The Uncivil War
1861-1865
By Mike Donovan
Abe Was Not an Abolitionist But He Was an abolitionist
Southern Born - Spot Resolutions– The first Republican and anti-Mason President – Wrestler - The first President born outside of the original 13 Colonies - VP Hannibal Hamlin (Republican); Andrew Johnson (Unionist Party) – The rail splitter – 6’4” our tallest President – Sister Sarah – Stepmother Sarah – His brother-in-law served in the Confederate Army in the Civil War
“I want God on my side, but I must have Kentucky!” -- A.L.
“THE CIVIL WAR HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH SLAVERY.”
Yeah, and the San Francisco Earthquake had nothing to do with geology.
The Civil War came about because the South reneged on the results of the Election of 1860, and reneged over slavery.
The Southern concept of democracy in 1860 was “heads I win, tails you lose.” They agreed to participate in a legitimate national election and when they didn't get the result they wanted they decided that the Election results would not stand and they would leave.
South: “Tell you what, North, let's flip a coin for a thousand dollars.”
North: “You're on, call it in the air.”
South: “Heads”
The coin lands on tails.
North “Where's my thousand bucks.”
South “States rights! Northern economic oppression! Northern hypocrisy! Northern arrogance! Northern hatred! We're leaving right now!”
North “Don't change the subject! You pay up the thousand dollars or we will invade you and collect the money by the means of war.”
South “You dare try it and you will taste Southern steel!”
North “We make more steel than you ever can.”
South “Come and get us.”
South in 1865 “All right, here's your thousand dollars.”
North “Thank you. Now can we all try and get along?”
Some pro-South historians won't even call it “The Civil War.” They won't even call it the “War of the Rebellion.” Instead they call it “The War of Northern Aggression.”
Nice try.
The South caused the Civil War. The North 'didn't do nothin.' The South broke the sacred eternal contract of 1787 and they're the ones who fired on Fort Sumter. The South would not abide by results of the Election of 1860, an election they agreed to participate in. They didn't get their way in the election so they walked.
The South broke its word of honor. It reneged on democracy. They didn't like Lincoln. So they walked. And the historians for the most part still defend them! They never write that 'The South caused the Civil War.' They rarely take sides, and when they do, it's usually a Southern born historian playing advocate for the South. Where are the openly pro-northern histories of the Civil War?
The partisan South historians write that 'The South knew that the Election of Lincoln was unacceptable and it only wanted to leave in peace. Lincoln's election caused the Civil War.'
“Leave in peace.” We hear that one a lot.
Leave in peace? When Lee invaded Pennsylvania on the way to Gettysburg in 1863 he distributed leaflets that reminded the people of the North that the South meant them no harm and only asked to be allowed to “Leave in Peace.” Some historians still consider that a valid argument.
What is peace? Is it 'peace' if three million blacks are still enslaved? The horrors of slavery are just as violent as the horrors of war. Why is it called “peace” to allow the South to leave with slavery flourishing? It is not peace when the South would use its independence to expand slavery towards Central and South America. Confederate independence meant that now at last the cotton/slavery power could expand at will without the Northern liberal Whigs and Republicans blocking them.
If the South had been allowed to leave in peace it would have invaded Mexico and various Islands in the Caribbean and set up a slave empire. It not only would have expanded the evil of slavery, it might have grown into a power so big and strong that it could have whipped the North in the Civil War if that had broken out after the South had grown bigger and stronger for 20 years. A Civil War that started in 1880 might have had a different outcome.
The Southerners call it “The war of Northern aggression. “But the South had aggression on its own mind, and it would start the aggression for empire the minute the North said, “go in peace.”
If The Great Civil War was a war of Northern aggression it was a war of Northern aggression to stop Southern aggression. It was a war to stop Southern aggression against a race of African people, and to stop the South from invading its Hispanic neighbors. Thank God, Lincoln never said 'The Union is ended. Go in peace.'
A world of slavery is not peace. Reneging on an election is an act of hostility too. Secession after an election is an act of aggression.
The South broke its word on both 1787 and 1860, committed a holocaust for about 200 years, and their native historians still paint the South as victim. There are countless paragraphs and pages in the history books about how the people of the South suffered during the war and Reconstruction.
But until very recently, and still very rarely, the history books do not give the same extra emotional attention to the suffering of the Southern slaves. What was life like for those poor devils? We get a page and a half on the shortage of salt in the South in 1863 and not a single sentence on the suffering of the slaves in everyday life.
Was slavery the cause of the Civil War?
Doyeeeeeee!
That's my answer. Of course it was. It's as obvious as the nose on Lincoln's face on Mt Rushmore.
But to the historical community, the jury is still out on that one. Some say yes, it was slavery. Most say no, it was a complex mix of several convoluted explanations.
The unrepentant Confederacy lovers are absolutely certain that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery at all. It's really breathtaking prejudice to arrive at that conclusion. You can go on any stars and bars website and find people writing things like, “These people are so ignorant that they actually still think that the Civil War was about slavery.” Or, “These Northerners still are so uneducated that they actually think that they were the good guys!”
Yet even pro-Confederacy historians like Vandiver, Foote, Owsley, and Truslow Adams concede that slavery had something to do with it. They might stress that it was hardly the only cause, but even the best Southern white brains concede that it had at least partly to do with the war. Then along comes the bloggers and the man in the street to tell us that slavery had nothing to do with it.
Slavery was the only thing the Southern states had in common and it was the only thing so crucial that it could create such unity.
Its easy to forget that the Southern states were not a band of brothers until the war banded them together for the first time. The southern (note the small s) people's allegiance for 8 decades was to their state and they competed with their Southern neighbors. So now history remembers a united ante-bellum South that didn't exist.
The Southern states had nothing in common. They had no reason to unite and make a nation. The state of Virginia was as different from the state of Florida as Shanghai is different from Yellowknife. Texas had nothing in common with North Carolina. Tennessee and Louisiana were world's apart. The geography of Virginia is more different from Louisiana than any two northern states were different. The only two states with similar systems would probably be Mississippi and Alabama. That's not much. The cultured Virginia aristocrat had as much in common with the Louisiana cracker as I have with a Peruvian goat-herder. Yet both of them marched arm and arm into battle for the Confederacy. These Southern states had been economic and cultural rivals, as much as pals for the last 50 years. Now all of a sudden there was this Southern nationhood replacing a famous and intense provincialism. Why did this nationalism emerge out of nowhere?
The only thing, the only thing, that the Southern states had in common was the desire to defend, continue and perhaps even expand the institution of slavery. That's the only thing that united these diverse states into a nation.
What do they say was the cause of the war, if it wasn't slavery?
One of them is states rights. The South was supposedly defending states rights, not slavery. States rights was the only desperate expedient the South could turn to. If somehow the supremacy of federalism had been the only way to keep slavery alive, the South would have endorsed federalism. If three Southern states seceded because they wanted to abolish slavery and the federal government had refused to allow them to secede, the rest of the Southern states would have supported the supremacy of the national government and would have denied the right of a state to secede.
Why did the Election of Abraham Lincoln necessarily mean the South had no choice but to secede? Answer: It didn't mean that at all.
Lincoln had made it clear in a hundred statements that he had no intention of interfering with slavery in Southern states where it already existed. They reacted to the Election as if Lincoln was going to do that very thing.
The other explanation for the cause of the Civil War is is
“Northern economic oppression.”
Was Lincoln planning to propose new tariffs making Southern commerce almost impossible?
No.
Was Lincoln proposing some plan that would give large federal funds to Northern states for railroads, bridges, canals, and roads, while denying any such funds to Southern states?
No.
Lincoln's Election was unacceptable to the South for one reason and one reason only. Lincoln was going to make sure that slavery would not expand into the new territories now under Federal rule. The Southerners even admit it in heir own statements and writings of the time.
Ok, now let's draw some logical conclusions from this.
First of all, we can safely say without any fear of sane and logical contradiction anyone that says that the Civil War was not about slavery is a pinhead, a dope, a moron, a fool, a lame-brain, a chump, a bozo, a numbskull, an ignoramus, a knucklehead, and a birdbrain combined. That's for starters.
