they fought and where they died.

For Stonewall Jackson, a final victory that led to Confederate catastrophe

By Michael E. Ruane

At 5:15 p.m. on May 2, 1863, a doomed Confederate officer with striking blue eyes sat on his horse holding his pocket watch in the Virginia wilderness west of Fredericksburg.

He wore a black rubber raincoat and gauntlets, and carried a book of Napoleon’s maxims in his haversack, as he waited for the last of his 21,000 soldiers to spread through the woods in an attack formation over a mile wide.

There were only a few hours of daylight left, and his men had been marching all day. But the officer had carefully maneuvered his regiments into position to launch one of the greatest assaults of the Civil War.

As the minutes ticked by, he asked a subordinate: “Are you ready?” Yes, came the reply.

“You can go forward, then.”

Here, two miles from a crossroads mansion called Chancellorsville, which would give this battle its name, Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and the Confederate States of America stood at the pinnacle of triumph.

Jackson’s forces would shortly sweep through woods, routing surprised Union soldiers at their dinner fires and culminating in a resounding victory that seemed to bring the South within reach of independence.

“My God,” President Abraham Lincoln would say, upon learning of the Chancellorsville calamity. “What will the country say?”

The battle would elevate the already-famous Jackson to mythical status and place him among the ranks of history’s best military leaders.

His death eight days later would cripple the Confederacy, and like Abraham Lincoln’s, would provide one of the most wrenching scenes of the Civil War.

And his funeral would become the largest public gathering in the South during the conflict. “With impious hearts we inveighed against the will of God in the destruction of our idol,” Richmond memoirist Sally Putnam wrote.

Orphaned as a child, Jackson had grown to become like a zealous Old Testament warrior, biographers have said, leading an army of Christian soldiers in defense not necessarily of slavery, but of piety.

He is the biblical Joshua slaying the Amalekites in the Book of Exodus.

But catastrophe awaited Jackson — and the Confederacy — in the dense woods up ahead that night. As the attack went forward, and the Union soldiers fled from the screaming rebels, the moon rose over the forest.

Jackson and an entourage rode out between the lines to reconnoiter. Picking his way back in the darkness, he surprised a jittery Southern infantry regiment that mistook the group for enemy horsemen.

In what is perhaps the best-known friendly-fire episode in American history, the rebel soldiers unleashed a volley at their famous commander, wounding him grievously in the left arm.

In a harrowing scene, Jackson was caught on a plunging horse in no-man’s land as the Confederate and Union soldiers, now both alarmed, fired on each other with muskets and cannon. He was helped to safety, but only after stretcher bearers dropped him.

His left arm was amputated at the shoulder and he was taken to a rear area, where he briefly rallied.

But eight days later, after his stricken wife sang him hymns and brought him his newborn daughter for a last visit, he died of pneumonia, murmuring battlefield orders in his delirium.

Although it was not evident at the time, some historians believe Jackson’s death began the ruin of the Confederacy. The Southern disaster at Gettysburg two months later only confirmed the start of the eclipse.

“The road to Appomattox [where the war ended] began on [that] Saturday night” at Chancellorsville, James I. Robertson Jr., Jackson’s best biographer, has said. “With his death, the southern confederacy began to die as well.”

“It was just a tragedy for the South,” Robertson said in an interview, “the greatest personal loss that the South suffered in that war . . . a horrible blow.”

Civil War scholar Robert K. Krick said: “It’s hard to imagine the war going the way it did with Jackson present.”

And in death, Jackson became the South’s great martyr, like Lincoln later in the North. His body lay in state in Richmond in a casket with a window, and then wound its way through tens of thousands of mourners across Virginia to his adopted home, in Lexington, Va.

To this day, signs on Interstate 95 identify the little house where he died as his “shrine.” There are also schools that bear his name, as well as a hotel, a hospital, a decommissioned submarine, numerous thoroughfares, a lake and several towns across the country. The Virginia Senate recognizes him every year on his birthday.

But all that lay ahead on May 2, 1863.

That evening, bugles sounded down the line as the Confederate host began its advance through the woods, preceded by frightened deer, rabbits and other wildlife.

Jackson rode behind, caught up in the stampede and the excitement, urging his men forward to cut off the Union army. He wanted more than victory. He wanted its destruction.

“Press on!” he cried. “Press on!”

Five months earlier, on a cold, quiet night, Jackson had led his weary and hungry staff toward a grand brick mansion perched on a plateau near the Rappahannock River in Caroline County, Va.

The woman of the house recalled years later that the general had an earache.

The place was called Moss Neck Manor and was the country home of Richard Corbin, the scion of an aristocratic Virginia family. He was fighting in a Confederate cavalry regiment and would be killed in battle nine months later.

It was Dec. 16, and Jackson and his command were fresh from the slaughter at Fredericksburg, a brutal battle that had ended three days before with the Confederates’ thorough defeat of the Union army, about 11 miles upriver.

Jackson had taken his corps downriver to check a report of an enemy crossing, but found it to be a false alarm. Night had fallen and now he and his men had been caught in the open with no food and no place to camp.

Jackson had resisted taking refuge in the house, preferring to stay with his men. But he relented finally in the cold, saying, “Let’s go to the Moss Neck house.”

The stately home — which still stands — was elegant, low-slung and comfortable, and it was part of the Corbins’ 1,600-acre plantation, from which most of the slaves had fled.

At the time, the house was occupied by, among others, the absent owner’s wife, Roberta, their only child, a 5-year-old daughter named Jane, and Roberta’s charming sister-in-law, Kate Corbin.

Here, in the plantation business office, Jackson would spend the winter, resting, refitting and reflecting, perhaps, on the tumult of the past 19 months.

They were intoxicating times, in which he had risen from an eccentric professor at the Virginia Military Institute to the war’s most celebrated general.

He had earned the nickname “Stonewall” for the steadiness of his men at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. He had run several Union armies ragged in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862.

In August that year, he had outfoxed another Union army at the Second Battle of Bull Run. He had bagged Harpers Ferry and withstood withering Union attacks at the Battle of Antietam in September. And he helped with the rebel victory at Fredericksburg in December.

At Chancellorsville, he had proposed to his commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee, that they split their outnumbered army. While Lee held the Yankees’ attention, Jackson would march his men quietly across the Union Army’s front, and then pounce on its right flank.

It was an audacious gamble, but Lee agreed and the plan worked. The Union army, under Gen. Joseph Hooker, was unhinged and then pummeled until it fled back across the Rappahannock River three days later.

It was one of the greatest coups of the war.

Handsome and clean-shaven as a young man, Jackson appears in an 1863 photograph as a bearded patriarch with a receding hairline. The soldiers called him “Old Jack,” though he was only 38.

A native of Clarksburg, in what is today West Virginia — about 35 miles southwest of Morgantown — he was a West Point graduate and a veteran of the Mexican War. He spoke Spanish and had traveled in Europe.

But death had already claimed his first wife and two infant children, and it informed his already deep religious faith. He saw the hand of God at work everywhere, especially on the battlefield, and sought to obey, and execute, his will in all things.

He was, however, extremely secretive, sharing his plans with few subordinates, and he became known for feuding bitterly with fellow officers when his instructions were not obeyed to the letter.

His confidants were seldom his top lieutenants. Instead, he gathered around him an unusual military “family.”

They included an extraordinary mapmaker, a top aide who was the son of an Episcopal minister, a former divinity student, his physician, a favorite clergyman, and his leased slave.

Most settled around Moss Neck for the winter, when the fighting ceased.

Jackson slept in the plantation business office with the Rev. Beverly Tucker Lacy, an old friend who became his chief chaplain and would be with the general in his final hours.

Jackson’s top aide, Maj. Alexander Swift “Sandie” Pendleton, 22, bunked in with the physician, Hunter Holmes McGuire, 27.

They slept in a tent and read Dickens and Shakespeare, and over time Pendleton became enamored of Kate Corbin.

For his part, Jackson, who adored children, became entranced by 5-year-old Jane Corbin.

She was “a sweet child . . . [with] a happy face and fair, flaxen curls,” Jackson subordinate Capt. James Power Smith, the former divinity student, recalled. “She was . . . as happy and sunny a child as I ever saw. . . . She was the general’s delight.”

Her mother, “Bertie,” remembered many years later how Jackson would summon the girl to his office and she would play for hours, cutting out paper dolls.

Jane admired a new hat the general had been given, and he cut off the gilt braid decoration and gave it to her, Roberta recalled.

The child wore it like a crown, and her mother kept it as a memorial “with precious associations” for years.

The season came and went “like a dream,” Kate Corbin wrote a friend. There were dinners, music and good company. And she and Sandie Pendleton eventually became engaged.

He had a “splendid, almost boyish, exuberance of spirits,” she wrote a friend, according to his biographer, W.G. Bean, and “is a sincere, professing Christian.”

A year later the war would claim him, too.

The advent of spring brought the coming of battle season.

In March, Jackson moved his headquarters from Moss Neck to be closer to his commander, Gen. Lee. He came to say goodbye to little Jane Corbin, who had been sick with scarlet fever.

Shortly after he left, the child suddenly died. Pendleton was still there.

“Never have I witnessed such a scene,” he wrote a sister. “It was truly appalling to witness the heartbroken anguish.” The child’s mother “seized me and began afresh her wild lamentations. . . . Death on the battlefield is not half so fearful as this.”

Fifty years later, as an old woman, the mother wrote of her daughter’s death as a portent for Jackson’s: “She seemed but the avant courier of the brilliant star so soon to set.”

On the rainy evening of Monday, May 4, a two-horse ambulance, escorted by cavalry, pulled up to a whitewashed cottage at Guinea Station, the railhead of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad.

Jackson and another wounded officer lay on mattresses inside the wagon, according to biographer Robertson’s account. McGuire sat beside the wagon driver. Jedediah Hotchkiss, the mapmaker, led the way. And Smith and Rev. Lacy rode inside with the general.

The cottage was the business office of Fairfield, a 1,200-acre plantation about 30 miles southeast of Chancellorsville, where Jackson hoped to spend a day or two before moving on to his home in Lexington.

He was carried inside on a litter and placed on a double bed in a first-floor room with a fireplace and a clock on the mantelpiece.

Jackson was tired but seemed to be doing better. He had told Lacy before they left that he was perfectly content with his amputation and believed God had ordained it for his own good.

During the trip he had chatted, and he had some bread and tea once he arrived. The next day he continued to do well. He slept but had no appetite.

Early Thursday, Lacy and Jackson’s servant, Jim Lewis, were awakened by Jackson’s groans. The general was nauseated and feverish and had a severe pain in his left side.

Lacy and Lewis wanted to summon the exhausted McGuire, who was sleeping in the next room. But Jackson wouldn’t let them. He called for a wet towel to be placed on his side. It did no good, and finally, around dawn he allowed McGuire to be awakened.

The doctor examined Jackson and realized that he had pneumonia.

There was little McGuire could do. Treatments for pneumonia in those days were primitive and largely futile. McGuire applied mustard plasters. He administered opiates, and by some accounts mercury and antimony. He even tried the ancient technique of cupping.

The disease rapidly ran its course. Jackson slipped in and out of delirium. His wife, Anna, was summoned and arrived with their infant daughter, Julia, later Thursday. He grew worse Friday and Saturday.

Lacy prayed with him. His wife sang him some hymns. His daughter was brought for him to see one last time.

That Sunday, May 10, Lacy held a service for him at army headquarters that was attended by 1,800 soldiers. Pendleton came to visit him and said the entire Confederate army was praying for him.

“Thank God, they are very kind,” Jackson said, adding “it is the Lord’s day. . . . I have always wanted to die on a Sunday.” Pendleton, who would later say he’d have given his life for Jackson, left the cottage and broke down on the porch.

By noon a silent crowd had gathered outside. Inside, Jackson was slipping away. “His mind began to fail and wander,” McGuire remembered. He began to shout orders as if in the heat of battle: “Pass the infantry to front rapidly!”

Then he quieted down, and as he died, said, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Cast of Characters

By Michael E. Ruane

Jedediah Hotchkiss

The Northern-born mapmaker became the most celebrated cartographer in the Confederacy. Attached to Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s staff, he drew exquisite and detailed maps that are credited with helping Jackson’s superb sense of what today is called “situational awareness.” Often referred to as “Major,” and “Captain,” Hotchkiss was never granted permanent army rank or commission. He kept a detailed journal and after the war was invaluable to Jackson’s biographers.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker

He was the Union general who commanded the Army of the Potomac during its spectacular defeat by the Confederates under Gen. Robert E. Lee at the 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville. He had been a veteran and competent leader but became known for his ego, backbiting and conniving against fellow officers. Rebuilding the Army prior to the battle, he boasted: “May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.”

Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble

The famous British actress had married a Georgia planter, Pierce Butler, and in the 1830s briefly lived on his plantations, where she was repulsed by what she saw. “Assuredly I am going prejudiced against slavery,” she wrote in her diary, “for I am an Englishwoman, in whom the absence of such a prejudice would be disgraceful.” In 1863, long after she and her husband divorced, she created a sensation when she published the disturbing diary, perhaps fearing that Britain might recognize the Confederacy.

Gen. George E. Pickett

A leading Confederate general, he will be forever associated with the disastrous climax of the Battle of Gettysburg — “Pickett’s Charge.” Known for his long, perfumed hair and exquisite uniforms, he was in command of much of the rebel force that was shattered on the battle’s last day. His career declined afterward. In 1864, he executed 22 Union prisoners as deserters from the rebel army. In 1865, his command was routed at the Battle of Five Forks while he was away at a shad bake. He died of scarlet fever in 1875, still brooding over the slaughter of his men at Gettysburg.

Clement L. Vallandigham

A former U.S. congressman from Ohio, he was the North’s fiery, pro-Southern, antiwar Democrat, or “Copperhead.” An antagonist of Abraham Lincoln, he was arrested May 5, 1863, for “publicly expressing . . . his sympathies with those in arms against the government.” Convicted, he was banished to the Confederacy. He returned to his law practice after the war and accidentally shot himself to death during a courtroom demonstration with a gun he thought was unloaded.

Gen. Alfred Pleasonton

The undistinguished Union cavalry officer was in command of the 11,000 Union horsemen who surprised Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart’s 9,500 troops at Brandy Station Va., on June 9, 1863. The biggest cavalry battle of the Civil War, it was a bloody, day-long draw, fought with pistols and sabres. But it embarrassed Stuart and instilled new confidence in the Yankee cavalry. Pleasonton was born in Washington and is buried in Congressional Cemetery.

Jennie Wade

Age 20, she was the only civilian killed at the Battle of Gettysburg, the Civil War’s biggest battle. A seamstress, she had gone to her sister’s home on Baltimore Street to bake bread for Union soldiers when a slug came through the door and hit her in the back.

William Harvey Carney

A Union sergeant in Company C, 54th Massachusetts infantry, Carney, with his famous African American regiment, assaulted the Confederate fortress at Battery Wagner, S.C., on July 18, 1863. The attack, depicted in the movie “Glory,” was a failure, but Carney planted the American flag on the parapet before being driven back, taking the flag with him. “Boys,” he is said to have remarked, “I only did my duty. The old flag never touched the ground.” Carney was given the Medal of Honor for his actions — 37 years after the battle, in 1900.

Gen. George G. Meade

The last-minute commander of the Union’s Army of the Potomac in 1863, he directed its momentous victory over Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederates at the Battle of Gettysburg that July. Nine months later Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was placed in command of all Union armies, and based himself with the Army of the Potomac. Though now subordinate, Meade was gracious and effective in carrying out Grant’s orders and will always be remembered as the hero of Gettysburg.

Capt. M.M. Miller

The white Union officer commanded Company I, Ninth Louisiana Regiment (African Descent), at the Battle of Milliken’s Bend, La., June 7, 1863, one of the first fights involving black Union troops. It was a desperate, hand-to-hand encounter. Outnumbered Northern forces were saved by Union gunboats, which drove off the rebels. “I never saw a braver company of men in my life,” Miller wrote of his soldiers. “They fought and died defending the cause that we revere.” He never again wanted to hear people say that black troops wouldn’t fight: “I can show you the wounds that cover the bodies of 16 as brave, loyal, and patriotic soldiers as ever drew beadcq on a rebel.”

Women soldiers fought, bled and died in the Civil War, then were forgotten

By Brigid Schulte

Under a deadly barrage of artillery fire, wave after wave of Union troops hurled themselves across an open field outside Fredericksburg on a bitterly cold mid-December day and charged up a steep hill in a futile attempt to dislodge Confederates dug in atop Marye’s Heights.

By nightfall, nearly 13,000 Union troops lay dead or wounded — double the number of fallen Confederates — and a “young and good-looking” corporal from New Jersey whom a comrade described as “a real soldierly, thoroughly military fellow” was promoted to sergeant for bravery.

One month later, the sergeant, a veteran of the Seven Days Battle and Antietam, gave birth to a baby boy.

“What use have we for women, if soldiers in the army can give birth to children?” an astonished Col. Elijah H.C. Cavins, of the 14th Indiana, wrote to his wife.

The New Jersey sergeant, whose name and fate have been lost to history, was not the only woman disguised as a man fighting at Fredericksburg that day. Sarah Emma Edmonds, using the alias Pvt. Franklin Thompson, spent 12 hours on her horse, often under enemy fire, delivering dispatches as the orderly to Union Gen. Orlando M. Poe.

A teenage Lizzie Compton, whom fellow soldiers knew as Jack or Johnny, was discovered to be a woman only after the battle when military doctors peeled her blue uniform away to treat a shrapnel wound to her side. Discharged — it was illegal to serve in the military as a woman — Compton would go on to reenlist in and be discovered by six more regiments and serve in the Union army a total of 18 months.

Just this past In January, the Pentagon agreed to allow women to serve in combat positions. But what was ignored in that controversial debate was the long-forgotten history of hundreds of American women who had already fought bravely in the nation’s wars, won battlefield citations for valor and died on the front lines.

Their ranks include Deborah Sampson, who served for 17 months in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War as Robert Shurtliff, and Lucy Brewer, who served with the Marines aboard Old Ironsides as George Baker during the War of 1812. And historians have found that an estimated 400 to 1,000 women, perhaps more, disguised themselves as men and took up arms in the Civil War.

“We just lifted the ban on women in combat as if it were a new phenomenon. It’s not,” said Elizabeth Leonard, a historian at Colby College in Maine who has studied women soldiers of the Civil War. “It’s that we let these stories disappear.”

DeAnne Blanton, a military historian at the National Archives, and Lauren Cook Wike have spent more than a decade meticulously combing diaries, letters, burial records, military reports and newspapers documenting the service of women soldiers.

In their book, “They Fought Like Demons,” they found solid evidence that at least 250 women dressed as men and fought for both the North and the South in virtually every major battle of the bloody Civil War.

At least eight women combatants fought at Antietam. Catherine Davidson’s right arm was amputated. Mary Galloway was shot in the neck. A woman fighting for the Confederates died in the Cornfield. Five women fought at Gettysburg. One Confederate woman was shot in the leg, and two were cut down in Pickett’s Charge.

Women soldiers fought in the First Battle of Bull Run. “There were a great many fanatic women in the Yankee army,” a Georgia Confederate wrote home, “some of whom were killed.” In fighting near Dallas in May 1864, several Confederate women soldiers were killed in an assault on Union lines. “They fought like demons,” Sgt. Robert Ardry of the 11th Illinois Infantry wrote to his father, “and we cut them down like dogs.”

Confederate Loreta Janeta Velazquez, disguised as Lt. Harry T. Buford, fought along with five other women soldiers in the Battle of Shiloh. Maria Lewis, an African American passing as a white male soldier, served in the 8th New York Cavalry and “skirmished and fought like the rest,” a fellow soldier wrote. Four Confederate women were promoted to the rank of captain. At least one was a major.

“We know that because these women were hiding the fact that they were women, they were fully expected to do everything that any other soldier in the company was expected to do,” Blanton said.

“They didn’t get a pass because of their gender. They were hiding their gender.”

It was easy enough for women to infiltrate the Union and Confederate ranks. Although Army regulations required all recruits to have a physical, the examinations became cursory as each side became desperate for fresh troops. “Often, they’d just have recruits walk by,” Blanton said. “And if they weren’t lame or blind and if their trigger finger worked, they were in.”

(The Army became serious about entrance physicals in 1872, Blanton said: “The Civil War was really the last time women could sneak into the Army and pass herself off as a man.”)

Because so many soldiers were teenage boys who had yet to shave, a woman’s beardless face went unnoticed.

The ill-fitting uniforms hid their shape, most soldiers rarely bathed and everyone slept in their clothes.

When armies were camped out in the field, it would have been easy enough for these women to slip away into the woods to take care of bodily functions, Blanton surmised, and months of marching, poor nutrition and the stress of combat most likely interrupted many menstrual cycles.

Sometimes, just the fact that the women wore pants and acted in a way wholly unexpected in the prim, Victorian era of hoop skirts and fainting couches gave them cover. “I readily recall many things which ought to have betrayed her,” Gen. Poe, Sarah Edmonds’s commanding officer, later confessed, “except that no one thought of finding a woman in soldier’s dress.”

Women were found out only if they were wounded, got sick, were taken prisoner or, as with the New Jersey sergeant and five other soldiers, gave birth.

Their service became an open secret. Fellow soldiers wrote home about them and chronicled their exploits, if not their names, in their diaries. Stories romanticizing their adventurous spirits and extolling their patriotism appeared in the New York Times, the Richmond Examiner and the Chicago Daily Tribune. Edmonds and Velazquez penned popular memoirs.

“No editor can turn over a morning’s ‘exchange papers’ without encountering authentic anecdotes of some fair and fast Polly or Lucy who, led by the spirit of patriotism, love, or fun, has donned the blue breeches and follows the drum,” wrote the United States Service magazine.

Even Abraham Lincoln knew of the women in uniform. Mary Ellen Wise, who took a Minie ball in the shoulder in the Battle of Lookout Mountain, came to Washington to ask for her back pay.

When the paymaster refused, Lincoln “blazed with anger” and ordered the injustice rectified, the Washington Daily Morning Chronicle reported in its story, “Brave Soldier Girl” on Sept. 30, 1874.

But over time, the stories of these outed women soldiers were forgotten. And once the war was over, hundreds more who’d made it through undetected, learning to spit, smoke, chew tobacco, swear, play cards and swagger like a man, slipped out of their uniforms and into obscurity.

“If a woman soldier died on the battlefield and was buried, unless someone opened her shirt to rifle through her pockets for valuables and discovered she was female, then she just went into the ground,” Blanton said. “And the women who survived and went back home never wrote or talked about what they did.”

Leaving no diaries behind to tell their own stories, the women soldiers were erased by others. For nearly 50 years, the Adjutant General’s Office denied women soldiers existed at all. And Confederate Gen. Jubal Early, who, as head of the Southern Historical Society, carefully crafted the noble Lost Cause narrative of the war, dismissed Velazquez as a hoax and other women soldiers as prostitutes.

Soon, historians, if they took any notice at all, dismissed women soldiers as “crazy, whores, or homosexuals,” Blanton wrote.

For more than a century, only the family of Pvt. Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers, knew that the body buried in Chalmette National Cemetery near New Orleans was really that of a woman, Rosetta Wakeman.

She’d died of dysentery, as many soldiers did, after a long, hot march from Alexandria to Louisiana.

Wakeman, who grew up on a farm, was already working as a man on the canal boats before she enlisted. She was like many of the women soldiers Blanton has found — working-class city girls who toiled in factories or as seamstresses in the North for about $4 a month or semi-literate farm girls from both North and South.

“If you were being paid starvation wages as a woman, $13 a month, which was the Union army pay for a private, sounded pretty good,” Blanton said.

Beyond economic opportunity, Banton said women soldiers enlisted in the army for the same reasons men did — patriotism, adventure, love. Some women followed husbands or sweethearts into battle. Others were like Kentucky Confederate Mary Ann Clark, whose husband abandoned her and their two children, then took up with a new wife, left her kids with her mother and became Henry Clark to escape her sorrows.

Charlotte Hope, a.k.a. Charlie Hopper, of Fairfax, joined the 1st Virginia Cavalry to avenge the death of her fiance, vowing to kill 21 Yankees for every year that he’d lived. She was later killed in a raid.

Orphan Frances Hook was about 17 when she took the name Frank Miller and enlisted in the Union Army with her brother; she did so because she didn’t want to she wouldn’t be left alone. When her brother was killed at Shiloh, she continued to fight, ultimately getting captured on a scouting mission in Alabama.

Some women wanted the freedom that came from living as a man. Lizzie Cook admitted to the Missouri Democrat that her “strong impulse to shoulder a musket” came from a desire to escape the “monotony of a woman’s life.”

“The fact that women were willing to risk injury, illness, maiming and even death to escape the kind of lives that were available to them at the time tells you something about just how limited their choices were,” said Leonard of Colby College.

“I’m as independent as a hog on ice,” Rosetta Wakeman wrote gleefully to her family. “I will dress as I am a mind to for all anyone else [cares], and if they don’t let me Alone they will be sorry for it.”

Wakeman’s letters, which were not published until 1994, are the only known collection of letters by a Civil War woman soldier. They weren’t unearthed until Lauren Cook Wike’s dust-up with the National Park Service. She’d dressed as “Larry” for a reenactment of the battle of Antietam in 1989, blew her own cover by using the women’s restroom and was kicked out of the park. “The superintendent of the park said I would have to have a sex change in order to portray a soldier there,” Wike said. “So I took them to court.”

She won. In the ensuing publicity about her case, Wakeman’s descendants contacted Wike and asked if she’d like to see the letters that they’d found in an attic trunk.

Although Wakeman never got the chance to carry out her plan to live and dress as a man after the war, an Irish immigrant named Jennie Hodgers did.

Hodgers, barely 5 feet 3 inches tall, had been living as a man before the war to get a fairer factory wage. She spent three years in the 95th Illinois Infantry as Pvt. Albert D.J. Cashier and lived as a man for the next 45 years until she was hit by a car and the doctors treating her discovered her sex.

She was later committed to an insane asylum and forced to wear a dress, which she pinned to make into pants.

When the Pension Bureau threatened to strip her of her pension, her army comrades rallied to her defense.

One relayed how Hodgers had climbed a tall tree under sniper fire to attach the Union flag after it had been shot down. Another wrote that she’d been captured on a reconnaissance mission outside Vicksburg and escaped by grabbing her guard’s gun, knocking him down and outrunning her captors.

When Hodgers died in 1915, her fellow soldiers made sure she was buried with full military honors.

The women who fought in the Civil War, like Hodgers, like Wakeman and the others, didn’t change the course of events, Leonard said. That, some military historians have griped to her, means they weren’t militarily important, but merely a freakish novelty.

But that’s not the point, she said.

“We need to keep telling these stories,” Leonard said. “We need to keep fighting the historical stereotypes about women that actually don’t fit the reality of their lives. Otherwise, American history will be told as a thin narrative, when in fact it’s so rich and complex and full of surprises like this.”

Against all odds and every social convention of the time, women soldiers were in the ranks during the Civil War.

They fought. They bled. They died. We should know that, Leonard said. And, unlike in the past, remember.

Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.

The draft begins, sparking deadly riots

By Linda Wheeler

July 13, 1863, dawned a miserable hot, muggy morning in New York. Inside a four-story building at 677 Third Ave., military officers were moving ahead with the nation’s first draft, authorized by Congress and ordered by the Lincoln administration to fill the depleted ranks on the battlefields. It was the second day of pulling names at random from a hand-cranked drum, and it would lead to the deadliest riots the country has ever seen. In the often glamorized accounts of Civil War lore, this unsavory episode goes mostly unmentioned.

The officers had a quota to fill of 1,500 men who didn’t want to go to war. There weren’t enough volunteers for the Army to fill the holes left by the thousands killed and the hundreds deserting.

Only the rich could escape, by paying $300.

Aside from this blatant exception, great care was taken to make the process look fair. The names were gathered by assistant provost marshals who had visited homes and factories during the past month looking for eligible white men between the ages of 20 and 45. It was a tough job. Some marshals had been attacked, and almost all had been lied to.

Now those names, written on slips of paper, rolled tightly and secured with rubber bands, were being drawn by a blindfolded clerk from what the New York Herald called the “wheel of misfortune.”

Outside, the crowd began to build into the thousands, filling Third Avenue and spreading into the side streets. There were men who had taken a day off work to protest the draft as well as others who didn’t like the idea of the federal intervention into their lives. But there was another element, mostly Irish, who constituted 25 percent of the city’s population, who took advantage of the draft issue to have a protest. Few had a stake in the draft controversy; the marshals had little success in finding candidates in the tough Five Points neighborhood. The men did, however, have serious gripes about finding jobs and feeling they had to compete with African Americans, who would work for less. The men, as well as women and children who followed along, came armed with paving stones, bricks and iron pipes.

“A ragged, coatless, heterogeneously weaponed army” was how journalist Joel Tyler Headley described them.

Up front, facing off against a thin line of police officers, who stood with their backs against the door, wooden clubs at the ready, were the firefighters of the Black Joke company, one of the city’s many volunteer companies. These linebacker-size men loved to brawl as much as put out a fire. Their chief’s name had been drawn on the first day of the lottery, and they had come to save him from the Army by destroying the draft machinery and records.

When someone fired a pistol into the air at 10:30 a.m., the mob behind the firefighters starting throwing stones and other missiles through the windows. Then the Black Jokers shoved their way forward, pushing past police and roaring through the doors and into the offices. The mob piled in behind them.

The provost marshal had just enough time to shove the enrollment log into an iron safe, lock it and then run for the back door along with the other draft administrators. The police, hugely outnumbered, followed quickly.

Within minutes, the lottery drum, tables and chairs were smashed. When the safe couldn’t be opened, turpentine was poured over it and the room was set ablaze. Soon flames and black billowing smoke could be seen blocks away. The families living on the floors above barely got out alive.

Police Superintendent John Kennedy came along about then. The mob had cut the telegraph lines during the morning, but rumors had reached him and he had come in person to check on things. He was out of uniform and was carrying only a walking stick. He quietly slipped by the mob that was staring at the flames. Since he was not a federal officer and had no interest in enforcing the draft, he expected no trouble. Then someone yelled his name.

“The instant he was recognized he was assailed with shouts and execrations, knocked down and terribly beaten,” special police officer William Osborn Stoddard would later write. “He was a strong man, of iron courage, and he struggled desperately for his life. Knocked down again and again and mercilessly beaten, he as often regained his feet and fled, pursued by his savage assailants.”

The wrath of the mob was now focused on this one man. Caked with mud and blood, he was barely recognizable. As the mob caught him again, he saw a man he knew running up to the scene. Kennedy called out, “John Egan, save my life!”

Kennedy was rescued but was so badly beaten that his own officers didn’t recognize him when he was taken by wagon back to headquarters. He survived.

The attack on Kennedy went beyond what the draft protesters had in mind. They backed away from the mob. The draft protest had turned into something else — a revolt against authority and, eventually, a race riot.

At this juncture, the Invalid Corps, 50 men who were recuperating from battlefield injuries, were belatedly arriving at the draft office, having been recruited only that morning to help the police. Lt. Abel Reade, the troop commander, was limping because his foot was maimed at Fredericksburg.

Facing the mob, Reade ordered the people to disperse and was met with a storm of stones and bricks, which knocked some of his men down. The soldiers shot back with blanks and then ball, deterring the crowd only briefly before it rushed the soldiers, clubbing and stabbing them and taking their muskets. The troops fled. Two didn’t make it. One soldier was knocked down and kicked to death. Another scrambled up a rock pile, only to be followed by men who stripped him of his uniform, beat him and then heaved his body down the hill.

In the next few hours, the mob, estimated at 5,000 or more, split into smaller groups, attacking stores and plundering them before setting them on fire. Then they gathered outside the Colored Orphan Asylum at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue, a residence and school for orphaned black children. The institution was founded by white women about 30 years earlier, and about 200 children were living there.

With the mob at the front doors, teachers led the children to safety out the back and took refuge at a local police station. One small girl was left behind and was killed when she was found hiding under her bed. Men and women roamed the place stealing what they could before setting it afire. Outside, men gouged out the bark of large shade trees and ripped out bushes. Others tore down an iron fence. It was as though they were trying to erase any trace of the orphanage.

Two days later, July 13, the Common Council met while the riot continued at full force. It voted to create a $2.5 million fund to pay the $300 get-out-of-the-army fee for any man who could not afford it. But the rioting didn’t let up, probably because the draft protesters were no longer part of the action.

For the next two days, the mob rioted around the clock, attacking armories, hotels, stores, newspaper offices and tenement houses. The rich were targeted as well, their homes sacked and burned. Sometimes clothes and jewelry might be taken, but mostly the mob was intent on destroying rather than stealing. Crystal chandeliers, painted portraits and pianos were hacked into little pieces.

The rioters fought with police and Army units returning from Gettysburg.

However, it was black men who suffered the most at their hands. Any black person unfortunate enough to encounter the mob became a target and was chased, beaten and often hanged. On the third day of the riots, newspaper images showed three black men hanging from lamp poles with a jubilant crowd dancing below them.

Accounts of the day say it was Irish women who were the most brutal in these attacks, cutting off fingers and toes as souvenirs or stabbing the men in every part of their bodies. When a man was hanged, they often also set him on fire.

A New York Times editorial said the writer had never witnessed a more disgusting and humiliating sight than the brutal mob in the streets of the city.

When it was over, official records put the number of people killed at 105. More recent research estimates the toll at 500.

Washington's Civil War madam could keep a secret

By T. Rees Shapiro

Mary Ann Hall was once among the most rich, popular and powerful women in Civil War Washington. Before she died in 1886 at age 71, she had garnered a nationwide reputation for integrity, charm, and utmost discretion.

Hall was the District’s Civil War madam and a top-dollar prostitute.

Her legacy was lost to history until the mid-1990s, when archaeologists uncovered the remnants of her large home under what is now the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall.

The scientists discovered what was perhaps the most distinguished and luxurious brothel in the city during the 19th century. The finely appointed establishment stood four blocks south of the Capitol, certainly a convenience for Hall’s elite clientele who worked a short walk away.

“It was first class, easily one of the top 10 brothels in the city,” said Donna J. Seifert, an archaeologist who helped dig up Hall’s home. “It was clearly quite well known.”

What remains not as well known are the particulars of Hall’s life. One fact about Hall, however, was apparent to the archaeologists who excavated the area around her brothel: She loved to serve bottles of champagne to her clients.

Although Hall’s name comes up in census records and newspaper accounts, the details of her life and career were largely forgotten until Seifert and her colleagues came along.

With the support of the Smithsonian Institution, Seifert and her team were dispatched to conduct a survey of the proposed Southwest site of the National Museum of the American Indian.

While digging up the land, they found gilt-edged porcelain, corset fasteners, seeds from exotic berries and coconuts and bones from expensive meats, including turtle. They also found “hundreds” of Piper-Heidsieck champagne corks and wire bales in the midden, or trash heap, buried near Hall’s property.

Single and apparently never married, Hall resided at 349 Maryland Ave. in a three-story brick home starting in the 1840s. There, she ran a business that flourished in Washington for nearly 40 years, especially during the Civil War, when soldiers deploying to battle passed through town.

One count by D.C. officials during the 1860s concluded that there were about 500 “bawdy houses” and nearly 5,000 prostitutes.

Hall’s brothel was ranked by the city’s provost marshal as one of the best and biggest, with a peak of 18 “inmates.”

“All who were rich and important went to Mary Ann Hall’s,” said Robert S. Pohl, author of the 2012 book “Wicked Capitol Hill.”

An 1864 article in the Washington Evening Star referred to Hall’s business as the “old and well established house” on Maryland Avenue.

The brothel “in question has had — it is no exaggeration to say — a national reputation for the last quarter century,” according to the paper.

Seifert said an inventory of Hall’s home shortly after her death catalogued its opulence. Hall had plush red furniture, carpets from Belgium, oil paintings, feather pillows, marble-topped tables and an icebox. Judging by the quality of the decor, Hall must have had high-profile clients, she said. Moreover, Seifert said, unlike other brothels, Hall’s establishment rarely came under official scrutiny.

“She ran the kind of house that didn’t cause trouble,” Seifert said. “It was a place of serious discretion. She ran a pretty straight business.”

Records indicate that Hall retired in the late 1870s. She later rented her home to a women’s clinic.

“The whole prostitute with a heart of gold — that was pretty much Mary Ann Hall,” Pohl said.

Hall died of a cerebral hemorrhage Jan. 29, 1886, according to her death certificate. Her net worth was about $90,000, equivalent to $2 million in today’s economy.

Her home later served as a YMCA before it was demolished during the 1930s. The government eventually bought the property as part of an expansion of the Mall.

Hall’s legacy lives on at Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill, where her remains are buried. Her plot is one of the cemetery’s largest, according to cemetery archivist and docent Dayle Dooley.

Hall rests in the northeast section of the cemetery, next to her mother and sister. Their plot is yards from the grave of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Hall’s headstone is a large, pale monument with a somber, female figure sitting on top.

Her Evening Star obituary gave no hint of Hall’s profession. But its eloquence reflected the influence she had in Washington’s public and private circles.

“With integrity unquestioned, a heart ever open to appeals of distress, a charity that was boundless, she is gone but her memory will be kept green by many who knew her sterling worth.”

A blueprint for America takes shape

By Brady Dennis

During national turmoil, the 37th Congress ushers in lasting change

If the persistent griping and gridlock on Capitol Hill in recent years has produced a do-nothing Congress, by contrast the 37th — which served from 1861 to 1863 — was the do-everything counterpoint.

It took monumental steps in accelerating the end of slavery. It helped to modernize the nation’s tax and banking system. It created the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It opened vast swaths of the country to development and expansion by creating the first transcontinental railroad and handing over huge amounts of public land to create colleges and serve as settlements for citizens.

“It was the members of this Congress — sometimes by accident and sometimes by design — who drew the blueprint for a new America,” historian Leonard P. Curry wrote of the 37th.

Why did it happen? How did it happen?

The simple answer: secession.

By the summer of 1861, nearly a third of the desks in both houses of Congress sat empty, vacated by members who had departed Washington for the Confederacy, leaving a splintered Democratic Party and a huge Republican majority with a Republican president willing to sign sweeping legislation. Ideas that had been mired for years or even decades in partisan gridlock finally could become reality.

“The people left behind said, ‘This is our golden opportunity,’ ” said U.S. Senate historian Donald Ritchie. “It opened the floodgates.”

What came through those floodgates were measures of such breadth and significance that they continue to shape American life.

One of the early landmark bills was the Revenue Act of 1861. Designed to help fund the Union war effort, it instituted the first federal income tax. That measure, along with the National Banking Act passed later in the session to create a national currency, laid some of the country’s key economic foundations.

By April 1862, lawmakers saw fit to use their authority to end slavery in the District of Columbia, a move that paved the way for President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation the following year and eventually for the abolition of slavery.

The following month, Congress created the Department of Agriculture, which would help fuel the nation’s agrarian growth in the wake of war. Lincoln called it “the people’s department.”

About the same time came the Homestead Act, which allowed anyone older than 21 who had never taken up arms against the U.S. government to apply for 160 acres of land to call his own.

A million Americans did just that, and the result was the nation’s rapid westward expansion.

That same frontier spirit lay behind the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, which authorized the construction of the first transcontinental railroad. It also involved granting millions of acres of public land to railroad companies building the project, which led to the development of new towns along the route.

In the summer of 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Act, also known as the Land Grant College Act, which granted each state 30,000 acres per congressional seat. Funds from the sale of those lands were used to establish new universities and enhance existing ones. Scores of major colleges throughout the country, from Cornell to Clemson to Texas A&M, grew out of that effort.

Such legislation spoke in part to a practical reality — the federal government was spending nearly all its money on the war, but it had plenty of land to give away. But it also spoke to a philosophy among many members, at least in the majority, that the nation should leverage the resources it had for growth and expansion.

“They were thinking about rebuilding the nation,” Ritchie said. “They thought they were going to win this war, and they were thinking about what kind of country was going to emerge from the war. They were shaping the future.”

The mood was far from upbeat inside the Senate chamber on July 4, 1861, as the presiding officer gaveled the 37th Congress into session. The Rev. Byron Sunderland offered up a solemn Independence Day prayer.

“Almighty and everlasting God, be not angry with us for our sins,” he began, adding, “Disasters have befallen us and darkness broods in the land. And now we ask Thy mercy as the Senate is convening at a most momentous crisis of our history. Give to Thy servants all needed help. Add to their deliberations wisdom and unanimity.”

Not that anyone needed reminding about the gravity of the situation. Aside from the empty seats, whose former occupants were now antagonists, the Capitol dome remained under construction, its future uncertain — not unlike the country itself.

Lincoln had summoned Congress for an extraordinary session that summer, urging lawmakers to give him “the legal means for making this contest a short and a decisive one.”

They granted the new president his war powers, though the fighting to follow proved anything but short and decisive.

For the men in the Senate chamber that day, as well as for their counterparts in the House, the war itself was inescapable and ever-present throughout their tenure, demanding constant attention.

But even as soldiers began drilling on the Capitol lawn and the sounds of distant cannon fire rumbled across the Mall, the conflict remained far from their only focus. They steadily racked up an impressive list of achievements.

“It’s a long list, astonishingly long,” Princeton University historian James M. McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Battle Cry of Freedom,” said of the accomplishments of the 37th Congress. “That legislation had an impact that went on for decades and generations.”

McPherson said the men on Capitol Hill knew well the monumental tasks they were undertaking — hence the heated, often-vitriolic debates.

“The Congress was well aware of the historic consequences of what they were doing,” McPherson said. “It was a sense of great challenge but also great opportunity. It created a sense of excitement, but also probably apprehension.”

Ritchie, the Senate historian, ranks the 37th Congress as among the most productive ever, on par with the very first Congress, which helped cobble together a nation; the “New Deal” Congress of 1933 and the “Great Society” Congress of 1965.

“These were Congresses that were just extraordinary in terms of passing lots of legislation,” he said.

Even so, the initial reviews of the 37th were, at best, mixed.

“It is an historic body, and has done its duty ably and fearlessly,” one Midwestern newspaper declared, according to Curry’s book, “Blueprint for Modern America.”

And Adam Gurowski, an influential Polish-born writer who spent the war years in Washington, proclaimed that the 37th Congress had “inaugurated and directed a new evolution in the onward progress of mankind.”

But the Philadelphia Inquirer labeled the 37th a “congregation of incompetents” and said its members had shown themselves to be “without the intellect to realize the true condition of this country, and utterly without the legislative ability to provide for it if they did.”

Perhaps the more common sentiment among the members themselves was a lingering uncertainty about how the decisions they had made would pan out, coupled with hopefulness that they had been the right ones for the country.

As the 37th Congress wound to a close in 1863 — now working under a Capitol dome well on its way to completion — Ohio Republican Sen. John Sherman predicted that the landmark laws passed during its two years “will be a monument to good or evil. They cover such vast sums, delegate and regulate such vast powers, and are so far-reaching in their effects, that generations will be affected well or ill by them.”

After the final debates had ended and the last vote had been counted, Republican Senate Leader William P. Fessenden reflected on all that had happened to change the course of the America that would emerge from the war.

“With all the labor and anxiety it has cost me, I am gratified to reflect that we have accomplished much,” he observed. “With all its faults and errors, this has been a great and self-sacrificing Congress. . . . Future times will comprehend our motives and all we have done and suffered.”

Panelists

Q: What is the greatest overlooked story of the Civil War period between Chancellorsville and Chickamauga?

John Stauffer

Hooker’s Defeat

Author and professor of English and the history of American civilization at Harvard University

When Lincoln heard the news of Gen. Joseph Hooker’s defeat at Chancellorsville on May 6, 1863, with 17,000 casualties, his face turned ashen. “My God! My God!” he moaned. “What will the country say?” It said it wanted an immediate end to the war, as reflected by the dramatic rise of the “Copperhead” peace movement in the summer of 1863.

Amid the news of Hooker’s defeat, Clement Vallandigham, the leader of the peace movement, was arrested at his home in Dayton, Ohio, for fomenting treason. In speeches, he had encouraged resistance to conscription, which had recently been passed, and declared that war was being waged to free blacks and enslave whites.

In the wake of Vallandigham’s arrest, Copperheads rioted throughout the North. They set fire to Republican newspaper offices, attacked conscription officers, and killed blacks. The July riots in New York and Boston were so intense that Union troops had to be called in to restore order.

With Vallandigham silenced, two unlikely Copperhead voices emerged in the summer of 1863: former president Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Pierce and Hawthorne had met as students at Bowdoin College and for the rest of their lives remained close friends and staunch Democrats. Both men hated the Lincoln administration and emancipation.

