The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  SPRINGFIELD, CAPITAL OF Illinois, the “Prairie State,” was the hometown Abraham Lincoln was about to leave. It was a chilly morning, February 11, 1861, sunless in midwinter, with an icy drizzle that failed to keep the president-elect’s friends, associates, and neighbors from gathering to see him off. The victor in the presidential election of 1860 stood—as always, at a raw-boned six-four, head, shoulders, and chest above everyone else—in the waiting room of the Great Western Depot. He shook hands and acknowledged the good wishes all round. Spirits, however, were not high in that room. There was no banter, no laughter, no joy.

  On the track alongside the depot, a waiting locomotive hissed, its steam mingling in wisps with the wintry vapor. At eight sharp, the engineer sounded the all-aboard whistle, summoning the president-elect, together with his family and a handful of others, to the steps of the passenger car that would take him on a twelve-day whistle-stop tour ending at Washington. Lincoln stood on the observation platform at the rear of the train and spoke to those who would remain behind. Among them were men and women Lincoln had known for many years, and, so, when he began his farewell speech with the words “My friends,” it was more than an oratorical commonplace. They were his friends, and Lincoln was by no means confident of finding any in the city for which he was bound. “My friends,” he began—

  no one not in my situation can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place and the kindness of these people I owe everything. Here I have lived for a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me and remain with you and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

  * * *

  In his Farewell, he called himself an old man. Doubtless, that iron gray morning, it was how he felt. Yet, the very next day, Abraham Lincoln would turn just fifty-two. He was, at that point in American history, the youngest man to be elected to the presidency.

  His election had followed the destruction of the Whig Party, traditional opponent of the pro-Southern Democratic Party. The Whigs had lost credibility among the swelling ranks of anti-slavery voters, who resented their complicity in the 1854 passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the people of each separate state to vote their state free or slave. As those opposed to slavery saw it, as long as a single US state allowed slavery, the United States was a slave nation. After passage of the act, abolitionists, who had deserted the Whigs for numerous small antislavery parties, joined forces to create a new party, one firmly founded on antislavery principles. The result was the Republican Party.

  The Republicans held their first national convention in 1856, two years after the party’s founding, nominating the famous Western explorer John C. Frémont as its first presidential contender. Although he was defeated by Democrat James Buchanan, there was still good news; in its maiden election, the party did win more than 100 congressional seats. Two years later, the new party nominated Lincoln to oppose incumbent Democrat Stephen Douglas in the race for Senator from Illinois. Lincoln lost to Douglas, but not before earning a national reputation for his eloquence in an epic series of debates against his opponent and, in particular, for a speech that drew upon the apostle Mark, comparing the United States to a “house divided against itself,” unable to “stand … permanently half slave and half free.”

  Yet, on balance, Lincoln’s position on slavery in 1858 was not dramatically different from Douglas’s. Both men wanted to ban slavery in the territories, but neither believed it constitutionally possible to abolish slavery altogether—not by legal action, at any rate. Nevertheless, as the Republicans drove the wishy-washy Whigs into political irrelevance, radical Southern Democrats claimed with certainty that the election of a Republican in 1860 would—and should—drive the Southern states out of the Union.

  Lincoln’s reputation grew so rapidly throughout the North after 1858 that the Republicans made him their standard bearer for the White House in 1860. He was, however, eminently beatable—and likely would have been defeated, if the Democrats had not suffered their own internal secession. The party splintered into northern and southern factions, thereby dividing the vote: 18.1 percent went to John C. Breckenridge, the Southern Democratic nominee, and 29.5 percent went to Stephen A. Douglas, nominee of the Northern Democratic Party, with an additional 12.9 percent going to John Bell, nominee of the new Constitutional Union Party, which was made up of Whig diehards. This was a total of 60.5 percent of the vote. Lincoln claimed just 39.8 percent—less than a majority, but more than any other single candidate. So, he was now president.

  And with his election, seven Southern states made good on their threat to secede: South Carolina (December 20, 1860), Mississippi (January 9, 1861), Florida (January 10), Alabama (January 11), Georgia (January 19), Louisiana (January 26), and Texas (February 1). On February 8, representatives from these seven states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to declare themselves a new nation, the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was elected interim president—pending a general election—and Alexander Stephens of Georgia as Vice President.

  The secessionists called the president-elect “Black Lincoln” and painted him as a radical abolitionist, who not only wanted to end slavery but also to upend the “natural” social order, by which they meant a society founded on the inherent superiority of whites. In truth, Lincoln never called himself or considered himself an abolitionist. True, he was personally and morally opposed to slavery. On a scrap of paper preserved by Mary Todd Lincoln and believed to date from August 1858, Lincoln wrote, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” Yet not until he championed the Thirteenth Amendment, when he stood for reelection in 1864, did Lincoln call for ending slavery where it already existed.

