The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  15

  May 20, 1862

  Congress Passes the Homestead Act of 1862

  Why it’s significant. Despite battlefield disappointments and with no end of the Civil War in sight, President Lincoln affirmed faith in the triumph of the Union by supporting a huge—mostly immigrant—population settlement project, a great national educational initiative, and an epic transportation construction project.

  FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT signed the G.I. Bill (officially the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act) into law on June 22, 1944. Two things were remarkable about it. First, it provided America’s returning veterans unprecedented access to low-cost mortgages, business loans, help with tuition (high school, vocational school, and college), a year of unemployment compensation, and other benefits. Second, the law was enacted in the midst of the biggest, most desperately fought war the world had ever known. This second fact proclaimed to the people of America—and the world—that the war would end, it would end in an American triumph, and the nation would emerge from the ordeal better and stronger than when it had entered it.

  Roosevelt and his advisers could look back to the legislation passed during another immense and desperate war to find a strategic precedent for what the administration was doing. On May 20, 1862, amid heartbreaking battle outcomes and with no end to the Civil War in sight, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the first Homestead Act, authorizing any citizen (or immigrant who intended to become a citizen) to select any surveyed but unclaimed parcel of public land up to 160 acres, settle it, improve it, and, by living on it for five years, gain title to it. It was legislation that had been promised in the Republican Party platform of 1860.

  Like FDR eighty-two years later, Lincoln wanted to show the people of America and the millions of Europeans thinking of immigrating to America that the United States had a future. In fact, the Homestead Act of 1862 was just one of four pieces of wartime legislation designed to make this point. The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 created land-grant colleges and universities with agricultural and “mechanical” programs intended to cultivate an educated citizenry throughout the nation, and the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 and 1863 promoted the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Like the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad Acts would help to settle and bind the nation along its east-west axis even as it was torn apart North from South. All four legislative actions were acts of national faith and defiant statements of the Union’s argument against the Confederacy. For these were acts of a nation that envisioned a united future.

  Lincoln’s forward-looking, future-affirming legislation also looked back to the ideological spirit in which the nation was founded. From colonial days, the “American dream” was based on a free, landholding citizenry. The history of the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be viewed as a succession of American Wests, starting with the trans-Appalachian Ohio Valley and the Old Northwest and moving west to the Mississippi Valley, the settling of the Great Plains, the journey across the wide Missouri, and the settling of the Far West. The westward-moving frontier was a place where families could prosper on their own land, and the acts Lincoln signed into law each affirmed and facilitated this American Dream.

  To claim their grant of 160 acres from the surveyed public domain, applicants had to meet an age qualification (twenty-one or older) and be the head of a family (regardless of gender). They were required to sign affidavits certifying their intention to use the land for their individual benefit by settling on it and cultivating it. To obtain full and final title to the land, the settler had to live on the homestead at least five years, make improvements (at least build a house), and pay a nominal registration fee. For those who could pony up $1.25 per acre—no small sum in the 1860s—they could “commute” their claim and obtain title to the land after just six months of residence.

  There was a kicker in the affidavit, which required applicants to assert that they had “never borne arms against the United States or aided its enemies.” This provision was a legal means of discriminating against Southerners, even those who returned to the North and professed loyalty to the Union. The provision, however, was included less to punish Southerners than to ensure that Northerners and Westerners would settle the new lands, bringing with them the social values of those regions. Indeed, as it began to move through Congress, the Homestead Bill helped to forge a political alliance between the Northeast and the West, which brought further unity to the Union. This alliance grew out of a thirty-year trend; for, when a homestead bill was first discussed in the 1830s, New England abolitionists saw it as a means of settling the Western territories in land packets too small to accommodate plantations. Since slavery was largely a plantation phenomenon—slaves were cheap and abundant labor to work large tracts of agricultural land—ensuring that the West would be settled in family-farm-sized parcels would discourage pro-slavery sentiment in the region.

