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

by Allen C. Guelzo

  81. DeBow, “Editorial,” DeBow’s Review 34 (July 1864): 98; Bernath, Confederate Minds, 268.

  82. Palmer, Thanksgiving Sermon, Delivered at the First Presbyterian Church, New Orleans, November 29, 1860 (New York: G. F. Nesbitt, 1861), 7, 12–13.

  83. Hammond, diary entry for October 3, 1854, in Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, A Southern Slaveholder, ed. Carol Bleser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 264; O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 2:955; Thornwell, “Sermon on National Sins,” in The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, ed. John B. Adger (Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1871–1873), 4:511; William White Narrative, R. L. Dabney Papers, Southern Historical Collection; Eaton, A History of the Southern Confederacy, 105.

  84. Hoge, May 15, 1865, in Peyton Harrison Hoge, Moses Drury Hoge: Life and Letters (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1899), 235; Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 38–40; Gorgas, diary entry for July 17, 1863, in The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 75; Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 37–38, 54–55, 63–71.

  85. Bushnell, “Popular Government by Divine Right,” in God Ordained This War: Sermons on the Sectional Crisis, 1830–1865, ed. D. B. Cheseborough (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 104, 117.

  86. James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 41, 50, 62, 76; Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, 99–103, 286–90, 307.

  87. Hollis Read, The Coming Crisis of the World, or, The Great Battle and the Golden Age (Columbus, OH: Follett, Foster, 1861), 242.

  88. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 44–45.

  89. Strong, diary entry for November 5, 1862, in Diary of the Civil War, 272.

  90. Drew G. Faust, “Christian Soldiers: The Meaning of Revivalism in the Confederate Army,” Journal of Southern History 53 (February 1987): 73–75; Morton Borden, “The Christian Amendment,” Civil War History 25 (June 1979): 160.

  91. Charles Grandison Finney, sermon outline, 1863, in Finney Papers, Oberlin College Archives.

  92. Edward King Wightman, From Antietam to Fort Fisher: The Civil War Letters of Edward King Wightman, 1862–1865, ed. E. G. Longacre (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), 56; Robertson, Soldiers Blue and Gray, 227; Linderman, Embattled Courage, 128.

  93. Anne Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 17–66.

  1. William F. Hanna, “The Boston Draft Riot,” Civil War History 36 (September 1990): 262–73.

  2. William P. Marchione, Boston Miscellany: An Essential History of the Hub (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2008), 110–11.

  3. Judith Ann Giesberg, “‘Lawless and Unprincipled’: Women in Boston’s Civil War Draft Riot,” in Boston’s Histories: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. O’Connor, ed. James O’Toole and David Quigley (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 72.

  4. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors, 304–6.

  5. Giesberg, “‘Lawless and Unprincipled,’” 71–76.

  6. William Schouler, A History of Massachusetts in the Civil War (Boston: E. P. Dutton, 1868), 1:476–80; Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 55.

  7. Grant to Dana, August 5, 1863, and Grant to Halleck, January 19, 1864, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 9:146–147 and 10:39–40; Grant to Halleck, December 7, 1863, The War of the Rebellion, Series One, 31(III):349–50; Stoker, The Grand Design, 344–49; Catton, Grant Takes Command, 101–2.

  8. Halleck to Grant, January 8 and February 16, 1864, and C. H. Dana to Grant, January 10, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 32(II):40–42, 58, 311, 313; Gary D. Joiner, Through the Howling Wilderness: The 1864 Red River Campaign and Union Failure in the West (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 48–51; Ludwell H. Johnson, Red River Campaign: Politics and Cotton in the Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993 [1958]), 42–44.

  9. Halleck to Grant, March 6, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 32(III):26. Winfield Scott had enjoyed the brevet rank of lieutenant-general, but brevets were little more than honorary designations; Grant was the first to be designated as a full lieutenant-general since Washington.

  10. “Lieutenant General,” February 24, 1864, Congressional Globe, 38th Congress, 1st Session, 797–98.

  11. Grant to Dana, August 5, 1863, in Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 9:147.

  12. Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 292; James H. Wilson, The Life of John A. Rawlins (New York: Neale, 1916), 407; Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won, 517.

  13. Theodore Lyman, April 12, 1864, in Meade’s Headquarters, 81; Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman, 114; William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 159.

  14. Wilkeson, Recollections of a Private Soldier, 36–37.

  15. Brooks D. Simpson, Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 63–64; Grimsley, And Keep Moving On, 21–22.

  16. Stoker, The Grand Design, 351–54; Edward G. Longacre, General Ulysses S. Grant: The Soldier and the Man (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006), 212–16; John Hay, diary entry for April 30, 1864, in Inside Lincoln’s White House, 194.

  17. “Report of Lieut. Gen. U.S. Grant, U. S. Army, Commanding, Armies of the United States, of Operations, March, 1864–May, 1865,” July 22, 1865, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 34(I):18; “Lee’s Offensive Policy,” Southern Historical Society Papers 9 (March 1881): 137; Nolan, Lee Considered, 85.

