The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  Johnston, who enthusiastically supported Davis’s choice, was widely admired, but he was committed to the defensive tactic of the strategic retreat. He met Major General George B. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign—the Union’s first major offensive in southeastern Virginia—by yielding ground while claiming Union casualties. Lee believed this approach was fatal to Confederate morale, and as soon as he took command, he shocked McClellan by offering the fiercest of attacks in each of the so-called Seven Days Battles, which spanned June 25 to July 1, 1862. Lee transformed what McClellan had intended as a war-winning offensive targeting Richmond into a succession of Confederate attacks on the Army of the Potomac.

  Contrary to both contemporary popular opinion and enduring myth, Lee was hardly at his tactical best in the Seven Days, but he did reveal himself as an inspiring commander with an ability to extract the utmost aggression from his men. The Battle of Oak Grove (June 25) ended inconclusively and with relatively light casualties on both sides, but it put Lee in position to seize the initiative on the following day at the Battle of Beaver Dam Creek (Battle of Mechanicsville, June 26). While Lee suffered a tactical defeat—1,484 casualties versus 361 for the Union—he set up a major strategic triumph by forcing McClellan to withdraw from the Richmond area.

  The Battle of Gaines Mill (June 27) on the next day again resulted in heavier losses for Lee (7,993 killed, wounded, missing, or captured) than McClellan (6,837 killed, wounded, missing, or captured), but so unnerved the Union general that he began the retreat of the entire Army of the Potomac all the way back to his supply base on the James River. For his part, Lee was not about to let him go. He engaged portions of the withdrawing Union forces at Garnett’s & Golding’s Farms (June 27–28) before mounting a major attack at the Battle of Savage’s Station (June 29), exacting more than a thousand casualties. By noon on June 30, most of the battered Army of the Potomac had retreated across White Oak Swamp Creek. Lee hit the main body of the army at Glendale (June 30) while his subordinate Stonewall Jackson attacked McClellan’s rearguard (under Major General William B. Franklin) at White Oak Swamp (June 30). By the numbers, both engagements were inconclusive, but the humiliating “optics” were incredibly damaging to the Union and just as incredibly inspiring to the Confederacy. Lee was driving McClellan away, whipping him as a man might whip a dog.

  The final battle of the Seven Days, at Malvern Hill (July 1), was evenly matched, pitting 54,000 men of the Army of the Potomac against 55,000 of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee suffered 5,355 casualties to McClellan’s 3,214, but persisted in pursuing McClellan. Concluding that McClellan was unwilling to use his army effectively against Lee, Lincoln ordered him to link up with John Pope’s Army of Virginia to reinforce him at the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 28–30, 1862).

  It was at this battle that Lee revealed the tactical daring absent from his action at the Seven Days. He attacked the Army of Virginia before the slow-moving McClellan arrived in to consolidate with it his Army of the Potomac. In this attack, Lee purposefully broke one of the supposedly inviolable military commandments by dividing his forces in the presence of the enemy. He sent one wing under Stonewall Jackson to attack on August 28. This deceived Pope into believing that he had Jackson exactly where he (Pope) wanted him. The Union general could taste victory. But, in fact, it was Jackson who was holding Pope, so that Longstreet, leading Lee’s other wing, could launch a surprise counterattack on August 30. This attack, 25,000 men brought to bear all at once, was the single greatest mass attack of the Civil War, and it brought about a second Union defeat at Bull Run that was far costlier than the first. Pope lost 14,642 killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Lee lost half that number.

  The Second Battle of Bull Run made Robert E. Lee the general to beat. Pope had been fired, and McClellan was recalled to lead the Army of the Potomac against the ever-aggressive Lee, who had decided to take the war to the North by invading Maryland. McClellan fought him at Antietam in that state on September 17, 1862.

