The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War
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Many onlookers had watched the action of March 8 from shore, and newspaper correspondents were transmitting detailed reports by telegraph. Washington buzzed with rumors of an indestructible Confederate ironclad that was preparing to steam up the Potomac and fire on the Capitol and the White House. There were fears that Washington would be bombarded with incendiaries and burned as it had been by the British during the War of 1812. Even President Lincoln was sufficiently alarmed to convene an emergency Cabinet meeting. The result was quite unsatisfactory, however. No one present could think of any expedient more useful than earnest and immediate prayer.
Nevertheless, although the appearance of CSS Virginia had baffled Union sailors, this was not the first that Union navy brass had heard of the vessel. Months earlier, Union spies in Virginia had reported on the work being done to salvage and reconfigure USS Merrimack. In October 1861, Congress responded by appropriating funds for a contract with John Ericsson, a Swedish-born New York mechanical engineer who specialized in designing and building steam locomotives and steamships. His commission was to build an iron steamship—not a wooden ship clad in iron. It was to be a warship capable of sinking a similar vessel. The Navy and Congress were aware that Ericsson had already designed such a ship, which he had tried (without success) to persuade Napoleon III to let him build for the French navy. They were confident that he knew what to do. The thing is, they wanted him to do it in just 100 days, from design to launch.
Ericsson labored day and night, but the vessel was not yet ready to launch on day 100. When Washington sent him secret intelligence that the Confederate ironclad was very near completion, however, he redoubled his efforts and managed to launch USS Monitor on March 6 from New York. There was no time for testing or troubleshooting. The vessel’s shakedown cruise would be its voyage down the coast to do battle in Hampton Roads.
Monitor may have been the ugliest warship ever created. It rode even lower in the water than the much larger Virginia, and instead of a casemate with multiple guns rising from its deck, it had a single cylindrical object that made the vessel look like what some derided as a “tin can on a shingle” and others as a “cheesebox on a raft.” But this ungainly looking “can” or “cheesebox” was actually the most innovative and remarkable feature of the Monitor. It was something never before seen on a ship—or on land, for that matter. Ericsson had invented the revolving gun turret, which held two massive eleven-inch smoothbore Dahlgrens. Thanks to the turret’s steam-powered gearing, they could be rotated into any direction for firing. Whereas conventional warships—even the Virginia—had to be sailed and maneuvered in order to bring their guns to bear as desired on a target, the guns of USS Monitor could be aimed 360 degrees independently of the ship’s direction and orientation. The time and exposure to enemy fire this saved were incalculable.
True, much like the Virginia, the Monitor was not a “handy” ship. She was not agile. In fact, she was barely seaworthy. Moreover, her top speed was six knots, no better than her adversary—though Virginia had been compromised and slowed by battle damage. If Virginia rode very low in the water, the Monitor rode even lower, so low that any moderate swell, let alone a really rough sea, threatened to swamp her.
Despite Monitor’s shortcomings, the untested vessel, under Lieutenant John L. Worden, arrived in Hampton Roads on the morning of March 9. Call it what it was: the nick of time. Worden immediately grasped that the grounded Minnesota was the ship in greatest immediate danger, and so he steamed into a position covering it and then lay in wait for the anticipated appearance of CSS Virginia. The Confederate ship heaved into sight at nine.
We don’t know if the captain and crew of the Confederate vessel had any advance knowledge of the Union’s iron ship of war, but there was no sign that anyone aboard the Virginia was shocked. The Confederate ship opened fire on the Monitor immediately, and for the next three hours the ironclad and the iron ship rained down upon one another a storm of iron.
