From Bull Run to Antietam
During the spring of 1861, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the seven original Confederate States. Yet even that number put the odds at 11 versus 23 Northern states. The North had a far more extensive industrial base than the South and more than twice as many miles of railroad. As far as the production of foodstuffs was concerned, Northern agriculture was also better organized. Although the North was just recovering from an economic depression, the entire South could scrape together no more than $27 million in specie (gold and silver). The North not only commanded far more wealth, but it also had diplomatic relations with foreign powers and, therefore, could secure extensive credit.
Yet the South did have more of the army's best officers, who, at the outbreak of hostilities, had resigned their commissions in the U.S. Army and joined the army of the Confederate States. Confederate leaders knew that their only chance was to score swift military victories that would sap the North's will to fight.
The first major engagement of the war, after the fall of Fort Sumter, proved just how effective the Confederate officers and men were. When it began, the battle the South would call First Manassas and the North would call First Bull Run was a picnic. On July 21, 1861, Washington's fashionable folk rode out to nearby Centreville, Virginia, in carriages filled with baskets of food and bottles of wine. Through spy glasses, they viewed the action three miles distant. The Union troops seemed similarly carefree; as they marched to battle, they frequently broke ranks to pick blackberries. Remarkably lax, too, was military security. Newspapers published the Union army's plan of action, and what information the papers didn't supply, rebel sympathizers, such as the seductive Rose O'Neal Greenhow, volunteered to spy for the cause. Thus General Beauregard was prepared for the. Union advance and had erected defenses near a railroad crossing called Manassas Junction. There, across Bull Run Creek, his 20,000 rebels (later augmented by reinforcements) faced the 37,000 Yankees under the command of the thoroughly mediocre General Irvin McDowell.
The battle began well for the North, as McDowell managed to push the rebels out of their positions. But then the Southern forces rallied when they beheld a Virginia brigade led by General Thomas J. Jackson. Like a "stone wall" the brigade held its ground, and thereafter, Thomas Jackson was best known by the name his soldiers gave him: Stonewall. The entire Confederate force now rallied and, ultimately, broke through the Union lines. Suddenly, panicked Northern troops retreated all the way to Washington. The First Battle of Bull. Run stunned the capital--which trembled in anticipation of a Confederate invasion that never came--and it stunned Union loyalists all across the nation. The picnickers ran for their lives, It would be a long, hard war.
Seven Days
Justifiably dismayed by McDowell's performance at Bull Run, President Lincoln called General George B. McClellan to command the main Union force. Jefferson Davis combined Beauregard's troops with those of General Joseph E. Johnston, who was given senior command of the Confederate forces in Virginia. Now the major action centered in Virginia as McClellan set about building a large army with which to invade Richmond, which became the Confederate capital in May 1861.
Despite the triumph at First Bull Run, the outlook seemed grim for the Confederates. Richmond could not withstand a massive assault. Yet McClellan, a popular commander who succeeded in transforming the Union army from an undisciplined rabble into a cohesive body of credible soldiers, suffered from a Hamlet-like tendency to ponder and delay. Eventually exasperated, Lincoln would peg him with homely accuracy: McClellan has a "bad case of the slows," the president pronounced.
McClellan repeatedly delayed his assault on Richmond, finally losing the initiative, so that lie had to settle into an arduous campaign on the Virginia peninsula. In that campaign's principal series of battles, called the Seven Days (June 26-July 2, 1862), more men were killed or wounded than in all the Civil War battles fought elsewhere during the first half of 1.862, including another encounter that became a byword for slaughter, Shiloh (April 6-7,1862). Shiloh pitted General Ulysses S. Grant's 42,000-man Union against a 40,000-man Confederate force under General Albert S. Johnston. Grant lost 13,000 men, and the Confederates lost more than 10,000 in a battle that resulted in strategic stalemate on the war's western front.
Back in Virginia, the Seven Days saw the placement of Robert E. Lee at the head of the South's major army, which he renamed the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee led his forces in a brilliant offensive against the always-cautious McClellan, launching daring attacks at Mechanicsville, Gaines Mill, Savage's Station, Frayser's Farm, and Malvern Hill. In fact, Lee lost twice as many men as his adversary, but he won a profound psychological victory. McClellan backed down the peninsula all the way to the James River.
Back to Bull Run
Appalled and heartbroken by McClellan's repeated failure to seize the initiative, Lincoln desperately cast about for a general to replace him. On July 11, Lincoln appointed Henry W. Halleck. It was not a good choice. Halleck dispatched a regrouped army into Virginia under John Pope, but Lee met him with more than half the Army of Northern Virginia. At Cedar Mountain on August 9, "Stonewall" Jackson drove Pope back toward Manassas junction, then Lee sent the "Stonewall Brigade" to flank Pope and outmarch him to Manassas. After destroying the Union supply depot, Jackson took a position near the old Bull Rijn battlefield. Pope lumbered into position to attack Jackson on August 29, just as Lee sent a wing of his army, under James Longstreet, against Pope's left on August 30.
