The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  In the end, it was the sheer weight of superior Union numbers that prevailed—that and the determination of the individual Union fighting man. Slowly and at great cost, the Confederates were pushed back to the outskirts of Sharpsburg, so that, by the end of the day, McClellan had achieved a great advantage. Yet he himself couldn’t see it, even when Lee began to withdraw back toward Virginia. Retreat makes any army vulnerable, and McClellan had a golden opportunity to pursue and quite possibly kill the Army of Northern Virginia. Instead, he let Lee and his army, reduced in number but still intact, cross the Potomac into Virginia.

  Antietam was, historians say, the single bloodiest day of the war. Union casualties numbered more than 12,000 killed, wounded, captured, or missing, while Confederate losses were significantly lower, officially tallied at 10,316 killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Because Lee’s army had been pushed out of Northern territory, however, the battle must be counted a Union strategic victory—albeit a victory both pyrrhic and limited. While McClellan had driven Lee out of Maryland, he missed an opportunity to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia. Had he pursued, the end of the war would have been hastened by years.

  Abraham Lincoln was appalled by the magnitude of casualties on both sides and the fact that Lee and his army had been allowed to withdraw and thereby live to fight another day. Still, he seized upon whatever degree of victory Antietam represented as a sufficiently sturdy platform from which to launch his “Preliminary” Emancipation Proclamation. His secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, recorded what the president said at a Cabinet meeting on September 22, 1862: “Gentlemen, I have, as you are aware, thought a great deal about the relation of this war to slavery, and you all remember that, several weeks ago, I read to you an order I had prepared upon the subject, which, on account of objections made by some of you was not issued”—referring to Seward’s warning that the proclamation must not be introduced against a backdrop of defeat. Lincoln continued:

  Ever since then my mind has been much occupied with this subject, and I have thought all along that the time for acting on it might probably come. I think the time has come now. I wish it was a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the Rebels has not been quite what I should have liked best. But they have been driven out of Maryland, and Pennsylvania is no longer in danger of invasion …. I have got you together to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter, for that I have determined for myself …. What I have written is that which my reflections have determined me to say.

  The so-called Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22 did not begin with any mention of slavery, but reasserted what Lincoln had said over and over again, beginning with his first inaugural address. The object of the war was not to abolish slavery, but to restore “the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the States.” Only then did the proclamation continue by reintroducing the idea of compensated emancipation—paying slave owners to free their slaves. Next, it broached a policy of colonizing the freed slaves “with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere.” These two incentives presented at the outset, the president next proclaimed a significantly limited emancipation:

  That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

  The only slaves to be freed on January 1, 1863, were those held by people living within states or parts of states still “in rebellion.” Slaves held elsewhere—whether in parts of the Confederacy that were under Union control or in the border states—would remain slaves. Indeed, practically speaking, the “final” Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, freed not a single slave, since the United States government had no power within most of the Confederacy to enforce this liberation. The president merely declared those slaves free.

  * * *

  Abraham Lincoln was raised in poverty on the frontier, but he prospered as a lawyer, and the Emancipation Proclamation, both in its preliminary and final form, reads like a legal document. It takes a cautious, even tentative tone, which may not be very stirring today, but which was right—just right—for the time and circumstances. The Emancipation Proclamation infused the war with new moral meaning and force, yet it judiciously avoided provoking the occupied South and the border states, and it did not trigger a potentially tragic legal challenge through the federal courts. Moreover, it laid the foundation for the action Congress took even before the Civil War ended. On April 8, 1864, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed by the Senate. After a bitter fight and with much presidential arm twisting, the House followed on January 31, 1865. Within a year, on December 18, 1865, the amendment achieved ratification. In contrast to the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment is brief—“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”—but it was thanks to that cautious and legalistic proclamation, ratified by the blood sacrifice of hundreds of thousands, that the Civil War became truly a war of liberation and social justice.

  5

  April 9, 1865

  Lee Surrenders to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia

  Why it’s significant. Following a final twelve-day campaign of gallant resistance, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, the premier military formation of the Confederacy, to Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of the Union armies. The character of both commanders—Grant in offering generous and humane surrender terms and Lee in accepting them with finality but without bitterness—contributed to ending the war definitively, thereby preventing what could have been a guerrilla conflict that might have lasted for years.

  BY VOCATION, JOSHUA Lawrence Chamberlain was the polymath and multilingual professor of rhetoric at Maine’s Bowdoin College. So, when he applied for a leave of absence in 1862 to study languages in Europe—he was already fluent in Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac—it was readily granted. Instead of sailing across the Atlantic, however, Chamberlain enlisted in the Union army and was soon made lieutenant colonel and then colonel of the 20th Maine Regiment.