Pierce called Lincoln the “instrument for all the evil” in the nation, and the Emancipation Proclamation “the climax of folly & wickedness” because it invited blacks “to slay & devastate without regard to age or sex.” He wanted peace and the Union as it was — with slavery.

Hawthorne preferred peace with “amputation,” hoping that the Confederacy would remain a separate slaveholding nation. Like Pierce, he thought that masters and slaves lived together in “peace and affection.”

Confederates viewed Copperheads as allies, funding their newspapers and encouraging their leaders. Gen. Robert E. Lee told President Jefferson Davis “to give all the encouragement we can . . . to the rising peace party of the North.”

On July 4, Pierce delivered an oration in Concord, N.H., with Hawthorne at his side. “Any of you,” he told the crowd of 25,000, “may be the next victim of unconstitutional, arbitrary, irresponsible power.” He urged resistance to Republican rule. “we will. . . defend our rights as a free people . . . with or without arms.”

Reports circulated through the crowd that the Union army had achieved a great victory at Gettysburg. ButPierce’s speech remained so popular that many Democrats urged him to run for president in 1864. Hawthorne loved the speech and dedicated his new book, “Our Old Home,” to Pierce, declaring that “no man’s loyalty [was] more steadfast.” It was published on September 19, amid the battle of Chickamauga, which turned into a nother Union disaster.

Hawthorne’s abolitionist friends were outraged by his dedication. “Do tell me if our friend Hawthorne praises that arch traitor Pierce in his preface & your loyal firm publishes it,” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Hawthorne’s editor. “Patronize such a traitor to our faces! I can scarcely believe it.”

Other Hawthorne admirers followed the example of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who simply “cut out the dedication,” thus separating what he considered Hawthorne’s ignoble politics from his beautiful art.

Waite Rawls

What Didn’t Happen

President and chief executive of the Museum of the Confederacy

In the summer of 1862, Robert E. Lee took the Army of Northern Virginia away from the defenses of Richmond on a campaign that ended in Maryland, leaving Richmond and Petersburg virtually undefended and George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac licking its wounds at Harrison’s Landing. McClellan did nothing with the opportunity to move on Richmond.

In early June 1863, Lee did it again. He abandoned his lines on the Rappahannock River, moving westward and northward in a campaign that ended in Pennsylvania. He recalled James Longstreet’s First Corps from the vicinity of Suffolk, Va., and all of the men he could muster from eastern North Carolina, leaving approaches to Richmond defended by a thin screen of nothing more than skirmishers.

Tens of thousands of Federals were in Suffolk but did not advance and take Petersburg. Tens of thousands more were at Fort Monroe and Williamsburg but did not advance in force on the Peninsula toward Richmond. And Joseph Hooker took the entire Army of the Potomac with him to chase Lee into Pennsylvania, rather than dispatch a force southward.

Perhaps the best example of the opportunity squandered was the raid by Union Col. Samuel Spear in late June. Landing with 1,200 men at White House, on the York River, and advancing along the south side of the Pamunkey and South Anna rivers, he intended to disrupt Lee’s supply communications with Richmond. Lee had left one regiment from Johnston Pettigrew’s North Carolina Brigade — the 44th North Carolina Troops — strung out along those rivers to protect bridges and fords. On June 26, Spear ran into Company A of the 44th NCT at a railroad bridge, where the Virginia Central R.R. crossed the South Anna River. Fifty Tarheels held off 1,200 Federal cavalrymen for four hours before finally being overrun and taking 100 percent casualties. The Union horsemen destroyed the bridge, but then returned to where they had started with little to show for their efforts other than the capture of Robert E. Lee’s son, Confederate Gen. Rooney Lee, who was recuperating from wounds suffered at Brandy Station.

Confederates quickly rebuilt the bridge, the railroad supply line was reopened, and Richmond was left untouched. Sometimes, what did not happen is as important as what did happen. In this case, the bluecoats did not take Richmond when they had the opportunity, and that is the most overlooked story of the summer of 1863.

Harold Holzer

Lincoln, Man of Surprises

Roger Hertog fellow at the New-Yorkcq Historical Society and author of the new book “The Civil War in 50 Objects”

To my mind — no surprise — the greatest untold story between May and September 1863 involved Abraham Lincoln’s ability to craft, and discard, words. Acknowledged now as the greatest writer of the Civil War era,Part of Lincoln’s talent for communication came not only from what he said in public, but what he revised to improve it; not only what he wrote in his famous letters, but what he discarded.

What made him such a master of the language was his understanding of the power of words and his ability to enhance, control and self-censor what he said. The most illustrative cases in point, I think, were inspired by the conflict that shook the town of Gettysburg on July 1-3. Four days later, a crowd gathered at the White House to serenade the president, and called for a speech.

Lincoln replied from the heart — but off the cuff: “How long ago is it? — eighty-odd years — since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’ ”

Cheers followed, and Lincoln surely knew at once that he was onto something important.

But rather than further develop his thoughts without more consideration, he stopped, noting: “This is the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.”

Four months later, that opportunity came — at Gettysburg itself — where Lincoln memorably revised his opening lines into a style that approached Holy Scripture: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers. . . ”

Gettysburg could elicit anger from Lincoln, too, and on July 14 he wrote a brutal letter to Gen. George G. Meade criticizing his failure to pursue Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army. “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape,” he complained.

“He was within your grasp, and to have closed upon him would . . . have ended the war . . . and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”

But Lincoln knew when to remain silent as surely as he knew when to rewrite. He folded up the Meade letter and stored it in his desk, marking it “never sent, or signed.” It was enough simply to get his disappointment off his chest.

Yet Lincoln was never predictable. When he learned that one of the Union’s most dangerous foes had been killed after Chancellorsville, he dashed off what sounded like a “fan letter,” praising a Washington newspaper for its “excellent and manly article on ‘Stonewall Jackson.’ ”

Lincoln the writer was full of surprises — and never more so than in the summer and early autumn of 1863.

John Marszalek

Milliken’s Bend

Giles distinguished professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State University

It was not an easy matter deciding just what the role of black men was to be in the Federal military. When President Abraham Lincoln promulgated the final Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, he dealt with the issue. He legalized the use of African Americans in the U.S. Army.

The motion picture “Glory” chronicled the bravery that black soldiers demonstrated in battle, showing the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Colored) charging to their deaths at Battery Wagner, S.C., on July 18, 1863. Black troops, doubted by white soldiers, proved their valor and martial abilities by facing heavy fire and unflinchingly suffering terrible losses for the Union cause.

The question whether African Americans made good soldiers had already been demonstrated earlier, however, although no motion picture has ever been made of these efforts. It was during the campaign of Ulysses S. Grant against Vicksburg, Miss., in 1863that recently recruited black slaves, with little military training and supplied with inferior equipment, proved their mettle at Milliken’s Bend, La., on June 7, 1863.

Confederate officers had convinced themselves that the only way to stop Grant’s siege and ultimate victory at Vicksburg was to destroy his supply line some 15 miles north, at Milliken’s Bend on the Mississippi River. They did not realize that Grant had already moved his supply line from the west side of the River to the east side. Confederates launched an all-out attack against the original supply base. Black troops, guarding this area, fought off the Confederate attackers despite facing overwhelming numbers and having received little training. The black soldiers received withering fire, but they courageously kept fighting.

This battle was a small one, as Civil War battles go, yet it was one of tremendous importance.

Milliken’s Bend proved to skeptical Federal officers and soldiers that black men could indeed fight. Although an unknown battle, it opened the way for a fuller use of black manpower.

By the end of the war, nearly 200,000 blacks fought in the Federal military. Charles A. Dana, whom Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had sent to Mississippi to spy on Grant, reported back to Washington after this engagement: “The sentiment in regard to the employment of negro troops has been revolutionized by the bravery of the blacks in the recent battle of Milliken’s Bend.”

From that day forward, through Fort Wagner to the end of the conflict, African Americans played a major role in the Union war effort.

Few people remember the battle at Milliken’s Bend today, but it was a crucial event leading to essential black participation in the Federal triumph. It deserves much more attention.

Robert Lee Hodge

Tullahoma Campaign

Regional Emmy award-winning filmmaker, writer, preservationist and reenactor

The most obvious military operation that comes to mind, that is grossly underrated is the Tullahoma Campaign. It began on June 24, 1863, in the area south of Murfreesboro, Tenn., with a massive Federal offensive launched by Union Gen. William Rosecrans’s 60,000-strong Army of the Cumberland. The Yankee objective was to outmaneuver and “turn” their Rebel opponent’s flank that was on a strong defensive line in mountainous terrain and force retreat. This effort would edge the Federals closer to the capture of the important nearby railroad hub of Chattanooga. The Federal capture of Chattanooga would be another coffin nail in a shrinking Confederacy. Opposing Rosecrans’s Federal troops were 45,000 toughened Rebels in the Army of Tennessee under the command of Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg.

In a masterful series of movements and deception, Rosecrans was able to pry Bragg’s Rebels from the all-important gaps into the mountainous country. Through these movements, juxtaposed with Bragg’s well-known lack of leadership and cooperation with subordinate generals in his command, the Rebels were “outflanked” time and again until Chattanooga — the fast-rail center of the then cutting-edge technology of trains and an obvious military objective — was eventually abandoned.

What Rosecrans was able to accomplish was a huge military feat. His massive Federal army moved from Murfreesboro, 45 miles to the southeast, to Tullahoma in 10 days, over ground that would normally be considered prime real estate for battle, yet Rosecrans spilled little blood, sustaining only 600 casualties and inflicting 2,500 on Bragg’s Rebels. Lincoln wrote, “The flanking of Bragg at Shelbyville, Tullahoma and Chattanooga is the most splendid piece of strategy I know of.” A Union general said, “If any student of the military art desires to make a study of a model campaign. . . . . No better example of successful strategy was carried out during the war than in the Tullahoma campaign.”

Rosecrans did not receive many accolades. The day the Tullahoma Campaign ended was the day Gettysburg and Vicksburg were coming to successful ends for the Union. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton telegraphed Rosecrans: “Lee’s Army overthrown; Grant victorious. You and your noble army now have a chance to give the finishing blow to the rebellion. Will you neglect the chance?” Rosecrans was shocked by that attitude and responded, “Just received your cheering telegram announcing the fall of Vicksburg and confirming the defeat of Lee. You do not appear to observe the fact that this noble army has driven the rebels from middle Tennessee. . . . I beg in behalf of this army that the War Department may not overlook so great an event because it is not written in letters of blood.”

Brag Bowling

The New York Draft Riots of 1863

Director of the Stephen D. Lee Institute, an educational group established by the Sons of Confederate Veterans

Sandwiched between two of the greatest Confederate victories, Chancellorsville and Chickamauga, was the fierce urban warfare of July 13-16, 1863, in New York City. Modern historians would lead one to believe that the racist lower-class Irish and Germans were taking out their frustrations on defenseless black people. In some ways that was true, but there was much more to this story; Like today’s Benghazi attacks, some historians view it as a spontaneous eruption of civil dissent. In actuality, the Draft Riots represented an attempt to bring the war north, perhaps in coordination with the Gettysburg campaign of July 1-3. The most violent and destructive example of civil insurrection in American history provides graphic testimony to the extent of Northern opposition to Lincoln and the war, the Republican Party, emancipation and forced federalized conscription.

The Draft Riots germinated out of opposition to the undemocratic wartime policies of the Lincoln administration and the Republican Party.

Mass arrests of political opponents denying the fundamental right of writ of habeas corpus; the silencing of newspaper opposition by jailing editors and reporters and closing down newspapers; and the use of military tribunals to try civilians helped set the stage for the riotous atmosphere encountered in New York in 1863. Opposition to both the Emancipation Proclamation and the Conscription (Draft) Act of 1863 galvanized the working class against Lincoln’s plans. These working-class people opposed being drafted as pawns fighting in the killing fields to free slaves who would then compete with them for their jobs. Strong states’ rights advocates such as Peace Democrat Gov. Horatio Seymour and the ex- mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, publicly and strongly opposed Lincoln and his policies.

To say that these riots were spontaneous is disingenuous. It certainly appears that the four days of rioting were planned, coordinated and well led. The disruption of telegraph and rail communications, burning of bridges to prevent reinforcements, military-style formations and destruction of key government and public buildings led to a battle royal that might be compared to the epic urban fighting of World War II. It has been estimated that as many as 50,000 people participated in the rioting. When the Union army arrived from Gettysburg to rescue the city from the mobs, the extent of casualties was unknown, but some historians place them in the range of Gettysburg and Antietam, making the Draft Riots one of the deadliest events of the war.

When the melee was stopped by the Union army on July 16, the state of New York was looked at suspiciously for years, and a strong military presence continued in the city to watch over its citizens and help supervise elections.

Editorials

The Richmond Enquirer

MAY 7, 1863 — Our victory on the Rappahannock has cost us dear in the severe wounds unfortunately received by the great and good Gen. JACKSON. His left arm has been amputated above the elbow, a bullet has passed through his right hand. His condition is now, we learn, as favorable as could possibly be expected; and he will doubtless recover, and is not, we trust, lost to active service. We could better spare a brigade or a division.

Our base foe will exult in the disaster to JACKSON; yet the accursed bullet that brought him down was never moulded by a Yankee. Through a cruel mistake, in the confusion the hero received two balls from some of his own men, who would all have died for him.

The Press of Philadelphia

JULY 3, 1863 — We have glorious news this morning. The rebel invader has been interrupted in his brief and haughty saturnalia, and compelled to accept battle from the Army of the Potomac. As we supposed, yesterday, from the information we had received, General Meade, acting with swift energy, has thrown his columns against the army of Lee. Near the town of Gettysburg, in Southern Pennsylvania, the rebels were encountered, and a fierce battle ensued. The corps of General [John] Reynolds [who was killed at Gettysburg] was hurled against Longstreet and Hill, and the contest became fierce, persistent, and bloody. Our troops fought with unexampled bravery, and, although we could have spared a thousand of armed men with less danger to the cause than the gifted and gallant Reynolds, we accept the battle as a glorious event. . . . . . In other parts of the State the intelligence is not so pleasing. The shells are falling into the peaceful town of Carlisle. Women and children are fleeing into the woods terrified and despairing. . . This is what the rebels have visited upon Pennsylvania. . . This outrage at Carlisle — this shelling of a town of women and children without any warning — is one of the most malignant acts of the war. . .

The great army is before Meade, and so placed that retreat seems to be impossible. If the rebels fall back towards Harrisburg, Smith and his militia are ready to meet them. If they advance, it is upon Meade and the Army of the Potomac, and they must either defeat these two armies or be annihilated. The Army of the Potomac never had such an opportunity, and we must strengthen it by our own patriotic action. Let us continue the work of enrolment and enlistment, so that if Meade wins a victory, we can relieve his tired troopers, and assist in the pursuit; and if he loses, we can save the State from devastation. We must be prepared for any event. We have not yet seen the end of this battle of Gettysburg. We do not know that it is a victory; the result is with Providence. We must not be lulled or charmed into a false hope, but labor constantly, earnestly, and with courage, until this invasion is repelled, the rebel army crushed, and the proud soil of Pennsylvania redeemed from dishonor and desolation . . .

Today will probably see the final struggle. God speed the right! The skies look brighter, and it may be that we shall celebrate our Fourth of July with the defeat of Bragg, the fall of Vicksburg, the capture of Richmond, and the annihilation of Lee.

The Richmond Daily Dispatch

JUNE 5, 1863 — . . . We do not predict that this will be a short war; we see no signs of its termination so long as the demagogues and speculators control the Yankee Government. But we simply desire the Yankees to understand that when they talk in a magnificent way of waging this war for fifty years, and when an unguarded admission falls from some individual in the South that such may be their honest purpose, ninety-nine out of every hundred of our people regard with equal incredulity and contempt their idle vaporings, and are making up their minds to accept, with fortitude and resignation, war as their natural condition for the remainder of their earthly existence. If the Yankees are willing to fight fifty years to subjugate the South, the South is more than willing to fight a hundred rather than be subjugated . . .The war has now lasted more than two years, and we are beginning to be accustomed to it. Habit, which is a second nature, is reconciling us to a condition which we now perceive was inevitable, and could not have been avoided without the deepest degradation. The war has hardened our nerves and sinews; it has discovered to us our strength; it has developed our industry; it has delivered us from the loathsome and corrupting embrace of a demoralized people, and from the most vulgar and detestable despotism that ever disgraced the earth. There was a time at the beginning of the contest when there was not powder enough in Virginia to fight one great battle, nor percussion caps enough to supply a single regiment, nor any other arms or munitions of war of either the quantity or quality demanded by the crisis. If the Yankees had rushed upon us then, we should have been almost at their mercy, but in that Providence which then restrained them, and has ever since confounded their devices, we see the sure guarantee of our final triumph. We have now more than arms enough for our wants, and the enemy is farther now than he was a year ago from the coveted prize of his ambition and vindictiveness. We have, therefore, no fears of any Yankee prolongation of the war. The longer it continues the stronger we shall grow; and the poorer will the enemy become. Nor will it always be a war of invasion on his part, and of defence on ours. No wonder that he should be reconciled to a long war at other people’s doors! It requires no super-human valor and resolution to attain to that state of mind. Let us see how long he will want the war to last when all the horrors that the South has witnessed are transferred to Northern soil!

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Legacy

Montgomery Meigs's vital influence on the Civil War - and Washington

By Robert O’Harrow Jr.

On Dec. 21, 1864, as William Tecumseh Sherman’s army came to the end of its devastating March to the Sea, his soldiers found a gift awaiting them in Savannah, Ga.

A new wardrobe.

A flotilla of transport ships in the harbor was crammed with comforts for the more than 62,000 weary men: tens of thousands of sturdy boots and shoes, fresh shirts, socks, underwear and trousers. There were greatcoats and blankets, camp kettles and pans, axes and spades, and even needles and thread.

So complete was the Union stockpile — at a time when many hungry Confederate soldiers went barefoot and wore rags — it might as well have been heralded by a choir of Northern angels.

One Washington man deserved the lion’s share of credit, a little-known organizational genius named Montgomery Cunningham Meigs.

At the war’s outset three years earlier, chaos and corruption dominated the mobilization of the Northern army. Speculators sold the government lame horses and leaky boats. Textile makers peddled material for uniforms called “shoddy,” redefining the meaning “poorly made.” It literally fell off soldiers in the field.

A professional soldier in the Army Corps of Engineers, Meigs had been named quartermaster general and given responsibility for outfitting the Union Army, which would grow in one year from 17,000 to more than 500,000.

He worked tirelessly to fight fraud and spend taxpayer money wisely. He loathed slavery and saw something almost biblical in the unfolding struggle. “God for our sins leads us to [victory] through seas of blood,” he once wrote to his son, John.

During the war, Meigs was so highly regarded that almost anyone who mattered listened to him. Upon receiving one report from Meigs, whose script was notoriously illegible, an admiring Sherman said: “The handwriting of this report is that of General Meigs, and I therefore approve of it, but I cannot read it.”

But these days, remarkably, few can recall his name, let alone the details of his greatness.

Meigs may be the most important bureaucrat in American history, a desk jockey who built the war machine that crushed the Confederacy. He also left behind another legacy — of technical ingenuity, humanity, love of art and belief in Washington, D.C., as a world power — before the first shot of the Civil War was ever fired.

Monty Meigs was a big man who could not stand still. He stood almost 6-foot-2 and wore a thick beard. A tinkerer, he conducted his own scientific experiments, invented mechanical devices and painted watercolors. He demanded excellence from subordinates and expected everyone to abide by the same ethical standards he lived by. Browbeating was a way of life.

In something of an irony, he came into the world as a Southerner. His father, Charles, had earned a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania, married and moved to Augusta, Ga., with his wife, Mary, in 1815. They had high hopes that Georgia would be a fine place for his medical career and their family. Instead, soon after Meigs was born, in May 1816, Mary realized that she could no longer stomach the slavery around her.

The family moved back north, to Philadelphia. Monty Meigs romped along the Delaware River with pals. He attracted much affection, but he demanded much of other people. Even his loving mom described him as “high-tempered, unyielding, tyrannical.” And that was when he was just 6 years old.

Meigs wanted to serve the nation and build things. A natural destination for him was West Point,the country’s first engineering school, where he was admitted in 1832. Among other things, he learned the rudiments of architecture, studied mineralogy and mastered the basics of drawing and painting — all of which would serve him later.

In 1836, he graduated fifth in his class, part of an elite group of aspiring scientists and engineers. He happened to be one of the school’s best artists. But he also earned a reputation as a challenging young man, racking up scores of demerits for cutting against the grain.

Meigs later railed against the demerit system in characteristic fashion, writing that it hindered “enterprising” men in favor of “the stolid, the namby pamby, the men having no distinguishing traits or character.”

The two men paddled across the Mississippi in a dugout canoe, scanning the densely wooded shoreline north of St. Louis. It was the summer of 1837, some years after Lewis and Clark had made maps of the same spot. Meigs and a fellow Army Corps of Engineers officer were there to help improve navigation of the river.

It was a prime assignment, and it gave Meigs, just 21, a chance to get to know one of the rising stars of the U.S. military, a serious but gracious lieutenant named Robert E. Lee. Lee had been at the top of West Point several years earlier. Under his guidance, Meigs carried the compass and made paintings and maps of the landscape. The two shared a rough-hewn cabin on the shore. Lee found Meigs’s extraordinary energy curious. But they became comrades who, according to writer Simon Schama, “shot wild turkey from horseback, Missouri-fashion, and caught whiskery catfish.”

Meigs would recall his time with Lee as a notable point in his early career, and Lee as “the model of a soldier and the beau ideal of a Christian man.”

Lee was “one with whom nobody ever wished or ventured to take a liberty, though kind and generous to all his subordinates, admired by all women, and respected by all men.”

But Meigs’s admiration would soon turn to bitter hatred.

In 1852, Montgomery Meigs, his wife, Louisa, and their young family moved to the District, a city they would call home for the rest of their lives. They found a booming place filled with great aspirations — and a lot of muck. The city’s population had soared in a half-century from 3,000 to 58,000. It had grand buildings, including the Capitol and White House. But some of the roads were occupied by pigs, cows and chickens, and some were rutted with wheel tracks or filled with mud.

The city’s iffy water supply arrived from springs and creeks through leaky cast-iron pipes. Foul water sometimes infected people with typhoid fever and killed them. Or the water ran short, leaving firefighters in the lurch, as the city’s wooden buildings burned to the ground.

Then as now, the nation’s lawmakers didn’t show much interest in spending money on the District, a political limbo. But they had a change of heart after the Library of Congress room caught fire on Christmas Eve 1851 and almost sent the Capitol’s old wooden dome up in smoke. The next year, Congress allocated $5,000 to explore new sources of water. It was a pittance, compared with the magnitude of the project. But the money held a far greater significance for Washington. It had triggered the arrival of Meigs, who was asked to conduct the survey.

Meigs saw a chance to make a name for himself, something he could not do during the recent war with Mexico, when he was assigned to build a fort on the other side of the country. He also wanted to help the poor, who suffered most from the fires and diseases.

He got to work on his first day in town, and three months later he submitted a 55-page report that dazzled lawmakers with its depth and clarity. It seems that Lt. Meigs had undertaken a crash course in water systems in New York, Boston, Paris and ancient Rome. Of the three options presented, Meigs wanted Congress to embrace the most ambitious, which involved construction of a massive aqueduct that he promised would carry water for hundreds of years.

The lawmakers agreed. A few months later, on a bright October day in 1853, Meigs rode to Great Falls and broke ground in a ceremonial beginning. “Thus quietly and unostentatiously was commenced this great work — which is destined I trust for the next thousand years to pour its healthful waters in to the capital of our union,” Meigs wrote in his journal that night.

The pitch for the aqueduct had been so successful that Meigs’s boss and soon-to-be friend and mentor — Secretary of War Jefferson Davis — added on still more work. Davis made him responsible for other major projects, including the expansion of the Capitol, the Post Office building and improvements to Fort Madison in Annapolis.

When Meigs wasn’t overseeing the manufacture of bricks for the aqueduct, the digging of tunnels or the construction of bridges, he was revising budgets or redrafting plans to enlarge the House and Senate. One of his favorite tasks was the building of a new dome on the Capitol, where he had his office.

Designed by architect Thomas U. Walter, who drew inspiration from cathedrals in Europe, the dome looked gorgeous on paper. But the construction challenges were daunting. Meigs urged that it be built with cast iron. By using modern materials and methods, he aimed to save money and cut construction time.

Meigs, the Capitol project’s superintendent, interpreted his mandate from Congress and Davis broadly, giving himself wide latitude to do pretty much whatever he wanted. That included taking charge of the building’s decoration. Seeing a chance for “the advancement of art in this country,” Meigs persuaded Congress to allow him to spend a near fortune on the projects. He commissioned tiles, stained glass and murals, statues and bronze doors. He had door handles cast in the form of black snakes his men found while working on the aqueduct, and railings made with images of leaping stags.

In an inspired move, he hired Constantino Brumidi, an Italian artist who had immigrated to America and would spent the last quarter-century of his life working on the Capitol. Working for as little as $8 a day, Brumidi filled the canopy under the dome with a painted swirl of mythic figures.

Meigs also commissioned the Capitol’s crowning motif, the Statue of Freedom. But before it could be placed atop the dome, Meigs had to solve a vexing engineering problem: How to put the new cast-iron dome itself on the old building?

He designed a tower that rose 100 feet through the center of the Capitol Rotunda. He added a derrick made of massive timbers that stretched 160 feet across and had the whole thing anchored fast with custom-made wire rope. The derrick, powered by a steam engine on the roof of the Capitol, could lift as much as 20,000 pounds of stone, iron or other material. To save money and get rid of debris, Meigs burned the wood from the old dome to fire the steam engine.

“It is a beautiful machine,” Meigs wrote proudly in his journal the day the system was tested in December 1855.

The senators patted one another on the back and talked at each other as though they were all hard of hearing. It was Jan. 4, 1859, and everyone was in high spirits as they crowded into their new Capitol chambers. The walls of the corridor glowed with bright Renaissance colors and gilding. Outside, down the hill in the direction of the White House, sat a new fountain. The day before, Meigs had opened the valves on the unfinished aqueduct that allowed the Potomac’s water to flow into the city. Now, the water was spraying 60 feet into the air for any lawmaker to see.

The blustery Meigs seemed almost humbled by his own achievements, particularly the aqueduct. In a letter to his father, he wrote: “I wish you could see my jet d’eau in the Capitol Park. I look upon it with constant pleasure for it seems to spring rejoicing in the air & proclaiming its arrival for free use of the sick & well, rich & poor, gentle & simple, old & young for generation after generation which will have come to rise up & call me blessed.”

The aqueduct turned out to be one of the great engineering feats of the day. The system relied on gravity to carry the water more than 12 miles from Great Falls into the District. The water coursed through a 9-foot-wide conduit made of millions of bricks, over precisely designed culverts and through bridges that together descended an average 9.5 inches each mile.

At its peak, the project employed more than 50 engineers, surveyors and inspectors; 700 tradesmen; 1,100 laborers; and 60 cooks and waiters.

Simply getting the water to its destination wasn’t enough for Meigs, according to Harry C. Ways, former chief of the water system and author of “The Washington Aqueduct 1852-1992.” One valley proved to be an irresistible temptation for something more.

Instead of an attractive, utilitarian bridge, Meigs oversaw the design of the longest stone arch in world history at the time. The 220-foot granite arch remains as impressive as when it was first used during the war and called Union Arch Bridge. It is now better known as a landmark on MacArthur Boulevard called the Cabin John Bridge.

As a hedge against anyone forgetting who was responsible for the work, Meigs, now a captain, left his mark throughout the system. He had his name carved into the side of Cabin John Bridge. Plaques and inscriptions on the bridges and along the conduits still bear the words “Capt. M.C. Meigs, Chief Engineer.”

Even the risers on each of the 39 steps descending into an aqueduct vault in Georgetown are made up of cast-iron letters: MC MEIGS.

Perhaps he can be forgiven for his egotism. Long after his role was forgotten, the aqueduct he built still carries nearly 100 million gallons of water each day for use in the District and Northern Virginia.

Meigs’s irritability, along with his high regard for his own principles, made him a natural foe of many people in Washington who preferred to operate in a loose, genial atmosphere in which favors and cash could flow freely. He was engaged in one feud after another, over everything from corruption to artistic taste. One of Meigs’s most determined antagonists was one of his bosses, Secretary of War John B. Floyd.

Floyd was a political hack from Virginia who succeeded Davis. When Floyd took office in 1857, he began tossing off patronage as though he owned the government. Meigs routinely declined Floyd’s requests, delayed or complained to Congress. He even appealed to President Buchanan. “I feel as though I was a plug which filthy rats & mice were gnawing at all the time in order to increase the flow from the Treasury — Contractors architects & Secretaries all against me,” Meigs wrote in a letter.

On Sept. 18, 1860, Floyd had had enough. He ordered Meigs to turn over all his plans, accounting and other documents. Then he dispatched Meigs to the Dry Tortugas off the coast of Florida, assigned to improve Fort Jefferson. The message of the move could not have been clearer: Meigs had been banished. It appeared that an extraordinary, productive career in public service had come to an end.

But it wasn’t over yet. On the way down to his new assignment, Meigs turned his energy and creativity to another kind of endeavor: helping to save the Union.

“I believe that the temper of the South is excited, is dangerous,” Meigs wrote on Nov. 10, 1860. “… A wise discretion and preparation on the part of the authorities, I think, would prevent any such general outbreak as would require the active use of military force.”

This letter, to Lt. Gen.Winfield Scott, the head of the Army, went outside Meigs’s chain of command. But he felt compelled. On his way south, he had decided to take stock of the mood of the people. In Lynchburg, Va.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Columbus, Ga.; and Montgomery, Ala., he snooped around and took notes. His analysis was grim, according to writer Sherrod E. East and his essay “The Banishment of Captain Meigs.”

The South seemed ready to break away, he wrote. The North could take steps to prepare. But Scott and others had to move fast and reinforce with loyal men Fort Jefferson, Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay, Fla., and other fortifications in the South, or risk losing them outright.

In the coming months, he wrote numerous letters to military leaders and fellow officers, seeking help and offering advice. Meigs also ruminated about the institution that he believed threatened the nation’s existence. “Is all this to end in order that slavery not freedom may have greater sway?” Meigs wrote.

“My heart grows sick as I think of this prospect, and yet I believe that even in the greatest political trouble there is peace & happiness for those & those only who each hour & minute endeavor to do their duty & I hope to be able to do mine.”

As Meigs renewed himself, Floyd went up in flames. Allegations of mismanagement and corruption dogged him. On Dec. 29, he resigned, claiming indignation over the federal government’s efforts to reinforce Fort Sumter.

Meigs was recalled to Washington, with acclaim. Said Francis Preston Blair, a politician and journalist for whom Blair House (where White House visitors sometimes stay) was named: “They sent Meigs to gather a thistle, but thank God, he has plucked a laurel.”

On the day before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Meigs was back at work on the aqueduct and Capitol. But his mind was on bigger things. He was bracing for war and was worried about Lincoln. “I have not yet seen him. I hope the prints do him injustice,” Meigs, a Democrat, wrote to his brother that evening, March 3, 1861. “He certainly does not seem to come much to the level of the great mission.”

Meigs squeezed in near the platform the next day and watched as the Republican president-elect took his spot at the front of the crowd. Meigs listened carefully as Lincoln framed his intent.

“No time was wasted in generalities or platitudes but he grappled at once with his subject & no one could doubt that he meant what he said,” Meigs wrote in a letter that day. “… Each sentence fell like a sledgehammer driving in the nails which maintain states.”

The speech left Meigs more devoted than ever to saving the Union and punishing those who pushed for its demise. In a letter to her mother that spring, his wife, Louisa, wrote: “His soul seems on fire with indignation at the treason of those wicked men who have laid the deep plot to overthrow our government and destroy the most noble fabric of freedom the world has ever seen.”

Three weeks after Lincoln’s speech, Meigs found himself at the White House, standing before the president he had doubted.

Secretary of State William Seward wanted Meigs to discuss the situation at Forts Sumter and Pickens. Seward thought Lincoln needed to “talk with some man who would speak of what he knew,” not of politics but of war, Meigs wrote in his journal.

Lincoln chatted easily with Meigs, who told him that plenty of men could be found to attempt a rescue of Fort Sumter, despite what his superiors in the Army might say.

What about Fort Pickens?

Meigs was blunt, something Lincoln relished.

“Certainly,” Meigs told him, “if the Navy would do its duty and had not lost it already.”

Would Meigs, in a secret mission, take command of the fortress and keep them safe? Lincoln asked.

“I told him I was only a captain and could not command majors who were there,” Meigs wrote in his journal. “He must take an officer of higher rank.”

Seward cut through the problem, saying that Meigs needed to be promoted. Meigs pointed out that could not be done because there were no vacancies in the Army just then.

Seward reminded him that the president, as commander in chief, could make it happen without too much fuss.

In April, Meigs and the new team embarked on their mission to reinforce Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay. He was given $10,000 in “secret service money” and sent to New York, where the expedition’s ships, loaded with horses and supplies, awaited him. They sailed by Cape Hatteras, N.C., in a gale, picked up hundreds of men and cannons in the Florida Keys and, on April 16, arrived off Fort Pickens.

While Meigs made his way, the siege of Fort Sumter in South Carolina began and ended. On April 13, after surviving a 34-hour bombardment from secessionist forces, Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered. The Civil War had begun.

Fort Pickens, thoroughly reinforced by Meigs and his colleagues, remained in Union hands for the rest of the war.

On Jan. 10, 1862, Lincoln walked into Quartermaster General Meigs’s office and sat down on a chair in front of an open fire. He was clearly distressed.

Gen. George McClellan, head of the Army of the Potomac, had been indisposed, possibly with typhoid fever. Apart from his illness, he seemed little inclined to go on the offensive against the rebel South.

Lincoln wanted the Army to engage the enemy. And he was worried about money. The military was in the midst of its greatest expansion ever, and he did not know how the government was going to pay for it.

Lincoln barely knew Meigs, a mere captain before the war, when he had vaulted him far above his rank seven months before. But in a letter to Gen. Winfield Scott urging for the promotion, Lincoln expressed unalloyed admiration for him.

“I have come to know [Meigs] quite well for a short acquaintance, and so far as I am capable of judging I do not know one who combines the qualities of masculine intellect, learning and experience of the right sort, and physical power of labor and endurance so well as he.”

Now, Lincoln was looking for advice, according to a Meigs report.

“The people are impatient,” he told Meigs. “[Treasury Secretary Salmon] Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?”

Meigs disliked McClellan intensely, believing he would rather train his massive army than fight. Meigs urged the president to move forward and seek guidance from a war council about how to do it.

“Perhaps you may select the responsible commander for such an event,” he told Lincoln.

The next day, after hearing word of the council, McClellan roused himself and agreed to meet with the president and his counselors.

Despite his lack of battlefield experience, Meigs became one of Lincoln’s trusted wartime advisers. “Meigs was quite willing to offer advice, and the president seemed to be always anxious for it,” according to historian Carmen Brissette Grayson.

Meigs had his own troubles, though. Some contractors, railroads and speculators continued to take advantage of the military’s rapid growth. But even as he wrestled with corruption and the natural friction that accompanied wartime logistics, Meigs remained determined to crush the South and end slavery.

“God does not intend to give us peace again until we expiate our crimes,” he wrote to his father, “[until] the last shackle is stricken from the wrist of the black man.”

Meigs knew Lee was a great leader and his army formidable. “The rebels are a gallant people & will make a desperate resistance,” he wrote to Seward in 1863, “but it is exhaustion of men and money that finally terminates all modern wars.”

The vast, efficient logistical system that Meigs created supported that aim like no other in history. William Dickinson, co-editor of a collection of essays about Meigs, said that Meigs’s appointment as quartermaster general “signaled the beginning of a new style of modern business management in government that would profoundly influence the course of the Civil War.”

Meigs and his many assistants, working with private contractors, the nation’s railroads, ship builders and others, routinely came up with innovative solutions to the logistical problems the war posed. His men bought or built almost 600 boats and ships. They made, and then laid, hundreds of miles of railroad track and ran 50 different lines. At the end of the war they owned (and sold) more than 200,000 horses and mules. They built hospitals for the wounded and then buried the dead.

The refit of Sherman’s army at Savannah in 1864 was regarded by Meigs as one of his finest moments during the war and “perhaps the greatest of all the accomplishments of the quartermaster fleet,” according to historian Russell Weigley’s book, “Quartermaster General of the Union Army.”

Meigs left a more tangible legacy that same year, when the cemeteries in Washington seemed close to being full. Meigs, asked to find new burial sites, pointed out a beautiful place across the Potomac, on a high hill in Arlington. It was the family grounds of the wife of his former friend and colleague, Robert E. Lee.

It is known now as Arlington National Cemetery.

Still bitter that Lee had chosen to leave the Union Army and lead the Confederate forces, Meigs even ordered the rose garden near the house lined with graves. Twenty-sixheadstones stand there today, a grim reminder of Meigs’s wrath.

Sixteen years after the end of the war, Meigs, still serving as quartermaster general, was given another chance to distinguish himself.

In 1881, Congress directed him to build a new home for the Pension Bureau, the agency responsible for assisting disabled veterans and the families of those who had died. Under Meigs’s plan, it would be fireproof and so well lighted that it would not have a single dark corner or corridor. He wanted ventilation that would create a healthful environment for the clerks. It also would be inspired by Renaissance architecture.

The result was big, brash and controversial, an expensive structure made with more than 15 million red bricks that mixed the classical with the modern. At the time, some critics derided the building as an aesthetic catastrophe, calling it Meigs’s “Old Red Barn.” Sherman is said to have cracked that the building was fine but for one thing: “It’s too bad the damn thing is fireproof.”

Some people now consider it among the most beautiful, venerable buildings in Washington. It’s the National Building Museum. Meigs, who so wanted to be remembered, would be proud.

A Tragedy's Second Act

By Michael E. Ruane

On Aug. 7, 1891, the royal Prussian physician in the town of Hildesheim, Germany, went to a mental asylum in a former Benedictine monastery to examine a wealthy American who had been an inmate there for the past eight years.

The patient’s name was Henry R. Rathbone. He was a former U.S. Army officer who had once moved in the elite circles of Washington society and now had exclusive quarters in the 800-year-old complex, where he had been confined by the German courts.

The physician, one A. Rosenbach, found Mr. Rathbone thin and graying. He was 53, stood 5-foot-11 and weighed 140 pounds. The doctor took his pulse — 68 beats per minute — and temperature — 99.6. Both about normal.

The doctor noted that the patient was polite, carefully dressed, and “earnest.” He appeared healthy, although the pupil in his right eye was larger than the left. The patient refused to discuss his mental condition, but the asylum records spelled it out.

Henry suffered from hallucinations. He believed he was being persecuted and tortured. He thought there was an apparatus in the wall pouring “injurious vapors” into his head, causing headaches. He believed he could hear people gliding suspiciously in the corridor outside his suite.

The doctor noted two more things: Mr. Rathbone declined to discuss his late wife, Clara, whom he had murdered in 1883 in the German apartment in which they were living during a European tour. And he would not talk about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

These two events, many years and an ocean apart, seemed unrelated. The doctor was unsure that they were connected. But Henry R. Rathbone’s friends and relatives had long been convinced that they were most certainly and fatefully linked.

In 1865, then-Army Maj. Rathbone and his fiancee, Clara H. Harris, were in the presidential box in Ford’s Theatre when John Wilkes Booth crept in and shot Lincoln. The major grappled briefly with Booth, who stabbed him with a knife and escaped.

It was a scene quickly memorialized in heroic prints and lore around the country: The assassin leaping from the balcony. Rathbone reaching for him, eternally in vain, crying, “Stop that man!” Clara’s scream: “The president is shot!”

The couple married two years later and had three children. But Rathbone, by most accounts, was never the same. On Christmas Eve, 1883, following a long deterioration, he attacked his wife with a pistol and dagger and then slashed himself, just as Booth had done to Lincoln and Rathbone. Rathbone barely survived and afterward contended that the attack had been conducted by someone else. He said he was injured trying to intervene.

The story made headlines in Washington, where the couple and their children lived on Lafayette Square, and in New York, where their families were among Albany’s finest.

But it soon faded from the papers and now is but a haunting footnote to the Lincoln assassination, whose 144th anniversary this month comes during the bicentennial year of the 16th president’s birth.

With all that has been written about Lincoln — an estimated 16,000 books — little has been said about the Rathbone tragedy, as it was known in its day. Aside from a novel about the couple published 15 years ago, the case is mentioned only in passing. Indeed, for three decades an erroneously identified photograph of Clara Harris hung unchallenged at Ford’s Theatre, until it was finally pointed out by a Gaithersburg antiquarian, William Hallam Webber, and was taken down in 1999.

It may be that the story of Henry and Clara lacks the heroic romance of Lincoln and the Civil War. There is no martyrdom. No glorious farewell. No monuments to their memory. There is, instead, the specter of mental illness, and even the possibility that the trauma of the assassination might have had nothing to do with Clara’s slaying.

On its face, it is a tale of two survivors, as the novelist Thomas Mallon, put it: the man who failed to stop Booth and the devoted woman who had to live with him. But it is also the story of a couple’s struggle with insanity. There’s no detailed account of how Henry and Clara coped with his illness, or what Clara felt as she watched his frightening descent. Their story must be pieced together.

In the summer of 1891, after Rosenbach finished his examination, which was part of Henry’s application for a military pension, he wrote a report. A translation resides in the National Archives. Rathbone was suffering with “delusions of persecution,” the doctor believed. His condition was incurable, and Rosenbach concluded: “The cause of his disease is not known.”

At 8:20 on the damp, chilly night of April 14, 1865, Abraham and Mary Lincoln pulled up in their big black carriage outside the home of New York Sen. Ira Harris, just off Lafayette Square. They were headed to a performance at Ford’s Theatre and had stopped to pick up their guests.

Official Washington was then a small community. The president lived across the street from the square. Secretary of State William H. Seward lived on the east side of the square. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles lived on the north side. And Sen. Harris lived at 15th and H streets, a block away.

Harris, a former judge, had come to Washington in 1861, when he gained the New York Senate seat vacated by Seward. He brought with him an unusual family. His first wife had died, and he had married a widow, Pauline Rathbone. Both were members of Albany’s most illustrious families.

The senator’s family included a son, William, and three daughters, Clara, Amanda and Louise. Pauline had two sons, Henry and Jared. The couple had married around 1848, and their children had virtually grown up together.

Clara was now 30, a cultured, self-assured woman who moved in the highest Washington social groups. She had become an intimate friend of the first lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, with whom she often attended the theater, and was a familiar guest at the White House. Henry was 27, an intense-looking young man with receding, wavy auburn hair, mutton chops and a desk job in the Army.

And although in their youth he had essentially been her little brother, they planned to be married.

Going to war had been a difficult change for Henry. He had been to college and had studied law, and he spoke French. His late father had been the mayor of Albany and left behind a fortune when he died.

With the outbreak of hostilities, Henry became an officer in the 12th U.S. Infantry. He fought in the battles southeast of Richmond in the spring of 1862. That September, he commanded a company at the Battle of Antietam, outside Sharpsburg, Md. In December, he was at the Battle of Fredericksburg, a bloody defeat for Union forces.

At one point, he and his stepbrother, William, landed on the staff of Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, who commanded the Union’s army at Fredericksburg.

Records don’t indicate that Henry was ever in the thick of combat. But they do show the toll the war took on him.

“His bodily health, never robust, suffered impairment from … fever in 1862,” his Washington doctor, G.W. Pope, wrote. Henry was sick for two months that summer.

In the winter of 1863-64 he was sick again, suffering from a malaria-like illness.

He returned to the Army against the doctor’s advice and was sick again later in 1864. Once again, he returned to duty, despite his physician’s advice that he seek an easier job in the service.

“I felt satisfied that these repeated attacks of a wasting and debilitating disease were likely to permanently injure your constitution,” the doctor, Henry D. Paine, wrote to him later. Rathbone must have taken the advice, because by April of 1865, and probably earlier, he was working in Washington.

Clara, meanwhile, had been close friends with the 46-year-old first lady since the Harris family’s arrival in the capital in 1861. “We have been constantly in the habit of driving and going to the opera and theater together,” Clara wrote later.

