America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  36. Corydon Edward Foote, With Sherman to the Sea: A Drummer’s Story of the Civil War (New York: John Day, 1960), 121; see also U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1972; first published in 1886), 350–94.

  37. Grant, Memoirs, 362.

  38. Foote, Sherman to the Sea, 145.

  39. Quoted in Sarah E. Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 261.

  40. Foote, Sherman to the Sea, 179. Foote also comments on the relatively comfortable winter quarters for Sherman’s army, 161–78.

  41. Sam R. Watkins, “Co. Aytch”: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War (New York: Touchstone, 2003), 115.

  42. Ibid., 98, 99, 112.

  43. See Donald, Lincoln, 468.

  CHAPTER 14: WAR IS CRUELTY

  1. 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), February 24, 1864, 120.

  2. Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 113.

  3. “Merry Christmas,” Harper’s, December 1863, 818, drawing on 824; Abbott’s sad departure from home is related by the editor of his letters, Robert Garth Scott, in Fallen Leaves: The Civil War Letters of Major Henry Livermore Abbott (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991), 26.

  4. Quoted in Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007), 188.

  5. Quoted in Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 37.

  6. James Daniel Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy (Nashville: U.S. Publishing, 1905), 1:564.

  7. Richard Barksdale Harwell, ed., Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), April 10, 1864, 198; Sam R. Watkins, “Co. Aytch”: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War (New York: Touchstone, 2003), 88; both quotes in Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 255.

  8. Both quotes in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 254.

  9. First quote in William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (New York: Penguin, 1990), 601; second quote in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 209.

  10. Quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 742.

  11. For a comprehensive view and statistics of Civil War prisons, especially the notorious Andersonville, see Benjamin G. Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

  12. Quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 799–800.

  13. Both quotes in Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity, 24, 22 (page numbers refer to manuscript in author’s possession).

  14. Both quotes in ibid., 26.

  15. Jay Parini has a forthcoming novel, Anderson Depot, based on extensive research on the facility; see also “Letter from a Soldier,” Harper’s, February 11, 1865, 93–94.

  16. Quote in Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity, 27.

  17. Both quotes in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 258.

  18. Harwell, Kate, August 19, 1864, 228.

  19. Gari Carter, ed., Troubled State: Civil War Journals of Franklin Archibald Dick (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2008), November 20, 1862, 91–92.

  20. Quoted in Charles P. Roland, An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004; first published in 1991), 108.

  21. First quote in Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity, 29; second quote in Manning, Cruel War, 156.

  22. “Further Proofs of Rebel Inhumanity,” Harper’s, June 18, 1864, 386.

  23. First quote in Steven Hahn, “The Politics of the Dead,” New Republic, April 23, 2008, 50; second quote in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 260.

  24. U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1972; first published in 1886), 781.

  25. Quoted in Roy Morris Jr., The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 173.

  26. Quoted in David Coffey, Sheridan’s Lieutenants: Phil Sheridan, His Generals, and the Final Year of the Civil War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 18.

  27. First quote in E. B. Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 492; second quote in Morris Schaff, “The Battle of the Wilderness,” Atlantic Monthly 104 (November 1909): 638; third quote in Morris, Better Angel, 176.

  28. Quoted in Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 284.

  29. First quote in “The Intellectual Character of President Grant,” Atlantic Monthly 23 (May 1869): 631; second quote in Grant, Memoirs, 569.

  30. First quote in John Gardner Perry, Letters from a Surgeon of the Civil War, ed. Martha Derby Perry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1906), 174, available on Google Books; second quote in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 55.

  31. See Noah Andre Trudeau, Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May–June 1864 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).

  32. Quoted in Herman Hattaway, “The Evolution of Tactics in the Civil War,” in Hattaway, Reflections of a Civil War Historian: Essays on Leadership, Society, and the Art of War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 219.

  33. CW 7:444.

  34. Frank Wilkeson, Reflections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887), 173.

  35. First quote in Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), 66; second quote in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 513.

  36. First three quotes in Donald, Lincoln, 513; remainder in James M. McPherson, “No Peace Without Victory, 1861–1865,” American Historical Review 109 (February 2004): 5, 6.

  37. Quoted in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 167.

  38. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 733.

