The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  Indeed, civil war had become universal war—at least for a time. For it did not take long for Meade’s soldiers to quench the New York City Draft Riot—although outbreaks continued to flare both nearby, in Brooklyn, Jamaica, Staten Island, Jersey City, and Newark, as well farther afield, in Albany and Troy, New York, in Boston, Massachusetts, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the Pennsylvania counties of Columbia and Bucks, and in parts of Kentucky, as well as Milwaukee and Ozaukee County, Wisconsin. None of these outbreaks approached the casualty levels reached in New York City, where estimates of loss of life ranged from 300 to more than a thousand.

  There were some Americans, of course, who welcomed it all. J. B. Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department at Richmond, Virginia, recorded in his diary on July 17 the “awfully good news from New York: an INSURRECTION, the loss of many lives, extensive pillage and burning.” And there were loyal Northerners who did not see the riots as racially motivated protests over unjust draft laws, but, rather, the result of a conspiracy of Confederate agents provocateurs. While it is true that Confederate agents were active throughout the North, the riots were homegrown and did not require the handiwork of outsiders. Nevertheless, the violence exposed the fragility, in some areas and among some groups, of the North’s will to continue to fight the Civil War to total victory. Among Northern Democrats, there was a faction known as “Peace Democrats.” They did not exactly want a Confederate triumph, but they did unquestionably want an immediate end to the war, which meant negotiating peace on terms favorable to the South.

  As it turns out, “Peace Democrats” was the polite name for this faction. The more commonly heard appellation was Copperheads. A term first used in print by the New York Tribune on July 20, 1861, it equated Peace Democrats with a deadly snake in the grass liable to attack without warning. As for the Peace Democrats themselves, many embraced the ugly label by taking copper pennies, cutting out the head of the Liberty goddess who adorned them, and using these as improvised “copperhead” lapel badges.

  Copperheads were often derided as “Confederate sympathizers.” Almost certainly, some among them actively worked toward a Confederate victory. The great majority, however, simply opposed both the Emancipation Proclamation and the Conscription Act, arguing that fighting to preserve the Union was constitutional, but fighting a war to free black slaves was not. Most believed that Radical Republicans had not only transformed the conflict into a “war for the Negro,” but were also using it as a war against the Democratic Party, which would be purged (they believed) on the heels of a Northern victory and occupation of the Confederate states.

  Motivated by a mixture of racial prejudice and a will to political survival—plus a sincere desire to end the slaughter of the most cataclysmic war ever fought in North America—the most dedicated Copperheads organized secret societies, especially in Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, where the Democratic Party’s appetite for compromise with the South far outweighed Republican zeal for total victory at any cost. The aim of these covert organizations was ending the war, letting the seceded states go their own way, and preventing African Americans from becoming integrated into white American society. Some of these groups were not content with fomenting mere civil disturbance. Some were bent on outright rebellion. Many Copperheads inclined in this direction rallied behind one Clement Vallandigham, a member of the US House of Representatives from Ohio’s 3rd District who served from 1858 to 1863, and who was the editor of the Western Empire, a radical Democratic newspaper. His Copperhead sentiments were too strong for a majority of his Ohio constituents, who voted him out of office in the 1862 elections. His final speech in the House, made just after that body passed the Conscription Act, was to urge all Union men inducted to simply stop fighting. Once out of Congress, Vallandigham made another speech, on May 1, 1863, this time claiming that the Civil War was being fought not to save the Union but to free the slaves at the expense of the liberty of all Americans, who henceforward would be subjects of “King Lincoln.”

  The May speech prompted Vallandigham’s arrest for violating General Order Number 38, issued by Major General Ambrose Burnside (commanding officer of the Union army’s Department of the Ohio), which ordered those who declared “sympathies with the enemy” to be either executed as traitors or “sent beyond our lines into the lines of their friends.” Found guilty by a military tribunal, Vallandigham was sentenced to imprisonment for the duration of the war. Fearing that this would make him a martyr to the Copperhead cause, President Lincoln ordered him expelled to the Confederacy. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Vallandigham presented himself in Richmond, which he soon covertly left, traveling by blockade runner via Bermuda. From here, he traveled to Windsor, Ontario, from which he conducted a campaign (in absentia) for Ohio governor. It was, of course, a long shot, and, after he lost, he conspired with one Jacob Thompson, a Confederate agent posted in Canada, to create a Northwestern Confederacy. His idea was to overthrow the existing governments of Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana, proclaim these as the Northwestern Confederacy, and secede. Unsurprisingly, the scheme came to nothing, but Vallandigham was able to sneak back into the United States and attend the 1864 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a delegate from Ohio. He introduced a peace plank into the party’s platform, unilaterally declaring the war “a failure” and demanding an immediate cessation of hostilities. George B. McClellan, in accepting the party’s nomination to oppose Lincoln for reelection, did so on the understanding that peace would be wholly conditional on the Confederacy’s rejoining the Union. This outraged Vallandigham, who was conciliated by being included on the Democratic ticket as secretary of war. McClellan raised no objection to this, but if he had had any real chance of defeating Lincoln, putting such an extremist on the ticket surely ended it.

