America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  50. Quoted in Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 266.

  51. CW 4:323.

  52. C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, eds., The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished War Diaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 57.

  53. Quoted in Gamaliel Bradford Jr., “Robert Toombs,” Atlantic Monthly 112 (August 1913): 215.

  54. Quoted in Donald, Lincoln, 293.

  55. Revelation 20:9, 21:1.

  56. Quoted in Philip Callow, From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 282.

  CHAPTER 9: JUST CAUSES

  1. Whitman, “First O Songs for a Prelude,” Leaves of Grass, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 281.

  2. First quote in James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, vol. 2, The Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1982), 149; second and third quotes in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 31, 32.

  3. Quoted in Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American Christianities (New York: Penguin, 2007), 323.

  4. “War as a Schoolmaster,” Harper’s, October 19, 1861, 658; “Our History of the War,” Scientific American, May 11, 1861, 297.

  5. Quoted in McPherson, Ordeal, 149.

  6. First quote in Charles P. Roland, An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004; first published in 1991), 39; second quote in Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1861), 1:324.

  7. First quote in James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20; second quote in Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007), 28.

  8. See Roy Morris Jr., Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 24–34.

  9. First quote in McPherson, Cause and Comrades, 112; second quote in McPherson, “‘For a Vast Future Also’: Lincoln and the Millennium,” Jefferson Lecture, March 27, 2000, http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/mcpherson/speech.html.

  10. Quotes in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Church, Honor, and Secession,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 103; Reid Mitchell, “Christian Soldiers? Perfecting the Confederacy,” in ibid., 302.

  11. First quote in McPherson, Cause and Comrades, 19; second quote in Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 82.

  12. First quote in Douglass, “Sudden Revolution in Northern Sentiment,” Douglass’ Monthly, May 1861, in FD:SSW, 445; second quote in Douglass, “The Decision of the Hour,” Douglass’ Monthly, July 1861, in ibid., 463.

  13. All quotes from Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 300.

  14. Mark Grimsley and Todd D. Miller, ed. The Union Must Stand: The Civil War Diary of John Quincy Adams Campbell, Fifth Iowa Volunteer Infantry (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), xvii.

  15. Quoted in Kurt O. Berends, “‘Wholesome Reading Purifies and Elevates the Man’: The Religious Military Press in the Confederacy,” in Miller, Stout, and Reagan, Religion and the American Civil War, 144.

  16. Ellen Glasgow, The Battle-Ground (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002; originally published in 1902), 284; Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 231.

  17. For the discussion of Confederate politics, I relied on George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) and Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

  18. First quote in McPherson, Ordeal by Fire; second quote in Thomas E. Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 356; third quote in Woodward and Muhlenfeld, eds., Private Mary Chesnut, 166.

  19. Quoted in Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 111.

  20. See McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, 181–82, for discussion of conscription issue; C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; first published in 1981), 773.

  21. Quoted in McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, 182.

  22. A good discussion of tactics and weaponry is Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), especially chapter 1.

  23. Quoted in Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 8.

  24. For a good summary of northern economic advantages, see Orville Vernon Burton, The Age of Lincoln (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 142–45.

  25. Bates in Martin E. Marty, The War-Time Lincoln and the Ironic Tradition, Annual Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture (Gettysburg, Pa.: Gettysburg College, 2000), 21; second quote in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 425; third quote in Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 274.

  26. CW 6:260–269.

  27. CW 7:512.

  28. CW 4:438.

  29. Sherman to Thomas Ewing Jr., May 23, 1861, in Home Letters of General Sherman, ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 198, available on Google Books.

  30. On the construction of the Union army, see Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, “Cowards and Heroes: Group Loyalty in the American Civil War,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 2003): 519–48.

  31. See Guelzo, Redeemer President, 292–93.

  32. See Donald, Lincoln, 297–98; Guelzo, Redeemer President, 272, 280.

  33. CW 7:281–82.

  34. “Our Institutions on Their Trial,” Harper’s, August 3, 1861, 482.

  35. CW 4:507; on the border states generally, see McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, 150–62.

  36. Ballou’s letter may be found at http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/war/ballou_letter.html.

  37. Lincoln quoted in James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin, 2008), 39; New York Tribune, June 26, 1861.

  38. For battle details, unless otherwise noted, I relied on E. B. Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971) and Russell F. Weigley, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). I also used the works cited above by Orville Vernon Burton, David Herbert Donald, Allen C. Guelzo, Earl J. Hess, Gerald F. Linderman, James M. McPherson, and Emory M. Thomas.