The two vessels were not precisely matched. Monitor was smaller and, while far from highly maneuverable, was considerably more maneuverable than CSS Virginia. This advantage was multiplied by its rotating turret, which could keep its adversary in the line of fire at virtually all times. Nevertheless, the contenders landed blows that seemed to have no permanent effect—at least not on the hulls of the ships. What the combat did to the human beings aboard those ships was something else however. The crash of iron projectiles against iron plate was relentless. The ears of crew members on both ships bled as eardrums burst. But it was not just these delicate human membranes that tore. The multiple shockwaves assaulted the entire body, beginning with the soles of the men’s feet, which were in contact with the deck. They ached and bled copiously, even though the skin was unbroken. Some crew members found themselves wading in the blood that filled their shoes.
Prior to this three-hour combat, naval battles constituted a history of captain against captain, crew against crew. The contest between Monitor and Virginia was very different. It was a fight of machine against machine, of iron against iron. The flesh-and-blood beings who were in nominal control of the battle were really at the mercy of their relentless machines. Lieutenant Worden occupied the Monitor’s cramped iron pilot house. There were no windows to the world outside, just narrow observation slits sliced through the iron. Amid the pounding, Worden would press his eye against one of the slits, as if he were a jousting knight squinting through the visor of his unwieldy helmet. At about noon, one of Virginia’s shells exploded against the pilot house wall, throwing Worden back from his observation slit in excruciating pain. He was blinded—temporarily, it turned out—but he was deprived of sight for the remainder of the battle. He turned over command to his first officer, Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene, who later recalled that Worden “was a ghastly sight, with his eyes closed and the blood apparently rushing from every pore in the upper part of his face.”
Greene’s first task was to get USS Monitor back under control. “In the confusion of the moment resulting from so serious an injury to the commanding officer, the Monitor had been moving without direction.” Greene could see, however, that CSS Virginia was taking on water—“leaking badly”—and was therefore withdrawing toward the Elizabeth River. Greene did not want to break off the fight, and so he continued to fire “at the retiring vessel.” But the Virginia was making for Norfolk and the safety of Confederate shore batteries. Not wanting to get within their range, Greene, like it or not, concluded that the “fight was over.”
Historians assess the two-day Battle of Hampton Roads as a draw, although it was the Virginia that suffered the greater damage, the Virginia that withdrew, and the Virginia that left the grounded Minnesota without delivering the coup de grâce. Both vessels were products of new developments in industrial technology. The difference was that Virginia had been built on the salvaged foundation of an earlier period of naval warfare, whereas the Monitor was the product of entirely new invention and innovation. This gave it an edge, however narrow.
Neither ship went on to a history of further glory. USS Monitor served as a gunboat on the James River at the Battle of Drewry’s Bluff (May 15, 1862), providing naval artillery support to the Army of the Potomac. But that, its second battle, was also its last. The ship was lost at sea in a storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina on New Year’s Eve 1862. The Virginia did not even last as long as the Monitor. She ran aground on May 11, 1862. Unable to break her free, her crew set her aflame.
The brevity of the combatant vessels’ lives notwithstanding, their duel at Hampton Roads profoundly transformed naval warfare. What is more, the transformation began almost immediately. Before the war ended, the US Navy built and deployed some twenty-nine “monitors,” as the new class of ship was called. The Confederate Navy purchased (from Britain and from France) or built at least thirty-one “ironclad batteries.” Like the Virginia, these were wooden-hull vessels clad with iron or steel plates. They were not intended for high seas use, but as maneuverable, steam-powered floati
ng gun batteries for shore defense. But it was the Monitor and the “Monitor class” of vessels it inspired that, by the end of the nineteenth century, evolved into the modern battleship, with multiple arrays of turreted guns. The battleship spelled an end to the era of wood and sail and became the symbol of the global projection of military power through the mid-twentieth century. During World War II, however, the battleship itself was supplanted by the submarine and the aircraft carrier. Of these two innovations in naval warfare, the submarine had made a brief and tragic appearance in the Civil War as the doomed Hunley.
The Civil War’s most profound impact on the future of warfare was not, of course, limited to naval innovations. But what ships like the Hunley, Virginia, and Monitor represented was radical innovation driven by technological economies. The wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be, like the Civil War, the products of industrial civilization.
