The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  The “Trent affair” might well have touched off a war with Great Britain, which would have almost certainly benefitted the Confederacy and quite possibly cost the Union the Civil War. As events ultimately developed, neither the British nor French governments could ever bring themselves to ally with a slave nation—although, on May 13, 1861, Queen Victoria herself conferred on the Confederacy the only international recognition it was to gain. Her government treated it as a “belligerent” entity, using a term reserved for sovereign nations at war.

  The Dix-Hill Prisoner Exchange Is Signed, July 22, 1862

  Historians often compare the Civil War to twentieth-century warfare in two respects. First, there is the historical status of the Civil War as the first war in history to be driven so extensively and ferociously by industrial technology. Mass-produced, advanced weaponry capable of an unprecedented volume and degree of devastation, transportation by railroad, and communication via telegraphy, all of these played key roles in the war and foreshadowed even greater reliance on industrial technology and innovation in World War I and World War II during the next century.

  The second point of comparison is the mass incarceration and inhumane treatment of prisoners of war, a phenomenon that not only seemed to predict the manner in which POWs would be abused in the twentieth century but, by extension, how the British (in the Second Boer War of 1899–1902) and the Germans (in World War II, 1939–1945) would confine civilian populations to concentration camps. In the case of the Nazis, the concentration camps became places of genocidal mass murder.

  Mention prisoners of war and the Civil War, and the horrors of Andersonville in the South or Elmira (called “Hell-mira”) in the North become the focus of conversation. Daguerreotypes of liberated prisoners show men reduced to living skeletons and invite comparison today with the horrors of World War II’s Auschwitz and Dachau. Though less infamous than Andersonville, the Elmira camp, near the upstate New York city of that name, was even more deadly. Its thirty acres had thirty-five barracks that held half of the camp’s 10,000 prisoners. The rest were assigned to tents or left to shift for themselves in the open, even during the frigid upstate winters. As guards, Union authorities assigned ex-slaves, who openly abused their charges. Nearly a quarter of the prisoners confined at Elmira—24 percent—died there, a mortality rate even higher than that at Andersonville.

  Yet POWs were not always treated this way during the Civil War, which began at a time in the nineteenth century when most Western nations were making earnest efforts to treat military prisoners humanely. Indeed, most warring nations exchanged rather than confined prisoners. At the outbreak of the Civil War, both the Union and Confederacy followed this model. There was no formal exchange agreement between the belligerents because President Lincoln refused to make any treaty or even quasi-treaty with an entity his administration did not want to legitimize by implying diplomatic standing. Instead, exchanges were negotiated ad hoc by the field commanders involved. In some cases, only sick or wounded captives were exchanged.

  At last, on December 11, 1861, the US Congress passed a joint resolution calling on Lincoln to introduce “systematic measures” for prisoner exchange. But it was not until July 8, 1862, that his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, appointed Major General John A. Dix to negotiate standard terms for prisoner exchange with a representative from the Confederacy. For the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee named Major General Daniel Harvey Hill to this position on July 14. The two men worked out a scale of equivalents by which a captain captured by one side would be exchanged, say, for a captain captured by the other, or a POW colonel could be redeemed by exchanging him for fifteen privates, and so on.

  Enactment of the so-called Dix-Hill Cartel suggested that the Civil War could be fought with a degree of humanity after all. In fact, the cartel functioned quite smoothly until December 1862, when Confederate President Jefferson Davis suspended it. Earlier that year, the Union’s Major General Benjamin F. Butler, as military governor of Union-occupied New Orleans, ordered the execution of one William Mumford, a civilian resident of New Orleans, for tearing down the Stars and Stripes from the flagpole at the US Mint in that city. Davis retaliated by suspending prisoner exchange. Union Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton issued a similar suspension order. The cartel broke down even further after the Davis government refused to exchange captured African-American soldiers on the grounds than some were fugitive slaves. By early June 1863, the prisoner exchanges and the cartel were effectively dead.