  By the 1860s, the homestead idea was very popular. True, there were some dissenters in the industrialized Northeast, who feared that homesteading would draw away labor from their region, but, by the time the bill was being seriously considered with the approach of the Civil War, a boom in European immigration was supplying the region with all the labor it needed. Moreover, northeastern captains of industry saw in the West a source of mineral wealth that would supply the raw materials for many of their manufacturing operations. At the same time, peopling the West would create whole new markets for the manufactured goods of the Northeast. While passing the Homestead Act in the midst of war was a bold move, it may also have been true that only with the South out of the picture could the act ever have been passed. Throughout the 1850s, Southern members of Congress consistently nipped homestead measures in the bud. Southerners feared—quite rightly—that homesteading would make agriculture in the West a family affair, a business of 160-acre parcels, and that the states that would be created out of the homestead territory would have no incentive not to vote themselves free.

  Passed in 1862, the Homestead Act went into effect on January 1, 1863, and between 1863 and 1880, nearly 500,000 applications were filed for about fifty-six million acres. A bit more than half of these—257,385 entries—were carried all the way to the issuance of a full title. As impressive as these numbers are, the homestead legislation was responsible for only a sixth of the farms in states and territories where the legislation applied. Homesteaders were obliged to choose from among whatever parcels the government had available. Many of these were in remote locations and even in arid or semiarid regions or regions far from optimal for farming. Settlers who could afford to buy western land privately were often able to obtain the choicest acreage, closer to towns and with more fertile soil. Indeed, the homesteaders—settlers who took advantage of the act—not only had limited choices in where they could stake their claim, but, short on capital, they often were unable to make even the rudimentary improvements required to obtain permanent title to their grant. Even those who managed to build often commanded insufficient means to purchase livestock, machinery, and other requisites of successful farming. Subsequent legislation, after the original 1862 act, addressed some of these deficiencies, but there is no question that the Homestead Act, along with the Morrill Act and the Pacific Railroad Act, made for powerful pro-Union propaganda during the war. They put the United States on the side of those who aspired to the American dream and ensured that it would remain a compelling destination for immigrants from abroad. The legislation made the stakes of the Civil War very personal. For only a great, unified, and free nation could fulfill for each and every citizen the promise of opportunity and the hope for new beginnings.

  Indeed, the Homestead Act linked the concept of a democratic American Union with the idea of the American family farm. In contrast to the cruelty of the slave plantation of the Confederate South, the Union farm was pictured as a loving partnership between husband and wife who created a legacy for their children. As the Civil War ultimately perfected the ideals of American independ
ence by liberating those Americans held in bondage, homesteading created in the family farm an enduring national ideal.

  For a time following the end of the Civil War, homesteading was also promoted as a way of helping newly free African Americans to live truly independent lives. In 1866, a Southern Homestead Act opened to settlement remaining public lands in the former Confederate states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, specifying the land’s availability to African Americans as well as to white Southern loyalists. It was envisioned that the black homesteads would become “cities of refuge” for former slaves. The reality, however, fell far short of the aspiration. The Southern homesteading lands were often ill-suited to agriculture. The soil was of poor quality, and there was an abundance of trees that had to be removed, stumps and all. Add to this the menace of the local and very hostile white population, and it is no wonder that the Freedman’s Bureau, which had responsibility for supervising the Southern homesteading program, settled no more than about 4,000 African American families, 75 percent of them in Florida. Only a handful homesteaded in Alabama, and while more families headed for Texas, most of them stopped short and squatted, illegally, in Louisiana without ever filing claims. The Southern Homestead Act was repealed in 1876 when Reconstruction came to an abrupt end in the corrupt bargain that quieted the objections of Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for Hayes’s pledge to end Reconstruction and return full sovereignty to the ex-Confederate states. Public lands throughout the South were sold to timber cartels, and African American homesteaders lit out for farms in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Colorado.

