Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  179 “in man’s capability”: CG, 36th Congress, 2nd Session, December 19, 1860, 134.

  179 “No: I intend”: Ibid., 243.

  179 “In the language”: Ibid.

  179 “Action, action is”: Carl Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, vol. 1, ed. Frederic Bancroft (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 175.

  180 “ultimate extinction”: Lincoln, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865, 38.

  180 “It is this perpetual putting”: “The Diary of a Public Man,” North American Review 129 (August 1879), 132.

  181 “the right of revolution”: Quoted in Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 773. See also James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 239–42.

  181 “I can’t stand the idea”: Quoted in Channing, Crisis of Fear, 289.

  181 “We are upholding”: Jefferson Davis, Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, vol. 6, ed. Dunbar Rowland (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1923), 357.

  182 Fear motivated them: See also the interesting argument in Kenneth Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 191–270, and his contention that these Southerners may also have been plagued by the nagging, unspoken knowledge that their peculiar institution was out of step with the nineteenth-century rhetoric of freedom.

  182 “On the 4th of March”: Quoted in Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 36.

  182 “It’s a revolution”: Quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 237.

  182 “Revolutions are much easier”: Quoted in Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb: Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1911, vol. 2, ed. Ulrich B. Phillips (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913), 504.

  183 “to yield to necessity”: OR, ser. I, vol. 1, December 21, 1860, 103.

  184 When the unarmed: “The Diary of a Public Man,” 134.

  184 “crafty and sensible”: Ibid., 140.

  185 “no shake”: Henry Adams, The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 204.

  186 “Soon, it will be”: CG, 36th Congress, 2nd Session, Jan. 12, 1861, 344.

  186 “God damn you, Seward”: Quoted in Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 249.

  187 “If he yields the ground”: John Greenleaf Whittier, The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, ed. John B. Pickard, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975 ), 10.

  187 Maybe so: One of Seward’s early biographers called the speech enigmatic, conciliatory, and self-contradictory. The historian Eric Foner noted that Seward’s reputation for radicalism was in large measure undeserved. See Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 222.

  187 “Compromises based on the idea”: Quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 303.

  187 “With the human soul”: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Michael Angelo: A Dramatic Poem (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884), 50.

  187 “The Government”: “Questions in American Politics,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 14, 1861, 4.

  187 “Republicans are as much afraid”: Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, vol. 2, 541.

  188 “The hour and the man”: Quoted in Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 435.

  188 “No compromise, no reconstruction”: Quoted in William J. Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis: American (New York: Vintage, 2000), 353.

  188 “illustrates the American idea”: Quoted in ibid., 354.

  189 “corner-stone”: Quoted in Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens in Public and Private: With Letters and Speeches, before, during, and since the War (Philadelphia, 1866), 721–22. For a fine analysis of the relation between this speech and the thinking of Lincoln and Davis on this subject, see Harry V. Jaffa, New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 215–18.

  189 “the first . . . it fell”: Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens, 721.

  189 “There is a hierarchy”: Ibid., 408.

  190 “You think slavery is right”: Lincoln, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865, 194.

  190 “We have just carried”: Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 172.

  191 “motley mixture”: Quoted in Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, 274.

  191 Lincoln had also been composing: For excellent analyses of Lincoln’s changes to the address, particularly after he showed it to Seward, see Ronald C. White, Jr., The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln through His Words (New York: Random House, 2005), and Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860–1 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008); see also Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Words of Lincoln,” Lincoln in Text and Context: Collected Essays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), and Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (New York: HarperCollins, 2008); for knives and pistols, see Walt Whitman, The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, vol. 15, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas Biggs Harned, Horace Traubel, and Oscar Lovell Triggs (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 243–44.

  191 “no purpose”: Lincoln, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865, 215–24.

  193 “It seemed more like escorting”: Quoted in Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect, 448.

  193 “I never expected”: “Diary of a Public Man, Part III,” North American Review 129 (October 1879), 283.

  194 “grasp the circumstances”: “The Inaugural Address of President Lincoln,” Charleston Mercury, March 5, 1861.

