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

by Allen C. Guelzo

  75. Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 4–16; Wilson, History of the Anti-Slavery Measures, 377; Herman Belz, Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 101–3; Bogue, The Earnest Men, 229.

  76. Lincoln, “Speech at Worcester,” September 12, 1848, in Collected Works, 2:2–3; The Diary of Edward Bates, 333; Lincoln to John B. Henderson, in Walter B. Stevens, A Reporter’s Lincoln, ed. Michael Burlingame (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 170–73.

  77. Garrison to Helen E. Garrison, June 11, 1864, in Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. V: Let the Oppressed Go Free, 1861–1867, ed. W. M. Merrill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 212; Hans L. Trefousse, “Owen Lovejoy and Abraham Lincoln During the Civil War,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 22 (Winter 2001): 31; John Hay, diary entry for October 28, 1863, in Inside Lincoln’s White House, 101; Allan G. Bogue, The Congressman’s Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 43.

  78. “Military Disasters,” December 9, 1861, Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 1st session, 31; Tap, Over Lincoln’s Shoulder, 21–24, 165–66; Sears, Controversies and Commanders, 33–46.

  79. Bogue, The Congressman’s Civil War, 101–3.

  80. Edwin M. Stanton to Andrew Johnson, March 3, 1862, in Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, at the First Session, Thirty-Ninth Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1866), 5; Edwin M. Stanton to Edward Stanly, May 20, 1862, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 9:397; William C. Harris, With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 40, 59–71, 78–81, 84.

  81. “Proclamation of Amnesty,” December 8, 1863, in McPherson, ed., Political History of the Rebellion, 147–48.

  82. LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 72–74; Joseph G. Dawson, Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 16–23; Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1893), 4:214–23.

  83. “An Act to Guarantee to Certain States Whose Governments Have Been Usurped or Overthrown a Republican Form of Government,” in The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861–1870, ed. Harold Hyman (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 128–34; “Rebellious States,” May 4, 1864, and “Reconstruction Bill,” July 2, 1864, Congressional Globe, 38th Congress, 1st Session, 2108, 3491.

  84. “Bill for Reconstruction,” in McPherson, ed., Political History, 316–18; “Protest of Sen. Wade and H. W. Davis, M.C.,” in The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1864 (New York: Appleton, 1865), 307–10.

  85. Wilson, History of the Anti-Slavery Measures, 203–17; “An Act to Amend the Act Calling Forth the Militia,” July 17, 1862, in Statutes at Large, 37th Congress, 2nd Session, 597–600.

  86. Miller, The Training of an Army, 106.

  87. Clarence D. Long, Wages and Earnings in the United States, 1860–1890 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 14–15.

  88. James W. Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991), 32–48.

  89. Douglas R. Harper, “If Thee Must Fight”: A Civil War History of Chester County, Pennsylvania (West Chester, PA: Chester County Historical Society, 1990), 204.

  90. Geary, We Need Men, 54–63, 67–70, 83–84.

  91. Eugene Converse Murdock, Patriotism Limited, 1862–1865: The Civil War Draft and the Bounty System (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1967), 211; Tyler Anbinder, “Which Poor Man’s Fight? Immigrants and the Federal Conscription of 1863,” Civil War History 52 (December 2006): 372.

  92. Ernest A. McKay, The Civil War and New York City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 197–212; Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 7–14; A. Hunter Dupree and Leslie H. Fishel, “An Eyewitness Account of the New York Draft Riots, July 1863,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (December 1960): 476–77.

  93. Grace Palladino, Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840–1868 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 124–35; Barnet Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (New York: Walker Publishing, 2005), 19.

  94. “To Francis P. Blair,” July 22, 1864, in Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 584.

  95. “To the Democratic Nomination Committee,” September 4, 1864, in Civil War Papers, 591.

  96. Lincoln, “Memorandum Concerning His Probable Failure of Re-election,” Collected Works, 7:514.

  97. J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: Century, 1890), 9:218; Charles B. Flood, 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 261; “Before My Own Conscience,” in Lincoln, Conversations with Lincoln, ed. Charles M. Segal (New York: Putnam, 1961), 359; McClure, Lincoln and Men of War-Times, 124, 203.

  98. George Templeton Strong, diary entry for September 8, 1864, in Diary of the Civil War, 483; Thomas S. Mach, “Gentleman George” Hunt Pendleton: Party Politics and Ideological Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007), 105.

  99. McClellan to Allan Pinkerton, October 20, 1864, in Civil War Papers, 591, 615.

  100. Tribune Almanac and Political Register for 1865 (New York: Tribune Association, 1865), 67; James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 176; Kreiser, Defeating Lee, 216–17.

  1. Herndon, “Lincoln’s Superstition,” in The Hidden Lincoln, 409–10; Lloyd Lewis, Myths After Lincoln (New York: Readers Club, 1941), 289–98; Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln, 163–65.

  2. Lincoln, “To Mary Todd Lincoln,” June 9, 1863, in Collected Works, 6:256; D. T. Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847–1865 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994 [1895]), 115–17; James Rollins, in Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, 384.