  For other American minorities, the homestead movement compiled a mixed record when it came to making the American dream a reality. For Hispanics, homestead laws actually disrupted the old communal ways of farm life lived around villages and shared pastures. On their own, many Hispanic families were too poor to improve their homestead claims, which, as a result, they ultimately forfeited. Native Americans—at least in some cases—did benefit from the homesteading, but relatively few families applied.

  Of all the American “minority” groups, women benefitted the most. In contrast to most federal and state laws of the era relating to property, the Homestead Act explicitly allowed women to apply for homesteads. The law did stipulate that female filers had to be single and over twenty-one years of age or the heads of households. For a half-century from implementation of the law in 1863, women homesteaded western lands in unprecedented numbers. In the early years of homesteading, female filers made up just 5 percent of all homesteaders, but the fraction rose to nearly 20 percent by 1900.

  Although the Homestead Act of 1862 was an affirmation of national values and the American dream, the life of the homesteader was never easy. As a rule, a family sent the father or the older sons out first to stake a claim and to build at least a crude dwelling on it. This accomplished, the mother and other children soon followed. The plains were far from a uniformly hospitable place. Often compared to a sea of grass, the prairie was solitary and raked by extreme weather—storms, 100-degree-plus temperatures in the summer, and temperatures that could dip into the negative 30s during the winter. Locusts and other destructive pests were prevalent. But the single greatest obstacle to farming was the hard-packed, root-bound soil itself, which had to be broken up before it would yield to the plow’s blade. From this, the homesteader earned a new name—sodbuster. And while the sod was an obstacle, in the absence of timber on the thinly forested prairie, sod was also the material from which many homesteaders built their first—sometimes their only—house. Typically, the sodbuster would excavate a rectangular “dugout” about six feet deep and then build it up above the surface of the ground with “bricks” cut from the hard-packed sod. The four walls were roofed with boards, straw, and more sod.

  Enacted in the democratic spirit that made the United States what Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called the “last best hope of earth,” the Homestead Act and subsequent legislation enduringly democratized public land policy—even though only about 10 percent of available Western land actually went to homesteaders. For all its hardships, the cultural and political influence of the homestead movement that was born in the Civil War extended well beyond the span of that war. By bringing families into the West, homesteading fixed in the American imagination the idea of the region as a land of opportunity, enterprise, perpetual renewal and optimism. This enduring Western identity is one of the most important and unexpected legacies of the Civil War.

  16

  May 2, 1863

  Stonewall Jackson Falls to Friendly Fire at Chancellorsville

  Why it’s significant. December of 1862 brought the Union a catastrophic defeat at Fredericksburg, which was followed in the spring of the next year by an even costlier defeat at Chancellorsville. Celebrated as “Lee’s masterpiece,” Chancellorsville was, in fact, a pyrrhic victory, gained at the loss of 22 percent of the Army of Virginia, including Lee’s greatest general, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Whereas the Union could endure two major defeats, Robert E. Lee was convinced that the Confederacy could not long survive another victory like that at Chancellorsville. He therefore decided to invade the North.

  NO GENERAL ENGAGES in battle to lose. The great generals want to achieve not only victory, but to create what military historians call a masterpiece—a tactical and strategic triumph that leverages sacrifice for the greatest, war-winning effect. As they approached the Battle of Chancellorsville (April 30-May 6, 1863), both Joseph Hooker, commanding the Army of the Potomac, and Robert E. Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia, were looking to create just such a masterpiece.

  The Union’s Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker graduated from West Point with the Class of 1837. He served in the Second Seminole War and the US-Mexican War, in which he fought with great gallantry but then testified against his commanding officer, Winfield Scott, in the court martial of another officer. Scott responded to this breach of loyalty by refusing to give Hooker any official assignment during the years following the war with Mexico. This prompted Hooker to resign his commission in 1853, and when, five years later, he wrote to the secretary of war to ask for a position as lieutenant general, his letter went unanswered. For this reason, he became one of many civilian spectators watching the First Battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861). Afterward, he wrote to President Lincoln: “I was at … Bull Run … and it is neither vanity nor boasting in me to declare that I am a damned sight better general than you, sir, had on that field.” Lincoln must have agreed. He responded to the letter by commissioning Hooker a brigadier general of volunteers.