  39. See Noah Andrew Trudeau, Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea (New York: Harper, 2008).

  40. Quoted in Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1995), 343.

  41. Quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 757.

  42. Valley Spirit, August 31, 1864, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/news/vs1864/pa.fr.vs.1864.08.31.xml.

  43. Quoted in Southern Historical Society Papers 9 (July/August 1881): 380, available on Google Books.

  44. Quotes in Donald, Lincoln, 528, 513.

  45. First quote in ibid., 522; second quote in James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin, 2008), 236.

  46. First quote in McPherson, Tried by War, 236; second quote in Robert F. Durden, The Self-Inflicted Wound: Southern Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 99–100.

  47. “The Testimony of Jeff. Davis,” New York Times, August 20, 1864.

  48. Quoted in McPherson, “No Peace Without Victory,” 11.

  49. Both quotes in ibid., 11, 12.

  50. All quotes in Donald, Lincoln, 528, 529, 532.

  51. Quoted in “Lincoln’s Triumph in 1864,” Atlantic Monthly 41 (April 1878): 457.

  52. Quoted in Donald, Lincoln, 537.

  53. First quote in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 776; second quote in “The Negro in His Native [text is unclear],” Campaign Age, September 1, 1864; third quote in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 768; final quote in “Horrible Crimes of the Negro Soldiers,” Campaign Age, August 18, 1864. Campaign Age and other Civil War newspapers and
magazines are available online from Alexander Street Press, http://alexanderstreet.com/products/cwdb.htm.

  54. First quote in “Sensible,” Campaign Age, August 25, 1864; second quote in “The Working Men,” ibid., August 18, 1864.

  55. “Compromise with the South,” Harper’s, September 3, 1864, 563.

  56. Both quotes in McPherson, “No Peace Without Victory,” 13, 14.

  57. Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 198–99.

  58. First two quotes in Sherman, Memoirs, 705, 602; third quote in David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 163; final quote in Sherman, Memoirs, 585.

  59. George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, (New York: Macmillan, 1952), September 3, 1864, 3:480; “General Sherman,” Harper’s, September 17, 1864, 594; last quote in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 775.

  60. First quote in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 11, June 1–August 15, 1864 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 378; second quote in William J. Miller, “‘Never Has There Been a More Complete Victory’: The Cavalry Engagement at Tom’s Brook, October 9, 1864,” in The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 136; third quote in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 213; final quote in Richmond Whig, October 15, 1864, quoted in New York Times, October 19, 1864.

  61. Both quotes in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 200.

  62. Carter, Troubled State, November 9, 1864, 160–61; “The Election,” Harper’s, November 19, 1864, 738.

  63. Corydon Edward Foote, With Sherman to the Sea: A Drummer’s Story of the Civil War (New York: John Day, 1960), 207.

  64. First three quotes in Manning, Cruel War, 184, 202; last two quotes, “The Re-Election of Abraham Lincoln,” Weekly Register, December 3, 1864.

  65. CW 8:101.

  CHAPTER 15: ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE

  1. Quoted in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 565.

  2. Corydon Edward Foote, With Sherman to the Sea: A Drummer’s Story of the Civil War (New York: John Day, 1960), 209.

  3. Quotes in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 809, 810; last quote in William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (New York: Penguin, 1990), 652.

  4. George S. Bradley, The Star Corps: or, Notes of an Army Chaplain During Sherman’s Famous “March to the Sea” (Milwaukee: Jermain & Brightman, 1865), 184, available on Google Books.

  5. Foote, With Sherman to the Sea, 212.

  6. First quote in James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin, 2008), 254; second quote in “Sherman’s Report of the Georgia Campaign,” in The Story of the Great March: From the Diary of a Staff Officer, ed. George Ward Nichols (Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 2008; first published in 1865), 335.

  7. Quoted in Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2008), 451.

  8. Dolly Sumner Lunt, A Woman’s Wartime Journal (New York: Century, 1918), 84.

  9. Sam R. Watkins, “Co. Aytch”: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War (New York: Touchstone, 2003), 219–27.

  10. Ibid., 21; second quote in Russell F. Weigley, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 415.

  11. U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1972; first published in 1886), 567; second quote in Archer Jones, Civil War Command and Strategy: The Process of Victory and Defeat (New York: Free Press, 1992), 214.