The action was devastating. Pope reeled back across the Potomac. At this point, the "invading" Union army had been effectively swept out of Virginia, and the Confederates went on the offensive. For the North, it was the low point of the war.
Perryville and Antietam
Lee was a keen student of Napoleon Bonaparte's strategy and tactics, the key to which was the principle of always acting from boldness. Thus Lee boldly conceived a double offensive: in the West, an invasion of Kentucky; in the East, an invasion of Maryland. Neither of these so-called "border states" had seceded, yet both were slave states, and capturing them would significantly expand the Confederacy. Moreover, if Louisville, Kentucky, fell to the Confederates, Indiana and Ohio would be open to invasion, and control of the Great Lakes might pass to the rebels. For the Union, the war could be lost.
But things didn't happen this way. Confederate general Braxton Bragg delayed, lost the initiative, and was defeated at Perryville, Kentucky, on October 8, 1862. In Maryland, Lee's invasion went well--until a copy of his orders detailing troop placement fell into the hands of George McClellan (restored to command of the Army of the Potomac after Halleck's disastrous performance at Second Bull Run). The Union general was able to mass 70,000 troops in front of Lee at Sharpsburg, Maryland, along Antietam Creek. On September 17, in the bloodiest day of fighting up to that time, McClellan drove Lee back to Virginia. Indeed, only the belated, last-minute arrival of a division under A.P. Hill saved Lee's forces from total annihilation.
Emancipation Proclaimed--More or Less
Antietam was not the turning point of the war, but it was nevertheless a momentous battle. It provided the platform from which Abraham Lincoln issued the so-called "preliminary" Emancipation Proclamation.
The fact is that Lincoln was no enthusiastic advocate of emancipation. To be sure, he personally hated slavery, but as president, he was sworn to uphold the Constitution, which clearly protected slavery in the slave states. More immediately, Lincoln feared that universally declaring the slaves free would propel the four slaveholding border states into the Confederate fold. For many Northerners, the moral basis of the Civil War was the issue of emancipation. But Lincoln moved cautiously.
In August 1861, Lincoln prevailed on Congress to declare slaves in the rebellious states "contraband" property. As such, slaves could be seized by the federal government, which could then refuse to return them. In March 1862, Congress passed a law forbidding army officers from returning fugitive slaves. In Ju
ly 1862, Congress passed legislation freeing slaves confiscated from owners "engaged in rebellion." In addition, a militia act authorized the president to use freed slaves in the army. With these acts, Lincoln's government edged closer to emancipation.
Secretary of State William H. Seward warned that a proclamation of emancipation would ring hollow down the depressingly long corridor of Union defeats. It was not until Antietam, a Union victory--albeit a costly one--that Lincoln felt confident in issuing the preliminary proclamation on September 23, 1862. This document did not free the slaves, but rather, warned slave owners living in states "still in rebellion on January 1, 1863" that their slaves would be declared "forever free." When that deadline came and passed, Lincoln issued the "final" Emancipation Proclamation-which set free only those slaves in areas of the Confederacy that were not under the control of the Union army (areas under Union control were no longer, technically, in rebellion); slaves in the border states were not liberated.
Timid, even disappointing as the Emancipation Proclamation may seem from our perspective, it served to galvanize the North by explicitly and officially elevating the war to a higher moral plane: slavery was now the central issue of the great Civil War.
The Least You Need to Know
The Confederacy attempted to negotiate independence from the Union before commencing hostilities by firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.
Plagued by cautious or inept commanders, the Union Army performed poorly in the first months of the war.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a fairly timid document, which reflected Lincoln's first priority: to preserve the Union, not necessarily to free the slaves.
Stats
The popular vote was much closer than the electoral vote was much closer than the electoral vote. Lincoln received only 1,866,452 votes against 2,815,617 votes for his combined opponents.
Stats
The population of the of the South in 1861 was about 9 million people, including 3 million slaves (who were not military assets). The North had 22 million people.
Real Life
Rose O'Neal Greenhow was born in Port Tobacco, Maryland, in 1817, and moved to Washington, D.C., where, from early womanhood, she cast a powerful spell on men. She married a State Department official, through whom she met a circle of highly influential Washingtonians, including James Buchanan. Widowed in 1854, Greenhow became particularly intimate with the bachelor president. Although this relationship was probably platonic, Greenhow had many others that were anything but. Among her "gentleman callers" was a host of military and government officials, perhaps including a U.S. Senator.
Greenhow was a highly intelligent woman who had nursed John C. Calhoun through his final illness when he was a resident at her aunt's fashionable Capitol Hill boardinghouse. She imbibed Calhoun's states' rights theories and became a passionate partisan of the South. When the Civil War broke out, Greenhow was recruited by Confederate spy master Thomas Jordan to obtain Union military secrets. Using her many charms, she procured information that proved highly valuable to the Confederacy at First Bull Run.
Arrested on August 23, 1861, by Alan J. Pinkerton, the man who virtually invented the profession of private detective, Greenhow was later paroled to the South, and on August 5, 1863, sailed to Europe on a mission to revive French and British support for the Confederate cause. There she met Napoleon III and Queen Victoria, and she published a best-selling memoir.
