109. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”
110. Michael Meyer, The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (New York, 2009), pp. 5–8, 166–67.
111. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York, 1904), vol. 4, p. 387.
112. Media, Pa., Advertiser, n.d., in Weekly Anglo-African, Aug. 10, 1861; Boston Traveller, May 2 and June 1, 1861; Sandusky Register, June 28, 1861; Harvey Brown to E. D. Townsend, June 22, 1861, OR II, vol. 1, p. 755; Harrisburg Union, June 27, 1861, in Washington Evening Star, July 3, 1861; Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.” Some slaves even crossed the Potomac from Washington, D.C., to Virginia in search of troops that might harbor them. (Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4, p. 390.)
113. George McClellan to “The Union Men of Western Virginia,” May 26, 1861, OR II, vol. 1, p. 753; Harvey Brown to E. D. Townsend, June 22, 1861, OR II, vol. 1, p. 755.
114. Boston Traveller, July 13, 1861; J. H. Lane to S. D. Sturgis, Oct. 3, 1861, OR II, vol. 1, pp. 771–72. Lane had served as a U.S. senator from Kansas, which is probably how he got away with sending such an extraordinary note to his commander.
115. Simon Cameron to BFB, Aug. 8, 1861, in BFB, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 201–03; Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”
116. Trenton State Gazette, June 12, 1861.
117. Allan Pinkerton, The Spy of the Rebellion (New York, 1886), p. 194; Albany Evening Journal, n.d., in Weekly Anglo-African, Aug. 17, 1861.
118. New York World, June 4, 1861.
119. New-York Tribune, July 25, 1861.
120. Douglass’ Monthly, June 1861; Boston Traveller, June 4, 1861; John Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861–1865 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1985), pp. 12–13; Pinkerton, Spy, p. 177.
121. New-York Tribune, n.d., in National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 18, 1861; New York Herald, n.d., in National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 15, 1861.
122. Jessie Frémont to John Anderson, May 11, 1861, Anderson Family Papers, Kansas State Historical Society.
123. Robinson, “In the Shadow of Old John Brown”; Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront (Columbia, S.C., 1993), p. 7; John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen (London, 1907), p. 2.
124. Donn Piatt, Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union (New York, 1887), p. 150.
125. Burning of Hampton: BFB to Winfield Scott, August 8, 1861, and J. Bankhead Magruder to George Deas, Aug. 9, 1861, in OR I, vol. 4, pp. 567–72; Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 10, 1861; H. K. W. Patterson, War Memories of Fort Monroe and Vicinity (Fort Monroe, Va., 1885), pp. 30–33; Boston Globe, Aug. 7, 1911; Cobb and Holt, Images of America, pp. 33–39; Williamson, Of the Sea and Skies, pp. 181–82; Cobb, “Rehearsing Reconstruction in Occupied Virginia,” p. 144; William H. Osborne, The History of the Twenty-ninth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Boston, 1877), pp. 78–81; Starkey, The First Plantation, pp. 81–2; Rouse, When the Yankees Came, p. 99.
Chapter Nine: Independence Day
1. Cometary observations: Daily National Intelligencer, July 4, 1861; Astronomical and Meteorological Observations Made at the United States Naval Observatory, During the Year 1861 (Washington, D.C., 1862); Washington Star, July 2 and 5, 1861; “The Comet As It Appeared to the Eyes of a Common Man,” Scientific American, vol. 5, no. 2 (July 13, 1861), p. 27; “The Great Comet of 1861,” The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal, Aug. 3, 1861, p. 34; Littell’s Living Age, Oct. 19, 1861; New York Herald, July 3 and 4, 1861; Cincinnati Daily Commercial, July 6, 1861; New York Times, July 8, 1861; Boston Traveller, July 8, 1861; Alfred Davenport, Camp and Field Life of the Fifth New York (Duryee’s Zouaves) (Boston, 1879), p. 84; Thomas Starr King, Christianity and Humanity (Boston, 1877), p. 325.