The Southern argument, espoused by Toombs and Cobb and Davis and Rhett late in 1860 was that Lincoln may have been elected legally, but he was planning to do some things that were unconstitutional once he was sworn in. By this logic the police should arrest everyone who they think might like to rob a bank in the near future.
How was Lincoln planning on unconstitutionally ending slavery? Would he end it by appointing new members of the Supreme Court who would overturn the Dred Scott decision and other Supreme Court rulings that had protected slavery up till now? Probably, but that was purely within the Constitution.
Lincoln had made it clear in a hundred statements that he had no intention of interfering with slavery in Southern states where it already existed. So that couldn't be the reason for secession. So it had to be the Supreme Court issue.
The South said yes. That was the reason. Lincoln would gradually end slavery by Supreme Court manipulations.
First of all it would take two full terms and a few timely Supreme Court deaths before Lincoln could turn the Court into a tool of the abolitionists, even if he might be so bold, which wasn't likely either. The court in 1861 was still dominated by Southerners. There was no guarantee that enough of these guys would die and enable Lincoln to go forward with the plan the Southerners so feared. So that argument is weak, and that is their supreme justification for secession. Lincoln was going to pack the court with lefty Yankees.
So what if he did? That's his Constitutional right after winning a fair and square election.
The South claimed a million times over the next hundred years that it seceded on Constitutional grounds, which is of course a delusional lie, like so much else they said and still say. They seceded 'on Constitutional grounds' because their opponent wanted to do things he was allowed to do within his Constitutional rights. Makes no sense.
The South perhaps overestimated the power of the American Presidency. It claimed that the election of Lincoln meant that slavery would be destroyed by this gorilla as soon as he got in. But Lincoln had no means to do this short of making himself dictator in a time of peace.
In the system of checks and balances, the Executive had a small a abolitionist in the chair who didn't want no trouble. The other two branches were solid for slavery. And in that setting the South claims it had no choice but to secede.
The House of Representatives was still overwhelmingly Democrat and under Southern rule. The US Senate was still overwhelmingly Democratic and under Southern rule. The Supreme Court was still overwhelmingly Democratic and still under Southern rule. How in the hell was Lincoln going to immediately do away with slavery and oppress the South under the circumstances? Answer; he couldn't. Conclusion. The secession of the South was uncalled for abject treason based on pernicious dishonest arguments and the decision to secede should be condemned by history instead of appeased.
Are these the thoughts of a partisan Yankee? Surely so, but all of the arguments I have just presented were taken from a speech made in the Georgia Legislature by Alexander Stephens in a spirited debate with fire-eating secessionists Cobb and Toombs in November of 1860. Stephens later became the Vice President of the Confederacy after his state seceded. Al believed in the Constitution and did not think that Lincoln's election was proper justification for secession. He went along with the Confederacy only after he could no longer prevent its formation.
I feel compassion for white guys from the South who try to defend the Confederacy. I think if I was a southern born white guy I might have fallen into the trap of these revisionist rationalizations. When it is your heritage, there's nothing you can do but to try and embrace it and find some way to take pride in it, even if the facts point to some very very bad things.
“LINCOLN WAS NO ABOLITIONIST”
President Lincoln’s reputation has been as misrepresented as has been the origin of the Civil War itself. The racist right and the extreme left have united and for opposite reasons have contrived and maintain the absurd myth that Lincoln was not an abolitionist. This is offered as important proof that slavery was not the origin of the War.
If Lincoln was no abolitionist, then why was he known in the South in 1860 as the blackest of the abolitionists threatening the sacred institution of slavery. In 1865 he was known all over the world as the hero who freed the slaves. Yet 140 years later he is recalled as a racist who had no more love of black people than Southern racists, and a man who conducted an opportunist war for complex accidental reasons, or worse, only in order to institute the national domination of his own Party and region.
That is all wrong. The original and obvious perception of him was, and still is, correct. The revisionist version that is now taught in our textbooks is wrong. What is obviously true is true, and the historians who roll their eyes at the naiveté of anyone who believes the obvious version are overanalysts who can’t see the humanist forest for the academic trees.
SHORT SUMMARY OF ELECTIONS OF 1860 -1864
Lincoln defeated Douglas, Bell, and Breckinridge in the red-hot election of 1860.
Electoral Vote 1860 ------- Lincoln R) 180
Breckinridge D) 72
Bell CU) 39
Douglas D) 12
Popular vote 1860---------Lincoln R) 1,865,000
Douglas D) 1,382,000
Breckinridge D) 848,000
Bell CU) 592,000
CU stands for Constitutional Union party.
Lincoln’s vote total in 1860 was the same number as the year of his death and the end of the war, 1865. The Electoral College produced some strange twists in 1860 with Douglas finishing a strong second in the popular vote but a pathetic last in the electoral votes. This has to do with some regions being fully behind their candidate but with no support outside their areas.
Lincoln was re-elected in 64 in a mudslide. His own general ran against him.
Electoral vote 1864-------------Lincoln CU) 212
McClelland D) 21
Popular vote 1864------------- Lincoln R) 2,206,000
McClelland D) 1,803,000
LINCOLN'S CABINET
Secretary of State --- William Seward----------1861-1865
Secretary of War---- Simon Cameron----------1861-1862
Edwin M. Stanton--------1862-1865
Sec. of Treasury-----Salmon P. Chase---------1861-1864
W. P. Fessenden-----------1864-1865
Hugh McCulloch----------1865
Att. General----------Edward Bates-------------1861-1863
T. J. Coffey---------------1863-1864
James Speed--------------1864-1865
Secretary of Navy---Gideon Welles-----------1861-1865
CONFEDERATE CABINET
President ----------------Jefferson Davis--------1861-1865
V.P.-------------------------Alexander Stephens---1861-1865
Secretary of State--------Robert Toombs ---------1861
Robert Hunter----------1861-2
Judah Benjamin -------1862-1865
Secretary of War ---------Leroy Pope Walker----1861
Judah Benjamin -------1861
George Randolph -----1861
James A. Seddon -----1861-1865
Secretary of Treasury---Christopher Meminger-1861-1864
George Trenholm-------1865
Postmaster General------John Reagan-------------1861-65
Secretary of the Navy---Stephen Mallory--------1861-1865
LINCOLN LOG
Honest Abe was Southern-born on February 12, 1809 in the slave state of Kentucky. He was a Jefferson baby.
The Lincolns moved to Dan Spencer County Indiana in 1816. His beloved mother died a year later.
Lincoln’s mother was Nancy Hanks. His father was Thomas Lincoln. So if the man took the woman’s name in our society instead of the reverse, then Abe's dad would have been Tom Hanks. The future Prez was named after his grandfather Abraham, who was “murdered by Indians.”
Tom Lincoln remarried in 1819 tying the knot with Sarah Bush Johnston. Lincoln had a wonderful relationship with both of his kind and gentle mothers but his father was neither kind, nor gentle. Abe left home the day it became legal to do so.
When president Lincoln heard his father was dying he declined to go and see him. It was a sad and bitter relationship. Criminals who plead abusive upbringing should look to Lincoln as proof that one can still make it in spite of crummy dad.
Historian Michael Burlingame sees a cause and effect between a bad upbringing and a hatred of slavery. He says of Dad Lincoln, “He doesn’t seem to have been abusive regularly, but he used to smack him. He treated him like a slave. One of the main reasons Lincoln hated slavery so much is that he hated the way his father treated him as a boy. He could identify with the slaves.”
I do not agree. “Like a slave” and “slave” are as different in reality as the difference between eating an ice cream cone and jumping off a cliff.
The real root of Lincoln’s hatred of slavery came from a trip he took downriver to New Orleans at the age of 20 to deliver some product by raft. His friend on that trip swears that it was the sights of slavery that Lincoln saw that traumatized him. Lincoln saw slaves sold, whipped and abused in public. On the way back from New Orleans Lincoln was sullen, sad, introverted and highly upset by what he had seen. He told this friend many times that his hatred of slavery was born on this trip to New Orleans.
Father Thomas moved the Lincolns to Illinois in 1830. Abe helped his father plant the first crop and then hit the road. He ended up in New Salem Illinois where he became a clerk in a grocery store. The young man, all 6’ 4” 185 of him, enjoyed telling funny stories (back then they were funny at least) and engaged in some competitive wrestling. Linc was challenged to a high profile match with a local legend named Jack Armstrong. A crowd gathered and the two went at it. When Lincoln began to win, the friends of Jack intervened and pulled Abe off. Lincoln was furious and offered to fight any one of them individually. Armstrong and Lincoln later became good friends.