In April of 1865, with the war essentially over, Washington was in a state of jubilation. On April 13 — four days after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox — Washington saw what was called “the grand illumination.” There were fireworks, bonfires, gaslight designs and torchlight parades, and the streets were thronged with revelers.

Clara was invited to the White House one night earlier that week and stood with the first lady to watch the president speak from a window to a cheering crowd outside. “After the speech was over, we went into Mr. Lincoln’s room,” Clara later wrote. “He was lying on the sofa, quite exhausted but he talked of the events of the past fortnight . . . and Mrs Lincoln declared the last few days to have been the happiest of her life.”

April 14 was Good Friday, a solemn day, but with the agony of the war finally over, the Lincolns wanted to enjoy themselves. There was a comedy called “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre, and the first couple decided to go. But they wanted company.

They originally invited the man of the hour: Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who had just accepted Lee’s surrender. But the general’s wife, Julia, and Mary Lincoln did not get along, and the Grants had planned to visit their children in New Jersey.

The invitation went instead to Henry and Clara. They were waiting at the senator’s home, where they lived, when the presidential carriage arrived. Despite the night chill, Clara recalled, the Lincolns were “in the gayest of spirits.”

The play had started when the foursome arrived. But the performance stopped when the president entered. The audience stood and cheered, and the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief.” The entourage made its way to the presidential box. The president took a seat in a cushioned rocking chair near the door. His wife sat in a chair to his right. Rathbone sat on an ornate, upholstered walnut sofa near the back of the box. Clara was in a chair to his right. At one point the president reached over and held his wife’s hand. She joked: “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?”

At 10:13 p.m., during Act 3, Scene 2, Booth slipped in through the door just as actor Harry Hawk delivered the comic line, “you sockdologizing old man-trap,” down on the stage. The gunshot mingled with the laughter. The major turned and saw Booth through the gun smoke.

Booth yelled something like, “Freedom!”

“I instantly sprang toward him, and seized him,” the major said later. “He wrested himself from my grasp.”

In addition to his derringer, Booth also carried a kind of Bowie knife that he now plunged toward the major. “I parried the blow by striking it up,” Rathbone said. But the blade cut into the inside of his left arm near his armpit. It pierced his biceps and grazed the bone a fraction of an inch from two major blood vessels.

The major recoiled, but then reached for Booth again, grasping only a piece of his clothing before the assassin vanished over the railing.

“Stop that man!” Rathbone yelled.

From the stage, Booth shouted: “Sic semper tyrannis!”

The box was now in chaos. Lincoln, with a gunshot wound to the back of his head, sat slumped in his chair, eyes closed. Clara screamed: “The president is shot!” Blood was everywhere — most of it from Rathbone’s stab wound. It soaked Clara’s dress, and streaked her hands and face.

Rathbone struggled to open a door to the box that Booth had wedged closed with a piece of a music stand. In rushed doctors and soldiers. Mary Lincoln was hysterical as the physicians laid the president on the floor.

The doctors decided that Lincoln was too badly wounded to be transported to the White House. Instead, they had him carried to a boardinghouse across the street. He was laid on a bed in a back room, and the death vigil began. Henry and Clara helped Mary Lincoln across the street.

The first lady was overwhelmed. She would shriek every time she noticed Clara’s dress, “Oh! My husband’s blood,” although the blood was more likely Henry’s.

Shortly after they arrived at the boardinghouse, Henry passed out and was taken to the senator’s house. It’s not clear how long Clara stayed with the first lady, but G.W. Pope later remembered that Clara was at home when he was called to the Harris house that night to tend to Henry.

Henry lay stripped of his clothes and as pale as a corpse, Pope recalled. He had lost a lot of blood and was delirious. He raved that the president had been shot: “God in heaven, save him!” Clara was calm, bringing water, towels and bandages as an Army surgeon, who had also been called, stitched up Henry’s wound.

“Clara Harris was a young lady of remarkable courage,” Pope remembered, with a “presence of mind in many emergencies, as I had known.”

A few weeks later, Clara posed for photographer Mathew B.Brady, reportedly in the dress she wore the night of the assassination. She told a friend she was trying not to think about the assassination. “But I really cannot fix my mind on anything else,” she wrote.

Seventeen years later, on a day in November, Henry Rathbone walked into the Albany office of his wife’s uncle, Hamilton Harris, with whom he had studied law as a young man. He was now the picture of prosperity, with his top hats, pinkie ring and ornamental walking canes. He was about to embark on another of his regular trips to Europe with his family — traveling on one of the most modern steamships afloat.

But Henry was ill. Harris asked him what was wrong. Henry claimed that he was suffering from dyspepsia, a chronic stomach ailment that historians say was then linked to so-called “nervous” disorders. “He described to me in a vivid way,” Harris would remember, “all the horrors of that disease.”

It was late fall of 1882. Henry was 45. He had recovered from his stab wound, stayed in the Army, and, in 1867, he and Clara were finally married. They moved into an elegant 22-room home on the west side of Lafayette Square. They had three children — the eldest born on Lincoln’s birthday in 1870.

Yet Henry was plagued by mysterious medical problems. During 1869 and again in 1870 he was treated for what a doctor described as “attacks of neuralgia of the head and face and in the region of the heart attended by palpitations and at times difficulty breathing.” In December 1870, Henry abruptly retired from the Army.

Despite his ailments, he still had connections and money. And although he did not need to work, in 1877 his friends and relatives peppered the new administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes with pleas that Henry get the State Department post of charge d’ affaires in Denmark.

Two dozen letters came in from a host of backers. Civil War hero Gen. William T. Sherman, then commander of the U.S. Army, wrote. So did the famous admiral, David D. Porter, on behalf of “my esteemed friend.” Rathbone’s old Civil War commander, Burnside, praised his gallantry and intelligence, adding, “I have a great interest in his welfare and advancement.”

Yet most of the correspondence is curious for what it does not say about Henry — the one thing he might have been most known for. Of all the letters, only two mention his role at Ford’s Theatre. Had people forgotten? Was it inappropriate to mention? Was it unwise?

Despite the effort, he didn’t get the job.

There’s no account of Henry’s reaction, but his friends would tell the newspapers that over the next few years, he turned increasingly volatile. He became obsessed with the notion that Clara was going to leave him and take the children.

She was 48, and had wealth of her own. She was charming and elegant, and in photographs from around that time, she has a delicate face and a look of serenity. But her life with Henry must have been anguished, as he grew more estranged and hostile.

Shortly after his Albany visit, Henry, Clara, her sister Louise and the children, Harry, 13, Gerald, 12, and Pauline, 10, sailed from New York aboard the steamship Werra, bound for Germany. One story had it that Clara agreed to go only after Louise said she would go, too.

By December of 1883, according to a local German newspaper of the time, the five of them, along with a governess, had been living in an apartment on Heinrichstrasse in Hanover for about seven months.

Henry had become even more depressed and erratic, people would recall later. He was pale and thin, and said he was afraid of himself. He had hallucinations. His relationship with Clara had grown even more tense. He was said to be so fearful that she would leave him that he would not allow her to sit by the window or be alone. He begged her to stay with him, and around this same time, he bought a revolver.

According to most accounts, before dawn on Christmas Eve, Henry either entered or tried to enter the room where the children were sleeping. Clara, alarmed that he might harm them, maneuvered him back to the master bedroom and closed the door. There, Henry shot her several times with the gun and stabbed her in the chest with a knife, which he then turned on himself.

Hon A.A. Sargent,
US Envoy Extraordinary etc. etc.

Sir:

The Vice Consul of this district . . . informs me . . . that a terrible tragedy had occurred in the American colony in Hanover. Col. H.C. Rathbone of Washington D.C. in a fit of insanity killed his wife and wounded himself, it is thought mortally. I am at present in possession of no further particulars . . .

I am sir your obt servt

Williams C. Fox

US Consul

The note was dated Dec. 25, 1883, and was sent from the U.S. consul in Brunswick, Germany, to the chief American minister in Berlin. Word quickly spread to the United States, where it was sensational, front-page news. “COLONEL RATHBONE’S MANIA,” the New York Tribune blared. Reporters tracked down Henry’s Washington lawyer, doctor G.W. Pope, Hamilton Harris and others. Many believed Henry had never recovered from Ford’s Theatre and had a kind of Civil War post-traumatic stress syndrome. “The scene always haunted his mind,” his lawyer told the Washington Star.

Pope said: “He never was thoroughly himself after that night . . . I have no hesitation in affirming that the dreaded tragedy, which preyed upon his nervous and impressionable temperament for many years, laid the seeds of that homicidal mania.”

Louise took charge of the children and moved them into a hotel. Her brother, William, who had served with Henry during the war, arrived from his home in Cleveland. Clara was buried Dec. 28 in a plot in the city’s ornate Engesohde cemetery. Louise, William and the children returned to the United States on Feb. 4.

Consul Fox, meanwhile, visited Henry in the hospital. “He is hopelessly insane,” Fox reported. “He is suffering from the worst form of Melancholia and imagines that everyone is conspiring against him. He realizes fully what he has done and says that it is the result of a conspiracy.”

The German authorities realized Henry was mentally ill and could not be prosecuted. After he recovered from his wounds, he was sent in April to the Provincial Insane Asylum at the former monastery. There he would live for the rest of his life.

In January of 1911, a reporter working for The Washington Post visited Rathbone at the monastery and related that his suite was like a hotel’s, with its own dining room and library. Rathbone was then 73 and still looked like a man of refinement. But his doctor said that he remained very sick. He scarcely ate, was chronically paranoid and still was tormented by hallucinations. He did not have many visitors.

Henry Rathbone died at 2:15 a.m. on Aug. 14, 1911. It’s not clear what finally killed him, or what illness he’d had all that time. Was it post-traumatic stress, linked to the assassination? Or something else? Today, psychiatrists and historians say his symptoms suggest that he might have been suffering from schizophrenia or post-traumatic stress disorder. Brief obituaries ran in the papers. One headline said: “Old Soldier Had Become Mentally Deranged.”

On Nov. 20, he was buried with his wife. There was likely no fanfare. And their epitaph, if any, has been lost. Many years later, the cemetery declared the graves abandoned and made the plot available for reuse. No one knows what happened to their remains.

Among Henry’s survivors was his eldest son, Henry Riggs Rathbone, the Lincoln birthday baby. He was a 41-year-old lawyer in Chicago and would shortly become a member of the U.S. Congress.

The younger Rathbone soon became known for his devotion to the memory of Lincoln and often was a keynote speaker at Lincoln birthday events. According to the newspapers, he also spoke at Civil War commemorations, lauding the deeds of his parents’ generation, reciting the Gettysburg Address, even delivering a talk he titled “Lincoln’s Last Day.”

He often told of his parents’ presence at Ford’s Theatre, and no doubt, of the invitation, the carriage ride and the innocent witnesses to the greatest tragedy of their time. Records do not show that he ever mentioned what befell them later.

Restored Civil War flag resurrects some rebel Greys'

By Michael E. Ruane

In the summer of 1862 the men of the Caroline Greys, having suffered the rigors of the first year of the Civil War, realized that their elegant silk flag was much too fine for the campfire and battlefield.

A remarkable banner, it bore a painting of the Confederate unit in fancy dress uniforms, exquisitely rendered on the dark blue fabric. It was grand, and refined, and captured the innocence of prewar pageantry.

So that July it was left for safekeeping at Richmond’s new Spotswood Hotel. If the Greys, organized in Caroline County, Va., didn’t survive the war, perhaps their flag might.

Over the next three years, the outfit was devoured in battle at places like Antietam, Drewry’s Bluff and Dindwiddie Court House. Only 11 men of the original 70 were left to surrender at Appomattox.

Their flag fared better, as they had hoped. But it, too, was eventually defeated, by the relentless assaults of time.

Last week, after a campaign waged with tweezers, tiny erasers and a humidifying gun, Richmond’s Museum of the Confederacy returned the once-tattered flag to display for the first time in 35 years.

In so doing, conservators preserved one of the most striking banners to survive the war and resurrected the Greys, who march again as they did in 1861, watched over by a smiling angel painted on silk.

The conservation also uncovered a forgotten mystery of the flag — a strangely altered numeral — and the signature of the flag maker, George Ruskell, which had been obscured by 150 years of grime.

“We had an idea that it was really a special and unique flag,” museum curator Catherine Wright said Monday. “But it wasn’t until it was at the conservator and they went through the process of flattening and straightening it” that its real beauty was revealed.

The flag is 4 feet by 5 feet and is trimmed in gold fringe. On the “front,” or obverse side, the center of the flag bears the painted state seal of Virginia, with a female warrior, the symbol of virtue, standing over a fallen tyrant whose crown has toppled off.

The reverse side shows 36 men, most dressed in dark gray uniforms with gold buttons, white belts and old-fashioned military caps topped with red pompons. Many of the faces appear somewhat distinct, and curators wonder if some might be miniature portraits.

The group is being led by two musicians in red jackets and light blue pants and a bearded man with a sword and epaulettes who is clearly their commander.

Curators noted that the bearded figure resembles a photograph of the unit’s early commander, Robert O. Peatross.

Beneath a green ribbon that reads “Presented by the Ladies” in gold letters, the angel, reclining on a cloud, gazes down at the soldiers.

Underneath the portrait is a painted red ribbon that reads “To the Caroline Greys, May, 1861.”

Over the years, curators said, the paint on the flag had deteriorated, shrinking and curling and tearing holes in the center so that both sides looked like a jumbled jigsaw puzzle.

Its condition was so bad that the flag had never been displayed in the museum’s new building, which opened in 1976, Wright said.

The bulk of the $21,000 cost of the restoration is being paid by retired Houston businessman B. Floyd Tyson Jr., 80, who said he grew up in Richmond hearing stories of the war and of elderly Confederate veterans.

“We hold these people very dear because of the sacrifices they made,” he said Thursday. “I am so happy for the museum because it’s something that they can present to future generations.”

A hamlet’s pride

The Caroline Greys, later Company E of the 30th Virginia Infantry Regiment, got its flag on April 27, 1861, two weeks after the war began, according to a story a few days later in a Richmond newspaper.

There were about 70 men in the company, according to the report, which was filed from Ruther Glen, a hamlet north of Richmond that still feels much like it probably did in 1861.

The Greys began as a militia group; it was formed Dec. 12, 1859, in response to the abolitionist John Brown’s attempt to spark a slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry two months before, the museum said.

Peatross was one of three members of his clan to join up.

The Mason brothers, Camillus, 23, a teacher, and his brother, Francis, 19, a student, also joined. Their father was a farmer who lived in a place nearby called White Chimneys, according to census records and a history of the 30th Virginia by Robert K. Krick.

Camillus was killed at the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862. Francis was wounded there and sent home; he died in his father’s house two weeks later.

The Turner brothers of Ruther Glen — George, 22, William, 21, and Joshua, 18 — all joined the company on the same day in 1861. Joshua died of disease a few months later. William was killed at Antietam, where George was wounded.

Antietam, one of the war’s bloodiest battles, also claimed the Greys’ Thomas W. Blunt, a carpenter who was 25 at enlistment, Albert C. Dimue, 19, Louis G. Goldsby, 21, and Edwin Jackson, 25.

“Very few of the young men who left here came home,” said Susan Sili, a Caroline County historian.

Putting pieces together

When the battered flag was delivered last year to Textile Preservation Associates in Ranson, W.Va., the company’s president, Cathy L. Heffner, rejoiced.

Despite its dreadful condition, Heffner, a veteran flag conservator, realized that almost all the pieces of the crumbled painting were there — twisted, curled and fragmented, but present on pieces of the flag silk.

All she had to do was “relax” the fragments with a humidifier, flatten them, and put the pieces back together like a puzzle.

“I could tell by the amount of folding and creasing that these pieces were going to open up and that there was going to be a substantial amount of flag left,” she said. “I was really excited.”

Once reassembled, the flag was sent for cleaning to Art Care Associates, of Frederick, and painting conservator Nancy R. Pollak.

Using tweezers and a small eraser, she began meticulously cleaning each fragment, and then painting, with water colors, small paper patches to fill the few gaps.

In the process she discovered Ruskell’s name under the grime, which prompted a debate as to whether he was the painter or the flag maker, or both.

She also stumbled upon the mysterious altered numeral. On the front of the flag, which bears the motto, “Presented to the Caroline Greys, May, 1860,” Pollak noticed that the zero in 1860 and originally been a 1, as in 1861.

The 1 had been switched to change the front date to 1860, while the date on the reverse side remained 1861.

Why?

County historian Sili believes she knows: The Greys “wanted to make it clear that they had been ready to fight a year beforehand.”

Unaware of the suffering that was ahead, she said, “they were pretty hot to fight.”

Man in Civil War photo, long unidentified, finally gets his name back

By Michael E. Ruane

The old photograph shows a young Confederate soldier posing proudly in an elegant uniform, with a pistol in his belt and a saber in his hand.

It is a well-known 1860s ambrotype worth thousands of dollars, and experts had identified the rare style of his buckle, the make of his English revolver and the cavalry outfit in which he served.

But scholars at the Library of Congress, which was given the photo last year, had no idea who he was. Like scores of Civil War portraits, his was listed as “unidentified.”

Until this week.

Last Sunday, Karen Thatcher of Martinsburg, W.Va., opened a Washington Post Civil War history supplement. She spotted the picture in a Library of Congress advertisement, and realized: “That’s Uncle Dave!”

In an instant, for posterity, the soldier was given back his name — and his story.

He was David M. Thatcher, a farmer’s son from Martinsburg, who enlisted at 17 in Company B, Berkeley Troop, First Virginia Cavalry, on April 19, 1861, a week after the war began.

At 19, he was mortally wounded in battle outside Warrenton in 1863, and he was buried in the cemetery at Martinsburg’s Tuscarora Presbyterian Church, where he rests today. Family lore has it that his parents brought his body home with a horse and wagon.

The identification thrilled Karen Thatcher, a retired federal government worker, as well as the library and the collector, Tom Liljenquist, who bought the picture several years ago and donated it in October.

“We’re just tickled to death,” Thatcher said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “There’s something very satisfying about this 19-year-old boy who died in 1863 who was [listed as] unidentified . . . that we’re able to put a name to that face.”

Liljenquist, who has given the library almost 1,000 Civil War portraits in recent months, said: “I’m just awestruck. . . . This anonymous young boy has gotten his life back.”

The identification was made when Thatcher saw that the photo in the advertisement looked almost exactly like a larger image she had of David Thatcher, an ancestor of her husband, Larry.

The larger image — which was probably copied from the photograph — is a “crayon enlargement,” said Carol Johnson, the Library of Congress’s curator of photographs.

Crayon enlargement was a common 19th-century technique in which a picture was enlarged, printed and then colored in with charcoal or chalk to make a bigger portrait.

“That way, people would have something they could hang on their walls,” she said. “Since he died in the war, they probably had this made . . . as a way to remember him.”

What happened to the original photograph is less clear. “Maybe he gave it to his girlfriend before he left for the war,” Johnson said.

Eventually, someone came into possession of it and didn’t know who he was, and it went onto the collectors market.

Johnson said experts were able to glean some information about the soldier from his uniform type and accouterments — his frock coat with the lateral, braided “frogging,” his Virginia state seal belt buckle, and the crossed sabers and the number 1 on his cap.

His unit was deduced because his get-up exactly matched that in another picture of a soldier from Berkeley Troop, the experts said.

But Thatcher’s name remained elusive.

Liljenquist, of McLean, said he bought the picture years ago at a Civil War show, probably in Virginia. “It’s a well-known photograph,” he said. “It’s been published in a few books.” But no name was associated with it.

David Thatcher, it turns out, served in a storied unit that was originally commanded by the South’s legendary cavalry general J.E.B. Stuart.

David Thatcher was wounded Oct. 19, 1863, in the Battle of Buckland Mills, which was such a complete Confederate victory that the rebels called it “the Buckland Races.” He died the next day, acccording to Johnson’s research.

His tombstone reads:

When thou goest out to battle
against thine enemies, be not
afraid of them, for the Lord
thy God is with thee.

Karen Thatcher said that the Civil War is still “close” in her area and that her family, with deep roots there, has long known of the story.

“If you have a family member who dies at the age of 19 in the Civil War, everyone knows that,” she said. “And this picture was just always in the family. And so you just knew that that’s who it was.”

“My husband jokingly calls him ‘Uncle Dave,’ ” she said of the soldier, who was three generations removed — a brother of her husband’s great-grandfather.

She said she and her husband have a small prewar photograph of David Thatcher in civilian clothes attached to a certificate honoring his memory. That photo, too, resembles the other images.

She said their “crayon enlargement” was a copy of one that had been in her husband’s household when he grew up and was passed down to one of his nieces.

“It looks like a drawing of a photograph,” she said.

A history lover, Karen Thatcher said she opened The Post’s Civil War section, and staring back was an identical copy of the picture that the niece had given them.

“Except, I could tell that it was a photograph . . . not a drawing of a photograph. I thought, ‘Son of a gun.’ I thought, ‘Gee whiz.’ I thought, ‘Isn’t this amazing?’ ”

She said she went to the library’s online gallery, and “there’s Uncle Dave.”

She called the Library of Congress on Monday morning.

The library said Friday that it had already changed its master catalogue to add Thatcher’s name to the the picture’s description, and remove the word “unidentified.”

The library said it would make the change to its online gallery next week.

Invalid boy's diary focus of Library of Congress Civil War exhibit

By Michael E. Ruane

On a blazing Wednesday in July 1862, an invalid teenager from Macon, Ga., opened the journal he was keeping to make his daily entry. “Terribly hot,” he wrote. It was so hot that beads of his sweat fell onto the page.

He tried to rub them off, but they smeared the ink. Mindful of his readers, he explained, “notwithstanding we have just eaten a nice melon . . . perspiration pours off me and drops on the book.”

A century and a half later, LeRoy Wiley Gresham’s smudges still mark the page, in a kind of communion with students of his remarkable record of the Civil War, the collapse of the Old South, and the last years of his privileged but afflicted life.

It is a chronicle — in neat, legible handwriting — of the excitement of the war’s early months, the seeming endlessness of the conflict and the approach of the dreaded Yankees as they steamroll through Georgia.

From his rooftop, LeRoy sees the smoke and hears the booming of cannons in the distance. At night there is the glow from burning houses.

The Library of Congress is featuring selected pages of Gresham’s little-known diary as part of an extensive display of its voluminous Civil War material to mark the sesquicentennial of the war years.

The exhibit, which opens Monday, is called “The Civil War in America,” and includes more than 200 items — maps, song sheets, letters, photographs and the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets the night he was assassinated.

As for Gresham’s journal, numerous Civil War diaries exist, and some are famous. Those of South Carolina belle Mary Chesnut and New York lawyer George Templeton Strong are among the best known.

But Gresham’s apparently has never been published, the library said, and it offers a unique view of the war and an intimate personal story. The library acquired it in the 1980s from family descendants.

The diary also speaks about slavery and its demise — about “servants” and “valets,” always in the background and almost always referred to by first name only, Howard, Eaveline and “Mammy Dinah.”

And it is the saga, in seven volumes, of a precocious, delicate boy who was a voracious consumer of books and newspapers, but who was often confined to a special wagon that was pulled about town by slave.

Crippled by a broken left leg years before, and tormented by what sound like bedsores, and a host of other infirmities, LeRoy is exposed to a full range of Victorian remedies — opiates, whiskey, syrup of lettuce, spirits of lavender, and various powders, plasters and poultices.

Little of it works.

From his wagon, he can only watch the other children play “town ball,” a precursor to baseball. He has to be carried at times — he weighs 63 pounds — and in one case his mother drops him. He is often despondent.

“I feel more discouraged [and] less hopeful about getting well than I ever did before,” he writes on March 17, 1863, at the age of 15. “I am weaker and more helpless than I ever was.”

And on Feb. 7, 1864: “It seems to me that as I grow older, the dreary, monotonous life I lead seems more burdensome. If I just had some regular employment I could get along better.”

Occasionally he writes, “saw off my leg.”

But the war seems to sustain him, said Michelle Krowl, Civil War and Reconstruction specialist in the library’s manuscript division.

“The war is interesting, and there’s a lot for him to follow,” she said. “He only dies a few months after Lee’s surrender and not much longer after the Confederacy completely collapses.” He was 17.

He is keen observer of nature, noting comets, eclipses and the weather. He describes thunder “like the grumbling of some demon,” and a night when “it rained sweetly and musically after we went to bed.”

There are flashes of humor.

“And now dear reader, pause one moment and drop one tear over the memory of an honest, faithful cat,” he writes on June 6, 1864. “Poor kitty had one of her hard fits yesterday . . . from which she could not rally and at 6 1/2 p.m. she died . . . Requiescat in pace.”

There are adolescent doodles, entries penned in cherry juice and a fictitious battle at “Pokehistailandhewillgo.” And between two pages in June 1863 there is the elegant insect wing he probably placed there almost 150 years ago.

LeRoy is refined and courteous. He reads Dickens and Shakespeare and plays chess. He refers to his parents as Mother and Father. An old ambrotype of him shows a fair-skinned youngster with light eyes and pleasant features.

“We just fall in love with this kid,” Krowl said. “He’s so interesting, and he’s engaging, and . . . he’s legible and he’s literate and he’s all these wonderful things that you want in diarist.”

But he is a partisan Southern youth.

Abraham Lincoln is “the royal ape.” A Northern general killed in an early battle is a “red-mouthed abolitionist.” And Lincoln’s famous second inaugural address “is a hypocritical praise God barebone piece of puritanical fanaticism.”

LeRoy Gresham was born Nov. 11, 1847, the son of John Jones Gresham, who had twice been mayor of Macon, owned a manufacturing company and a plantation south of town, according to the diary and a history of Civil War Macon by Richard W. Iobst.

LeRoy had a younger sister, Minnie, and an older brother, Thomas, to whom he was very close.

At one point, “Father” buys Thomas a sparkling Confederate uniform for $500. But as the war goes badly, the elder Gresham frantically pulls strings to get him out of the trenches at Petersburg, and finally goes there himself to bring Thomas back to Macon.

‘War! Thou demon that ravishes fair countries’

The diary begins in June 1860, when LeRoy is 13.

He and his father are sailing to Philadelphia to see a renowned physician, Joseph Pancoast, about his broken leg, which seems to have never healed right and is now “drawn up.” The diary does not say how the leg was broken.

There is no resolution, and LeRoy is told to go home and remain “lying down for the summer.”

What follows is his account of the war, viewed from his fine home on College Street, as well as a look at the experience of an upper-class, slave-owning household in the 1860s.

With the fall of Fort Sumter, in April 1861, LeRoy writes: “War! Thou demon that ravishes fair countries, stay thy mad career.”

He records the great battles at Bull Run, Shiloh and Antietam. He writes of a visit from “Cousin Helen,” who is traveling north to search for the body of her husband, Col. William F. Plane, of the 6th Georgia Regiment , who had been killed at Antietam.

He notes the Emancipation Proclamation — “Lincoln has declared slaves of rebels free” — and makes no further comment.

Near the end of 1862, he writes:

“I close this record with the earnest hope that ere another Christmas is gone we may have peace and prosperity, and . . . the crisis of my disease may have passed and I may at least be released from constant confinement to a horizontal position.”

The year 1863 brings the Battle of Chancellorsville and the death by friendly fire of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. “The pride of the nation is gone,” LeRoy writes. “Dearly was the victory won at such a price.”

Then come Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, soldier funerals in Macon, and the melting down of the town’s bells to make cannon — “an altogether useless proceeding.”

As 1863 closes, he writes, “the year goes out weeping, weeping. We might well think over the blood that has been shed and the fiery trials this poor country has been called upon to undergo.”

‘The town is in a furor of excitement’

All this time Macon had been geographically distant from the front lines, but with the approach of the Union Army under Gen. William T. Sherman, things start to change.

Slaves are impressed and put to work building defenses in Atlanta. Men between 17 and 50 are liable for military service. LeRoy’s father is summoned to the militia. The town fills with wounded.

Suddenly, Yankee raiders show up outside town, and his father, taking a slave, Howard, with him, joins his company to do battle.

“Shells have fallen over this side of the river,” LeRoy writes on July 30, 1864.

“I went upon the top of the house but could only see the smoke. Every man in town is under arms. . . . We sit anxiously waiting for news, too excited to read or do anything but think of Father . . . and listen to the booming of the cannon. . . . A thousand wild rumors are afloat.”

When Yankees retreat and the elder Gresham returns home safely, LeRoy writes, “I felt so thankful to eat our supper safely and in peace again and Father with us covered with the glory of a right severe campaign.”

But inglorious events come next. On Aug. 6, 1864, he reports that one of his cousin’s slaves was hanged for “insubordination” and other slaves were “paroled” for “joining the raiders and declaring themselves free.”

The reader can fairly guess what he meant by “paroled.”

On Nov. 11, 1864, he writes, “this is my 17th birthday and I am old enough to be in the reserve forces of the C.S.A. . . . What a farce!”

With the approach of Sherman’s entire army, panic in Macon sets in.

“We do not know what to do or think,” he writes on Nov. 17, 1864. “We have no place to run to where we could be safe, and we feel awfully about it. The town is in a furor of excitement.”

His father has gone to Virginia to bring Thomas home. In his absence, his mother decides to send sister Minnie out of town for safety.

“I was never so perplexed and I determined to do all I could to settle the question of running or staying,” he writes on Nov. 18. “Mother and I will stay till further developments.”

In the end, Sherman bypasses Macon, and the emergency eases.

In February 1865, near the close of the war, LeRoy reports that a new slave has been brought from the plantation to pull him in his wagon, because his previous “valet” is “played out.”

The new slave is Gulielmus, “vulgarly termed ‘Bill,’” he writes. LeRoy takes a liking to him. “I have been trying to clothe ‘Bill’ in the garments of civilization . . . and have improved his appearance.”

April 9, 1865, brings the surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army at Appomattox, all but ending the war. But LeRoy in isolated Macon does not hear about it right away.

It is not until April 20 that he records, with “great excitement,” that the Yankees are on the outskirts of town, and as Macon is “under an armistice no resistance will be made.”

Union forces duly occupy the town, and on April 22, he writes:

“When we awoke this morning . . . it was hard to believe that we were under U.S. rule. But the clanking sabre and the tramp of the horses teaches how stern is the reality. The capitulation of Lee is believed to be true; if so, good-bye C.S.A.”

He doesn’t hear of Abraham Lincoln’s April 14 assassination until April 25, and notes it without comment.

By May, his health begins to falter, and the family’s slaves begin to leave.

“It is supposed that all the negroes will be declared free in a day or two,” he writes on May 22. Eight days later, he records that slaves “Howard and Eaveline, being the only servants now, do all the work. My ‘valet’ Bill left this morning . . . (I) am very unwell today and will miss Bill the more.”

LeRoy’s last complete entry is on June 8, 1865. “Nothing definite from Bill as yet, doubtful whether I will ever see him again,” he records.

His final entry, on June 9, is just a fragment, “I am,” followed by a word that is indecipherable.

Beneath that, in someone else’s handwriting, is written, “LeRoy Wiley Gresham, author of this diary, died in Macon. Ga. June 18th 1865.”

Civil War faces live again at Library of Congress

By Michael E. Ruane

Samuel W. Doble was 16 when he walked into Shattuck’s photo studio in Lowell, Mass., in December of 1861.

His regiment, the 12th Maine, was en route to the front, and he was Company D’s drummer. He hadn’t been in the Army long; the 12th had just been formed. And the hardship of military life had yet to take its toll on him.

So as he stood before the camera, Samuel wore his cap tilted confidently to one side and his big drum slung from a harness around his neck. He adopted a look of manly determination.

But his face was that of a child, smooth and delicate, his cheeks and lips tinted pink by the photographer afterward.

Such were many of the lads who marched away in 1861. Hundreds of them, young and not so young, are returning in an exhibit at the Library of Congress that opens April 12 in the Jefferson Building.

Titled “The Last Full Measure: Civil War Photographs from the Liljenquist Family Collection,” the exhibit features 400 haunting pictures of the average Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs who fought each other so bitterly from Bull Run to Appomattox.

There are images of men, or boys, with looks of serenity, of confidence, of innocence, as they stand before photographers to get the equivalent of a snapshot to send home to family or sweethearts, perhaps for the last time.

One photo depicts a handsome young Confederate soldier wearing a bow tie and with a watch fob. The inscription on the back says, “given to me by my Darling . . . Bobbie. Died Oct. 5th 1862.”

There are men in beards, youngsters in ill-fitting hats and guys goofing off. There are dandies and hicks, officers and privates, those who look like country boys and those who might be city kids.

They are captured in one-time-only moments from 150 years ago.

Library experts said that usually only a single image was made. It was framed in lacquered brass and placed in a special, velvet-lined case that looked like a small book, and the soldier walked out the door with the picture in his pocket.

They are “one of a kind,” said Dana Hemmenway, a conservator who examined all the photos on exhibit. “They didn’t make copies.

“It was really awe-inspiring to see them all,” she said. “Just peering into the faces . . . trying to imagine what their lives were like. Some of the faces looked very 19th century. Some of them looked extremely contemporary, like they would be somebody you’d pass walking down the street.”

Together, the photographs constitute a mosaic of the Civil War generation, which gave at least 620,000 lives in the creation of a new United States.

Here, too, are images of its children, wives, sisters and brothers, sometimes displayed with a lock of hair, a fragment of Shakespeare, a love poem, a piece of lace clutched in death on the battlefield.

Unlike Samuel Doble, whose name and particulars are scrawled on the back of his picture case and whose records the library has, most of the men in the images are unidentified.

The pictures are from the collection of the McLean jeweler Tom Liljenquist and his sons, who donated 700 glass ambrotypes and metal tintypes to the library last year. The family has been collecting the photographs for 15 years.

The exhibit is timed to coincide with the start of the national observance of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, which began 150 years ago on April 12.

Most of the photographs are small, some not much bigger than a pack of matches. They are arranged in neat rows inside glass cases in a way that almost gives the effect of a quilt.

The library is also setting up two interactive stations at the exhibit where the pictures can be uploaded onto a computer screen and then enlarged to reveal the most minute details.

The same thing can be done online at the library’s Web site.

One day last week, library experts demonstrated the system using a picture of an unidentified little girl who had been photographed holding an image of what is believed to be her deceased soldier-father.

She is about 6. Her hair is parted down the middle and combed behind her ears, and she is wearing mourning ribbons on the sleeves of her dress. She sits with her hands clasped, and stares with a look of hurt on her face.

“Look at those eyes,” Susan K. Mordan, a library education specialist, said as she enlarged the child’s face on the computer screen. “You can almost see the studio photographer reflected in her eyes.”

Along with pain. There is an urge to speak to the girl, to say, “What is that, that you’re going through?” Mordan said.

Indeed, such interaction, in a way, returns the subject to life, Hemmenway said: With viewing, the faces “are brought back and made live again.”

For better, and worse.

The drummer boy, Samuel Doble, for example, who records show stood only 5 feet tall, did not take well to soldiering in the months after his picture was taken.

Much loved by the men of Company D and watched over by his father, the company cook, he suffered from chronic diarrhea, a deadly Civil War malaise that killed many a soldier. He was sent home in the summer.

But in 1863, two years older, four inches taller, and a “veteran,” according to the records, he reenlisted in a cavalry outfit. A few weeks later, he was severely injured when his horse fell on him. Although he could no longer fire his carbine because of the pain caused by its recoil, he remained in the Army until 1865.

Doble married, got divorced after the war, remarried, and raised two sons. Troubled by his injuries much of his life, he died in San Francisco, where he had been living with one of his children, on March 6, 1925, at the age of 79.

Now, 86 years later, he lives again — heading off to war, clutching his drumsticks, and eternally 16.

Alexander Gardner: The mysteries of the Civil War's photographic giant

By Michael E. Ruane

On a fall day in 1893, an itinerant photographer began rooting through a huge collection of dust-covered glass negatives that had been stashed under the stairs of an old house on Pennsylvania Avenue.

From dingy boxes he pulled portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and George B. McClellan, stark pictures of the hanging of the Lincoln conspirators and shots of the Civil War battlefield at Antietam.

It was an astonishing find. Thirty years after the war, on the cusp of the 20th century, he had rediscovered lost work of one of the conflict’s most important and forgotten figures: the Washington photographer Alexander Gardner.

Although often overshadowed by his former employer, Mathew B. Brady, Gardner was the one who actually took many of the war’s most famous, and unsettling, pictures.

It was Gardner who took the portraits of a gaunt and exhausted Lincoln weeks before his assassination.

It was Gardner who shot the ghastly photos of the dead at Antietam — history’s first photographs, experts say, of slain Americans on a battlefield.

And it was Gardner who captured the execution of the four bound and hooded assassination conspirators in Washington in 1865.

Although Brady is known as the father of Civil War photography, it was Gardner who took so many of the pictures that have defined the event for posterity.

Gardner “took more photos than anybody else,” said Bob Zeller, president and co-founder of the Center for Civil War Photography. “Gardner’s collection is, in terms of outdoor photographs . . . the most extensive collection of Civil War photography that exists.”

When the shocking Antietam photos went on exhibit in Brady’s gallery in New York in 1862, the New York Times wrote: “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 . . . he has done something very like it.”

But Gardner had taken the pictures.

With the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the National Portrait Gallery is preparing a major exhibit on Gardner’s work.

Scheduled for 2014, it is planned as the capstone of the gallery’s commemoration of the war’s 150th anniversary, said Frank Goodyear, associate curator of photographs.

Gardner’s “life . . . is little understood,” he said. “There still is a lot of new information to be learned about who . . . [he]was and the pictures that he was taking.”

Gardner died and was buried in Washington 129 years ago this month — his career in photography past, his war over and his historic pictures of little interest to the government. His gallery at Seventh and D streets had been closed for almost a decade. And many of his negatives were scattered, sold or lost.

But fellow photographer J. Watson Porter — who had worked for Gardner as a young man years before — remembered them. In 1893, he tracked down hundreds in the old house on Pennsylvania Avenue and showed them to a newspaper reporter.

“That this collection could have been for so many years hidden and neglected in the heart of a city like Washington is remarkable,” the reporter wrote in The Washington Post. “But the collection tells its own story.”

‘Staging’ the scene

Thirty years earlier, when Gardner and his assistants Timothy O’Sullivan and James F. Gibson reached Gettysburg shortly after the terrible battle there, most of the dead soldiers were either buried or decomposing.

So when the photographers spotted the intact corpse of a young Confederate near a part of the battlefield called the Devil’s Den, they took full advantage. After shooting photos of the soldier where he had fallen, they appear to have put his body on a blanket, and lugged it to a more photogenic location, according to historian William A. Frassanito.

The photographers placed the soldier against the backdrop of a stone fortification, probably turned his head toward the camera, and leaned a rifle beside him for maximum effect.

The resulting picture, one of the war’s most memorable, was largely accepted at face value until Frassanito, in his groundbreaking 1975 study “Gettysburg: A Journey in Time,” unearthed what probably happened.

Today such “staging” of photographs is considered unethical, but Zeller, of the photography center, said 19th-century sensibilities were different.

Gardner “thought of himself . . . as an artist,” he said. “When photography was invented, it was thought that it was going to replace art.”

Thus, a photograph could be composed, just like a painting.

Besides, Gardner already knew, from his work at Antietam, that images of the dead had impact.

Photographing horrors

The year before, Gardner had been following the Union’s Army of the Potomac when it fought the Confederates at Antietam Creek on Sept. 17, 1862, in one of the deadliest battles in U.S. history.

The scene, outside Sharpsburg, Md., was horrific. The landscape was littered with dead soldiers. Along the Hagerstown turnpike, Gardner photographed clots of dead Confederates behind a wooden fence where they had been killed.

Near the tiny whitewashed Dunker Church, around which the battle had roared, he captured a tableau of dead soldiers and dead horses.

And in a place that has come to be called “Bloody Lane,” he photographed a sunken road filled with slain soldiers.

Elsewhere, he shot haunting images of a newly dug grave under a dead tree, and a grim-looking Union burial party.

In the latter, 17 weather-beaten Yankees, armed with picks and shovels, pause before a line of bodies whose graves they are digging. Off to the side, one young soldier stares back at the camera with a look of anguish in his eyes.

Such pictures, all of which were probably in the New York exhibit, had never been seen by the American public.

“Of all objects of horror, one would think the battle-field would stand preeminent,” the Times wrote. “But . . . there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures . . . chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes.”

A photo book of war

Gardner was 40 that September, and only a few years removed from his 1856 immigration from Scotland. There, he had been a jeweler, newspaper publisher and fledgling photographer, according to historian D. Mark Katz.

Gardner had gone to work for Brady, who opened an elegant Washington gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1858.

By 1861, with the start of the war, Gardner had wangled an additional appointment as chief photographer on the staff of the commanding Union general, George B. McClellan, according to Katz’s 1991 study of Gardner and his work.

He held the rank of captain, and could essentially embed with McClellan’s Army.

At some point after Antietam, Gardner and Brady parted ways, and Gardner opened his own gallery in Washington.

In 1865, with the close of hostilities, Gardner produced a compendium of his best pictures. Entitled “Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War,” it remains one of the finest photo records of the conflict.

It was pricey, for its time: $150. But it contained shots of the stone bridge at Bull Run and the Dunker Church at Antietam. There were pictures of the dead at Gettysburg and the young rebel whose body was moved. And there were pictures of the ruins of Richmond.

“As mementos of the fearful struggle through which the country has just passed,” Gardner wrote in the preface, “it is confidently hoped that . . . [these photos] will possess an enduring interest.”

An almost lost legacy

In 1869, Gardner asked Congress to purchase his photographs, describing them as national treasures, according to Katz’s history. Congress was not interested.

When Gardner died 13 years later, his estate consisted of, among other things, books, and furniture, but, apparently, no photographic material.

Some of his priceless negatives may have been sold as scrap glass, according to Katz’s study. Many were acquired by collectors, and in 1884 again offered for sale to the government. The government still was not interested.

When the 1893 cache was discovered, a Post reporter visited Gardner’s son, Lawrence, a Washington insurance executive, who said the old negatives were probably his father’s.

After that, their fate is uncertain.

In 1942, the Library of Congress acquired a trove of Gardner negatives that had been bought by a Connecticut collector and stored in a vault for a quarter century.

But it’s not clear whether the library acquisition included the 1893 discovery.

“I am completely stumped as to where this collection of negatives fits in the picture,” Zeller, the photo expert, wrote in an e-mail.

The Smithsonian said it has a few photos — apparently Gardner’s — for which there is no provenance.

And William Stapp, former curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, said some Gardner negatives have “just vanished.”

Meanwhile, as Gardner hoped, the nation has rediscovered an “enduring interest” in his work.

The Library of Congress has digitized many of his Civil War photographs. They can be viewed online in “magical” clarity, said Helena Zinkham, head of the library’s prints and photographs division.

And Zeller said a single Gardner photo of Washington, taken from the roof of the photographer’s gallery looking toward the Capitol, went up for auction late last year.

It sold for $35,000.

How Julia Ward Howe wrote "Battle Hymn of the Republic" - despite her husband

By Michael E. Ruane

Julia Ward Howe remembered years later that she had awakened around dawn in her room in Willard’s Hotel with the lyrics floating in her head. It was November 1861, and she was on her first trip to wartime Washington, with her husband and her minister.

The day before, she and thousands of others had attended a review of Union troops at Baileys Crossroads. In the traffic jam on the way back to town, she had joined in singing the new soldiers’ song, “John Brown’s Body.”

Julia, then 42, had a beautiful, finely trained mezzo-soprano voice that carried over the crowd.

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave

His soul is marching on.

“Good for you!” the soldiers called out.

Her minister, James Freeman Clarke, suggested that Howe, an accomplished poet, write better lyrics. She said she had thought about it but had not come up with anything.

Now, in the dim morning light of her hotel room, new words began to form.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

Later, looking back on the birth of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” 150 years ago this month, Julia didn’t mention her famous husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, who had funded the militant abolitionist John Brown.

She didn’t say whether Samuel was with her in the room that morning as she “sprang” from bed, grabbed a pen and scribbled the timeless verses before she could forget them.

She didn’t mention whether he was in the carriage the day before with Clarke and “several other friends.”

Indeed, if her husband was there, he might have rolled his eyes at the suggestion that his wife take on another literary endeavor.

Her writing had been one of the sources of the bitterness that had poisoned their marriage and would continue to do so until his death 15 years later, according to historians.

A dashing, bewhiskered Romantic who had just turned 60, he had fought in the Greek revolution of the 1820s, battled slavery and pioneered care for the blind in Boston.

He also worked diligently to crush his wife’s intellectual aspirations and isolate her from literary outlets for much of her life.