  Hooker’s disloyalty to Scott and his unmannerly missive to Lincoln were typical of his brash and grating personality, which would make him one of the most unpopular commanders in the Union army—at least as far as his fellow officers were concerned. He was outspoken in his condemnation of his own commanding general, George B. McClellan, whom he mocked as an “infant among soldiers.” There was no happiness in the US Army when, following Ambrose Burnside’s tragic failure against Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Fredericksburg (December 11–15, 1862) and the heartbreaking “Mud March” that followed, he was replaced as commanding general of the Army of the Potomac by Hooker.

  The public had no particular loyalty to Burnside, but they were disposed to dislike Hooker, who was widely regarded as so ruthlessly ambitious that loyalty to brother officers never entered into his calculations. Still, he had a winning record as a commander, and, even though he was cordially hated by the officer corps, the common soldier had both respect and affection for him. Hooker was, in fact, very effective in restoring the post-Fredericksburg morale of the Army of the Potomac. He did this not with stern speeches, but by obtaining for his soldiers the things they most needed and wanted: better clothing, shelter, and palatable food. Something as simple as replacing the dreaded Union staple, hardtack—a tasteless cracker so hard that it was universally known as “to
oth duller”—with freshly baked bread lifted spirits and won the loyalty of soldiers who now had reason to believe that their commanding officer cared about them.

  Militarily, Hooker was—at least by comparison with most other Union officers—an innovative thinker. He recognized that Union cavalry was being poorly and inadequately used. Hooker took a new tack and vigorously employed the cavalry for aggressive advanced reconnaissance. Understanding that early intelligence about the enemy was of no use if it could not be conveyed to headquarters quickly, Hooker authorized the creation of the first United States Air Force. He hired civilian balloonists to serve as artillery spotters. Instead of relying on rickety observation towers, he sent them aloft in tethered balloons. A telegraph wire was bound to the tether, running along its length, thereby allowing a Signal Corps telegrapher who accompanied the spotter to tap out in Morse code his observations in real time. Despite his forward thinking, Hooker had the fatal flaw of hubris. In the early spring of 1863, he boasted: “May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.”

  But, to give Hooker due credit, he meant to use his reinvigorated Army of the Potomac as it had never been used before—as an all-out, go-for-broke, maximum-effort instrument of war. He had nearly 134,000 men, and he knew Lee had 60,000 at most. In contrast to the likes of McClellan, Hooker believed in his vast numerical advantage and intended to use it. In contrast to Burnside, who repeated the same unsuccessful head-on tactics no fewer than fourteen disastrous times at Fredericksburg, Hooker had formulated what he believed would be a military masterpiece. His plan included a diversionary attack by Major General John Sedgwick leading a third of the army across the Rappahannock above the Confederate entrenchments at Fredericksburg. Once in position, Sedgwick would attack, forcing Lee to focus his undermanned army against him while he, Hooker, led another third of the army up along the Rappahannock, then wheeled about sharply to fall upon Lee’s left flank and rear. The result would be an envelopment in which the Army of Northern Virginia would be crushed between two thirds of the Army of the Potomac. While this pincers action was under way, Hooker held in readiness the remaining third of his army at nearby Chancellorsville. It would be deployed to reinforce either Sedgwick or Hooker—whichever force required it. Hooker also reserved an ambitious role for the Cavalry Corps, under Brigadier General George Stoneman. Ten thousand troopers would make a series of lightning raids on Lee’s lines of communication to Richmond, thereby cutting off the Army of Northern Virginia from both retreat and reinforcement.