  As early as 1858, Lincoln did propose banning the further extension of slavery into US territories, and, early in his first term, he even proposed a system of compensated emancipation, whereby slavery would be gradually abolished altogether, but slave owners would be compensated in cash for freeing their slaves. On April 16, 1862, such legislation was actually applied to the District of Columbia. Beyond these views, however, as a candidate and as a president, Lincoln believed that the Constitution protected slavery as a property right. Nor, apparently, did he believe that blacks and whites were inherently equal. In his debates with Douglas in 1858, he spoke of the racial superiority of whites, and he made clear his opposition to African American service on juries and to marriage between blacks and whites. As the war and his own presidency progressed, Lincoln evolved, arguing for the enfranchisement of African American voters—albeit arguing tepidly. In what turned out to be his very last public address, delivered to a crowd gathered outside of the White House on April 11, 1865, two days after Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant, the president commented on the new constitution Louisiana had drawn up in a bid for restoration to the Union. The document proclaimed emancipation throughout the state, which Lincoln praised, but it did not extend “the elective franchise … to the colored man.” Gratified by the emancipation, Lincoln nevertheless said that he would “prefer that [the right to vote be] conferred on … very intelligent [blacks], and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” By today’s standards, the remark is, of course, racist, implying that prospective black voters would have to pass an intelligence test. At least one member of the audience gathered that day believed the president’s words were a radical betrayal of the white race. Hearing them, the man vowed that this speech was “the last speech h
e will make.” The offended party was John Wilkes Booth.

  No one, including those who founded the Confederacy, could have foreseen, let alone assumed, Abraham Lincoln’s evolution on slavery and race. At the time of his election, Lincoln shared the view of the majority of American whites, who found slavery distasteful, perhaps even immoral. Many more believed it an economic threat to free labor for wages. As for racial equality, however, this view was uncommon among whites, who generally believed they were created, by nature and God, superior to the black race. But this did not mean that African Americans were not entitled to justice under the law. In short, Lincoln’s point of view was one shared by most Northerners. This further implies that just about anyone the North would have supported for president would have been unacceptable to the South, where slavery was an essential pillar of the economy and the social order.

  * * *

  Prior to the January 23, 1933 ratification of the Twentieth Amendment, which established January 20 (or January 21, if the 20th fell on a Sunday) as the end of the sitting president’s term, Inauguration Day was on March 4. Thus, there was a four-month gap between the election of Lincoln and his installation into office. During this interval, a dwindling handful of lawmakers held onto the hope that the Union could yet be saved. Among these was Senator John J. Crittenden, who, as mentioned in Chapter 1, presented in December 1860 a package of six constitutional amendments intended to explicitly protect slavery while also explicitly limiting its expansion. He hoped this would mollify the South.

  Concerning the “Crittenden Compromise,” the fifteenth president of the United States, James Buchanan, did what he had done for the previous four years of the growing secession crisis—nothing. It is for his single term of incomprehension and inaction that most historians rate him near or at the bottom of lists ranking the American presidents. Yet President-elect Lincoln also refused to take any public position on Crittenden, the course of secession, or any other matter of significance before he formally assumed office. He even went so far as to instruct a Republican colleague to “entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery.” The apparent indifference on the part of the incoming chief executive cast the Crittenden Compromise adrift. It was little discussed and largely ignored.

  Today, the interval between election and inauguration is much briefer, and that abbreviated time is used to make a transition guided, in part, by the incoming president’s dedicated “transition team.” There was no such thing in Abraham Lincoln’s day. Before he left Springfield, he was silent, and then he spent twelve days, from February 11 to February 23, on a meandering rail journey from his home in the Illinois capital to Washington. He believed it was far more important for as many American citizens to see him than for him to speak out on matters of civil war before he had any legal authority to deal with them. Even after Lincoln learned that Jefferson Davis was offering to negotiate peaceful relations with the United States, he held his tongue and kept traveling. With many stops between the major cities, the journey took him east to Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Pittsburgh. Then it veered northeast to Cleveland, from which the train traveled northeast to Buffalo, due east to Albany, then a sharp turn south to New York City.

  From New York, the train was scheduled to head toward Philadelphia via Trenton. Then from Philadelphia, it was supposed to stop at Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania capital, before going on to Baltimore. But there was a potentially cataclysmic problem with the Lincoln itinerary.

  Before the president-elect set off from Springfield, railway officials hired the Scottish immigrant who had, for all practical purposes, invented the American profession of private detective, Allan J. Pinkerton, to investigate a rash of apparent sabotage against railway property in and around Baltimore. Maryland was a border state. It had not seceded from the Union, but it nevertheless was a slave state, and many of its citizens had greater sympathy for the Confederacy than for the Union. Baltimore was regarded as a hotbed of dissension and anti-Union conspiracy. Investigating the attacks on railroad property, Pinkerton was rapidly persuaded not only that a plot to assassinate the president-elect was afoot, but that the murder was being planned as the curtain raiser on an invasion of Washington, DC. The objective was to so stun and demoralize the North that the federal government would abandon any effort to force the South to bend to its will and would simply allow the disgruntled Confederate states to leave the Union.