In 1832 Lincoln made two important decisions that would help him win the presidency later. The first decision was to enter politics; the second was to join the Illinois militia. Military service has always been a key to unlocking the door to the White House. Lincoln was voted Captain of Volunteers and his unit went off to fight in the Black Hawk War against a tribe of unhappy Illinois Indians. These rebel Black Hawks had resisted being pushed west of the Mississippi and decided to defy the whites and return east of the river. The Americans wanted to keep all of the Indian names but none of the Indians (Today the Chicago “Black Hawks” play in the state of “Illinois.” But there are no Indians on the hockey team, and very few in Chicago.)
Lincoln didn’t see any fighting in the Black Hawk War, but after his unit broke up he decided to re-enlist anyway. All this time he was an active candidate for the Illinois State Legislature and his military service served to hurt his election effort. He was too busy campaigning to be campaigning and lost. “The only time I have ever been beaten by the people,” he later wrote.
To make ends meet Abraham became a partner in the general store where he had worked. The effort failed and Lincoln went into debt for the next 17 years, taking jobs as a surveyor and as postmaster of New Salem.
Lincoln made a political comeback on 1834 winning the seat he had failed to win in 32. Abe increased his debt by borrowing $200 for a suit so that he wouldn’t embarrass his constituents when he made his acceptance speech. AL was re-elected in 36 and 38 while studying to become a lawyer. He walked 20 miles at a time to borrow books from a lawyer friend in Springfield, and passed the bar in 1836. I too have walked 20 miles to borrow books, … as long as you add up all the trips I have ever taken to the library.
Lincoln did not seek re-election in 1840 and became a full-time lawyer with a reputation for honesty, lack of greed, and an ability to deliver a withering attack on an opponent or defendant he considered dishonest.
Then came D-Day. Abe married Mary Todd on November 4, 1842. Their first home was a pad above the Globe Tavern in Springfield. Two years later they moved in to the only house he ever called his own, excepting the White one later.
In 1846 Lincoln ran for the United States Congress as a Whig and won. He was famously against the war with Mexico but did vote for appropriations for the forces in the field and later endorsed a Mexican War hero, Taylor, for president.
The Whigs were all pledged to one-term in D.C. so Lincoln returned to Springfield in 1849. He was not forced by the party to step down because of his controversial stance against the Mexican War, as some historians claim. He was honoring the Whig one-term pledge. Lincoln returned to law life and began to forget about politics.
The dreadful Dred Scott decision and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise “aroused” him to return to politics. This man who the historians claim was not an abolitionist returned to the politics because of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Does that tell you anything? It tells me plenty.
In 1858 he sought the United States Senate against Steve Douglas, and the rest of his life belongs to US history, not Presidential biography.
EVENTS;
ELECTION OF 1860
SOUTHERN SECESSION
FORT SUMTER
DEATH OF STEPHEN DOUGLAS
MARYLAND SECESSION CRISIS
BULL RUN
FORT DONNELLSON
HOMESTEAD ACT OF 1862
NYC DRAFT RIOTS
LEE INVADES THE NORTH
GETTYSBURG
VICKSBURG
MONITOR VS MERRIMACK
ELECTION OF 1864
ST ALBAN'S RAID
SOUTHERN CONSCRIPTION
REBS TRY TO BURN NYC
SHERMAN’S MARCH TO THE SEA
LINCOLN VISITS BURNING RICHMOND
APPOMATTOX
ASSASSINATION AT FORD’S THEATRE
ELECTION OF 1860
Lincoln was a minority President in terms of the overall popular vote in 1860. On the other hand if the four other candidates had combined their votes Lincoln still would have won in the Electoral College.
The Republican candidate would have to win some of the northern states that the Democrat Buchanan had carried in 56. The Republicans in fact had to win just about every state in the North in order to win. They knew they weren’t going to win any states in the South.
The Republicans held their convention at Chicago. They built a special structure for the event called the “Wig-wam.’
New York anti-slavery man Willie Seward was the front-runner for the Republicans when the convention opened. He led by almost a hundred votes at the end of the first ballot. But it wasn’t enough to win and most of the delegates realized that he wasn’t going to. Abraham Lincoln gained new votes and new momentum with each new round of voting.
Seward could not win the nomination because he was too much of an abolitionist (small a) to hope to gain any key wins for the party outside of the northeast. Almost any Republican candidate could win New England and New York. The key was winning the Midwest. Lincoln obviously had more clout there. Also Seward was hampered by some alleged scandals from his career in New York State politics. “Honest Abe” had no such baggage.
Lincoln had no support in the South and Breckinridge had none in the North. So the Election of 1860 was really two elections. Douglas the Democrat ran against Lincoln the Black Republican in the North. In the South the Democrat Breckinridge ran against Bell the Constitutional Democrat. Douglas had token support in the upper South and Bell had token support in the lower North.
1860 – The South Dishonors the Results of a Fair Election
The election of 1860 was probably the most important in our history. It was also most divided with four different parties running effective candidates. Bell and Breckinridge weren’t Shirley Chisolm and Ralph Nadar. They were legitimate threats to win the election against the two established major parties. This was the “third system,” a one-shot self-contained election system, following the Whig-Dem “second system” and was to be followed by the Democrat-Republican “fourth system” still in play, (which is generally called the “third system.”)
The Democrats made an incredibly bad choice when they held their convention in Charleston. A Democratic committee had picked that city in hopes of saving party unity; but this sop to the South only inspired it to be more defiant.
So Lincoln won as a “sectional candidate.” That is mentioned by the historians in an accusatory tone. All four were sectional in their own way. So what if any candidate is sectional? It's fair play in a free national election. Since when did the victory of a sectional candidate give the losing section the right to secede, just by calling him a 'sectional candidate' as thought that is some sort of cheating?
The South reacted to the election of 1860 by doing at last what it had been threatening to do since 1830. It left the USA. When the baby didn’t get its way in the final tally, it took its cotton ball and went home.
Recapping the secessions, South Carolina had seceded in December 1860.
Then in 1861 the dominoes fell. Mississippi went grey on January 9, 1861. Florida reneged on 1787 the next day. Then Alabama seceded on the eleventh. Georgia had secession on its mind on the 19th. Louisiana seceded on my birthday, the 26th. Texas yelled “yiii-haaaaw!” on the first of February.
There were more secessions after Texas, but they did not take place until after the artillery battle of Fort Sumter.
SOUTH WASN'T REACTING TO NORTHERN ACTION
The South says that it had to secede because it knew that Lincoln was going to to do this, and Lincoln was going tot do that. They didn't even wait to make sure he was really going to do them. That tells me that they were just secessionist, per se.
Andrew Jackson was right in 1832 when he said that the South threatened to secede because it wanted to secede. Jackson said in 32 that the tariff was just a pretext, and that the South would try to secede again down the tobacco road. Andy said that the next time the South would probably use slavery as the pretext, but in any case it was going to try to secede again. Jax was the Swami on that one. The South didn’t wait for the actions it feared before it reacted by seceding. It was pre-emptive secession.
But how much could Lincoln really do to hurt the South and slavery? Nothing really. Yet the Southern claim was that the election of Lincoln meant the end of slavery.
THE SPIRIT OF MONTGOMERY
The Rebs got down to business in Montgomery Alabama. Who would be President? The most talented politician was Stephens and he was pure South. But Stephens had been too opposed to secession to meet the standard. Robert Toombs was the odds-on favorite in the Cal-Neva sportsbook in Reno, and he wanted the job, but after some slick maneuvering by someone who didn't want him to get the job, the Presidency went to a military man who didn't want it, Mississippi's West Point Mexican War hero Jeff Davis. JD was the former Secretary of War in the Buchanan Administration.
“PRESIDENT” DAVIS “INAUGURATED” FEBRUARY 1861
On Monday February 18, 1861 “President” Davis took the oath of office on the steps of the state legislature of Montgomery Alabama. His speech was a claim that the South wanted only to leave in peace, but his words were not exactly peaceful. His words were belligerent and threatening,
“The time for compromised has passed my friends. The South is determined to maintain its position. Anyone who opposes us will taste Southern gunpowder and feel Southern steel.”