“I am forced to make to myself an imaginary public,” she recorded early in her marriage. “I have seen and heard only myself, talked with myself, eaten and drunk with myself . . . and condoled [grieved] with myself that I was about to be left to myself for another day. Oh cursed self. How I hate the very sight of you!”

Brilliant, ambitious and suffocated by her husband’s domination, she engaged in a stubborn domestic insurgency, defying his wishes when she could and publishing at one point an anonymous book of poems that hinted at their damaged relationship. At least one of its foolish characters seemed modeled on him.

He was enraged.

“The book . . . was a blow to him,” she wrote, after she was revealed as the author. “He has been in a very dangerous state, I think, very near insanity.”

In one of the most troubled, high-profile marriages of the time, he would badger her for divorce, and separations, and custody of some of their children, all of which she declined.

He complained about her housework. He told her he’d had affairs and, she said, made a marital civil war of long stretches of their 33-year union.

Often, the author of the battle hymn felt vanquished, and in a photograph from that period she wears an expression of one who looks lost.

“I make no opposition of will or of temper, because it would be useless,” Julia wrote her husband during one fight, according to biographer Valarie H. Ziegler. “I cannot struggle with so fierce an opponent.”

On April 23, 1865, two weeks after the close of the nation’s Civil War, she indicated in her diary that her battles continued.

“I have been married twenty two years today,” she wrote. “In the course of this time I have never known my husband to approve any act of mine. . . . Books, poems, plays, everything has been contemptible . . . in his eyes, because it was not his way of doing things.”

But he had not been able to silence her voice.

And as the nation marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War era, the intense, apocalyptic “poem” that came to her that morning in Washington has outlived the story of its author, her husband and their turbulent lives.

Song of grief and vengeance

On June 8, 1968, as the 21-car funeral train bearing the body of assassinated U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy from New York to Washington crept through Baltimore, a lone mourner in the crowd began slowly singing,Mine eyes have seen the glory . . .

Others in the throng of stricken bystanders picked up the lyrics and the melody:

Glory, glory, hallelujah

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Soon, as millions watched on television, thousands of people lining the tracks were singing Julia Ward Howe’s century-old lyrics — somehow still fitting, and comforting, as an American song of grief.

Ever since 1861, when Julia sent a copy of her poem to James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, saying, “Fields! Do you want this?” the battle hymn has been a part of American culture.

Stirring, militant and reverent, it has served many purposes, said Harvard scholar John Stauffer, who is working on a book about it.

But it was first an apocalyptic call to arms.

“This is a song of vengeance, of God’s vengeance,” Stauffer said in an interview last week.

“It’s a justification for the bloodshed . . . across the nation, and justification that will lead to this new age,” he said. “And it’s also a song that tells singers and readers that they are only acting like Christ if they vanquish their enemies.”

As he died to make men holy

Let us die to make men free.

As the war years passed, the hymn came to be embraced even in the South, said Stauffer, a professor of English and of African and African American studies. Evangelists loved it. It almost became the national anthem.

“The lyrics . . . are wonderfully abstract,” Stauffer said. “God is the main character.”

It was sung at the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 and at the Washington National Cathedral after the terrorist attacks of 2001.

And Martin Luther King Jr.’s last public address — his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech the night before his assassination — ended with “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

Stauffer said the melody has been traced to a Swedish drinking song, first heard in England and brought by Methodists into their rich musical tradition. The tune was used for a religious song, “Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us?”

With John Brown’s doomed raid on Harper’s Ferry, and then the outbreak of the Civil War, new lyrics about the abolitionist were set to the melody and then famously printed in the New York Tribune, Stauffer said.

“Shortly after that, the song is everywhere up North,” he said.

A lasting contribution

Julia, Samuel and their entourage arrived in Washington late in the fall of 1861. In her reminiscences, published in 1899, she recalled approaching the city and seeing soldiers huddled around campfires.

It was only four months after the Union’s defeat at the first Battle of Bull Run that July, and the streets were bustling with ambulances, officers and orderlies. From her hotel room, she could see a “ghastly advertisement” for a business that embalmed and forwarded the bodies of the dead.

She recalled meeting the president. “I remember well the sad expression of Mr. Lincoln’s deep blue eyes,” she wrote.

Julia was attractive; she had auburn hair and a large inheritance from her wealthy father, scholars have said.

But constricted by her circumstances, she felt that she had little to contribute to the war. “You have nothing to give, and there is nothing for you to do,” she recalled thinking.

Later, she realized that she had made a powerful contribution, “a word,” as she put it, to “strengthen the hearts of those who fought.”

The exact date of her visit to the Army review is slightly confused, although the best evidence suggests that it was the occasion of Gen. George B. McClellan’s “grand review” on Nov. 20, 1861.

Writing almost four decades later, Julia did not provide a date in her reminiscences. What is believed to be the original version of the hymn simply says “Nov. 1861.”

The sources of her inspiration may have gone beyond the striking sight of tens of thousands of Union soldiers.

“She was a very strong-willed and independent woman who was not going to wilt in front of an enemy,” Stauffer said. “Whether it was her husband, or the Confederacy, or slave owners.”

“One could easily make an argument that her ability to learn how to stand up to her husband informed her radical reform sensibility,” he said.

She was also a superb literary stylist, transforming prosaic visual images into literature.

I have seen him in the watch-fires

Of a hundred circling camps.

And she had been steeped in the Old Testament brimstone of a strict Calvinist childhood. “If you read the King James Bible over and over, you can’t help but become a good writer,” Stauffer said.

Julia Ward Howe died in 1910, still best known for one poem, despite a long literary life. But Stauffer said that in the end, that did not bother her: “She was grateful that she was still one of the most famous authors, simply because of ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ ”

Ghosts of the Union's black soldiers rise from Loudoun County's past

By Michael E. Ruane

The ghost of Dennis W. Weaver, of the 1st U.S. Colored Infantry, had to reach from his Loudoun County grave to get history’s attention.

First, it latched on to Vernon Peterson, the 81-year-old caretaker at the venerable Rock Hill Cemetery. Peterson was walking past Weaver’s tombstone one day when something stopped him cold.

“It was as if it grabbed me by the leg,” he said. The name, carved in the shape of an arch. The mysterious letters underneath. “It got to me so much I had to try to find out what it meant.”

Peterson researched Weaver’s story and told it to local historian Kevin D. Grigsby. And now the old soldier from Company D and hundreds of other black men from Loudoun who fought for freedom in the Civil War are getting their due.

Grigsby has resurrected their names and some of their stories in a book, “From Loudoun to Glory,” about the forgotten role of African Americans from the county during the war and its aftermath.

In the land of the legendary “Gray Ghost” — Confederate raider Col. John S. Mosby — Grigsby tells of the county’s intrepid black men who flocked, often from the slave cabin, to the defense of the Union.

“Yes, there was a Confederate heritage” in Loudoun, Grigsby, who lives in Leesburg, said in an interview. “But there’s also this story that’s behind the scenes of African American soldiers. People need to know the whole story.”

From rural graveyards, interviews and archives like Loudoun’s old “Register of Free Negroes,” Grigsby, 40, found the stories of men such as Weaver.

He was one of many ex-slaves and free blacks who in 1863 made their way to Roosevelt Island, then Mason’s Island, to sign up with the 1st Colored Infantry.

Weaver was about 19 that summer and was joined by other Loudoun natives or residents who signed on with the 1st — Julius Caesar, who became a sharpshooter and was wounded in battle, Abraham Mill, Claiborne Jackson and Gabriel C. Fields.

Another black Loudoun soldier was Washington Alexander, a slave who had been sold to a master in the Deep South. Newly freed, he signed up with the 49th U.S. Colored Infantry in either Louisiana or Mississippi in 1863.

He was reported missing in action in 1863 after the bitter Battle of Milliken’s Bend in Louisiana, where Southern soldiers yelled that they would take no black prisoners.

“This is a regiment that was formed straight off the plantation,” Grigsby said. “Not a lot of time for training. By all accounts they should have been slaughtered, but somehow they ended up winning.”

Daniel Lacey, another county native, served in the 11th U.S. Colored Infantry. He was involved in the Fort Pillow Massacre on April 12, 1864, where black soldiers were said to have been executed by rebels who seized the fort, Grigsby wrote.

Lacey was wounded and taken prisoner but later escaped. He managed to rejoin the remnants of his regiment, but he died of his wounds on June 22, 1864.

William Gilbert, of Waterford in Loudoun County, served in the 32nd U.S. Colored Infantry. He was killed in the lopsided Union defeat at Honey Hill, S.C., on Nov. 30, 1864.

Archibald Wright, Richard Addison, Peter Johnson and probably Wilson Gant, all of the 6th U.S. Colored Infantry, were killed in action at the Battle of New Market Heights/Chaffin’s Farm on Sept. 29 and 30, 1864. The 6th was one of 14 black regiments that fought there.

The fighting southeast of Richmond was especially bloody, and 14 African Americans received the Medal of Honor for their actions in the battle.

A few county natives made it back to Loudoun after the war and, like Weaver, made a mark on the local African American community. Of the 250 or so black Loudoun soldiers Grigsby found, fewer than 20 returned.

“I don’t want to say they lived an anonymous life,” he said. “But they just kind of settled back in. There weren’t parades or statues or monuments; they came back as victors.”

“I can’t even imagine what it was like for an African American . . . to have had that moment,” Grigsby said. “In some cases, you went from a slave to a liberator . . . to a protector and then, within so many years, you begin to see that freedom slowly peeled back and you have the rise of Jim Crow.”

“So it’s no wonder that it took all these years later to kind of start discovering, wow, we had a lot of Civil War vets who were African American here,” he added. “You have to remember you are in Virginia, and that story kind of got overlooked.”

Weaver helped found and fund the cemetery where he is buried — a crucial task for blacks in the post-slavery South, where they couldn’t be buried with whites, Grigsby wrote in his book.

Weaver “understood that having a cemetery was an important part of establishing an identity for the black communities in southwestern Loudoun County,” Grigsby wrote.

“A school, cemetery, and church were three things soon established after ex-slaves founded communities of their own . . . following the end of the Civil War,” he wrote.

Other black Loudoun veterans are buried in such cemeteries.

James Gaskins of the 39th U.S. Colored Infantry, William Taylor of the 1st U.S. Colored Infantry and Joseph Waters of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry rest in Leesburg’s Mount Zion Cemetery.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Grigsby and Peterson stood in the windblown cemetery where Weaver is buried. As the sun set, a tattered American flag flew overhead and tall evergreens swayed in the gusts.

For years, Peterson said, he had ignored Weaver’s modest tombstone etched with the cryptic “ CO.D 1 U.S.C.I.”

“I never paid any attention to it,” said Peterson, who said he has been the caretaker for 57 years. “At the time, I didn’t understand. I could read his name, but I couldn’t understand the other part of it.”

That began to change the day in the cemetery when Weaver’s spirit seemed to grab him.

“It almost had to be something like that,” Grigsby said.

Weaver and his wife had no children. “So there was no one left to take care of their graves, no one to tell their story,” he said. “So if it wasn’t for Vernon, their story would have been forgotten.”

D.C. emancipation tallied the price of freedom

By Michael E. Ruane

One of Bladen Forrest’s eight slaves was a Susan Mason, who was listed by the appraiser as “old & infirm,” and whose value was placed at zero.

Union Gen. Lorenzo Thomas claimed $800 for his slave laundress, Lucy Berry, and $100 each for her children, George and Lorenzo. But the general was allowed only $219 for Lucy and $43.80 for little Lorenzo. George had “no value.”

So it went in Washington in the spring of 1862. It was a cold accounting, the search for the price of a person.

As the question of slavery in America was being tried on the battlefield, its future in the District was resolved in April 1862 through strange and pioneering legislation that freed 3,100 slaves but paid the masters for their “property.” The slaves received no money unless they agreed to leave the country.

The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act became law on April 16 — 150 years ago Monday. It was the cause of jubilation among those whose chains it broke, and today it is celebrated in Washington on “Emancipation Day,” a city holiday.

On Wednesday, the National Archives displayed some records that detailed how many slaves were freed, how many owners applied for compensation and how much each slave was deemed to be worth.

“It was the first time the government had officially liberated any group of slaves,” said David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, and it anticipated the more famous Emancipation Proclamation by six months.

The documents offer a window into the bookkeeping of slavery and a rare glimpse into the lives of local slaves and their owners.

Assigning value was hard for the commission set up to administer the law, according to its final report. For years, slavery in Washington had been a matter of “trifling importance,” the report said, and an expert was needed.

So the commissioners brought in from Baltimore “an experienced dealer in slaves,” B.M. Campbell, to provide expert and independent opinion.

Campbell and his brother, Walter, appear to have had a prewar business trading slaves between Baltimore and New Orleans, Archives experts said, and were considered impartial judges of the value of slaves.

The new law stipulated that the government would pay masters as much as $300 for each freed slave, although, in the end, the owners were often paid much more.

The owners posted a claim and had to present their slaves for examination, Kenneth J. Winkle, a history professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, wrote on the university’s “Civil War Washington” Web site.

The Campbells — like Civil War insurance adjusters — issued their valuations. And the commission decreed what the government would pay.

Official ledger sheets detailed the accounting.

William Pressy, for example, claimed a value of $100 for James Thomas, one of his five slaves, but he was awarded $21.90. Thomas might well have been a child because $21.90 seems to be a valuation given for some slave youngsters.

Some slaves were deemed to be worth nothing. The records are dotted with notations that such and such a slave, often an infant or child, had “no val.”

The commission records present an array of Washington slave holders.

On June 2, 1862, the “Sisters of the Visitation, Georgetown,” listed a dozen slaves — including a couple and their seven children in their petition. They were allowed $3,774 in compensation.

Francis P. Blair, whose family was strongly allied with President Abraham Lincoln, and whose son, Montgomery, was Lincoln’s postmaster general, filed for compensation for two slaves.

Clark Mills, the sculptor who created the equestrian statue of President Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square and who worked on the statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome, sought compensation for 11 slaves, for whom he was allowed $1,916.25.

And Henry Hatton, one of several petitioners described in the ledgers as “colored,” sought compensation for three slaves, Martha, Henry and George Hatton, who could have been members of his family, according to Archives expert Damani Davis.

Davis said the District emancipation records are remarkable for the personal detail they provide.

Many records from other sources don’t even provide an enslaved person’s last name. Slaves are treated “as just another form of property,” he said. In contrast, the District records provide last names, physical descriptions, personal qualities and work skills.

Mills, the sculptor, for example, spoke well of his slave Philip Reid, whom he valued at $1,500. Reid was a skilled plasterer and had figured out a way to complete the problematic construction of the Freedom statue, Davis said.

Reid was “aged 42 years, mullatto color, short in stature, in good health, not prepossessing in appearance, but smart in mind, a good workman in a foundry,” Mills wrote of him.

Another owner stated that his slave had “no infirmities or defects either morally, mentally or bodily.”

The legislation was introduced by Henry Wilson, an anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts, said Clarence Davis, of the D.C. Office of Public Records.

Because of Congress’s jurisdiction over the District, northern legislators were able to pass a D.C. emancipation bill in the absence of their departed Southern brethren.

The Senate appoved the legislation on April 3 and the House on April 12. Lincoln signed the bill into law four days after the House acted.

“I am gratified that the two principles of compensation and colonization are both recognized and practically applied in the act,” Lincoln wrote Congress.

In addition to compensating owners, the bill provided for payments of as much as $100 to slaves who agreed to move to Haiti or Liberia.

This voluntary “colonization,” supported by Lincoln and others, was rejected by most blacks, and only “a handful” from Washington accepted the offer, Winkle said.

Once the legislation was enacted, most of the District’s freed slaves “immediately left their homes and sought employment from others,” the commission’s report stated. “Many of them left the District of Columbia to join the service of officers of the army, or to go north.”

Lee's surrender sword, and echoes of the Lost Cause, at new Appomattox museum

By Michael E. Ruane

APPOMATTOX, Va. — The sword’s hilt was made of ivory and gold, with a pommel shaped like a lion’s head, but as the weary, gray-haired general walked up the steps of the simple brick house here, he had never drawn it in battle.

The exquisite weapon had been made in Paris and slipped through the Union blockade. It was presented to Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1863 — a tribute to the virtuous knight of the Confederacy.

But two years later, on April 9, 1865, it seemed like the relic of a misguided dream. And as Lee sat down to await his conqueror, it was perhaps the most elegant thing left in the meager army he was about to surrender.

This weekend, the sword — encased and illuminated as if from an ancient hoard — is the centerpiece of the official opening of the Museum of the Confederacy’s new $7.5 million satellite a mile and a half from the surrender site.

It is the first of the Richmond museum’s projected three new sites designed to exhibit more of its vast artifact collection and “take the museum to the people,” said its president, S. Waite Rawls III. The other sites are near Fredericksburg and Norfolk.

“We did a detailed study of where are people who are interested in Civil War history . . . already going,” Rawls said. One answer was that more than 150,000 a year were visiting the Appomattox area.

“Appomattox is one of those words that you can say anywhere in the world and people know what you’re talking about,” he said. Like “Waterloo, Gettysburg . . . the very name rings.

“It is both an ending and a beginning,” he said. “It is certainly the metaphor for the end of the Civil War. . . . It was very much the beginning of the modern United States of America.”

The opening of the eight-acre site comes as the nation marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War years 1861-1865.

Lee’s sword is inscribed in French on one side of the blade, “Help thyself, and God will help thee,” the museum said. The inscription on the other side reads: “Genl. Robert. E. Lee. C.S.A. from a marylander. 1863.”

The sword was bequeathed to the museum in 1982. No one seems to know who the Marylander was.

It is one of scores of artifacts on display related to the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, to the months leading up to the capitulation, and to the years after the event, which effectively brought an end to the Civil War.

They include two dozen uniforms — some moth-eaten and tattered, others on special mounts, looking as if their owners might be back in a minute to slip them on again.

“You open those things up and they look like they just came off the rack,” said museum spokesman Sam Craghead.

The elegant gray uniform coat Lee wore when he surrendered to begrimed, cigar-smoking Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is there.

So is that of Confederate Gen. William N. Pendleton, the Episcopal priest and artillery commander to whom other rebel officers delegated the task of urging Lee to surrender.

The gray-bearded Pendleton, who was often mistaken for Lee, had lost his son, “Sandie,” in battle only six months before. Sandie’s uniform coat, which was said to be hidden in upholstery to keep it from the Yankees, is there, too.

Several garments still bear the bullet holes indicating the death or wounding of the wearer.

A child’s “sack coat,” made from the uniform of the toddler’s father, shows how some impoverished Southerners made do after the war, said museum curator Catherine Wright.

Also in the display cases are Confederate flags said to have been surrendered at Appomattox, and their flagstaffs — often just long tree branches.

The new museum has an interactive, touch-screen “wall of faces,” featuring people of those times whose backgrounds can be viewed by tapping the screen, as well as a copy of Lee’s death mask.

The surrender came after four years of increasingly savage civil war and an estimated 600,000 deaths from battle and disease. That was 2 percent of the U.S. population, the equivalent of 6 million deaths today, historians have said.

In the final campaign, Grant, with about 63,000 men, had driven Lee’s estimated 30,000 men from entrenchments around Petersburg, Va., on April 2, according to the National Park Service.

Over the next week, the Union army chased down and, with the help of seven regiments of black troops, trapped the dwindling Confederate force near Appomattox Court House, 90 miles west of Richmond.

After an exchange of notes between Lee and Grant, Lee recognized the hopelessness of his situation and met Grant on Palm Sunday in the home of Wilmer McLean, on the old Richmond-Lynchburg Stage road.

McLean, a slave owner and sugar speculator, had recently moved his family from its plantation in Manassas to the former tavern in Appomattox to escape the war and ease his business dealings, said National Park Service historian Patrick A. Schroeder.

A slave cabin sat in McLean’s backyard, clearly visible out the window of the room where Lee sat down to await Grant.

Although it’s not known whether any of McLean’s 18 slaves observed the event, Schroeder said, Appomattox County had more slaves than whites, according to the 1860 Census.

And the lone civilian killed in the final fighting on April 9 was Hannah Reynolds, a slave.

Lee, whose son, Custis, had been captured three days before, came to the meeting in an immaculate uniform, boots, spurs and buckskin gloves, Horace Porter, an aide to Grant, wrote later.

Lee arrived with his aide, Col. Charles Marshall, a bespectacled lawyer and former college mathematics teacher who borrowed a sword, gauntlets and a clean shirt collar to look presentable.

They had to wait half an hour for Grant to show up with a small entourage that included Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert, who was an officer on Grant’s staff. (Robert later recounted the scene to his father over breakfast on the day of the president’s assassination.)

The meeting at the McLean house was amiable, businesslike and one of the most remarkable surrenders in military history. No reparations were demanded. No hostages were taken. No one was imprisoned.

Grant agreed to feed Lee’s starving army, and he ordered his men to stop celebratory cannon firing. Lee did not offer, and Grant did not demand, the beautiful sword.

The next day the officers of the two armies mingled at McLean’s house.

They “seemed to enjoy the meeting . . . as though they had been friends separated for a long time while fighting battles under the same flag,” Grant wrote in his memoirs. “For the time being it looked . . . as if all thought of the war had escaped their minds.”

It had not, of course, and the name Appomattox would echo, for better and worse, across 15 decades of American history.

“It’s one of the great turning points, if not the great turning point, in American history,” said Wright, the museum curator. It is “when we kind of decided once and for all exactly what that means when we say, ‘liberty and justice for all.’ ”

Faces of the Civil War, staring out across the decades

By Michael E. Ruane

A Virginia collector has donated to the Library of Congress the largest trove of Civil War-era photographs depicting average soldiers that the institution has received in at least 50 years, officials said last week.

The stunning photographs - small, elegant ambrotypes and tintypes - show hundreds of the young men who fought and died in the war, often portrayed in the innocence and idealism before the experience of battle.

The pictures, almost 700 in all, make up the bulk of the collection of Tom Liljenquist, 58, of McLean, who operates a chain of Washington area jewelry stores and with his sons has been buying Civil War photographs for 15 years.

The images show the striking youth of the soldiers of the 1860s. Many seem barely out of boyhood and too young for the trials ahead of them. Yet, as Liljenquist remarked last week, they became saviors of the nation.

The donation comes on the eve of the war’s sesquicentennial next year, and the library plans a major exhibition of the photos in April, on the 150th anniversary of start of the war.

But most of the images have been digitized and are available online.

“This is an amazing gift of Civil War material,” said Carol M. Johnson, curator of photography in the library’s prints and photographs division. “A landmark gift.”

Liljenquist, whose name is pronounced “Lily-en-quist,” said his family donated the images to make them available to posterity, free of restrictions. And when “they digitize the photos,” he said, “that photograph will look exactly that way 20,000 years from now.”

Most of the pictures are of Union soldiers. But there are also several dozen Confederates. There are no generals or politicians, and most of the Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs portrayed are unidentified.

There are also rare photos of African American soldiers, as well as women and children.

One moving photograph shows a young boy wearing a checkered shirt and sitting in a wooden chair, his thumb hooked in the pocket of a jacket that has rows of bright buttons.

He’s a fair-skinned child, and there was a lock of blond hair tucked behind the keepsake, dated from the 1850s. Also hidden behind the photo was a folded note, with a haunting message from the past.

“My beloved son Carl,” it read. “Taken from me on April 1, 1865 at age 18.” He’d been killed in the fighting at Dinwiddie Courthouse, days before the Civil War ended, the writer said: “Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

The identity of the boy is not known. Nor is that of his bereaved parent, although he or she knew Shakespeare, as the closing quote is from “Hamlet.”

But such anonymity confers a certain mystery and allows the viewer to imagine each subject’s life, Liljenquist said at the library last week.

A story in a stare

A picture of a sad-eyed little girl wearing mourning ribbons on her dress as she holds a photo of her dead soldier father in her lap seems a saga. She is wearing a necklace and sits with clasped hands as she stares wearily into the camera over the distance of a century and a half.

The striking ambrotype of the African American Union soldier posing with his wife and two daughters cost Liljenquist $19,200, but it reminded his sons of a family now in the White House. Did that soldier, they wondered, ever fathom such an event?

“I think it’s one of the most important photographs taken during the American Civil War,” the collector said. “It’s the only one that we know of of a black soldier and his family.”

There are numerous photos of soldiers who look like boys - in hats too large, collars too big.

There is confidence, determination and beauty in their faces. They don’t seem to be faces yet etched by the sights of Fredericksburg, Gettysburg or Spotsylvania.

One serene young Union soldier with the visage of a teenager holds his musket with the large hands of a man. His name is not known. Did he live, marry, have children and grandchildren? What parents, wife, descendants perhaps gazed at his likeness, with pride or heartbreak?

Some facts are known about some of the subjects.

The fresh-faced Cpl. Alvin B. Williams, of the 11th New Hampshire regiment, is pictured standing with his musket, in full uniform with his cap brim turned up - the picture of a jaunty Union infantryman.

Eighteen when he enlisted in 1862, he was killed at Spotsylvania on May 12, 1864.

Another Union soldier, Freeman Mason, of the 17th Vermont regiment, was photographed holding a picture showing his brother, Michael, who was killed at the Battle of Savage’s Station in 1862. Freeman Mason, himself, died in 1865.

One photograph shows a young Union soldier sitting beside a woman, who might be his wife or sister. Their names are not known. But the soldier’s hat indicates that he was with the battle-hardened 86th New York infantry regiment, which lost scores of men at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and Spotsylvania.

Another shot identifies its youthful subject as Confederate Pvt. W.T. Harbison, of the 11th North Carolina regiment. He has light-colored eyes and short hair, and he looks like a high school senior. His regiment is said to have lost half its 600 men at Gettysburg.

A sense of kinship

Liljenquist said he became fascinated with the photographs after he bought one in a shop in Ellicott City. “I was just impressed by the sincerity of the soldier’s look,” he said. “I felt like I had really picked up a piece of history . . . I felt a real kinship.”

Liljenquist, who was reared in Northern Virginia and is the president of Liljenquist & Beckstead Jewelers, said he grew up steeped in the region’s Civil War history.

He, and later his sons, Jason, 19, Brandon, 17, and Christian, 13, assembled the collection methodically, he said.

They went to memorabilia shows as far away as Tennessee, networked with dealers, and made purchases on eBay. Some pictures cost a hundred dollars; others thousands.

They wanted images that resonated with them, pictures that for one reason or another made them say, “Wow,” he said. “We looked for compelling faces that seemed to be saying something across time to us.”

The photos, many which fit in the palm of a hand, are on glass - an ambrotype; or metal - a tintype.

Most were probably taken by local photographers before a soldier was sent to the front or by itinerant photographers who set up a mobile studio at a regimental encampment, said Johnson, the library curator.

In the past 50 years, the library, which has many photos of famous Civil War figures, had acquired only about three dozen photographs of average soldiers, she said.

“This fills that gap completely,” she said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

U.S. Grant: History’s incredible shrinking man

U.S. Grant was the great hero of the Civil War but lost favor with historians

By Joel Achenbach

The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial is the Lost Monument of Washington. It might as well be invisible. No one knows it’s there.

Its location is actually spectacular, right at the foot of Capitol Hill, at the opening to the Mall. The memorial features one of the largest equestrian statues in the world, set on a platform 250 feet wide, with ancillary sculptures that are heaving with action and drama. Grant is, appropriately, the calm man at the center of the storm. He stares fixedly down the Mall toward Lincoln in his memorial. His horse is so passive-looking it appears to be waiting for someone to insert a quarter.

Washington is full of statues to Civil War heroes whose achievements have been largely forgotten. Logan. Thomas. Sheridan. Scott. Farragut. McPherson. But at least these folks are surrounded by pedestrians and motorists.

Grant, huge as he is, is dwarfed by the Capitol and is flanked by lots with signs reading “Permit Parking Only.” The oceanic Capitol Reflecting Pool was built in 1971 as if to block Grant from charging onto the Mall. The memorial is a hike from the museums, Union Station or any Metro stop. Tour buses stop nearby, but everyone walks toward the Capitol — except groups that pose on the steps of the memorial because it offers an excellent spot to capture the Capitol as a backdrop. Grant is left out of the frame.

One hundred and fifty years ago this spring, Ulysses S. Grant took command of all the armies of the United States. He developed a grand strategy to defeat the Confederacy and ultimately, with much struggle, succeeded. As much as any person not named Abraham Lincoln, Grant saved the Union. He went on to serve two terms as president and write some of the most celebrated memoirs in the history of American letters.

More than 1 million people, and possibly as many as 1.5 million, attended his funeral procession in New York in 1885 on a national day of mourning.

A million people attended the dedication of his tomb on the northern tip of Manhattan in 1897.

And then the veterans of the war died off, and the populace as a whole largely forgot why they had once revered the little man from Ohio.

When Groucho Marx asked on his 1950s TV quiz show, “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?,” he was just being silly (no one is actually buried there — the remains of the 18th president and his wife, Julia, are in sarcophagi). But by then the tomb was no longer one of the most visited sites in New York. It had fallen into disrepair, marred by graffiti and vandalism. That matched the decline in Grant’s reputation among historians.

Many ranked him among the very worst presidents. They maligned his military prowess. The “Lost Cause” interpretation of the war, created by the Confederate generation and later adopted by such influential historians as Douglas Southall Freeman, portrayed Southern commanders as chivalrous aristocrats waging a noble war against the industrialized and more populous North. They heaped praise on Robert E. Lee at the expense of the man to whom Lee surrendered.

Grant has been on the $50 bill for 101 years, but even there he’s an outlier — because how often do you see a fifty?

“Grant has been forgotten. And I don’t know that it’s ever going to change that dramatically,” said Joan Waugh, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of “U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth.”

Her book is among a number of favorable reassessments of Grant. Additional biographies are forthcoming from such acclaimed historians as Ronald C. White Jr. and Ron Chernow. Lee’s reputation has suffered in recent decades, while Grant’s has been gradually rehabilitated. Even if this is so, Waugh writes, his reputation in popular culture is that of a “drunken butcher” (he was periodically a heavy drinker and, yes, many soldiers died because of his straight-ahead style of warfare) and “worst president.”

Something about Grant got lost over time, which is why, when Waugh would eat her lunch at the Grant Memorial while researching her book, she would often hear people say as they looked up at the horseman, “Who’s that guy?”

Named by accident

Hiram Ulysses Grant, the son of a tanner, was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, on April 27, 1822. When a congressman nominated the teenage Grant to West Point, he mistakenly wrote the boy’s name down as Ulysses S. Grant, which stuck. At West Point, Grant proved to be an average student. He was an excellent horseman and fought with distinction in the Mexican War.

Rough times followed. Military duty often separated him from his wife, with whom he would raise four children. After serving at a lonely outpost on the California coast and struggling with alcohol, he resigned from the army and bounced around for a few years, trying his hand at farming and winding up working in his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Ill.

Then the war came.

“He had unknown qualities that were just waiting for an opportunity to be revealed,” said Steve Laise, chief of cultural resources for the National Park Service’s New York City sites, including Grant’s Tomb.

He racked up victories in the West, including at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga. He earned his nickname, “Unconditional Surrender Grant,” at Fort Donelson in Tennessee when the opposing commander asked for terms of capitulation and he replied, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

He added stars to his shoulders until finally, in March 1864, Lincoln elevated him to lieutenant general, the first officer to be promoted to that rank since George Washington. Grant would now be general in chief.

He was no majestic figure like Washington. Grant was 5 feet 8 inches tall, not quite 140 pounds, slouchy, rough-looking, and handsome only in the renderings of artists. People noticed his steely gaze and headlong way of walking.

One Union officer famously wrote that Grant “habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.”

In the Army of Northern Virginia, the rebel general James Longstreet, who knew Grant well from their military adventures long before the great rupture, knew what was coming: “That man will fight us every day and every hour ’til the end of the war.”

At photographer Mathew Brady’s studio, an assistant to Brady fell partway through a skylight and showered potentially lethal glass shards all over the floor next to Grant, who had been sitting for a portrait. Grant barely flinched. He was almost superhumanly imperturbable. He was the kind of man who did not seem to hear the shrieking of the world.

“I think his secret was his utter unflappability and his ability to keep his eye on the ball no matter what else was going on,” said Gary W. Gallagher, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of numerous books about the war.

That’s what the Union would need in the painful spring and summer of 1864, which Gallagher calls the low point of the war for the U.S. government because civilian morale had plummeted. All eyes were on the coming presidential election. The Democrats were angling to nominate Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, who ran as a War Democrat but whose party’s platform called for a negotiated peace with the Confederacy that could permit the survival of slavery.

Against this backdrop, the Confederacy didn’t need to defeat the Union forces; it needed merely to hang on. The Union’s will to fight might well succumb to exhaustion.

Lincoln and Grant both understood this.

Grant had planned to return to the West, but the public was clamoring for him to face Lee head-on. Half a dozen Union offensives in Virginia had already failed, and although from a purely military perspective the war in the West was just as important, the Eastern theater produced the greatest political reverberations.

Grant decided to attach himself to the Army of the Potomac, which, while officially commanded by Maj. Gen. George Meade, became in the public’s mind and for practical purposes “Grant’s Army.”

His broad strategy called for simultaneous advances on Confederate positions from multiple angles. Grant would press upon Lee directly over land from the north, while other forces would move up the James River and in the Shenandoah Valley. Advancing in the West were multiple Union armies, including one under the command of Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who had his eye on Atlanta. Grant knew that if he fully occupied Lee’s army, Lee could not send reinforcements to the rebels trying to halt Sherman’s march through the heart of the Confederacy.

On May 4, the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River, heading south. So began what came to be known as the Overland Campaign. Grant’s goal was to fight Lee’s army, destroy it and march on to Richmond.

As Grant wrote in his memoirs, “This was not to be accomplished, however, without as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed; not to be consummated in a day, a week, a month, single season… . We had to have hard fighting to achieve this. The two armies had been confronting each other so long, without any decisive result, that they hardly knew which could whip.”

Virtues of obstinateness

The key moment came early in the campaign. As soon as Grant’s army had crossed the river, and as his men moved through a forest dense with underbrush known as the Wilderness, Lee pressed the attack. Lee was outnumbered nearly 2-1 and did not want to let the battle get onto open ground. The rebels charged and the woods quickly filled with smoke. Wounded men were immolated as fire swept through the forest. The Battle of the Wilderness proved to be a ghastly two-day affair that prefigured more horrors to come.

At the end of the battle, the Army of the Potomac had 18,000 casualties, and it looked like another defeat in Virginia. But when Grant rode his horse to a crossroads, he turned south, not north.

His men let out a cheer. Grant would not retreat back toward Washington as so many other generals had done after previous battles. He pressed on, toward Spotsylvania Court House.

The history books tell of discrete battles at Spotsylvania, North Anna and Cold Harbor, but in fact this became a single 40-day, meat-grinder engagement with barely a quiet interlude long enough to pick up the bodies on the battlefield.

Grant’s one grave error was ordering an assault on fortified rebel positions at Cold Harbor, and he forever regretted it. After that bloodbath, Lincoln wrote, “It can almost be said that the ‘heavens are hung in black.’”

In the words of Confederate commander Evander Law, “It was not war, it was murder.”

The critics called Grant a butcher. None other than Mary Lincoln used the term after Cold Harbor. She called Grant an “obstinate fool.”

Lee assumed that Grant would gather strength for another charge at his main line, but Grant slyly slipped away south, sneaking the bulk of his army across the James and advancing to Petersburg. He hoped to cut the supply lines from the south leading into Richmond, but his men were too slow and too exhausted, too frazzled by six weeks of unrelenting combat, to take advantage of their numerical advantage. Lee reinforced Petersburg and the two sides dug in for what would become a 10-month siege. This became trench warfare.

It looked bad for Lincoln and Grant. The prize of Richmond had not been seized and Lee remained in the field. Sherman in the West had yet to reach Atlanta. The Confederate general Jubal Early staged a raid on the nation’s capital, reaching Silver Spring, so close to the White House that Lincoln himself ventured (a bit recklessly) to the front line to see his first Civil War battle up close. Early was driven back, but this hardly seemed a season of triumph for the Union cause. Lincoln’s reelection looked increasingly unlikely.

Everything that happened in the spring and summer of 1864 proved the adage of Clausewitz that war is politics by other means. The events also showed that war is a contest of wills. Battlefield victories and the occupation of territory do not necessarily yield what you need, which is capitulation.

But in the darkest days for Lincoln and the Union cause, Grant’s strategy finally paid off. On Sept. 2, Sherman marched into Atlanta, bearing his chilling message, “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.” The news of Atlanta’s capture reversed public opinion in the North about the war.

Now came the endgame — Sherman’s march to the sea, Gen. Philip Sheridan’s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley and the tightening noose on Lee in Virginia. Lincoln would win reelection; the war’s duration would be measured in months.

It is not reckless to guess that without Grant’s bullheaded determination, the story of the Civil War would have played out differently, perhaps ending with the inauguration of President George B. McClellan and the perpetuation of slavery.

A reluctant president

Grant got a fourth star, and as the embodiment of the Union he almost inexorably followed the path to the White House. He was not eager to be president nor particularly adept at the job. His presidency was troubled by scandals among his aides and appointees and sectional strife over Reconstruction. He won a second term, handily, and in his second inaugural address said, “I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history, which today I feel that I can afford to disregard in view of your verdict.”

Soon thereafter came the Panic of ’73, a deep depression, the takeover of Congress by Democrats and the disintegration of Reconstruction.

Grant’s admirers note many accomplishments: He pushed for passage of the 15th Amendment giving male African Americans the vote, sent federal troops to fight the Ku Klux Klan and reformed the government’s Indian policy.

In his farewell address, Grant said, “It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of Chief Executive without previous political training. … Mistakes have been made, as all can see, and I admit.”

He told a reporter, “I was never as happy in my life as the day I left the White House.”

Still just 55, he spent two years on a world tour amid adoring throngs. He visited Europe, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, China and Japan.

As Waugh recounts in her book, the German leader Otto von Bismarck said to Grant that it was a shame that the United States had to endure so terrible a war. Grant answered, “But it had to be done.”

Bismarck: “Yes, you had to save the Union.”

Grant: “Not only save the Union, but destroy slavery.”

He finally returned home, arriving in San Francisco to a parade and fireworks. About 350,000 people honored him with a parade in Philadelphia. Then he lost almost everything in a financial swindle. He wrote magazine articles for money and decided to write his autobiography. (Mark Twain’s new company published the two volumes, offering an excellent royalty arrangement, but Twain did not, as some mistakenly think, write a word of the memoirs.)

The historian White notes, “He had a remarkable ability to use strong verbs, which are action words, and the ability not to use adjectives and almost no adverbs.” On the battlefield, White said, “those who received the orders knew exactly what they were supposed to do. This is no small thing.”

Grant raced to finish the memoirs before throat cancer could silence him. The country learned of his grave illness and followed daily reports of his condition. He finished just in time, and the memoirs were hugely popular. He died July 23, 1885, at the age of 63.

Frederick Douglass eulogized Grant as “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”

Waugh’s book on Grant recounts a scene in the 1936 Frank Capra movie, “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” in which the protagonist, Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), visits Grant’s Tomb.

A cynical newspaper reporter asks him what he sees.

He answers, “I see a small Ohio farm boy becoming a great soldier. I see thousands of marching men. I see General Lee with a broken heart, surrendering, and I can see the beginning of a new nation, like Abraham Lincoln said. And I can see that Ohio boy being inaugurated as president. Things like that can only happen in a country like America.”

In 2013, according to the National Park Service, 83,400 people visited Grant’s Tomb, a drop of 9,000 from the previous year.

At Battle of the Crater, black troops prove their courage

By William Forstchen and Newt Gingrich

Spring 1864. Our nation, divided into warring halves, was entering the fourth year of bloody civil war. Nearly half a million had given the last full measure of devotion in battles such as Shiloh, Second Manassas, Antietam and Gettysburg, or in the fever-ridden hospitals that were more dangerous than any battlefield.

It is nearly impossible to put a modern perspective on the level of suffering and loss in a conflict that is too often romanticized, or play-acted before cheering audiences at “reenactments” on sunlit weekends. But here is one statistic to contemplate: America was a nation of approximately 30 million souls when the conflict started. Today we number over 310 million. Imagine us trapped in a conflict, entering its fourth year, with over 5 million dead, 5 million maimed and in hospitals, another million languishing in the squalor of prison camps, a million addicted to drugs and far more suffering from post-traumatic stress, not to mention property damage into the trillions. And no end in sight.

This was the harsh face of our Civil War in the spring of 1864. By June of that fateful summer, the newspapers were reporting more than 2,000 casualties a day, a loss rate higher than that of the Battle of the Bulge 80 years later.

The Northern offensive to take Richmond stalled in the fetid trenches in front of Petersburg, Va., where the hard-bitten veterans of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee had fought Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac to a standstill. Union troops refused to try yet more futile frontal assaults after debacles such as Cold Harbor, where nearly 7,000 men fell in a single charge lasting little more than 20 minutes on June 3, 1864. Morale was shot — except for one group of recruits who were now putting on the Union blue.

A year earlier, as recruitments to “fill the vacant ranks” all but dried up in the face of the daily casualty rolls, one group cried out to step forward, claiming that this was indeed their war as well. A spokesman declared that once such men held a musket in hand, wore the Union blue and had on their hips a cartridge box stamped “U.S.,” he defied any power on earth to deny their right to full citizenship. Men of African descent, free-born or escaped slave in the North and slave in the South, came forward to pick up the tottering banner of the Union cause. Nearly 200,000 would serve by war’s end.

With the Army of the Potomac locked in siege warfare in front of Richmond and Petersburg, one of the few generals eager to accept the men designated as the U.S. Colored Troops was the eccentric Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, who commanded the XI Corps. New black troops became his fourth division. Stuck on the toughest part of the siege lines, some of Burnside’s men had conceived a daring plan that Burnside believed would not just win a battle but perhaps even end the war in one gallant rush.

The plan was ingenious. Three bitter years of experience had taught the veterans of both sides that to storm trench works and fortifications was a bloody exercise in futility. This plan offered a forlorn hope. A 500-foot tunnel would be dug under the Rebel lines that blocked the Union advance into Petersburg. The tunnel would be packed with explosives. Detonation would blow a gap in the enemy line 200 yards wide and sow panic for hundreds of yards more in either direction. Timing in the minutes after the explosion would be everything. A lead division of 4,000 men would sprint forward even before the debris had rained down, storm around the giant crater left by the blast, seize the heights behind the shattered enemy line, then push straight into downtown Petersburg, taking the railroad yards.

If they could accomplish that within the first hour, Burnside’s troops would cut General Lee’s army in half, pinning them to the banks of the Appomattox River, seizing their supplies and cutting off Richmond, the Confederate capital, from nearly all rail connection to the South. The plan required dash, bold leadership and troops with the nerve to face the challenge.

Tragically, only the last element was in place, and even that disappeared in the opening minutes of the battle.

History records the event as the Battle of the Crater. It is not an action recalled alongside Gettysburg, Antietam and Shiloh — battles that, grim and terrible as they were, carry with them a memory of honor and, for some, even a dash of glory. Read about the Battle of the Crater and you soon sense that you are looking into a darker realm of warfare.

When Burnside accepted the division of African American troops into his formation, he tasked them with leading the assault, which was planned to take place within a month. To a man, white officers and black enlisted troops embraced the challenge and — unique in Civil War battles — trained extensively for this one mission. They saw it as a chance to prove their mettle to the world, and many speculated that perhaps here they would win the war and a glorious place in history.

And then, less than a day before the action, Burnside’s superior, Maj. Gen. George Meade, ordered a complete shake-up of the order of attack, pulling the “colored” division out of the front ranks and placing it in a reserve position. He stated that he did not want to be blamed for a “massacre” of colored troops. A weak argument, indeed, when nearly any assault during the Civil War, by modern definitions, was little better than a massacre. Many speculate that Meade made this fateful decision so that if the assault did succeed it would be white troops who gained the glory. Some historians go so far as to argue that the politics of the Army of the Potomac were so poisonous that Meade made the fateful decision because he did not want the acclaim to go to Burnside, a hated rival.

The decision doomed the attack before it was launched. By analogy, imagine if, on the evening of June 5, 1944, Eisenhower had thrown a tirade at Omar Bradley, denounced the plan of battle and ordered the lead assault waves destined for Normandy’s Omaha Beach to be replaced with troops who had not been trained and were clueless about their mission.