  Attempts were made to resume prisoner exchange, but the idea became decreasingly popular among Northern military commanders. They believed that the Confederacy, with its smaller population, was always hungry for manpower, whereas the Union had a much larger pool of military-age men on which to draw. Exchange, Northern generals concluded, benefitted the South, not the North, and so the large and squalid POW camps multiplied, grew, and became places of extreme misery and deliberate brutality on both sides. The cartel’s fleeting promise of humane warfare vanished.

  The Great Santee Sioux Uprising Begins in Minnesota, August 17, 1862

  For most Americans, the Eastern Theater, especially the southeast, was the focus of attention during the Civil War. Nevertheless, the so-called Western Theater—Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Louisiana east of the Mississippi River—was also crucial. But there was yet another “Western” Theater, whose combatants did not participate directly in the Civil War, yet were strongly affected by it. This was the military theater of the Plains Indian Wars, and what happened there beginning on August 17, 1862, demonstrated that the Union, full as its hands were fighting the Confederacy, had another war ongoing along with it.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the Santee Sioux, now more usually referred to as the Dakota people, a cultural subdivision of the Great Sioux Nation, initially acquiesced in the federal government’s policy of concentrating them on government reservations. In this, the Santee, who lived in the eastern Dakotas and central Minnesota, differed from the Apaches and Navajos of the Southwest, tribes that violently resisted confinement to reservations. But by the start of the 1860s, as the Santee suffered from crop failures and found themselves increasingly hemmed in by an influx of Scandinavian and German immigrant settlers, discontent with reservation life quickly grew. It was aggravated by the corruption, incompetence, indifference, and, sometimes, outright cruelty of a federal Indian agency system whose white officials often diverted funds and stole supplies and food provisions promised by treaty.

  During the drought-ravaged summer of 1862, the Santees repeatedly petitioned for the release of rations and cash that local agents withheld. Their petitions went unanswered or were rebuffed. At last, Little Crow, chief of the Mdewakanton villages, put the desperate situation of his people this way: “We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangements by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry they help themselves.”

  Andrew Myrick, a prominent local trader, replied to the chief that he and his people could, if they were truly hungry, “eat grass.”

  With tensions at the boiling point, on August 17, four young Mdewakanton men, returning from a futile hunting trip, stopped at a white family’s farm. One suggested stealing eggs from the chicken coop. This set off a dispute among the four concerning fear of white men. The young man escalated the issue at hand from egg stealing to a resolution that the four should kill the very next white man they encountered. With that, they murdered the farmer and his family. Having done this deed, the next day, they stormed the trading post of Andrew Myrick, whom they shot dead—and then stuffed his mouth with the grass he had told them to eat.

  Soon, much of the Santee tribe was at war. Before the Civil War, the tiny United States Army had chiefly served to police Indian country. The demands of the war drew down the soldiers available for that police work, an
d, taking advantage of the paucity of troops, the Santee rapidly spread war throughout the region.

  The effect was devastating. New Ulm, an immigrant village, was laid under siege on August 20 and 23. Thirty-six residents were killed, twenty-three were wounded, and the town was razed to the ground. Its two thousand settlers, homeless, fled to Mankato. By August 27, virtually all the Dakota people in Minnesota were at war with the whites. Before it ended, between 350 and 800 settlers had been killed, many victims of torture.

  About half the state’s population became refugees from the uprising—and there were rumors that it was not abuse and deliberate starvation, but Confederate agents, who had incited the Santee. These rumors were unfounded, but the uprising did indirectly benefit the Confederacy. Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey had to ask President Lincoln for permission to delay sending his state’s quota of enlistees east to fight the Civil War. Lincoln replied by telegraph: “Attend to the Indians. If the draft cannot proceed of course it will not proceed. Necessity knows no law.”