He should have added, “Ask not, what the perpetuation of slavery can do for you, ask what you can do for the perpetuation of slavery.
Because that's what it was all about.
JD also added this,
“The impartial and enlightened verdict of mankind will vindicate the rectitude of our conduct.”
Yeah, try and be a little more wrong. The impartial and enlightened verdict of mankind will condemn you as anachronistic racists bent on building a slave empire.
WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION
On February 22, 1861 the entire country celebrated the birthday of George Washington. That's right. The entire two countries. The South had parades and fireworks and marching music and served everyone spiked punch as if nothing had changed.
The Confederacy had no business celebrating Washington's Birthday. They had just undone everything he had fought so hard to create, a united nation of Americans. Unlike Davis and Lee, Washington was an American first and a Virginian second. He risked his life in combat many times so that one nation could emerge from the smoke or revolutionary battle of a just cause.
1787 was a sacred compact. It was inviolate.
The South had 1787 to thank for all its prosperity. It could never have achieved it's fabulous lifestyle without the united national government that built its roads, protected its trade, maintained law and order, and provided for the common defense. Now that it had grown to manhood, the South told its parents to drop dead.
In legal terms if a man discovers that a neighbors acre is actually deeded to himself on an old map, he can try to claim it. But if his neighbor has built a mansion on that acre, it doesn't mean the house is turned over to the new owner who did not build it. A judge would have to rule on it with a lot of compromise. The South was that man. The South wanted to walk away with its many mansions, even it they couldn't have built up such a fine infrastructure without the United States of America providing the growth.
On Washington's Birthday the marching bands in the South didn't need a drummer. They could march to the steady metronomic thumping of Washington's body spinning in his grave.
LINCOLN'S USA INAUGURAL 3-4-61
Lincoln turned his 1861 journey from Illinois to D.C. into a speechmaking tour. But near the end of the line, when it was time to travel through Baltimore there was a problem. Two different sources in his security department warned of a planned assassination attempt. Lincoln stole his way through Baltimore in the middle of the night and regretted it later. He never wanted to act out of fear of assassination ever again.
Lincoln and William Seward drafted carefully the famous Lincoln Inauguration speech of March 4, 1861. The new Capitol dome was half built behind him. Lincoln told the South that it would have to fire the first shot. As he spoke, the good citizens of Charleston were helping the state militia align the cannons to bomb Fort Sumter.
Lincoln was urged to include passages assuring the South that slavery where it already existed was not going to be molested. He reacted angrily to the idea saying that he had already said this so explicitly so often that it would only make him look weak to say it again.
Symbolic of the situation, and of the entire war was the Statue of Freedom. This is the same statue that stands tall today on top of the Capitol Building. As Lincoln gave his speech that March-4 the statue was not finished and the dome on which it was to stand was not finished either. The statue was laying on its side not too far from where Lincoln talked.
The dome and the statue were completed in stages over the next two and a half years. It was a joyous day in Washington when on December 2, 1863, amidst some tough-won progress in winning the war for freedom, the Statue of Freedom was lifted in stages and reconstructed on top of the seat of government.
When Lincoln gave his second Inaugural address in 1865, the war was clearly being won, and the Statue of Freedom stood tall behind him. The symbolism was extraordinary.
MARCH 21 1861 – STEPHENS TIPS THE SOUTHERN HAND
This 3.21.61 speech at Savannah by the Vice President of the Confederate States of America, Alexander Stephens is the best answer to all the revisionists who say it wasn't about slavery.
Stevens said that, “our government is founded on the guiding principle that the black man is the inferior of the white man, and that servitude is his natural condition.”
Any questions?
Just the other day a guy I know saw me reading a Civil War book and said to me, “You know, the Civil War was not about slavery. It was about Northern economic domination of the South.”
I don't know what his sources are.
No, Buddy; The Civil War was all about slavery; And while we're at it, the South was the aggressor. We fought the Civil War because the South tried to secede from the Union over the election of a president who was against slavery.
Its incredible to me that the South has managed to convince a lot of non-Southern scholars to agree with them that slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War.
I can understand Southerners trying to re-write history to ease their guilt complex. If I was born white in Mobile in 1955 instead of Boston, I might pretend to feel exactly the same way. I don't really begrudge the Southern historians and bloggers for their passionate self-delusion about the origins of the war. But when historians that aren't Southern-born back them up it's sad. That calls for a strenuous argument. To me, its a foolish argument. It's like a furious argument about whether Mexico City has a a large population or a small population. Why are we even arguing about this?
ABOLITION – CAPITAL A VS. SMALL A
The South did not hate Lincoln specifically personally, notwithstanding that some Southern writers called him a gorilla. A victorious Seward would have been every bit as obnoxious to the South, if not more so. Whether a Seward or a Lincoln, Southerners understood that the Republican Party stood for the eradication of slavery even if it were by gradual and peaceful means. Therefore, any Republican winner in a presidential contest was going to have to mean the secession of the slave states. If Freemont had won in 56 the war would have probably started then. The Republican Party had always been against slavery. It was founded on that basis.
Was the Republican party an abolitionist party? Yes, with a small ‘a’. The Abolitionist Party was an extreme, rigid and violent group, not willing to try to work towards a gradual nor an accommodating solution to the problem. The Abbies would never agree to the compensation of slaveowners for emancipated slaves, for example. So when the historians always write that ‘Lincoln was no abolitionist’ they are wrong. Lincoln was no Abolitionist, yes, but he was certainly an abolitionist. He was a man whose entire life was wrapped up in politics, and now he was the leader of the party formed to abolish slavery. It’s absurd to suggest that he was never sincere in his desire to free the slaves.
Were there some Republicans were probably racists who had little more love for the blacks than the southern white racist and only joined the Party for other reasons? Sure. There are aberrations within any group.
Other Republicans were extremely anti-slavery but were wise enough to know that the Abolitionist platform was doomed to failure so they joined a party more moderate than their feelings. Better to obtain part of the goal than fail going for it all. The perfect is the enemy of the good. But deep down inside a great many Republicans were Abolitionist with a capitol ‘A.’
The other device used to debunk Lincoln and the War effort is to use selective citation to misrepresent the general tenor of his views. Your closest friend in a seven-hour interview about you will playfully criticize you from time to time. Any writer or film editor can then use an isolated excerpt to support a negative portrait of you based on other sources. At the right moment he slips in a clip of your friend tweaking you with that little criticism. In a created context, the playful tenor is removed and it looks like your best friend hates you. This is the lowest form of journalism, to co-opt your opposition out of context to condemn itself. Lincoln made a trillion statements in favor of the rights of blacks and against slavery but what is always quoted? - Only the four or five times his comments make him look like a cold hearted racist just like all the other 1860 whites.
This out of context game is always used on Lincoln to prove that he wasn’t an abolitionist and the war was not fought over slavery.
Specifically they always cite the line he wrote to an editor saying that preservation of the Union was his only goal and not the eradication of slavery. He said (to Greely) that if he could preserve the Union by keeping it all free he would do so and that if he could preserve the Union by keeping it all slave he would do so.
First of all he was writing in a spirit of desperation to stop the Border States from seceding. That was the point of the letter. So in that situation he would tend to downplay or even lie about his commitment to end slavery. It was a dismissal of the primacy of the slavery issue for expedience. It wasn’t sincere. The entire outline of his life’s works and letters and speeches and decisions certainly out weighs any single excerpt where he seems like a borderline racist. And even if he did display a moment of abandoning the blacks, what is that contradictory moment next to the evidence of the other thousands of days of his life?
Was he more of a borderline racist than say, Thad Stevens, Angelina Grimke, Charlie Sumner, or Willie Garrison? Of course compared to those outrageous courageous liberals Lincoln was a redneck racist. Was he a racist compared to the most moderate middle of the road American today? Yes he was. But compared to the average American of 1860, Abraham was pro-black and a crusader against slavery. In other words, he was an abolitionist.