Beyond the rearranging of the order of attack, no proper orders were given to the units sent in as replacements, equipment was not issued, and the wrong types of fuses and only half the powder requested was sent forward for the tunnel. At least two generals in command would later be found drunk in rear-line bunkers while their men were slaughtered.

What ensued on July 30, 1864, at the Battle of the Crater was one of the most mismanaged tragedies of the war. The assault waves that did go in, leaderless and without orders, sought safety in the massive crater left by the explosion rather than pushing forward, thus giving Lee precious time to organize a defense and seal the breach. The brave men of the colored division watched with helpless rage and frustration as the chance to win an overwhelming victory was tossed away. In a final suicidal bid, they were ordered in anyway. Never in American military history have men gone forward into an attack that was so preordained to bloody failure. Yet they did go forward, and more than half were killed, wounded or captured in that last useless gesture.

Perhaps the darker horror of it all was what transpired behind the lines. Meade and Burnside turned on each other with bitter recriminations and accusations even while the battle still raged, any hope of rational command collapsed. In the weeks after the tragedy, a court inquiry was convened. Even the most unbiased readers today would find its conclusions a coverup full of blame-shifting — something that reads more like current events than we might expect.

The months ahead mark the 150th anniversary of some of the most bitterly fought battles of that tragic war — the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Peachtree Creek and the Crater. Memory of the Crater should stand at the forefront for a number of reasons. While it was an unmitigated tragedy of a fight and a lost opportunity to end the war perhaps nine months earlier than it finally concluded, there is something worthy in that action. The men of the 4th Division, IX Corps, 4,000 strong, who went forward that day were but months earlier either slaves or “freemen,” who in nearly every state held no true rights of citizenship. Yet they rose to the cause. They believed the promise of Frederick Douglass that with rifle in hand and in Army blue, they would forever win full citizenship for themselves and their descendants. For each, it was an act of noble idealism to believe this, to believe the words of a solemn man who at Gettysburg declared that this war was a struggle for that most fundamental declaration that “all men are created equal.” Few recall these men now, and even fewer know their names.

But in remembering them, and honoring all those who gave the last full measure of devotion on July 30, 1864, we can see today, 150 years later, that they did not die in vain.

William R. Forstchen, a faculty fellow in history at Montreat College in North Carolina, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation about the 28th U.S. Colored Troops, one of the regiments decimated at the Battle of the Crater. Newt Gingrich is the former speaker of the House of Representatives and a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire.” They are co-authors of “To Make Men Free,” a novel about the Battle of the Crater.

Arlington National Cemetery, and the fight over Robert E. Lee's home

By Linda Wheeler

Union Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs detested Robert E. Lee, who had once been his friend and mentor, even his idol. Once Lee defected to the Confederate side, Meigs turned against him with a vengeance.

Because of that dynamic, today we have Arlington National Cemetery.

As quartermaster general and close adviser to Lincoln, Meigs was often consulted on matters of logistics. When the need arose for a new military cemetery, he recommended Arlington House — which was owned by Lee’s wife, Mary. The military was already occupying the estate, and it was conveniently close to Washington. It also offered the opportunity to make sure the Lees would never want to return to their home.

As the tombstones began to fill the long sloping hill in front of the house, Meigs announced that he was “grimly satisfied.” But then he inflicted one more wound: He ordered that bodies be buried in Mary Lee’s much-prized rose garden, right next to the mansion. When that didn’t happen fast enough, he personally drew the lines for several graves and directed the excavations.

The mansion

George Washington Parke Custis built Arlington House atop the highest point of land on his 1,100-acre estate, across the river from the capital. Custis, a wealthy man and George Washington’s adopted grandson, who had inherited several plantations and hundreds of slaves, intended his home to be conspicuous. He achieved his goal: a 140-foot-wide house with eight 23-foot-tall columns on the portico that was then, and remains, visible from across the Potomac River in Washington.

Custis carved an English-style park out of the 200-acre parcel of woods that faced Washington. Bridle and walking trails wound through the cultivated meadows and grassy lawns, anchored by groves of oaks and chestnuts. Stone benches gave visitors a place to rest and admire the view.

It was in the Arlington House parlor that Custis’s daughter, Mary Anna, wed Lt. Robert E. Lee in 1831. Although the couple moved often with each new posting, Arlington House was always home to them. Six of their seven children were born there.

When her parents died, Mary Lee inherited the estate in 1857. Robert Lee took time off from the Army to make repairs and improvements to the house and grounds.

Arlington House was a happy place for the large family, which entertained as many as a dozen visitors a day. That ended unexpectedly when Lee decided to resign his commission in the U.S. Army in 1861 and join the Confederate military.

From Richmond, Lee wrote his wife telling her that she and the family had to pack up and leave quickly, that they were not safe. “War is inevitable, and there is no telling when it will burst around you,” he wrote. “You have to move and make arrangements to go to some point of safety which you must select. … Keep quiet while you remain.”

Mary Lee could not imagine leaving the family home where she had lived most of her life. She kept telling her children that she would not leave — right up until a friend of her daughter’s raced into the house from the capital and said Union troops were getting ready to seize the place.

She lingered a few more days, walking in her rose garden and admiring the view. She told her husband in a letter, “The yellow jasmine is in full bloom and perfuming the air, but a death like stillness prevails everywhere.”

Finally she handed the house keys to her personal slave, Selina Grey, and left. She and the slaves presumed that the Lee family would return soon because everyone thought it would be a short war.

On May 24, about 14,000 soldiers crossed the river and seized the house and property, quickly taking over the mansion for offices and the open land for camp sites.

The following year, Congress passed legislation that allowed for new taxes on real estate in “insurrectionary districts.” The taxes had to be paid in person.

Mary Lee, now living in Richmond, got a bill for $92.07. She sent her cousin to pay the bill, but the commissioners would not accept the money from him. Arlington House was declared to be in default, and the property was put up for auction. The federal government was the only bidder, buying it for $34,100.

Just before her death, Mary Lee paid one last visit to her beloved home, but she barely recognized the place except for a few trees that she and her husband had planted. She was unable to leave the carriage because of her arthritis. She didn’t stay long.

At her death, the property was supposed to pass to her eldest son, Custis Lee. In 1874, he sued the federal government to regain the estate on the grounds that Arlington House had been confiscated without due process. In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor and Congress retuned it to him. Lee sold it back to the government for $150,000.

The cemetery

In the three years between the Lees’ departure and the decision to turn the estate into a cemetery, much had changed. Tens of thousands of soldiers and horses had tramped through the English-style park, turning it to mush and mud. The house had been mostly stripped of anything of value. The public was allowed to wander around the house.

A Union soldier wrote to his wife about Arlington House: “I will sum it up by saying desolation and ruin. There seems to be plenty of men, guns, cannon, horses, wagons and mules and tents in sight, which is all that can be seen. The fences are gone and the country around here is all slumped over and trod down.”

When Meigs got the approval on June 15, 1864, to establish a cemetery at the Lee estate, he began mapping out the locations for burials. By the end of June, 2,600 bodies had been put in the ground. One year later, the war was over and the number of graves had grown to more than 5,000.

Since then the cemetery has tripled in size; there are now more than 400,000 graves.

The man who saw it all

Much of the history of Arlington House before and after the war would have been lost except for several former slaves who could still recall the old days decades later. Among them was Jim Parks, who had worked as a field hand. Parks, raised on the plantation, was 18 when the war started.

Parks, who lived until 1929, never left the plantation. First he helped build forts, and when the cemetery opened, he became a grave digger. He retired in 1925, the same year that Congress responded to strong public interest in the historic house and passed legislation for its restoration.

The following year, he showed a local reporter where “coffins had been piled in long rows like cordwood” as the war progressed. He even prepared the grave for Meigs, the man who had ordered the conversion of the estate to a military cemetery.

Parks took researchers on a tour of the grounds surrounding the mansion, pointing out exact locations for forgotten “wells, springs, slave quarters, slave cemetery, dance pavilion, old roads, ice houses and kitchens,” according to the National Park Service.

When Parks died, he was buried in the cemetery where he had worked for more than 60 years. He was given full military honors.

The Battle of Bethesda: A daylong firefight in Jubal Early's march into Washington

By John H. Walsh

The Confederate general and his men rode south on Rockville Pike, past the sites of White Flint Mall, Strathmore Music Center and the Beltway, none of which was there at the time. Instead, the horses trotted by woods, rolling fields and farmland on that hot July day 150 years ago.

The Union colonel and his men rode north up the same road to confront the rebels, out of the Union fortifications at Tenleytown, and then past the places where Mazza Gallerie and Saks Fifth Avenue stand today.

The Battle of Bethesda was a small skirmish, part of Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s assault on Washington. Until recently, with the publication of several battlefield diaries, its exact location was unknown. Now we know that it took place at the Old Stone Tavern, where Robert A. Pumphrey Funeral Home stands today, near the Bethesda Metro station.

The officers who fought there — Confederate Gen. John McCausland and Union Col. Charles Russell Lowell — are known for other operations, and this engagement has been largely forgotten. But guns blazed from early morning to mid-afternoon before the Union troops pulled back under orders at 3 p.m.

The residents and shoppers who crowd Bethesda today may not realize that it sits on a broad hill, since office and apartment buildings dwarf the natural rise of the land. Col. Lowell rode up that hill on his way to battle. To the north, Gen. McCausland rode up the hill from the other side. The battleground would have been the shallow swale on top.

Lowell, in his dispatches to headquarters, said he was near the Old Stone Tavern and in “a good position to remain.” That would be at the intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and Old Georgetown Road, in the heart of what is now downtown Bethesda.

But a subordinate officer, Maj. William Fry, who had been independently skirmishing with the Confederates closer to Rockville before joining Lowell, wrote: “In the vicinity of the Old Tavern the enemy were again found to be advancing in force. We fell back, skirmishing constantly, until, within 2 miles of [the city’s fortifications], a dismounted skirmish line was formed and held, the enemy never succeeding in driving us away.”

His description left some ambiguity about whether the Union had “fallen back” closer to the city of Washington.

Lowell’s command, the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment, contained one of the most famous cavalry units of the war: the California Hundred. They were Union men who had volunteered in California and traveled east to join the fight. One of them, Cpl. Valorus Dearborn of San Francisco, kept a diary that appears to clarify the situation. It says that on July 11, the Union cavalry moved some distance from Washington’s fortifications and then fell back to the Old Stone Tavern, where they held their position “for the day.”

The battle probably consisted of exchanges of fire between dismounted Confederates along the northern edge of the swale and dismounted Yankees along the southern. Another Californian, Cpl. George Buhrer, recorded that the Union cavalry “took positions behind fences, bushes, stumps, rocks, etc.” He described the fire as “quite sharp,” while Dearborn called it “hot.” A military observer listening from Washington called it “rapid.”

Union records show that Lowell had about 800 troops, and he estimated he was facing six squadrons of rebels, or about 600 men. The Confederates also had a cannon, positioned near Wisconsin Avenue, while some local civilians came out with their guns “to get a shot at a Reb,” according to Pvt. George Towle, in his memoirs of the war.

As the day wore on, reinforcements arrived for the Union position but proved to be of little assistance. “They came marching up the road in close order with arms at right shoulder shift like militia on parade,” Towle wrote. “They were very soldierly appearing until they reached the brow of the rise in front of us where they were first exposed to the Confederate fire. None of them were hit, but the immediate result was that the command as a command, officers and all disappeared; and I have often wondered when, if ever, some of them stopped running.”

William Offutt, a historian of Bethesda, cautions that this was only a skirmish. If any of the cavalry troopers later gave accounts of having fought in a full-scale battle, they shouldn’t be trusted: “No one did at the time.” Nonetheless, he says, this new history “adds to our store of knowledge.”

By dark, the guns had fallen silent, with slight casualties from the day of fighting. Despite all the fury, little damage had been done to either side. Of course, as Offutt notes, at the time, Bethesda was a simple country crossroads, with the Old Stone Tavern, a blacksmith’s shop and a few rural buildings. There wasn’t much for the fighting to destroy. Bethesda remained in Union hands, safe for the upscale restaurants, bagel shops and yoga studios that occupy it today.

John Walsh is a Washington lawyer and a historical researcher with a PhD in history from Boston College.

Washington Revels' "Voices of the Civil War"

By Greg Lewis

Music played an integral part in the Civil War on both the battlefields and home front. In addition to patriotic tunes, campaign songs, bugle calls, and soldier’s songs, there was the music of families waiting and praying for war’s end, and songs of hope and struggle that rose from slave quarters of African Americans whose freedom hung on its outcome. The music and songs influenced one another, giving shape to a new, uniquely American music.

During the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War, three of Washington Revels’ five year-round performing ensembles are presenting music and spoken word (poetry, diaries and letters) of the Civil War era at venues including area heritage sites, museums, churches, parks and concert halls. Admission is free.

- Jubilee Voices, committed to helping preserve African-American history and traditions, sing spirituals, shouts, hollers, planting songs, field and code songs, and other songs of struggle and freedom. They will perform Sat., June 28, 1-3 pm at Oakley Cabin African American Museum and Park; Sun, July 13 as part of the rededication ceremony of the Battleground National Cemetery, 6625 Georgia Avenue NW, and Wed., July 30, 7-8 pm at the Friendship Heights Village Center. Concert will be outside at the fountain in good weather; inside the center in case of rain or heat.

- Heritage Voices perform popular songs, patriotic music, parlor music, work songs, spirituals, shape note tunes, and other traditional music from the Civil War period, accompanied by the old-time Roustabout String Band. They will give a concert of Civil War-era songs and spoken word on Sat., June 7 at 8 pm at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Frederick, and two concerts on Sat, July 12 as part of the day-long commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Stevens. 13th St. and Quackenbos St.. NW.

- Voices of History consists of professional and non-professional actors who portray historic personages from the greater D.C. area. Portrayals include Abraham Lincoln and his secretary, John Nicolay; Ann Maria Weems, a former slave on a Rockville farm who escaped to freedom on the Underground Railroad disguised as a coachboy; Johanna Plummer, a Quaker woman who owned slaves in Maryland; and others. In addition to prepared speeches and remarks, they mingle and talk with guests or attendees.

8 overlooked Civil War moments from 1864 that could have changed history

Mike Musick

A stealthy slaughter

Retired subject area expert for the U.S. Civil War at the National Archives

It may not have surprised many of those blown into eternity at City Point, Va., on Aug. 9, 1864, that their deaths produced no great outpouring of grief across the Union. After all, there had been much dying in the Old Dominion and elsewhere. Moreover, the explosion was chalked up to an accident, the result of carelessness in the loading of ordnance onto a barge at the huge supply base on the James River that was created to enable the siege of Petersburg, key to Richmond. And most of those killed were civilian laborers rather than soldiers.

Few on the scene suspected the truth. The ghastly explosion that sank a supply ship and two ammunition vessels, leveled warehouses, killed or mangled an estimated 250 people and rained down splinters and shell fragments on commanding officer Gen. Ulysses. S. Grant was no accident. It was the result of a “horological torpedo” — a time bomb — handed off to an unsuspecting Union sentry to be given to the barge captain by Confederate agent John Maxwell.

Not until June 1865, long after many basketfuls of body parts had been collected, was Maxwell’s official report of his deed found among enemy archives. Only then did it become certain that it was a premeditated act of the Confederate Secret Service.

The significance of the explosion at City Point became apparent with the passage of time. It brings into focus what the Civil War had become as it ground on: a vast technological and logistical endeavor pursued with ever increasing bitterness. There had been other attempts to blast foes to smithereens, not least the recent federal attempt that led to what became known as the Crater. But that action involved only uniformed soldiers in what had become an accepted part of sieges. It was becoming increasingly clear that the war had taken on its own logic of retribution, independent of its original cause.

John F. Marszalek

‘In God We Trust’

The Giles distinguished professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State University

In 1956 during the Cold War, the U.S. Congress passed and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a resolution mandating the words “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United States.

In fact, though, these words were actually the product of the Civil War. On Nov. 13, 1861, a minister from a small town in Pennsylvania urged Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase to place on American coins an indication that the United States was a Christian nation whose God supported its battle against the slave-holding South.

Chase immediately ordered James Pollock, the director of the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, to devise a motto to place on American coins. The problem was that Congress, since January 1837, had held authority over the inscription of coins. It was not until December 1863 that Pollock sent to Chase his suggested design for new 1-cent, 2-cent and 3-cent coins. He suggested the motto “Our Country; Our God” or “God, Our Trust.” Chase liked the design, but changed the words to “In God We Trust.”

Four months later, on April 22, 1864, Congress passed a law that few historians know anything about, even today. The legislation authorized a 2-cent coin with this motto on it. On March 3, 1865, Congress expanded permission for the motto to appear on a variety of gold and silver coins. Ironically, it was just a day later that President Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, which Frederick Douglass considered more “like a sermon than like a state paper.” In this speech, Lincoln did not make any direct comments about signing the legislation for the change, but it demonstrates that Lincoln believed that God envisioned the war as a cleansing agent for the entire sinful nation, whereas others might have supported the motto as a statement of the deity’s endorsement of the federal war effort.

The motto lived a quiet existence, used on some American coinage but not congressionally mandated. In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt called its presence on coins sacrilegious: God’s name was on money being spent in bars, brothels and gambling establishments, he said. Congress saw this as an attack on religion and ordered the motto included on all gold and silver coins. The 1956 law then required it on all currency.

No Civil War legislation has influenced the nation for so long a time as this motto. In 2011, the House of Representatives reaffirmed it, and a variety of court cases pop up regularly calling for its elimination. Some Americans take it less seriously, however. Over the years, “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” has appeared on signs in more than a few mercantile shops.

William Blair

Rebel exploits in Canada

Director of the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University

Canada may be a friendly neighbor today, but during the Civil War it posed a concern for national security. The U.S. government eyed Canada — made up of separate colonies of Great Britain until confederation in 1867 — as an area to watch for possible saboteurs. At no time was this truer than the spring through fall of 1864, as the Confederate government sent agents there to create mayhem in the upper North through a variety of plots that included a terrorist strike to burn down hotels in New York City.

In March 1864, Confederate leaders sent agents north to attempt to release its prisoners of war in the Midwest, control the Great Lakes, encourage anti-war sentiment and perhaps influence the presidential election. The Confederacy tapped former secretary of the interior Jacob Thompson, ex-U.S. senator Clement C. Clay and University of Virginia professor James P. Holcombe, among others, to conduct operations in Canada. Most of the plans seemed fanciful at best.

Using Montreal and Toronto as meeting places, Thompson and his colleagues established contact with leading Copperheads — Democrats who sought peace. The Confederates courted secret societies known as the Sons of Liberty to advocate peace sentiment and enlist supporters for releasing prisoners of war from Camp Douglas in Chicago and other parts of the Midwest. The idea was to create an uprising that might result in a Northwest Confederacy. But if the effort merely forced the U.S. to shift troops or affected the presidential election, that would suffice.

Nearly every plan failed. One involved the gunboat Michigan, which Confederates hoped to capture by slipping drugs into the officers’ wine. An informant betrayed the leaders. Similarly, the plans to liberate prisoners of war in Indiana and Illinois failed as support from disgruntled citizens in the U.S. never materialized. And the effort to burn down hotels in New York City, carried out in November 1864, fizzled because of the inexperience of the men in working with Greek fire, a flammable substance that was the 19th-century equivalent of napalm.

One effort had some success. Raiders robbed three banks in St. Alban’s, Vt., in October 1864 to get money for the Confederate cause and, possibly, divert Union troops to the Canadian border. The raiders made off with a nice haul, but some of it was returned to the banks after the men were arrested in Canada. However, the Canadian government refused to turn the men over to U.S. authorities.

After the war, Canada continued to provide a haven for Confederate expatriates. Notables such as Gens. Jubal Early and John C. Breckinridge lived there until it became clear that the U.S. government would not prosecute them for treason.

Robert Lee Hodge

Spotsylvania

Civil War researcher, filmmaker and reenactor

In the East during the opening 50 days of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign to capture Richmond, 50,000 Federal soldiers fell to Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Southerners. The first massive battle in that campaign was at the Wilderness, and because it was the first battle and casualties were 30,000, it may be the most well-known battle of 1864.

Less known is another one that was also costly and took place nearby. Just a day after the Wilderness ended, a 13-day engagement erupted at Spotsylvania Court House. At that battle Gen. John Sedgwick was killed. He was the highest-ranking Union general to be killed during the war.

Also at that battle, Confederate chieftain Lee personally led his troops into combat three times, an unheard-of action. In this battle as well, Confederates fought against Federal black troops for the first time.

Although it was a major battle, and part of it is in a military park, less than 10 percent of the Spotsylvania Court House battlefield is protected from development.

This battle should be known for its 22 hours of continuous massive, animalistic combat at “the Bloody Angle” in an area known as the Mule Shoe on May 12, 1864.

A Mississippian said of that fighting, “We could hardly tell one another apart. No Mardi Gras Carnival ever devised such a diabolical set of devils. It was no imitation of red paint and burn cork, but genuine human gore and powder smoke that came from guns belching death at close range.” He was next to a 22-inch diameter oak tree that was felled by rifle fire — that stump now resides in the Smithsonian as a testament to the carnage.

Along a six-mile front, 175,000 Americans committed fratricide in a series of subsection battles that raged around Spotsylvania: on May 8 at Laurel Hill, May 10 at Waite’s Shop and Po River, Laurel Hill again, Upton’s Mule Shoe attack and Fredericksburg Road, May 12 at the Mule Shoe, May 14 at Myer’s Hill, May 18 at the Harrison House and May 19 at Harris Farm. Grant disengaged on May 21.

There is no visitors center at Spotsylvania battlefield. The National Park Service, because of budgetary restraints, has only one visitors center for the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and the nearby 1863 Chancellorsville battlefield. None gets the individual attention it deserves, and all are marginalized by being combined.

Spotsylvania is known as the fifth-bloodiest battle of the Civil War.

A veteran of the famed Union Iron Brigade said Gettysburg was a mere skirmish compared to Spotsylvania.

Dana Shoaf

The day Lee was sick

Editor of Civil War Times magazine

On May 24, 1864, the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia faced each other along the North Anna River, roughly where modern Route 1 crosses the watercourse just a few miles north of King’s Dominion amusement park.

Robert E. Lee had cleverly positioned his army in an inverted “V,” pulling the two wings of his army back and leaving the point of the V on the North Anna. He did so to trick Union commander Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who oversaw Maj. Gen. George G. Meade and the Army of the Potomac, into thinking the Confederates were in retreat.

It worked. “The enemy have fallen back,” Grant telegraphed Washington, and the blue columns began crossing the river. Grant did not realize that Lee’s army was ready for him and that he was unintentionally splitting his superior force on both sides of the V with the river to its back.

If Lee could spring the trap, he could pin down one half of the Union army while destroying the other half. But the Rebel leader was sick with severe intestinal issues as the Union troops crossed on pontoon bridges. Lee lay on a cot, murmuring throughout the day, “We must never let them pass again — we must strike them a blow.”

But that blow never came. Lee’s lieutenants did not launch the necessary attacks and Grant finally sensed his predicament. The Federal troops entrenched and erected additional pontoon bridges to protect their lines of retreat. By May 26, the Army of the Potomac had pulled back across the North Anna.

The proceeding May bloodbaths of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and the early June attacks at Cold Harbor often overshadow the May 24 incident along the North Anna. But if Lee had succeeded in crushing half of the Army of the Potomac, it would have changed the tenor of the war in the east.

The Union host would have had to pull back and cede the initiative to the Army of Northern Virginia. The Confederate force had been battered, but it could still land a blow. If Grant and Meade had turned around, how would the Northern public, already staggered by lengthy casualty lists, have reacted?

Grant and Meade’s relationship had been strained for weeks. A defeat on the North Anna would surely have caused another command shake-up in the Army of the Potomac, further delaying the start of another Union offensive.

The war, many say, was won in the Western Theater. But if it were not for the illness of the Rebel chieftain on May 24, 1864, historians may have said the war was won in the East.

Harold Holzer

Lincoln’s secret memo

Author or editor of 40 books, many on Lincoln, and chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation

In a year of military and political slugfests large and small, nearly all of them closely observed and widely reported, it is difficult to find an important but overlooked story from mid-1864. But perhaps none was stranger, yet at a certain level more illuminating, than Abraham Lincoln’s “secret memorandum” of Aug. 23.

Though he had easily won renomination 10 weeks earlier, Lincoln’s reelection chances by late summer looked dismal. Union casualties in Virginia were skyrocketing, without military success. Several of the president’s key supporters were coming to the realization that likely Democratic nominee George B. McClellan would beat Lincoln in November. Secretary of State William H. Seward told Lincoln frankly that his “re-election was an impossibility,” adding glumly that “nobody here doubts it.”

By Aug. 23, having just received yet another bleak assessment of his chances for a second term, Lincoln no longer had the strength to disagree. Instead, he sat right down and wrote himself a letter: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to co-operate with the President-elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such grounds that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”

Then Lincoln did something extraordinary: He sealed shut the memo with glue and, without revealing its contents, asked his Cabinet secretaries to sign it sight unseen. Remarkably enough, they did so — to a man — apparently with no questions asked, quite a sign of respect (or pity) from that fractious group.

Lincoln later explained that he fully expected McClellan to beat him in November, but then planned to ask him to raise more troops and “finish the war,” and with it, he implied, secure black freedom. McClellan might — as always — hesitate. “At least,” the president explained, “I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience.” He had committed himself — and his entire administration — to fight unrelentingly during the four months between Election and Inauguration Day, even if the people had rejected him. He would not be the kind of lame duck President James Buchanan was — ignoring the crisis and handing it, unresolved, to his successor.

A week later, McClellan won the Democratic presidential nomination as expected, but then Gen. William T. Sherman took Atlanta and, almost overnight, Lincoln’s moribund campaign took off. In November, he won 55 percent of the popular vote — and only then told his Cabinet of the strange pledge they had signed to “finish up the work we are in.”

As fate — and the people — had decided, it was Lincoln who got to do the finishing up.

Waite Rawls

The VMI contingent

President and CEO of the Museum of the Confederacy

In May 1864, Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant began his strategy of “attack everywhere,” taking away the ability of Confederate armies to reinforce each other. Gen. Nathaniel Banks advanced into Texas along the Red River, Gen. William T. Sherman headed for Atlanta from Chattanooga and Gen. George Meade crossed the Rapidan River into the Wilderness. Less known was the Union force under Gen. Franz Sigel, which advanced with 9,000 men south through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Scattered Confederate forces were assembled by Gen. John C. Breckinridge, the former U.S. vice president and runner-up to Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. But his total force of less than 4,000 men required Breckinridge to also call up the 247 cadets from the Virginia Military Institute as reserves — boys between 14 and 18 years old. Breckinridge told them, “Gentlemen from VMI, I trust I will not need your services today, but if I do, I know you will do your duty.”

The two armies clashed on May 15 at the small hamlet of New Market, Va.; and they made history.

Although outnumbered, Breckinridge decided to take the initiative and attack. The advance stalled and, in the face of tremendous artillery fire, the center of the Confederate line gave way and retreated in confusion. To plug the hole and without other options, Breckinridge gave the reluctant order, “Put the boys in, and may God forgive the order.” With their commandant already wounded, 247 cadets advanced into the fray in the midst of a thunderstorm. Gaining a fence line under a ferocious fire, where veterans would have halted or retreated, the cadets decided to charge. Sweeping through a freshly plowed field where many had their shoes sucked off by the mud, they advanced toward a Union artillery battery, captured it and turned the guns on the retreating Federals. By that time, 57 of the cadets had fallen, with 10 killed outright or dying from their wounds.

These 247 boys had secured their place in history: the only time in American history that a cadet corps was committed to battle and the only time in world history where it emerged victorious. The famous “Spirit of VMI” was born in the “field of lost shoes.” Today, on the anniversary of the battle, the VMI Cadet Corps has a ceremony in front of the graves of the fallen cadets in which each of the 10 names is called out with the response “Died on the field of honor, sir.” The moving rite is not an observance of a political cause or merely a historical event. It is a tribute to those who did their duty, no matter the sacrifice.

Frank J. Williams

President Lincoln under fire

Founding chair of the Lincoln Forum and author of “Lincoln as Hero”

In mid-July 1864, 15,000 Confederate troops under Gen. Jubal Early threatened the nation’s capital. The threat was palpable. It created fear and consternation throughout the entire North.

An array of fortifications surrounded the District, including Fort Stevens on the northern edge of the city. Orders from President Abraham Lincoln and the War Department forced General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant to dispatch Gen. Horatio Wright’s 6th Corps to reinforce the government clerks and disabled soldiers defending Fort Stevens.

During the second day of battle on July 12, 1864, the president visited Fort Stevens to observe the fighting. A curious Lincoln climbed up on the parapet. Capt. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who would later become an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, allegedly shouted, “Get down, you damn fool,” and the president complied. Others believe it was Gen. Wright who admonished the commander in chief regarding his safety.

Lincoln’s presence in the line of fire was either foolhardy, encouragement for the troops or an act of courage. In the end, Early failed to mount a full-scale attack against the fort or the District. He withdrew. Later that year, Early was decisively defeated by Gen. Phillip Sheridan at the Battle of Fishers Hill and Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley. Those victories were sweet for Lincoln, who once again emerged taller than ever.

This presidential incident raises “what if” questions. What if the president had been killed at Fort Stevens? Fortunately, the president survived. His actions there showed he could both issue and obey commands. It became part of the evolving legend of Lincoln as hero.

Cast of Supporting Characters

By Michael E. Ruane

Col. Emory Upton

The brilliant, young Union commander came up with the idea for a surprise, mass assault on rebel positions outside Spotsylvania Courthouse on May 10, 1864. Although the attack ultimately failed, Union commander Gen. Ulysses S. Grant liked the idea and tried it on a larger scale on May 12. As with Upton’s attack, Grant’s initially succeeded, then faltered. After the war, Upton advanced through the ranks. In 1881, while stationed in California, he shot and killed himself after suffering from what may have been a brain tumor.

Joseph E. Davis

The fourth of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s six children, Joseph had just turned 5 when he fell about 15 feet while climbing on the bannister of a portico at the Confederate White House in Richmond on April 30, 1864. The child’s body was found on the brick pavement by a servant. “The most beautiful and brightest of my children,” his mother, Varina, remembered. “He died a few minutes after we reached his side.” Amid the tragedy of the war, and the South’s flagging fortunes, this was a cruel blow. Varina wrote: “This child was Mr. Davis’ hope and greatest joy in life.” Afterward, Jefferson Davis had the portico taken down.

Gen. J.E.B. Stuart

The legendary Confederate cavalry commander who had ridden circles around the Union army for years was wounded in an engagement with the cavalry of not-yet-famous Union commander George Armstrong Custer on May 11, 1864. During the fight, near a place called Yellow Tavern, Stuart was astride his horse, wearing his plumed hat, when a Yankee private shot him in the abdomen with a pistol. Stuart was taken to Richmond, where he died the next day.

Col. Thomas E. Rose

A Union officer who had been captured at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863, Rose headed one of the most spectacular and successful prison escapes of the Civil War. On the night of Feb. 9 and the morning of Feb. 10, 1864, he and 108 other Union prisoners used a tunnel to escape from Richmond’s Libby Prison. Fifty-nine got away; 48, including Rose, were recaptured; and two drowned in the James River. Rose was later exchanged for a captured Confederate officer and returned to duty.

Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick

The beloved Union commander known as “Uncle John” to his troops was killed by a sniper on May 9, 1864, before the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse. He was realigning some of his men’s position when he began to draw enemy fire. When aides began to duck, Sedgwick jested: “What are you dodging at? They couldn’t hit an elephant at that distance.” A moment later, a bullet struck him just below the left eye, killing him almost instantly. He is believed to be the highest ranking Union military casualty of the war.

Raphael Semmes

The captain of the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama Semmes had captured scores of Union merchant vessels across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the first years of the war. But on June 19, 1864, the Union warship USS Kearsarge caught up with the Alabama and the two ships battled outside the French port of Cherbourg. The Alabama was sunk, but Semmes and many of his sailors were rescued by a British yacht and taken to England. The North rejoiced that the Alabama had been sunk. The South rejoiced that Semmes had escaped.

After Spotsylvania, Grant and Lee waged relentless warfare through Virginia

By Michael E. Ruane

SPOTSYLVANIA, Va. — All that remains of the Confederate “mule shoe” fortification here is a fragile, moss-covered mound that arcs across a landscape where visitors are asked not to tread.

In the open fields where the Yankees charged, tall grass rustles in the wind. And the sheltering stands of pines in the surrounding woods sway and creak in the quiet.

There are only a handful of monuments to the nightmare battle that was fought here in May 1864. There is no on-site visitor center, few tourists, and a silence that contrasts with the extraordinary violence that unfolded 150 years ago.

“An air of suffocating loneliness reigns,” Katherine Couse, 28, a prescient resident wrote of the place just before the battle.

“The wind has a peculiar howling sound as if ghosts and witches were around,” she wrote to friends. “Do not think me superstitious. Troubles seem to be attracted to this spot.”

On May 10, 11 and 12, a huge Union army hurled itself against entrenched Confederate forces in a relentless and often futile series of attacks that culminated in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House.

It was not the biggest battle of the war, nor the deadliest, and it was sandwiched between others that came in quick succession that tortured season.

But for sustained, frightful fighting at close quarters in horrible conditions, it is perhaps unsurpassed in the annals of the war. Participants found it worse than the earlier battles at Gettysburg and Antietam.

And in crucial ways, it changed the course of the Civil War, launching a savage kind of trench combat and setting an ominous tone for the conflict’s closing months.

“The human experience there was so vastly different than in any other battle,” said John Hennessy, chief historian at the National Park Service’s Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.

“Somehow, some way, all the kind of accumulated, pent-up frustration, anger, violence of the war seemed to find expression that day,” he said. “Not just for a moment, but for 22 hours.”

Around the mule shoe, a heavily fortified Confederate position named for its shape, soldiers fought in the pouring rain, and the opposing forces were packed so close to each other that one rebel was grabbed by the hair and pulled into the Union lines.

“Skulls were crushed with clubbed muskets, and men stabbed to death with swords and bayonets thrust between the logs in the parapet which separated the combatants,” Horace Porter, a top aide to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, remembered.

Wounded men fell in the mud, then were trampled and buried under the bodies of the dead.

A large oak that stood in the line of fire was chopped down by sheets of flying lead about five feet from the bottom, about the height of a man’s head. The stump stands today, a century and a half later, in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, scored and shredded, with bullets burrowed into the wood.

“I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spottsylvania,” a Union staff officer wrote. “I should be loth to believe it myself, were the case reversed,”

A soldier from Mississippi called it “one vast Golgotha in immensity of the number of the dead.”

An officer from Michigan wrote: “This spot should be consecrated ground. No other has drank so deeply of brave men’s blood.”

And as Kate Couse huddled in her home on May 12, and the battle raged in the rain outside, she wrote: “Great God how more than awful. ….. [My] very soul almost dies within me.”

‘The grit of a bulldog’

On the morning of May 11, 1864, Gen. Ulysses Grant rose and had a breakfast of coffee and nearly burned beef, just the way he liked it. After eating, he lit a cigar.

Grant had turned 42 in April, and in March, after a string of victories in the western theater of the war, he had been given command of all the Union’s armies.

He took charge of the North’s Army of the Potomac, in the Eastern theater, and on May 4, he moved it across the Rapidan River, west of Fredericksburg, to attack the main Confederate army, under Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Lee had outwitted four previous commanders of the Army of the Potomac — besting them in battle on the Virginia peninsula, at Manassas, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and surviving a near defeat at Antietam.

He had been beaten at Gettysburg, but remained a cunning and deadly opponent.

Grant brought a new approach and mind-set to the struggle, however. He knew he had a larger army and better equipment, and he was undaunted by setbacks.

His plan was to attack Lee without letup, to seize the initiative and not let it go, according to Gordon C. Rhea, a historian of the 1864 campaign.

“He has the grit of a bulldog,” President Abraham Lincoln is said to have remarked of Grant. “Once let him get his ‘teeth’ in and nothing can shake him off.”

By May 11, Grant had his teeth into Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

On May 5 and 6, the two forces had already fought to a bloody stalemate in a tangled forest known as the Wilderness.

Grant, seeking to get at Lee from another angle, slipped to the southeast. But Lee managed to stay ahead of him. After more bitter fighting May 10, the two armies faced off just north of the hamlet of Spotsylvania Courthouse to go at it again.

After breakfast the morning of May 11, Grant was asked to write a note that a visiting congressman could take back to Lincoln. He hesitated, not wanting to raise false hopes, according to his aide, Horace Porter.

He then went into his tent and with his cigar in his mouth wrote a blunt dispatch that summarized his position: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

Hand-to-hand brutality

In the early morning of May 12, 20,000 Union soldiers waited in the rainy darkness to launch a surprise assault on the bulge in the Southern lines called the mule shoe, about two miles north of the courthouse.

Typically, such bulges in a line are avoided because they are hard to defend. But this one was on high ground that the Confederates wanted to keep. So they bolstered it with trenches, log barricades, and sharpened tree limbs pointed outward to impede attackers.

Grant planned to try a new tactic, one a young subordinate, Col. Emory Upton, had used with some success two days earlier.

Instead of charging in a long sweeping line of battle, and pausing to fire, Upton had used a compact force of 5,000 to overrun his objective in a swift strike without pause. His attack breached the Southern lines but failed for lack of reinforcements.

Grant liked the idea but wanted to use four times as many men.

About 5 a.m., Union forces emerged from the rain and mist, dashed across the open field and quickly overran the mule shoe. Thousands of Confederates were captured, including two generals, and it appeared that the Yankees had achieved a breakthrough.

“It was a brilliant charge with the bayonet,” a Union soldier recalled, according to Rhea’s account, “hardly a gun being fired.”

But the breakthrough was short-lived. Once inside the confines of the mule shoe, the Union soldiers fell into chaos. Lee quickly organized a series of counterattacks that pushed the Yankees out of the salient, where they clung to the outer face of the fortification.

And there the fighting descended into hand-to-hand brutality.

“It seemed as though instead of being human we were turned into fiends and brutes, seeking to kill all in our way,” a Union soldier wrote.

A soldier from Mississippi remarked that “no Mardi Gras Carnival ever devised such a diabolical looking set of devils as we were.”

And a member of a New Jersey regiment recalled: “There are occasions when minutes exceed, in their awful bearing, the weeks and years of ordinary existence.”

The fighting went on all day and into the night. Individual combatants fired hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

A Vermont soldier, William W. Noyes, jumped up on the parapet and began firing down on the rebels as comrades handed him loaded muskets, Rhea, the historian, recounted.

Noyes fired 15 muskets before his hat was shot off, and he returned to cover. He was later given the Medal of Honor.

Union troops blasted the fortifications with artillery and used trench mortars to loft explosives inside the Southern lines.

As the fighting went into the night, Lee’s men were busy building a second, log-fortified line across the base of the mule shoe that they could fall back to. At 3?a.m. it was ready, and the remaining Confederates quietly withdrew.

“When the sun came up, Grant discovered he had captured 10 or 15 acres of bloodstained Virginia soil,” Rhea said in an interview. “And Lee was in a stronger position than he had been in the day before.”

Casualties on both sides totaled about 17,000 men killed, wounded or captured. Grant’s army had been reduced by about 9,000 and Lee’s by about 8,000, according to Rhea’s study. But Grant could absorb the losses better than Lee, and Grant knew it.

Two weeks later, the armies fought again at the North Anna River, and two weeks after that, Lee repulsed Grant, inflicting heavy losses, at Cold Harbor.

Spotsylvania had helped transform the war from one of “sporadic spasms of intensity into [an] ongoing, grinding ordeal,” said Hennessy, the Park Service historian.

For the soldiers on both sides, “here was the emotional toil and toll of constant danger without relief,” he said. “And that would be the story of the war until its very end.”

After the armies left Spotsylvania, Kate Couse and her neighbors began venturing out.

“Very calm,” Couse wrote on May 21. “See only an occasional Reb .?.?. late this eve we hear cannon. It sounds more distant. ….. We are tired. We walked out and I looked at the graves. Sad sights.”

CHAPTER NINE

The Unions's Restless Warrior

Gen. William T. Sherman, the restless warrior who led the ‘March to the Sea’

By Michael E. Ruane

General William T. Sherman. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Gen. William T. Sherman, the restless warrior who led the ‘March to the Sea’

The three ragged men were drifting out to sea in a leaky boat when a U.S. Navy ship spotted them at the mouth of Georgia’s Ogeechee River.

Tired, hungry and rain-soaked, they’d been hiding with slaves, sleeping in the woods and eluding Confederate patrols for three days. They wore tattered civilian clothes, but they bore momentous military news.

On shore behind them, closing in on the city of Savannah, was the 62,000-man Union army of Gen. William T. Sherman that hadn’t been heard from in weeks. Southern newspapers had reported it doomed. President Abraham Lincoln had been anxious about it.

Now, as the three sodden men clambered aboard a Yankee warship, they announced that they were Sherman’s advance scouts, and they delivered a letter with momentous news: The army was close to reaching its goal.

It was Dec. 12, 1864, and the word went out to Washington and the world:We have met with perfect success . . .

“The excitement, the exhilaration, ay the rapture, created by this arrival will never be forgotten,” a naval officer wrote. The end of the war seemed in sight.

In the scouts’ wake lay a broad zone of destruction carved through the heart of Georgia all the way back to Atlanta, 250 miles away.

It was a trail of burned mills and railroad stations, emptied barns and corn cribs, ransacked homes and vacant chicken coops.

There were charred bridges, burned courthouses and dead slave-hunting dogs killed by Northern soldiers.

There were miles of ripped-up railroad, with the ties incinerated and the rails bent around trees to prevent them from being used again.

Atlanta had been emptied and wrecked. The library in Milledgeville, the state capital at the time, was pillaged.

“Stables and barn all in ashes,” plantation owner Thomas Maguire wrote, according to Noah Andre Trudeau, a Washington historian who has chronicled the march.

“Fencing burned and destruction all around,” the owner wrote. “The carriage and big wagon burned up, corn and potatoes gone, horses and steers gone, sheep, chickens and geese” all gone.

Another plantation owner recalled: “To my smoke house, my dairy, pantry, kitchen, and cellar, like famished wolves they come, breaking locks and whatever is in their way.”

Also in the wake of Sherman’s horde were jubilant African Americans who, for the most part, saw the Yankees as their deliverers from slavery. Slaves embraced Union regimental flags, mobbed Sherman when he rode by and hailed the Northern army as angels of the Lord. Thousands of them packed up and, for better or worse, followed the army.

“Women came with large bundles on their heads,” a Union soldier recalled, according to Trudeau’s history. “Children also carried quite large packages on their heads, and some of the larger ones carried the little ones.”

This was Sherman’s March to the Sea — 150 years ago — a month-long advance that is one of the most famous and controversial campaigns in U.S. military history, as well as an event that foretold the death of the Confederacy.

It ravaged parts of Georgia, gave hope to slaves and, historians say, planted the seeds of an enduring Southern myth: that of Sherman the monster, Sherman the malevolent war criminal, Sherman the Hun.

“There’s no doubt that [his men] took livestock and emptied the granaries,” said Brooks D. Simpson, a professor of history at Arizona State University and co-editor of a selection of Sherman’s Civil War correspondence.

“But if we talk about violence against private dwellings or against individuals . . . we don’t find the sort of evidence that would support some of the stories we hear,” he said.

Relatively few lives were lost during the trek that began in Atlanta on Nov. 15, 1864, and ended when Union forces entered Savannah on Dec. 21, 1864.

“What Sherman did more than anything else was to break Confederate will,” Simpson said. He accepted the image of a brute and a madman, and understood that “if you get the reputation as being a lunatic . . . that was a psychological advantage,” Simpson said.

Sherman’s bark was far worse than his bite, Simpson said.

But his bark was ferocious.

When some Union soldiers were captured by rebel guerrillas just before the march, he wrote a subordinate:

“Arrest some six or eight citizens known . . . to be hostile. Let one or two go free to carry word to the guerrilla band that you give them forty-eight hours notice that unless all the men of ours . . . are returned, Kingston, Cassville, and Cartersville will be burned.”

That was the way he would handle things throughout.

Tragedy and doubt

Memphis Oct. 6, 1863
7 A.M.

Dearest Ellen,

I have got up early this morning to steal a short period to write to you but I can hardly trust myself. Sleeping-Waking-everwheres I see poor little Willy. His face & form are as deeply imprinted on my memory as . . . the hopes I had in his future. Why oh why should that child be taken from us? leaving us full of trembling & reproaches . . . ”

“I . . . feel the chief stay to my faltering heart is now gone . . .