  194 “double-tongued document”: Frederick Douglass, “The Inaugural Address,” Douglass’ Monthly (April 1861), in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000), 433.

  194 “I claim not to have”: Lincoln, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865, 586.

  194 “I think there’s a clank”: Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong: 1835–1875, vol. 3, 106.

  CHAPTER 9: ON TO RICHMOND

  197 “We learned once for all”: James Russell Lowell, “Democracy: Inaugural Address on Assuming the Presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, Birmingham, England, 6 October, 1884,” in The Complete Writings of James Russell Lowell, vol. 6, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 24.

  198 “Events are crowding”: CG, 36th Congress, 2nd session, December 18, 1860, 116.

  198 “moral anachronism”: Kenneth Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 230.

  198 “War begins where reason ends”: Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction,” The Atlantic Monthly 18 (December 1866), 763.

  199 “They mean to compel”: Quoted in William J. Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis: American (New York: Vintage, 2000), 365.

  200 “I shall have no winter”: Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2, ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 377.

  200 “Squads gather everywhere”: Walt Whitman, “Drum Taps,” in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan
(New York: Library of America, 1982), 417.

  200 “fossil court of arbitration”: “Situation of Affairs,” New York Herald, April 29, 1861.

  200 The next month, Lincoln called: See James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 322.

  201 “Our cause is just and holy”: Quoted in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896), 22.

  201 “On to Washington”: See Allan Nevins, ed., American Press Opinion: Washington to Coolidge, a Documentary Record of Editorial Leadership and Criticism, 1785–1927, vol. 1 (New York: Kennikat Press, 1969), 253–54.

  201 “The regular cavalry”: Quoted in “The Flight from the Field,” in Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, Etc., vol. 2 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862), 87.

  202 “Ayer’s battery dashed”: Charles Carleton Coffin, Four Years of Fighting: A Volume of Personal Observation with the Army and the Navy, from the First Battle of Bull Run to the Fall of Richmond (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866), 23.

  202 “the dust, the grime”: Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 708.

  202 “rang like a reveille”: John Hay, Addresses of John Hay (New York: Century Company, 1906), 231.

  203 “a grand army, retreating”: Edmund Clarence Stedman, The Battle of Bull Run (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1861), 10.

  203 “the scenes on the battlefield”: [Henry Villard] “The Bull Run Battle. The Advance into Virginia,” New York Herald, July 24, 1861.

  204 “Turn back! Turn back!”: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnam, 1863), 451.

  204 “something extraordinary”: Ibid., 454.

  204 “in the hope of seeing”: Ibid., 435.

  204 “Their hearts were all willing”: Quoted in Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, Etc., vol. 2 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862), 4.

  205 McDowell had no reserves: See Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 48.

  205 “There is Jackson”: Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1886), 85.

  205 “For our people”: Quoted in Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Vintage, 1993), 41. Royster’s superb account of the war focuses on Jackson and Sherman.

  205 “The vaunted Union”: Whitman, Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 710.

  205 “the tone of the Northern papers”: Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, vol. 2, ed. Ulrich B. Phillips (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913), 573.

  206 “the best lesson”: Quoted in Royster, The Destructive War, 93.

  206 “Youth must its ignorant impulse”: Herman Melville, “The March into Virginia Ending in the First Manassas,” in Selected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Jaffrey, N.H.: David Godine, 2006), 96.

  207 “no preparations whatever”: William C. Prime, ed., McClellan’s Own Story: The War for the Union, the Soldiers Who Fought It, the Civilians Who Directed It and His Relations to It and to Them (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1887), 66–67.

  207 “professional rivalry, jealousy”: William Henry Hurlbert, General McClellan and the Conduct of the War (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1864), 103.

  208 “the officers themselves”: Ibid., 104.

  208 “The men have lost”: George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 173.

  208 “Repulse may do us good”: R. H. Stoddard, “Resurgamus,” The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, Etc., vol. 2, ed. Frank Moore (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862), 10.

  208 “is one of the greatest powers”: See Joseph L. Gardner, “ ‘Bull Run Russell,’ ” American Heritage 13 (June 1962), 59–64.