The Republican Party from its birth had done what the Whigs and the Democrats had been afraid to do for two decades. It had declared itself unequivocally one way or the other on the slavery issue. In fact that was its reason for being. There were too many Americans tired of the other parties equivocal stands on the matter. The new Republican Party was tired of the national pussyfooting around with slavery. It was officially openly going to fight against slavery. The Republican Party was composed of all the anti-slavery leftover voters from the Free-Soil, Democrat, Know-Nothing, and Whig parties.
The Small a abolitionist Republican Party differed from the capital A Abolitionist Party in extremes and techniques, but not in
goals.
The Wendell Phillips Abolitionists in large part favored secession of the North from the South! They wanted no part of belonging to that sinful slaveocracy even indirectly. Many Abbies went far beyond merely allowing the South to leave; they wanted to beat them to the punch and boot them out of the Union! The Lincoln/Seward Republicans on the other hand wanted to preserve the Union and eliminate slavery. The Abolitionists would have allowed slavery to exist in an expelled South. Their main goal wasn't even to eliminate slavery, per se. They most of all wanted a United States of America without slavery, and would let the slave power leave in peace. So in a way the Abolitionists were less against slavery than the Republicans!
When Stephen Douglas had pointed out in 1858 Lincoln’s hypocrisy for saying he was not going to interfere with slavery in the states yet also saying he was working for its ultimate extinction, the crowd cheered Douglas and yelled ‘hit him again!’ Douglas was right. Lincoln was lying when he said he did not want to interfere with slavery in the states. The Republicans were working with consummate dedication towards slavery’s ‘ultimate extinction.’
Anyone who opposed slavery was an abolitionist. Yet the historians always play games with the word. ‘Lincoln was no abolitionist’ is a slick sentence and I reject it. It’s especially galling when a modern liberal US History textbook uses it. I can understand the bitter southern educator writing that way in 1935. But when modern Yale professors say the same thing its very sad.
Okay, class lets go over it one more time. There is only one honest and correct take on this issue. Lincoln was not a member of the radical Abolitionist political movement, but by leading an avowed anti-slavery party and in speaking clearly about working towards the ultimate extinction of slavery, he was without a reasonable doubt an abolitionist.
Republican leadership would be willing to respect slavery where it existed in Southern States. But slavery would never be allowed to expand under Republican rule and the follow up goal would be to legislate it out of existence. This was an attainable hope for the abolitionists and a plausible fear for the slaver power. This was the origin of the Civil War. The refusal of the South to sit by and watch while the Northern states gradually and peacefully legislated the end of slavery.
Here is leftorian Howard Zinn explaining that the Civil War was not fought over slavery,
“The clash was not over slavery as a moral institution
---most northerners did not care enough about
slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the
sacrifice of war. It was not a clash of peoples … but
of elites. The northern elite wanted economic
expansion – free land free labor, a free market, a
high protective tariff for manufactures, a bank of
the United States.
This is the great Zinn’s take on the origin of the Civil War. Nice try. It’s a shame to take all that courage and bloodshed, all those tears, all that suffering and reduce it to a mass of naïve people being manipulated by the greedy capitalist pigs. Shame on Zinn for backing up every racist redneck historian. Slavery as a moral institution was the sky-written cause of the Civil War. Only those fond of being in error would suggest otherwise.
That first slice was from page 184 of his famous People’s History of the United States of America. On the next page he cites a Congressional resolution passed in the mid-1861 North to further back his position,
“this war is not waged … for any purpose of
overthrowing or interfering with the rights
of established institutions of those states…
but … to preserve the Union.”
With each passing year it becomes easier to spread this myth. But lets hear from a British historian in 1901. The Oxford History of the American People knows that two plus two equals four even if some others do not,
“Secession and rebellion, devised and begun by Southern
leaders to extend and perpetuate slavery, proved the most
powerful agency for its swift destruction. ..
Jefferson Davis, in his book “The Rise and Fall of the
Confederate Government,” has asserted that the South
did not fight for slavery but for equality. The whole mass
of Secessionist literature, speeches, proclamations,
legislative resolutions and Acts, show this statement to
be an error.”
The further one goes back in time, the more the obvious cause of the Civil War was slavery. But the more recent the scholarship, the more the Civil War was not about slavery. Who knows more, the people who lived through the era or the people 150 years later who didn’t?
KIA
Before we begin the military story lets put the tragedy in perspective with the real stats that count. The American Civil War would cost both sides a combined 618,000 war related deaths, with more dying from disease than in battle. These numbers are almost twice as many Americans that died in World War Two. The South used a total of 800,000 troops while the Union used 2.1 million. Stats are always suspect, but this is the generally accepted estimate. (Historian E.B. Long seems to be the most respected last word on most Civil War stats.)
ROMAN, CRAWFORD, AND FORSYTH GO TO WASHINGTON – MARCH 1861
In early March of 61 the CSA authorized a diplomatic mission to Washington to try to work out all problems between the two nations peacefully. Three powerful men were chosen to go to D.C. and seek an audience with Secretary of State Seward with hope of then getting a meeting with President Lincoln. It didn't matter to them that Lincoln hadn't even taken the oath of office. He was the man they wanted to meet, not President Buchanan.
Secretary Seward dissed the three famous Rebel emissaries. He would not meet with them. Seward and Lincoln were insisting that the Confederacy was illegal and illegitimate, and that the seceded states were in rebellion, but were nevertheless still in the Union. To even meet with the trio would be almost the same as granting recognition to the CSA. The three were told that they could meet informally with some friends of Seward at a saloon on the outskirts of town, and talk things over there in an unofficial capacity.
The three went back to the South in a bad mood. Seward's official account of the failed negotiations speaks some plain language I like,
The Secretary of State frankly confesses that he understands the events which have recently occurred, and the condition of political affairs which actually exists in the part of the Union to which his attention has thus been directed, very differently from the aspect in which they are presented by Messrs. Forsyth and Crawford. He sees in them, not a rightful and accomplished revolution and an independent nation, with an established government, but rather a perversion of a temporary and partisan excitement to the inconsiderate purposes of an unjustifiable and unconstitutional aggression upon the rights and the authority vested in the Federal Government.
That's right on. Davis had told the three men that they could make concessions on almost any point except Fort Sumter. Which is like kidnappers saying they are willing to negotiate anythings with one exception; the release of the hostages. The USA was simply not willing to negotiate with the CSA on anything, with or without Sumter on the menu. Roman, Crawford, and Forsyth had the same diplomatic status in D.C. in March of 1861 as a wino.
FATAL DECISION OF APRIL 9 1861
This war that was about to begin would end when Lee surrendered on April 9 1865 at Appomattox Court House Virginia. The decision to fire on Fort Sumter South Carolina was arrived at on April 9 1861 at a key Confederate cabinet meeting in Montgomery Alabama. The Civil War lasted exactly four years. (some books say this meeting took place on April 10 – You would absolutely not believe how often famous historians give conflicting dates – for the purpose of the point I'm sticking with April 9))
Lincoln knew he had to trick the South into firing the first shot. He needed a Pearl Harbor to get the North all stirred up. It's easy to forget today that the North was in fact not all that stirred up about secession in early April 1861. Quite a lot of Northerners did not expect a war for quite a lot of different reasons. Some Yanks thought that the Confederacy was a hapless, almost comical enterprise and were so busy watching the play unfold that they lost sight of the bigger issues and the threat of war. Some Abolitionists were happy to have the detested South out of the Union at long last. Many Northern Democrats thought that the North had caused the problem and had no right to use force to get the South back in the Union. There were millions of Northerners who didn't like slavery, didn't like the South and didn't approve of secession, but didn't necessarily feel that hundreds of thousands of men should die to get the South back. They were anti-South but also anti-war.
Lincoln could not conduct a full scale war until the South gave the North he anger it needed, the unity it needed, and the sense of being the victim of Southern aggression that it needed. Davis and his cabinet provided the solution by firing the first shot in Southie (South Carolina.)
At the April 9 Reb cabinet meeting, the leaders went around the table and agreed that the order should be sent to Beauregard at Charleston to begin bombarding Sumter. Then in walked Toombs.
Bob Toombs, the new Secretary of State stood in the doorway and listened for about 15 minutes. Then he was asked to speak his two cents. He spoke his two million dollars instead.
Toombs walked up and down the room with his hands behind his back, looking everyone up and down and making one of the most dramatic speeches in American history. Robert told them that they were all insane. That the South would be stirring up a hornets nest if it fired on Fort Sumter, That “you men will be making the biggest mistake of your lifetime.”