2. Washington Star, July 5, 1861; New York World, July 10, 1861; Eugene Goodwin Civil War Diary, July 4, 1861.
3. New York Tribune, July 10, 1861; Robert F. Durden, “The American Revolution as Seen by Southerners in 1861,” Louisiana History, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 1978), pp. 33–42; New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 4, 1861.
4. Durden, “The American Revolution,” pp. 40–1.
5. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 4, 1861; The Crisis (Columbus, Ohio), July 4, 1861.
6. Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, vol. 1: The Improvised War (New York, 1959), p. 188; Washington Star, July 3, 1861; New York Times, July 7, 1861; Report of the Commissioner of Public Buildings, Nov. 8, 1861.
7. Nevins, War for the Union, vol. 1, p. 189; Washington Star, July 2, 1861; Philadelphia Press, July 5, 1861; [Theodore Winthrop], “Washington as a Camp,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861; Thomas U. Walter to Amanda Walter, May 3, 1861, quoted in William C. Allen, History of the United States Capitol: A Chronicle of Design, Construction, and Politics (Washington, D.C., 2001), p. 314. “These are nasty things to talk to a lady about,” Walter added, “but ladies ought to know what vile uses the most elegant things are devoted to in times of war.”
8. Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York, 1973), p. 867.
9. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, July 8 and 9, 1861; Congressional Globe, July 4, 1861.
10. Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 133–34.
11. William J. Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American (New York, 2001), p. 353.
12. John Hay Diary, May 7, 1861, in Michael Burlingame and John R. T. Ettinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1999), pp. 19–20.
13. AL to the Regent Captains of San Marino, May 7, 1861, in Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953), p. 360.
14. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 168; New York Times, June 20, 1861; Nicolay to Therena Bates, July 3, 1861, in Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale, Ill., 2000), p. 46.
15. Douglas Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York, 2006), p. 74. The context of Emerson’s remark makes it clear that it was meant as a criticism: cf. Linda Allardt, et al., eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), vol. 15, p. 520.
16. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword, pp. 94–95; Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, June 23, 1861, and Sumner to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., June 30, 1861, in Beverly Wilson Palmer, ed., The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston, 1990), vol. 2, pp. 71–72; David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960), pp. 382–83; John Lothrop Motley to Mary Motley, June 23, 1861, in George W. Curtis, ed., Complete Works of John Lothrop Motley (New York, 1900), vol. 16, pp. 158–59; Nicolay to Therena Bates, July 3, 1861, in Burlingame, With Lincoln in the White House, p. 46; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 166. Wilson’s Lincoln’s Sword offers a careful and informative analysis of the document’s several surviving drafts and how they reflect the evolution of Lincoln’s thought during the writing process.
17. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 170. Although dated July 4, Lincoln’s address was not actually read aloud in the House and Senate until July 5.
18. Wilfred Buck Yearns, The Confederate Congress (Athens, Ga., 1960), p. 35.
19. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword, p. 79.
20. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 172.
21. Baltimore Sun, July 20, 1861.
22. AL, “Message to Congress, July 4, 1861,” handwritten draft, May or June 1861, in AL Papers.
23. George W. Curtis to John J. Pinkerton, July 9, 1861, in Edward Cary, George William Curtis (Boston, 1896), p. 147.
24. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 171.
25. Washington Star, July 7, 1861 (italics in original).
26. Sandusky Daily Commercial Register, July 19, 1861; Nicolay to Therena Bates, May 31, 1861, quoted in Helen Nicolay, Lincoln’s Secretary: A Biography of Joh
n G. Nicolay (New York, 1949), p. 106. Although George Washington freed his own slaves in his will, the so-called dower slaves at Mount Vernon—the Negroes and their descendants who had come into the estate as part of his wife’s dowry—remained the property of Martha Washington, and passed to her Custis heirs at her death.
27. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1861; Illinois State Journal, July 9, 1861.
28. New York World, July 4, 1861.
29. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1861; William Milmine to Alf Milmine, July 8, 1861, private collection.
30. Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York, 1941), p. 85; Harper’s Weekly, July 27, 1861; Washington Star, July 5, 1861; Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1861; New York Times, May 26 and July 5, 1861; Nicolay to Therena Bates, July 7, 1861, in Burlingame, With Lincoln in the White House, p. 47; James G. Randall and Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln the President, vol. 4: The Last Full Measure (Carbondale, Ill., 2000), pp. 77–78.
31. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1861.
32. C. Vann Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), p. 94.
33. Christian Examiner, July 1861.
34. Julia Taft Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father (Lincoln, Neb., 2001), pp. 30–31.
35. New York Herald, July 4, 1861.
Postscripts
1. New York Times, Apr. 18, 1865; Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York, 2006), pp. 1–15; E. Milby Burton, The Siege of Charleston 1861–1865 (Columbia, S.C., 1970).
2. DAB, vol. 2, pp. 213–14; Elbert B. Smith, The Presidency of James Buchanan (Lawrence, Kans., 1975), pp. 193–98.
3. DAB, vol. 10, p. 92; LeRoy P. Graf et al., eds., The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 11 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1994), pp. 525–26 n.
4. Albert D. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (Lexington, Ky., 1962).
5. Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York, 1991), pp. 339–56.
6. John E. Vacha, “The Case of Sara Lucy Bagby: A Late Gesture,” Ohio History, vol. 76, no. 4 (Autumn 1967), p. 231; Charles M. Christian and Sari Bennett, eds., Black Saga: The African American Experience: A Chronology (Boston, 1995), p. 185; Judith Luckett, “Local Studies and Larger Issues: The Case of Sara Bagby,” Teaching History, vol. 27, no. 2 (Fall 2002), p. 97.
7. Margaret Leech and Harry J. Brown, The Garfield Orbit (New York, 1978); Allan Peskin, Garfield: A Biography (Kent, Ohio, 1978); Frank Holcomb Mason, The Forty-Second Ohio Infantry; A History of the Organization and Services of That Regiment, in the War of the Rebellion (Cleveland, 1876).
8. Alvy L. King, Louis T. Wigfall: Southern Fire-Eater (Baton Rouge, 1970), pp. 205–31.
9. Pamela Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography (New York, 1987), pp. 324–450; Jessie Benton Frémont, The Story of the Guard: A Chronicle of the War (Boston, 1863), pp. 222–24; Out West, January 1903.
10. Sally Denton, Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2007), p. 341; Jessie Benton Frémont, “A Home Lost, and Found,” The Home-Maker, Feb. 1892; San Francisco Chronicle, July 4, 2010.
11. Robert Monzingo, Thomas Starr King: Eminent Californian, Civil War Statesman, Unitarian Minister (Pacific Grove, Ca., 1991), pp. 133–239; Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2009.
12. Hans L. Trefousse, Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast (New York, 1957), passim; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1953), pp. 115–18; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, July 25, 2010.
13. Robert Francis Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (New York, 2004).
14. Henry R. Mallory, Genealogy of the Mallorys of Virginia (Hartford, Conn., 1955), pp. 24–26.
15. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), p. 746.
16. Inside Business: The Hampton Roads Business Journal, June 11, 2010; Hampton Roads Daily Press, Aug. 9, 2010; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Jan. 10, 2010.
17. U.S. Census data, 1870–1920; Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, pp. 145–46. The census worker in 1920 recorded Mallory’s age as seventy, but other records make it clear he was approximately a decade older than that.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The total number of books published on the Civil War since 1861 roughly equals the total number of soldiers—both Union and Confederate—who fought the First Battle of Bull Run. Sending my own off into that fray, I have of course benefited enormously from the work of those who went before, including trailblazing research during the past two decades that has done much to open new fields of inquiry and correct past imbalances.
