We have shared the incommunicable experience of war.
"We have felt, we still feel,
"the passion of life to its top.
"In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes.
By the summer 1861 Wilmer McLean had had enough.
Two great armies were converging on his farm
and what would be the first major battle of the Civil War,
Bull Run, or Manassas, as the Confederates called it,
would soon rage across the aging Virginian's farm,
a Union shell going so far as to explode in the summer kitchen.
Now McLean moved his family away from Manassas
far south and west of Richmond.
Out of harm's way, he prayed,
to a dusty little crossroads called Appomattox Courthouse.
And it was there, in his living room, three and a half years later,
that Lee surrendered to Grant.
And Wilmer McLean could rightfully say,
"The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor".
[The Civil War]
The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places,
from Valverde, New Mexico and Tullahoma, Tennessee,
to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina, on the Florida coast.
More than three million Americans fought in it
and over 600,000 men, 2% of the population, died in it.
American homes became headquarters.
American churches and schoolhouses sheltered the dying.
And huge foraging armies swept across American farms
and burned American towns.
Americans slaughtered one another wholesale, here, in America,
in their own corn fields, and peach orchards,
along familiar roads and by waters with old American names.
In two days, at Shiloh, on the banks of the Tennessee,
more American men fell than on all previous American wars combined.
At Cold Harbor, 7,000 Americans fell in 20 minutes.
Men who had never strayed 20 miles from their own front doors,
now found themselves soldiers in great armies,
fighting epic battles hundreds of miles from home.
They knew they were making history
and it was the greatest adventure of their lives.
The war made some rich, ruined others
and change forever the lives of all who lived through it.
A lackluster clerk from Galena, Illinois,
a failure at everything except marriage and war,
who in three years would be head of the Union army
and in seven President the United States.
An eccentric student of theology and military tactics,
a hypochondriac who rode in the battle with one hand raised
"to keep", he said, "the blood balanced".
A college professor from Maine, who on a little hill in Pennsylvania,
ordered an unlikely textbook maneuver,
that saved the Union army and possibly the Union itself.
Two ordinary soldiers, one from Providence, Rhode Island,
the other from Columbia, Tennessee,
who each serve four years
and together seemed to have been everywhere during the war
and live to tell the tale.
The courtly unknowable aristocrat
who disapproved of secession and slavery.
yet went on to defend them both
at the head of one of the greatest armies of all time.
The runaway boy who "stole himself" from slavery,
recruited two regiments of black soldiers
and helped transform the Civil War
into a struggle for the freedom of all Americans.
And then there was the rough man from Illinois,
who would rise to be the greatest President the country has ever seen.
Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other
and killed each other in great numbers
if only to become the kind of country
that could no longer conceive how that was possible.
What began as a bitter dispute over Union and states' rights,
ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America.
At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln can said perhaps more than he knew.
The war was about "a new birth of freedom".
1938 — 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.
President Roosevelt spoke to the remaining few Civil War veterans.
"Veterans of the Blue and the Gray.
"On behalf of the people of the United States,
"I accept this monument
"in the spirit of brotherhood and peace".
Year after year, the nation remembered.
In 1930, veterans of the Union army marched in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Four years later in New York City.
They and the surviving veterans of the Confederacy
were the last link with the terrible conflict
that tore America apart,
from 1861 to 1865.
The last Civil War veteran would die in 1959
and no longer were there been living memories of long ago battles.
Only History and legends.
Any understanding of this nation has to be based,
and I mean, really based on an understanding of the Civil War.
I believe that firmly. It defined us.
The Revolution did what it did.
Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the I World War,
did what it did.
But the Civil War defines us as what we are
and it opened us to being what we became,
good and bad things.
It is very necessary if you are going to understand
the American character, in the 20th century,
to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-19th century.
It was the crossroads of our being and it was a hell of a crossroads.
For me, the picture of the Civil War,
as a historic phenomenon,
is not on the battlefield.
It's not about weapons.
It's not about soldiers,
except to the extent that weapons and soldiers at that crucial moment,
joined a discussion about something higher,
about humanity, about human dignity,
about human freedom.
"From whence shall we expect the approach of danger?
"Shall some trans-Atlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow?
"Never.
"All the armies of Europe and Asia
"could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River
"or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.
"No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
"As a nation of free men, we will live forever
"or die by suicide".
— Abraham Lincoln, 1837.
[1861— the Cause]
In 1861 most of the nation's 31 million people
live peaceably on farms and in small towns.
At Sharpsburg, Maryland, a German pacifist sect, the Dunkards,
made their home in a sea of wheat and corn.
In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, population 2,400,
young men studied Latin and Mathematics at the small college there.
Steamboats filled with cotton,
came and went at Vicksburg on the Mississippi.
In Washington D.C., Senator Jefferson Davis
reviewed plans for remodeling the Capitol.
In Richmond, the 900 employees of the Tredegar Iron Works
turned out gun carriages and cannon for the US government.
At West Point, on the Hudson, officers trained
and friendships were formed, they thought, would last a lifetime.
"In thinking of America,
"I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky
"her grand old woods, her fertile fields,
"her beautiful rivers,
"her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains.
"But my rapture is soon checked
"when I remember that all is cursed
"with the infernal spirit of slaveholding and wrong,
"when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers
"the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean,
"disregarded and forgotten,
"that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters,
"I am filled with an unutterable loathing".
— Frederick Douglass.
[All Night Forever]
"No day ever dawns for the slave", a freed black man wrote.
"nor is it looked for.
"For the slave, it is all night,
"all night forever."
One white Mississippian was more blunt.
"I'd rather be dead", he said,
"than be a nigger on one of these big plantations".
A slave entered the world in a one-room, dirt-floored shack.
Drafty in winter, reeking in summer,
slave cabins bred pneumonia, typhus,
cholera, lockjaw, tuberculosis.
The child who survived to be sent to the fields at 12,
was likely to have rotten teeth, worms, dysentery, malaria.
Fewer than four out of a hundred lived to be 60.
Work began at sunrise and continued as long as there was light.
Fourteen hours sometimes,
unless there was a full moon when it went on still longer.
On the auction block, blacks be made to jump and dance
to demonstrate their sprightliness
and stripped to show how little whipping they needed.
Buyers poked and prodded them,
examined their feet, eyes and teeth,
"precisely", one ex-slave recalled, "as a jockey examines a horse".
"A slave could expect to be sold at least once in his lifetime.
"maybe two times, maybe more.
"Since slave marriages had no legal status,
"preachers changed the wedding vows to read
"until death or distance do you part".