The rest of the cabinet was giving Toombs defiant almost sarcastic smiles as he tried to sell them that they were making the wrong call. Their swagger seemed to make Toombs the more determined to drive his points home more bluntly.
RT then walked over to where Jeff Davis was sitting and leaned over to within a foot from his face and said to him and in effect to all loud and clear,
“We must not begin hostilities. The Confederacy will lose every friend it has in the North. We will lose all of our diplomatic leverage overseas. And gentlemen, we will lose the war. Not only will we lose, we and all of our families will suffer, for this will be a war far greater and far more horrible than anything the world has ever seen.
And I repeat, the South will lose. Mr. Davis, Mr. President, gentlemen; We are making a fatal error.”
Toombs then turned his back to the meeting and stared out the window.
Davis kept his cool and after a pause said that he respected the right of Toombs to make his arguments bluntly, but that the Secretary of State had not changed anyone's mind. The other faces nodded in agreement, and that was that.
As soon as the meeting was adjourned Davis sent a telegram to Beauregard at Charleston ordering him to, “Blast Sumter to smithereens.”
Confederate sympathizer historian Frank Vandiver in his book Their Tattered Flags makes it seem that the South had no choice on Sumter and that those who chose to fire on it were doing it with sad reluctance, throwing up their hands in dismay, because the North had left them no options. He makes it seem that everyone else was on the same page as Toombs but they simply didn't bother to get up and make the same speech. Frank takes the arrogance out of the CSA and replaces it with reluctance and martyrdom. Big V quotes Toombs making the same speech in the same room, then comes out of the quote with this misleading excuse for history.
“Who doubted that Toombs was right? But what else could be done?”
I'll answer that for you. They all doubted that he was right. My other account of this meeting has all the others absolutely doubting that he was right. They felt that cotton would win Europe and with that would come victory. They saw Robby T as the odd man out, the killjoy pessimist ruining their secessionist party.
Vandiver makes it seem that Toombs wasn't even courageous, that he was histrionically making a point that everyone already understood. If Vandiver is right, then Toombs was being a condescending jack-ass. If Vandiver is right the rest of the people in that Monty room were in essence listening to Toombs and thinking, 'Yeah, no kidding Dick Tracy.”
But that was not the definition of the situation in that room, otherwise Toombs would not have been able to deliver the warning speech at all. If it was that obvious, he either wouldn't have made the speech, and if he had, he would have been interrupted. Every member of the Davis cabinet was not reluctantly agreeing to start a war they can't win. That's not even logical.
The South thought it was going to win recognition from England and France and that's why many of its leaders were not afraid to go to war.
FORT SUMTER APRIL 1861
The military phase of the Great Rebellion began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter. This was a Federal island named after General Sumter who died in 1832 as the last surviving general of the American Revolution.
General Sumter was a defender of South Carolina in its battle with President Jackson over nullification. Fort Sumter stood in the middle of the harbor in Charleston South Carolina. The state had declared itself to be part of a new nation, but even if the old USA accepted this, would the South allow the North to maintain it’s Federal property in those regions? This would constitute an irredentist nation scattered about in the states within the new Confederacy.
Sumter was strong and if fully equipped, very powerful. The problem for the Union was that the fort had been built on the presumption that South Carolina was part of the USA. It was designed to stop foreign warships attacking from the sea. Its feebly-armed rear was well within range of the land-based cannon of Charleston.
The commander of Sumter was Bob Anderson a former instructor at West Point. The commander of the Southern batteries preparing to bombard Sumter was Beauregard, one of Anderson's students at West Point. If Anderson did his job right as a teacher, he would now get blown to bits by his pupil.
On April 12, 1861 just before dawn the ‘shock and awe’ bombardment of Fort Sumter began. The cannon on Sumter was incomplete and could only shoot back occasionally and ineffectually while the slavery shells could pound the fort endlessly with ammo coming in from all over the South. Anderson had little choice but to surrender. There were no casualties, but the first man to die in the Civil War was a federal soldier killed the next day during the surrender ceremonies when a salutary cannon misfired.
There had been no real bloodshed at Sumter but now both sides knew that the war was on. The political fight over slavery begun when the founding fathers haggled over it at Philadelphia in 1787 was finally over. From now on it was a different game. From now on it was might makes right. Once the shooting started the issues no longer mattered. Like the first punch in a fistfight, from now on, it doesn’t matter why it started or who started it. Now the only thing that mattered for both sides was who wins. Whoever wins was apparently in the right from the start.
No one has yet to devise a plan to successfully stop a war from reaching some sort of a decision once it has begun. Even a stalemate is a decision reached. Once war begins, some level of results must be determined before either side will even think of negotiating. Once Sumter was fired on it was too late to stop the evil momentum of violence begetting violence. The war could now be fought in full and to the finish on the grounds that it had begun.
The chain reaction of conflict had set in. The South had done the Union a favor by bombarding Sumter. Now the North could commence military action for the stated purpose of repossessing what was already its own, not for the purpose seizing Confederate state soil in an act of aggression. Stop! Thief! The South has taken my wallet! Theoretically the entire war was fought to retake Fort Sumter.
The reaction to the 36-hour bombardment of Sumter was sensational. Both sides cheered wildly in the streets for war. The North was enraged and the South was euphoric. Both sides were now up for it. Stephen Douglas who had done so much to bring on the war and had only months to live said in the wake of Sumter that there are no neutrals in this conflict, only patriots and traitors. Thank you, sir!
On his future deathday, April 15, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteers to restore order in the South. The quota was surpassed handily. Enthusiasm was high on both sides. This was the 19th, not the 20th century, and war was still a glorious thing.
MORE SECESSION
Prior to the hostilities in Charleston, the border slave states in the middle were undecided on secession. Politics on both sides were focused on these competing loyalties.
Lincoln knew that to defend Sumter would probably trigger more secession, but he also knew that to not defend Sumter would validate the Confederacy, and would also give the South the chance for international recognition. It was a no-win situation for Lincoln. He chose the lesser of two evils. The Union had to be preserved. The Constitution of 1787 and the Election of 1860 had to both be honored as agreed to. Bloody war was less evil than the legitimizing of a fascist slave empire in the South with a chance to expand into Central America, the Caribbean, and who knows how far beyond.
The upper South was hesitant on secession because it had more to lose than the lower. For one thing, the war would probably be fought on the soil of the upper South. Also, the deep South exported most of its cotton and rice overseas, whereas the upper South depended heavily on trade with the North. Thirdly, slavery was less prominent in the upper south, and slavery, in spite of what the newer history books are teaching our children, was the actual cause of the Civil War.
The Enduring Vision, a modern book, has the standard new revisionist take on the post-Sumter situation,
The North, too, was ready for a fight, less to
abolish slavery than to punish secession.
But slavery was the cause of the secession, so this is pure semantic sophistry. Everyone knew what the cause of the Civil War was at the time. Historians delicately call Lincoln a “free-soiler,” and stress that he was not an abolitionist. But all free soilers were essentially abolitionists. The South certainly knew that Lincoln was an abolitionist and there are a thousand quotations from Southerners that say this explicitly.
It’s like a next-door neighbor who keeps throwing rocks at your house every day for three years. Then one day he gives you the finger and you go over and punch him in the nose. The guy then tells everyone that the fight had nothing to do with him throwing rocks. In a strict technical sense he is correct but obviously he is not.
With the call for troops, the Border States had to come off the fence and make a call. Four states chose to join the “stars and bars” (meaning the blacks will stay behind bars unless they want to see stars.) Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Arkansas were now in the pro-slavery fold.
CSA MOVES CAPITOL TO RICHMOND - MAY 1861
The secession of Virginia and the addition of the old dominion to the CSA gave the Rebs a newfound status. This wasn't the wild west of Andy Jackson, Crazy Lou Wigfall, and hard-drinking Andrew Johnson. This was staid aristocratic Virginia, the state that gave us an entire dynasty of Presidents, and Secretaries of State in the nation's Wonder Years.
Perhaps just as important, Virginia was the only state on the Confederacy that had any serious armaments factories. The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond made as much cannon as any foundry in New England. It was a sad day in Lincoln's life when Virginia joined the bad guys.