  Propelled by major Union victories at Mobile Bay (August 23, 1864) and Atlanta (September 2, 1864), Lincoln’s successful reelection (Chapter 7) came as the death blow to the Copperhead movement and any possibility that a Northwestern Confederacy would be created in the Midwest. Moreover, the performance of African American troops in the Union army, especially the heroism of the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner (July 18, 1863) broadened Northern enthusiasm for the abolitionist dimension of the Civil War. Thus the New York Draft Riot and the burning of the Orphan Asylum for Colored Children on July 13, 1863, became the high-water mark of major Northern resistance to embracing the absolute defeat and unconditional surrender of the Confederacy as the only acceptable ends of the Civil War.

  9

  April 14, 1865

  John Wilkes Booth Assassinates Abraham Lincoln

  Why it’s significant. In his second inaugural address, delivered when Union victory in the Civil War was near at hand, President Lincoln proclaimed a policy of “malice toward none” and “charity for all” as Americans prepared to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Clearly, Lincoln was prepared to institute and preside over a regime of reconciliation with the South. His death on April 15, 1865, from a gunshot wound suffered the night before, left a leadership vacuum that poisoned reconciliation, made a harsh and punitive program of Reconstruction all but inevitable, retarded the economic recovery of the South, and left fertile ground for a reign of terror and repression against African Americans in the former Confederacy.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, Good Friday, April 14, 1865, 8 a.m. Abraham Lincoln was at breakfast with his wife, Mary, and their sons, twelve-year-old Tad and Robert, twenty-two. The president picked at his meal, one egg, and sipped at his single cup of coffee. The six-foot-four Lincoln had weighed 180 pounds at his first inauguration in 1861. After four years of war, he was a gaunt 145. Still, he was eager to hear Robert’s account of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House just five days earlier. As a captain on General Grant’s staff, Robert had witnessed the two generals negotiate in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s farmhouse the terms by which the Army of Northern Virginia, beaten
but unbowed, laid down its arms.

  Robert began his narrative, only to be cut off by his mother, who had, she insisted, an important matter to discuss. She announced that although she already had tickets to a great gala at Grover’s Theatre for tonight, she really wanted to see Laura Keene—the nation’s most popular comic actress—in Our American Cousin, the hit comedy of the day. She insisted that her husband get tickets to Ford’s Theatre.

  He would get the tickets, he assured her. And when Mary asked if she might invite the General and Mrs. Grant to join them, Lincoln agreed to that, too. Then he turned back to his son. Before the young man resumed his account of the surrender, he presented his father with a little gift. It was a tintype of Robert E. Lee, which he gave to the president as something of a lighthearted joke. But Lincoln, fixing his glasses on his nose, studied the image intently and without smiling.

  “It is a good face,” he said. “I am glad the war is over at last.”

  * * *

  At Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, chief military instrument of the Confederacy. The generals leading some 175,000 other Confederate soldiers had yet to raise the white flag, but, as Lincoln was aware, that very morning, April 14, 1865, Major Robert Anderson, Union commandant of Fort Sumter in 1861, would return to the site of his surrender to hoist once more the Stars and Stripes over the ruined fort. He would do this at 11:12 a.m., four years to the minute after those colors had been lowered. Later that afternoon, Mrs. Lincoln would remark on her husband’s “great cheerfulness,” and he replied: “Mary, I consider this day, the war has come to a close.”

  No American president had ever borne so great a burden as he. The war—in many ways, his war—produced more than 1.1 million casualties on both sides, more than a fifth of the nation’s men of military age.

  * * *

  After breakfast on April 14, the president worked through his always voluminous stack of correspondence and had numerous meetings, one after another, including one with former senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire, whom he had just appointed minister (ambassador) to Spain. Lincoln advised Hale to work closely with Frederick Seward, assistant secretary of state under his father, William H. Seward, who was bedridden, undergoing a painful convalescence from severe injuries suffered in a carriage accident. No one knows if Hale mentioned to Lincoln what he had already confided to a few friends: that he was greatly relieved to be taking himself and his family to Spain because his daughter, Lucy Lambert Hale, was becoming seriously involved in a romance with an actor. Hale did not like the man—partly because he was an actor, but mostly because he was an outspoken pro-slavery white supremacist. His name was John Wilkes Booth.

  After Hale left, Lincoln met with his Cabinet and his top general, Ulysses S. Grant, mainly to discuss policy for the postwar “Reconstruction” of the Union. During the meeting, Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s imperious secretary of war, raised a document in the air. “I will see that each of you gets a copy of this.” It was his comprehensive, dictatorial, and, above all, punitive Reconstruction plan. Thanking him for it, the president cautioned, “We can’t take to running state governments in all of these southern states. Their people must do that, although I reckon at first, they may do it badly.”

  Stanton pressed his punitive agenda, pointing out that the House and Senate would surely demand punishment of the leaders of the rebellion. Lincoln pronounced it “providential that this great rebellion is crushed just as Congress has adjourned … If we are wise and discreet we shall reanimate the states and get their governments in successful operation … before Congress comes together in December. I hope that there will be no persecution, no bloody work after the war is over. No one need expect me to take any part in hanging or killing these men, even the worst of them. Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off, enough lives have been sacrificed.”