"You know what I'd rather do,
"if I thought that I'd ever be a slave again?
"I'd take a gun and just end it all right away.
"Because you're nothing but a dog.
"You're not a thing but a dog.
"Some slaves refused to work.
"Some ran away.
"Still, blacks struggled to hold their families together,
"created their own culture under the worst of conditions
"and yearned to be free.
If there was a single event that caused the war,
it was the establishment of the United States
in independence from Great Britain,
with slavery still a part of its heritage.
It was because we failed to do the thing.
We really have a genius for, which is compromise.
Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising.
Our true genius is for compromise, our whole governments founded on it,
and it failed.
"There was never a moment in our History
"when slavery was not a sleeping serpent.
"It laid coiled up under the table
"during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention.
"Owing to the Cotton Gin, it was more than half awake.
"Thereafter, slavery was on everyone's mind,
"though not always on his tongue".
— John G. Chapman.
By the time the nation was founded, slavery was dying in the North.
There were doubts in the South too.
But few could conceive of any alternative.
Thomas Jefferson in Virginia said
maintaining slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears.
"You didn't like it but you didn't dare let it go".
Then, in 1793, a Northerner, Eli Whitney,
taught the South how to make slavery pay.
Whitney's engine, or "gin", made it easier to separate cotton from its seed.
Where before it had taken one slave
ten hours to produce a single pound of lint,
the Cotton Gin could crank out a thousand pounds a day.
Production soared
and with it, the demand for slaves.
By 1860, the last year of peace,
one out of every seven Americans belonged to another American.
Four million men, women and children were slaves.
[Are We Free?]
In Boston, in 1831, claiming that "which is not just, is not law",
William Lloyd Garrison began publishing
a militant, anti-slavery newspaper, "The Liberator".
He called for complete and immediate abolition.
"I am in earnest. I will not equivocate.
"I will not excuse,
"I will not retreat a single inch
"and I will be heard!"
He was heard
and his message was clear.
Slavery was sin
and those who maintained it, criminals.
The abolition movement grew inspired by passionate leaders.
Harriet Tubman, called Moses by the slaves who followed her north to freedom.
Wendell Phillips, named the Golden Trumpet of Abolitionism,
for his oratory
and Frederick Douglass,
the son of a slave and a white man.
"I appear this evening as a thief and robber
"I stole this head, these limbs
"this body from my master
"and ran off with them.
Douglass was so eloquent that skeptics charged he could never have been a slave.
In part to prove them wrong, he wrote an autobiography,
purchased his freedom with 600 dollars obtained from English admirers
and returned to the struggle.
[Southern men! Down with the abolition press]
"The abolitionists would raise the negroes
"to a social and political equality with the whites
"and, that being effected, would soon see
"the present condition of the two races reversed.
"They and their Northern allies would be the masters and we the slaves".
— John C. Calhoun.
More and more Southerners worried
about the growing political as well as economic power of the North.
Northerners were increasingly hostile to slavery.
Still most Southerners refused to acknowledge even the possibility
of changing their way of life.
"On the North Bank of the Ohio everything is activity, industry.
"Labor is honored. There are no slaves.
"Pass to the South Bank and the scene changes so suddenly
"that you think yourself on the other side of the world.
"The enterprising spirit is gone."
— Alexis de Tocqueville.
"We are separated because of incompatibility of temper.
"We are divorced North from South
"because we hated each other so."
— Mary Chesnut.
On the clear moonlit night of November 7th, 1837,
a mob surrounded a warehouse at Alton, Illinois,
intent on destroying an antislavery newspaper,
run by the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy.
When one of the mob moved to set the building on fire,
Lovejoy armed with a pistol came out to stop him.
(Gunfire)
The slavery men shot him dead
and dumped his printing press into the Mississippi.
The news stunned the nation.
A white man had been killed over black slavery.
Protest meetings were held throughout the North.
One abolitionist wrote that,
"Thousands of our citizens who lately believed
"that they had nothing to do with slavery,
"now begin to discover their error".
In Hudson, Ohio, a clergyman told a church gathering,
"The question now before us is no longer 'can slaves be made free?'
"but 'are we free or are we slaves under mob law?'"
In the back of the church a strange gaunt man
rose to his feet and raised his right hand.
"Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses,
"I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery".
— John Brown.
[A House Divided]
In 1846 a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois,
was elected to Congress.
He was born in Kentucky, the son of a farmer,
who could barely sign his name.
He became a legislator at 24, a prosperous attorney
and, after a turbulent courtship, the husband of Miss Mary Todd,
the daughter of a slave-holding Kentucky banker.
For Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence
was to be taken literally.
All men had the right to rise as far as talent would take them,
just as he had.
He detested slavery,
but he called for its restriction, not immediate abolition.
By mid-century the country was deeply divided.
Southerners feared the North might forbid slavery.
Northerners feared slavery might move west.
As each new state was added to the Union,
it threatened to upset the delicate equilibrium of power.
"There are grave doubts at the hugeness of the land
"and whether one government can comprehend the whole.
— Henry Adams.
Now events accelerated.
In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published "Uncle Tom's Cabin".
Its portrayal of slavery's cruelty moved readers as nothing else had.
Queen Victoria wept over.
Within a year more than 1.5 million copies were in print worldwide.
In 1854, Congress allowed settlers in the Kansas and Nebraska territories
to decide for themselves whether or not to permit slavery.
Kansas exploded.
Five thousand pro-slavery men invaded the territory.
In the next three months 200 men died in bleeding Kansas.
The killing would not stop for 10 years.
In 1857, the Supreme Court refused to free a slave, Dred Scott,
even though he had lived for many years on free soil.
Chief justice Roger B. Taney said
a black man had no rights a white man was bound to respect.
"As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal'.
"We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes'.
"Soon it will read
" 'all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics'.
"When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country
"where they make no pretense of loving liberty.
"to Russia, for instance,
"where despotism can be taken pure
"and without the base alloy of hypocrisy".
— Abraham Lincoln.
Violence reached the floor the United States Senate
where congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina
savagely beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner with his cane.
Southern sympathizers sent Brooks new canes.
Members began carrying knives and pistols into the Chamber.
Meanwhile, the nation's chief executive, James Buchanan, did nothing.
"A House divided against itself cannot stand.
"I believe this government cannot endure,
"permanently half slave and half free.
"I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,
"I do not expect the House to fall,
"but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
"It will become all one thing
"or all the other.
— A. Lincoln.
[The Meteor]
On Sunday evening, October 16, 1859,
the radical abolitionist John Brown
led 5 blacks and 13 whites into Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
He brought along a wagon loaded of guns
to arm the slaves he was sure would rally to him.