  The uprising ended on September 23, 1862, at the Battle of Wood Lake. Little Crow fled westward, but he returned to Minnesota the following year. He and his son were ambushed and killed on July 3, 1863. They were picking raspberries, even as, in Gettysburg, 15,000 Confederate soldiers charged Union positions on Cemetery Ridge.

  CSS Alabama Is Commissioned by the Confederate States Navy, August 24, 1862

  Much derided by both the Northern and Southern press and public as “Scott’s Anaconda,” the naval blockade the Union army’s first general-in-chief, Winfield Scott, initiated in an attempt to close Southern ports to commerce and military operations became increasingly effective as the Union Navy grew. From the beginning, however, the Confederacy was determined to defy the blockade, and the tiny Confederate States Navy, as well as intrepid civilian mariners, honed “blockade running” into a maritime military art.

  The most famous and effective of the Confederate blockade runners was Raphael Semmes. He was a commander in the US Navy until he resigned his commission in February 1861 to serve the Confederacy as an agent for the covert purchase of arms from foreign powers. Quickly restless in this job, Semmes lobbied for a command in the Confederate navy, and was given the CSS Sumter, which the Confederates had converted the from Habana, a commercial steamer that happened to be tied up at New Orleans at the outbreak of the war. Under Semmes, CSS Sumter became the first Confederate warship to successfully run the Union blockade, on June 30, 1861. After steaming into the open Atlantic via the Gulf of Mexico, Semmes spent the next six months preying upon Northern commercial vessels, capturing eighteen of them, together with their cargoes.

  Semmes left CSS Sumter at Gibraltar, where he boarded a ship called the Agrippina, which rendezvoused with a vessel built in England as the Enrica. The ship was refitted for combat and, rechristened CSS Alabama, became, in Semmes’s hands, a veritable scourge. Commissioned in the Confederate Navy on August 24, 1862, Alabama stalked shipping lanes from September 1862 to June 1864. During this long period, Semmes seized or sank sixty-five—perhaps sixty-nine—Northern commercial vessels. It was not just a matter of looting cargoes. Semmes conducted a military campaign of terror that took a crippling toll on Northern financiers and insurance underwriters. Strategically, he presented such a menace that the US Navy was compelled to remove a number of ships and crews from blockade duty to find, engage, and destroy him and his ship. For this reason, Semmes’s military achievement as a commerce raider cannot be calculated solely on the number of ships he captured or sank. The effect his operations had on reducing the strength of the Union blockade cannot be estimated by numbers alone.

  The months passed, and the toll taken by CSS Alabama continued to multiply until USS Kearsarge was pulled off blockade duty and, under Captain John A. Winslow, sent in pursuit of Semmes. Alabama displaced 1,050 tons, and its steam engine, with the aid of auxiliary sails, could make 13 knots, carrying six thirty-two-pound cannons, one sixty-eight pounder, and one 110 pounder. Kearsarge was bigger, displacing 1,570 tons, and far better armed with more modern artillery: two eleven-inch smoothbore Dahlgren guns, four thirty-two pounders, and one thirty-pound, highly accurate Parrott rifle.

  Kearsarge was anchored off the Dutch coast on Sunday, June 12, 1864, when Captain Winslow received a report that the Alabama, which he had been chasing for almost a year, was just seen in the port of Cherbourg, France, where it was unloading prisoners and taking on coal. Winslow immediately weighed anchor and steamed toward Cherbourg, taking up a position just outside of the three-mile French territorial limit, at the southern mouth of the English Channel. He waited for CSS Alabama to appear.

  Learning of Winslow’s proximity, Semmes was faced with an unpalatable choice. He could either try to wait Winslow out, or he could venture out himself and fight him. He knew that he had long been the object of Winslow’s pursuit, so he assumed that the Union commander would have no problem lying in wait for a long time. This in itself would be a victory for Winslow, since it would keep Alabama out of action. For this reason, Semmes decided to fight. He would pit what he believed was his superior seamanship and the modest speed advantage of his vessel against Winslow’s superior firepower.