  At least twice in the Civil War, Chamberlain found himself in precisely the right place at the right time. On day two of the Battle of Gettysburg, as we will see in Chapter 6, his 20th Maine was positioned at the extreme southern end of the Army of the Potomac on Little Round Top. Leading this understrength, battle-weary unit, Chamberlain saved the entire Army of the Potomac from a crushing defeat in that turning point battle. Three years later, now holding the brevet rank of major general, Chamberlain was once again in the right place at the right time—Appomattox, Virginia—on the morning of April 9, 1865. He was awaiting an attack order on a morning still heavy with mist. He did his best to peer through it, watching to detect any movement in the enemy line. Later he wrote about it. He wrote of how, through the shimmering veil, there “rose to sight … a soldierly young figure, a Confederate staff officer undoubtedly. Now I see the white flag earnestly borne, and its possible purport sweeps before my inner vision like a wraith of morning mist.”

  Tested in desperate combat, Chamberlain time and again proved himself a man of uncommon valor, yet that “wraith” wrapped around his very nerves, which now tightened to the extremity of suspense. He saw the young man approach “steadily on, the mysterious form in gray, my mood so whimsically sensitive that I could even smile at the material of the flag—wondering whe
re in either army was found a towel, and one so white.” At long last, the figure stopped, dismounted, and, “with graceful salutation and hardly suppressed emotion, delivered his message.”

  “Sir, I am from General Gordon.”

  Chamberlain knew John Brown Gordon to be a commander of boundless gallantry. At Bloody Lane in the Battle of Antietam, a Minié ball tore through his calf, another hit him higher up on the same leg, and a third buried itself in his left arm. He nevertheless continued to command his Confederates. When a fourth ball struck his shoulder, a subordinate begged him to retire to the rear at last. He refused—and continued to refuse, until a round struck his face, piercing the left cheek through and through and exiting his jaw. That fourth blow sent him down. He was carried off the field, and a Confederate surgeon pronounced his case hopeless. But his wife, a steadfast soldier’s wife, saw to his recovery, and he returned to combat months later. As the war approached its end, Gordon commanded II Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia and was among Robert E. Lee’s most trusted lieutenants, entrusted now with seeking terms from General Grant. To Chamberlain, the young messenger announced the subject of Gordon’s note: “General Lee desires a cessation of hostilities until he can hear from General Grant as to the proposed surrender.”

  Struggling to contain himself, Chamberlain replied to the emissary, “Sir, that matter exceeds my authority. I will send to my superior,” adding: “General Lee is right. He can do no more.”

  Actually, Lee believed there was one more thing he could do. Wrung out and heartbroken by four years of war and, more immediately, worn out by the twelve-day running fight called the Appomattox Campaign, the commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia decided to make good use of the interval during which he awaited Grant’s reply to his offer of surrender. Summoning his aide-de-camp, Colonel Charles Marshall, Lee asked him to seek a house where he could parley with the Union general-in-chief. Marshall rode off and soon encountered a farmer named Wilmer McLean. Marshall asked him if he knew the area well. McLean explained that he “used to live on the first battle field of Manassas”—Bull Run—“at a house about a mile from Manassas Junction.” He hated the war, he said, and thought he should “get away where there wouldn’t be any more fighting.” So he moved to Appomattox Court House. Now the war had caught up with him again. In response to Marshall’s request that he point out a house where the two generals could meet to bring that hated war to an end, McLean took Marshall to a structure ruined by battle, a shell, gutted, and without furniture. When Marshall shook his head no, McLean suggested: “Maybe my house will do!”

  It was a plain brick farmhouse, not a grand plantation manor, but it was neat, intact, and fully furnished. Marshall chose it, and so the McLean house would enter history.

  * * *

  Almost from its very formation, in July 1861, the implicit mission of the Union’s Army of the Potomac had been to decapitate the Confederacy by capturing Richmond, its capital. That objective eluded every commander from McClellan to Grant, whose Overland Campaign ended not at the gates of Richmond, but in the prolonged siege of Petersburg. Only after nine and a half months, from June 9, 1864, to March 25, 1865, were the Petersburg defenses breached, sending the Confederate government in flight from Richmond on April 2, 1865.

  It was the downfall of the Confederate States of America. The night that followed the Union breakthrough (according to Edward Pollard, editor of the Richmond Examiner) “was an extraordinary night; disorder, pillage, shouts, mad revelry of confusion …. The gutters ran with a liquor freshet, and the fumes filled the air.” Straggling Confederate troops drank themselves into blind, raging stupors, “sidewalks were encumbered with broken glass; stores were entered at pleasure and stripped from top to bottom; yells of drunken men, shouts of roving pillagers, wild cries of distress filled the air, and made night hideous.” Morning, Pollard wrote, “broke on a scene never to be forgotten …. The smoke and glare of fire mingled with the golden beams of the rising sun …. The fire was reaching to whole blocks of buildings …. Pillagers were busy at their vocation, and in the hot breath of the fire were figures as of demons contending for prey.”

  Richmond fell, and Major General Godfrey Weitzel led the Army of the Potomac’s XXV Corps into the shattered city on April 3. Seeking out the “Confederate White House,” Weitzel found that the residence had been evacuated by President Jefferson Davis and his family. He seized it as his headquarters and ordered his chief of staff, Johnston de Peyster, to climb to the roof and raise over it the Stars and Stripes.

  President Lincoln arrived the next day. “Thank God I have lived to see this,” he said softly. “It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone.”