  39. Quoted in James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (New York: Macmillan, 1997), 264. Although there are many biographies of Jackson, Robertson’s is the definitive work.

  40. Both quotes in Thomas, Confederate Nation, 117, 118.

  41. Quoted in Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 195.

  42. First quote in Thomas, Confederate Nation, 118; second quote in George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allen Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, (New York: Macmillan, 1952), July 22, 1861, 3:169; third quote in Guelzo, Redeemer President, 295; last quote in “The Lesson of Defeat,” Harper’s, August 10, 1861, 499.

  43. “The Necessity of War,” Harper’s, August 17, 1861, 514.

  CHAPTER 10: SHILOH AWAKENING

  1. I drew biographical details from the following works, unless otherwise noted: William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: Norton, 2002; first published in 1981); Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2000); Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). Grant’s memoirs also provided valuable insights: U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1972; first published in 1886).

  2. Quoted in Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 16.

  3. Quoted in Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1864), 3:431, available on Google Books.

  4. Quoted in David A. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 48.

  5. CG, 37th Congress, 2nd Session, Appendix, 3.

  6. Gari Carter, ed., Troubled State: Civil War Journals of Franklin Archibald Dick (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2008), January 26, 1862, 50; February 17, 1862, 60.

  7. “The Beginning of the End,” Harper’s, March 1, 1862, 130; quoted in Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 302.

  8. Grant, Memoirs, 188.

  9. First quote in Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 147; second quote in Morgan Ebenezer Wescott, Civil War Letters, 1861 to 1865: Written by a Boy in Blue to His Mother (Mora, Minn.: privately published, 1909), 5.

  10. Quoted in Bruce Catton, “The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant Defended,” in Grant, Lee, Lincoln, and the Radicals: Essays on Civil War Leadership, ed. Grady McWhiney (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 10.

  11. First quote in Winston Groom, Vicksburg, 1863 (New York: Knopf, 2009), 265; second quote in E. B. Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 196.

  12. First quote, Sherman to his wife (Ellen Ewing Sherman), April 11, 1862, in Home Letters of General Sherman, ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 222; second quote in Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007), 55.

  13. Derived from a compilation of soldiers’ accounts: Ambrose Bierce, “What I Saw of Shiloh,” in Bierce, Civil War Stories (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1994), 4–17; Corydon Edward Foote, With Sherman to the Sea: A Drummer’s Story of the Civil War (New York: John Day, 1960), 35; Grant, Memoirs, 211; Sam R. Watkins, “Co. Aytch”: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War (New York: Touchstone, 2003; first published in 1990), 25–28; William T. Sherman quoted in Hess, Union Soldier, 1.

  14. First quote in Richard Barksdale Harwell, ed., Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 14; second quote in Charles P. Roland, An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004, first published in 1991), 65.

  15. Olynthus B. Clark, ed., Downing’s Civil War Diary (Des Moines: Iowa State Department of History and Archives, 1916), 41.

  16. Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 27.

  17. Quotes in Ellen Glasgow, The Battle-Ground (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002; originally published in 1902), 175, 307, 315; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), 58.

  18. Quoted in Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 117.

  19. Quoted in Hess, Union Soldier, 10.

  20. Quoted in ibid., 16.

  21. First quote in ibid., 137; second quote in Faust, Suffering, 37.

  22. Quoted in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 101.

  23. Quoted in ibid., 217.

  24. Quoted in Manning, Cruel War, 58; Elisha Franklin Paxton, Memoir and Memorials (privately published, 1905), 74, available on Google Books.

  25. First quote in Faust, Suffering, 37; second quote in Hess, Union Soldier, 1.

  26. First quote in Grant, Memoirs, 218; second quote in John T. Trowbridge, The Desolate South, 1865–1866: A Picture of the Battlefields and of the Devastated Confederacy, ed. Gordon Carroll (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), 134.

  27. Theresa M. Collins and Lisa Gitelman, eds., Thomas Edison and Modern America: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 5–6.

  28. Quoted in Faust, Suffering, 188.

  29. CW 5:403–4.

  30. Herman Melville’s poem, “Shiloh: A Requiem” (1862), may be accessed at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org.

  31. Quoted in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 159.

  32. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 212.