  Semmes quietly left port at 9:45 on Sunday morning, June 19. His departure was spied by Winslow’s lookout, who announced that Alabama was heading straight for Kearsarge. Winslow, who had been conducting Sunday religious services, calmly dismissed those attending and ordered “beat to quarters,” the traditional call to battle stations. He also ordered full steam ahead and moved rapidly out of the English Channel and into open waters. He knew he had no time to waste. The important thing was to bring his heaviest guns to bear on Alabama as quickly as possible. The best chance he had of preventing the wily Semmes from eluding him yet again was to destroy him—fast. Captain Winslow conceded that Alabama was faster, but it also had a deeper draft, riding four feet lower in the water than Kearsarge. This would give Winslow an advantage in maneuverability.

  By 10:57, Winslow and Semmes were just one mile apart. Alabama opened fire first, with her heaviest gun, the 110 pounder. Instead of attempting to withdraw out of range, Winslow bore down on Alabama with all the steam he had. Semmes fired every gun he could bring to bear, but Winslow kept coming on, so fast that Semmes’s gunners were unable to land a single shot. At a half-mile range, Winslow finally opened fire—methodically, endeavoring to make each shot count. He fired only about a third of the rounds that Semmes had gotten off, but he was much more accurate. Although both ships were damaged, the Alabama was fatally wounded and began to sink. She did not surrender, but when Winslow saw her crew abandoning ship, he called out to the crew of a nearby British yacht to “do what you can to save” the Alabama’s survivors. Kearsarge itself picked up seventy Confederate sailors before the raider disappeared under the waves at 12:24 p.m. Semmes and forty others did succeed in evading Winslow, but the career of CSS Alabama was at an end.

  The 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment Assaults Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863

  The Emancipation Proclamation officially made the abolition of slavery one of the Union’s war aims in fighting the Civil War (Chapter 4). This did not mean that a majority of Northerners were abolitionists or even believed that black people were in any way equal to whites. The New York Draft Riots (Chapter 8) revealed the extent of resentment among many Union men at being required to lay down their lives to liberate people they not only believed were inferior to them, but were also after their jobs. A freed slave, after all, would work for the lowest of wages.

  For their part, many African American men yearned for the opportunity to join in the fight, to take responsibility for helping to win their own freedom. In March 1863, while Lincoln and his cabinet were still arguing over how to bring black troops into the army, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew authorized raising a “colored” regiment. It became the 54th Massachusetts.

  From the beginning, the regiment made national news as the first “colored” reg
iment raised in the North. Before this, the few black units that existed in the Union army had been slaves liberated by Union forces occupying portions of Southern states. But while the 54th was unique in having been recruited from free Northern black men and slaves who had escaped to the North, it was in every other way typical of a black unit in a white American army. It consisted of African American enlisted men commanded by Caucasian officers. In this case, Robert Gould Shaw, the twenty-six-year-old man Governor Andrew appointed as colonel, was a prominent young abolitionist.

  On May 13, 1863, the regiment mustered with a strength of 1,100 and set off from Boston, bound for Union-occupied Beaufort, on the South Carolina coast. Although the troops had been promised pay and allowances equal to those of white soldiers, $14 a month, they were notified on arrival in Beaufort that their gross pay would be just $10 per month and that $3 would be taken out for clothing—an expense that was not deducted from the pay of white soldiers. By way of quiet protest, the soldiers of the 54th, together with their white officers, refused to accept any pay until they received equal pay. (That would not happen until March 3, 1865.)

  For the most part, the 54th was given minor assignments, typically involving manual labor rather than combat. Then came July 18, 1863, when Colonel Shaw volunteered elements of his regiment to lead an assault on Fort (or Battery) Wagner, a Confederate stronghold protecting the entrance to Charleston Harbor.