Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  A number of published papers and diaries of Lincoln’s cabinet secretaries offer critical glimpses into the operation of wartime politics at the highest levels in the North, beginning with The Diary of Gideon Welles, ed. John T. Morse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), The Diary of Edward Bates 1859–1866, ed. Howard K. Beale (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), and David Donald’s edition of Salmon Chase’s wartime diaries, Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York: Longmans, Green, 1954). The diaries and papers of Lincoln’s wartime secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, have been exhaustively edited by Michael Burlingame as Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). The best surveys of the Republican domestic policy agenda during the war are Heather Cox Richardson’s The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Michael Green’s Freedom, Union and Power: Lincoln and His Party in the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Salmon Chase’s decision to invite Jay Cooke to act as the Treasury’s wartime agent was of greater significance to the long-term Union victory than a number of battles, and is described in detail by Ellis Oberholtzer in Jay Cooke: Financier of the Civil War, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: G. W. Jacobs, 1907). The war involved not only economic and political difficulties but also legal and constitutional problems for the Union, most of which are surveyed in J. G. Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (New York: D. Appleton, 1926), Harold Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1973), Brian McGinty, Lincoln and the Court (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), Robert Bruce Murray, Legal Cases of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2003) and Stephen C. Neff, Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). The particular problems posed by the blockade have been searchingly analyzed by Ludwell H. Johnson, “The Confederacy: What Was It? A View from the Federal Courts,” in Civil War History 32 (March 1986), and Johnson’s article on the Prize Cases, “Abraham Lincoln and the Development of Presidential War-Making Powers: Prize Cases (1863) Revisited,” in Civil War History 35 (September 1989).

  The fires set in the rear of the Union cause by Democratic and Copperhead dissent have been the particular object of the late Frank L. Klement’s attention in a series of volumes, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), and Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). Klement entered a strong skepticism about the legitimacy of Lincoln’s concerns; by contrast, Mark Neely’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) offers a comprehensive rebuttal to wartime charges that Lincoln wantonly disregarded the civil rights of dissenters and Democrats and imposed a quasi-dictatorship on the North, while Jennifer L. Weber’s Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) is a spirited defense of Lincoln’s worries about Copperhead dissent.

  SIX. THE SOLDIER’S TALE

  In 1886, the onetime Federal artilleryman Frank Wilkeson was growing disgusted with the flood of Civil War memoirs flowing from the pens of former generals who sought chiefly “to belittle the work of others, or to falsify or obscure it.” He sat down to write his own recollections of service in the Army of the Potomac in 1864 and 1865 to give a voice to “the private soldiers who won the battles, when they were given a fair chance to win them,” and who “have scarcely begun to write the history from their point of view.” Wilkeson himself may have done some self-embroidery of his service in the 11th New York Artillery, but his preference for writing the Civil War from the bottom up has been pursued in a seemingly unending flood of regimental histories (some of which appeared even before the war was over), published diaries, and collections of private letters edited by descendants and scholars of the Civil War soldier. The richness of these sources is due largely to the conjunction of two events: one is the mass movement of American males into the war, and the other is the rising tide of literacy in the American population in the nineteenth century. Americans were clearly confronted with a public event of crisis proportions in their national life, and for the first time in the history of the republic, an overwhelming number of those Americans were literate enough to record their thoughts and descriptions of it.