21
Lest We Forget
TWENTY IS AN arbitrary number of “most significant” events. Why not twenty-five? Twenty-three? Well, why not twenty + ten? In my judgment, the following ten events may not have had as great an impact on the Civil War and American history as the preceding twenty, but they are highly significant nevertheless and should not be forgotten. They are discussed in chronological order.
South Carolina Secedes from the Union, December 20, 1860
With the highest percentage of slaves among the Southern states—57 percent of the population owned by 46 percent of white families—South Carolina was more invested than any other state in slavery as the foundation of an economy and a way of life. Prior to the election of 1860, a South Carolina politician named Alfred P. Aldrich proclaimed: “If the Republican party with its platform of principles, the main feature of which is the abolition of slavery and, therefore, the destruction of the South, carries the country at the next Presidential election, shall we remain in the Union, or form a separate Confederacy? This is the great, grave issue. It is not who shall be President, it is not which party shall rule—it is a question of political and social existence.” It was this mindset that equated secession with survival for the South, and it prompted passage, on November 9, 1860, three days after the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln as president, a South Carolina General Assembly “Resolution to Call the Election of Abraham Lincoln as US President a Hostile Act.” The very next day, November 10, the Assembly called for a secession “Convention of the People of South Carolina,” which was convened on December 17 and voted unanimously to leave the Union. Three days after this, the state formally enacted an ordinance of secession.
This sequence of events is remarkable for four things:
• Its assertion of life-or-death stakes for the state, the Southern economy, and the Southern way of life.
• Its absolute assumption that, under a Republican administration, no compromise on slavery was possible.
• The speed with which secession proceeded.
• The unanimity driving secession.
Just as remarkable was the response of the federal government under lame-duck President James Buchanan. Declaring the secession ordinance illegal, he did nothing to act against it. From this, the South concluded that, while the federal government objected to secession, it would—perhaps could—do little to stop it. The example of South Carolina, together with Buchanan’s feckless response to it, inspired the eventual secession of six more states—Mississippi (January 9, 1861), Florida (January 10), Alabama (January 11), Georgia (January 19), Louisiana (January 26), and Texas (February 1; referendum, February 23)—prior to the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln on March 4, 1861. After the attack on Fort Sumter (April 12–14, Chapter 3) and Lincoln’s call for volunteers (April 15), four more states seceded: Virginia (April 17; referendum, May 23), Arkansas (May 6), Tennessee (May 7; referendum, June 8), and North Carolina (May 20). South Carolina took secession from a doctrine to an action, which, on May 20, 1861, became the fact of the eleven Confederate States of America.
The United States Sanitary Commission Is Authorized, June 8, 1861
Although the Civil War tore the nation apart, it also elevated the federal government to unprecedented supremacy in American life. Indeed, historians have often argued that the Civil War was the Second American Revolution, the revolution that transformed what had been a federation of separate states into a true nation, a place in which people no longer identified themselves as Ohioans or Virginians, but as Americans. Nevertheless, the demands of the war on both sides also revealed the limits of the central government’s power and competency. In both the Union and the Confederacy, recruitment and mobilization efforts were overwhelmingly the responsibility of the states. It was the states that took primary responsibility for raising and, to a large extent, training and equipping the needed regiments.
Where both the central governments and the state governments fell short in these tasks, the Civil War brought out the power of collective and individual civilian volunteerism. Both the national and state governments turned to newly created charitable and civic organizations in part simply to help feed and clothe the troops, but, far more extensively, to care for them when they were sick or wounded. Mid-nineteenth-century industrial technology and mass production had produced weapons, both shoulder arms and artillery, of unprecedented efficiency and destructive power. The wounds these weapons produced were of an abundance and severity that far outstripped the capacity of mid-nineteenth-century medicine to cure, treat, or even palliate adequately. Military medicine, in particular, was hardly up to the monumental task the war represented.