  18. Hagerman, The American Civil War and The Origins of Modern Warfare, 248; Grimsley, And Keep Moving On, 21–22; Andrew A. Humphreys, The Virginia Campaign of ’64 and ’65: The Army of the Potomac and the Army of the James (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1883), 19; Longacre, General Ulysses S. Grant, 220.

  19. Gordon C. Rhea, The Battle of the Wilderness May 5–6, 1864 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 9; Lee to G. W. C. Lee, April 9, 1864, in The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 695–96.

  20. McHenry Howard, Recollections of a Maryland Confederate Soldier and Staff Officer Under Johnston, Jackson, and Lee (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1914), 253; Gary W. Gallagher, “The Army of Northern Virginia in May 1864: A Crisis of High Command,” Civil War History 36 (July 1990): 101–7; Gallagher, Lee and His Army in Confederate History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 202; E. Porter Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate: A Critical Narrative (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 360; Rhea, The Battle of the Wilderness, 24.

  21. William Meade Dame, From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign: A Sketch in Personal Narrative of Scenes a Soldier Saw (Baltimore: Green-Lucas, 1920), 71–72.

  22. Judson, History of the 83rd Pennsylvania Volunteers, 94; David M. Jordan, Winfield Scott Hancock: A Soldier’s Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 119.

  23. J. Tracy Power, Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 23; Robert K. Krick, “‘Lee to the Rear,’ the Texans Cried,” in The Wilderness Campaign, ed. Gary Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 182.

  24. Ulysses S. Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” 539.

  25. Catton, Grant Takes Command, 208; Wilkeson, Recollections, 80.

  26. Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Knopf, 1962), 300; Hay, diary entry for May 9, 1864, in Inside Lincoln’s Whit
e House, 195; Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” 550–51.

  27. Henry Walter Thomas, History of the Doles-Cook Brigade, Army of Northern Virginia, C.S.A. (Atlanta: Franklin, 1903), 478–79; Stephen E. Ambrose, Upton and the Army (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992 [1964]), 32.

  28. “Reports of Brig. Gen. Lewis A. Grant, U.S. Army, Commanding Second Brigade,” August 30, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 36(I), 704; John Cannan, Bloody Angle: Hancock’s Assault on the Mule Shoe Salient, May 12, 1864 (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), 153; William D. Matter, If It Takes All Summer: The Battle of Spotsylvania (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 248–49.

  29. George Walsh, Damage Them All You Can: Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia (New York: Forge Books, 2002), 475.

  30. Gordon C. Rhea, Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26–June 3, 1864 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 362; Ernest B. Furgurson, Not War but Murder: Cold Harbor 1864 (New York: Knopf, 2000), 102.

  31. Humphreys, The Virginia Campaign of ’64 and ’65, 100; Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” 598; Catton, Grant Takes Command, 240–41; Edward H. Bonekemper, Ulysses S. Grant: A Victor, Not a Butcher: The Military Genius of the Man Who Won the Civil War (Lanham, MD: Regnery, 2004), 186, 191.

  32. “Report of Lieut. Gen. U.S. Grant,” July 22, 1865, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 34(I):18.

  33. Grant to Halleck, June 5, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 36(1):11.

  34. Smith, Grant, 372; Longacre, General Ulysses S. Grant, 237.

  35. Stoddard, in Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, 426; T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York, Knopf, 1952), 307; Catton, Grant Takes Command, 176–77; Lincoln, “To Ulysses S. Grant,” June 15, 1864, in Collected Works, 7:393.

  36. P. G. T. Beauregard, “Four Days of Battle at Petersburg,” in Battles and Leaders, 3:540–43; August V. Kautz, “The Siege of Petersburg: Two Failures to Capture the ‘Cockade City,’” in Battles and Leaders, ed. Cozzens, 6:401; Wilkeson, Recollections, 157–58; Bonekemper, Ulysses S. Grant, 190; Eppa Hunton, in Noah Andre Trudeau, Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May–June 1864 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 316; A. Wilson Greene, Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 185–89.

  37. William H. Powell, “The Battle of the Petersburg Crater,” in Battles and Leaders, 4:551; 40–41; Michael A. Cavanaugh and William Marvel, The Petersburg Campaign—The Battle of the Crater “The Horrid Pit,” June 25–August 6, 1864 (Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1989), 40–41; Richard Slotkin, No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 (New York: Random House, 2009), 140–42; Grant to Halleck, August 1, 1864, War of the Rebellion, Series One, 40(1):17–18.

  38. John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (New York: Free Press, 1993), 119.

  39. Sherman to Thomas Ewing, December 23, 1859, in General W. T. Sherman as College President, ed. Walter L. Fleming (Cleveland: Arthur M. Clark, 1912), 89.

  40. Mark Wells Johnson, That Body of Brave Men: The U.S. Regular Infantry and the Civil War in the West (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 12.

  41. Sherman to John Sherman, October 26, 1861, in Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865, ed. Brooks Simpson and Jean V. Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 163; Lee Kennett, Sherman: A Soldier’s Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 144; David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 148.