“But I must not dwell so much in it. I will try to make poor Willys memory the cure for the defects which have sullied my character.

Always yours

W.T. Sherman

More than a year before the triumphant march, on Oct. 3, 1863, Sherman had been devastated by the death of his 9-year-old son. The child had contracted typhoid during a family visit to his father’s headquarters near Vicksburg, Miss., and perished in Memphis as the family made its way home to Ohio.

Sherman blamed himself. “I will always deplore my want of judgement in taking my family to so fatal a climate at so critical period of the year,” he continued in his letter to his wife, Ellen.

“It nearly kills me to think of it,” he wrote her the next day. “Why was I not killed . . . and left Willy to grow up to care for you? God knows I [loved] . . .that boy and [He] will pardon any error of judgement that carried him to death.”

It was the second emotional trauma to shake Sherman during the war. Both provide glimpses into the complex psyche of the fierce warrior.

The first had occurred early in the conflict, and it had left him with thoughts of suicide and an abiding hatred of the press — “dirty newspaper scribblers who have the impudence of satan.”

Although he had graduated sixth in the Class of 1840 at the U.S. Military Academy, and served in the Army until September 1853, he had been out of the service for seven years when the war began in 1861.

He had fought at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, but then had been assigned to a post in Louisville, where he was to help assemble and organize Union forces gathering in the area.

To his dismay, he quickly found himself in charge, and overwhelmed.

He saw threats everywhere and grew paranoid and despondent. “A dread of danger so hangs around me,” he wrote his wife that October. “I am . . . in the midst of people ready to betray” their country.

In early October, Sherman begged Secretary of War Simon Cameron, who was traveling through the area, to come see him in Louisville. Cameron, hurrying back to Washington, reluctantly agreed. He met Sherman in the general’s hotel room Oct. 16.

Sherman told him a tale of woe, claiming that he was grossly outnumbered and asserting that he needed 200,000 men to prosecute the war in his sector. Cameron was aghast, exclaiming: “Great God! Where are they to come from?”

A few weeks later, Sherman wrote to a relative: “I suppose I have been morose and cross — and could I hide myself in some obscure corner I would do so, for my conviction is that our Govt. is destroyed and no human power can restore it.”

Soon, newspapers across the North began carrying headlines about his instability and, citing Cameron, reporting that Sherman was insane.

Sherman was humiliated and asked for a 20-day leave of absence. He believed he had brought shame on his family, especially his children.

“I am so sensible now of my disgrace . . . that I do think I should have committed suicide, were it not for my children,” he wrote his brother John in early 1862.

He believed he could no longer be entrusted with a command, though he might be helpful in some place such as the Army’s disbursing department.

That was soon to change.

The restless warrior

Late on the night of Nov. 29, 1864, Union Maj. Henry M. Hitchcock saw a shadow pass over his tent in central Georgia and heard someone rustling the embers of the campfire.

He went out and found a man wearing slippers over his bare feet, red flannel underdrawers, a nightshirt and a blue cape. It was Sherman. He was “the most restless man in the army at night,” Hitchcock recalled. “Never sleeps a night straight through, and frequently comes out and pokes round in this style.”

Hitchcock, a bespectacled lawyer who had just joined Sherman’s staff and would later leave a fascinating diary and letters, chatted with the general. Sherman said he liked to be up late at night to wander around in the quiet and listen.

That night, the army was two weeks into the trek, and Hitchcock noted that the march had reached “the perfection of campaigning.”

Sherman was then 44 and the second leading commander in the Union Army, behind Ulysses S. Grant. His past troubles were over. After his leave, he returned to duty, grew close to Grant and proved himself in the hard fighting at Shiloh and Vicksburg.

Now he commanded tens of thousands of men who were battling and foraging through the heart of the Confederacy.

He cut a striking figure: a weathered face with a short beard and thatch of hair; a nose like a hawk’s beak, and fierce eyes to match. He was tall and thin and wore a broad-brimmed black hat pulled down tight on his head. In Sherman, Hitchcock wrote, the science of war was in the hands of a master. But its calculus was cold and its application harsh.

“In the districts . . . where the army is unmolested, no destruction of . . .property should be permitted,” Sherman ordered before the march.

“But should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march or . . .inhabitants burn bridges . . . then army commanders should order . . . a devastation more or less relentless.”

Although the army had been ordered to forage for food and feed, Hitchcock thought things had gone too far. There seemed to be little discipline, and wanton foraging and burning went unchecked.

“It is a terrible thing to consume and destroy the sustenance of thousands of people,” he recorded. “And most sad . . . to see . . . the terror and grief of these women and children.”

He debated Sherman about it. Sherman argued that if a bridge had been burned to obstruct his progress, he had a right to burn a local house, even if there was no evidence the homeowner had burned the bridge.

Hitchcock, the lawyer, believed evidence was needed. Sherman, the soldier, said that if enough houses were burned, the bridge burnings would stop.

At Sandersville, about halfway to Savannah, the rebels had used the courthouse as a bunker, firing from its safety. Sherman was furious and ordered it burned. Hitchcock began to come around.

“War is war,” he wrote. “And . . . when forced on us, as this war is, there is no help but to make it so terrible that when peace comes it will last.”

Nearing Savannah, Union troops began to encounter “buried torpedoes,” as Hitchcock called them: the Civil War equivalent of IEDs. An officer on horseback had ridden over one, which exploded, killing the horse and tearing off the officer’s foot.

“This was not war, but murder,” Sherman wrote in his memoirs. “It made me very angry.” He ordered a bunch of Confederate prisoners to march down the road and find the other mines. He chuckled as they tiptoed along the road. No more mines were found.

Meanwhile, thousands of slaves were now tramping along with the Yankees — “poor, helpless creatures” seeking their freedom, a Northern soldier wrote, according to Trudeau’s history.

“All have tales of barbarous cruelty at the hands of their master,” another soldier wrote.

A third remembered: “We could not drive them back, as they were seeking their freedom. So they trudged on after us and we divided our rations with them.”

But they were encumbering the army, and Sherman urged them to stay home.

In two of the cruelest episodes of the march, Union commanders seeking to shed throngs of slaves ordered temporary bridges removed at two creeks as soon as their soldiers had crossed. The actions stranded scores of blacks, leaving them to the depredations of marauding rebels. Many were recaptured by the Confederates and returned to their owners, according to Trudeau’s history. Others drowned.

The march went on.

On Dec. 9, the Northerners sniffed on the breeze the odor of the ocean and knew they were close. Eleven days later, rebel forces began to evacuate Savannah in what one Confederate later described as an “immense funeral procession.”

At 4:30 a.m. on Dec. 21, the mayor formally surrendered the city. Sherman rode into town the next morning and sent Lincoln a message: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah . . .”

On the streets of the city, blacks rejoiced at the arrival of the “victorious army of liberty,” a black minister wrote.

“Every . . . military movement told us they had come for our deliverance,” he recorded. “And the cry went around the city from house to house among the race of our people, ‘Glory be to God, we are free!’ ”

Sherman’s March to the Sea: A military triumph left a bitter legacy

By Robert B. Mitchell

Portrait of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

In the autumn of 1863, a Union general with a sandy-colored beard and a piercing gaze produced a grim assessment of conditions in the South that foreshadowed one of the Civil War’s most controversial campaigns.

Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman dispatched his appraisal to Gen. Henry Halleck in Washington after the fall of Vicksburg in July. Halleck was anticipating the possibility of reestablishing loyal governments in Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, and he asked Sherman for his views.

Sherman’s response, written from his camp along the Big Black River in Mississippi, was uncompromising.

Planters in territory controlled by Union armies still pined for a revival of Confederate fortunes that would restore their slaves and privileges, Sherman believed, while the region’s small farmers and mechanics were too easily manipulated by politicians who favored secession. Political ineptitude plagued weak-willed Southern Unionists, while another class — the “young bloods of the South” — loved the thrill of combat. “War suits them,” Sherman believed, “and the rascals are brave, fine riders, bold to rashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense.”

All things considered, continued instability seemed likely unless belligerent Southerners were made to suffer for the conflict Sherman blamed them for starting. “War is upon us, none can deny it,” Sherman told Halleck. “I would not coax them, or meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

After his capture of Atlanta less than a year later, the wiry, intense Union general departed for the seacoast port of Savannah with 62,000 troops in a campaign that brought the horror of the war deep into the Confederacy.

The March to the Sea, which culminated with the fall of Savannah in December 1864, cut a swath of torn-up railroads, pillaged farms and burned-out plantations through the Georgia countryside. After reaching Savannah, Sherman extended his campaign of destruction into the Carolinas. Like Atlanta, Columbia, S.C., was consumed in flames.

With the march, Sherman hoped to deprive troops of food and other material support. Guided by his view of Southern culpability for the war, Sherman had another objective as well — the demoralization of the Southern civilian population.

“It’s very much about saying, ‘Here’s the power of the Union army,’ ” said historian Anne Sarah Rubin, an associate professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Sherman’s purpose, she said, was to convey to the South that “you cannot stop us. You cannot resist us. You just need to give up.”

In the South, civilians followed the Union advance through Georgia with dread.

“Georgia has been desolated,” observed Emma Florence LeConte in her diary after the fall of Savannah, and she feared that South Carolina was next. “They are preparing to hurl destruction upon the State they hate most of all, and Sherman the brute avows his intention of converting South Carolina into a wilderness.”

In the years to come, this view became widely accepted throughout the South, but Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas was not an exercise in gratuitous barbarity. President Abraham Lincoln and his generals had come to believe that the Union needed to target not only the Confederate armies but the morale of the civilian population that supported them, said Christian Keller, a history professor at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.

The “hard war” policy of the North was manifest as early as the summer of 1862, Keller said, when Gen. John Pope assumed command of Union forces in north-central Virginia. Pope ordered the destruction of any home from which Federal troops were fired upon and the exile of any Virginian unwilling to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. He also warned that anyone living within five miles of a road or telegraph line damaged by rebels would be required to repair the damage. The Confederates responded by declaring that Pope and his officers “were not entitled to be considered as soldiers” if captured.

Although Sherman’s March to the Sea and his campaign in the Carolinas differed in scale from Pope’s policies in north-
central Virginia and similarly severe actions in the Shenandoah Valley, it was consistent with the approach increasingly favored by Lincoln and some of his generals, including Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Keller said.

“What Sherman is doing in Georgia and the Carolinas is his manifestation, his personal take, on the evolution of an overall federal policy that has been moving forward since 1862,” Keller said.

Sherman was born in 1820 in Ohio, when memories of the War of 1812 remained fresh. In his memoirs, Sherman wrote that he acquired his distinctive middle name because his father “seems to have caught a fancy” for Tecumseh, the Native American war leader who fought with the British against the Americans.

Despite the martial overtones of his name, war was not a romantic undertaking for Sherman, who understood the horror of battle even though he had seen little of it prior to secession. He graduated from West Point in 1840 and went to Florida during the war against the Seminoles, but did little fighting. During the Mexican War, he was stationed in California.

Sherman, who liked Southerners and had been stationed at Fort Moultrie in Charleston, S.C., in the 1840s, was “a far cry from any kind of abolitionist,” Rubin said. In the months leading up to secession, while superintendent of Louisiana’s new military academy, he watched the budding sectional crisis with alarm.

Upon learning that South Carolina had voted to secede, “he burst out crying like a child,” David F. Boyd, a faculty member from Virginia and a friend of Sherman, wrote later. For more than an hour, Sherman anxiously paced in his room and warned of the carnage to come. “You think you can tear to pieces this great Union without war! But I tell you there will be blood shed — and plenty of it! And God only knows how it will end.”

By the time he wrote to Halleck, Sherman had fought in several of the war’s most significant battles. As an untested colonel, he led troops at the battle of Bull Run in July 1861, where he saw “for the first time in my life” the devastating effect of artillery “and realized the always sickening confusion as one approaches a fight from the rear.”

At Shiloh the following April, Sherman endured what he called “the extreme fury” of a two-day clash in which more than 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded. In the months that followed, he campaigned along the Mississippi and its tributaries as Grant besieged Vicksburg.

At one point, the responsibilities of command proved overwhelming. Sherman resigned his appointment as commander of the Army of the Cumberland soon after a meeting with Secretary of War Simon Cameron at which he alarmed Cameron and others with an overwrought warning about his vulnerability to Confederate attack.

Whispers of mental instability followed Sherman when he was transferred to Missouri, and they were amplified in the press. “The painful intelligence reaches us in such form that we are not at liberty to discredit it,” the Cincinnati Commercial reported, “that Gen. W.T. Sherman, late commander of the Army of the Cumberland, is insane.”

Sherman, “a very conflicted man emotionally,” probably suffered a breakdown during his tenure as a Union commander in Kentucky, Keller said. But he recovered in time to join Grant’s move south along the Mississippi — and initially favored a relatively relaxed approach to dealing with Southern civilians.

In September 1862, as military governor of Memphis, Sherman assured residents that he was committed to preventing pillage of crops and that troops under his command would issue receipts for confiscated property. Even then, however, he warned that he had little patience for those who voiced contempt for their occupiers.

“I will not tolerate insults to our country or cause,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Memphis Bulletin. “When people forget their obligations to a Government that made them respected among the nations of the earth, and speak contemptuously of the flag which is the silent emblem of that country, I will not go out of my way to protect them or their property.”

Impatience with Confederate sympathizers evolved into something more severe as the war continued.

In a Jan. 31, 1864, letter to Maj. R.M. Sawyer, Sherman advised his officers to seize crops, horses and wagons “because otherwise they might be used against us.” Civilians who keep to themselves should be left alone, he said, but anyone who made a public demonstration against the Union war effort was subject to punishment. “These are the well-established principles of war, and the people of the South, having appealed to war, are barred from appealing to our Constitution, which they have practically and publicly defied. They have appealed to war, and must abide by its rules and laws.”

By the time he decided to order the evacuation of Atlanta’s civilian population in September, Sherman professed to be utterly indifferent to the outcry that would ensue. “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking,” he wrote to Halleck. “If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.”

After the fall of Atlanta, Sherman believed he needed to press on to Savannah to stay on the offensive and keep Confederate Gen. John B. Hood guessing as to his intentions. At the same time, Sherman believed he could wreak havoc on the crops, farms, roads and railroads that helped supply rebel troops in Virginia.

The march also offered the opportunity to bring his hard-war philosophy deep into territory thus far untouched by the war. “I can make this march, and I can make Georgia howl!” Sherman assured Grant.

Although he demonstrated a willingness to “skate right up to the line” when it came to observing generally accepted rules governing combat and the treatment of civilians, Sherman regarded himself as a stickler when it came to following the laws of war, Rubin said. As he began his march to Savannah, he issued a detailed order that allowed soldiers to gather food and “forage liberally on the country” but prohibited troops from trespassing or entering homes.

The Union rank-and-file was often less scrupulous. As Sherman’s forces moved southeast from Atlanta, Maj. Henry Hitchcock, Sherman’s military secretary, recorded in his diary numerous episodes of ill-
disciplined Union stragglers burning homes and pillaging farms. “With untiring zeal,” Union veteran George Ward Nichols wrote in an account of the campaign, “the soldiers hunted for concealed treasures” and confiscated jewelry, plate and other valuables in addition to food. “It was all fair spoil of war,” Nichols wrote, “and the search made one of the excitements of the march.”

Sherman’s indulgent attitude about misbehavior by his troops appalled his secretary. “I am bound to say,” Hitchcock noted in his diary, “I think Sherman lacking in enforcing discipline. Brilliant and daring, fertile, rapid and terrible, he does not seem to me to carry out things in this respect.”

In military terms, Sherman’s march proved an unqualified success. The campaign thoroughly succeeded in smashing railroads and laying waste to the Southern agricultural economy that fed Confederate armies in Virginia, and in so doing shortened the war, Keller said.

But the hard-war strategy left a legacy of bitterness that lasted for generations.

“I wonder if the vengeance of heaven will not pursue such fiends!” Le Conte wrote of Sherman’s army. “Before they came here I thought I hated them as much as was possible — now I know there are no limits to the feeling of hatred.”

Flames consume Shenandoah Valley in Union campaign

By Linda Wheeler

The residents of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley were in for the worst the Civil War could unleash on them in the autumn of 1864. The war was coming to their doorstep. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the new commander of the Union armies, was fulfilling the mandate from President Abraham Lincoln: Win the war and win it now

The Union victories at the battles of Third Winchester and Fisher’s Hill had abruptly ended the Confederates’ long dominance of the lush and productive valley and given Grant and his hand-picked commander, Gen. Philip Sheridan, the opportunity they needed. Rebel Lt. Gen. Jubal Early, the audacious commander who had briefly terrorized the nation’s capital with his bold invasion in July, was humiliated by the twin losses and was now on the run, trying to save what was left of his broken army.

Before Early could regroup, Sheridan launched what would become known as the Burning, a 12-day period when Union forces brought war to the residents of the valley. Mills, barns, homes, crops, supplies and anything considered a possible aid to the Confederate effort was systematically torched by Union cavalry.

No amount of mothers’ crying and children shrieking would deter the soldiers, who quickly got used to the response and efficiently went about their business.

It was total war.

The destruction was part of Grant’s new war plan. By bringing the war to civilians, he believed, he could end the conflict more quickly because the Southern army could not sustain itself without a stable food supply. Grant’s order was to “eat out Virginia clear and clean.”

He later expanded on that, saying, “if the war is to continue another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”

In the valley, as winter was coming on, the destruction included food of any description as well as the means to make food. Wheat was burned in the fields and in the barns. Mills used to grind grain into flour were destroyed.

Thousands of farm animals were either slaughtered in their pens or taken for the army’s use. Horses were rounded up.

Furnaces that produced iron for military use were wrecked. Tanneries were burned.

Although Sheridan’s orders directed soldiers to leave houses alone, many were burned either on purpose or by accident when fire spread from farm buildings. If the occasional officer was persuaded to spare a house, the next one through might not be so kind.

The valley was not the first place to experience total war between 1861 and 1865, but historians say that the situation in the valley was different because the destruction was systematic. Sheridan planned it as carefully as any military campaign.

When Sheridan broke camp near Harrisonburg, he assigned his infantry to take the Valley Pike that ran through the center of the valley. Each of his two cavalry units took lesser roads that ran more or less parallel to the pike.Few places would be missed.

Between the beginning of the campaign on Sept. 26 in Staunton and its end at Fisher’s Hill on Oct. 8, residents and soldiers reported seeing as many as 100 fires burning at one time, filling the sky with smoke. At night, the fires created a lurid red light along the horizon.

Mount Jackson resident Amanda Moore watched the inferno and later wrote, “I shall never forget that day it looked to me like the day of judgement, our Father’s old mill & barn and [cloth] mill and all the Mills and barns ten miles up the creek were burning at once and the flames seemed to reach the skies it was awful to watch.”

A Union soldier wrote in his diary, “The whole country around is wrapped in flames, the heavens are aglow with the light thereof.”

Overhead, hundreds of vultures circled and swooped. For them, the Burning meant an extended feast.

Residents who lived north of where the soldiers were working knew they would be next. Some tried guile or defiance to dissuade the burning parties. Others tried outright bribery.

Valley native John L. Heatwole, in his book, “The Burning: Sheridan’s Devastation of the Shenandoah Valley,” tells some of those stories.

John Koontz, an elderly man whose family owned a house, mill and large barn just off the Valley Pike, knew the importance of food to a soldier. On the day he expected the arsonists to reach his place, his wife had already prepared a hearty, harvest-style meal. When the men arrived, Koontz greeted them in a friendly manner and invited them into the house for dinner.

At first, the sergeant in charge said no, because he had orders to fire the barn and mill and he would feel bad doing that after accepting a meal. Koontz said he understood that a soldier had to obey orders and he would not hold a grudge, but a meal was important to a working man. The young soldiers were hungry and accepted the offer. They ate well.

As Mrs. Koontz cleared the table, she told the men that now they could return to duty. Outside, the officer looked over at the barn and reminded his men that their orders allowed them to skip an empty barn. They all agreed this looked like an empty barn to them although there was a lot of corn inside.

The men mounted up and moved on to the next site.

At least one resident was able to stare down the burners. An elderly woman near Edinburg met the soldiers outside her farmhouse. An officer who was present asked her how many sons she had in the “Rebel army.”

According to Heatwole, she “fixed on him a steely-eyed, defiant gaze and replied she had only seven but wished she had seven more. Her courage so impressed the officer that he waved his men off, and the barn was still standing when her sons came home.”

Just outside Harrisonburg, an elderly man approached the burners at the gate of a fine-looking farm. “I see what you are doing,” he said. “My barn is full of grain. I have a lot of women and children and slaves here who will starve if you destroy my barn; not only that but you will burn my house.”

He then offered $1,800 in gold coins to the lieutenant in charge. “Take my gold and spare my barn,” he said.

The officer refused the bribe and ordered his men to get to work. He then rode away as the barn burst into flames. He expected the house would be burned also, according to Heatwole, but “did not wait to see.”

Exactly how much damage was done by the Burning will never be known. Sheridan reported: “The whole country from the Blue Ridge to the North Mountain has been made untenable for a rebel army. I have destroyed over two thousand barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements, and over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat, have driven in front of this army over four thousand head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops over three thousand sheep.” Various county governments reported many houses had also been burned.

Even farmers loyal to the U.S. government were wiped out in the Burning, but Sheridan offered them a way out. He would furnish a wagon with horses and protection if they chose to leave the valley. More than 400 families, many of them pacifist Dunkards and Mennonites, took him up on the offer. Their wagons covered 16 miles of road as they left. The long train of misery followed Sheridan’s army through a barren land and into Union territory.

Civil War massacre launched reparations debate

By Gillian Brockell

On a rainy night in early 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton arrived in Savannah, Ga. — which the Union had captured weeks earlier — with a question: What should become of newly free black people? It was a question that many in power had been asking for some time. What was different this time was to whom the question was posed: the newly free black people themselves.

It was a visit born of a massacre about a month before, and it launched a debate that continues to this day.

The issue of where these people should go had dogged Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, too, as he marched through Georgia in the fall of 1864. Sherman had expected to pick up able-bodied black men to assist his troops (but not to join them; Sherman would not allow that). An unintended consequence of his scorched-earth policy was that all manner of freed slaves — including women, children and the elderly — abandoned the plantations and fell in behind him.

More than 10,000 black refugees followed Sherman’s March to the Sea. That many mouths to feed would have proved challenging for a well-stocked force, but for an army that survived by foraging, it was nearly impossible. James Connolly, a 21-year-old major in the Illinois Volunteer Infantry (and future congressman), wrote that the refugee camps were so numerous that they often ringed the camps of the corps. The “contrabands,” as they were called, regularly wandered into Union camps to beg for food. And as Sherman’s force approached the sandy and less fertile Georgia coast, it became even more difficult to accommodate them.

There was one corps, however, the refugees seemed to avoid: the 14th Corps, led by a brigadier general with a most unlikely name: Jefferson Davis. Davis — derisively called “General Reb” not only for having the same name as the Confederate president but also for his hatred of black people — had become notorious two years earlier when he shot dead a superior officer, Maj. Gen. William “Bull” Nelson, during an argument at a hotel. He escaped punishment only because the military couldn’t afford to lose an experienced field commander.

Davis blamed the 600 or so black refugees following his unit for slowing down his 14,000 men in the closing weeks of the march. But from other accounts, it seems that the problem was the relentless winter rain. “At one time an officer counted 24 wagons sunk to their beds in mud,” writes Jim Miles in “To the Sea: A History and Tour Guide of Sherman’s March.” “He witnessed several mules sink out of sight.”

Speed was vital. Davis knew that Lt. Gen. Joseph Wheeler’s Confederate cavalry was hot on their heels.

For several days in early December, Davis drove the 14th Corps nearly nonstop, resting for two or three hours a night. One soldier reported falling asleep in the middle of “a fearfully hard march” and found himself in lock step upon jerking awake. Little more than coffee sustained them.

On the night of Dec. 8, the corps arrived at the western bank of Ebenezer Creek. The bridge had been destroyed, in anticipation of their arrival, and the frigid waters had swollen to 10 feet deep and 165 feet wide. Scouts from Wheeler’s cavalry harassed Union troops in the rear.

A pontoon bridge was in place by midnight, and Davis ordered the corps to cross the creek in silence and under the cover of darkness. According to Miles, a single Confederate cannon could have destroyed the bridge and stopped the entire corps, then only 18 miles from Savannah.

But in this tenuous artery, Davis saw an opportunity.

“On the pretence that there was likely to be fighting in front, the negroes were told not to go upon the pontoon-bridge until all the troops and wagons were over: a guard was detailed to enforce the order,” recalled Col. Charles Kerr of the 16th Illinois Cavalry in a speech 20 years after the incident. “As soon as we were over the creek, orders were given to the engineers to take up the pontoons and not let a negro cross. . . . I sat upon my horse then and witnessed a scene the like of which I pray my eyes may never see again.”

Just before sunrise, the refugees cried out as their escape route was pulled away from them. Moments later, Wheeler’s scouts rode up from behind and opened fire. Hundreds of refugees rushed forward into the icy current. Several Union soldiers on the eastern bank tried to help, pushing logs out to the few refugees still swimming.

Some of the refugees were crushed under the weight of the stampede. Most slipped under the water and drowned. Those who remained onshore were either shot or captured and re-enslaved.

And when Wheeler’s men began shooting across the creek, the Union soldiers helping the black people were ordered to rejoin the line and continue the march.

Connolly — the future congressman — was outraged. “I told [Davis’s] staff officers what I thought of such an inhuman, barbarous proceeding in language which may possibly result in a reprimand from his serene Highness [Davis],” he wrote in his diary. “But I don’t care a fig; I am determined to expose this act of his publicly.”

Connolly wrote a letter to the Senate Military Commission. The letter was leaked to the press, where it caught the attention of the secretary of war. Stanton had long been bothered by Sherman’s seeming ambivalence toward black Americans, both enslaved and free. He rushed to Savannah in secret, hoping to catch the general by surprise.

(He didn’t. Sherman was tipped off by Army Chief of Staff Henry Halleck.)

The night after Stanton arrived, on Jan. 12, he asked Sherman to gather a group of black leaders at Sherman’s headquarters in a mansion on Macon Street.

All 20 men were church leaders. Most of them were preachers. Sixteen were former slaves. Their average age was 50. They chose Garrison Frazier, 67, a preacher, as their spokesman. After briefly quizzing Frazier on his understanding of the U.S. Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation — he explained both elegantly — Stanton put a question to him that the nation has wrestled with for the ensuing 150 years: What should the government do for black people?

“We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own,” Frazier answered, according to detailed notes of the meeting that would be published in the New York Daily Tribune a month later.

Stanton asked Frazier if they would rather stay “scattered among the whites” or live by themselves, in a separate colony.

“I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over; but I do not know if I can answer for my brethren,” he said. All but one of the men agreed with Frazier that it would be better for black people if they lived apart from whites.

(The lone proponent of integration, James Lynch, at 26, was also the youngest man in the room. In the South for only two years, he had never been a slave. Lynch later became Mississippi’s first black secretary of state.)

Perhaps even more surprising than this focus group’s having taken place is that the government listened.

Four days after the meeting, Sherman issued Field Order No. 15 – or the “40 acres and a mule” rule. The mule technically came later, but the order set aside islands along the Georgia, Florida and Carolina coasts – nearly 400,000 acres – for black resettlement. Within months, more than 40,000 black Americans had flocked to the Sea Islands area, dubbed “Sherman Land.”

History, however, was as unkind to Sherman Land as it was to the stranded refugees at Ebenezer Creek. Soon after its inception, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. His successor, Andrew Johnson, a Southern sympathizer, overturned Field Order No. 15 in the fall of 1865. The Sea Islands were returned to their prewar white owners, the sacrifice of hundreds of refugees at Ebenezer Creek went unpunished — and the debate about reparations for black Americans continues to this day.

The election of 1864 and the last temptation of Abraham Lincoln

By Joel Achenbach

"This reminds me of a little joke," 1864, a pro-Lincoln cartoon showing the president holding a tiny McClellan, as published in the Sept. 17, 1864, edition of Harper's Weekly. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

In the grim summer of 1864, with the Civil War in its fourth year and seemingly stalemated, the smartest minds in American politics came to the realization that there was no chance that President Abraham Lincoln would be reelected.

Even Lincoln had lost all hope.

“You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten, but I do, and unless some great change takes place, beaten badly,” he told a fellow Republican.

On Aug. 23, he committed his pessimism to paper.

“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”

Lincoln folded the memorandum and elaborately sealed it, then asked the members of his Cabinet to sign the back of the paper without reading it. This oddly theatrical gesture would forever remain a bit enigmatic. One plausible interpretation is that he thought the memorandum would be politically useful after the election, but he didn’t want word to get out that he already was making contingency plans for his defeat.

The astounding duration and carnage of the war had made the Northern citizenry “wild for peace,” declared Thurlow Weed, a prominent Republican who, had he lived in a later age, surely would have been a ubiquitous pundit on Sunday morning talk shows.

Weed informed Secretary of State William Seward that Lincoln’s reelection was “an impossibility.”

Political allies of Lincoln began plotting to force him to withdraw so they could nominate a candidate with better prospects. Radical Republicans, who despised Lincoln for his political moderation, were poised to back Gen. John C. Fremont’s third-party candidacy. Lincoln’s political enemies in the Capitol were on the verge of calling for his impeachment.

And those were just his fellow Republicans. The Democrats hated him more. As the telegraph wires hummed with woeful bulletins from the battlefields, the pro-slavery, white-supremacist “peace” wing of the Democratic Party — the “Copperheads,” as their critics called them — gained strength.

The presidential election Nov. 8 would serve as a referendum on the war. At stake was not merely Lincoln’s continued occupation of the White House, but the fate of millions of African Americans held in Southern bondage.

Slavery was, as Lincoln said later, “somehow the cause of the war,” but to forge an alliance of Republicans and northern Democrats, he initially had insisted that his only goal in prosecuting the war was to restore the Union.

When Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, he made the argument that it was a military necessity first and foremost. Abolition would drain strength from the Rebels as blacks escaped to freedom or as Union forces conquered Rebel territory. Lincoln’s emancipation order applied only to the rebellious states, leaving slavery intact in the loyal border states.

By the summer of 1864, the Union war machine included, by Lincoln’s estimate, close to 150,000 black soldiers, sailors and laborers.

“There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South,” Lincoln told two visitors to the White House. “I should be damned in time and in eternity for so doing.”

In a later letter that he decided not to send, he said the Union military needed the might of its black fighters, and added, “Nor is it possible for any administration to retain the service of these people with the express or implied understanding that upon the first convenient occasion they are to be re-enslaved. It can not be, and it ought not to be.”

But even his allies questioned whether he had gone too far in making the war about abolition rather than simply the restoration of the Union. Lincoln faced pressure to cut a deal.

It was tempting.

In July, he had given a letter to Horace Greeley, an opponent of slavery who planned to meet with Confederate agents, listing as the conditions for any peace “the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of Slavery.” Then in mid-August, after a northern politician questioned the president’s insistence on abolition as a condition for peace, Lincoln drafted a letter that suggested that he remained flexible on the issue, and that ended with a sentence that would remain the subject of historical debate a century and a half later:

“If Jefferson Davis wishes, for himself, or for the benefit of his friends at the North, to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.”

But Lincoln did not mail the letter yet. He knew it would be published in newspapers and widely discussed. He wanted to talk it over with Frederick Douglass.

Douglass, an abolitionist and former slave, came to the White House and, after reviewing the letter, persuaded the president not to send it.

Historian Jonathan White, author of “Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln,” says Lincoln knew that Davis would never agree to restoring the Union. Davis and the Southern leaders wanted permanent independence. There was never a deal to be had.

Thus Lincoln probably was being characteristically crafty: His suggestion of flexibility would not have been aimed at the Rebel leaders, but at his allies in the North who threatened to pull their support from the war effort.

Lincoln understood that peace would be reached only on the far side of the battlefield. He sought an unconditional surrender by the Rebels.

“It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory,” Lincoln said.

War candidate, peace platform

The election of 1864 — taking place in the middle of a civil war — would be the most consequential presidential election in American history to that point — and perhaps to this day.

“It is remarkable that there was even an election held,” says historian Joan Waugh of the University of California at Los Angeles.

The political fortunes of Lincoln — who had been nominated in Baltimore in June, with the Republicans rebranding themselves the National Union Party — suddenly improved when the Democrats gathered Aug. 29 in Chicago to nominate their candidate.

The Democrats were deeply split by their pro-war and Copperhead factions. They reached a compromise: They nominated a war candidate and adopted a peace platform.

That candidate was, as long expected, Gen. George B. McClellan, a handsome young officer who had risen to the command of all the Union armies only to be shelved by Lincoln after he repeatedly overestimated the enemy’s strength and hesitated to attack the Rebels.

The peace platform said Lincoln had been unable to restore the Union by “the experiment of war,” and called for “a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States, or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.”

McClellan registered that the restoration of the Union was not a precondition of such an armistice, and said, in his letter accepting the nomination, that he could not face his “gallant comrades” in the Army and the Navy and tell them that “we had abandoned that Union for which we had so often periled our lives.”

Although he had, in effect, repudiated a key element of the platform, the damage had been done. Many rank-and-file Democrats, including legions of troops in the field who were going to cast absentee ballots, saw the Democratic platform as treasonous. Lincoln would win the military vote overwhelmingly.

The Democrats also suffered a case of exquisitely bad timing. Even as news of the peace platform spread, another bulletin came from the Deep South: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s telegram, received in Washington on Sept. 3, a day after his forces had taken Atlanta, signaled another turning point of the war.

Lincoln ordered 100-gun salutes across the country and a national day of thanksgiving.

He then maneuvered to neutralize Fremont’s third-party threat. By firing the conservative postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, a bitter enemy of Fremont, Lincoln appeased the Radical Republicans and won their support.

On Nov. 8, Lincoln won 55 percent of the popular vote to McClellan’s 45 percent — a margin of about 400,000 votes — and enjoyed an Electoral College landslide, winning 22 states and 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s three states and 21 electoral votes.

The enemies of human liberties, Douglass said after the election, had hoped to see “this country commit suicide.” It had been a contest, he said, between the advocates of freedom and “the advocates of caste, of aristocratic pretensions, of despotic Government, of limiting the power of the people, all who are for King-craft and priest-craft.”

Lincoln convened his Cabinet and finally read out loud the “blind memorandum” of Aug. 23. He told members what he had planned to say to president-elect McClellan:

“You raise as many troops as you possibly can for this final trial, and I will devote all my energies to assist and finish the war.”

And then Seward observed, “And the general would have answered you, ‘Yes, yes,’ and the next day when you saw him again and pressed these views upon him, he would have said ‘Yes, yes,’ and so on forever, and would have done nothing at all.”

Lincoln replied, “At least I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience.”

We cannot know what Lincoln actually would have done had he lost, but a close reading of the blind memorandum offers a hint. Lincoln wrote that “it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect as to save the Union,” and the word “so” looms large there. He is not going to let the election results destroy the Union and perpetuate slavery.

Lincoln’s term would not end until the inauguration of the new president March 4. He had work to do, and a war to win, and no one was going to stop him.

Years later, discovering a family split by the Civil War

By Mike Wise

The heavy steel army trunk that moved with my father all his life was still padlocked when my sister and I came to clean out his apartment in Napa, Calif., 18 months ago. Like the black onyx arrowhead collection of his Nevada youth and the Moody Blues vinyl albums, that trunk contained mementoes of a past he could not bring himself to part with.

Among the Christmas ornaments and wedding rings and old diaries was one yellowed document that caught my eye immediately.

It was a statement from Mamie Belle Stout, my father’s maternal grandmother, declaring that we had relatives who fought on both sides in the Civil War. My father had always told me he believed this to be true.

“Need to research further,” a notation on the document read, in his handwriting.

I put it off for a year after his death in February 2013. But this March, I finally contacted Ancestry.com, sending the world’s largest online genealogy resource an incomplete family tree along with a question: Were members of my family literally brother against brother?

Months went by before the research was complete, but I often received updates saying “we have found something interesting,” which piqued my imagination. Finally, a form titled “Family Tree Finds” appeared in my e-mail inbox. I was again teased with a message stating, “We don’t often find what we’ve found with you.” To preserve my authentic reaction to the discovery — and, frankly, because I wanted help in processing what they found — I promised I would not open the file before Brock Bierman, Ancestry.com’s director of education, explained their finds to me personally two weeks ago in The Washington Post’s television studio.

Although I had anticipated this moment for months, I still was not ready for what I was about to hear:

My great-great-grandfather, Samuel Goodwin Stout, was a Confederate soldier who fought at Gettysburg. He enlisted at 18 in Raleigh, N.C., on Aug. 19, 1861. He was with the 1st North Carolina Light Artillery, 10th Regiment, Company C (also called the Charlotte Artillery). He wrote home during his entire Civil War experience, 65 letters of which a living relative had digitized on Ancestry.com.

Raring to go, Samuel was all adrenaline writing to his mother, Sarah, on New Year’s Day 1862, less than five months after he enlisted:

“. . . From what news I can get, a war between old Abe and England is quite probable at this juncture. I hope that a good providence will speedily intervene and cause this unnatural war on the part of the North to terminate in the independence, final triumph, and glory of the South.”

One-hundred and fifty-two years after those words were written, they are still hard to read from a blood relative. The zeal evident in that letter seemed to show that Samuel was a believer in the cause.

Now I knew I had a Confederate relative who was ready to die for the glory of the South, and all that implied.

I immediately thought of my grandmother, Martha Pearl Stout, Samuel’s granddaughter. The phrase would have been anathema to her. Until the day she died, she drummed it into us: Irrespective of the differences in our complexions, geography and social rungs, we are all in this together.

More disturbing was the realization that the letter was written exactly one week after my other Civil War era ancestor, Tilman Settles, was killed in a Confederate raid walking back to his Missouri home on Christmas Eve in 1861, his body dumped in the Osage River, very possibly still in its Union blues.

Tilman, my great-great-great-grandfather, was my Union Army relative. He was a corporal in Company A of the Hickory County Battalion of the Missouri Home Guards, a local militia raised from Union loyalists. He served five months — the shortest length of service was three months — and was discharged Dec. 20, 1861. Four days later he was likely returning home from his battalion when he was killed near Warsaw, Mo., by members of Price’s Missouri Expedition, essentially the Confederate cavalry. He was 44. He left seven children — two boys and five girls — including Eliza Ann Settles Booth, my great-grandmother Mamie’s mother.

This was all detailed in a widow’s pension request by Tilman’s wife, Nancy, 12 years after his death, in 1873. The document, titled “WIDOWS CLAIM FOR PENSION,” is filled in with elaborate cursive writing in the copy preserved in the National Archives.

Under the heading INCIDENTAL MATTER on the claim’s last page, was the cold-hearted decision: “Rejected on the grounds that soldier was killed after his discharge from the U.S. service.”

Think about that: A widowed woman with seven children, whose husband’s death was directly related to his service and an armed enemy pursuing and killing him, would not be compensated by the U.S. government on a technicality.

Reading this a century and a half later, I choked up. Nancy was now real to me. I genuinely felt sick for the woman, realizing how this conflict to preserve the Union had destroyed her own union, as it did so many others’.

Nancy Wilson married Tilman Settles in Kanawha County, Va., on March 28, 1844. They had 17 years together before he became one of the Civil War’s 620,000 casualties.

Walking out of that Benton, Mo., courthouse, the thought must have crossed her mind that if her husband had been killed four days earlier she would have had a way to support her family. Studying the impersonal document, I ached for her.

Eventually I came to terms with Samuel Goodwin Stout. According to his Company Muster-in and Descriptive Roll Card, Samuel was a 5-foot-10 1 / 2carpenter when he enlisted. Company C served in Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the primary military force of the Confederacy, which meant he saw much valor and even more death, perhaps nothing so brutal as three days in July 1863.

On June 28, 1863, he wrote from Chambersburg, Pa.: “Dear Mother, I can inform you that I am well at this time, and I hope those lines will find you all well. I can inform you that we have been through Maryland, and we are now going through Pennsylvania. But we don’t think that we shall get far into Pennsylvania before we shall get into a fight. But we are all in good spirit. We have got a strong army with us — we have got 122,000 now across the Potomac. We get plenty of rations now. If we [run] out of anything, we [poach] it. We don’t suffer for anything at all — we are not destroying the country, but we have what we want. The opinion of the people [is] that the war will soon end. We see it in all of the letters we find. We don’t know which way we are going or how long we shall stay. I can’t tell you anything about that.”

He was but four days and 24 miles from Gettsyburg when the letter was mailed.

On July 2, 1863, he fought in one of the bloodiest days of the conflict, a day before Pickett’s Charge and the turning point of the Civil War. He suffered sunstroke in the searing heat that day, according to the records. His Confederate Pension file reveals he was also “shocked” by shell fire numerous times in other battles.

He also fought in the Wilderness Campaign, at Cold Harbor and Petersburg. And on April 9, 1865, he was at Appomattox, where he was paroled after the surrender.

The war deeply damaged Samuel. His letters gradually changed as the conflict dragged on. Even his penmanship and writing deteriorated, from fluid and precise to long, labored messy strokes and tortured grammar.

Nearing the end of the war, the spirited teen had morphed into a young man who wanted to go home. On Feb. 10, 1864, he wrote to his mother: “I see no cessation of it. Now only to look to the all wide and merciful God for peace and that is the only way we are to have peace any way. We have to [give in] to a higher power than Jefferson Davis or General Lee to end this horrible conflict in which we are struggling.”

Later in his long life — he lived to be 75 — his war injuries prevented him from working.

I don’t know if he believed in shackling fellow human beings for the glory of the South. There is no record of him owning slaves. Courtesy of a photo of his headstone in Moravian Falls, N.C., on Ancestry.com, I know that he died in 1919 — a year after my grandmother was born.

I was at first almost angry to learn that the man fighting against Abraham Lincoln’s principles had lived some 50 years after his service and 30 years longer than fate afforded Tilman Settles. Given a couple of weeks to process it, though, I’m glad one of them survived and was able to marry, have children and return home into the loving arms of family. I like to believe he lived the life Tilman couldn’t.

Mamie Belle Stout, who started this all with the declaration inside my father’s steel trunk, was affected the most by this dual North-South relationship. Her father-in-law had fought on the side that killed her grandfather in Missouri.

She died in 1974. I still remember my grandmother taking me over to her small apartment in Napa as she cleaned up and looked after an infirm woman. As with any 10-year-old, I suppose, I was oblivious to the connections that formed her life, oblivious to all who lost so much so long ago, in fields and rivers on our own soil.

It feels so personal and indelible now. I’m grateful to the ancestry researchers, whose care and vigilant research went into filling in the holes of my history, and to Brock, who spent a couple of hours letting me process what he had told me.

Back into the silver trunk the packet goes. Back into my own closet for my own son to unearth one day. Back to the past, where my father, Roger Francis Wise, so longed to go that I finally took the trip for him.

In hindsight, the tears I shed weren’t for Nancy Settles or Tilman or Samuel. They were for my father. When he said he thought we had ancestors on both sides of the War Between the States, it wasn’t just another embellished tale. He got that right. If he had opened the trunk and shared its contents with my sister and me years ago, we could have discovered the truth together, peeling back the layers of who we are.

Additional Content:

PostTV: Mike Wise’s surprising civil war ancestry

Civil War experts weigh in on what story lines get overlooked

John Stauffer

Author and professor of English and the history of American civilization at Harvard University.

The inaugural audience

Inauguration Day, March 4, 1865, was bleak and rainy in Washington, but the mood was celebratory: for the war seemed almost over, as Lincoln noted in his majestic address.

But what has been forgotten is the presence and influence of blacks. Half or more of the 30,000 people attending the inauguration were African American. An additional 170,000 were armed and in uniform, spread out across the South.

Frederick Douglass stood in front of Lincoln as Alexander Gardner’s famous photograph of the ceremony reveals. He was introduced to Andrew Johnson, whose expression on seeing Douglass turned to “one of bitter contempt and aversion.” Douglass turned to a friend and said: “Whatever else Andrew Johnson may be, he certainly is no friend of our race.”

The ceremony was “wonderfully quiet, earnest, and solemn,” Douglass noted. There was a “leaden stillness about the crowd” as Lincoln delivered his address. Douglass thought it sounded more like a sermon than a state paper.

After the ceremony Douglass went to the reception at the White House. He had met Lincoln on two previous occasions and they considered each other friends.

