-
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.