  At the beginning of the Seven Days, the battle line had been some six miles outside of Richmond. Three months later and thanks to Lee, it was at Antietam, just twenty miles outside of Washington. At the end of the day, McClellan had suffered heavier losses than Lee (12,410 to 10,316 killed, wounded, missing, or captured) but he had forced Lee to withdraw back into Virginia. President Lincoln used this narrow Union victory to launch his Emancipation Proclamation (Chapter 4), but, privately, he was bitterly disappointed—heartbroken, really—that McClellan had failed to pursue the retreating Lee in the way that Lee had earlier pursued the retreating McClellan.

  Abraham Lincoln removed George McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac and replaced him with Ambrose Burnside—despite Burnside’s own protests that he was not up to commanding a full army. At Fredericksburg (December 11–15, 1862), Burnside proved his self-appraisal to be correct. Although substantially outnumbered (78,513 to 122,009), Lee dealt Burnside and the Army of the Potomac a catastrophic defeat, inflicting 12,653 casualties for his own losses of 4,201 killed, wounded, or missing.

  Lincoln replaced Burnside with Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker, who proclaimed, “May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.” Hooker commanded an Army of the Potomac that now mustered nearly 134,000 men, whereas Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia amounted to no more than 60,298. Lopsided though the numbers were, the Battle of Chancellorsville (April 30–May 6, 1863) was Lee’s tactical masterpiece—arguably the tactical masterpiece of the Civil War itself. Once again, Lee divided his forces in the presence of the enemy, dispatching his cavalry to control the roads and bottle up Union reinforcements at Fredericksburg while 26,000 men under Stonewall Jackson surprised Hooker’s flank even as he, Lee, personally commanded a force of 17,000 against Hooker’s front. The result stunned the Union general into utter confusion. Jackson’s surprise attack routed an entire corps and drove the principal portion of Hooker’s army out of its well-prepared defensive positions. By May 2, the Army of the Potomac, though it outnumbered the Army of Northern Virginia two to one, had been sent into headlong retreat.

  Yet Lee understood that he was in no position to bask in his triumph, great as it was. Hooker had suffered 17,287 casualties, but he himself had lost 13,303 killed, wounded, captured, or missing—all out of a much smaller force. Hooker’s casualty rate was roughly 13 percent, whereas his own was a staggering 22 percent. Despite the victories he delivered, Lee was convinced that the Confederacy could not endure such attrition much longer. He therefore resolved to once again invade the North. This time, his objective was Pennsylvania. Not only did he want to raid the countryside for much-needed provisions, Lee believed a successful invasion would utterly demoralize the North and erode its will to continue the war while also opening up an avenue for an assault on Washington itself. This, he believed, would cost Lincoln reelection and bring into office a Democrat willing to conclude a negotiated end to the Civil War.

  The grim fate of Lee’s aspirations for the Battle of Gettysburg is one of the subjects of Chapter 4. Defeated badly here, Lee was nevertheless able to withdraw back into Virginia, his army diminished but still very much intact. He would lead it next against his most formidable adversary, Ulysses S. Grant, in the Civil War’s culminating Virginia battles. In many of these engagements, Lee would, in fact, beat Grant. But, unlike the other Union opponents Lee had confronted, Grant responded to defeat not with retreat, but with continued advance toward Richmond. Each advance forced Lee to pit his dwindling Army of Northern Virginia against Grant’s continually reinforced army. The Union general understood and embraced the ultimate calculus of the Civil War, which was that the North could afford to spend more lives than the South and could replenish most of its losses.

  Lee’s objective in the final months of the war was to make his own increasingly inevitable defeat so costly to the Union that the people of the North might demand a negotiated settlement after all. Costly he did make it, but, in the end, Robert E. Lee felt compelled to admit
defeat. In this admission was perhaps the most profound and enduring significance of his elevation to top command of Confederate forces. For as he had been uncompromising in his quest for victory, so he proved equally uncompromising in his manner of surrender. He secured from Grant the best terms possible, namely the right of his men to return to their homes unmolested and without loss of honor. In return for this, he exercised his character and influence to ensure that the war would in fact end rather than devolve into a long and lawless guerrilla struggle, which is the fate of so many civil conflicts throughout history.