  For Lincoln, Reconstruction was about healing; but for many others, it was about vengeance.

  * * *

  At two in the afternoon, the cabinet meeting ended, but General Grant lingered to explain why his wife, Julia, had declined Mrs. Lincoln’s invitation to Ford’s Theatre. They were leaving that very evening to visit their children at school in Burlington, New Jersey, and he had a great deal of paperwork to attend to beforehand. The president replied that he understood perfectly. (He likely also understood that Julia Grant had little affection for Mary Todd Lincoln.) There is a story—perhaps true—that Secretary Stanton overheard this exchange between Lincoln and Grant and warned both that “Neither … should go to the theater tonight.”

  Following the cabinet meeting, Lincoln granted six pardons: one was for an ailing Confederate prisoner, one for a Confederate seeking amnesty, and another for a youthful Confederate soldier about to be executed. “I think this boy can do more good above ground than under ground,” Lincoln remarked to his secretary, John Hay. He also pardoned an underage Union soldier, writing to Major General George Meade, commanding the Army of the Potomac: “I am appealed to in behalf of August Bittersdorf, at Mitchells Station, Va. to be shot to-morrow as a deserter. I am unwilling for any boy under eighteen to be shot; and his father affirms that he is under sixteen.” Two more individuals received presidential pardons on April 14, a man accused of intimidating loyal citizens into joining the Confederate army and another accused of deserting from one regiment only to enlist in another. Both had been condemned to death by firing squad.

  The Cabinet meeting finished and the pardons issued, the president joined Mrs. Lincoln for a carriage ride he had earlier promised her. As Lincoln was washing his hands before leaving for the excursion, Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana presented an urgent dispatch from the provost marshal at Portland, Maine. It concerned Jacob Thompson, a Confederate agent about to board a Canadian steamer bound for Liverpool, England.

  What did Stanton want to do? the President asked.

  Arrest him, Dana replied.

  Drying his hands, Lincoln turned to the young man: “I rather guess not. When you have an elephant in hand, and he wants to run away, you better let him run.” (In the wee hours of the morning of April 15, even as Abraham Lincoln lay in coma, Stanton would order the arrest not only of Thompson, but every other agent associated with his Canadian-based operation.)

  The President and Mrs. Lincoln rode out to the Navy Yard in the southeast quadrant of the capital. “I never saw him so supremely cheerful” as he was during the drive, Mary Lincoln later recalled.

  * * *

  Dinner that evening lasted only from 7 to 7:30, presumably abbreviated to permit the Lincolns to make an eight o’clock curtain at Ford’s. Mary announced that she had replaced the Grants with Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, as their theater companions for the evening. The Lincolns would pick them up on the way to the theater.

  With a stop to pick up their guests, the carriage rolled up at the theater door at 8:25. Metropolitan Police officer John F. Parker, Lincoln’s regular evening-shift bodyguard, had arrived in advance to inspect the theater and the “State Box,” which was actually Boxes 7 and 8 with the thin pine partition normally separating them removed. Finding all in order, he went out to the front door to await the arrival of the presidential party. Parker neither reported nor, apparently, worried that the lock on the inner door to Box 7 was broken.

  With Parker taking the lead, the party made its way into the theater, up the stairs to the balcony, and across the rear of the balcony toward the State Box. Seeing Lincoln’s arrival, patrons in the first balcony rose and applauded. On stage, Laura Keene (as Florence Trenchard) was trading puns with the resolutely clueless Lord Dundreary. They bantered about a window draft, a draught of medicine, and a bank draft.

  “Good gracious!” Keene’s character exclaimed. “You have almost a game of draughts.”

  This sent Dundreary into a convulsion of stage laughter.

  “What is the matter?” asked Keene.


  “That wath a joke,” Dundreary sputtered, “that wath.”

  Now seeing the president, Laura Keene stepped out of character, stopped the action, looked to the guests of honor, and joined the swelling applause. At this, the entire theater, 1,675 patrons, rose to its feet in applause.

  With quick wit, Laura Keene ad libbed yet another pun, in reference to the end of military conscription. “The draft has been suspended,” she said, and the orchestra struck up “Hail to the Chief.”

  After acknowledging the greeting, Lincoln settled into the high-backed rocker the management reserved for him. Officer Parker withdrew to a cane chair positioned outside the outer door of the State Box. Major Rathbone took the hand of Clara Harris, and President Lincoln took Mary’s.

  “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging onto you so?”

  “Why, she will think nothing about it,” Abraham Lincoln replied.

  * * *

  Madman, drunkard, failed actor—John Wilkes Booth has been called all of these. Twenty-six years old, he was in fact a matinee idol earning $20,000 a year in an age when a common working man eked out about a dollar a day. Maryland, the state of his birth and upbringing, was a border state, a slave state that remained loyal to the Union, but Booth, like many other Marylanders, identified more closely with the South than the North. As an actor, his greatest popularity was south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Perhaps this is why he was so passionate a supporter of the Confederacy, so vocal an advocate of slavery, and so vehement a hater of “Black Lincoln.”