As he was about to enter, two policemen rudely yanked him away and told him that no persons of color were allowed to enter. Douglass said there must be some mistake, for no such order could have come from the president. The police refused to yield, until Douglass sent word to Lincoln that he was being detained at the door. Douglass found him in the elegant East Room, standing “like a mountain pine in his grand simplicity and homely beauty.”

“Here comes my friend,” Lincoln said, and took Douglass by the hand. “I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my Inaugural Address.” He asked Douglass how he liked it, adding, “there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.”

“Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort,” Douglass recalled.

Elizabeth Peabody of Boston heard their conversation, and shared it with her friend Sarah Pugh, whose diary entry resembles Douglass’s recollection.

It is an extraordinary statement — Lincoln saying that he valued a black man’s opinion more than any white’s. But it was not the first time he acknowledged the importance of blacks.

Seven months earlier, he had summarized the potent force of black troops: “Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it.”

As Lincoln and most other Northerners at the time recognized, the presence of blacks at the inauguration reflected their crucial role in winning the war and ending slavery. War had given way to a social revolution that we are still reckoning with.

Waite Rawls

Co-chief executive, the American Civil War Museum.

Chicago’s POW camp

The first year of the Civil War may have been marked by “glory,” as bands, review parades and waving flags demonstrated the patriotic spirit of volunteers who flooded both Confederate and Union army camps. But the last six months saw the war turn to “gory” as men, especially Confederates, toiled in mud, disease and starvation.

The battlefields were nothing compared to the prisoner of war camps, both North and South. During the course of the war, 400,000 men were taken prisoner. By its end, 56,000 of them had died in the prisoner of war camps. As a percentage of the population, that would be the equivalent of 600,000 Americans today.

Many people may have heard of Andersonville, the Georgia camp where thousands of Union soldiers died. But very few know of Camp Douglas, a prisoner of war camp in Chicago where 4,500 Confederate soldiers died, 17 percent of all those who entered the gates. That is almost 2 percent of all Confederate deaths in the entire war and more than the death toll at Antietam.

During most of the war’s first two years, prisoners were exchanged. But those exchanges essentially ended in 1863. The number of men in prison camps rose precipitously in 1864, and the death toll mounted to a level that was simply intolerable in both the North and South. Exchanges began anew in 1865, but thousands of the men who were returned were so weakened by their experience that they died within weeks of release. Thousands more were too weak to even attempt the trip. At Camp Douglas almost 900 Confederate soldiers died in 1865 after the exchanges resumed.

I lived in Chicago for 15 years and was surprised that almost no one knows of this record, as they all assume that the Civil War happened hundreds of miles away. And even fewer know, as they walk their dogs or play softball in Lincoln Park, that hundreds of Confederate soldiers lie beneath their feet, in a swamp that served as a paupers’ cemetery until it was covered over with the detritus from the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

Brag Bowling

Director, Stephen D. Lee Institute, an educational group established by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Absentee ballots

Memorandum Aug. 23, 1864, from Abraham Lincoln to his Cabinet in a sealed envelope to be opened only after the November election:

“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; so he will have secured his election on such grounds that he cannot save it afterwards.”

Lincoln was simply reading the tea leaves. Four years of horrific fighting with massive casualties, high living costs, opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation, continuation of the draft and opposition to his political and unconstitutional policies (such as the denial of the writ of habeas corpus, mass arrests and closure of opposition newspapers) had left his popularity at low ebb. Tactical losses from the Wilderness to Petersburg produced 65,000 casualties. The unpopular war seemed no closer to ending than in 1861.

George McClellan was considered a formidable challenger whose party’s platform included ending the war and Confederate independence, although McClellan rejected that part in his letter accepting the nomination.

The mid-term 1862 elections proved disastrous to the Republican Party with congressional losses in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Indiana and Lincoln’s home state of Illinois.

Lincoln had significant opposition in the Republican Party. The Radical Republicans doubted Lincoln’s fervor to end slavery and thought his Reconstruction plan was not punitive enough to the South.

Prospects brightened greatly with victories in Mobile Bay, the Shenandoah Valley and Atlanta on Sept. 6, 1864. Still, a November victory was uncertain. What could he do to guarantee a victory?

The answer lay in the novel use of absentee ballots. Letting American troops vote absentee while in the field had not been done before. Lincoln banked on the hope that the soldiers would support him and continue with the war to validate their sacrifices. Many thought this could lead to corruption. Blank absentee ballots showed up throughout the army. Whole regiments were given furloughs to return home and vote. Lincoln took it a step further. In many polling precincts, armed Union troops intimidated voters. His electoral victory in New York has been credited to the menacing presence of soldiers. Accusations of voter fraud were made in nearly every state. Lincoln was reelected on Nov. 8, 1864. As he hoped, the army ballots proved decisive. The horrific war and subsequent Reconstruction would proceed as Lincoln planned.

Congratulatory letters poured in. Two of note came from European supporter Karl Marx writing on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association.

William Blair

Director of the George and Ann Richards Center at Pennsylvania State University and author of “With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era.”

Disenfranchising deserters

In early 1865, Republicans followed their victory in the presidential election with a piece of legislation that rubbed salt in the wounds of their Democratic opponents.

The bill, adopted March 3, denied citizenship to soldiers who had deserted. Men had 60 days from the issuing of a presidential proclamation to return to the ranks or face the loss of their rights as citizens. Lincoln subsequently issued the proclamation. Undoubtedly, he intended the bill to encourage men to rejoin the army, increasing the odds of ending the war. But it had very little impact in restoring deserters to the ranks.

After the war, though, the law became a means of preventing Democrats from voting.

The deserter legislation empowered election commissioners to disenfranchise on the spot at polling precincts anyone they considered to be a wartime deserter. The federal government provided rosters to local officials upon request. The law rested on a shaky legal foundation: It didn’t allow for due process and it violated the Constitution’s provision against enacting ex post facto laws, or laws that criminalized behavior after the fact. Pennsylvania was a leader in using this law, with a handful of other states following suit. The practice lasted until court challenges ended it in the Keystone State in 1868.

But the battles over white suffrage should remind us of the hard tactics employed in the policing of disloyalty in a civil war as well as the very different political culture that existed. Elections were easier to influence because there was no secret ballot; often, voters cast their ballots into boxes labeled with the name of the party they were voting for. It wasn’t until after the war that the country moved toward voter registration laws and, finally, a secret ballot — an innovation adopted from Australia.

Harold Holzer

Author, his new book is “Lincoln and the Power of the Press” from Simon & Schuster.

Lincoln’s priorities

Abraham Lincoln thought he knew two things for certain in August 1864: that he would not win a second term as president (his own reelection chairman, New York Times publisher Henry J. Raymond, told him so); and that his Democratic successor, George B. McClellan, would certainly rescind the Emancipation Proclamation when he took office.

The president faced a difficult decision: postpone the proclamation to jumpstart peace negotiations or fight harder for freedom than for his own political survival.

Lincoln gave an idea of his priorities when he summoned African American leader Frederick Douglass to the White House. Earlier, Lincoln had urged Douglass to lead the call for black recruitment, even promising him an officer’s commission. Douglass rallied his community into the armed forces, but Lincoln never gave him the commission. Douglass subsequently castigated Lincoln for paying “colored” troops less than white soldiers.

Now, believing voters were about to retire him, the president wanted one final favor from a man who had good reason to doubt his sincerity. Lincoln made his case with convincing sincerity. McClellan was sure to win in November. That would leave four months to spread the word of emancipation to as many enslaved people as possible before his inauguration. (Surely not even McClellan could reverse freedom for those already made “forever free” by the proclamation between 1863 and 1865).

Douglass responded just as Lincoln hoped: with a detailed plan to recruit a corps of African Americans to head south and speed freedom for as many people as possible before McClellan took office.

“The negro is the stomach of the rebellion,” Douglass wrote Lincoln on Aug. 29. “I will therefore . . . submit at once to your Excellency the ways and means by which many such persons may be wrested from the enemy and brought within our lines.” Adept as ever at managing the press, Lincoln kept his plan secret from all — except, of course, ex-newspaperman Douglass.

The plan was never put into effect. Sherman took Atlanta on Sept. 1, the electoral momentum was upended, and Lincoln went on to win a second term.

Douglass, however, believed the mere invitation to write it offered “evidence conclusive on Mr. Lincoln’s part that the proclamation, as far at least as he was concerned, was not effected merely as a ‘necessity,’ ’’ but out of a sincere desire to end human bondage.

Mike Musick

Retired subject-area expert for the U.S. Civil War at the National Archives.

The assassin’s motives

“This country,” announced the self-proclaimed patriot, “was formed for the white not for the black man.” In six closely spaced pages, of which this was a part, the author spelled out his motives. On or around Feb. 10, 1865, in Philadelphia, he gave this and a letter for his mother to his sister, telling her to “Lock this up for me. . . . If anything should happen to me, open the packet alone and send the letters as directed.” Though they were composed some time in the fall of 1864, at some later date the writer appended his name to them: “J. Wilkes Booth.”

History has not entirely overlooked these documents, but the primary one, which gives Booth’s thoughts at length, has not received the attention it deserves. It was apparently penned while Booth was promoting a scheme to abduct Abraham Lincoln, take him to Richmond and exchange him for Confederate POWs, and before he decided on assassination instead. It was printed in newspapers soon after the president’s murder, but the original dropped from sight until rediscovered by researcher James O. Hall in 1977 among Justice Department records in the National Archives.

It was written hurriedly, and betrays the kind of disjointed stream of consciousness one might expect from a zealot aflame with the justice of the desperate act he was about to undertake. The manuscript is reproduced by the Archives, and transcribed on pages 124-131 of “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me”: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1997), edited by John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper. The title is taken from the letter.

In sum, Booth claimed that Lincoln’s election decreed “war upon Southern rights and institutions.” The South was not fighting to continue slavery, he wrote, but even if it had been, the events of the war “have made the wrong become right.” “Heaven knows, no one would be willing to do more for the negro race than I.” He recalled his presence at John Brown’s execution in 1859 and asserted that even the abolitionist would have rejected the kind of war waged by the North. Secession was legal, and though “the South have never bestowed upon me one kind word . . . I go penniless to her side.”

Before his signature, the writer designated himself “A Confederate at present doing duty upon his own responsibility,” then crossed out “at present.”

Americans and others can benefit from reflecting on the justification given before his deed by the man who fired a Derringer bullet into the head of the chief executive. No less can they benefit from the contrast in tone between Booth’s histrionic plaint and that of the words spoken not long before the fateful night at Ford’s by his target, calling for “malice toward none . . .charity for all . . . [and] a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Posterity has rendered a resounding verdict on whose form of patriotism it prefers.

Frank J. Williams

President of the Ulysses S. Grant Association and founding Chair of the Lincoln Forum.

Peace conference

One final effort to end the Civil War was made by Democrat Francis Preston Blair with Lincoln’s approval in late December 1864. Blair traveled to Richmond to visit his political colleague, Jefferson Davis.

Davis gave Blair a letter for Lincoln offering to appoint commissioners to “enter into conference with a view to secure peace to the two countries.” Lincoln had Blair return to Richmond offering to receive any commissioner that Davis “may informally send to me with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.” Overlooking the discrepancy between “two countries” and “one common country,” Davis appointed a commission comprised of Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, president pro tem of the Senate Robert M.T. Hunter and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell.

The agents were told by Major T.T. Eckert — the president’s representative — they could not proceed unless they agreed to Lincoln’s “one common country” as a basis for talks. The conference seemed aborted until Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who usually refrained from politics and had been directed by President Lincoln to stay away from policy other than military matters, intervened.

Grant demonstrated shrewd political acumen — for which he has not been credited. He telegraphed the President on Feb. 2, “I am convinced, upon conversation with Messrs. [Stephens] & Hunter that their intentions are good and their desire sincere to restore peace and reunion. . . . I am sorry, however, that Mr. Lincoln cannot have an interview with [them]. . . . I fear now their going back without any expression from any one in authority will have a bad influence.”

This is all Lincoln needed to hear. On reading Grant’s wire, he went to Virginia to join Secretary of State William Seward for a meeting with the commissioners. This extraordinary “informal” four-hour meeting of the five men took place Feb. 3, 1865, aboard the steamer River Queen at Hampton Roads.

Lincoln would not accede to an armistice while peace negotiations took place or allow official negotiations while the war continued. He did promise a pardon for Confederate leaders and went so far as to suggest that if the Confederate states abolished slavery, he would seek compensation.

Davis described Lincoln’s terms as “degrading submission” and “humiliating surrender” to rally Southerners. While the Hampton Roads conference failed to bring about an earlier peace, it could not have occurred without the deftness of U.S. Grant.

John F. Marszalek

The Giles distinguished professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State University

The death of Taney

If there was a figure whom Abraham Lincoln feared during the Civil War, it was the chief justice of the United States, Roger Brooke Taney. Famous for his decision in the 1857 Dred Scott case, which Lincoln and many other Americans abhorred, Taney battled the administration during the Civil War on matters such as the arrest of dissidents, the blockade and the writ of habeas corpus. The president feared Taney might destroy his constitutional argument for the Emancipation Proclamation. The chief justice represented opposition to the Union, and Lincoln worried.

Taney was not a healthy man during the Civil War, and his psyche was ravaged by thoughts of the recent deaths of his beloved wife and daughter. He considered constitutional rights to be more important than the Union, yet he did not want to see the Union lost. As one author put it, “Taney hovered around Washington like an unrespected ghost.” And Lincoln worried.

Taney died Oct. 12, 1864. The Emancipation Proclamation had been promulgated, and the Thirteenth Amendment was on its way. The Dred Scott decision constituted an even greater mark against the dead chief justice than it had before. One Republican paper spoke of his “perdurable ignominy.” When legislation was introduced in Congress to place his bust next to that of earlier chief justices, Sen. Charles Sumner protested, insisting that “the name of Taney is to be hooted down the page of history.” Sen. Ben Wade agreed and said he would rather appropriate money to hang Taney in effigy than spend any money to enshrine him.

Attending Taney’s funeral was a matter of debate in Lincoln’s Cabinet. Lincoln, Seward and William Dennison finally decided to attend the brief Washington ceremony, while only Edward Bates went to the interment in Maryland. Gideon Welles, William Pitt Fessenden, Edwin Stanton and John Palmer Usher attended neither. In “The Unjust Judge,” a 66-page pamphlet, an anonymous writer, perhaps Sumner, held nothing back in criticizing Taney. “Next to Pontius Pilate, perhaps [he was] the worst that ever occupied the seat of judgment among men.”

Taney was viewed as a threat to the Union and someone to be despised. His death sealed his negative reputation among Americans. Lincoln lost a menace to his administration, and he eliminated a threat to his re-election by appointing a major political opponent to take Taney’s place on the bench. Lincoln still worried about the future of the Union, but he did not worry so much as he had before.

CHAPTER TEN

War's End

No closure after Appomattox

Assassination, Reconstruction, Jim Crow: The war was just one chapter in an ongoing tale

By Philip Kennicott

Confederate soldier Andrew Chandler and his slave Silas look like brothers in arms in this portrait. (Library of Congress)

The 50th anniversary of the Civil War was all about reconciliation, grizzled old men shaking hands across the wall in Gettysburg, bunking down in tents with the remains of their old regiments, listening to Woodrow Wilson talk of "reunion and hope and patriotic fervor" before heading back to Washington to preside over a more rigidly segregated federal workforce. The second major anniversary - the centennial - was a strained echo of the first, with politicians and civic leaders still nattering on about sectional and racial comity, but it had the air of an awkward family reunion with toxic secrets just under the surface. That was in the early 1960s, with McCarthyism a not-so-distant memory, and the simmering anger of the civil rights movement about to explode.

And what of this most recent anniversary, now that we've reached the end of another four-year cycle of remembrance? An African American president held office during the entirety of it, while some sectors of the society celebrated a post-racial America, and others focused anew on the glaring racial and economic inequities of our economic, education and penal systems. We have spent four years, now, thinking about the Civil War, in some ways refighting it and contesting again its legacy and meaning. Have we accomplished anything? Have we made any progress?

If so, it may not be clear for years, not just because it's difficult to measure how attitudes and understanding change, but also because the anniversary of the Civil War was always an imperfect way to think about the broader currents of 19th-century American history. Anniversaries are a necessary evil of how history is processed in the popular consciousness. They arrive in the arbitrary increments of 10 or 50 or 100 years, with no natural correspondence to larger social forces. Consider an entry in a diary now on view at the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum. It appears in a family journal begun by Adam Plummer, who was born a slave in Maryland in 1819.

In November 1860, Plummer's daughter Sarah Miranda was sold to a slave trader and ended up in New Orleans. After the war was over, Plummer and his wife, Emily, sought to reunite with their daughter. They used their savings, and loans and contributions from their extended family, to buy their son Henry a train ticket to New Orleans, where he managed to find his sister, now a widow with a young child. They were reunited with their family in October 1866.

Not quite a half century later, the family journal contains this entry: "Just forty-eight (48 yrs.) years ago tonight Bro. Henry and Sister Miranda returned from New Orleans. October 19, 1914 - October 19, 1866 = 48."

It is by our reckoning an irregular interval - 48, not 50 years - marking an event that transpired a year and a half after the war was over. But there's no reason that the dates inscribed in familial memory should correspond to the dates we remember collectively. Even those who lived through the fighting might have more intense memories associated with events that don't correspond neatly to the calendars of history: The open-ended wait for a relative who never returned; the ongoing trauma of veterans emotionally shaken and psychically shattered by what they experienced; the grinding poverty of daily life in the South after its economy and infrastructure were destroyed; the disorientation of former slaves grappling with a freedom that was often more de jure than de facto;, the painful readjustment (for men) to civilian life, and the return (for women) to ordinary domesticity.

A recent poem by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa published in the volume "Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration" dramatizes the irregular ways that private hopes and pain map onto events like the Civil War. "I Am Silas" was inspired by a famous photograph that has been at the center of contentious arguments about the South and slavery to the current day. It shows two young men, one white, the other African American, sitting together, each holding a fearsome-looking knife, with a single rifle lying across both of their laps as if to suggest they are conjoined by its barrel. The white man is Andrew Chandler, a Confederate soldier and son of a slave owner from Mississippi, the black man is Silas, a slave who served his young master during the fighting, including rescuing him from an unnecessary amputation and delivering him to decent medical care after Andrew was wounded at Chickamauga.

The poem takes liberty with what is known of Chandler and Silas, imagining a close companionship before the war, and a sense of genuine care and affection during the days after Andrew's wounding:

". . . Sometimes,
if you plant a red pear tree
beside an apple, the roots tangle
underneath, & it's hard to say
if you're eating apple or pear."

The original photograph has been used to justify the belief that African Americans served happily in the Confederate army, which plays into the resilient myth that slavery was not the root cause of the war, and that slaves were not unhappy with their lot. But Komunyakaa extends the poem to the days and years after the war, to suggest that after Silas saves a man who was his master and perhaps his friend, he is shown no love or consideration once free: "When we came back," he writes in the voice of Silas, "I was ready to bargain for a corner of land/but history tried to pay me/in infamy . . ./ & a few pieces of tarnished silver." The poem extends the narrative of slavery and race to the years both before and after the war, capturing an emotional complexity undisclosed by mere historical analysis.

Foremost among all the things not easily accommodated by a historical perspective that prioritizes the war years as its organizing principle is the history and failure of Reconstruction, the great next chapter that arguably played as large a role in the formation of the racial future as the war and emancipation. These two periods, the war and Reconstruction, are chronologically contiguous, but occupy radically different places in the general American consciousness. One is the subject of intense curiosity, extensive remembrance, rampant mythologizing and an industry of book-writing both scholarly and popular; the other is almost entirely terra incognita for most Americans.

A decade ago, when Eric Foner wrote "Forever Free," an account of Reconstruction for mainstream audiences, he found myriad markers of how absent Reconstruction remains in our national consciousness: At that time, only one National Park Service site out of hundreds was particularly devoted to the events of Reconstruction; tests administered to high school students showed that their ignorance of Reconstruction was greater than any other subject in American history; and a best-selling book that prescribed some 1,000 basic facts everyone should know included not one fact relevant to Reconstruction.

At the National Portrait Gallery, senior historian David Ward doesn't think that's changed, which is one reason his next exhibition will treat the Civil War as just one piece of a larger narrative, beginning before and lasting well after the actual war itself. "Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs 1859-1872" deals with a photographer primarily known for having brought the carnage of the battlefield home to a wide American audience, and for being the favorite photographer of Lincoln. But Ward sees the importance of Gardner's work extending into the age of westward expansion, the confrontation and exploitation of Native American populations, and the emergence of a more ambitious and imperial United States. The Civil War and Reconstruction, he says, were only part of a larger "war over the nature of the union which continues well into the 20th century."

By expanding the focus from the battlefield to the larger "fields" or landscape of America, the show will push the historical narrative into a period when the federal government begins to take the expansive, nationalized form we know today, an era of railroad building and land-grant colleges, when the prewar promise of "Manifest Destiny" was realized with all the technological and military prowess the government could muster.

One photograph, in particular, stands out for Ward as laden with meaning. It shows five union officers from the Civil War, including Philip Henry Sheridan and George Armstrong Custer, gathered around a table. It was taken in 1865, and might seem a valedictory image by men who had accomplished their mission. But it isn't.

"These are the guys who fight the Indian wars," says Ward. "They are all moving west. The war doesn't stop for them."

For Native Americans, the end of the Civil War brought only more violence and suffering. For African Americans, the promises and failure of Reconstruction, and the de facto apartheid of Jim Crow made the promise of emancipation often seem desperately shallow.

Even today, the country is still divided, North and South, in ways that people love to parse on social media and in the partisan press: Vast differences in social attitudes to race, sexuality and religion, and significant differences in educational attainment, lifespan, obesity and other markers of well-being. The basic division of Red and Blue America, which has governed our thinking for decades now, map onto more than just the North and South, with rural and urban cleavages as well; but for most of the states that fought the war 150 years ago, today's red and blue are basically yesterday's gray and blue.

It's tempting to say that is the lesson we've just learned from the most recent anniversary: The war isn't over, it was never over, and it continues now by other means. But we'd be wrong to think we have just discovered that truth. In the early years after Appomattox and the assassination of Lincoln, a muted sense of dread haunted the country. Even with the war ended and the country moving on to new endeavors, there was a powerful intuition that the war would not be easily packaged, delimited and contained within neat historical parameters. In 1873, Winslow Homer, who had covered the war as an illustrator for Harpers, painted what at first appears to be a slightly saccharine, sentimental picture of a girl in a white dress, seated among grass and flowers. Homer created some of the most incisive images of the war - a sniper in a tree, a Confederate soldier standing on the ramparts taunting Union soldiers to fire, off-duty troops lost in meditation - but eight years later it seems perhaps he'd moved on to happier subjects.

But no. The painting, titled "The Four-Leaf Clover," positions the girl in front of a window that is partially open, with a pot of bleeding heart flowers slightly askew beside her. A black ribbon is woven into her hat, and the lay of the ground is strangely angled to one side. The window must lead to a basement, because whatever is behind it is lost in inky darkness. It is a powerfully conflicted picture, a black hole of ominous and disturbing proportions framed in an innocuous image of sweetness and light. It is, of course, the unresolved issues of the war that are being memorialized. The window is open to suggest the lack of closure, its panes are darkened to suggest the trauma just beneath the surface of American life. And the four-leaf clover?

It stands for wishful thinking, the powerful, often unthinking optimism that sweeps all before it, leaves no time for delving into anything painful, anything complex. Like the founders of our country and the problematic constitution they created - which made a moral reckoning with slavery inevitable - the four-leaf clover suggests the folly of trying to wish away the structural problems that grind us down. Some part of America has always been a child, naively hoping for the best.

It is a painting about trauma, the ongoing nature of trauma, the unresolved trauma of the nation's birth and rebirth, both bathed in blood and in hope. History and trauma share this: Nothing is ever over. If we've learned that during the last four years, perhaps we've grown up a little. If not, we will be sitting once again before the same window, wishing away the old ugliness of our divided nation, in 2065.

‘Richmond at last!’: The final, fiery days of the Confederacy

By Michael E. Ruane

Union soldiers survey the ruins of Richmond. (Library of Congress)

RICHMOND

The arsenal blew up early on the morning of Monday, April 3.

The explosion shattered windows across town, lofted ordnance into the sky and knocked down tombstones in the Shockoe Hill Cemetery.

Much of the city already was on fire, the blaze spread by flames from burning tobacco warehouses. Mobs were looting. The inmates had gotten out of the prison. And a man was seen torching a pile of worthless money in the street.

It was the spring of 1865 and, after almost four years of civil war, the Confederacy was dying.

The government had fled by train the previous night with what remained of its gold and silver, headed southwest for Danville. Desperate people had packed onto the departing rail cars. But many were turned away.

One was Robert Lumpkin, the city's notorious slave broker. He had failed to get passage for himself and 50 shackled men, women and children.

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here," a reporter for the London Times wrote, quoting Shakespeare.

Richmond diarist Judith Brockenbrough McGuire wrote that day: "Oh, who shall tell the horror of the past night!"

About 100 miles to the southwest, the starving remnants of the main Confederate army under Gen. Robert E. Lee were being run down by Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac.

The Confederates would stagger on for six more days before capitulating in the carpeted parlor of a home in the village of Appomattox Court House.

But here in Richmond, the real death agony of the Confederacy played out in apocalyptic scenes of fire and bedlam.

The city was overcrowded and had experienced food shortages and hardships. But it had always trusted in Lee to protect it. Now, with Lee in flight, Richmond was left to the depredations of the Yankees.

"This town is the Rebellion," a New York newspaper reporter wrote.

The capital of the Confederacy since 1861 and the target of Union armies that had smashed themselves against its defenses in a dozen battles, the city was falling at last.

The cry, "On to Richmond!" had been raised in the North before the first major battle of the war, at Manassas, Va., in July 1861.

That battle had been a disaster for the Union, and it would be followed by many others as Yankee armies assailed the Rebel capital from the north, east and south.

Now, at least 600,000 deaths later, Grant had driven Lee out of his lines, and Richmond was being evacuated.

"It is all that we have . . . striven for," the New York reporter George Alfred Townsend wrote. "Its history is the epitome of the whole contest . . . to us, shivering our thunderbolts against it for . . . four years."

Watching from afar, Frederick Chesson of the Union's 29th Connecticut Regiment recalled: "We began to realize as we had not till then . . . that this was one of the great days of the Lord.

"Right out there in the open in sight of the flaming city we went wild with excitement," Chesson wrote, according to historian Ernest B. Furgurson's study of Richmond during the war. "We yelled, we cheered, we sang, we prayed, we wept, we hugged each other and threw up our hats."

The fire, started by Confederates to wreck anything of use to the enemy, raged all night and into the morning.

It destroyed Richmond's banks, two hotels, three newspapers (the Enquirer, the Dispatch and the Examiner), a flour mill, a paper mill, railroad depots, bridges over the James River and the Confederate Post Office.

"The entire business part of the city on fire," eyewitness John Leyburn wrote a year later, a "sea of flame."

Lee's lines break

The previous day, Sunday, April 2, 1865, had brought beautiful spring weather, witnesses remembered.

"The temperature wooed people abroad," Stephen R. Mallory, the Confederacy's secretary of the navy, recalled later. "A pleasant air swept the foliage and flowers of the Capitol grounds. . . . The old city had never, during the war, worn an aspect more serene and quiet."

But 25 miles to the south, at the besieged city of Petersburg, Va., Lee's army had been stretched and finally broken by Grant's forces.

That morning, Lee sent a telegram to the Confederate War Department: "I see no prospect of doing more than holding our position here till night. I am not certain I can do that. . . . I advise that all preparation be made for leaving Richmond tonight."

Many people, including Confederate President Jefferson Davis, were in church when the telegram arrived at 10:40 a.m. An official walked down the aisle of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, tapped Davis on the shoulder and handed him a copy.

Davis rose and left, ashen-faced, some thought.

Remnants of defeat

On a drizzly day earlier this month, the brown waters of the James River roared over the rocks at the fall line here.

Out in the river stood the abandoned bridge piers of the Richmond & Petersburg Railroad, over which Jefferson Davis entered the city in May 1861 to make it the capital of the Confederacy.

Downstream were the remains of the Richmond & Danville Railroad bridge he used to flee in 1865.

Just upstream was Hollywood Cemetery, where Davis, many other Confederates and generations of the city's residents are buried.

Elsewhere, elegant St. Paul's Church still stands on Grace Street. The Museum of the Confederacy has meticulously cared for the Confederate White House, where Davis and his family lived.

And 10 years ago, the remains of Lumpkin's slave compound were found, after being buried under an iron foundry, a freight depot and then a parking lot for over a century.

Now a city of commerce, medicine and education, with a population that is half African American, Richmond is still the conquered capital of the Confederacy.

Its fall is the most dramatic event in the city's history, said Nelson Lankford, author of "Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital."

"In three days, you've got the Confederate government fleeing, the Southern army retreats, the city burns, slavery ends, and Abraham Lincoln himself walks through the smoking ruins," he said. "It doesn't get any more dramatic than that."

A shell of a fearsome force

Outside Petersburg that Sunday in 1865, after months of trench warfare and a crucial victory at the Battle of Five Forks the day before, Grant had launched an all-out assault, breaking Lee's lines in several places.

Subordinates urged him to press the attack on the town itself. But he guessed that Lee would pull out and head west. He wanted to save his men for the pursuit, an aide, Horace Porter, wrote later.

Plus, Grant wrote in his memoirs, "I had not the heart to turn the artillery upon such a mass of defeated and fleeing men, and I hoped to capture them soon."

Grant had guessed right. That night, Lee withdrew and the chase was on.

It would continue for a week, the two forces racing side by side and clashing at Namozine Church on April 3, Sayler's Creek on April 6, Cumberland Church on April 7, and Appomattox Court House on April 9.

There, Grant caught up and blocked Lee's escape route.

The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had dwindled to a hungry mob of about 25,000 men, a shell of the fearsome 60,000-man host that had beaten and tormented a parade of Union generals.

Gone were its great commanders, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, killed in 1863, J.E.B. Stuart, killed in 1864, and Ambrose Powell Hill, who had just been killed on April 2.

The army's ranks had been thinned by death, disease and desertion. Its legendary Texas Brigade was down to 130 men.

Grant knew all this and had made an overture to Lee on April 7. "The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance," he wrote. He urged Lee to surrender to avoid "further effusion of blood."

Lee showed Grant's dispatch to his veteran subordinate, Gen. James Longstreet.

"Not yet," Longstreet said.

'Richmond at last!'

In Richmond, on Monday, April 3, Rebel soldiers and officials were gone, but the fire raged on.

"A dense pall of smoke hovered over the entire city, and through it shone huge eddies of flames . . . carrying great blazing planks and rafters whirling over the shriveling buildings," eyewitness T. C. DeLeon wrote many years later.

"By noon, one vast, livid flame roared and screamed before the wind, from Tenth street to Rockett's," he remembered. Ammunition from the arsenal continued to explode, tossing shells into the air.

"Richmond burning," resident Mary Fontaine wrote, and nobody to douse the flames.

Then the Yankees arrived.

At first, just one "rose over the hill, standing transfixed with astonishment at what he saw," hospital nurse Phoebe Yates Pember wrote, according to historian Burke Davis's account. "Another and another sprang up as if out of the earth."

"Some advanced infantry followed," she wrote. "Company after company, regiment after regiment, they poured into the doomed city, an endless stream."

Few whites were on the streets, but Richmond's black citizens poured outside.

"The slaves seemed to think that the day of jubilee had fully come," wrote H.S. DeForest, chaplain of the Union's 11th Connecticut Regiment. "How they danced, shouted . . . shook our hands . . . and thanked God, too, for our coming. . . . It is a day never to be forgotten by us, till days shall be no more."

And some of the Yankee liberators were black - members of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) regiments.

For decades before the Civil War, Richmond had been a major hub for the nation's slave trade. By 1850, slaves constituted the city's biggest interstate export, according to a report done for Richmond's City Council in 2010.

Robert Lumpkin, who had tried to leave town with his slaves, had operated an extensive and lucrative slave depot, called "the devil's half acre," in the city's Shockoe Bottom district for almost 20 years.

He had holding pens, a whipping room, and lodging and a tavern for owners.

On "evacuation Sunday," clinging to the doomed institution, he had failed to get away, according to Lankford's book, and took his slaves back to his jail for their last night in bondage.

And now, to the dismay of Richmond's white citizens, here came black Union soldiers in triumph.

"I looked down the street and to my horror beheld a Negro cavalryman yelling, 'Richmond at last!" recalled Fannie Walker, a government clerk.

Another African American outfit entering town was the 28th USCT. Its chaplain was the Rev. Garland H. White, who had been born a slave in Richmond but had escaped to the North.

"It appeared to me [that] all colored people in the world had collected," he recalled of his joyous greeting.

Some of his men brought him an old woman, who questioned him about his background, and then said: "This is your mother, Garland, whom you are now talking to, who has spent twenty years of grief about her son."

Not far away, at the capitol building, Union soldiers hauled down the Confederate flag and raised the Stars and Stripes.

"We covered our faces and cried aloud," remembered resident Nellie Grey. "All through the house was the sound of sobbing. It was as the house of mourning, the house of death."

"Was it to this end we had fought and starved . . . that the wives and children of many a dear gallant friend were husbandless and fatherless? To this end that our homes were in ruins, our state devastated?"

'It is our duty to live'

On the road to Appomattox, an exhausted and begrimed Grant was suffering from what sounded like a migraine headache. He and his staff stopped in a local dwelling for the night on April 8. It was called Clifton House, and it was deserted except for a few black servants.

Grant sought relief by "bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck," he recounted in his memoirs.

He took off his coat and boots and lay down on a sitting room sofa to try to sleep.

He and Lee had been exchanging notes, with Grant urging surrender and Lee hesitating.

Another note from Lee arrived at midnight. A member of Grant's staff softly pushed open his door. "Come in, I am awake," the general said. His headache was no better. Lee's note was evasive. He wasn't ready to surrender but was willing to meet Grant.

The Union general shook his head. "Looks as if Lee still means to fight," he said. "I will reply in the morning." He went back to the sofa.

About 4 a.m. on April 9, his aide, Horace Porter, rose to check on him, and fount Grant pacing the yard in pain, holding both hands to his head. The staff suggested some coffee, and Grant improved slightly.

He composed a reply to Lee, saying a meeting without surrender was pointless, but he was still willing to meet if Lee would give up.

On the Confederate side, Lee realized he had reached the end. He had no food and no reinforcements. He thought about just riding out in the open along the front lines and "all will be over."

"But it is our duty to live," he said. He must go see Grant. He sent a note saying he was willing to discuss the surrender. And it was arranged that the two would meet in a private home at Appomattox Court House.

A distraught Lee put on his best uniform and sword for the meeting.

Grant told an aide that his headache had gone away.

'You are free'

Back in smoldering Richmond, Union soldiers had helped put out the fires and restore order.

And five days earlier, on April 4, the city had witnessed one of the most striking scenes of the war.

A haggard President Abraham Lincoln, who had been following events from nearby City Point on the James River, stepped off a Navy barge with his son, Tad, to see the devastated city. It was Tad's 12th birthday.

Word spread quickly among Richmond's African Americans, many of them newly freed slaves, and Lincoln was mobbed. "Glory hallelujah!" people cried. "I know that I am free, for I have seen father Abraham!"

Lincoln walked the streets, taking off his coat in the warm weather and the press of the crowd. He took off his stovepipe hat when a man said a prayer for him.

When another man knelt, Lincoln said to him, "Don't kneel to me. . . . Kneel to God only and thank him for your liberty," according to historian Burke Davis's account.

"My poor friends," the president told the crowd. "You are free - free as air. You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it. It will come to you no more."

On April 9, Lincoln arrived by boat back in Washington. He learned of Lee's surrender that night. The city heard about it the next day.

"Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering," wrote Gideon Welles, the Union secretary of the Navy. "All, all jubilant."

Six days later, a shabby group of horsemen riding in the rain crossed a pontoon bridge over the James River into Richmond. The entourage was headed by Lee, who was going to his temporary home on Franklin Street. (His estate in Arlington had been seized by the Union Army.)

He and his horse were splattered with mud, an observer remembered, "his garments were worn in service and stained with travel."

"Even in the fleeting moment of passing by my gate, I was awed by his incomparable dignity," the observer, a minister named William E. Hatcher, wrote, according to Douglas Southall Freeman's biography of Lee. "His majestic composure, his rectitude and his sorrow, were so . . . beautiful and impressive to my eyes that I fell into violent weeping."

Crowds gathered to cheer Lee and touch him. He lifted his hat in return. Here, amid the ashes of the Confederacy, was a hero for a defeated people and its lost cause.

Here, amid the ashes of the Confederacy, was a hero for a defeated people and their lost cause - a cause that continues to resonate, and divide the country, a century and a half later.

Great joy, then a gunshot, and a nation mourns

By Joel Achenbach

APRIL 14, 1865. Actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth had plotted against President Lincoln for the better part of a year before fatally shooting him at Ford’s Theatre. Lithograph from 1870.

It was Good Friday, April 14, 1865, and Abraham Lincoln was in an unusual mood: Happy. Giddy, even. He was a man freed of the heaviest burden any American president had ever been forced to bear. The mighty scourge of war - his phrase - was finally passing away.

Ten days earlier, Lincoln had walked through the streets of Richmond, the rebel capital. And then on Palm Sunday, General Lee had surrendered his army to General Grant at Appomattox. There were still Confederate forces in the field, but that would surely be mop-up duty. The war in every practical sense seemed to be over, the rebellion crushed, the nation saved and the evil of slavery vanquished forever on this continent.

Lincoln told his wife, Mary, that the two of them, alone, without friends or supplicants, should enjoy a leisurely carriage ride around Washington.

"The Friday, I never saw him so supremely cheerful - his manner was even playful," Mary Lincoln wrote to a friend months later. Her husband told her that he felt that this was the day that the war had come to a close.

Five years earlier, Abraham Lincoln had been little more than a former one-term congressman from Illinois, a lawyer handling property disputes and small-town squabbles. But he had a way with words, and a distinctive frontier persona, and he became the standard-bearer of the young Republican Party and its opposition to the spread of slavery. His victory in the chaotic, fractious election of 1860 precipitated the secession of the slave states. And the war came.

Before he took his first oath of office he was forced to slip into Washington in disguise to evade a rumored assassination threat. That skulking entrance invited sneers from rivals and the opposition press. Lincoln in truth had minimal interest in personal safety and during his presidency would often travel without guards. Back in 1862, a mystery sniper had taken a shot at him as he rode his horse to the Soldiers' Home. He was fatalistic, thinking that anyone wanting to kill him probably couldn't be stopped.

The war had visited upon America an unimaginable spectacle of death and grief. No one had expected the war to last so long; neither side, Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, had expected a result so "fundamental and astounding." At least 620,000 Americans had perished, perhaps as many as 750,000. Hardly a household in the land had been spared the loss of a loved one, a pain that the Lincolns knew all too well, having lost their child Willie to a fever in the first year of Lincoln's tenure.

As the president and his wife toured the city in their carriage, he said to her: We must both be more cheerful in the future.

They had plans that night to attend the theater.

On Lafayette Square, Gideon Welles, the secretary of the Navy, was dozing off in bed at half past 10 when his wife said there was someone at the door. Welles opened a window and looked out to see a messenger. The man said the president had been shot at Ford's Theatre and Secretary of State William H. Seward and his son assassinated.

Impossible, Welles answered. Lincoln and Seward couldn't be in the same place. Seward was bedridden at home after a nearly fatal carriage accident. But the messenger insisted it was true, saying he'd been to the Seward home before coming to see Welles.

Welles quickly dressed and walked the short distance to Seward's home on the east side of Lafayette Square, just a stone's throw from the White House. There he encountered the equally agitated Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, who'd arrived via carriage from his home a few blocks away on K Street. They made their way upstairs to Seward's bedroom, where they discovered a scene of carnage.

An intruder had stabbed and slashed Seward about the face and neck as his daughter Fanny had screamed, "Don't kill him!" Only a metal brace on Seward's neck, meant to stabilize him during his recovery, prevented the attacker from severing his jugular. In another room, Seward's son was unconscious, pistol-whipped, his skull cracked open horribly. Other attendants were badly injured with knife wounds.

The two Cabinet officers knew they had to find Lincoln, and despite warnings from aides that the situation was too dangerous, they climbed into a carriage and rattled in the direction of Ford's Theatre, swept along in a torrent of horses, carriages and pedestrians converging on 10th Street.

A massive crowd had formed. The president was no longer in the theater but rather had been carried across the street to a private home, a rowhouse owned by a German immigrant named William Petersen.

Stanton and Welles found Lincoln in a small, extremely crowded bedroom in the rear of the house, his 6-foot-4-inch frame laid diagonally on a bed unequal to his great stature. Lincoln's head rested on a pillow soaked in blood. The president's breath came and went laboriously, and the doctors said he would last only a matter of hours. This was a deathwatch.

Stanton immediately took charge. There was now no president of the United States in any meaningful sense of the word, and Stanton by his nature assumed authority without compunction. He was effectively now the commander-in-chief as well as the chief investigator of the attacks on Lincoln and Seward. While Welles stayed in the death chamber, Stanton set up operations in a nearby room, behind the front parlor harboring Mary Lincoln.

Stanton needed stenographic help, and by chance a soldier next door, James Tanner, knew shorthand. Tanner - who had lost both legs below the knee during the battle of Second Manassas - soon found himself in the Petersen House, taking notes next to Stanton.

"Mrs. Lincoln was in the front room, weeping as though her heart would break. In the back room lay His Excellency breathing hard, and with every breath a groan," Tanner wrote later.

The witnesses came in one by one and described what they'd seen.

It had been a big night at Ford's Theatre. The leading lady of the stage, Laura Keene, headlined the performance of "Our American Cousin," a comedy about a coarse American who visits his refined, stuffy cousins in England. The theater had sold 1,700 tickets; word had gotten out that the president and his wife would be in attendance along with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia.

The Grants had actually begged off, choosing to travel to New Jersey to visit their children in boarding school. The Lincolns were instead accompanied by Clara Harris, the daughter of a senator, and her fiance, Henry Rathbone, an Army major.

The presidential party arrived during the first act, taking their seats in the presidential box above stage left. The president was, as he'd been all afternoon, in terrific spirits. He and Mrs. Lincoln laughed through the play and held hands.

At 10:15 p.m., actor Harry Hawk, playing the coarse American, stood alone on stage and aimed a laugh-out-loud line at a female character who had just exited: "Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal - you sockdologizing old man-trap!"

That was the last thing Abraham Lincoln heard.

The sound of a gunshot pierced the laughter, followed by a scream. Blue smoke wafted from the president's box. The audience heard a scuffle, and then a man threw his legs over the balustrade and dropped to the stage, snagging a boot spur on a decorative flag and landing awkwardly.

It was a famous actor, John Wilkes Booth.

Booth took center stage, raised a dagger in the air and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis" - "Thus always to tyrants." It was the state motto of Virginia. Then Booth said, "The South is avenged," and, slashing at Hawk with the dagger, ran offstage and vanished.

The audience did not know what to make of this.

Was it part of the play?

Now came a generalized commotion, mounting horror and people rushing to the president's box. A doctor, Charles Leale, pushed his way through the scrum to see how he could help. He entered the president's box and found Mrs. Lincoln weeping bitterly, cradling the head of her husband.

"When I reached the President he was in a state of general paralysis, his eyes were closed and he was in a profoundly comatose condition, while his breathing was intermittent and exceedingly stertorous," Leale wrote later.

He couldn't find a wound at first, but then he ran his fingers through the president's hair and found a clot of blood behind the left ear.

"The coagula I easily removed and passed the little finger of my left hand through the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball, and found that it had entered the encephalon."

Leale and two other doctors decided that the president was too weak to be transported back to the White House. They would go instead to the nearest house. Along with four soldiers they picked up the president, carried him down the stairs and out onto 10th street, where the agitated crowd was thickening. Someone led them across the street to the house of the German tailor.

Booth had performed many times at Ford's Theatre, including in front of the president. He was a vicious white supremacist and Confederate sympathizer. He had been plotting against Lincoln for the better part of a year. At first, the conspirators wanted to kidnap the president, take him to Richmond and ransom him to free Confederate prisoners of war.

Now the Confederacy was disintegrating, and Booth revised the plan, giving the final orders that Friday evening. The conspirators had three targets. Booth would kill Lincoln at the theater. Lewis Powell would kill Seward in his home. George Atzerodt would kill Vice President Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood Hotel, where he was staying. They would strike simultaneously at 10:15 p.m. and effectively decapitate the leadership of the U.S. government.