Down in Montgomery, the Jefferson Davis team decided to move the Confederate Capitol to Richmond. This would give a new improved international status to the CSA and would pose a military threat to Washington D.C.
The weather probably played a part in the decision. It was just beginning to get Montgomery hot. The sweating Rebels decided it was important to move the HQ to Richmond before everyone suffocated at the meetings.
Of course, the threat to Washington was a double-edged sword. The Union Army was now going to be within striking distance of Richmond at all times.
What a different war it would have been if the Rebel Government had never left Montgomery. All those stalemate slugfests in Virginia would probably have never happened.
SOUTH ARMS ITSELF WITH STOLEN GUNS
When Virginia seceded on the 17th of April, it decided that the best way to declare its independence of the United States of America was to rob it of its legitimate armaments that happened to be in Virginia. The Virginians attacked and occupied the Federal Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, the place where John Brown made history in 1859.
What possible moral justification can Virginia offer for this deed? That arsenal belonged to the Federal government of the USA, not Virginia nor the CSA. Why do the historians overlook this criminal immoral scummy act of piracy and thievery by the high and mighty moralist South that claimed that it only wanted 'to leave in peace?' The South was like a roommate that agreed that the two of us can't get along so I'll move out in peace. By the way, I'm taking all your stuff too, because you're away on business this week and you can't stop me.
On the 18th, General Win Scott, aged hero of the Mexican War offered Robert E. Lee the command of the true American Army. Lee told Scott in essence, “No, I am a Virginian first, a Southerner second, and an American third.” Lee told Scott that he had a similar offer from the other side and he was going to take it.
Scott told Lee, “Bobby buddy, you are making the biggest mistake of your life.”
Was Scott right? Morally yes, but as far as his legacy goes, Lee was probably making a fabulous choice. He could never have achieved the status of the Redneck Jesus Christ of the South that he holds to this day if he had merely done a fine job along with other generals for the North. By representing the lost cause, he became the martyr and hero forever in Dixie.
Is it unfair to call Lee-lovers 'rednecks?' Maybe. But does it mean anything to anyone out there that 99.999% of the people who worship Robert E. Lee are white? Doesn't that tell you something? The few Northern whites who love his beard today are limited to military historians or that abomination of abominations, 'Civil War buffs.' The average white Joe in the North today does not love Robert E. Lee at all.
And what about his supposed genius and brilliance as a general? The military historians are just about unanimous on that one. But why do Southern white people have no such admiration for the generals who made brilliant decisions in the other wars of America? Why is this man, plus the likes of Stonewall, Longstreet and Forrest the only military geniuses they decide to worship like a 12 year old boy with a poster on his wall of a star athlete? Millions of white Southerners who have no particular interest in the military geniuses of history per se, suddenly become pre-occupied with the science of military tactics only for this one war. Why is that?
They use love of Lee's brilliance as a cover for their real love; the values and goals of the old Confederacy. Tommy Jefferson had dreamed of an 'empire for liberty.' Lee chose the side that wanted an empire for slavery, an empire for the absence of liberty.
BALTIMORE BULLETS
The next action came in Baltimore.
In D.C. there was a healthy fear of an attack from the South. A regiment of Massachusetts’s soldiers on its way to protect the old nation’s capitol was attacked by a street mob in Baltimore. There was no continuous rail line through Baltimore. In order to change trains the troops had to cross-town on foot. It was a combination march/fight between the soldiers and the pro rebel elements of the city populace. Men and women hurled objects and catcalls at the trotting troops. Four soldiers were killed along with 12 mobsters.
The secessionist civilians destroyed the main railroad tracks leading into Baltimore from the North. Now Washington was completely cut off from the North. The South must have been suddenly glad it had agreed in 1790 to let the Federal government assume the state debts in exchange for the capitol being moved south to the Potomac. That bargain led to this strategic Confederate advantage in 1860. The Northern capitol was an island surrounded by southern territory. Both Virginia and Maryland were slave states.
The telegraphs were also cut. Lincoln had no way of knowing if he and his capitol were going to be rescued or sacked. Rumors were all gloomy at best, as 90% of all rumors are (How many rumors have you heard about something great that might happen soon?) The South was going to attack from the south with a uniformed army, while Baltimore maniac mobs supported the invasion from the north. The President and the government would be isolated. The war would be over in a shorter amount of time than it took to start it. This worst-case scenario was more than plausible. It was possible. It was doable.
For a few days there was panic in the capitol city. The Treasury Building was fortified for a last stand. We know where our priorities stand. It would be the D.C. Alamo, Lincoln shooting his pistol and then hurling it at the men charging through the window and ramming him through with a bayonet.
But the South wanted independence, not conquest. It’s military goal was to be left alone, not to occupy the North. The CFA’s first instinct was not to invade the District of Columbia and no invasion was in the offing. But Lincoln had no way of knowing this, and he was nervous.
Significant U.S. Army reinforcements did arrive in a few days via a circuitous rout. The news they brought back from the North was encouraging. Morale was fantastic all across the Union states of America. Enlistment goals were so far surpassed as to be logistically problematic for training and deployment. To use an oil analogy, there weren’t enough refineries for the ample supply of needed fuel. But at least at last the army was here to protect our President, and more troops were on the way. Lincoln could relax. A little.
As for Baltimore, order would later be completely restored in the land of Unitas, and in a close call, Maryland would stay in the Union.
MARYLAND SECESSION AND HABEAS CORPUS
To many of Lincoln's critics, his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was one of his worst offenses. Marxist and redneck historians both like to discredit Lincoln for opposite reasons, but they both agree this one. Lincoln was a tyrant and he was no friend of democracy nor humanity and his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was wrong.
The phrase is Latin for “show me the body.” Men in ancient Rome got slapped if they said it to the wrong woman. It means bring before the court the person you have in prison. You must drag them out of the dungeon and bring them to open court. The state must demonstrate in public what the charges against the person is and under what law they are being held pending a fair trial. If the state won't do it, they have to release the prisoner. That is the sacred right of habeas corpus.
But the Constitution specifically authorizes the President of the United to States to suspend the writ of habeas corpus if he feels that the national security is threatened.
To charge Lincoln with being a tyrant for suspending the habeas corpus when the nations capitol in physically threatened is bogus.
But Lincoln was indeed a tyrant when he arrested the Maryland Legislature so the couldn't vote to secede!
MYTH OF SOUTHERN SUPERIOR PERFORMANCE
A sidebar now on the legend of Southern military superiority.
The Southern generals did not perform much better than the Northern generals in the Civil War. Most people believe they did perform better, and that's what most Civil War historians believe too - But not all.
The South won some spectacular battles in 1862 and 1863, but in the overall campaigns, the North fought just as cleverly.
The problems is, the South lost the war, so it had to exaggerate the deeds of its heroes for psychological comforting. It had to ignore the parade of devastating blunders made by Southern generals and further ignore the dazzling deeds by Northern generals. The Southern victories get all the ink. It's that simple.
The other reason this myth arose is that too much credit for Northern victories went to the advantage of superior Northern resources. Since the South was always outnumbered and outgunned, it rarely occurs to historians that the North might have often made more of its superior resources than the South made of its inferior resources. Being the Goliath, the Northern military plans that work to perfection get no real credit or glory. No one writes songs about the bully winning the battle. But the South as the underdog becomes the darling of drama for victory at Chickamauga or Bull Run.
The Northern Army and Navy brains trust had developed very nicely over the course of the war and by 1864 they were doing more great things than blundering things. But the Northern blunders get the spotlight, such as Cold Harbor.
Overall the Southern generals might have performed better than the South, but if so, not by much. That is a myth. Don't believe it.
I learned this from a pro-Southern historian!
FORCES
The North was especially unprepared for war. In April of 1861 the Union Army consisted of only 16,755 troops, most of them stationed in the wild wild west guarding the Indian frontiers.
Mobilization grew to a point where all told by April of 1865 more than 2 million men had served in the Union Army.
The South had several major advantages.
There were many more Southerners already in arms. The average rural plantation Southerner had better riding and shooting (and whipping) skills as compared to the industrial worker of the Northern cities. Fighting, dueling and gunmanship were also more commonplace in the South in general. Violence was a ho-hum part of Southern higher culture.