Once they had, he planned to lead them southward
along the crest of the Appalachians
and destroy slavery.
Brown was an inept businessman who had failed 20 times in six states
and defaulted on his debts.
Yet he believed himself God's agent on Earth.
In 1856, at Pottawatomie Creek, in Kansas,
he and his sons had hacked five proslavery men to death with broadswords.
All in the name of defeating Satan and his legions.
Brown and his men quietly seized the armory, arsenal and engine house
and took up hostages, including George Washington's great-grandnephew.
After that, nothing went right.
The first person killed was the town baggage master, a free black.
The slaves did not rise up.
Angry town's people did.
The first of Brown's followers to fall was Dangerfield Newby,
a former slave.
Someone in the crowd cut off his ears as souvenirs.
On Tuesday morning, Federal troops arrive from Washington
led by a U.S. army colonel, Robert E. Lee.
Lee's men stormed the engine house
and nine more of Brown's men were killed,
including two of his sons.
Brown, severely wounded, was turned over to Virginia
to be tried for treason.
"In firing his gun
"John Brown has merely told what time of day it is.
"It is high noon, thank God!"
— William Lloyd Garrison.
"An undivided South says, 'Let him hang'."
— Albany Georgia patriot.
Virginia found Brown guilty and sentenced him to death.
Among the troops at the scene of his hanging
were cadets from the Virginia military Institute,
led by an eccentric professor, Thomas J. Jackson.
Also there was a private in the Richmond Grays,
a young actor named John Wilkes Booth.
December 2nd, 1859.
"Old John Brown has been executed for treason against the state.
"We cannot object even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong.
"That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason.
"It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right."
— Abraham Lincoln.
Ralph Waldo Emerson likened Brown to Christ.
Nathaniel Hawthorne declared, "No man ever more justly hanged".
And Herman Melville called him "the meteor of the war".
Brown had said nothing from the gallows,
but he did hand one of his guards a note.
"I, John Brown, am now quite certain
"that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood".
"His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine.
"Mine was as the taper light.
"His was as the burning sun.
"I could live for the slave.
John Brown could die for him".
John Brown... John Brown... very important person in History.
Important, though, for only one episode.
Failure of everything in life,
except he becomes the single most important factor,
in my opinion, in bringing on the war.
The militia system in the South
which had been a joke before this, before them,
becomes a viable instrument
as the Southern militias begin to take a true form
and the South begins to worry about Northerners
agitating the blacks to murder them in their beds.
It was the beginning of the Confederate army.
[Secessionists]
"The feeling among the Southern members
"for dissolution of the Union is becoming more general.
"Men are now beginning to talk of it seriously
"who twelve months ago hardly permitted themselves to think of it.
"The crisis is not far ahead.
— Alexander Stephens.
The country was coming apart.
In the presidential election of 1860, Buchanan happily stepped aside
but not before his ruling Democratic Party
was fatally split over the issue of slavery.
The Republicans, a new party, saw their chance
and nominated Abraham Lincoln, a moderate.
His platform pledged only to halt slavery's further spread.
"On that point, hold firm as with a chain of steel.
"Those who denied freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
"and under a just, God cannot long retain it".
Radical abolitionists in the North complained
that Lincoln's opposition to slavery did not go far enough.
But to most people in the South
the prospect of Lincoln's election posed a lethal threat.
The 1860 campaign had become a referendum
on the southern way of life.
On November 6th, 1860, Abraham Lincoln
won the presidency with only 40% of the votes.
He did not even appear on the ballot in 10 Southern states.
"The election of Mr. Lincoln is undoubtedly the greatest evil
"that has ever befallen this country
"but the mischief is done,
"and the only relief for the American people
"is to shorten sail, send down the top masts, and prepare for a hurricane".
— Richmond Whig.
In the South, Lincoln was burned in effigy.
Now the South Carolina legislature called for a convention
to consider seceding from the Union.
Southerners would have told you they were fighting for self-government.
They believed the gathering of power in Washington was against them.
When they entered into that Federation,
they certainly would never have entered into it,
if they hadn't believe it would be possible to get out.
And when the time came that they wanted to get out,
they thought they had every right.
The Southerners saw the election of Lincoln as a sign
that the Union was about to be radicalized
and that they were about to be taken in directions they did not care to go.
They figured they were about to lose what they call their property
and face ruin.
Yet many Southerners thought secession was madness.
"South Carolina", one Southern politician wrote,
"Is too small for a republic
"and too large for an insane asylum".
"November 18th, 1860.
"A most gloomy day in Wall Street.
"Everything at a deadlock.
"First class paper not negotiable.
"Stocks falling".
— George Templeton Strong.
In New York emotions were no less explosive.
And George Templeton Strong, a conservative lawyer,
who distrusted Lincoln,
began to keep track of events in his diary.
"The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken
"disguised in eagle feathers.
"We have never been a nation.
"We are only an aggregate of communities
"ready to fall apart at the first serious shock".
When Abraham Lincoln was elected President,
there were 33 states in the Union
and a 34th, free Kansas, was about to join.
By the time of his inauguration, five months later,
just 27 states would remain.
The suddenness of secession took everyone by surprise.
South Carolina led the way on December, 20th.
A bell in Charleston tolled the succession of departing states.
Mississippi, on January, 9th.
Florida, on the 10th.
Then Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana.
In Texas, Governor Sam Houston was deposed,
when he tried to stop his state from joining the Confederacy.
"Let me tell you what is coming.
"After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure
"and hundreds of thousands of lives
"you may win Southern independence
"but I doubt it.
"The North is determined to preserve this Union.
"They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are
"for they live in colder climates.
"But when they begin to move in a given direction,
"they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche".
Texas left anyway.
Even Virginia, the most popular Southern state,
birthplace of seven Presidents, seem sure to follow.
"All the indications are that this treasonable inflammation,
"secessionists, keeps on making steady progress, week by week.
"If disunion becomes an established fact,
"we have one consolation.
"The self-amputated members were diseased beyond immediate cure
"and their virus will infect our system no longer.
— George Templeton Strong.
The Charleston Mercury:
"The tea has been thrown overboard.
"The revolution of 1860 has been initiated".
After South Carolina seceded, the handful of federal troops,
still stationed in Charleston, withdrew to Fort Sumter,
far out in the harbor.
Their commander, Major Robert Anderson,
said he has moved his men in order to prevent the effusion of blood.
They were quickly surrounded by rebel batteries.
[Gen. Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Republic]
[On his way to Montgomery]
"Thank God, we have a country at last
"to live for, to pray for and, if need be, to die for".