  For Robert E. Lee and the tattered, half-starved remains of the Army of Northern Virginia, the nightmare was still unfolding. Practically speaking, the fall of Petersburg was the end of the Confederacy. Nevertheless, Lee withdrew from Petersburg what was left of his army, not quite 50,000 men, and marched west. His forlorn hope was to link up with Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee in North Carolina and continue to fight, presumably with the intention of coaxing the Lincoln government into a settlement more favorable to the South than unconditional surrender. Getting his army to North Carolina required marching to the town of Amelia Court House, in which, Lee believed, was a cache of provisions as well as access to transportation via the Danville and Richmond Railroad.

  Even in defeat, Robert E. Lee commanded the respect and loyalty of his men. His motive was no longer victory. Lee just wanted to leave the Army of Northern Virginia with something more than abject defeat. This desire was about to run up against a military leader as vainglorious as Lee was selfless. Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer graduated dead last in the West Point class of 1861 but distinguished himself in the Civil War with one display of reckless gallantry under fire after another. Now he found himself in position to play a high-profile role in the climactic campaign of the Civil War, the pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia to Appomattox Court House.

  After taking part in the Battle of Five Forks (April 1, 1865), Custer led a brigade of his division in pursuit of Confederate cavalry under Robert E. Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh Lee. Custer fought him to a standstill at Willicomack Creek, but Fitzhugh Lee broke free until he and his command were run down again at Namozine Church (April 3). Instead of giving up or digging in, Fitzhugh Lee wheeled his men around in a fierce counterattack, which Custer skillfully parried. Fitzhugh Lee then divided his command, sending some of his cavalrymen riding off toward Bevill’s Bridge over the Appomattox River. They followed behind yet another Lee, William Henry Fitzhugh (“Rooney”) Lee, the second-eldest son of Robert E. Lee. Fitzhugh Lee personally led his remaining cavalry directly toward Amelia Court House, where, on April 5, eluding Custer, they linked up with the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia.

  Amelia Court House was thirty miles west of Petersburg, and Custer and the other commanders under Major General Philip Sheridan resolved to allow Lee to withdraw no farther. Custer immediately deployed his division to block the Richmond and Danville Railroad and thus prevent the Army of Northern Virginia from achieving a breakout. For his part, Lee had intended to draw rations at Amelia Court House, but amid the chaos of Richmond’s collapse, the Confederate army quartermaster had failed to send them. Now Lee and his army were bottled up in the small town, desperately hungry, awaiting Sheridan’s inevitable attack.

  The Union commander took his time, sending a brigade to reconnoiter Amelia Springs, in the rear of the Army of Northern Virginia. The Union brigade located a Confederate wagon train there and promptly put it to the torch, burning the very last of Lee’s provisions as well as most of his papers. Lee was now completely without supplies and still unable to push past Amelia Court House. He therefore turned his army to the southwest and began a march toward Rice Station, still hopeful of finding provisions.

  Unlike so many other Union generals before h
im, Ulysses Grant was dogged in pursuit of the enemy, regardless of cost. He now dogged the Army of Northern Virginia, whichever way Lee turned, attacking the army’s rear. At Little Sayler’s Creek on April 6, Confederate General Richard S. Ewell counterattacked the pursuers, who were stunned by the ferocity of the “beaten” men. How could a defeated army counterpunch so fast and so hard? Indeed, Ewell pushed back the Union’s center—for a time. But then Union reinforcements began to arrive, and they kept coming. Soon overwhelmingly outnumbered, Ewell found himself caught in a double envelopment, yet refused to submit. There was no hope of victory, but Ewell was determined to save as much of the army as possible. He bought time for three of his subordinate commanders, Richard H. Anderson, Bushrod Johnson, and George Pickett, to escape with most of their commands intact. Ewell, in the meantime, fought a desperate rearguard action, much of it hand-to-hand. Many of his soldiers, shoeless, fought barefoot before they, along with Ewell and five other Confederate commanders, were taken prisoner. Among the latter was Lee’s eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee. From a distance, the father watched it all, making the bland assessment that “half of our army is destroyed.”

  Lee, it turned out, overestimated his losses at Little Sayler’s Creek. About a third, not a half, of the Army of Northern Virginia had evaporated. John Brown Gordon continued to lead his corps farther west, to High Bridge, an impressive railway span lofted atop sixty-foot piers across the Appomattox at Farmville. Detaching a portion of the corps under Fitzhugh Lee to fight a rearguard action, Gordon linked up with James A. Longstreet’s corps and withdrew across High Bridge.

  Any ordinary army would never have gotten this far. The partial breakout from Little Sayler’s Creek was magnificent, but it was also marred by a fatal error. William “Little Billy” Mahone, commanding one of the divisions covering Gordon’s withdrawal, had orders to blow up High Bridge after the Confederates had safely crossed it. This would have significantly slowed the Union pursuit. But in civilian life Mahone had been a railway engineer and president of the Southside Railroad, the builder of High Bridge. He could not bring himself to order its demolition, and so Lee’s pursuers had a bridge across the river and closed in on Gordon and Longstreet.