  12. First quote in James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 36; second quote in Charles P. Roland, An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004; first published in 1991), 242; final quote in Jones, Civil War Command and Strategy, 214.

  13. Sherman, Memoirs, 254.

  14. First quote in Marion Brunson Lucas, Sherman and the Burning of Columbia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000; first published in 1976), 111; second quote in George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 178; remaining quotes in Emma LeConte, Diary, 35, electronic ed., http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/leconteemma/leconte.html.

  15. Quoted in Judith N. McArthur and Orville Vernon Burton, eds., A Gentleman and an Officer: A Military and Social History of James B. Griffin’s Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 78.

  16. Description in James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, vol. 2, The Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1982), 471–73.

  17. Quoted in E. B. Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 644.

  18. Quoted in James M. McPherson, “No Peace Without Victory, 1861–1865,” American Historical Review 109 (February 2004): 15.

  19. CW 8:220–21.

  20. First quote in Thomas E. Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 445; second quote in Donald, Lincoln, 557.

  21. Quoted in Schott, Stephens, 447.

  22. First quote in ibid., 448; second and third quotes in McPherson, “No Peace Without Victory,” 17; final quote in Manning, Cruel War, 204.

  23. All quotes in Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 241, 243.

  24. Quoted in ibid., 247.

  25. Both quotes in ibid., 249.

  26. Quotes in William C. Harris, “The Hampton Roads Peace Conference: A Final Test of Lincoln’s Presidential Leadership,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Winter 2000, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/21.1/harris.html.

  27. Quoted in Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 409.

  28. Both quotes in Stephen V. Ash, “Poor Whites in the Occupied South, 1861–1865,” Journal of Southern History 47 (February 1991): 53, 51.

  29. See Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); see also Albion W. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand: A Novel of the South During Reconstruction (New York: Harper, 1961; first published in 1879), 124; Victoria Bynum, “‘War Within a War’: Women’s Participation in the Revolt of the North Carolina Piedmont, 1863–1865,” Frontiers 9, no. 3 (1987): 43–49.

  30. First quote in C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 777; second quote in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 820.

  31. First quote in Winston Groom, Shrouds of Glory: From Atlanta to Nashville—the Last Great Campaign of the Civil War (New York: Pocket Books, 1995), 274; second quote in “The End of Rebel Logic,” Harper’s, December 3, 1864, 770.

  32. 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), November 3, 1864, 182; Baughman quoted in Bruce C. Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 44; third quote in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 836; last quote in Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 297.

  33. See Roland, American Iliad, 216–219.

  34. Quoted in Ronald C. White Jr., “Lincoln’s Sermon on the Mount: The Second Inaugural,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 211.

  35. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is widely available. The Library of Congress Web site for the address contains related useful links: http://www.loc.go
v/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Lincoln2nd.html.

  36. “The Inaugural,” New York Times, March 6, 1865; Tribune quoted in “The Inaugural Address,” Harper’s, March 18, 1865, 162.

  37. Quotes in White, “Lincoln’s Sermon on the Mount,” 222.

  38. Quoted in Mark A. Noll, “‘Both … Pray to the Same God’: The Singularity of Lincoln’s Faith in the Era of the Civil War,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Winter 1997, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/18.1/noll.html.

  39. “Amending the Constitution,” New York Times, February 2, 1864. The editorial opposed the amendment.

  40. Quoted in Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2007), 130.

  41. See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), preface.

  42. Quoted in E. B. Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 659.

  43. Lincoln to Lt. Gen. Grant, April 2, 1865, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I—Volume XLVI—Part III, 449. The OR is a valuable resource for the Civil War. It may be accessed online: http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/moawar/waro.html.

  44. First quote in Douglas Southall Freeman, ed., A Calendar of Confederate Papers (Richmond: Confederate Museum, 1908), 251; second and third quotes in Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month That Saved America (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 116, 119; fourth quote in K. M. Kostyal, Abraham Lincoln’s Extraordinary Era: The Man and His Times (New York: National Geographic, 2009), 188; final quote, CW 8:406.

  45. Both quotes in Grant, Memoirs, 624.

  46. Quoted in 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), 85.

  47. Grant, Memoirs, 631, 633, 634.

  48. Quoted in Long, Civil War Day by Day, 671.

  49. CW 8:393.

  50. Quotes in Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 12.