Although the South had no chance of winning after Lincoln’s reelection, the war continued for another six months. In Georgia the armies that had waltzed together for months parted company. After he evacuated Atlanta, Hood moved north, threatening Sherman’s railroad line, and for a month the Federals futilely chased him. Sherman finally decided to avoid dependence on vulnerable supply lines and undertake a massive raid through Georgia, while Hood planned an invasion into Tennessee. Sherman’s purpose was primarily logistical and psychological: To cripple southern resources and to show even diehard rebels that the Confederacy was powerless. He left Atlanta with 62,000 men in mid-November. Foraging off the land, they cut a 250-mile swath against token resistance and captured Savannah on December 21. Only the veteran character of Sherman’s army allowed it to complete the march. Nearly four out of five enlisted men and nearly 100 percent of the noncommissioned officers had been in service since 1862. Consequently they were campaign-toughened, inured to hardship and disease, self-reliant, and deeply committed to Union victory. They had also developed a ruthless, callous attitude toward enemy civilians that characterized so many experienced troops on both sides by 1864–1865, so they embraced their commander’s goal of instilling fear in noncombatants as a means to hasten the war’s end.
While Sherman’s veterans advanced through the Confederate heartland, the Army of Tennessee marched to its death. At the Battle of Franklin on November 30, Hood made another suicidal Confederate assault against an entrenched force under John M. Schofield, losing 6,252 men to Schofield’s 2,326. When Schofield pulled back to Nashville to join Thomas’s army, Hood pursued and nominally besieged the strongly fortified city. In mid-December Thomas attacked and virtually annihilated Hood’s army, which by then numbered only 25,000 demoralized men.
As the 1865 campaigns began, northern morale was unshakable, Federals controlled the Shenandoah, Sherman’s march to the sea had bisected the Confederacy again, and one of the South’s two major field armies had been obliterated. Furthermore, in January Union forces captured Fort Fisher on the Cape Fear River, bottling up Wilmington, which had been the last blockade-running port. All that remained of the shriveled Confederacy was Lee’s army manning the Richmond-Petersburg trenches and a small army forming in North Carolina under Johnston, who was recalled to duty. Yet hardened rebels such as Davis and Lee were unwilling to quit. An indication of their determination and desperation was the South’s decision in March to arm its slaves. Aside from the question of whether blacks would fight for the South, the law authorizing black enlistments came too late to do any good. The final acts already unfolding were not heroic drama, but needless tragedy.
In early February Sherman resumed his campaign against the South’s resources and morale, heading north through the Carolinas. Though less well known than the march to the sea, the Carolinas trek was a more stunning accomplishment. The journey was longer, the terrain and weather were worse, and resistance was stiffer. Since the army burned “with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina,” the birthplace of secession, the devastation was greater and more vindictively inflicted than in Georgia. On February 17 the army entered Columbia, causing the Confederates to evacuate Charleston, since the Federals had severed its communications to the interior. A month later the combatants fought the campaign’s one large battle at Bentonville. Johnston tried to rout Sherman’s left wing but failed, and on March 23 the Yankees entered Goldsboro, where they found Schofield’s corps, which Grant had transferred from Tennessee, awaiting them. Although Sherman refitted for an advance against Lee’s rear, it was unnecessary, for Grant drove the Army of Northern Virginia from its trenches and forced it to capitulate.
During the winter Grant undertook no major offensives, letting disease and desertion weaken Lee’s army. Lee’s only hope was to unite with Johnston, for combined they might push back Sherman, then turn on Grant. To make Grant contract his left flank and thereby open an escape hatch, on March 25 Lee struck at Fort Stedman in the Union center. Disastrous failure followed initial success, and Grant seized the initiative, massing Sheridan’s cavalry and 43,000 infantry against 11,000 Confederates at Five Forks on Lee’s extreme right. When the Federals routed the rebels on April 1, Grant ordered an attack against the Petersburg line on April 2, which overran long stretches of Confederate trenches. That night Lee abandoned Richmond and retreated westward, with Sheridan and several infantry corps in pursuit. Sheridan got in front of Lee’s dwindling band on April 8, and after an unsuccessful breakout attempt on the 9th Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Like the Army of Tennessee, the Army of Northern Virginia had been practically annihilated. Offering rations for Lee’s starving army, Grant asked if 25,000 would be enough. “Plenty; plenty; an abundance,” replied Lee, for he had fewer than 8,000 effectives.
Recalling the night of April 9, a Union cavalryman wrote that the “thought that I was certain, yes, certain of having a quiet night, the idea of security, was ineffable.” All over the South, men soon experienced the same sense of relief, for by late May all other Confederate armies had surrendered. The immediate fears of neither the South nor the North came true. Southerners thought the victors might engage in mass reprisals, but no postwar bloodletting occurred. Grant, Sherman, and others worried that Confederates would form guerrilla bands and continue fighting, but this did not happen either. Many southern officers advised against it. No place existed for guerrillas to use as bases, since the North occupied much of the South, and Unionists and deserters ruled the mountains and swamps. Partisan bands would get little sympathy from the population, whose morale had cracked long before the army’s. Finally, the average soldier was sick of war. The troops knew better than anyone that by force majeure the North had crushed the Confederacy.