Booth knew the theater inside and out, and everyone who worked there knew Booth well. Lincoln had one police officer assigned to his protection that night, but only during the trip to the theater; inside he was unguarded. To reach the president, Booth needed merely to produce a calling card for the president's valet, who, sitting close to the president's box, let the famous actor proceed. Booth first entered a small vestibule and peered through a hole to see precisely where the president was sitting. From his vest pocket he pulled a Deringer, a gun weighing just 8 ounces and loaded with a single .44-caliber lead ball. When the audience erupted in laughter, he stepped into the box and fired from point-blank range.

He fled the theater on his horse, which had been held in an alleyway by a young man who had no idea what was going on. Booth rode down F Street to the Navy Yard Bridge, and then into Southern Maryland.

Lawrence Gobright, a Washington-based reporter for the Associated Press, sent off his first bulletin late on April 14:

"The President was shot in a theater to-night and is perhaps mortally wounded."

The civilian telegraph went quiet for about two hours when the nervous operator of the telegraph office decided to shut everything down and let the military telegraph office handle everything. But the military dispatches wound up in the newspapers verbatim as the presses continued to roll through the night and into the morning. The New York Herald, the biggest-circulation paper in the country, would go through seven editions Friday night and Saturday.

From the third edition:

Washington was thrown into intense excitement a few minutes before eleven o'clock this evening, by the announcement that the President and Secretary Seward had been assassinated and were dead . . . [R]umors were magnified until we had nearly every member of the Cabinet killed.

The Herald reprinted telegrams sent by Stanton to an Army general in New York:

War Department, April 15, 1865 - 1:30 a.m.
Major-General Dix,
New York:

Last evening, about 10:30 p.m., at Ford's Theater, the President, while sitting in his private box with Mrs. Lincoln, Miss Harris, and Major Rathbone, was shot by an assassin . . . The pistol-ball entered the back of the President's head, and penetrated nearly through the head. The wound is mortal. The President has been insensible ever since it was inflicted, and is now dying.

Stanton sent another telegram 65 minutes later, saying the president was still alive but "quite insensible," and reporting, "Investigation strongly indicates J. Wilkes Booth as the assassin of the President."

He sent another at 4:44 a.m. saying that Lincoln was "sinking."

The vice president had remained asleep Friday night until, early Saturday morning, someone finally woke him with the terrible news. Johnson made a cursory visit to Lincoln's bedside, but he had always had bad chemistry with Mary Lincoln and soon returned to the hotel. Only later would he discover that he had been targeted for assassination and spared only because the would-be killer lost his nerve.

Mary Lincoln was overcome with grief and erupted in wailing and sobbing to the point that the unsentimental Stanton banished her to the front parlor. She was comforted through the night by Elizabeth Dixon, the wife of a U.S. senator.

In the bedroom stood Robert Lincoln, the president's eldest son, who just five days earlier had borne witness to Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. He sobbed on a senator's shoulder.

Notes from a doctor at the Lincoln bedside:

Six o'clock - Pulse failing; respiration twenty-eight
Half-past six - still failing and labored breathing
Seven o'clock - symptoms of immediate dissolution
Twenty-two minutes past seven - Death

A minister said a prayer then, and Tanner, the peg-legged soldier, could not transcribe it because in the trauma of the moment he had broken the pencil in his pocket.

"Now he belongs to the ages," Stanton said - though some heard it as "angels."

There is no dispute about the wording of the telegram that Stanton sent soon thereafter:

Abraham Lincoln died this morning at 22 minutes after 7 o'clock.

There are terrible moments in American history when chance plays an outsized role, when the outcome could have gone either way, when a stroke of luck makes all the difference.

This was not really one of those moments.

This was more like the certain path of a stone hurled high in the air. The forces at work were as predictable as gravity. The war, it turned out, wasn't actually over, and its cruel logic dictated the sacrifice of another life.

The assassination, unlike many others to come in American history, was not the handiwork of the proverbial "lone nut." The murder of Lincoln, as writer Adam Gopnik has suggested, should not be psychologized. This was a true conspiracy, born of the war and its underlying causes. The breadth of the conspiracy remains fodder for historians - there are those who say it went all the way to the top of the Confederate leadership. What's certain is that the assassination was an extension of the war, fueled by Confederate sympathies and virulent racism.

And at some level, the American people came to understand that. Yet at first they were shocked by the news, confused, unable to believe it was true, desperate for confirmation that this event had really happened, and we all know that sensation – the experience of being hurled into chaos, faced by vague threats not yet calibrated, the world tilting suddenly toward madness. We know what it's like not knowing how many hijacked planes are still in the air.

The killing of the president was not a single event but an unfolding story, because Booth and his conspirators were on the loose. One by one they were rounded up, and four went to the gallows, including Mary Surratt, who ran a boarding house on H Street that today is a Chinese restaurant called Wok and Roll. On the 12th day of the manhunt, the surrounded Booth was shot and killed in a burning barn in Virginia.

For the American people, Lincoln's martyrdom on Good Friday seemed a sign that God was closely directing human events for purposes not easily grasped.

"The mourning and grief were sort of tempered or colored by the sense that somehow narratively it made perfect sense," said Adam Goodheart, director of the Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

"If Shakespeare had scripted the Civil War, he couldn't have done better than killing Lincoln in the last scene, on Good Friday, just after he had freed the slaves."

It was almost like proof of American exceptionalism - akin to the remarkable fact that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

"How could this have happened unless God were the one scripting the American story," Goodheart said.

Martha Hodes, author of "Mourning Lincoln," writes of the special challenge facing preachers on Easter morning, the day after Lincoln's death: "On a day's notice, they had to find a way to address the palpable sorrow without entirely jettisoning Easter season rejoicing. They had to think about the problem of calamitous evil in the world God had created, and they had to make sense of Union victory and the end of slavery, followed by the president's murder."

Lincoln believed, to take him at his own word, that the war was not a random event but something ordained by God. So he said, in that brilliant second inaugural address, delivered six weeks before his death. Perhaps this war was God's punishment for the 250 years of slavery.

In Lincoln's formulation, humans are part of a narrative that they do not fully control or understand.

"The Almighty has His own purposes," Lincoln told the people who had assembled at the Capitol - including the man who would become his assassin.

Sources: "Blood On the Moon," by Edward Steers Jr.; "President Lincoln Assassinated!," edited by Harold Holzer; "Mourning Lincoln," by Martha Hodes; and "Team of Rivals," by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

The towns built by freed slaves

A race is on to document black communities before they disappear

By DeNeen L. Brown

Gwendora Hebron Reese, 73, sits in historic St. Paul Community Church in the Sugarland community in Poolesville,Md. The resource center of the church houses the Sugarland Ethno History Project. Sugarland, a community in Montgomery County, was founded by former slaves soon after the CivilWar. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Legend says that Sugarland, Md., one of the hundreds of all-black towns and communities established by freed slaves after the Civil War, got its name because its founders believed that "the women here were as sweet as sugar."

Gwendora Reese, 73, and her cousins Nettie Johnson La'Master, 74, and Suzanne Johnson, 65 - who are direct descendants of the town's founders - are telling the story of Sugarland. Reese and La'Master grew up here, in wood-frame houses built by their fathers, themselves direct descendants of freed slaves who founded this community about an hour's drive north of Washington.

They remember their mothers canning peaches and their siblings skipping along dirt roads, playing tag among fruit orchards. They remember sitting on the hard benches in the church built by former slaves. And visiting elders who spoke with pride about a community founded and run by blacks. Sugarland had its own general store and postmaster.

"It was a community born out of slavery," Reese says. "The church was one of the first community buildings they built. By them being in slavery, they learned trades. Some were blacksmiths. My great-grandfather made bricks. They took the skills they learned in slavery and helped each other building log cabins."

Sugarland was founded on Oct. 6, 1871, when three freedmen - William Taylor, Patrick Hebron Jr. and John H. Diggs - "purchased land for a church from George W. Dawson, a white former slave owner, for the sum of $25," Reese says. The founders made a small down payment and continued to pay until the debt was settled. The deed dictated that the land be used for a church, a school and "as a burial site for people of African descent."

Today, Sugarland is mostly horse country with million-dollar homes that sit on rolling hills. Many of the houses that former slaves built have been torn down. The forest has overtaken lots where freedmen once lived. The winding dirt roads that separated this black community from a white world are now paved.

But Reese, La'Master and Johnson remember a different place. "It used to be you could stand on a hill and see all over Sugarland," Reese says wistfully.

A national crisis

At the war's end, 4 million enslaved people suddenly faced stark decisions. Many wondered where they would go, what they would eat and how they would survive. Some stayed on plantations working as sharecroppers. Others fled for a "promised land," hoping to find jobs in cities. Some freedmen tried to scrape together nickels and dimes to buy land, creating all-black communities and towns across the country, where black people, sheltered from a white world, would run stores, banks, post offices and schools.

In his autobiography, "Up From Slavery," Booker T. Washington described "wild scenes of ecstasy" in response to news of freedom that came to the farm in Virginia where he grew up a slave. But the rejoicing, he wrote, was quickly tempered by a new reality.

"For I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins, there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them."

A feeling of gloom seeped into the slave quarters, Washington wrote. "To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it. Some of the slaves were seventy or eighty years old; their best days were gone. They had no strength with which to earn a living in a strange place and among strange people."

Freedom of millions of people prompted a national crisis. Millions of slaves, prohibited by law from learning to read, were illiterate. Many owned nothing and had no money.

On March 3, 1865, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, which dispensed food, clothing and medicine, and built schools.

"The Freedmen's Bureau didn't have much funding and manpower," said Deborah A. Lee, a historian in Virginia who worked with the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness of American heritage. "They worked with people in the local community to establish schools or build schools. There was a huge hunger for learning." One woman who kept a diary described "people of color going around carrying books everywhere."

Buying land was important, Lee said. "They would build buildings, whether it was a home or a fellowship hall." Because some of them were working to earn a living during the day, they would raise community buildings at night. "There is a story of one church where the women would hold lanterns so the men could work in the dark."

Often, Lee said, freedmen paid a premium for land - "even from those sympathetic to them. They often paid more for land than white people would, but it was very important to them. . . . They wanted to develop their autonomy and independence as much as possible."

'History is being lost'

By 1888, at least 200 black towns and communities had been established nationwide. Some were modeled on black towns that had been formed after the American Revolution and during the antebellum era - from the late 1700s to 1860.

"The black-town idea reached its peak in the fifty years after the Civil War," Norman L. Crockett wrote in his book "The Black Towns." "The dearth of extant records prohibits an exact enumeration of them, but at least sixty black communities were settled between 1865 and 1915. With more than twenty, Oklahoma led all other states."

According to Crockett, not much was documented about the daily lives, aspirations, and fears of people living in such towns as "Blackdom, New Mexico; Hobson City, Alabama; Allensworth, California; and Rentiesville, Oklahoma because residents failed to record their experiences and whites were not interested in preserving and collecting material on the black towns."

Many of the black communities were tight-knit, rural, and centered around school and church, said Susan Pearl, a historian at the Prince George's County Historical Society in Maryland. "Little communities formed. The first thing they would build was a church or a Freedman's Bureau school. That happened in Chapel Hill," a community in Prince George's that freed blacks founded in 1868.

Hope Lee, 76, a retired government worker and a fifth-generation descendant of one of the founders, still lives in Chapel Hill, which sits off Indian Head Highway. A few other original families remain, she said, but "all the younger people are moving out. As they widen the roads, property is being lost. People who are moving in don't have the same passion for Chapel Hill that the originals do. . . . The history is being lost."

And not just in Chapel Hill. Researchers across the region are racing to document black towns and communities before they disappear. Emily Huebner, a research archivist on the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland Project at the Maryland State Archives, has been studying Unionville, a community founded in 1867 in Talbot County by veterans of Colored Troops who fought in the Civil War.

Fighting for Confederacy

For more than 20 years, Reese has been collecting her community's history.

"You go digging around to see what you can find out," she said. "It is like a puzzle. The pieces are slowly coming together."

She discovered that two of Sugarland's founders fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War. "My great-grandfather's brother [Luke Hebron] was a Confederate soldier," she said. "He joined the fight because it was a source of income for his family."

A second black man who fought for the Confederacy was Basil Dorsey, who is listed in church records as one of the founders of Sugarland. About 15 years ago, Reese interviewed one of Dorsey's nieces, Mary Beckwith Crenshaw, who told her about the Confederate recruiters who came to Poolesville during the war.

"The grown-ups said that they traveled in pairs," said Crenshaw, who was 92 at the time of the interview. "They said that they were Confederate recruiters looking for men that were willing to sign up" - even black men.

Crenshaw's father and Dorsey went to Rockville, Md., for physicals. "My father didn't pass, but Uncle Basil did," she said. "The reason that they signed up was for the money that they told them that they would receive.

"I was told that my father and the other families in the community helped take care of his family while he was away. They made sure Aunt Nancy and her daughter, Mary, had lots of wood during the winter, and when they butchered hogs in the fall of the year they gave her meat. The women gave them homemade sausage, pudding, scrapple and canned goods."

When Dorsey died in 1880, a notice of his death was printed in the Montgomery County Sentinel: "Basil Dorsey, (colored,) died last Sunday night. He was a noted darkey in our midst; and had served through the late war on the confederate side."

Reese found other stories about the war. Here in a 1937 interview, her great-grandfather Phillip Johnson described for the Work Progress Administration what it was like living as a slave near Edwards Ferry.

"We all liked the Missis," he recalled. "But the overseer was so cruel. . . . I promised him a killin' if I ever got to be big enough."

Johnson remembered Yankee and Confederate soldiers swooping into Poolesville, seeking recruits. He feared that the owner of his plantation would require him to fight for the Confederacy, which had authorized the enlistment of "able-bodied Negro men" in March 1865.

"Cap'n Sam White, he join the Confederate in Virginia. He come home and say he goin' to take me along back with him for to serve him. But the Yankees came and he left very sudden and leave me behind," Johnson said. "I was glad I didn't have to go with him. I saw all the fightin' around Poolesville."

Keeping records

In 1995, Reese, her cousins and other descendants of founding families organized the Sugarland Ethno-History Project to help preserve the community's history. Reese, Johnson and La'Master established a historical foundation with the help of an archaeologist from Howard University, and are trying raise money to build a museum.

"These books are priceless," Reese says, thumbing through a school primer that helped teach one of her ancestors to read. The back two rows of St. Paul Community Church in Sugarland are set aside for family histories and newspaper clippings. Reese has collected antiques, irons, water basins, tools and detailed records her ancestors left.

"Here is a church register dating to 1882," she says. Instructions in the front of the register dictate that the church keep detailed records of community members:

"The Discipline of our Church provides that every Society shall have a permanent Register, in which the Secretary of the Church Conference 'shall enter in chronological order the full names of all who shall join the church, with the time and manner of the reception of each; and also shall make a permanent record of all baptisms and marriages within the congregation.

"These Registers are intended to be permanent, and to contain not only the list of living members, but of all who joined the Church. . . . A Register, therefore, should be large enough to last a generation and should never be revised or rewritten until the book is exhausted."

Reese flips through the register and lands on a page in which someone has recorded a sermon from 1881: "Jan 16th . . . discussed whether the race white is better to the collard race than they are to themselfs . . . discussed by CW. Johnson, R. Hebrowns, F. Branson; . . . It is desided colard Race is better to themSelfs."

Several more pages contain a record of a dispute that came before the church board of trustees, which governed the community. In this self-contained community, Reese says, punishment often meant banishment from church for a few weeks.

On Oct. 26, 1885, for example, the church board heard a case about a young woman who was kicked out of her house by her grandmother, who told her to "take your dirty rags you stinken huzzie and go away from here." She fled to the home of a man who was found guilty of taking her in.

The register also includes an obituary: "In rememnance of Brother Nathan Richson who departed this life April 13 1888. . . . Brother richson was a good member and a good man to his family. He was born Dec. 22 1842. . . . he leaves a wife and six children to mourn his lost. . . . Brother Richson will be remembered for many years. he was good singer could not be excel. Brother is gone, he is gone, yea he is gone to rest with the angels above."

Reese and her cousins handle the fragile records with care. Reese, who took a class on the preservation of historic items, re-wraps the book in acid-free plastic and carefully places it on a bench in the back the church. Sometimes she wonders whether she will run out of space and then what will happen to the history of Sugarland.

La'Master still lives in the house her father built. The house began with two rooms, but her father, an inventor, continued adding rooms until it had 16. When he died in 2010, La'Master couldn't bring herself to pack up his belongings. So she left things where he put them - his reading glasses on his desk, the wood in his iron stove, his bugle from World War II.

"There is so much history in this house," La'Master says.

Outside the church, Reese and La'Master take a walk among the tombstones, remembering the sheer determination of the community's founders.

"There it is," Reese said, pointing to the headstone of her great-grandfather. Etched in the rugged stone marker are the words, "Phillip S. Johnson. Died Jan. 1938."

The S, diligently carved by someone just out of slavery, is backward.

Next to the marker is the broken tombstone of Phillip's wife, Rachel, who died a week before he did. Many years ago, it was hit by a tree felled by lightning, which slashed it diagonally, leaving a pointed edge jutting up.

"I tried to repair it myself. It stayed for several years, then you can see the piece fell off," said Reese, one of the last trustees of the church built by former slaves who created Sugarland.

The victors turn on one another

After the epic conflict came a battle of wills to shape the future of the defeated South

By Robert B. Mitchell

President Andrew Johnson came to be reviled by Republican lawmakers. 1860 photo. (Library of Congress)

After the guns fell silent at Appomattox, Washington went to war with itself.

The combatants, occupying opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, battled over post-war Reconstruction. President Andrew Johnson, who favored a lenient approach to restoring civilian rule in the South, clashed with so-called Radical Republicans who believed conditions in the defeated Confederacy required vigorous federal intervention to protect the hard-won fruits of victory.

At stake was "[w]hether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results," the abolitionist, former slave and prominent Republican Frederick Douglass wrote.

The ranks of the Radicals and their allies featured blacks and whites, practical politicians and visionary abolitionists. Their motives ran the gamut from genuine idealism to the hard-eyed political calculation that newly freed slaves could become a vital constituency for the Republican Party.

For his part, Johnson vowed to stand against Republican opponents who, he charged, labored to "pervert and destroy" the government with their Reconstruction policies. But beneath the veneer of Johnson's proclaimed fidelity to the Constitution lurked a combative personality and deep-seated bigotry that drove his opposition to political equality for former slaves.

"He was a great fighter and not so good at making nice," author and historian David O. Stewart said of Johnson. In addition to his taste for political pugilism, the humorless Johnson was a "thoroughgoing racist," Stewart said. "He was a guy with real limits."

Before it was over, the conflict between Johnson and the Radicals escalated into the first impeachment trial of a president. But in the dark days after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, some thought Johnson and the Radicals might get along.

During the war, Johnson had demonstrated a strong devotion to the Union and seemingly implacable hostility to slave-owning Southern planters as Tennessee's military governor. His record as a Southern Democrat who opposed secession earned him his place as Lincoln's vice-presidential candidate in 1864.

In a meeting between Johnson and members of the congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, held shortly after Lincoln was shot, the new president vowed that "treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be impoverished."

The Radicals, who had opposed Lincoln's plans to speedily reintegrate rebellious states into the Union, took heart at the declarations of the new president. "We were all encouraged by this brave talk," recalled Radical Republican George Julian of Indiana.

But Julian and his allies quickly became disillusioned with Johnson after he issued a pair of proclamations that set out a liberal course on Reconstruction. To hasten the return of civilian rule, the decrees outlined the process by which military occupation would end, protected property rights and offered immunity to most Southerners who swore loyalty to the U.S. government.

Beginning shortly after he took office, and continuing throughout the remainder of his presidency, Johnson also made energetic use of his power to issue pardons to defeated rebels. "At the present rate," the Cincinnati Commercial observed in the summer of 1865, "the whole confederacy will apply for pardon before the 1st of August."

The initiatives caused intense alarm among Republicans. It was "a profoundly tense moment, and Johnson didn't do anything to ease those tensions," said C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University. "Essentially he is thumbing his nose at the Republican Party."

Johnson's conduct wasn't the only thing worrying Republicans.

Across the South, white voters returned rebel leaders to elective office. In Georgia, legislators sent former Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens to the U.S. Senate.

Newly freed slaves in Mississippi, Virginia, South Carolina and other states faced a reign of terror from vindictive whites. Southern states enacted "black codes" with the aim, according to J.W. Alvord of the Freedmen's Bureau, of keeping former slaves "subservient to the white race and compelled to labor for low wages."

When Congress convened on Dec. 4, Radical Republicans and their more conservative colleagues pushed back. The House and Senate barred the seating of Stephens and other lawmakers sent to Washington from the defeated South. Many were "persons fresh from the rebel congress or from the rebel army, men who could not take the requisite oath" to uphold the Constitution, said Republican Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois.

Congress also created a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate conditions in the former Confederacy. The evidence gathered by the panel in early 1866 confirmed the Radicals' worst fears.

Few locations seemed more dangerous for former slaves than southern Mississippi. Capt. J.H. Matthews, assigned to the Freedmen's Bureau, told lawmakers that vigilantes in Amite and Pike counties whipped and murdered former slaves. In a report to his superiors in the bureau, Matthews told of one ex-slave being hanged and skinned.

Outrages occurred elsewhere. The Rev. William Thornton, a black Baptist preacher from what is now Hampton, Va., testified that he had been threatened with death and that members of a church in a nearby county where he preached had been flogged simply for attending services.

"Did they not know they had a right to resist?" a committee member asked.

"They dare not do it," Thornton replied.

South Carolina, where witnesses testified that whites routinely flogged, shot and whipped former slaves, seemed particularly unrepentant.

"The late slaveholders of South Carolina still believe that the loyal black man has no rights that they need respect, and have not been taught that hard lesson for them to learn: that they must treat those they once owned as free men and deal justly with them," Gen. Rufus Saxton told the committee.

Johnson shrugged it all off. On Feb. 19 he vetoed legislation to extend the life of the Freedmen's Bureau, established to assist former slaves as they made the transition to freedom. In March, he vetoed a civil rights bill and questioned whether former slaves possessed "the requisite qualifications to entitle them to all the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States." Congress overrode both vetoes.

At loggerheads with the Radicals, Johnson embarked on an unusual speaking tour in the summer of 1866 in the hopes of influencing the upcoming congressional elections. But the "Swing Around the Circle," in which Johnson traveled to Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, St. Louis and other cities with leading members of his administration, proved to be a political disaster.

As he attempted to convince Northern voters that he was defending the Constitution, Johnson traded insults with hecklers and embarrassed his supporters. "The President of the United States," the New York Times warned, "cannot enter upon an exchange of epithets with the brawlers of a mob, without seriously compromising his official character and hazarding interests too momentous to be thus lightly imperiled."

After the elections produced a landslide for Republicans, who won 173 of the 226 seats in the House and held 43 of 52 seats in the Senate, Johnson's emboldened congressional foes began their counterattack.

Congress imposed military rule throughout the South to create new civilian governments that protected black voting rights and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

Not content to reshape the South, Congress also took aim at the powers of the presidency. The Tenure of Office Act passed in March 1867, prohibited Johnson from dismissing a Cabinet member unless the Senate had approved a successor.

Simmering fury with the president boiled over at the end of the year. Johnson removed military commanders seen as sympathetic to the Radicals, and then further antagonized his foes with an annual message in which he asserted that blacks lacked the qualities required for self-government.

"It is the glory of white men to know that they have had these qualities in sufficient measure to build upon this continent a great political fabric," the president declared. "But if anything can be proven by known facts - if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people."

Goaded, the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment. The House rejected the measures by almost 2 to 1, but the Radicals remained at the ramparts. All they needed was another provocation.

It came Feb. 21, 1868, when the president dismissed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical ally. Three days later, before deciding on the charges that would be sent to the Senate, enraged House Republicans voted overwhelmingly to impeach Johnson.

"The president," Julian asserted, "as if to leave Congress wholly without excuse, has done an act which on its face settles the question of law, and shuts us up to the absolute necessity of taking the recreant usurper by the throat."

Many of the articles of impeachment focused on the dismissal of Stanton, which appeared to violate the Tenure of Office Act. But the broadest charge against Johnson - Article XI - alleged that he had attempted to bring Congress into disrepute with intemperate denunciations of its opposition to his Reconstruction program.

Radical Charles Sumner of Massachusetts made his feelings about Johnson plain. "This is one of the last great battles with slavery," he declared as he argued in favor of removing the Tennessean from office. Johnson embodied "the tyrannical Slave Power. In him it lives again. He is the lineal successor of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis."

More than half of the Senate favored removing Johnson from office, but the two-thirds majority required by the Constitution proved just out of reach. Johnson survived the first vote, on Article XI, by a single vote. Two charges pertaining to the dismissal of Stanton also failed by a single vote, and the rest of the case was dropped by the House.

Trumbull, who shared Sumner's contempt for the president, voted to acquit. "If the question was, 'Is Andrew Johnson a fit person for president?' I should answer no," the Illinois Republican conceded. But the case presented by the House failed to rise to the standards required to remove a president from office, he said.

Some votes may have been cast for less high-minded reasons. Suspicions that some senators were paid off to acquit Johnson hovered over the proceedings and moved Benjamin Butler, one of the House impeachment managers, to investigate.

Butler's probe proved inconclusive, but Stewart said bribery may well have played a role in determining the outcome. "Our politics were really corrupt at a level we don't appreciate," he said. "It was a seamy time."

As time passed, one of the radicals began to have second thoughts about the vigor with which he attacked Johnson. In his memoirs, published in 1883, Julian attributed the attempt to remove Johnson from office to overheated politics rather than concerns about Reconstruction.

"No extravagance of speech or explosion of wrath was deemed out of order during this strange dispensation in our politics," Julian wrote. "Andrew Johnson was not the Devil-incarnate he was then painted, nor did he monopolize, entirely, the 'wrong-headedness' of the times."

But the incendiary rhetoric of the period isn't so difficult to understand. Involving issues of race, the enfranchisement of African Americans, and executive power versus the prerogatives of Congress, Reconstruction was a political tinderbox that has left a legacy in some ways more enduring than the war itself. "In terms of creating the political fabric of our present day," Genetin-Pilawa said, "Reconstruction is more important."

War over, they died going home

Union POWs perished on an overloaded steamboat in a disaster quickly forgotten

By Brady Dennis

A depiction of the burning steamboat Sultana. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

The men on the boat had seen all manner of death and despair.

They had witnessed friends and fellow soldiers shot dead on muddy battlefields. They had endured dirty, disease-ridden Confederate prison camps in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. They were tired and injured, sick and underfed.

But, in late April 1865, they also were happy and relieved.

Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. The Civil War had drawn to a close and, however improbably, they had survived it.

Months earlier, on Christmas Day, a Union soldier from Ohio named John Clark Ely had sat in a prison camp in Mississippi, wondering whether he would see home again. "Such a day for us prisoners. Hungry, dirty, sleepy and lousy," he wrote in his journal. "Will another Christmas find us again among friends and loved ones?"

Now he seemed to have his answer.

Ely was among the more than 2,000 paroled Union prisoners of war, many of them still teenagers, crowded aboard the steamboat Sultana as it pulled away from the docks at Vicksburg, Miss., on April 24. They were headed up the Mississippi River, bound for their farms and families in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and other places they hadn't set eyes on in far too long.

"Oh, this is the brightest day of my life long to be remembered," Ely wrote before the trip commenced.

The brightness would not last.

"All of these guys were on their way home after going through so many ordeals," said historian and author Alan Huffman. "People were just dying around them constantly for four years. You set foot on this boat and you think you're on your way home. You're home free. And really, the worst was ahead."

For two days, the woefully overcrowded boat lurched northward. Melting snow in the north had contributed to one of the worst spring floods in memory. The Sultana stopped in Memphis on April 26, and continued north later that night. About 2 a.m., seven miles upriver from Memphis, a boiler exploded. Two more exploded in rapid succession, visiting yet another hell on men who had already endured so much.

"Some were killed instantly by the explosion. Others awoke to find themselves flying through the air, and did not know what had happened," Huffman wrote in his book, "Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History." "One minute they were sleeping and the next they found themselves struggling to swim in the very cold Mississippi River. Some passengers burned on the boat. The fortunate ones clung to debris in the river, or to horses and mules that had escaped the boat, hoping to make it to shore, which they could not see because it was dark and the flooded river was at that point almost five miles wide."

Still others faced a horrible choice: remain aboard the floating inferno, or jump into the river and risk being drowned by the panicked masses in the waters below. Making matters worse, many of the men didn't know how to swim.

"When I came to my senses I found myself . . . surrounded by wreckage, and in the midst of smoke and fire," an Ohio soldier recalled in a collection of survivor essays, "Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors," published in 1892. "The agonizing shrieks and groans of the injured and dying were heart rending, and the stench of burning flesh was intolerable and beyond my power of description."

"It was all confusion," remembered one Michigan soldier. "Brave men rushed to and fro in the agony of fear, some uttering the most profane language and others commending their spirits to the Great Ruler of the Universe."

"There were some killed in the explosion, lying in the bottom of the boat, being trampled upon, while some were crying and praying, many were cursing while others were singing," recalled another Ohio soldier. "That sight I shall never forget; I often see it in my sleep, and wake with a start."

The Sultana disaster killed an estimated 1,700 or more of the passengers - a death toll higher than caused by the sinking of the Titanic half a century later. While it remains the worst maritime catastrophe in U.S. history, the Sultana was relegated to brief mentions in the country's newspapers, overshadowed by the end of the war and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln less than two weeks earlier. Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, had been tracked down by authorities and killed the day before the Sultana explosion. The Sultana story could not compete with headlines such as "Lee Surrenders!" "President Murdered!" and "Booth Killed!"

"It didn't really get a lot of press coverage because of where and when it occurred and who the victims were. These were mainly enlisted men; they hadn't made any mark on history," said Jerry Potter, author of "The Sultana Tragedy: America's Greatest Maritime Disaster." "The nation had just finished four long, bloody years of civil war. Over 600,000 men had died. People were accustomed, unfortunately, to reading about Gettysburg and Antietam and Chickamauga and Shiloh. They were used to reading about death, and I think the country was just somewhat calloused toward it."

Greed, incompetence, recklessness and bad luck all played a role.

The trouble started the moment the steamboat docked in Vicksburg. One of its boilers had sprung a leak on the way from New Orleans and needed repair. The boat's captain, J. Cass Mason, brought in a mechanic who wanted to replace a ruptured seam. That job could take days and cost Mason time and money, so he insisted that the mechanic hastily patch the leaky boiler.

The government's offer to pay $5 or more per man to transport Union POWs back north after the war meant big money for steamboat captains such as Mason. It also sowed the seeds of corruption, as boat captains commonly offered kickbacks or other bribes to Army officers willing to load their vessels with as many men as possible.

That was part of the reason the Sultana, built to hold about 375 passengers, was crammed with 2,400 - about six times its recommended capacity - as it began the journey to Cairo, Ill. Every corner of the boat was occupied by weary soldiers, so tightly sandwiched together that many could find no place to sleep and barely any place to stand. The decks of the 260-foot-long boat sagged and creaked under the load.

"It was corruption and gross negligence," Potter said. "It was a horrible comedy of errors."

Hours after the explosions, the Sultana sank to the bottom of the Mississippi. Bodies continued to surface downriver for months; many were never recovered. Mason, the boat's captain, was among the casualties.

Despite claims of Confederate sabotage, a government inquiry determined that too little water in the boilers, coupled with the shoddy repairs and the strain of the heavy load, probably contributed to the disaster. There were investigations and military tribunals, but ultimately no one was held fully accountable for America's worst maritime calamity.

For those who survived the Sultana explosion, through luck or resourcefulness or some combination of the two, the event shaped the rest of their lives.

"The war trumped all their previous travails," Huffman wrote. "For those who were also former prisoners, captivity trumped the war. And for those who survived the Sultana, the disaster trumped everything."

Some survivors slipped into alcoholism and depression. Others wrote about their experiences in newspaper and magazine articles, sometimes omitting parts of the narrative or embellishing their own heroism, but always desperately trying to make sure the tragedy was not forgotten. Many carried with them burns and other lasting physical injuries to accompany their psychological wounds.

Huffman said the story of two Indiana farm boys, Romulus Tolbert and John Maddox, illustrates how different men wrestled with the demons of war and of the Sultana.

They had fought side by side in the war, ended up in the same prison camp and wound up together on the doomed steamboat. After the disaster, back in the same home town, Tolbert embraced a quiet life of stability. He married, built a house with a picket fence, farmed the land and rarely spoke of the Sultana. Maddox remained restless. He suffered failed marriages and health problems, couldn't hold down a job and seemed haunted by the past.

"How they dealt with it was very different," Huffman said. "That wasn't uncommon. Some people were just beaten down by these things; other people just became sort of stoic and endured it. There wasn't any template."

More than two decades after the disaster, survivors of the Sultana in different parts of the country began holding annual reunions around the anniversary of the catastrophe. Eventually, their numbers dwindled, until the last survivor died in 1936. By then, their children and grandchildren had grown up hearing the extraordinary tales of hardship, loss and survival.

"This is, and always has been, something that defines our family," said Mary Beth Mason, of Silver Spring. Her grandfather, William Carter Warner, joined the Union Army's 9th Indiana Cavalry as a teenager, became a prisoner of war and survived the Sultana, managing to swim ashore after he was blown into the river.

Mason's grandfather died before she was born, but she and her siblings grew up hearing his life story from her father. She still has a copy of the official survivor's certificate her grandfather received in September 1888 from the Sultana Survivors Association.

"My grandfather could have died in Cahaba prison when he was 16," Mason said. "He could have died on the Sultana, but he didn't. . . . Of course, it's important in my family. My father would have never been born. I would have never been born."

Descendants of Sultana survivors have continued to meet in recent decades to remember a tragedy that the nation barely acknowledged at the time and that has been relegated to a footnote ever since.

This April, to mark the 150th anniversary of the disaster, they will gather in Marion, Ark., just across the Mississippi River from Memphis. They will board a boat and travel upstream to where the Sultana sank and lay a wreath on the river to honor those lost. They will visit the spot where the wreckage of the steamboat now lies under a field on the Arkansas side of the river.

"We've done a lot to keep the story and to spread the story," said Norman Shaw of Knoxville, Tenn., who as founder of the Association of Sultana Descendants and Friends has been organizing gatherings since 1987. He expects 100 people or more to attend this year. "These fellows felt history forgot about them. . . . We're following the wishes of the original survivors to keep the story alive."

In the spring of 1865, the boys on the boat had wanted nothing more than to go home. Most never made it past Memphis. Today, many of them lie in the Memphis National Cemetery under simple white headstones engraved with the words "Unknown U.S. Soldier."

But not all of the graves are anonymous.

One marker is etched with the name of John Clark Ely, the Ohio soldier who never saw his next Christmas.

The greatest overlooked stories from the end of the war

Our panel of experts weighs in

Q: What is the greatest overlooked story at the end of the Civil War?

Lincoln what-if
By Harold Holzer

I hate to admit it, but ever since I was a youngster first excitedly immersing myself in the mysteries of the Lincoln story, I've always been intrigued, above all, by that most compelling and inescapable of Civil War-era might-have-beens: What would have happened had Lincoln not been assassinated some 150 years ago on April 14, 1865?

When I was a kid, I dreamed repeatedly about rushing into the Ford's Theatre presidential box myself and heroically shouting: "On your guard, Mr. President! The crazed actor John Wilkes Booth is on his way here to shoot you! Let me help you escape while the going is good!" Somehow, I always woke up before Lincoln could come to his senses, heed an 11-year-old's warning, tear himself away from watching "Our American Cousin" and sensibly retreat from imminent, fatal danger.

That's why I was so intrigued when, in assembling a book of citizen correspondence with Lincoln for my 1993 book "Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President," I came across an unpublished note that had arrived at the White House a month before the assassination. For had Lincoln heeded its advice, he might actually have thwarted John Wilkes Booth's plot - or at least survived until another murder scheme could be hatched. Here was real, long-lost evidence that Lincoln might have prevented his own murder. And it was no dream. I call it the most amazing unknown story of this period.

The letter in question came from one Carlton Chase, bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire, and he had a proposal for how the country - and its president - should observe the upcoming religious holiday. Lincoln ought to "appoint Good Friday, the fourteenth of April next - to be observed as a day of Fasting and Prayer throughout the United States." Bishop Chase was certain that his idea "would be agreeable to Christian people of all denominations."

As it turned out, however, it was not agreeable to Abraham Lincoln. He declared no fast day for April 14. Instead, he and his wife went to Ford's Theatre to watch a rollicking British comedy. Though a man of deep religious conviction, he apparently did not believe a national day of self-denial was appropriate so soon after Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox – even on the anniversary of Christ's crucifixion. It was time to laugh and celebrate, not fast and pray.

It was, in retrospect, the worst decision Lincoln ever made - the stuff that "what if?" dreams are made of. And maybe the best unknown yarn of the final days of America's bloodiest conflict. Ironically, in ignoring the bishop's advice, the martyred Lincoln became a Christ-like figure himself.

The 2015 Lincoln Prize winner's latest book is "President Lincoln Assassinated!!" (Library of America)

The CSS Shenandoah
By Waite Rawls

On Oct. 19, 1864, the last Confederate commerce raider sailed from Madeira on what would become the most remarkable cruise of any Confederate ship. And it would become an even more remarkable end to the Civil War.

The British-built ship's target was the American whaling fleet in the far North Pacific, Bering Sea and the Arctic. Since the beginning of the Civil War, a handful of Rebel commerce raiders had captured, burned or bonded more than 200 U.S. merchant ships, causing insurance rates for cargo and crafts to increase to the point where owners found it difficult to justify sending their ships to sea and merchants worldwide refused to transport their goods in American vessels.

As it headed south through the Atlantic, Shenandoah captured seven merchant ships before taking its first whaler on Dec. 5. That ship was burned, and the prisoners were landed on the remote island of Tristan da Cunha. A problem was discovered with Shenandoah's propeller shaft, and the most-secure repair facility was in Melbourne, Australia. Burning another merchant ship on the way, Shenandoah pulled into Melbourne on Jan. 25, 1865, and spent 25 days there. Australians cheered or condemned it, according to their feelings about the war on the other side of the world. The officers were the guests of the exclusive Melbourne Club for a private dinner, and a ball was held in their honor at Craig's Royal Hotel in the goldfield town of Ballarat.

Repairs completed, the ship left on Feb. 18, 1865. It captured four whaling ships on April 1 in the harbor of the island of Pohnpei in the Carolines before heading to the whaling grounds. From May 27 until June 28, Shenandoah captured, burned or bonded 25 more whaling ships, most near the Arctic Circle. These encounters proved to be the last combat actions in the Civil War, thousands of miles from Richmond, Washington or Appomattox.

Shenandoah then headed back into the Pacific. On Aug. 2, it met a British merchant ship that had proof the war was over. After disarming, Shenandoah headed to Liverpool, England, by going around the southern tip of South America and after circumnavigating the globe - the only Confederate ship to do so. Pulling into Liverpool with its flag flying, Shenandoah lowered the flag on Nov. 6, 1865, and the ship was turned over to the British government. This proved to be the last Confederate combat unit to surrender.

The crew was released and Shenandoah was then turned over to the American consul. The ship was sold at auction on March 26, 1866, and bought by the Sultan of Zanzibar. It sank in the Indian Ocean on Sept. 10, 1872.

So if your friends ask where the last shots of the American Civil War were fired, tell them the Bering Sea, off Alaska. And if they want to know the location and time of the last Confederate surrender, tell them Liverpool, England, seven months after Appomattox.

Rawls is co-chief executive of the American Civil War Museum

A Forrest defeat
By John F. Marszalek

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate general who never had independent command in a major battle, but his daring style of commanding cavalry in smaller incidents has made him better known than other more important generals. When Shelby Foote became the star of Ken Burns's "Civil War" series and named Forrest and Abraham Lincoln as the two geniuses of the Civil War, Forrest's mythical reputation seemed sealed. He was the unbeatable "wizard in the saddle," his slave trader past, Fort Pillow Massacre horror and KKK ties ignored.

Forrest's victories are well known - Brice's Crossroads, for example - while instances of defeat are not. As the Civil War was drawing to a close, however, even Forrest could not halt the inevitable. He failed to prevent two of the final defeats the Confederacy suffered, defeats few now remember.

Beginning on March 22, 1865, less than a month before the war ended, Union Maj. Gen. James Harrison Wilson, a topographical engineer by military profession, led a raid into Alabama with the purpose of capturing Selma, the site of the Selma Ordnance and Naval Foundry. His aim was to destroy the foundry's capability for supplying the Confederate military. Wilson commanded some 13,500 horsemen, while the Confederates under Forrest had only 5,000, the kind of odds Forrest supporters have long argued that the Confederate regularly faced yet overwhelmed.

Such was not the case this time. On April 1, 1865, Wilson clashed with Forrest at Ebenezer Church, Ala., 18 miles from Selma. A Union saber attack resulted in Forrest's wounding, though he killed his attacker and got away. Then the Federals drove him back into the three-mile-long entrenchments around Selma, which the Union cavalrymen gained knowledge of from a designer of the construction plans. Wilson's three-pronged attack broke through the manned entrenchments. Forrest was able to escape in the confusion after the battle, but Wilson had soundly defeated him. There were 2,700 Confederate losses to 359 Union casualties.

The Confederates thus suffered the destruction of the army under Forrest's command. Wilson and his men burned the Selma industrial works and captured Montgomery, Ala., Columbus, Ga., and finally the fleeing Confederate president Jefferson Davis. As for Forrest, he surrendered.

It was at Selma, the site of the later civil rights event of the 1960s, that Nathan Bedford Forrest, the allegedly unbeatable general and the commander at the Fort Pillow massacre of black troops, met defeat. In recent times, another battle of Selma has taken place, this time over a statue erected to honor Forrest - even though he lost the battle there and he could hardly be linked to the modern civil rights movement.

Marszalek is Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Executive Director of the Ulysses S. Grant Association’s Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University

Decision at Petersburg
By Jim Campi

The curtain rose on the final act of the Civil War in Virginia on April 2, 1865, with the Federal assault on weakened Confederate lines at Petersburg. This attack, often overlooked in histories of the war, was one of the most successful of the four-year conflict.

For 10 months, Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had held the siege lines around Petersburg, protecting both that city and vital supply lines into the Confederate capital at Richmond. While Southern armies were suffering defeat elsewhere, around Atlanta and in the Carolinas, Lee's stubborn defense of Petersburg gave the Southern cause what little hope that remained.

The thrashing of Confederate forces defending Five Forks on April 1 left Lee's army in dire straits, cut off from its best line of retreat southward. Lee anticipated his Union counterpart, Lt. Gen. Ulysses Grant, would take full advantage of the situation and launch an assault on the lines around Petersburg. Lee tried to move troops to meet the expected attacks, but he no longer had the manpower to stave off disaster.

Despite the Federals' advantage in men and supplies, Union soldiers preparing for battle on April 2 viewed the assault with trepidation. The Southern trenches were formidable. An officer in the Union 9th Corps would write, "There can be no doubt that few of us expected to emerge alive from this affair."

The veteran 6th and 9th corps led the Union assault, stepping off about 4 a.m. The advance was preceded by a massive artillery bombardment that disrupted the Confederate defense. Although the 9th Corps attack became bogged down amid the elaborate fortifications around Fort Mahone, the 6th Corps assault would achieve spectacular success.

The 6th Corps infantry quickly breached the Confederate lines opposite Union Fort Welch. The outnumbered Confederates fought back with fierce determination, and a vicious hand-to-hand struggle ensued. Capt. Charles Gould, the first Federal to make it into the Southern lines, was bayoneted through the face. He would earn the Medal of Honor for his actions that day.

Despite the ferocity of the Southern defense, the result was inevitable - the Confederate line was irretrievably broken. That night, Lee would abandon both Petersburg and Richmond, beginning a retreat that would end with the surrender of his army at Appomattox on April 9.

Today, the site of the Union breakthrough is preserved through a partnership between two private-sector organizations: the Civil War Trust and Pamplin Historical Park. The two organizations have joined forces to protect the Petersburg breakthrough battlefield and restore it to its wartime appearance. On April 2, the trust will unveil a new 1.5-mile walking trail on its 470-acre Petersburg breakthrough property.

Campi is policy and communications director of the Civil War Trust

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