The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  None of the prison camps on either side were very pleasant places (Camp Douglas, a prison for Confederate troops in Chicago, was known as “eighty acres of hell”), but the most notorious was the overcrowded Andersonville prison in Georgia, in which forty-five thousand Union prisoners were held. More than twelve thousand of them died, largely due to disease and starvation. By most accounts, the people in charge did their best—the guards got the same rations as the prisoners—but the Confederacy just didn’t have the resources to make the prisons safe or sanitary. When the prison was full, Andersonville went from being a tiny town to the fifth largest in the Confederacy.

  Sherman marched from Chattanooga, Tennessee, into Georgia, not bothering to do much fighting along the way. He only made one attack on the Confederate army, which kicked his army’s butt at Kennesaw Mountain, not far from Atlanta.

  After this, he wisely avoided directly assaulting the armies and instead simply marched straight to the cities. He took over Atlanta (and set fire to it) in early September. This victory made him famous, and helped Lincoln win reelection in a near landslide two months later.

  Sherman then took his troops on a march through Georgia to Savannah, a city of great strategic importance due to its location on the Atlantic coast. Along the way, he caused, by his own estimate, about a hundred million dollars in property damage. He also stopped at the state capitol in Milledgeville, where his men held a mock session of the state government in which they repealed Georgia’s ordinance of secession.

  Contrary to popular belief, Sherman didn’t burn every city he came to. To this day, a lot of stories are told about the brutality of Sherman’s march. Many small towns around Georgia have stories about why Sherman didn’t burn them down: usually something along the lines of “he thought it was too pretty to burn.” Usually, the truth is that he didn’t burn it because he was never actually there; he didn’t stop in every single city in the state.

  Sherman and his men arrived in Savannah in late December and promptly sent a telegram to Lincoln offering him the city as a Christmas gift. Lincoln was pleased but probably would have preferred a pony. He was only human, after all.

  GENERAL LEE SURRENDERS

  By 1865, the war was winding to a close. Lincoln even met with the Confederate vice president early in the year to discuss terms of ending the war—one suggestion brought up was that both armies be brought together to invade Mexico. But terms couldn’t be agreed on, and the war went on.

  As Sherman continued marching across the South, burning things down, Lee’s and Grant’s armies continued to fight each other in and around Virginia. In early April, Grant finally broke through the trenches. Lee was forced to abandon both Petersburg and Richmond and move his army to Appomattox Station, where he hoped to meet a supply train that would take his troops to join those led by General Johnston30 in North Carolina. But on April 8, Union forces captured three supply trains, further crippling Lee’s army. The Union now controlled the Confederate capital city, and Lincoln was able to sit in Davis’s chair (Davis had escaped by then). Lincoln hadn’t told anyone he was coming but found himself mobbed by black Virginians who saw him as their emancipator.

  William Tecumseh Sherman certainly didn’t look like someone you’d want to meet in a dark alley. He said “War is hell,” and looked like he knew what he was talking about.

  Meanwhile, at Appomattox, Lee sent a message to Grant saying he wasn’t ready to surrender just yet. He wanted to discuss how the terms of surrender would affect the South. Grant had a throbbing headache that got worse when he realized Lee wasn’t done fighting.

  The Confederate army made one last stand in Appomattox the next day. When they were defeated and driven back, Lee knew that his only option was to surrender. A cease-fire was enacted, and Grant and Lee met to discuss the terms of the surrender.

  By all accounts, the meeting was an awkward one. At first, all the generals could do was discuss the last time they had met: as comrades in the Mexican-American War. When Lee finally brought the conversation around to the surrender, Grant offered generous terms: the soldiers would have to lay down their arms, but they could keep their horses and baggage and go home, rather than being taken as prisoners. Officers could even keep their sidearms, in case they got attacked by bears or something on the long trip back, and their ancestors could call anyone who said they were fighting to protect and prolong slavery a historical revisionist.31

  Lee accepted the terms and rode away. As he did, Grant’s men began to celebrate, but Grant ordered them to stop. The Confederate army had just lost, and he didn’t think it was very polite to rub it in. Grant wrote, “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who … had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

  The formal surrender was the next day. Lee’s soldiers were met by those of General Joshua Chamberlain (whose strategies at Gettysburg had probably won the battle), who then shocked some of his officers by ordering his soldiers to salute the Southern armies.

  Lee ordered his army to lay down their arms. Some officers wanted to let their forces slip into the mountains and set up a guerrilla army. Had Lee let them, the guerilla war could have lasted years—possibly to this day. But Lee told his men that the war was over, and when Lee spoke, they listened.

  DAVIS IN A DRESS?

  On May 10, Jefferson Davis was captured by Union forces who assumed—incorrectly—that he had been involved in the Lincoln assassination. The story goes that he was attempting to disguise himself in his wife’s Sunday dress when he was captured, but those who were present insisted that this was nonsense.

