The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  For his part, while Lincoln greatly feared the pessimism he shared with his own party was justified, he refused to now divorce from the war the issues of abolition and emancipation. He believed the peace McClellan intended to negotiate with the Confederacy would perpetuate slavery. He therefore took, on August 23, the unprecedented step of writing a sealed memorandum and presenting it to his Cabinet with the request that they endorse it without knowing its contents. It is a testament to the Cabinet’s loyalty and confidence that they complied. Only after the election was won did Lincoln unseal the document, revealing it as a solemn pledge of the Cabinet’s full cooperation with the president-elect for the sake of the nation.

  Lincoln went further. He was so convinced of the probability of McClellan’s election that he summoned the dean of African American abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, to the White House and asked him to draw up a covert plan for facilitating the exodus of as many slaves as possible from the slave states—before the election.

  Douglass did as he was asked, and on August 29, 1864, delivered to President Lincoln his plan. Five days later, however, Atlanta fell to the combined Union armies of the Cumberland, Ohio, and the Tennessee, which were collectively under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman. The loss of its industrial and transportation hub seemed to set the seal on the fate of the Confederacy. Throughout the North, enthusiasm revived for fighting the war through to nothing less than total victory, which meant the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy. Moreover, former US Army general and ardent abolitionist John C. Frémont, the nominee of a short-lived Republican splinter party called the Radical Democracy Party, dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Lincoln. This removed the threat that the abolitionist vote would be split between anti-Lincoln Radical Republicans and pro-Lincoln Republicans. The president therefore tucked the Douglass plan into a drawer. It was no longer necessary to implement it, he believed, since his prospects for reelection were looking much brighter.

  In May 1864, the Republican Party temporarily renamed itself the National Union Party, mainly as a way to invite non-Republican voters in the Border States and so-called War Democrats—Democrats who wanted total victory, not an immediate negotiated end to the war—to vote the Republican ticket. In the spirit of the party’s new name, Lincoln chose as his running mate a Democrat, Andrew Johnson, who had never wavered in his loyalty to the Union and was the only senator from a seceded state to remain in the United States Senate during the Civil War. In March 1862, President Lincoln appointed Johnson to serve as military governor of Tennessee, whose central and western sections had been brought under the control of the Union army. By now offering voters Johnson as vice-president, Lincoln intended to demonstrate his commitment to the full restoration of the Union with, to borrow a phrase from his own Second Inaugural Address, “malice toward none.”

  By Election Day, November 8, 1864, the luster of the Democratic peace platform had dulled and the value of a negotiated peace had plummeted. Even the most pessimistic of Northerners glimpsed light at the end of the tunnel. To the majority of the Northern electorate, offering the South anything more than the opportunity to give up and dissolve their Confederacy began to seem like a sucker’s bargain. Too many of the Union’s sons, brothers, and fathers had given their lives or their limbs for the war to mean anything less than total victory—and total victory included an end to slavery. The proof of this came in the election returns. Abraham Lincoln earned 2,218,288 votes to McClellan’s 1,812,807. Lincoln won 212 electoral votes to his opponent’s 21. Lincoln carried twenty-two states plus the districts of Confederate Louisiana and Tennessee that were now under Federal military control. McClellan carried just three states: Kentucky, New Jersey (his home state), and Delaware. The greatest blow to the former general was the army vote. Of the officers and men who cast their ballots in 1864, 70 percent chose Lincoln.

  The total voter turnout, 73.8 percent, dwarfs the anemic numbers in recent election history and speaks of how seriously Americans took this election. They understood that it was a referendum on whether or not to fight the Civil War to total victory. By returning Abraham Lincoln to office, the American majority voted for Union, liberty, and social justice and, what is more, affirmed that they were willing to pay the full price to secure these.

  Those voters who also looked forward to visiting vengeance upon the South were bound for disappointment. Abraham Lincoln did not crow over the coming victory against the Confederacy, much less threaten the defeated “rebels” with some stern retribution. Rather, in his Second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 1865, the president asked his listeners to “strive on to finish the work we are in,” but to do so “with malice toward none” and “with charity for all.” He asked that, together, they “bind up the nation’s wounds,” that they “care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan” and “do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Having won the war, Abraham Lincoln did not want to lose the peace, peace he would live long enough barely to glimpse.

  Contrary to his own expectations, President Lincoln won reelection to a second term—a powerful affirmation of his countrymen’s desire to see the terrible war through to a total victory that would restore the Union and end slavery. One of the most immediate reasons for the nation’s vote of confidence was General Sherman’s victory in the Atlanta Campaign (May 7-September 2, 1864). This was followed by his March to the Sea (November 15-December 21), culminating in the capture of Savannah, Georgia (December 21). These triumphs doomed the Confederacy—while also revealing Sherman’s cold genius for waging “total war,” war directed against civilian populations, not just the opposing military. Atlanta and the March to the Sea foreshadowed war as it would be fought globally in the first half of the twentieth century.