  33. First quote in Glasgow, Battle-Ground, 291; second quote in Hess, Union Soldier, 124.

  34. Henry Timrod, “Two Armies,” in Timrod, Poems of Henry Timrod: Memoir and Portrait (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 158–60, available on Google Books; last quote in Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narrative of War,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1207.

  35. First quote, T. Buchanan Read, “The Brave at Home,” in The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, ed. Frank Moore (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1861), 1:51; second quote in Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice” 1211; third quote in Jeffrey C. Lowe and Sam Hodges, eds., Letters to Amanda: The Civil War Letters of Marion Hill Fitzpatrick, Army of Northern Virginia (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1998), May 8, 1862, 3.

  36. Quoted in Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice,” 1217–18, 1219.

  37. C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, eds., The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), August 29, 1861, 145.

  38. Quoted in Giselle Roberts, “The Confederate Belle: The Belle Ideal, Patriotic Womanhood, and Wartime Reality in Louisiana and Mississippi, 1861–1865,” Louisiana History 43 (Spring 2003): 207.

  39. Quoted in James Marten, Children for the Union: The War Spirit on the Northern Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), 65.

  40. Quoted in ibid., 59.

  41. Quoted in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 108.

  42. Both quotes in ibid., 83, 87.

  43. Lowe and Hodges, Fitzpatrick, June 8, 1865, 210.

  44. “The Second Division at Shiloh,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, May 1864, 830.

  45. Robert Garth Scott, ed., Fallen Leaves: The Civil War Letters of Major Henry Livermore Abbott (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991), December 20, 1862, 160.

  46. Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 188.

  47. Hess, Union Soldier, 7.

  48. Ambrose Bierce, “Chickamauga,” in Bierce, Civil War Stories (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1994), 45.

  49. Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 64.

  CHAPTER 11: BORN IN A DAY

  1. Fanny Burdock, interviewed by the Federal Writers Project and quoted in Allan Gurganus, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (New York: Knopf, 1989), xiii–xiv.

  2. Nat Love, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love (electronic ed., 1999; first published in 1907), 14, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/natlove/natlove,html#nlove14.

  3. “The Steamer Planter and Her Captor,” Harper’s, June 14, 1862, 372–73.

  4. Quoted in Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007), 45.

  5. Quoted in ibid., 50.

  6. Lincoln quote in Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 330; Wade quote in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 317.

  7. “Slavery and the War,” Harper’s, August 24, 1861, 530.

  8. CG, 37th Congress, 2nd Session (March 6, 1862), 1102.

  9. Quoted in Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 19.

  10. Quoted in Emory Upton, Military Policy of the United States (Washington: GPO, 1916), April 9, 1862, 297.

  11. Walker Freeman’s notes on the Peninsula Campaign appear in Keith D. Dickson’s forthcoming book,
Keeping Southern Memories Alive: Douglas Southall Freeman and Identity in the Modern South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).

  12. Quoted in Donald, Lincoln, 357.

  13. For details on the life of Robert E. Lee, unless otherwise noted, I relied on Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1934–35); Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (New York: Penguin, 2008); Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1997).

  14. Stephen Vincent Benét, “Army of Northern Virginia,” http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/38925-Stephen-Vincent-Benet-Army-Of-Northern-Virginia.

  15. Quotes in Pryor, Lee, 285.

  16. Quoted in ibid., 288.

  17. Quoted in Elizabeth Brown Pryor, “Robert E. Lee’s ‘Severest Struggle,’” American Heritage 58 (Winter 2008): 23.

  18. Sam R. Watkins, “Co. Aytch”: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War (New York: Touchstone, 2003), 11.

  19. Quoted in Fellman, Lee, 115.

  20. Quoted in James I. Robertson Jr., “Stonewall Jackson: A ‘Pious Blue-Eyed Killer’?” in New Perspectives on the Civil War: Myths and Realities of the National Conflict, ed. John Y. Simon and Michael E. Stevens (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 86.

  21. Quoted in ibid.

  22. First quote in John S. Salmon, “Land Operations in Virginia in 1862,” in Virginia At War, 1862, ed. William C. Davis and James I. Robertson Jr. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 10; second quote in Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 443.

  23. Olmsted compiled his observations from the Peninsula Campaign in a memoir. It is most recently available in Laura L. Behling, ed., Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005; first published in 1863), 115.

  24. Quoted in Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 42.

  25. Quoted in Guelzo, Emancipation Proclamation, 120.