The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War
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The mission he and his men accepted was close to suicidal. They were to make a frontal assault via an extremely narrow beach that passed below the fort, where cannon fire as well as rifle fire would be poured down on them. It seemed a hopeless endeavor, but, remarkably, the 54th ultimately succeeded in breaching small portions of the fort’s wall. Nevertheless, the Union brigades that followed this initial attack were forced to withdraw.
Six hundred of the 54th Regiment’s total strength of 1,007 black enlisted men (all thirty-seven officers were white) participated in the attack, of whom 272 were killed, wounded, or captured. Shaw, in the first wave, was among those who fell. The Confederates sought to disgrace him by throwing his body into a common grave with the bodies of the black men he had led. When he was told of this, Shaw’s father spoke on behalf of his son’s entire family: “We can imagine no holier place than in which he is.”
The valiant record of the 54th paved the way for creation of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) on May 22, 1863. Some eighty years would pass before the US military was racially integrated, but African Americans now had a permanent place in the Army and, by war’s end, African American soldiers made up 10 percent of the Union’s military forces.
Nathan Bedford Forrest Leads the Fort Pillow Massacre, April 12, 1864
In contrast to most of the principal generals who fought in the Civil War, on both sides, Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest not only lacked a West Point education, he had very little education of any kind. Yet he was a born genius when it came to combat, a warrior fierce and wily. William Tecumseh Sherman called him a “devil,” who “must be hunted down and killed if it costs ten thousand men and bankrupts the Federal treasury.” Sherman also pronounced him “the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side.”
Forrest’s philosophy of war can be summed up in a single sentence he once uttered: “War means fightin’, and fightin’ means killin’.” On April 12, 1864, he sent one of his divisions under Brigadier General James R. Chalmers to Fort Pillow, an earthwork fort on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi. It had been built by a Confederate general, Gideon Pillow, but it was now held by a Union garrison, which manned it with the purpose of protecting Union supply lines. Forrest’s assignment was to disrupt those supply lines, and so he resolved to re-take Fort Pillow.
It was garrisoned by 262 black soldiers and 295 whites. Chalmers attacked, forcing the Union pickets (advance guard) to take refuge inside the fort. At this point, Forrest arrived on the scene and took over command from Chalmers. His first act was to demand that the Union garrison immediately surrender. When the demand was rejected, he ordered his men to charge the fort. A fully manned division consists of as many as 8,000 soldiers. The 1st Division of Forrest’s Cavalry Corps mustered anywhere between 1,500 and 2,500. In either case, the numbers overwhelmed the small Fort Pillow Garrison.
Everyone agrees on that. But where accounts differ, South from North, is on just how the attack proceeded. We do know the result: 231 men of the garrison were killed and another hundred wounded. Additionally, 168 whites and fifty-eight African Americans were captured, and many of those died in captivity. Forrest explained the heavy losses he inflicted as the result of the Union commander’s foolishly stubborn refusal to surrender. Northern survivors claimed that the garrison did surrender—immediately after the fort had been breached. But instead of accepting the surrender, the attackers yelled out: “No quarter! No quarter! Kill the damned niggers; shoot them down!” And then they proceeded to do just that.
Witnesses insisted that Nathan Bedford Forrest led the whole “massacre.” These charges were sufficient reason for the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War to investigate. The committee concluded that Forrest and his troops had indeed committed atrocities, chief among which was the murder of men after they had surrendered. The stories that emerged from the battle are lurid. Forrest’s men, it was said, buried “colored” troops alive, and they set fire to hospital tents where Union wounded lay.
For many Northerners, the Fort Pillow Massacre made the fight for the end of “Southern tyranny” and slavery even more urgent. As for Forrest, he survived the war, was never called to account for Fort Pillow, and he even rebuilt the fortune that the war had cost him. He also became a founding member and Grand Wizard of the original Ku Klux Klan—which even he renounced some years after the war, when the violence it directed at African American Southerners, former slaves, transformed the former Confederacy into a land of terror.
Congress Passes the Wade-Davis Bill, Mandating a Punitive Reconstruction Policy, July 2, 1864
“Reconstruction,” they called it—putting the country back together after the war. President Lincoln wanted to make the process quick and simple. All he intended to require was a loyalty oath to be administered in each of the former Confederate states. When 10 percent of voters in a state had taken the oath, the state would be readmitted to the Union and its population and leaders would be granted a full and complete amnesty. Indeed, even before the war ended, new state governments were created for Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas, as they came under Union military control.
Congress, particularly the faction called the Radical Republicans, did not want to let the South off so easily. Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland presented a bill that required not just 10 percent, but a simple majority of voters in each state to take an “ironclad” oath that not only affirmed their loyalty to the United States but also swore that they had never in the past supported the Confederacy. This effectively excluded Confederate political leaders, government officials, military officers, and even common soldiers. The Wade-Davis Bill also required that each state constitution explicitly abolish slavery, repudiate secession, and bar all former Confederate officials from ever holding office or even from voting.