  Lincoln received word that Lee had surrendered. The war wasn’t over yet—there were still plenty of Confederate soldiers in the field who hadn’t heard about the surrender—but now it was only a matter of time. To relax his stressed nerves, he and his wife, Mary Todd, went to see a play at Ford’s Theatre a couple of days later, on April 14, 1865.

  THE DEATH OF LINCOLN

  A couple of days after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln gave a speech from the White House suggesting that soon, some black people would even be allowed to vote. In the crowd stood John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who didn’t like this idea one bit. Furious, he is said to have vowed that it was the last speech Lincoln would ever make.

  John Wilkes Booth was not a crazy loner, like most of the historical assassins. On the contrary, he was a very famous actor who had performed in theaters all over the country. Some reviewers called him “the handsomest man in the country,” and the Chicago Tribune called him a genius. He performed at Ford’s Theatre so often that he had his mail sent there. He even gave his final performance there, less than a month before the assassination. He knew the theater, and all of the guards, pretty well.

  He had been getting offers to do some pretty big engagements but ended up taking some time off to focus on other interests, such as plotting to kill Abraham Lincoln. He and several coconspirators had hatched a plan to kidnap Lincoln after a play the month before the assassination. However, the president never showed up that night. Instead of going to the play, he went to a gala at the National Hotel, which, ironically, was where Booth had been living.

  On April 14, Booth learned that Lincoln would be attending the play Our American Cousin. Friendly as he was with the guards, he had no trouble leaving his horse right outside the theater and slipping into the building, right into Lincoln’s box.

  He snuck up behind Lincoln, drawing a pistol.

  Onstage, an actor said, “I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal, you sockdologizing old man-trap …”

  The crowd erupted in laughter. Booth knew that this was the best line in what must have been a fairly dull play, and had picked the laughter that followed as the moment to pull the trigger. As the crowd laughed, he fired his gun into the back of Lincoln’s head.

  Lincoln being shot by John Wilkes Booth in a re
alllly tasteful cartoon. Apparently, people in 1865 had shorter arms than people in most other eras.

  WHAT DID BOOTH SAY?

  After jumping from the balcony, John Wilkes Booth either said “Sic semper tyrannis!” or “The South shall live!” Nobody is totally sure, but it seems a lot more likely that it was sic semper tyrannis.

  SCENARIO A

  Booth: Sic semper tyrannis!

  Patron A: What did he just say? Was that even English?

  Patron B: I dunno. Probably something about the South.

  Patron A: Yeah, that sounds right. I’ll bet it was “The South shall live.”

  SCENARIO B

  Booth: The South shall live!

  Patron A: What did he say?

  Patron B: Why, I believe he said “Thus always to tyrants.”

  Patron A: No, that’s not what it sounded like.

  Patron B: Well, he said it in Latin, so …

  Patron A: Did anyone else hear what he said?

  You can see how someone might think Booth said “The South shall live,” but how could anyone have come up with that Latin phrase if he didn’t say it? Still others, however, maintain that he didn’t say a thing; he just ran like a bat out of New Jersey to his horse, which would have been the smart thing to do.

  Booth then jumped eleven feet from the box seats onto the stage—breaking a bone in his leg in the process32—and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!” It was the state motto of Virginia, Latin for “Thus always to tyrants.”

  Lincoln’s funeral train goes through New York. One of the kids looking out the window is thought to be a young Theodore Roosevelt, the next truly memorable president. It’s either him or some kid who snuck into the Roosevelts’ house to watch the funeral train go by.

  Everyone was so surprised by what happened, and so confused as to what exactly had happened, that no one was able to stop Booth as he ran out of the theater, jumped on his horse, and rode away. He was captured and shot to death in a barn eleven days later, never having brought about the Confederate comeback he thought he would be facilitating.

  Booth had assigned friends of his to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward the same night, but both assassination attempts were unsuccessful, and Johnson was quickly sworn in as president.

  All the coconspirators were arrested and executed … or were they? Lots of people believed that others had been involved but were never captured. Mary Todd Lincoln herself was sure that Vice President Johnson had been involved.

  RECONSTRUCTION

  After Lee surrendered, there were still 175,000 troops in the field, but everyone who heard about Lee knew that the war was basically over. Johnston surrendered to Sherman less than two weeks after Lincoln’s assassination. On May 5, 1865, Jefferson Davis met with other officials to officially dissolve the Confederate government. About six weeks later, the last Confederate general in the field surrendered, officially ending the war.

  Lincoln had known that, even with the war over, uniting the country again and helping the South regain its footing was going to be a massive task. Between the naval blockade, the destruction brought by Sherman’s army, and the sheer cost of a war in which 18 percent of the young men in the region had died, the South was in bad, bad shape. The fact that slavery—previously the backbone of their economy—was now outlawed didn’t help them too much, either. The Southern states immediately enacted “black codes” that would more or less keep slavery going, even though it was outlawed on paper.