  209 “I have seen a telegraph-operator”: Quoted in David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military (New York: Century Company, 1907), 12.

  210 “we might as well”: On Uriah Painter, see J. Cutler Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955), 90.

  210 “hybrid”: Junius Henri Browne, Four Years in Secessia: Adventures within and beyond the Union Lines (Hartford, Conn.: O. D. Case and Company, 1865), 13.

  211 “Unthinkable”: Royal Cortissoz, The Life of Whitelaw Reid, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 70.

  211 “crushed by a shell”: Samuel Wilkeson, “Details from Our Special Correspondent,” The New York Times, July 6, 1863, 1.

  211 “Many, particularly among our officers”: “Agate,” Cincinnati Times, April 14, 1862.

  211 “the most contemptible race”: Quoted in William T. Sherman, Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, ed. Brooks D. Simpson and Jean Vance Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 212.

  213 “You can send that”: Quoted in Noah Brooks, Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks, ed. Michael Burlingame (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 9.

  213 “That’s good!”: Browne, Four Years in Secessia, 238.

  213 In the Midwest: See Carl R. Osthaus, Partisans of the Southern Press: Editorial Spokesmen of the Nineteenth Century (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), 103.

  213 At the same time: See Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

  213 So did Lincoln: Richard Carwardine, Lincoln and the Fourth Estate: The White House and the Press during the American Civil War (Reading, England: University of Reading, 2004), 8.

  214 “This is the Peoples war”: Virginia Jeans Laas, ed., Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 450.

  214 “News of the War!” Harper’s Weekly, June 14, 1862, 378.

  214 “personal courage”: Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode with Stonewall: The War Experiences of the Youngest Member of Jackson’s Staff (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), 76.

  214 There were pictures, too: See, e.g., Michael L. Carlebach, The Origins of Photojournalism in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), esp. 61–72; see also Gisèle Freund, Photography and Society (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980).

  215 “If all the terrific”: Quoted in Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 55.

  215 “You fellows make the best spies”: Quoted in William F. Thompson, The Image of War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 79.

  215 “The above impression”: Quoted in Elizabeth Johns, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation (Berkeley: University of California Press), 35.

  216 “How much better”: Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 3 (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1906), 553.

  217 Along with the copy: See “Brady’s Photographs of the War,” New York Daily Tribune, July 19, 1862, 3.

  217 “I felt that I had to go”: George Alfred Townsend, “Still Taking Pictures,” The World, April 12, 1891, 26.

  217 “whatisit wagons”: For more information on Brady, see James Horan, Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera (New York: Crown, 1955); Roy Meredith, Mathew B. Brady: Mr.
Lincoln’s Camera Man (New York: Dover, 1974); the very fine Mary Panzer, Mathew Brady and the Image of History (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1997); and the excellent work of Alan Trachtenberg in Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).

  218 “In every glade”: Quoted in Panzer, Mathew Brady and the Image of History, 102.

  218 The photographs taken by: See, e.g., Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs.

  218 “The hills were black”: Edwin Forbes, Thirty Years After: An Artist’s Memoir of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 258.

  218 “There were men in every state”: Josiah Marshall Favill, The Diary of a Young Officer Serving with the Armies of the United States during the War of the Rebellion (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1909), 189.

  218 “dead horses, swollen”: Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3, 260.

  219 “pale faces of the dead”: “Brady’s Photographs,” The New York Times, October 20, 1862, 5.

  219 The photographs then appeared: See Harper’s Weekly, October 18, 1862, 662–63.

  219 “the same sun”: “Brady’s Photographs,” The New York Times, October 20, 1862, 5.

  220 “Don’t ask awkward questions”: Mary Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 109.

  220 “Why did we not follow”: Ibid., 121.

  220 “On this day of the week”: Quoted in Moore, The Rebellion Record, vol. 2, 71.

  220 “There is no legitimate excuse”: See Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, ed. Gary Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 58–59.

  221 “Thousands of Yankees and Rebs”: James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 580. Thanks to Eric Wilson for reminding me of the passage.