  8

  July 13, 1863

  New York Draft Rioters Set Fire to the Orphan Asylum for Colored Children

  Why it’s significant. A bloody three-day race riot in New York City, pitting recent white immigrants against free black residents of the city, exposed a deep Northern divide over the “new” abolitionist element in Abraham Lincoln’s war aims, as well as the resolve to fight the war to absolute victory and the unconditional defeat of the Confederacy.

  THE UNION VICTORY at Gettysburg came on July 3, 1863. Just one day later, on the Fourth of July no less, Vicksburg, Mississippi, the fortress-town known as the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” fell to the Union’s Army of the Tennessee, led by Ulysses S. Grant. Little wonder that history books treat these tandem events as the unmistakable “turning points” of the Civil War. Certainly there were those in the North—and even in the South—who saw things precisely this way, but an oppressive war weariness bore down on much of the North, and it was not easily lifted by all the hopeful news from Pennsylvania and Mississippi. Without a doubt, what many Northerners wanted was an end to the war.

  At the outbreak of the conflict in 1861, volunteers rallied around both the Stars and Bars in the South and the Stars and Stripes in the North. Calls for troops from Confederate President Jefferson Davis and from United States President Abraham Lincoln were answered in such overabundance that some comers had to be turned back, at least temporarily, for lack of sufficient supplies, shelter, and experienced commissioned and noncommissioned officers to train, lead, and manage them. By the second year of the war, however, both sides began to experience a drought of recruits even as both faced a flood of casualties and an urgent need to replace them, let alone enlarge the armies. The shortfall hit the Confederacy first and hardest. Having seceded from the Union in response to what it claimed was the tyranny of Washington, Richmond enacted a conscription law on April 16, 1862, that many Southerners believed was the very height of tyranny.

  The 1862 Confederate law required all white males between eighteen and thirty-five years of age to render three years of military service. Before the end of the year, the upper age limit was pushe
d to forty-five, and in February 1864, to fifty, at which time the lower limit was set at seventeen. Moreover, the Confederate draft law was inherently unjust and inequitable. It provided two alternatives to compulsory military service—but they were alternatives available only to those with the means to pay for them. A man could avoid service by either paying a “commutation fee” or by hiring an acceptable substitute to serve in his stead. Those men who owned (or oversaw) twenty slaves or more were also exempt. Few Southerners could afford to pay the commutation fee or pay for a substitute, and even fewer owned or oversaw twenty slaves. In effect, the draft applied unconditionally to the poor and even the middling majority while exempting the wealthy minority.

  It took the North nearly a year longer than the South to enact conscription, but come it did, on March 3, 1863. Like the Confederate law, the Northern law gave the well-heeled an out, either by hiring a substitute or by paying a $300 commutation fee. A manual laborer in the Northern states earned about a dollar a day in 1860 currency, so that the price of avoiding conscription was a year’s wages.

  Now, it must be noted that of the total number of enlisted men who served in the Union army during the war—2,778,304—the great majority enlisted voluntarily. After March 1863, many of these voluntary enlistments were doubtless motivated by the prospect of being involuntarily drafted. A mere 52,068 Union conscripts were held to service during the entire war. A total of 86,724 men subject to conscripted service paid the $300 commutation fee to receive exemption, and 42,581 hired substitutes. The Confederacy kept poor records, and many records were destroyed in the course of the war; however, it is clear that, throughout the war, the Confederate forces consisted, like those of the Union, mostly of volunteers. Still, on both sides, enactment of conscription caused unrest and outrage over the perceived exploitation of hard-working, hard-pressed men. In both the South and the North, there were anti-draft demonstrations, which sometimes turned violent. In the North, towns and cities in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio saw rioting, but it was in New York City that the explosion assumed a scale and duration greater than anywhere else.

  In this, the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we Americans often regard our nation as seriously divided, but, as alienated as it seems, we still think of the United States as a divided America. In the mid-nineteenth century, most Americans did not even think of themselves first and foremost as Americans. While the states were putatively “united,” most Americans identified themselves primarily as citizens of their home state. They were Virginians, Ohioans, Alabamans, New Yorkers, and so on. It was largely for this reason that the likes of Robert E. Lee, a distinguished career US Army officer, resigned his commission to join the Confederate army because he could not bring himself to “lift his sword” against Virginia, whereas he had no problem lifting it against the United States. This was the feeling of many throughout the nation in 1861.

  Along this spectrum of nationalist/non-nationalist sentiment, New York City had long been a very special case, and, in 1860–1861, as civil war appeared increasingly inevitable, relatively few New Yorkers eagerly rallied ’round the flag. Mayor Fernando Wood even proposed that the city secede from the Union—albeit without joining the Confederacy. His argument was that the wealth of New York was bound by trade to both the South and the North, and he envisioned declaring it a kind of “free city,” in the European sense, a city-state doing business equally with Union and Confederacy. Of course, New York City never chose so radical a path, but, throughout the war, it harnessed the force of commerce more than it embraced fierce loyalty to the Union. The city was a stronghold of “peace Democrats,” who believed the war should be ended quickly with a negotiated settlement.