— Lucius Quintus Lamar.
On February, 18th, a few minutes after noon,
Jefferson Davis stood on the steps of the Alabama Statehouse at Montgomery.
He took the oath of office as President
of the provisional Confederate States of America.
The crowds cheered, wept, sang farewell to the star-spangled banner and Dixie,
a minstrel tune written by a Northerner.
He was brittle, nervous, often unable to sleep,
and partly blind in one eye.
Accustomed to being obeyed, he scorned the bargaining
that made Democratic government work.
Sam Houston said he was cold as a lizard and ambitious as Lucifer.
Like Lincoln he was a Kentuckian,
the son of an itinerant farmer,
but he had been educated at West Point,
fought in Mexico and served as Secretary of War.
As Senator from Mississippi, he resisted secession as long as he could.
But when his state withdrew from the Union,
he headed home to his plantation, Brierfield, South of Vicksburg.
He and his wife Varina, were there,
clipping roses in the garden,
when word came that he had been elected President.
"Reading that telegram he looked so grieved
"that I feared some evil had fallen in our family.
"After a few minutes he told me
"as a man might speak of a sentence of death".
"Upon my head were showered smiles, plaudits and flowers
"but beyond them, I saw troubles innumerable".
— Jefferson Davis.
The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to the U.S. Constitution.
But it gave the President a line-item veto, a six-year term
and it outlawed international slave trading.
The Confederate cabinet met for the first time in a hotel room.
A sheet of stationery pinned to the door, marked the President's office.
"Where will I find the State Department?"
a visitor asked Robert Toombs, Secretary of State.
"In my hat, sir, and the archives in my coat pocket".
"Our new government is founded upon the great truth
"that the negro is not equal to the white man".
— Vice President Alexander Stephens.
"God forgive us! But ours is a monstrous system.
"Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house
"with their wives and their concubines
"and the mulattoes one sees in every family
"exactly resemble the white children.
"All the time they seem to think themselves patterns, models of husbands and fathers".
— Mary Chestnut.
Mary Chestnut and her husband James,
a former United States Senator from South Carolina,
moved among the highest circles of the Confederacy
and were close to Jefferson Davis and his wife.
Mary was subject to depressions and nightmares
for which she sometimes took opium.
Now she, too, began to keep a diary.
"This journal is intended to be entirely objective.
"My subjective days are over".
"The impression produced by the size of his extremities
"and by his flapping and wide-projecting ears,
"may be removed by the appearance of kindliness, sagacity.
"The nose itself, a prominent organ,
"stands out from the face, with an inquiring, anxious air,
"as though it were sniffing for some good thing in the wind.
"The eyes dark, full, and deeply set,
"are penetrating, but full of an expression
"which almost amounts to tenderness".
— William Russel, The London Times
Two days after Jefferson Davis left home,
Abraham Lincoln set out from Springfield, Illinois, for his capital.
"Here I have lived a quarter of a century
"and passed from a young to an old man.
"Here my children have been born and one is buried.
"I now leave not knowing when or whether ever I may return,
"with the task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.
"Without the assistance of that divine Being who ever attended him,
"I cannot succeed.
"With that assistance, I cannot fail.
"To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me,
"I bid you an affectionate farewell".
En route to Washington, the President's train stopped
at Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany and New York.
In Philadelphia, warned of plots to kill him,
Lincoln declared he would rather be assassinated
than see a single star removed from the American flag.
Two days later he reluctantly canceled plans for a grand arrival in Washington
and slipped into the capital by train at dawn,
wrapped in a shawl and protected by two armed guards.
Inauguration day, in Washington, was cloudy and cold.
A large, tense crowd gathered beneath the unfinished dome.
Cannon guarded the Capitol grounds.
Sharp shooters lined the roof.
Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery,
but he denied the right of any state to secede,
vowed to defend Federal installations,
and spoke directly to the South.
"In your hands, my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in mine,
"is the momentous issue of civil war.
"The government will not assail you.
"You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.
"We are not enemies but friends.
"We must not be enemies".
"Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bounds of affection.
"The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield
"and patriotic grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land,
"will yet swell the chorus of the Union,
"when again touched, as surely they will be,
"by the better angels of our nature".
[Revival of rumors of war]
[An attack on Fort Sumter Expected]
[4:30 a.m. April 12, 1861]
"I do not pretend to go to sleep, how can I?
"If Anderson does not accept terms, at four,
"the orders are he shall be fired upon.
"I count... four St. Michael chimes.
"I begin to hope.
(Cannon fire)
"The heavy booming of a cannon.
"I sprang out of the bed and on my knees prostrated,
"I prayed as I have never prayed before".
(Cannon fire)
The Civil War began at 4:38 a.m. on the 12th of April, 1861.
General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard ordered his Confederate gunners
to open fire on Fort Sumter,
at that hour, only a dark shape out in Charleston Harbor.
Confederate commander Beauregard was a gunner,
so skilled as an artillery student at West Point
that his instructor kept him on as his assistance for another year.
That instructor was Major Robert Anderson,
Union commander inside Fort Sumter.
All the pent-up hatred of the past months and years
is voiced in the thunder of this cannon.
And the people seem almost beside themselves
in the exultation of a freedom they deemed already won.
The signal to fire the first shot was given by a civilian, Edmund Ruffin,
a Virginia farmer, and editor, who had preached secession for 20 years.
"Of course", he said, "I was delighted to perform the service".
34 hours later, a white flag over the Fort ended the bombardment.
The only casualty had been a Confederate horse.
It was a bloodless opening to the bloodiest war in American history.
"The first gun that was fired in Fort Sumter sounded the dead knell of slavery.
"They who fired it were the greatest practical abolitionists
this nation has produced.
"April 13, so Civil War is inaugurated at last.
"God defend the right".
[Fort Sumter surrender!]
[Maj. Anderson, a prisoner of war]
[The white flag displayed on the walls!]
["Nobody hurt!"]
[Major Anderson taken!]
[Entrance obtained under a flag of truce]
[New Yorkers implicated!]
14 April, Montgomery daily advertiser:
"The intelligence that Fort Sumter has surrendered
"to the Confederate forces yesterday
"sent a thrill of joy to the heart of every true friend of the South.
"The face of every Southern man was brighter, his step lighter
"and his bearing prouder than had been before".
In Boston, jubilant volunteers marched past Faneuil Hall,
eager to avenge Fort Sumter.
In Baltimore, anti-Lincoln men rampaged through the streets.
In Richmond a mob marched on the Statehouse,
tore down the stars and stripes
and raised the stars and bars.