  Pinkerton understood that Lincoln presented an especially soft target in Baltimore. Coming from Harrisburg, a rail passenger would not only have to change trains, but also change stations, to continue the journey to Washington. Lincoln, of course, was no ordinary passenger. The plan was to uncouple his private railway car from the inbound train when it stopped at the Northern Central Railway station on Baltimore’s Calvert Street. The car would then be pulled to another train waiting at the Baltimore and Ohio’s Camden Street Station for the ride to Washington. Pinkerton believed that assassins were plotting to ambush the car as it made its way slowly from one station to the other. He therefore dispatched one of his “female operatives,” Kate Warne, from Baltimore to New York, where she met the president-elect’s train and conveyed the details of the assassination conspiracy to Norman Judd, a member of the inaugural party traveling with Lincoln. Warne and Judd decided to lay all the facts before the president-elect when he arrived in Philadelphia on February 21. According to recollections published in Pinkerton’s memoirs, Lincoln received the news not with fear, but sorrow. Through Warne, Pinkerton advised the president-elect to cut short the rest of his itinerary and head immediately to Washington. Lincoln protested, however, that he had promised to raise the flag over Independence Hall in Philadelphia and then to visit the Pennsylvania legislature at Harrisburg in the afternoon.

  Pinkerton proposed another alternative, to which Lincoln agreed. After the president-elect addressed the legislature at Harrisburg, a special train consisting of a baggage car and one passenger coach would secretly carry Lincoln back to Philadelphia. There Pinkerton would meet the train and personally escort Lincoln from one Philadelphia depot to another, where the two would board a regularly scheduled 11 p.m. passenger train bound for Baltimore. The next day, the official inaugural train, which the assassins were expecting, would leave Harrisburg for Baltimore as scheduled—but minus the president-elect. To ensure that no telegraph message could reach the conspirators to advise them of the change, George H. Burns, the American Telegraph Company’s confidential agent, was assigned to see to it that the line between Harrisburg and Baltimore was cut and any messages sent were intercepted and delivered directly to Pinkerton.

  At 5:45 p.m. John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, handed the president-elect a note while he and his traveling party were in the dining room of a Harrisburg hotel. The men abruptly rose, and the president-elect changed out of his dinner clothes and into a traveling suit. According to Joseph Howard, Jr., a reporter for the New York Times, Lincoln, acting on Pinkerton’s instructions, carried a plaid shawl upon one arm, as if he were an invalid, and had a soft felt hat—apparently, a distinctly unpresidential tam o’shanter—tucked into his coat pocket. Lincoln was spirited into a coach, which took him to the depot. The special train arrived in Philadelphia shortly after 10:00 p.m. Lincoln, now in the care of Pinkerton, was transferred by coach to the other depot. Kate Warne had already booked the entire rear half of the Baltimore-bound sleeping car to accommodate (she explained to the ticket agent) “her invalid brother.” At the depot, Warne approached the president-elect (who, according to the New York Times reporter, still carried the shawl over one arm) and greeted him loudly as her brother. Together with Pinkerton and Lincoln’s longtime friend Ward H. Lamon, who had accompanied the president-elect all the way from Springfield, she entered the sleeping car by its rear door.

  The train pulled into Baltimore at 3:30 in the morning of February 23. Lincoln did not leave the sleeping car. Ordinarily, a small locomotive would could be used to pull the
car from the President Street Station to the Camden Street Station, where it would be coupled to the Washington-bound train. However, a Baltimore city ordinance prohibited night rail travel through the central city, so the sleeping car was drawn by a team of horses over the horse-car tracks. Pinkerton had heard a rumor that, despite all his efforts at secrecy, this car might be attacked as it moved slowly through the downtown streets. He kept a wary lookout, but the car arrived at the Camden Street Station without incident, whereupon Pinkerton sent a brief telegram to the president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad: “Plums delivered nuts safely.”

  As it turned out, the arrival of the Washington-bound train to which Lincoln’s car was to be coupled was delayed nearly two hours. The occupants of a railway car without a locomotive were wracked by anxiety—all except Lincoln, who settled back in his berth, cracking jokes with his nervous companions. Even at so early an hour, the depot was active, and Lincoln and the others caught snatches of “rebel” tunes, including Dixie, a song introduced by the popular minstrel entertainer Dan Emmett in 1859 and taken up by secessionists as an unofficial anthem. “No doubt there will be a great time in Dixie by and by,” Lincoln dryly quipped.