  42. Charles Bracelen Flood, Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 109.

  43. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War, 76.

  44. Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, 365.

  45. Sherman to Grant, March 10, 1864, in “General Sherman’s Reply,” Littell’s Living Age 87 (October 28, 1865): 189; Lloyd Lewis, Sherman: Fighting Prophet (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 307–8, 330.

  46. Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, 1037.

  47. James L. Huston, “Putting African-Americans in the Center of American National Discourse: The Strange Fate of Popular Sovereignty,” in Politics and Culture of the Civil War Era: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Johannsen, ed. Daniel J. McDonough and Kenneth W. Noe (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), 113.

  48. Jacob Dolson Cox, Atlanta (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1882), 21; David Conyngham, Sherman’s March Through the South, with Sketches and Incidents of the Campaign (New York: Sheldon, 1865), 29–30.

  49. Cater, As It Was: Reminiscences of a Soldier of the Third Texas Cavalry and the Nineteenth Louisiana Infantry, 169, 178–79.

  50. Stanley F. Horn, The Army of Tennessee (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1944), 311–13; Craig L. Symonds, Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 249–50; Winston Groom, Shrouds of Glory: From Atlanta to Nashville: The Last Great Campaign of the Civil War (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 17.

  51. Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Knopf, 2005), 522–26.

  52. Sherman to Halleck, July 16, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 38(V):150; Thomas W. Duncan, Recollections of Thomas D. Duncan, A Confederate Soldier (Nashville, TN: McQuiddy, 1922), 150.

  53. Archer Jones, Civil War Command and Strategy (New York: Free Press, 1992), 201–2; Lewis, Sherman: Fighting Prophet, 383; Brian Craig Miller, John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010), 111–22; Cater, As It Was, 183–84, 185.

  54. Richard M. McMurry, John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 127–34; Richard M. McMurry, Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 150–57; Philip L. Secrist, Sherman’s 1864 Trail of Battle to Atlanta (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2006), 145–48.

  55. Hood to Seddon, August 26, 1864, F. A. Shoup to William Hardee, August 31, 1864, and Sherman to Halleck, September 3, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 38(V):777, 990, 1007; Marc Wortman, The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 301–10.

  56. Farragut was probably not quite so concise; his response was more likely, “Damn the torpedoes! Four bells, Captain Dayton. Go ahead, Jouett, full speed.” See Craig L. Symonds, The Civil War at Sea (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009), 154.

  57. Foxhall A. Parker, The Battle of Mobile Bay and the Capture of Forts Powell, Gaines and Morgan (Boston: A. Williams, 1878), 26, 29.

  58. Sherman to Grant, September 20, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 39(11):412.

  59. Sherman to Grant, November 6, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 39(II):660; Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies, 295; Lewis, Fighting Prophet, 431.

  60. Sherman to Grant, October 9, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 39(11):162; Sherman, Memoirs, 627; Lewis, Fighting Prophet, 430; Noah Andre Trudeau, Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea (New York: Harper, 2008), 42.

  61. “Special Field Orders No. 120,” November 8, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 39(11): 713; Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 169; Sherman to Lincoln, December 22, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 44:783.

  62. Burke Davis, Sherman’s March (New York: Random House, 1980), 12, 24, 31, 118; Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond, 130; Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won, 654; “Sherman’s Campaign,” in The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, ed. Frank Moore (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1866), 9:7.

  63. John Bell Hood, Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies (New Orleans: Hood Orphan Memorial Fund, 1880), 244.

  64. Jacob Dolson Cox, The Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, November 3
0, 1864 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 89–91, 211–14.

  65. Grant to Thomas, December 11, 1864, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 45(11):143; James Lee McDonough, Nashville: The Western Confederacy’s Final Gamble (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 264; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, 513.

  66. Steven Bernstein, The Confederacy’s Last Northern Off ensive: Jubal Early, the Army of the Valley, and the Raid on Washington (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 106; Benjamin Shroder Schneck, The Burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1864), 16.

  67. McClure, Lincoln and Men of War-Times, 132.

  68. William Frank Zornow, Lincoln and the Party Divided (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 49–50.

  69. Burton J. Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet (New York: Little, Brown, 1946), 486–87; Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), 223–25; McClure, Lincoln and Men of War-Times, 134.

  70. John Niven, Salmon P. Chase: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 366; David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 508; Lincoln, “To Salmon P. Chase,” June 30, 1864, in Collected Works, 7:419.

  71. Tribune Almanac for 1864 (New York: Tribune Association, 1864), 24.

  72. Ben Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros., 1886), 1:538; Allan G. Bogue, The Earnest Men: Republicans of the Civil War Senate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 97–98, 109–10, 130.

  73. Henry Wilson, History of the Antislavery Measures of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth United-States Congresses, 1861–64 (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1864), 65, 222–23, 292, 376.

  74. Wade to Zachariah Chandler, September 23 and October 8, 1861, in Zachariah Chandler Papers, Library of Congress; Wade, “Property in Territories,” March 7, 1860, Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session (Appendix), 154.