  3. Donald, Lincoln, 594; Thomas and Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War, 319, 393–401.

  4. LeGrand B. Cannon, in Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, 78; Welles, diary entry for April 14, 1865, in Diary of Gideon Welles, 2:282–83.

  5. Horace Porter, “Lincoln and Grant,” Century Magazine 30 (October 1885): 956; The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant), ed. John Y. Simon (New York: Putnam, 1975), 155–56.

  6. Lee to Seddon, January 11, 1865, and January 27, 1865, in The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 881, 886.

  7. Mrs. Roger A. Pryor, Reminiscences of Peace and War (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 267.

  8. Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 508–9; Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York: Random House, 2000), 172–75; Scott Nelson and Carol Sheriff, A People at War, 274–77.

  9. William Livermore to “Friend Abbie,” February 26, 1865, “20th Maine Infantry,” in Gettysburg National Military Park Vertical Files, #6-ME20; Lee to Longstreet, and Lee to Cooper, February 25, 1865, in The War of the Rebellion, Series One, 46:1258; Douglas Southall, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942–44), 3:623–24; Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953), 330; George G. Meade to Margaretta Meade, March 4, 1865, in George G. Meade Papers, Box 1/Folder 4, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Gorgas, diary entry for January 25, 1865, in The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 149.

  10. Symonds, Joseph E. Johnston, 344.


  11. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond, 79, 142; James M. Merrill, William Tecumseh Sherman (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971), 283.

  12. Lincoln, “Speech in United States House of Representatives on Internal Improvements,” June 20, 1848, and “To Stephen A. Hurlbut,” July 31, 1863, in Collected Works, 1:488, 6:358.

  13. Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress,” December 6, 1864, in Collected Works, 8:149.

  14. Rollins, in Fehrenbacher, ed., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, 384; John Alley, in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American, 1886), 585–86; Trefousse, The Radical Republicans, 298–300; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 186.

  15. Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1865, in Collected Works, 8:333.

  16. Lincoln, in Recollected Words, 15, 38; Lincoln, “Last Public Address,” April 11, 1865, in Collected Works, 8:403.

  17. William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, 810–13. Gideon Welles said that Lincoln accompanied his injunction to “frighten” the Confederate leaders “out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off” with a gesture that reminded Welles of someone “shooing sheep out of a lot”; see Welles, “Lincoln and Johnson,” in Civil War and Reconstruction, 191.

  18. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, 2:598–616; William C. Harris, Lincoln’s Last Months (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 115–21; Robert M. T. Hunter, “The Peace Commission of 1865” (1877), in The New Annals of the Civil War, eds. Peter Cozzens and R. I. Girardi (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2004), 495–98; Reagan, Memoirs, 166–79.

  19. Lincoln, “To John A. Campbell,” April 5, 1865, and “To Godfrey Weitzel,” April 12, 1865, in Collected Works, 8:386, 406–7.

  20. George G. Meade to Margaretta Meade, March 4, 1865, in George G. Meade Papers, Box 1/Folder 4, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

  21. A. Wilson Greene, The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign: Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 112–25, 294–309; Earl J. Hess, In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009), 245–79.

  22. Lee to John C. Breckinridge, February 21, 1865, and to James Longstreet, February 22, 1865, in Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee, 906, 908; Michael Ballard, A Long Shadow: Jefferson Davis and the Final Days of the Confederacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 44, 46; Ernest B. Furgurson, Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War (New York: Knopf, 1996), 333, 336–37.

  23. William Marvel, Lee’s Last Retreat: The Flight to Appomattox (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 50–51.

  24. Pollard, The Lost Cause, 704.

  25. Young, in Thomas Nelson Page, “Robert E. Lee: Man and Soldier,” in The Novels, Stories, Sketches and Poems of Thomas Nelson Page (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1912), 18:224; Philip H. Sheridan, “The Last Days of the Rebellion,” in Battles and Leaders, ed. Cozzens, 6:526–35; Greg Eames, Black Day of the Army: The Battles of Sailor’s Creek (Burkeville, VA: E. & H. Pubs., 2001), 166; Chris Calkins, The Battles of Appomattox Station and Appomattox Court House, April 8–9, 1865 (Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1987), 25–30; Henry E. Tremaine, Sailors’ Creek to Appomattox Court House, 7th, 8th, 9th April, 1865, or, The Last Hours of Sheridan’s Cavalry (New York: C. H. Ludwig, 1885), 34–38.

  26. Thomas C. Devin, “Didn’t We Fight Splendid,” Civil War Times Illustrated 17 (December 1978): 38.

  27. Marvel, Lee’s Last Retreat, 167–71; John S. Wise, The End of an Era (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901), 429; J. H. Claiborne, “Last Days of Lee and His Paladins,” in War-Talks of Confederate Veterans, ed. G. S. Bernard (Dayton, OH: Morningside Press, 2003 [1892]), 256.