  New York at mid-century was also a magnet for immigrants, who came mostly from Europe. The first generation struggled to make a living at whatever low-wage labor they could find. Living in a town driven more by commercial pragmatism than be patriotic idealism, the immigrants in New York (and some other Northern cities) feared and resented three things by the summer of 1863. First, they feared the consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation that became final on January 1. They believed it would open a great flood of freedmen bubbling up in a torrent from the South, offering to work for slave wages and thereby usurping the low-wage jobs that barely served to keep many immigrants alive. Second, they were outraged by the draft, which required them to give up their meager but much-needed jobs to fight—and quite possibly die—for the express purpose of liberating people who, once free, would take from them their livelihood. Third, they felt betrayed by a draft law that, ultimately, applied only to men like themselves, who could not afford to buy their way out of conscription. Most of this generation of immigrants had fled such injustice in Europe. Some tens of thousands of Irish immigrants had fled their homeland to escape a great potato famine that was exacerbated by the greed of rich English landlords. America promised equality, but now offered only more of the treatment to which they had been subject and subjugated in the old country.

  In 1863, the first- and second-generation Irish immigrants and their sons and daughters living in New York City numbered more than 200,000. The powder was thus packed in the keg. The match that lit the fuse was the commencement of the draft lottery in New York City on Saturday, July 11, 1863. Within two days, on Monday, journalist Joel T. Headley described “a ragged, coatless, heterogeneously weaponed army [that] heaved tumultuously along toward Third Avenue. Tearing down the telegraph poles as it crossed the Harlem & New Haven Railroad track, it surged angrily up around the building where the drafting was going on …. The mob seized the [draft-lottery] wheel in which were the names, and what books, papers, and lists were left, and tore them up.” Seeking more of the records without which the draft could not proceed, some of the mob attempted to break open a safe inside the draft office. Unable to tear the iron box open, they put the building to the torch. Against the backdrop of that blaze, the rioters advanced toward the Second Avenue armory, intent on seizing more lethal weapons than the clubs, brickbats, fists, and torches they currently possessed. Along the way, however, they were frequently distracted by such inviting targets as jewelry and liquor shops.

  At some point, a far more vulnerable target loomed—African Americans. When rioters began running down whatever persons of color were unfortunate enough to cross their paths, the so-called draft riot became a race riot—and the rage that had been directed against the draft was now concentrated on black New Yorkers.

  Mobs roamed the streets where the city’s working-class blacks lived. They chased down their victims. Some they beat, and some they lynched, hanging them from lampposts. The race riot intensified on Tuesday, and, this time, the rioters focused on the Colored Orphan Asylum at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue. The institution had been established in 1836, down on 12th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, by a trio of white Quaker women, Anna and Hanna Shotwell and Mary Murray. It moved uptown to 43rd Street in 1843. By 1863, the large four-story structure sheltered (according to Harper’s Weekly) an average of “600 or 800 homeless colored orphans.” Harper’s reported that when “it became evident that the crowd designed to destroy it, a flag of truce appeared on the walk opposite, and the principals of the establishment made an appeal to the excited populace, but in vain.”

  Fortunately, the first objective of the rioters was to loot the building of “every article deemed worth carrying away.” This gave orphanage caretakers sufficient time to evacuate the children by a back exit. Moreover, the first attempt to burn the building down failed, as the facility’s “Chief-Engineer,” a man named Decker, was able to extinguish the first fires. Aided by a “half-dozen of his men,” Decker was even able to defeat a second attempt at arson, but, outnumbered 2,000:1 (if the Harper’s report is accurate), he and his helpers gave up, and a third attempt succeeded in burning the building to the ground. Members of a city fire brigade saved Decker from the wrath of the mob, but they could not save the building. Some persons were injured by falling debris
, but the children had all escaped to safety.

  Wednesday, the third day of the New York riot, began with mobs tearing down the houses of black residents by hand. The frenzy of devastation continued though the afternoon until, at the approach of evening, a detachment of Army of the Potomac troops, diverted from their march out of Gettysburg—that bloody “turning point” of the Civil War—advanced into the greatest city of the North with a new mission: to restore order.

  These were soldiers who had been part of the deadliest battle ever fought on American soil. Victorious though they had been, they had seen many of their brothers-in-arms fall, and they were now inclined to treat the rioters as just another set of enemy combatants. As one eyewitness recalled, the fighting was “terrific … Streets were swept again and again by grape”—a type of artillery ammunition in which lead balls, tightly packed into a canvas container, are driven out in a wide dispersal pattern when the projectile is fired. Grapeshot and the similar canister shot (in which a tin or brass container replaces the canvas bag) were the primary, and very deadly, antipersonnel ammunition types during the Civil War. In addition, infantrymen stormed houses “at the point of the bayonet,” while sharpshooters, firing from housetops, “picked off” individual troublemakers. The same eyewitness who spoke of “terrific” fighting reported that, in the aftermath, “men were hurled, dying or dead, into the streets.” And so the Civil War came to Broadway.