  Seeing that the Southern states weren’t going to cooperate with the whole emancipation business, Congress had to crack down hard. They passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which made blacks (and anyone else born in the United States, except for “Indians not taxed,” who, of course, continued to get a raw deal) citizens and prohibited states from denying them their rights. President Johnson vetoed the act, but Congress overrode the veto.

  WOULD THE SOUTH HAVE ENDED SLAVERY?

  Most historians agree that slavery wouldn’t have lasted forever in the South even if they had won the war. Some even say that it was already on its way out. The cotton gin was making owning slaves a lot less profitable than it had been before.

  It is likely, though, that overturning slavery in the Confederacy would have taken decades. After all, any future Confederate president who wanted to outlaw slavery would have had a hard time, as doing so would have been clearly unconstitutional in the Confederacy.

  Congress then set out a series of acts that required states that wanted to come back into the Union to recognize blacks as citizens and allow black men to vote. Many states were not happy in the least, but they needn’t have worried. Most of these acts were vetoed by President Andrew Johnson before they could become law. Johnson was, by all accounts, one annoying little booger.

  Most generally think Reconstruction was a failure, partly because it failed to rebuild the Southern economy and partly because the South largely refused to cooperate. The states enacted as many laws as they could to restrict black rights. Many of these “Jim Crow laws” stayed on the books for over a century. We know of neighborhoods in the South that didn’t allow nonwhites to move in as late as the year 2000.

  But another view of Reconstruction is that the South was let off easy. The Union didn’t classify the ex-Confederates as traitors, they simply let them go home. They didn’t even execute the leaders, which is generally the first thing a country does after crushing a rebellion. Compared to other losing sides, the South got a pretty good deal.

  Either a 1917 reunion of Civil War soldiers in Washington, D.C., or a Colonel Sanders look-alike contest.

  CONCLUSION

  To this day, there are people who claim that the South very nearly won the war. Saying that the two powers were pretty evenly matched makes the stories that much more dramatic. In reality, though, the Confederates never had a chance. That they lasted as long as they did was actually quite a feat.

  From the beginning, the deck was stacked against the Confederacy. The Union had twice as many people, five times as many factories (to make guns and other weapons), and almost all the railroad equipment in the country. The only things the Confederacy had were a lot more slaves (who they refused to let fight, at least until the very last days of the war), and a lot more cotton. But you just can’t win a war by throwing cotton at your enemy. Not anymore.

  Very early on, Lincoln had ordered a naval fleet to block all the Southern ports. The blockade kept the Southern states from being able to sell cotton overseas, which essentially ruined their economy. And yet they fought on.

  Many people still argue that neither side was actually right, per se—certainly, neither side can be proud of everything they did. And one way of looking at it is that nobody really won the war—more than six hundred thousand lives were lost, in addition to almost unimaginable damage to land, property, and national morale.

  But at the end of it, slavery had been abolished, closing the book on one of American history’s greatest embarrassments. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, perhaps it’s that sometimes, two wrongs do make a right.

  WHAT BECAME OF …

  Short version:

  They All died

  Robert E. Lee: Worked to repair relations between the North and the South and criticized Jefferson Davis for holding a grudge. Suffered a stroke and died in 1870.

  Jefferson Davis: Was in prison for two years on a somewhat trumped-up charge before his bail was posted (partly by a man who had earlier been a primary funder of John Brown’s war on slavery). He became president of a life insurance company (a bit of a step down, but at least he was out of jail) and retired to write books about the Confederacy, arguing persuasively that the states that had seceded had every right to do so.

  Ulysses S. Grant: Became one of the most famous men in the country, and heard so many people say he should be president that he decided they must be right. As a president … well, he was a pretty good soldier. See the next chapter.

  Gene
ral Joseph Johnston: Became a commissioner of railroads, and respected Grant and Sherman (to whom he surrendered) so much that he was a pallbearer at their funerals. By the time of Sherman’s funeral, Johnston was eighty-four and feeble but insisted on keeping his hat off as a sign of respect, even though it was raining. He caught a cold, or possibly pneumonia, and died shortly therafter.

  William Tecumseh Sherman: When asked to run for president, he said, “If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve.” He was reputed to be a brutal, heartless fighter, but at the end of the war he openly spoke of being sick to death of violence and spent his later years studying Shakespeare, attending plays, and painting. In 1879, he famously told the graduating class of a military academy that “there is many a boy here who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it’s all hell.”

  Sherman, postwar.

  BAD GUYS FROM THE NORTH

  There were really no completely good or bad guys in the war. Here are some bad things about the Union:

  Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, the constitutional right to a fair trial. This allowed him to jail thousands of suspected Confederate sympathizers for years without giving them a trial. Really uncool.

  While Lincoln’s views on race—especially by the end of the war—were very liberal for his day, some of his earlier speeches in which he claimed that he absolutely didn’t support social equality or interracial marriage are quite racist by today’s standards. He even once suggested that the best thing to do was send black people back to Africa, though he gave up on that idea pretty quickly.