President Lincoln believed this punitive approach would doom the nation so many had fought and died to restore. When the bill nevertheless passed both houses of Congress on July 2, 1864, Lincoln used a political and legal maneuver called a pocket veto in an effort to kill it. Per Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution, if the president does not sign or veto a bill within ten days after it is presented to him, it becomes law, even without a presidential signature—unless, that is, “the Congress by their Adjournment prevent [the bill’s] return.” The Wade-Davis Bill was passed at the end of the congressional session. Lincoln simply did not sign it before adjournment. It was as if he had “pocketed” the document, and so it did not become law.
For his pocket veto, Lincoln was strongly attacked by the Radical Republicans. Union victories in Atlanta and elsewhere, however, helped propel him to a landslide reelection in November 1864, and subsequent passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, making slavery unconstitutional, blunted the perceived need for the stringent loyalty requirements. It is likely that the bill, when resubmitted after Congress returned, would either have been modified or would have failed to survive a formal veto. But President Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865 (Chapter 1), before this could take place. The bill was therefore resubmitted to President Andrew Johnson when Congress reconvened. Johnson demanded important revisions. He called for dropping the oath concerning past conduct and, instead, demanded that amnesty be granted to anyone who took an oath to be loyal to the Union going forward. While Johnson required states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment as a condition for readmission to the Union, he did not want to make readmission contingent on the majority of the population taking the loyalty oath. Finally, he required states to forbid slavery in their own constitutions, to repudiate debts incurred during the rebellion (thereby relieving the federal government of responsibility for them), and to declare secession null and void both in fact and in theory.
Ultimately, Wade-Davis failed to pass, but the friction between Andrew Johnson and Congress escalated when he did not wait for Congress to approve his changes to Wade-Davis before he issued, on his own authority, executiv
e proclamations of amnesty for all of the Confederate states and proclamations prescribing provisional governments for each of the former Confederate states. Congress impeached Johnson on February 24, 1868. Although finally acquitted by a single vote, his executive authority was, as a practical matter, neutralized as the Radical Republicans in Congress imposed on the former Confederacy a Reconstruction scheme so punitive that it effectively extended the bitterness of the Civil War even after Reconstruction was formally ended in 1876. Economic, cultural, and political division, as well as the organized repression of African Americans, persisted into the mid-twentieth century.
Bloody Bill Anderson Leads the Centralia Massacre, September 27, 1864
As summer turned to fall in 1864, the Confederacy was rapidly losing its grip on the West. Major General Sterling Price responded by leading his Missouri State Guard in an invasion of northern Missouri, with the objective of capturing St. Louis and, he hoped, thereby sufficiently undermine Northern confidence that President Lincoln would lose his bid for reelection. An important element in Price’s plan was guerrilla warfare, and for this he turned to William T. “Bloody Bill” Anderson.
Before the Civil War, Anderson had made his living as a trafficker in stolen horses along the Santa Fe Trail. When the war started, he joined Quantrill’s Raiders, a Confederate guerrilla band led by William Quantrill and including among its number the future outlaws Frank and Jesse James. After compiling a record of mayhem throughout Missouri, the Quantrill band broke into several smaller groups, one of which was led by Bloody Bill, who took Jesse and Frank James with him.
Anderson’s guerrillas, about eighty in number, were terrorists who exuberantly tortured, scalped, and even decapitated their victims—sparing only women. (Three of Bloody Bill’s sisters had been killed when Union forces jailed them and others in a ramshackle building that collapsed on its inmates.) On September 27, 1864, Anderson led his eighty guerrillas on a raid to cut the North Missouri Railroad in Centralia as part of Price’s invasion. Many disguised themselves in Union uniforms taken from troops killed earlier.
After looting the town, Anderson’s men piled obstacles on the rail line. An approaching train stopped, and the blue-uniformed guerrillas swarmed it. Of 125 passengers, twenty-three were Union soldiers. At gunpoint, they were ordered to strip. Anderson called for an officer to step forward. Sergeant Thomas Goodman responded, offering himself as a sacrifice in the hope that the others might be spared. Instead, Anderson and his men gunned down the soldiers, mutilated their bodies, and took their scalps as the civilian passengers looked on. Sergeant Goodman was taken prisoner. (He would manage to escape ten days later.)
That afternoon, Union Major A.V.E. Johnston, leading the 155 men of the 39th Missouri Infantry Regiment (Mounted), rode into Centralia, was told what had happened, and set out in pursuit of Anderson. He caught up with the guerrillas, but his regiment, raw recruits all, was outgunned and defeated. Of 155 Union troops, 123 were killed or wounded. Major Johnston was among the slain, gunned down, according to Frank James, by his brother Jesse.