The Final Reckoning
In Margaret Mitchell’s famous novel Gone With the Wind, heroine Scarlett O’Hara’s first husband, Charles Hamilton, rushes off to war in 1861 with romantic visions of glory. In less than two months he is dead—from measles followed by pneumonia. While hardly heroic, Charles’s death was typical, since twice as many soldiers died from disease as from battle. Diseases swept through regiments in two waves. Shortly after a unit assembled, infectious childhood diseases such as measles and mumps thinned the ranks. Those who survived this wave then endured the camp diseases, primarily dysentery, malaria, and typhoid fever. Since these often occurred in epidemics, leading to unexpected reductions in fighting force, camp diseases were of great military significance.
The number of battle casualties was enormous, even though the theoretical long-range killing power of rifled weapons rarely came into play. Two significant factors limited the rifle’s impact. One was that few troops received training in estimating ranges, setting rifle sights, and firing live ammunition. Yet such practice was essential if a soldier hoped to hit a target—especially one that was moving—at more than a hundred yards. To counter both the minie ball’s low velocity and gravity’s tug at that distance, a shot would have to be aimed well above the target and come plunging down at a steep angle. If a rifleman aimed at the target, the bullet would plow into the ground well short of the intended victim. The second limiting factor was that many battles occurred in places like Chickamauga and the Wilderness, where the rugged terrain and dense foliage greatly reduced the killing range because combatants could not see each other at more than a few dozen yards’ distance. Only in a few engagements such as Pickett’s Charge, when a massed force advanced over a long expanse of relatively open ground, did rifled firepower and artillery quickly inflict fearsome losses.
Unlike Pickett’s Charge, most battles rapidly degenerated into prolonged firefights between two “entrenched” forces, which were often so close to each other that old-fashioned smoothbores would have been just about as effective as rifles. The close-order ranks that an attacking army used so that soldiers could hear or see their officers giving orders rarely survived the opening moments of combat. Traversing stream-laced, heavily forested,
steep terrain in tight formations was impossible. And the first few shots frequently impelled the attackers to take cover, since they invariably confronted defenders who enjoyed both the physical and psychological advantages of being protected by entrenchments and field fortifications. “The truth is,” wrote one soldier, “when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way.” But how? Fear of death or injury told a soldier he should not go forward; fear of being considered a coward restrained him from retreating. So an attacking force simply stopped, with each soldier seeking safety behind a nearby fence, rock, or tree stump or else digging a shallow, sheltering hole. Casualties accumulated slowly because the soldiers on both sides were dug in, but the final toll could be quite large, since these slugging matches often lasted for hours.
For attackers and defenders, losers and winners, a battlefield was a melancholy scene. Hundreds of men would be blasted into shapeless masses of pulpy gore. In warm weather the bodies and parts of bodies bloated, turned black, and putrefied rapidly, filling the air with a pungent stench. Though the guns might be still, the battlefield remained noisy with the anguish of the wounded. Perhaps the most chilling description came from Joshua Chamberlain, commander of the 20th Maine Volunteers, regarding the night of December 13–14 at Fredericksburg:
But out of that silence from the battle’s crash and roar rose new sounds more appalling still; rose or fell, you knew not which, or whether from the earth or air; a strange ventriloquism, of which you could not locate the source, a smothered moan that seemed to come from distances beyond the reach of the natural sense, a wail so far and deep and wide, as if a thousand discords were flowing together into a key-note weird, unearthly, terrible to hear and bear, yet startling with its nearness; the writhing concord broken by cries for help, pierced by shrieks of paroxysm; some begging for a drop of water; some calling on God for pity; and some on friendly hands to finish what the enemy had so horribly begun; some with delirious, dreamy voices murmuring loved names, as if the dearest were bending over them; some gathering their last strength to fire a musket to call attention to them where they lay helpless and deserted; and underneath, all the time, that deep bass note from closed lips too hopeless or too heroic to articulate their agony.
And in the rear of each army the same grisly scene took place: temporary hospitals where bare-armed surgeons in blood-stained aprons and with bloody instruments worked to save the gashed and dying, invariably creating a mound of amputated limbs, the slicing and sawing more often than not done without the benefit of anesthetics.