  12

  July 4, 1863

  Vicksburg falls to Grant

  Why it’s significant: The successful conclusion to Grant’s epic siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4, 1863, secured Union control of the Mississippi River and its vast valley, cutting the Confederacy in two and effectively ending any hope for a Southern victory. With the Union triumph at Gettysburg the day before, the fall of Vicksburg was a major turning point in the war.

  BY THE TIME of the Civil War, Winfield Scott, who had begun his military career before the War of 1812 and who, more than any other American military leader, brought victory in the US-Mexican War of 1846–1848, was too old and, at considerably more than 300 pounds, much too fat to sit on a horse, let alone ride one. His corpulence and relative immobility had not extinguished his affection for ornate uniforms. His raiment was resplendent in gold leaves, massive epaulettes, and a bicorne hat that put Napoleon’s in the shade. The picture was laughable, but, forgetting the hero of earlier days, one of the nation’s truly prodigious military figures, the press saw only the gilded brass and the aging flesh. He was widely dismissed as “Old Fuss and Feathers,” and his plan for victory was denounced as inglorious, even cowardly. Rather than waste lives in a fruitless offensive against Richmond, Scott proposed a naval blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and simultaneous seizure of control over Mississippi River navigation. This accomplished, he wanted to conduct an offensive not from the front but from the western flank.

  Scorned in 1861, “Scott’s Anaconda” (so called because the naval blockade was supposed to strangle the South in the manner of some great constrictor) was looking pretty good by 1863. With the spectacular growth of the Union navy, the blockade was inexorably throttling the South, and, while the war raged hottest near the eastern seaboard, Major General Henry Wager Halleck, the army’s general in chief from July 1862 to March 1864, observed, “the opening of the Mississippi River will be to us more advantage than the capture of forty Richmonds,” in effect echoing Scott’s original assertion. As Ulysses S. Grant explained long after the war in his Personal Memoirs, the Mississippi town of “Vicksburg was the only channel … connecting parts of the Confederacy divided by the Mississippi. So long as it was held by the enemy, the free navigation of the river was prevented. Hence its importance.”

  In 1862, while the attention of most of the nation, North and South, was focused on the bloody duel between the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac in the southeast, Grant was taking Fort Henry on the Tennessee River (February 6, 1862) and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland (February 11–16, 1862). Confederate Major General Edmund Kirby Smith, having pulled out of Knoxville, Tennessee, invaded Kentucky in August 1862, and Confederate General Braxton Bragg and Union General Don Carlos Buell contested ground in these states. Gradually, Buell’s pressure pushed the fighting farther southwest, into Mississippi. On September 19, 1862, Confederate Sterling Price suffered a sharp defeat at the hands of William S. Rosecrans, one of Grant’s subordinates, at Iuka, Mississippi. Driven even farther south, Price linked up with General Earl Van Dorn to attack Corinth, Mississippi, which Rosecrans occupied. It was a brutal battle (October 3–4, 1862) between almost evenly matched forces—23,000 Federals against 22,000 Confederates—but Rosecrans, who lost 2,520 killed, wounded, missing, and captured, achieved a decisive victory, forcing Price and Van Dorn into retreat (with 4,233 casualties between them) and leaving Braxton Bragg stranded in Kentucky, cut off without hope of reinforcement. Buell struck against Bragg at the Battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862) but, even with vast numerical superiority—55,000 versus 16,000—Buell achieved no more than a costly strategic victory. The Confederates were pushed out of Kentucky, but Buell was replaced by William S. Rosecrans as commander of the Department of the Ohio.