Anderson himself met his own death on October 26, 1864, at the hands of 33rd Regiment of the Missouri State Militia in a firefight at Albany, Missouri. But his career of terror lives on as an example of what the Civil War might have become had a few men of noble goodwill and common sense not prevailed after the Confederate government collapsed and the formally constituted armies departed the field. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865 (Chapter 5), where Ulysses S. Grant offered terms both honorable and humane and Lee accepted them with dignity and good faith, created the model on which this most terrible of American wars was ended.
The 20 Most Significant Civil War Books
Ira Berlin, et al, eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: The New Press, 1992).
A trove of original documents that reveal the course of slavery and abolition up to and through the Civil War.
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
A study of the Civil War in American popular culture and the popular conception of history.
Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 volumes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
A superb biography of the Union’s Civil War president.
Bruce Catton, The Centennial History of the Civil War, 1861-65, 3 volumes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961. Includes all three volumes of the classic Civil War trilogy, Mr. Lincoln’s Army, 1951; Glory Road, 1952; and A Stillness at Appomattox, 1953.
To this day, these books remain among the most widely read works on the Civil War.
Alice Fahs. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
This survey and study of the popular literature of the Civil War period provides a window into prevailing public sentiment about the war in the North and the South.
Shelby Foote. The Civil War: A Narrative, 3 volumes (1958-1974; reprint ed., New York: Vintage, 1986).
Excellent history as written by a noted historical novelist.
Douglas Southall Freeman. Robert E. Lee: A Biography, 4 volumes (New York: Scribner’s, 1947).
Both exhaustive (2,445 pages) and immensely readable, this biography of perhaps the most-admired general in military history will never be surpassed.
Doris Kearns Goodwin. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
A study of the Civil War president in the context of his contentious yet often brilliant cabinet.
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1885-1886; reprint ed., New York: Da Capo, 1982.)
A great work of military autobiography that is also a notable work of American literature.
William C. Harris, With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).
The story of how Lincoln began Reconstruction—he called it “Restoration”—before the Civil War ended.
William Marvel. Andersonville: The Last Depot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
The best and most complete historical treatment of the Civil War’s most notorious POW camp.
James McPherson. Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Certainly the best and most authoritative one-volume history of the Civil War.
James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
The title and subtitle perfectly define the subject of this extraordinary work of history.
Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, 4 volumes (New York: Scribner’s, 1959-1971).
This is the most complete treatment of the Civil War from a Union perspective.
David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper, 1976).
A study of the political causes of the Civil War, beginning with the end of the US-Mexican War.
Charles Royster. The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Knopf, 1992).
An unflinching look at the two fiercest warriors of the Civil War—advocates not merely of victory, but extermination.
Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974; reprint ed., New York: Modern Library, 2004).
This masterpiece of Civil War fiction focuses on the commanders instrumental in the Battle of Gettysburg.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852).
When Abraham Lincoln met the author of this enormously popular antislavery novel, he greeted her with “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”
Russell F. Weigley. A Great Civil War: Military and Political History, 1861-1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
The dean of historians of American
military doctrine and policy studies the strategy and tactics that dominated the Civil War.
Bell Irvin Wiley. The Life of Johnny Reb (1943; reprinted, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008) and The Life of Billy Yank (1952; reprinted, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
Lovingly researched and compassionately written, this is the classic study of the common soldier in both the Confederate and Union armies.
Index
A
abolitionist movement
Brooks assaults Sumner, 7–17
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 17
Frederick Douglas to White House, 90
John Brown Raids Harpers Ferry, 208–218
Lincoln’s attitudes toward, 20–21, 44–47, 90
and moral objections to slavery, 10–12
Northern attitudes on slavery, 243
raid on Harper’s Ferry, 208–218
timeline, 1–6
and the Wilmot Proviso, 11
Agrippina, 241
Aldrich, Alfred P., 231–232
Alexander, E. Porter, 125
Amelia Court House, 60
American Revolution, 68
American Telegraph Company, 25
American War of Independence, 68, 118, 129
Anderson, Gen. Richard H., 61
Anderson, Maj. General William “Bloody Bill,” 6, 248–249
Anderson, Major Robert, 2, 6, 33, 37–43, 103
Andersonville, 64–65, 236
Andrew, Gov. John A., 243
Antietam Creek, 51–53
Appomattox Court House, Virginia, 6, 56, 58, 63, 103
Appomattox River, 60–62
Appomattox Station, 63
Armistead, Gen. Lewis, 84
Army of Northern Virginia, 59, 66–67, 72, 75–76, 85, 103, 151–152. see also Battle of Antietam (Sept. 17, 1862); Battle of Chancellorsville (April 30-May 6, 1863); Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863); Bull Run, Second Battle (Aug. 28-30 1862); Johnston, Gen. Joseph E.; Lee, Gen. Robert E.; Longstreet, Gen. James “Old Pete”