There was no longer any doubt that Virginia would secede.
In New York a hundred thousand people crowded Union Square
where the Sumter flag now flew.
Walt Whitman, sometime poet and journalist for the Brooklyn Standard
was stunned by the news.
"All the past we leave behind with the Sumter", he said.
"Woe to those who began this war if they were not in bitter earnest."
— Mary Chestnut.
[Traitors and Patriots]
"Father and I were husking out corn when William Corry came across the field.
"He was excited and said,
"'Jonathan, the rebels have fire upon Fort Sumter'.
"Father got white and couldn't say a word".
— Theodore F. Upson.
[Lincoln declares war]
April, 15. Events multiply.
The President is out with a proclamation calling to 75,000 volunteers.
It is said 200,000 more will be called within a few days.
On the day Sumter fell, the regular army of the United States
consisted of fewer than 17,000 men,
most of whom were stationed in the Far West.
Only two of his generals had ever commanded an army in the field
and both were long past their prime.
Winfield Scott, the hero of the Mexican war,
"Old Fuss and Feathers",
was too fat even to mount a horse.
[To arms! To arms!]
[The capital of our country in danger!]
[A few good men wanted]
[Young men join this company!]
[Sharp shooters for the war]
[The best regiment yet!]
[Recruits wanted immediately]
[Ho! For the war!]
[Soldiers for the U.S. army wanted!]
"We were treated as good as a company could be at every station.
"We got kisses from the girls at a good many places
"and we returned the same to them".
— Hercules Stanard.
"I've got the best suit of clothes I ever had in my life".
In the North they came by hundreds and by thousands,
from Boston, Massachusetts,
from Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan,
and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the rain.
Whole towns signed up.
The 10th Michigan Volunteer Infantry was made up of Flint boys.
Their commander was the Mayor.
Their regimental doctor, the man who had been taking care of them
since they were young.
The 6th New York contained so many boweries
it was said a man had to have done time in prison just to get into the regiment.
The elite 7th, on the other hand,
set out for Washington with sandwiches from Delmonico's,
and 1,000 velvet covered campstools
on which to sit and eat them.
On his way to war, Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer, just 22,
and less than a month out of West Point,
where he graduated at the bottom of his class,
stopped in New York to have himself fitted out
with a splendid new uniform,
then went to a photographer.
In Pawtuxet, Rhode Island, 19 year old, Elisha Hunt Rhodes left his job
as a harness maker's clerk
and signed on as a private in the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers.
He would have joined earlier but his widowed mother begged him to stay home.
"We drilled all day and night.
"Standing before a long mirror,
"I put many hours of weary work and soon thought myself quite a soldier.
"I was elected first Sergeant, much to my surprise.
"Just what a first sergeant's duties might be, I had no idea".
After two weeks of drilling, the 2nd Rhode Island moved out.
"Today, we have orders to pack up and be ready to leave for Washington.
"My knapsack was so heavy that I could scarcely stagger under the load.
"At the wharf an immense crowd had gathered and we went on board our steamer
"with mingled feelings of joy and sorrow.
"In Baton Rouge William Tecumseh Sherman
"resigned as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy
"and headed North".
"You politicians", he told his brother Senator John Sherman of Ohio,
"have got things in a hell of a fix
"and you may get them out as best as you can.
"I will have no more to do with it".
But when Sumter fell, he put his uniform back on
and reluctantly he went to war.
"You might as well attempt to put out the flames
"of a burning house with a squirt gun".
"I think this is to be a long war, very long,
"much longer than any politician thinks.
"There were but two parties now,
"Traitors and Patriots.
"And I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter".
— Ulysses S. Grant.
In Galena, Illinois, 39 year old, Ulysses S. Grant
was working in his father's harness shop.
Having failed as a peace time soldier and considered by some a drunk,
now he signed on as mustering officer
handling the flood of volunteers
at 4.20 dollars a day.
New Orleans, 1861.
"I feel if I would like to shoot a Yankee
"and yet I know that this would not be in harmony with the spirit of Christianity".
— William Nugent.
"So impatient did I become for starting
"that I felt like a thousand pins were pricking me in every part of my body
"and I started off a week in advance of my brothers."
"I found Mobile boiling over with enthusiasm.
The young merchants had dropped their ledgers
and were forming and drilling companies by night and day.
"Everyday regiments marched by.
"Charleston is crowded with soldiers.
"These new ones are running in fairly.
"They fear the war will be over before they get sight of the fun.
"Every man from every little county precinct
"wants a place in the picture".
The Confederate government, its capital now in Richmond,
called for 100,000 volunteers.
So many Southerners volunteered that a third of them had to be sent home.
They came from Catahoula, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
Greenville, Mississippi, Mooresvile, Alabama,
and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Tennessee joined the Confederacy.
So did Arkansas and North Carolina.
In Memphis, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a blacksmith's son
who had made himself a millionaire selling land, cotton and slaves,
put up posters calling on anyone who wanted to kill Yankees
to come and ride with him.
The Clinch Rifles from Augusta, Georgia started out in May, 1861.
Only the drummer boy would survive.
The odds against a Southern victory were long.
There were nearly 21 million people in the North,
just 9 million in the Confederacy,
and 4 million of them were slaves,
whom their masters did not dare arm.
The value of all the manufactured goods produced in all the Confederate states
added up to less than one fourth of those produced in New York state alone.
But none of this matter to the men who joined the Tallapoosa Thrashers
and Chickasaw Desperados and Cherokee Lincoln Killers.
"The histories of the lost cause are all written out by big bugs,
"generals and renowned historians.
"Well, I have as much right as any man to write a history".
— Sam Watkins.
One of the first to answer the Southern call
was 21-year-old Sam Watkins of Columbia, Tennessee.
He joined Company "H" of the 1st Tennessee at Nashville.
Like most rebel soldiers, he owned no slaves,
The bugle sound... and place everything aboard the cars.
"We went bowling along at 30 miles an hour,
"as fast as steam can carry us.
"At every town and station,
"citizens and ladies were waving their handkerchiefs
"and hurrahing for Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy".
"It's worth soldiering to receive such a welcome as this".
"If the President of the United States would tell me
"that a great battle was to be fought for the liberty or slavery of the country
"and asked my judgement as to the ability of a commander,
"I would say with my dying breath, let it be Robert E. Lee".
— General Winfield Scott.
"I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country
"than a dissolution of the Union.
"It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of.
"And I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation".
— Robert E. Lee.
The most promising officer in the regular army
was Robert E. Lee of Virginia.