  28. “Report of Lieut. Gen. U.S. Grant,” July 22, 1865, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 34(I):56; Chris Calkins, The Appomattox Campaign, March 29–April 9, 1865 (Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1997), 169–77; Ulysses S. Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” 735–41; Charles Marshall, Appomattox: An Address Delivered Before the Society of the Army and Navy of the Confederate States (Baltimore: Guggenheimer, Weil, 1894), 19–21, and “Occurrences at Lee’s Surrender,” Confederate Veteran, February 1894, 42.

  29. Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York: Century, 1907), 472–85.

  30. Mills, History of the 16th North Carolina Regiment, 68.

  31. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army, 461–71.

  32. Frank P. Cauble, The Surrender Proceedings, April 9, 1865, Appomattox Court House (Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1987), 93–100; Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac, Based upon Personal Reminiscences of the Fifth Army Corps (Dayton, OH: Morningside Press, 1982 [1915]), 261; Chamberlain to Sara Brastow, April 13, 1865, in Through Blood and Fire: Selected Civil War Papers of Major General Joshua Chamberlain, ed. Mark Nesbitt (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1996), 178–79.

  33. Sherman to Grant, March 22, 1865, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 47 (II):950.

  34. Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Bentonville: The Final Battle of Sherman and Johnston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 216; Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations … During the Late War Between the States (New York: D. Appleton, 1874), 398–400.

  35. F. Milton Willis, Fort Sumter Memorial: The Fall of Fort Sumter, A Contemporary Sketch (New York: Edwin C. Hill, 1915), 35–45.

  36. Julia Adeline Shepherd, April 16, 1865, in We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Timothy S. Good (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 55–56; Harold Holzer, “Eyewitnesses Remember the ‘Fearful Night,’” Civil War Times Illustrated 32 (March/April 1993): 14.

  37. Edward Steers, Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001), 116; Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2005), 225.

  38. William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 53–54.

  39. “Major Rathbone’s Affidavit,” in John Edward Buckingham, Reminiscences and Souvenirs of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Washington, DC: R. H. Darby, 1894), 75–76; Knox, in “Eyewitnesses Remember the ‘Fearful Night,’” 14.

  40. John Hay and John George Nicolay, “The Fourteenth of April,” Century Magazine 39 (January 1890): 436; Charles S. Taft, “Abraham Lincoln’s Last Hours,” Century Magazine 45 (February 1893): 635; James Tanner to Henry F. Walch, April 17, 1865, in Howard H. Peck, “James Tanner’s Account of Lincoln’s Death,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 2 (December 1942): 179; Bryan, The Great American Myth, 189.

  41. Chase, diary entry for April 15, 1865, in Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase, ed. David H. Donald (New York: Longmans, Green, 1954), 267–68.

  42. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 69–70; Michael Vorenberg, “Reconstruction as a Constitutional Crisis,” in Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, ed. Thomas J. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 167–68.

  43. “Interview with a Colored Delegation respecting Suffrage,” February 7, 1866, in The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction (From April 15, 1865, to July 15, 1870), ed. Edward McPherson (Washington, DC: Solomons & Chapman, 1875), 55; Heather Cox Richardson, Westward from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 52; Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (New York: Knopf, 1965), 96; Garrett Epps, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Civil Rights in Post–Civil War America (New York: H. Holt, 2006), 32–33.

  44. Phillips, in The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861–1870, ed. Harold Hyman (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 480, 483; Stevens, “Reconstruction,” Sep
tember 6, 1865, in Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, 23; Peyton McCrary, “The Party of Revolution: Republican Ideas About Politics and Social Change, 1862–1867,” Civil War History 30 (December 1984): 330–50; “Desperation and Colonization,” Continental Monthly 1 (June 1862), 664.

  45. William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 291; John C. Rodrigue, “Introduction,” in H. C. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction: Stormy Days in Louisiana (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), lii; “An Act to Establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees,” March 3, 1865, in Statutes at Large, 38th Congress, 2nd Session, ed. G. P. Sanger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1866), 13:507–9.

  46. Ronald E. Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862–1875 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 178.

  47. “Special Field Orders No. 15,” January 16, 1865, in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 47(II): 61–62.

  48. Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, 357–58.

  49. “Memorandum or Basis of Agreement Made This 18th Day of April, A. D. 1865, Near Durham’s Station,” in War of the Rebellion, Series One, 47 (III):243–44.

  50. Sherman, Memoirs, 840–45; Brooks D. Simpson, “Facilitating Defeat: The Union High Command and the Collapse of the Confederacy,” in The Collapse of the Confederacy, ed. Grimsley and Simpson, 98.

  51. Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 183; McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, 317; Howard B. Means, The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson and the 45 Days That Changed the Nation (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006), 55; Hans L. Trefousse, “Andrew Johnson and the Freedmen’s Bureau,” in The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations, ed. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 42.

  52. Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 137; Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade, 249–50; James L. Swanson, Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse (New York: William Morrow, 2010), 309–16.