Using round figures that are educated estimates, total Civil War casualties for soldiers and sailors on both sides were 1,095,000. Of these, 640,000 were Federals: 112,000 killed or mortally wounded in action; 227,500 dead of disease; 277,500 wounded; and 23,000 dead from miscellaneous causes such as drowning, murder, execution, sunstroke, and suicide. The remaining 455,000 were Confederates: 94,000 killed or mortally wounded in action; 164,000 dead of diseases; 194,000 wounded; and at least 3,000 deaths from miscellaneous causes. To put these figures in perspective, American deaths in World War I, World War II, and Korea totaled 564,000, but still do not reach the Civil War total of 620,000.13
Although war involves killing, killing is not the object of war. Men fight for vital reasons, as defined by their country’s political leadership. The North fought for the preservation of the Union and the destruction of slavery, while the South fought for independence and the preservation of its “peculiar institution.” In saving the Union and freeing the slaves, Lincoln believed the North would be achieving goals of cosmic significance, transcending national boundaries into the infinite future. Like many of America’s leaders, he thought the United States had a special destiny to safeguard and foster its democratic institutions as an example for the world. The North, he said in December 1862, “shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.” And in the Gettysburg Address he urged his fellow citizens to take increased resolve from the northern soldiers who had given “the last full measure of devotion” on the battlefield. Let us ensure “that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Those northerners who fell at Gettysburg and elsewhere did not die in vain, since the North achieved its dual war aims. The conflict delivered a deathblow to the doctrine of secession and considerably weakened (though it did not destroy) the idea of states’ rights. Within the American federal system, the balance of power shifted from the states to the national government. People no longer said “the United States are” but instead “the United States is.” In the process of saving the Union, the North also destroyed slavery. Advancing Union armies and the Emancipation Proclamation undermined the institution, and the Thirteenth Amendment killed it.
Southerners had seemingly died in vain, since the Confederacy achieved neither of its war aims. And yet merely saying that the Union lived and slavery died left several crucial questions unanswered. What was the status of the defeated states? How and when were they to return to “their proper practical relation with the Union”? Who would control the restored states, former secessionists or southern Unionists, perhaps in league with the freedmen? And what was the status of the former slaves? Although pledged to black freedom, the North had not adopted a third war aim of equality, and between freedom and equality lay a vast middle ground. As solutions to these perplexing problems emerged during Reconstruction, southerners salvaged much that looked like victory from their apparent defeat. Former secessionists regained effective control over the former Confederate States and maintained unquestioned white supremacy. Furthermore, southerners soon took as much pride in the legend of the Lost Cause as northerners did in the fact of Appomattox. Ironically, even perversely, by 1877 both North and South could proclaim success. How and why the North lost so many of the fruits of victory is a complex story in which the Army played a central role.
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EIGHT
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From Postwar Demobilization Toward Great Power Status, 1865–1898
The weather on May 23 was beautiful for campaigning, and the Army of the Potomac was on the move. Under cloudless skies the soft spring sun glinted off the steel sabers and bayonets of 100,000 men. But this was May of 1865, the war was over, and the Union’s saviors were marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the cheers of jubilant spectators. Meade’s cavalry stretched seven miles and took more than an hour to pass the reviewing stand. Marching twelve abreast, the general’s infantry consumed another five hours. The next day six corps from Sherman’s army repeated the performance, the rangy westerners swaggering past the crowds “like the lords of the world!”
Following the two-day victory festivities the Union military forces underwent a rapid demobilization. By November 1866, only 11,043 of the 1,034,064 volunteers in the service in May 1865 were still in uniform. As the volunteers departed, the regular Army remained. It temporarily benefited from lingering martial enthusiasm when, in July 1866, Congress authorized a peacetime strength of 54,302. Included in the table of organization were four black infantry regiments (reduced to two in 1869), two black cavalry regiments, and 1,000 Indian scouts. Although these black units and Indian scouts were an innovation in the peacetime Army, which historically had been composed exclusively of whites, they became a permanent feature of the postwar military establishment. However, Congress soon slashed the Army’s overall size, and by 1876 the maximum strength was 27,442.
The Navy also underwent drastic reduction. Within five years it declined from a wartime peak of about 700 ships to 52. By European standards most of the ships were obsolete, for they were made of wood, moved by sails, and carried muzzleloading smoothbores. The mobilization accompanying the Virginius crisis showed how far the Navy had deteriorated. After war broke out
in Cuba in 1868, Virginius made repeated voyages to the island carrying contraband to the revolutionaries fighting against Spanish rule. Although it sailed under the U.S. flag, the Spanish captured the ship in October 1873 and executed approximately fifty crewmen and passengers, many of them Americans. The result was a war scare with Spain. The Navy concentrated all available ships at Key West, but the assembled fleet (about two dozen ships, only six of them ironclads) was feeble compared to that of any major naval power, and diplomacy soon eliminated the likelihood of war. In early 1874 the fleet held maneuvers, which were unimpressive. Logistical support was nil, gunnery training was inadequate, and the ships’ boilers were so decrepit that the fleet’s top speed was only 4.5 knots. The fleet, declared one newspaper, was “almost useless for military purposes” because the vessels belonged “to a class of ships which other governments have sold or are selling for firewood.”
Although Army and Navy officers naturally lamented the extent of the demobilization, the reductions actually made sense considering the nation’s relative security and the missions that American policymakers wanted the armed forces to undertake. As even Generals Sherman and Sheridan realized, an invasion was unlikely. No European nation had a navy capable of transporting and sustaining a substantial expeditionary force across the Atlantic. Continental rivalries restrained any of the great powers from making a significant New World military commitment, and America’s vast size and immense military potential made foreign conquest impossible. Geography and European balance-of-power considerations gave the United States virtually total security. Moreover, through the 1880s a foreign policy with limited goals required little mobilized military power.
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