On April 18, four days after Sumter,
Lee was summoned to Blair House at Lincoln's behest
and offered field command of the entire Union army.
Lee said he would think about it.
Virginia had voted to secede the day before.
That night, he paced anxiously in the gardens,
around his Arlington mansion, across the Potomac.
At midnight, Saturday the 20th,
Lee wrote his letter of resignation from the United States army.
On the 21st, the Governor of Virginia
asked Lee to take command of the state militia.
When Lee had to choose between the nation and Virginia,
there was never any doubt about what his choice would be.
He went with his state, and he said,
"I can't draw my sword against my native state",
or, as he often said, "my country".
Lincoln had lost his best soldier.
"Not by one word or look, can we detect any change
"in the demeanor of the negro servants.
"They make no sign.
"Are they stupid or wiser than we are?
"Silent and strong, biding their time?"
— Mary Chestnut.
Both sides thought it would be a 90-day war.
And both sides agreed it was to be a white man's fight.
Blacks who tried to sign up were turned away.
[... Regiment attacked in Baltimore! Two soldiers killed!]
April, 19.
"There has been a serious disturbance in Baltimore.
"Regiments from Massachusetts assailed by a mob
"that was repulsed by shot and steel.
"It's a notable coincidence that the first blood in this great struggle
"is drawn by Massachusetts men on the anniversary of Lexington."
[Gun Men]
"We are in Washington, and what a city!
"Mud, pigs, negroes, palaces, shanties everywhere.
"As we passed the White House, I had my first view of Abraham Lincoln.
"He looks like a good, honest man.
"And I trust that, with God's help,
"he can bring our country safely out of its peril.
— Elisha Hunt Rhodes.
The Rhode islanders set up their bunks at the patent office.
New Yorkers slept on the carpeted floor of the House Chamber.
Massachusetts men camped in the rotunda
and cooked their bacon on furnaces in the basement.
Overhead, the Capitol dome remained incomplete.
Despite the war, Lincoln insisted that the work go on.
"I take it as a sign", he said, "that the Union will continue".
"The first thing in the morning is drill.
"Then drill, then drill again.
"Then drill, drill, a little more drill, then drill.
"Then, lastly, drill.
"Between drills, we drill and sometimes stop to eat a little and have a roll call."
"Outskirts of Baltimore,
"My dear William, I can now march 20 and 25 miles a day,
"live on short rations of hardtack, raw, rancid bacon,
"green roasting and use cold water,
"sleep out in the rain and heavy dew with nothing but an army coat over me
"and enjoy myself capitally."
— Edward Hastings Ripley.
Early in the war, there was a Confederate veteran,
a young country boy, on guard duty.
He's walking his post in the woods.
And there was an owl, unknown to him, in a tree nearby
and the owl said, "Who-o-o-o!"
And the boy, trembling with fear, said,
"It's me, sir, John Albert, a friend of yours".
In May, Union troops crossed the Potomac by torchlight
and took the heights of Arlington.
Robert E. Lee's house would be occupied by Union troops for the rest of the war.
In late June, the new general in charge of the Union army, Irvin McDowell,
outlined plans for attacking the Confederates in Virginia,
but he did not yet want to fight.
"This is not an army", he warned the President.
"You are green, it is true", Lincoln answered,
"but they are green also.
"You are all green alike".
To preserve the Constitution,
Lincoln had for three months gone beyond it,
waging war without congressional consent,
seizing northern telegraph offices, suspending habeas corpus.
To keep the border states from seceding, Lincoln sent troops to occupy Baltimore
and clapped the Mayor and 19 secessionist legislators in jail without trial.
Chief Justice Taney ruled that the President had exceeded his power.
Lincoln simply ignored him.
"More rogues than honest men find shelter under habeas corpus", he said,
and even contemplated arresting the chief justice.
A very mysterious man, he's got so many sides to him.
The curious thing about Lincoln to me
is that he could remove himself from himself,
as if he were looking at himself.
It's a very strange, very eerie thing and highly intelligent,
it's such a simple thing to say,
but Lincoln's been so smothered with stories of his compassion,
that people forget what a highly intelligent man he was.
And almost everything he did, was calculated for effect.
"Teach the rebels and traitors that the price they are to pay
"for the attempt to abolish this government
"must be the abolition of slavery".
— Frederick Douglass.
From the start of the war, slaves fled their plantations for the Union lines,
but Lincoln's policy was clear.
Despite pressure from the abolitionists, he insisted he was making war on secession,
not slavery,
and ordered the army to return fugitives to their owners.
But now, an unlikely figure helped to change men's minds.
General Benjamin Butler was a Massachusetts politician,
with crossed eyes and mixed motives
who had once backed Jefferson Davis for President of the United States.
"Returning slaves only aided the enemy", Butler argued,
And he got permission to hold fugitive slaves as contraband of war
and employ them as laborers in the Union army.
"Major Cary of Virginia asked if I did not feel myself
"bound by my constitutional obligations
"to deliver up fugitives under the Fugitive Slave Act.
"To this, I replied that the Fugitive Slave Act
"did not affect a foreign country,
"which Virginia claimed to be.
"And she must reckon it one of the infelicities of her position
"that insofar, at least, she was taken at her word".
— General Benjamin Butler.
The trickle of runaways coming into Northern lines now swelled to a flood.
One ex-slave who had recently bought his freedom told a Union soldier,
"If I had known you gun men were coming, I'd have saved my money".
[Explosions)
War was breaking out all across the country.
There were engagements at Big Bethel, Virginia and Booneville, Missouri.
Skirmishes from Maryland to New Mexico territory.
At Philippi, in Western Virginia, a young Union general, George McClellan
won a small, highly publicized victory over a tiny Confederate force.
But still, there had been no decisive battle.
"July 9, our battle Summer.
"May it be our first and our last so-called.
"After all, we've not had any of the horrors of war".
— Mary Chestnut.
"July 16, it begins to look warlike
"and we shall probably have a chance
"to pay our Southern brethren a visit upon the sacred soil of Virginia very soon.
"I hope we shall be successful and give the rebels a good pounding".
— Elisha Hunt Rhodes.
On July 16th, the Volunteer Union Army of 37,000 men marched into Virginia.
Their aim, to cut the railroad at Manassas,
then move on at last to Richmond.
Washington Star:
"The scene to the hills was grand.
"Regiment after regiment was seen coming along the road and across the long bridge,
"their arms gleaming in the sun.
"Cheer after cheer was heard as regiment greeted regiment.
"With the martial music and sharp, clear orders of commanding officers,
"it made a combination of sounds very pleasant to the ear of a Union man".