In the Confederacy, civic organizations such as Association for the Relief of Maimed Soldiers (which furnished prosthetics to Confederate amputees), the Georgia Relief and Hospital Association (furnished medicines, bandages, and other supplies to military hospitals and subsidized the services of civilian physicians), the Richmond Ambulance Committee (supported, fed, and transported wounded Confederate soldiers from the battle front to hospitals in the rear), and hundreds of small, local women’s relief organizations (which collected clothing, food, and medical supplies and provided volunteer female nursing services) did their best to fill a huge gap in medical and basic humanitarian aid to wounded troops.
Although the Union Army’s medical department was better equipped and more adequately staffed than its Confederate counterpart, it was nevertheless inadequate to care for the massive numbers of wounded and sick soldiers the war produced. The principal civilian aid organization in the North was the United States Sanitary Commission. It was established by federal legislation on June 18, 1861, but it was a totally private organization, founded by a prominent clergyman, Henry Whitney Bellows, and the great American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who modeled the organization on the British Sanitary Commission, which had been created during the Crimean War (1853–56). Like the American Civil War, it was a conflict that produced wounded and sick soldiers in numbers beyond the ability of the army and the government to care for them.
The remarkable United States Sanitary Commission operated using funds raised by public contributions, often obtained through public “Sanitary Fairs” the organization staged. Organization volunteers inspected Union camps and hospitals with an eye toward improving sanitary conditions. The commission collected clothing, food, medicines, and medical supplies and subsidized civilian nursing care for the sick and wounded. The Commission inspired the creation of other private aid organizations, most notably the United States Christian Commission (an activity of the YMCA of New York, which became famous for the food and coffee wagons it sent to the front) and the Western Sanitary Commission (established in St. Louis in 1861, it addressed the often-neglected problems of the war’s “Western Theater” and set up hospital kitchens, furnished medical supplies, and even outfitted a paddle steamer, the City of Louisiana, as a hospital ship). Without the efforts of private citizens on both sides of the Civil War, the conflict would have been even more brutal and barbaric than it was.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis, anxious to hammer out an alliance with England and France, appointed James M. Mason of Virginia minister to England and John Slidell of Louisiana minister to France. He sent the pair to Europe and assigned them to negotiate both diplomatic recognition of the Confederate States of America and formal alliances.
Getting them safely to Europe was not easy. The pair slipped out of Charleston on a blockade runner in October and made it to Havana. There, Mason and Slidell boarded a British mail packet, the Trent, which was headed for England. Officially, Great Britain was neutral in the American Civil War—though various English manufacturers and shipbuilders began covertly supplying the Confederacy with arms and vessels in violation of British neutrality laws. Under universally accepted international law, the US could not touch Mason and Slidell as long as they were on board a neutral vessel, which offered them protection.
As luck would have it, the USS San Jacinto, under Captain Charles Wilkes, was in Havana on its way back from patrol on the African coast to take its place in the Union naval blockade. Receiving word of Mason and Slidell’s departure from Havana, Wilkes steamed out and intercepted the Trent on November 8. He fired two warning shots across her bow, which forced the British ship to admit a boarding party. Slidell and Mason were arrested and bundled aboard the San Jacinto, which deposited the pair at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, where they were confined. The British government responded with outrage at such a seizure on the high seas. Eleven thousand British soldiers were dispatched to Canada, and the Royal Navy was put on war alert. The prime minister demanded an apology from the Lincoln government, as well as the release of Mason and Slidell.
President Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, advised the president to make no apology. He actually believed that provoking a war with Great Britain would unite South and North against a common foe. President Lincoln sensibly disagreed, replying to Seward with the admonition, “One war at a time.” At this, Seward came to his senses, backed down, and ordered the release of Mason and Slidell. He did not, however, apologize on behalf of the government, but, on December 26, presented to Lord Richard Lyons, British minister to the United States, a note justifying the boarding and the seizure of Mason and Slidell while asserting that Captain Wilkes had acted without permission from the government.