  The most obvious primary source for the ordinary life of the Civil War soldier is the regimental history, which developed between 1885 and 1910 into what amounts to a major genre of American literature. One of the earliest, and arguably the liveliest, of these “regimentals” is Amos Judson’s History of the Eighty-Third Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers (Dayton, OH: Morningside Press, 1986 [1865]), which was published shortly after the end of the war. Free from many of the conventions which later shackled and then strangled the regimental history, Judson’s volume bristles with cracker-barrel wit and a keen reporter’s eye for the foibles of the American character. After Judson came a string of regimental histories, running out to nearly 800 published volumes. Until 1910, when the soldiers of the Civil War generation began passing swiftly from the scene, most regimental histories were written by survivors of the regiments themselves. But after the Civil War centennial in the 1960s, the regimental history was reborn as a historical genre. The engine of this rebirth was John J. Pullen’s The Twentieth Maine: A Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1957), and it proceeded to blossom into numerous great unit histories, such as James I. Robertson’s The Stonewall Brigade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963) and Alan Nolan’s The Iron Brigade: A Military History (Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1975). Another genre closely related to the regimental history is the volume of collected war letters. Oliver W. Norton’s Army Letters, 1861–1865 (Chicago: O. L. Deming, 1903) is one of the best examples of such collections, coming directly from the editorial hand of the soldier who wrote them. Most often, however, these collections have been discovered in archives or among family heirlooms and have been reconstructed and edited by modern scholars or archivists. A model for such a modern collection is the assemblage of letters of Edward King Wightman in From Antietam to Fort Fisher: The Civil War Letters of Edward King Wightman, ed. by E. G. Longacre (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985). Sometimes soldiers kept their opinions to themselves, or at least to their diaries, and several memorable soldier diaries have survived to be republished in scholarly editions. The most outstanding examples of this sort are Allan Nevins’s edition of the diary of the upper-class New York artillery chief Charles S. Wainwright in A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Col. Charles S. Wainwright, 1861–1865 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962) and K. Jack Bauer’s edition of Soldiering: The Civil War Diary of Rice C. Bull, 123rd New York Volunteer Infantry (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1977).

  Some veterans of the war chose to pour their experiences into a third genre, the personal memoir. The outstanding example of the Civil War memoir is Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, but the common soldiers also produced memoirs of their service which match Grant’s for interest if not for eloquence. Foremost among these soldier memoirs must be Hard Tack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life (Boston: G. M. Smith, 1887) by John D. Billings. From the Confederate side, Henry Kyd Douglas’s I Rode with Stonewall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940) is the most
famous, but it should not eclipse the edition of E. P. Alexander’s memoirs, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, by Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

  Not every memoir or regimental history necessarily took the form of a book. Civil War veterans organizations, such as the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS), regularly met to hear members read papers related to their wartime experiences, and an almost bottomless well of material on the common soldier can be found in the sixty-five volumes of MOLLUS Papers, the fifty-five volumes of Southern Historical Society Papers, the forty-three volumes of Confederate Veteran magazine, and the nineteen volumes of Confederate Military History. In another postwar contribution to the history of the common soldier, the adjutants-general of many of the Northern states issued comprehensive volumes of rosters and unit histories of their state volunteer regiments, the most striking of which are the five volumes of Samuel P. Bates’s History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–65 (Harrisburg, PA: B. Singerly, 1869).

  A number of important studies of the Civil War soldier have attempted to synthesize the vast array of materials available in the regimental histories, letters, diaries, and memoirs into a comprehensive portrait of Wilkeson’s “private soldier.” The most famous of these synthetic studies are Bell I. Wiley’s famous The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982 [1943]) and The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978 [1952]). These two works have been supplemented by James I. Robertson’s Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988). Specific aspects of the soldier’s experience in combat have been skillfully analyzed in Gerald Linderman’s Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), Joseph T. Glatthaar’s The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York: New York University Press, 1985), and Reid Mitchell’s Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Their Experiences (New York: Viking, 1988).

  The Civil War field officer has attracted comparatively less notice in the current literature than Wilkeson’s “private soldier,” although T. Harry Williams’s Hayes of the Twenty-Third: The Civil War Volunteer Officer (New York: Knopf, 1965) is a reminder that even the officer was a common soldier in the Civil War. James A. Garfield, an Ohio officer who later rose to become president of the United States (along with two other Ohio veterans of the Civil War, Hayes and McKinley) left examples of both diaries and letters, which have been edited and published as The Wild Life of the Army: Civil War Letters of James A. Garfield, edited by F. D. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964), and The Diary of James A. Garfield, edited by H. J. Brown and F. D. Williams, 4 vols. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967–81). A particularly useful officer memoir is Jacob Dolson Cox’s Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, 2 vols. (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1900). One grade of officer that has enjoyed an outsize degree of attention has been the Civil War surgeon. George Worthington Adams’ Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (New York: H. Schuman, 1952), H.H. Cunningham’s Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958) and Ira M. Rutkow’s Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine (New York: Random House, 2005) make the very best of what could hardly help being an appalling story.

  And even the regimental colors have biographies. Richard Sauers’ two- volume illustrated history of the flags carried by Pennsylvania’s volunteer regiments, Advance the Colors (Harrisburg, PA: Capitol Preservation Committee, 1987, 1992) photographs and documents every Pennsylvania regimental color, along with a brief history and bibliography for the units which carried them. Those who fled from the colors also have a remembrancer in Ella Lonn’s Desertion During the Civil War (New York: Century Co., 1928).