To stop the Union invasion,
22,000 Confederate troops had moved north from Richmond
commanded by General Beauregard,
who knew in advance the Federals were coming.
Rose Greenhow, a prominent socialite in Washington,
and a Confederate spy, had alerted him.
Now Beauregard made his headquarters in Wilmer McLean's farm house.
The Confederates formed a meandering 8-mile line
along one side of Bull Run Creek.
They were less than 25 miles from Washington, and there they waited.
Hundreds of Washingtonians in holiday mood
rode out to Manassas hoping to see a real battle.
Some brought field glasses, picnic baskets, bottles of champagne.
"We saw carriages which contained civilians,
"who'd driven out from Washington to witness the operations.
"A Connecticut boy said, 'There's our Senator!'
"and some of our men recognized other members of Congress.
"We thought it wasn't a bad idea to have the great men from Washington
"come out to see us thrash the rebs".
— private James Tinkham.
On the morning of the 21st, McDowell sent his men across Bull Run.
They smashed into the left side of the Confederate line,
driving the rebels from one position after another.
The civilian onlookers waved hats and fluttered handkerchiefs.
It was not yet noon, and all was going just as they wanted.
"On reaching a clearing separated from our left flank by a rail fence,
"we were saluted by a volley of musketry
"which was fired so high that all the bullets went over our heads.
"My first sensation was astonishment at the peculiar whir of the bullets
"and that the regiment immediately laid down without waiting for orders".
"We fired a volley and saw the rebels running.
"The boys were saying constantly in great glee,
" 'We've whipped them'.
" 'We'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree.
" 'They're running. The war's over'."
An onlooker remembered that the advancing Union army looked like a bristling monster
lifting himself by a slow, wavy motion up the laborious ascent.
Union victory seemed so sure that on one part of the battlefield
men stopped to gather souvenirs.
But holding a hill at the center of the Southern line,
was a Virginia brigade led by General Thomas Jackson.
While other Southern commands wavered, Jackson's held firm.
One Confederate officer, trying to rally his own frightened men, shouted,
"Look! There's Jackson with his Virginians, standing like a stone wall".
The name stuck.
He had the strange combination
of religious fanaticism and a glory in battle.
He loved battle. His eyes would light up.
They called him "Old Blue Light"
because of the way his eyes would light up in battle.
He was totally fearless, had no thought whatsoever of danger
at any time the battle was on,
and he could define what he wanted to do.
He said, "Once you get them running, you stay right on top of them.
"That way a small force can defeat a large one every time".
He knew perfectly well that a reputation for victory would roll and build.
It was the turning point.
At 4:00, Beauregard ordered a counterattack.
Jackson urged his men to yell like furies.
The rebel yell first heard that day would echo from 1,000 battlefields.
Confederate reinforcements began to arrive.
The first came on horseback.
More arrived by train, something new in war.
The Northern army fell apart.
The retreat soon became a rout,
as Union guns became entangled with the carriages of fleeing spectators.
"We tried to tell them that there was no danger,
"called on them to stop, implored them to stand.
"We called them cowards.
"Put out our heavy revolvers and threatened to shoot, but all in vain".
"Along the shady little valley through which our road lay
"the surgeons had been plying their vocation all the morning upon the wounded.
"Tables about breast-high had been erected
"upon which screaming victims were having legs and arms cut off.
"The surgeons and their assistants, stripped to the waist
"and all bespattered with blood, stood around.
"Some holding the poor fellas,
"while others, armed with long, bloody knives and saws,
"cut and saw away with frightful rapidity, throwing the mangled limbs
"on a pile nearby, as soon as removed.
— Lieutenant colonel W.W. Blackford, 1st Cavalry, Virginia.
"What a horrible sight it was!
"Here a man, grasping his gun firmly in his hands, stone dead.
"Several with distorted features, all horribly dirty.
"Many were terribly wounded, some with legs shot off,
"others with arms gone.
"Some so badly wounded, they could not drag themselves away,
"slowly bleeding to death.
"We stopped many times to give some a drink
"and soon saw enough to satisfy us with the horrors of war".
— Lieutenant Josiah Favill.
"I struggled on, clinging to my gun and cartridge box.
"Many times, I sat down in the mud, determined to go no further
"and willing to die and end my misery.
"But soon a friend would pass and urge me to make another effort,
"and I would stagger a mile further.
"At daylight, we could see the spires of Washington,
"and a welcome sight it was.
"The loss of regiment in this disastrous affair
"was 93 killed, wounded or missing".
There is a congressman, I believe from Alabama
— I've forgotten where from —
who said there would be no war.
And he offered to wipe up all blood that would be shed
with a pocket handkerchief.
That was his prediction.
I've always said, someone could get a Ph.D.
by calculating how many pocket handkerchiefs it would take
to wipe up all the blood that was shed.
It would be a lot of handkerchiefs.
From the Confederate White House in Richmond,
Jefferson Davis rejoiced.
"My fellow citizens, your little army,
"derided for its want of arms,
"derided for its lack of all the essential material of war,
"has met the grand army of the enemy,
"routed it at every point,
"and it now flies inglorious in retreat,
"before our victorious columns.
"We have taught them a lesson
"in their invasion of the sacred soil of Virginia".
[Great Southern Victory!]
"Today will be known as Black Monday.
"We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped by secessionists.
— George Templeton Strong,
London Times:
"The inmates of the White House are in a state of utmost trepidation
"and Mr. Lincoln in despair.
"Why Beauregard does not attack Washington,
"I know not, nor can I well guess".
It was remembered as the "great skedaddle".
For days, discouraged troops straggled back into Washington.
"I saw a steady stream of men,
"covered with mud, soaked through with rain,
"who were pouring irregularly up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol.
"A dense stream of vapor rose from the multitude.
"I asked a pale young man who looked exhausted to death,
"whether the whole army had been defeated.
"That's more than I know", he said.
"I know I'm going home.
"I've had enough of fighting to last my lifetime".
The North was appalled at the 5,000 casualties.
Both sides now knew it would be no 90 days war.
Two days later, Canny real estate speculators
bought up the battlefield to make a second kind of killing.
— as a tourist attraction.
"What upon earth is the matter with the American people?
"Do they really covet the world's ridicule,
"as well as their own social and political ruin?
"The national edifice is on fire.
"Every man who can carry a bucket of water or remove a brick is wanted.
"Yet government leaders persistently refuse
"to receive as soldiers the slaves,
"the very class of men which has a deeper interest
"in the defeat and humiliation of the rebels than all others.
"Such is the pride, the stupid prejudice
"and folly that rules the hour".