Rose O'Neal Greenhow drowned in 1864 when the blockade-runner on which she was returning from abroad ran aground off Wilmington, North Carolina.
Real Life
No military figure in American history is more universally admired than Robert E. Lee, who not only served the Confederate cause as a brilliant commander but, in defeat, became an enduring example of courage and dignity.
Lee was born on January 19, 1807, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the son of Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, a fine cavalry officer during the American Revolution. Appointed to West Point in 1825, Robert E. Lee graduated at the top of his class in 1829 and, two years later, married Mary Ann Randolph Custis, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington by her first marriage. Lee served as an engineering officer under General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War (1846-48) and, from 1852-1855, was superintendent of West Point. In 1859, Lee led the force that suppressed John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.
Robert E. Lee was anything but a Southern "fire-eater." He deplored the extrimism--on both sides--that led to the Civil War. But Lee felt intense loyalty to Virginia, and when war came, he declined an offer to command the Union army, resigned his commission, and offered his services to Virginia.
Lee repeatedly took the offensive against the North-and repeatedly attained victory against superior forces, achieving his greatest triumph at extremes (May 1863). But as the South ran short of men and money, the tide turned in favor of the North. Falling back into Virginia, Lee continued to wage war brilliantly. Finally trapped at Appomattox Court House, he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, in what is considered the symbolic end of the Civil War.
After the war, Lee became president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia. He died on October 12, 1870, a universally admired figure.
Stats
Although Antietam was a Union victory, McClellan lost more troops than Lee: 12,000 troops versus 10,000.
BLOODY ROAD TO APPOMATTOX AND BEYOND (1863-1876)
In This Chapter
Gettysburg and Vicksburg: turning point of the war
Lincoln's ultimate commander: U.S. Grant
"Total war": Sherman's March to the Sea
The assassination of Lincoln
Reconstruction and bitterness in the South
Andrew Johnson's impeachment; election of Rutherford B. Hayes
No face in American history is more familiar, better loved, or more terrible than that of Abraham Lincoln. Fortunately for us, famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady was there to photograph it. In the 16th president's face, we see his character: the hard life of the backwoods, an infinite gentleness, an infinite sorrow. Lincoln's burden is unimaginable; he had a mission to save the Union, even if doing so cost more than half a million lives.
Through the long, terrible summer of 1862, the president despaired. Lincoln was no military man, but he had a sound and simple grasp of strategy, and he saw that Generals Don Carlos Buell and George B. McClellan failed to press their gains toward decisive victories. Frustrated, Lincoln removed Buell from command of the Army of the Ohio and replaced him with William S. Rosecrans in late October 1862. The next month, be put Ambrose E. Burnside in McClellan's place as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Rosecrans scored a very costly victory at Murfreesboro, Tennessee (December 31, 1862-January 3, 1863), forcing Braxton Bragg out of Tennessee, but Burnside suffered a terrible defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia. He tried to regain the initiative for the Union forces by renewing a drive on Richmond, but faltered at the Rappahannock River and was checked by Lee's army. On December 13, Burnside hurled a series of assaults against the Confederate trenches. He not only failed to penetrate the Confederate lines but lost more than 12,000 men in the process.
A month after Fredericksburg, Lincoln replaced Burnside with "Fighting Joe" Hooker, who led the Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville (May 1-3, 1863) in the wilderness of northern Virginia, again aiming to take Richmond. Hooker was defeated--brilliantly--by Stonewall Jackson (who, however, lost his life in the battle, accidentally shot by one of his own troops). Lincoln replaced Hooker with George Gordon Meade on June 29, 1863--just two days before Union and Confederate forces would clash at an obscure Pennsylvania hamlet called Gettysburg.
Four Score and Seven
Anxious to move the war into Union territory, Lee invaded Pennsylvania with an army of about 75,000. He did not aim to do battle with the forces of the North in the vicinity of Gettysburg, a village distinguished only in that it was positioned at important crossroads,
but the fact is that Lieutenant General A.P. Hill's corps of Confederates needed shoes. Short of manufacturing capability, the South always had a difficult time keeping its soldiers shod. On June 30, while marching toward Gettysburg in search of shoes, Hill was engaged by cavalry under Union Brigadier General John Buford. The battle began in earnest on the next day, July 1.
The encounter did not go well for the Union. Hill's troops killed Major General John F. Reynolds, commander of the Union I Corps, almost as soon as he came onto the field. Despite shock and confusion, his troops held their ground until reinforcements arrived. But in the afternoon, Hill and Lieutenant General R.S. Ewell joined forces in an attack that routed the Federals through the town of Gettysburg. The forces regrouped and rallied on Cemetery Ridge, where they were joined by fresh troops from the south and east. The Confederates arrayed their forces in an encircling position, encompassing Seminary Ridge, parallel to Cemetery Ridge.
The Complete Idiot's Guide to American History Page 20