Surprisingly, there are still some topics that remain too little explored, such as the presidential campaigns of 1860 (especially the Wide Awake phenomenon); the transcontinental telegraph; the distinctive roles of Germans and other white ethnic groups; and the story of the contrabands at Fortress Monroe and elsewhere during the opening year of the war.
Space does not permit a full listing of every source that I drew upon; the bibliographical essay below touches on a few highlights for each chapter, especially the secondary sources. A much more complete bibliography can be found on the website for this book, www.1861book.com.
The Civil War era is, of course, also incredibly rich in visual images. The technology of the printed page cannot do full justice to the astonishing detail captured in a glass-plate photograph, but that of the Internet can: zooming in bit by bit is like entering the vanished moment itself. High-resolution versions of the photographs in this book are available on my website. Readers will also find there the full texts of poems quoted as epigraphs.
In referring to African-Americans, I have used the terms “Negro” and “colored,” in keeping with the usage of the time. Unfortunately, giving a full sense of the period also compels the historian to quote racist rhetoric that is often quite ugly. But this was so much a part of the political culture of the Civil War era, in both North and South, that it cannot and should not be avoided. In providing verbal quotations from African-Americans themselves as reported by whites, I have, reluctantly, preserved the “dialect” versions used in almost all the original sources, even though some of the conventional spellings (e.g., “wuz” for “was”) served no conceivable phonetic purpose, and were as characteristic of Southern whites’ speech as of blacks’. Trying to correct this would have required bowdlerizing the original sources, and I believe that the voices of the original speakers ring through eloquently despite the white writers’ reflexive habits of belittlement.
Period newspapers are essential sources for the Civil War era, but must be used with caution, since objectivity was an alien concept in the 1860s, and most editors cared more about providing sensational coverage than about being accurate. (For example, many Northern papers originally described the disasters at Big Bethel and Bull Run as magnificent Union victories.) On the other hand, the concept of eyewitness journalism was just coming into its own, and when a reporter was actually on the scene, he often recounted details quite vividly and usually with reasonable accuracy. Even “second-tier” papers such as the Cincinnati Daily Commercial and the Philadelphia Press often provide a surprising amount of valuable firsthand reporting by those papers’ national correspondents.
It is considerably more difficult to hear the voices of ordinary Americans from the months that this book covers than from later in the war. Eventually, of course, the long struggle would generate a tremendous outpouring of letters and diaries written by enlisted men and their families back home, papers that (unlike most routine correspondence during peacetime) would be treasured and preserved by them and their descendants. But there were simply far fewer soldiers in the early months of 1861, and even those who did serve were perhaps less likely to send as many letters, since most were on three-month enlistments and believed they would soon be home to recount their experiences in person. Perhaps, too, families were less likely to pre
serve the soldiers’ letters than they would be later, once it became clear to everyone that the war was going to be both a long struggle and an epochal event in the nation’s history. So far, I have been able to locate only two letters from an enlisted man at Fort Sumter during the siege. There are very few surviving letters or diaries of African-Americans from this period.
General Sources
James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988) has been justly hailed as the best contemporary one-volume history of the war. I would go further and call it the best one-volume history of the conflict ever written: it is astonishing how much narrative detail, period color, subtle analysis, and topical breadth the author is able to fit into a single (admittedly thick but never ponderous) book. Older accounts continue to provide fresh insights and are written with an elegance and wit, a sense of irony and a subtle appreciation of the complex (often contradictory) nature of the past, that are too rarely found in recent scholarship. Allan Nevins’s eight-volume The Ordeal of the Union (New York: Scribner, 1947–71) remains a monument of American historiography. Bruce Catton has gone somewhat into eclipse in recent decades, but his books—especially, for the purposes of my own work, The Coming Fury (New York: Doubleday, 1961)—are inspiring examples of how an author can write history as literature without sacrificing accuracy.
1861 Page 58