— Frederick Douglass.
"Little did I conceive of the greatness of the defeat,
"the magnitude of the disaster, which had entailed upon the U.S.
"So short-lived has been the American Union
"that men who saw it rise may live to see it fall".
— William Russell, London Times.
[A Thousand Mile Front]
[Disaster to the National Army]
[90,000 rebels in the field]
[The retreat of our forces on the eve of victory]
[A panic among the Temmsters and civilians]
[Exaggerated statements of our losses]
[Measures of the government to retrieve the disaster]
"Washington, August.
"I found no preparations whatever for defense.
"Not a regiment was properly encamped,
"not a single avenue or approach guarded.
"All was chaos, and the streets, hotels and bar rooms
"were filled with drunken officers
"and men absent from their regiments without leave.
"Perfect pandemonium!"
— George McClellan.
Five days after the disaster at Bull Run,
a new general took over what is now called the "army of the Potomac".
George Brinton McClellan, only 34, seemed just what the North needed.
He brought with him to the demoralized capital,
what one aide called an indescribable air of success.
He replaced inept officers with regulars.
He laid out tidy camps around Washington to accommodate the 10,000 new volunteers
arriving each week, drilled them 8 hours a day,
staged grand reviews to boost morale.
"All the attention was upon the young general
"with the calm eye, with the satisfied air,
"who moved around followed by an immense staff
"to the clanking of sabers and the acclamation of the spectators".
— Régis de Trobiand.
"I find myself in a new and strange position here
"— president, cabinet, general Scott — and all deferring to me.
"By some strange piece of magic, I seem to become the power of the land.
"I almost think that were I to win some small success now,
"I could become dictator or anything else that might please me.
"But nothing of that kind would please me.
"Therefore, I won't be a dictator".
Admirable self-denial.
The newspapers called him "young Napoleon".
And he could not help seeing the resemblance himself.
But 100,000 untrained volunteers had become an army,
McClellan's army.
His men, who loved him for having made them proud of themselves,
called him Little Mac.
"His specialty is preparing troops to fight
"and he did that superbly.
"McClellan trained that army.
"Whatever the army of the Potomac did in the after years
"is largely due to the training McClellan gave them in that first year".
With Lincoln, McClellan and his staff
devised a three-pronged attack on the Confederacy.
One army would drive into Virginia and take Richmond.
Another would secure Kentucky and Tennessee,
then push into the heartland of the Confederacy
and occupy Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.
Meanwhile, the navy would clear the Mississippi,
surround the Confederacy by sea, and choke off supplies.
The war would be fought along a 1,000-mile front.
That fall, Lincoln elevated McClellan to general in chief,
replacing the aging Winfield Scott.
"I can do it all", McClellan said,
but he did nothing.
As Summer turned to Autumn, it became increasingly clear
that having made a magnificent army,
George McClellan had no immediate plans to lead it anywhere.
"As we approached the brow of the hill,
"my heart kept getting higher and higher,
"until it felt to me it was in my throat.
"I would have given anything then to be back in Illinois, where I kept ride on.
"When the valley below was in full view, I halted.
"The enemy's troops were gone.
"My heart resumed its place and it occurred to me at once
"that he had been as much afraid of me as I of him.
"This was a view of the question I had never taken before,
"but it was one I never forgot afterwards".
— General Ulysses S. Grant.
In September, Ulysses S. Grant
took Paducah, Kentucky, a strategic city at the mouth of the Tennessee.
But two months later, his undisciplined recruits were almost destroyed,
looting a captured rebel camp instead of preparing for a counterattack.
Grant was returned to desk duty.
In November, William Tecumseh Sherman was relieved
as Union commander in Kentucky
when he insisted that at least 200,000 men
would be needed to suppress the rebellion in the West.
No one believed him.
He grew melancholic, prone to fits of anxiety and rage.
"Sherman", McClellan said, "is gone in the head".
December found him at home in the care of his wife,
contemplating suicide.
No. No one thought it would last long.
No one on the either side thought it would last long.
Those few individuals who said that it would,
— Tecumseh Sherman, for instance — were actually judged to be insane
for making predictions about casualties,
which were actually low.
In November, a Union warship stopped a British steamer at gunpoint
in international waters and arrested two Confederate diplomats found on board.
Britain's Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, was outraged,
demanded their immediate release
and dispatched 11,000 troops to Canada.
"One war at a time", Lincoln said,
and quietly let the two Confederates go.
By December, optimists on both sides were disappointed.
The Confederacy showed no signs of imminent collapse.
The North would not abandon its efforts to reunite the nation by force.
By the end of the year, there were 700,000 men in the Union army.
No one knew how many Confederates there were.
"December 31st.
"Poor old 1861 just going.
"It has been a gloomy year of trouble and disaster.
"I should be glad of its departure,
"were it not that 1862 is likely to be no better".
— George Templeton Strong.
[Honorable Manhood]
A week before the battle of Bull Run,
Sullivan Ballou, a major in the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers,
wrote home to his wife in Smithfield.
"July 14, 1861, Washington, D.C.
"Dear Sarah, The indications are very strong
"that we shall move in a few days, perhaps tomorrow.
"And lest I should not be able to write you again,
"I feel impelled to write a few lines
"that may fall under your eye when I'm no more.
"I have no misgivings about or lack of confidence
"in the cause in which I am engaged,
"and my courage does not halt or falter.
"I know how American civilization now leans upon the triumph of the government,
"and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us
"through the blood and suffering of the Revolution,
"and I am willing, perfectly willing,
"to lay down all my joys in this life
"to help maintain this government and to pay that debt.
"Sarah, my love for you is deathless.
"It seems to bind me with mighty cables
"that nothing but Omnipotence can break
"and yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind
"and bears me irresistibly with all those chains to the battlefield.
"The memory of all the blissful moments I have enjoyed with you
"come crowding over me
"and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you that I've enjoyed them for so long,
"and how hard it is for me to give them up
"and burn to ashes the hopes of future years,
"when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together
"and see our boys grown up to honorable manhood around us.
"If I do not return, my dear Sarah,
"never forget how much I loved you,
"nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield
"it will whisper your name.
"Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you.
"How thoughtless, how foolish I have sometimes been.
"But, oh, Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth,
"and flit unseen around those they love,
"I shall always be with you in the brightest day and the darkest night,
"always, always.
"And when the soft breeze fans your cheek,
"it shall be my breath.
"Or the cool air at your throbbing temple,
"it shall be my spirit passing by.
"Sarah, do not mourn me dead.
"Think I am gone and wait for me, for we shall meet again".
Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later
at the first battle of Bull Run.