  SEVEN. THE MANUFACTURE OF WAR

  The romance of the blockade-runners is one of the great fictions of the Civil War, elaborated in large part by the post-war recollections of the blockade-runners and concealing the life-and-death struggle which was going on behind the curtain of foreign policy and military supply. The Confederacy’s attempts to draw France and England into the war as mediators or belligerents has received surprisingly good coverage from both English and American sources, although the consensus which has emerged from that literature leans toward the opinion that the Confederacy never really had much serious prospect of being actively protected by either European power. Howard Jones’s Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), and Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) make it clear how limited British enthusiasm for the Confederacy really was, and also how differently the Emancipation Proclamation was read at the various levels of British government and society (some observers actually thought that the Proclamation, by inciting slave revolts in the South, actually made the case for intervention stronger). The other major studies of Civil War diplomacy are Frank Owsley’s King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), Frank J. Merli, The Alabama, British Neutrality, and the American Civil War (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004 [1970]), and Lynn Case and Warren Spencer’s The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970).

  The Civil War navies have been the subject of many books, but a useful survey to begin with is Spencer Tucker, Blue and Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006). Of course, sooner or later the reader’s interest will wander back to the daring and duplicity of the blockade-runners and the dreaded commerce raiders, and at that moment, no better suggestions can be offered than the slippery, Latin-quoting John Wilkinson’s The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner (New York: Sheldon, 1877) and Raphael Semmes’s own memoir of his service on the Sumter and the Alabama in Service Afloat: Or, the Remarkable Career of the Confederate Cruisers, Sumter and Alabama, During the War Between the States (Baltimore: Kelly, Piet, 1887). The Confederate navy received its earliest chronicle from one of its own officers, an artilleryman-turned-sailor, John Thomas Scharf, whose History of the Confederate States Navy (New York: Rogers and Sherwood, 1887) is a highly partisan but far-reaching account of the Southern navy. More modern work on the Confederate Navy has been done by Raimondo Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996) and Warren Spencer, The Confederate Navy in Europe (University: University of Alabama Press, 1983). The entanglement of Confederate diplomacy with the Confederate navy and its plans to build warships and commerce-raiders in Britain has been analyzed by Frank J. Merli in Great Britain and the Confederate Navy (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004 [1970]), while the ingenuity with which the Confederates fashioned a fleet of ironclad warships has been told by William N. Still in Iron Afloat: The Story of the Confederate Armorclads (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985). The Confederate secretary of the navy who was the spark for much of that ingenuity has been the subject of two biographers, Rodman Underwood in Stephen Russell Mallory: A Biography of the Confederate Navy Secretary and United States Senator (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005) and Joseph T. Durkin in Stephen R. Mallory: Confederate Navy Chief (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954).

  Mallory’s opposite number in Lincoln’s cabinet has also enjoyed outstanding biographical treatment from John Niven in Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and Richard S. West Jr. in Gideon Welles: Lincoln’
s Navy Department (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). Welles’s famous diaries have been edited by Howard K. Beale in three volumes as The Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911). Welles’s squadrons have been well analyzed in Stephen R. Taaffe’s Commanding Lincoln’s Navy: Union Naval Leadership During the Civil War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009). The momentous combat of the Monitor and Virginia has never been better told than in William C. Davis’s lively Duel Between the First Ironclads (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975). In addition to Welles and his management of the Federal navy, Seward and the State Department have been discussed in Glyndon Van Deusen’s William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), while Seward’s diplomatic faux pas in the first year of the war have been dealt with in a more positive fashion by Norman Ferris in his aptly titled Desperate Diplomacy: William Henry Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976) and in Ferris’s The Trent Affair (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977). Managing the war fell in large measure to Stanton, whose biography by Harold Hyman and Benjamin P. Thomas, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Knopf, 1962) is one of the models of Civil War biographical literature. Supplying the war was the task of Montgomery C. Meigs, who has also benefitted from a superb biography by Russell F. Weigley, Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M. C. Meigs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), although one should not miss a fine survey of wartime logistics in Mark R. Wilson’s The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Coordinating the armies for the North really became the province of Henry Wager Halleck, the subject of a high-level biography from John Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). An outstanding general survey of the organization of the North’s economic resources during the war is Philip Shaw Paludan’s A People’s Contest: The Union and the Civil War (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).