  In truth, the Union’s real problem in the Western Theater was not the generals in the field, but the general behind the desk. General-in-Chief Henry Halleck was known throughout the army as “Old Brains,” and it was hardly an affectionate sobriquet. A bureaucrat more than a soldier, he was more interested in occupying territory than in killing the enemy. For this reason, he broadcast his forces widely and thinly over the vast theater. Grant, in contrast, understood—and his victories at Forts Henry and Donelson proved—that success required concentration of forces for battle, one battle at a time. It wasn’t that Grant was competent and Halleck not. It was that Grant’s experience in the war with Mexico taught him the value of rapid movement and violent offensive, whereas Halleck, a student of the Napoleonic Wars, measured victory not by body count, but by the acquisition of ground. Halleck had about 100,000 men at his disposal in the Western Theater. Had he used these to attack the smaller Confederate forces there, he might have destroyed the Confederate military presence west of the Appalachians and thereby positioned the Union army to do what Scott had originally proposed: attack the Confederacy west to east, on its vulnerable western flank. Instead, he continued to conduct the war mainly in the southeast, with Richmond as his ultimate objective.

  Subordinate to Old Brains, Grant did what he could with what he was given. Once Kentucky was secured in October 1862, he returned to his advance down the Mississippi, and that brought him up against the problem of Vicksburg. It was a fortress town, the Confederacy’s “Gibraltar of the West,” located on a sheer bluff overlooking the Mississippi at a sharp river bend to the southwest. Any vessels, including gunboats and transports, navigating here would have to slow down to make the turn and would therefore be fully exposed to artillery fire from the bluff. In addition to its natural defenses, Vicksburg was ringed by a six-and-a-half-mile defensive line that was a veritable catalog of nineteenth-century fortification as taught at West Point. There were field fortifications such as firing holes and trenches. Most of them were linked to built-up redoubts, which were typically constructed as crescent-shaped fortifications (“lunettes”). At wider intervals along all the defensive lines were full-scale forts: Fort Hill, Square Fort, South Fort, Stockade Redan, 3rd Louisiana Redan, and the Great Redoubt. All of the Vicksburg fortifications, big and small, were skillfully etched into the natural terrain so as to stop or slow any attacker. The slower the progress of an attack, the heavier the toll the artillery would take.

  In December 1862, when Grant initiated his campaign to take Vicksburg, he had 35,000 men on hand. Reinforcements were available on short notice as well. His adversary, Confederate Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, commanded a garrison of just 18,500. Nevertheless, they were covered by the Vicksburg defenses, so that the disparity in numbers mattered little. Grant had proven himself aggressive, both in open battle and in assault on fortifications, but he was not foolishly wedded to the frontal assault. He was willing to take casualties, but he was not willing to suffer them without the realistic prospect of positive results. Grant therefore understood that he would need to devise an alternative to a futile frontal attack. And now he revealed himself as that rarest of commanders, one who is driven by an aggressive bias for the offense, yet with a judgment tempered by patience and method. His first step was to establish a well-defended forward base at Holly Springs, Mississippi. This would serve as the rallying point for what he planned as a siege force of 40,000 troops. They would be loaded onto rail cars for transportation on the Mississippi Central Railroad right-of-way to link up 32,000 soldiers commanded by William Tecumseh Sherman, who was transporting them via river steamers.


  Earl Van Dorn was not about to let Grant’s build-up proceed unopposed. On December 20, he hit the encampment of the 8th Wisconsin Regiment as the Federals slept. From here, Van Dorn’s raiders dashed through Holly Springs, where they put to the torch a massive stockpile of Grant’s supplies. Propelled by their triumphal momentum, the Confederates hit Union outpost after outpost. While this was happening, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the fiercest Confederate cavalry commander in the Western Theater, set out to destroy as much of the Mississippi Central Railway’s track as possible. His troopers managed to rip up well over sixty miles of rail. Between them, the two Confederate generals had dealt Grant a harsh rebuff. He could not tie into Sherman for an attack on the Confederate position at Chickasaw Bluffs, to the north of Vicksburg. Sherman nevertheless attempted to take his objective with what he had. It was not enough. After engaging the enemy during December 27–29, he reported to Grant: “I reached Vicksburg at the time appointed, landed, assaulted, and failed.”