The war was to be fought on Southern territory. They would know the terrain.
Defense is easier to fight than offense. It takes a three to one advantage in troops and artillery to storm a defensive position.
Southern armies could move within a compact arc of defense while Northern forces would have to make much larger movements on the outer arc to make its plays.
The Southerner had extra élan because he was fighting to defend his homeland.
The most significant advantage for the South was that it did not have to win. Tie or stalemate goes to the defense. The North had to occupy the entire South to win the war. The South only had to survive in some form in some corner of the Confederacy long enough to win recognition and, hopefully, the support of other nations. The South could win by wearing out the North with casualties until attrition forced the Yanks to sue for a negotiated peace recognizing Southern independence. The Confederated States of America in 1861 were in the same position militarily as the confederated states of America in 1776.
The South had another advantage in that it had a new Army which had no ego regarding its past.
The North had a veteran 'Regular Army' of 23,000 when the war began. Not a big number, but these guys were trained, disciplined, and somewhat experienced. The volunteers increased the size of the US Army to a peak size of about 623,000 men. The new hordes were nearly all volunteers with a few draftees. Only the Army veterans could help to train and inspire the new fighting masses based on their own experience and status. Lincoln asked them to. The new volunteers asked them to.
But no, the ego of the old U.S. Army units would not allow this, even if it saved lives and helped win the war. The old Army units insisted on staying together. The experienced officers refused to allow themselves to be spread out among the volunteers where they could create a team effort. The old guard could have made much better use of themselves and the new men if they had dispersed throughout the entire Union Army of 600,000 plus.
So the entire Civil War in the North was fought by the volunteers and draftees alone, with an occasional action by a regular army unit in the background. The volunteer Union Army had to train by fighting since the old school jerks refused to train them. It was untrained inexperienced officers training and drilling untrained inexperienced men by the hundreds of thousands. Senators and lawyers with no military background resigned their seats and went off to lead plumbers, actors, and janitors with no more military background their leaders. That was one of the main reasons for the poor performances by the U.S. Army during the war.
The South had no such ego baggage with its senior Army since it never had an old army. The many US Army officers who resigned their commissions and went to serve the South had no problem with leading and training a mass of undisciplined volunteers. The South didn't paint themselves into a corner by hoarding their desperately needed officers in a cocoon of old unit pride. So 100% of Rebel brigades were led by experienced officers, while only about 5% of the Union Brigades had the same advantage. The South was six month ahead of the North in training by the time McClellan took over the Army of the Potomac in late August 1861, and it showed.
The Rebels however had disadvantages that in the end spelled defeat.
The South was vastly outnumbered. The North had 22 million people, the South 9, and of this latter figure, over three million were slaves not quite eager for a chance to storm the enemy Northern lines like John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima.
The South had precious little heavy manufacturing capability.
The Northern railroad network was vastly better than the South in both mileage and quality.
Dixie was a powerful agricultural region, true, but most of this was not edible. The army could not march with a belly full of cotton, tobacco and indigo. Food supply was a major problem for the South from day one, and not a major one for the North. Hungry soldiers desert more often.
The South’s navy was tiny in size and number.
The North had more fighter jets than the South.
The CSA had no stable currency at any point in the conflict.
Because it was founded on slavery, the South had no chance of any significant international support in an age of global progressivism.
Most important, the North could and would continue to replenish its depleted ranks with new immigrants, while the South could not. There was no Ellis Island in Charleston harbor. What immigrant would choose to compete with slave labor, and in a region where all manual labor was considered undignified for a white man? Like a modern air force free-falling for lack of spare parts, the Confederate Army would have no spare human parts to keep its already outnumbered army up to snuff.
In every important economic indicator except cotton, the South was at approximately a four to one disadvantage. This includes railroads, armaments, wheat, iron, textiles, humanity, and coal. The South produced 96% of the 1860 USA’s cotton. The North produced 94% of its iron, 97% of its coal, 97% of its firearms and 93% of its textiles. As the polished Southern rascal Rhett Butler put it at a Georgia gathering when war broke out in Gone With the Wind, “All we have is cotton, slaves and … arrogance.” For this remark he was challenged to a duel.
Another disadvantage of the South was that it was trapped in it’s own logic over states rights. It had seceded to gain the superiority of states rights over federal. Now it had to conduct war, a thing that required the most federalized actions. States rights was the stated cause of the war and a major cause of defeat. States rights meant no military cohesion. For example, there are historians who believe that Lee conducted the entire war with defense of his home state of Virginia taking strategic precedence over overall defense of the CSA.
Southern states would and did co-operate with the war effort, but only whenever they damn well felt like it. It was their right, and they had seceded in order to win that right. The insubordination of the states in response to the requests of the Confederate central power was a catastrophic problem for the military conducts of the war in all its aspects. Sacred states rights would be a monkey wrench in the southern war machine for five years.
Drafting took place on both sides but was a smaller part of the forces than most people think. Only 46,000 men were drafted into the Union Army, 120,000 into the Southern.
Historian Hattaway, (pro-Southern war-lover historian Herman Hattaway) states clearly that one of the early advantages for the Confederacy was its mass use of conscription in the early stages of the war – but the numbers do not bear his assessment out.
Then there were substitutes. If you got drafted you could simply buy your way out. For 500 in gold you could pay someone else to risk his life and limb on your behalf. To most of us this sounds too immoral for words, but it was part of the value system in place at that time. A man named Grover Cleveland of Buffalo was drafted and bought his way out. He was later elected President of the United States under the Democratic banner and the bounty business was well known during the election campaign. If it had been the sin it seems today, he obviously never could have been elected President.
It is a bit amazing that the United States Army permitted thousands of enlisted men and officers to resign and go re-enlist in the Confederate Army. No charges for desertion were brought against the Colonels and Generals who did this, and the North might have won the war a little more quickly if it hard denied this permission to the future heroes whose names would be on Southern High Schools to this very day (for some strange reason.) Lee and Stonewall might have spent the war in stonewall prisons if Lincoln had cracked down on this procedure, but I guess they were hoping for some sort of reconciliation and did not want to arrest Southerners who wanted out of the Union and thus provoke the outbreak of fighting with the reaction to these arrests.
CAPITOL HOTEL
When the victims of the Baltimore attack reached Washington they bivouacked in the Capitol Building. A black volunteer named Nicholas Biddle had been hit in the head with a rock in Baltimore and his wound acted up. His blood was all over the Capitol building floor.
The rock was probably thrown from a private window. So it could be that a woman drew the first blood of the Civil War. Other units slept in the Senate Chamber and in the newly completed wing of the House of Representatives. Big Ben Butler’s Massachusetts regiment slept in the rotunda.
The luxurious “Capitol Hotel” was cleared of the interlopers by the time the Congress convened on the Fourth of July 1861. Military camps were built on the outskirts of the city and the men went back to muddy reality.
ANACONDA
The overall Northern plan for victory was called Operation Anaconda. The idea was to cut the South in half by the Mississippi, add a fierce blockade of all the seacoasts, and eventually strangle all the snakes that had seceded.
Anaconda recognized that the Union might not defeat the CSA's Army of Northern Virginia until the rest of the Confederacy had been weakened, and whittled down to size. Overall, it worked. The Southern historians still like to brag about how long it took to subdue the South, but that is pathetic consolation for the fact that Anaconda worked and the North won.
BORDER STATES/THE KEY TO WINNING IN CHESS IS TO CONTROL THE CENTER OF THE BOARD.
After the four post-Sumter secessions there were five states still up for grabs in the center of the country. In war terms, they had clout out of proportion to their normal political size because of their location. Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri were the center attraction in the spring of 61. If Lincoln could keep the remaining border states in the Union he felt confident that he could win the war. If he could not he was confident he could not. Collectively they added up to a 47% increase in the white population of the Confederacy if they could be added. This was a big prize. The border states were volatile and divided on both slavery and secession. It was in a letter to his brother-in-law Chadwick Lincoln at this time that Lincoln issued the famous quotation that he wants God on his side but must have Kentucky.
Maryland had the obvious quality of surrounding the District of Columbia, and for a small state was an agricultural giant. Slavery was prominent in the eastern tobacco region but not popular elsewhere.
The Baltimore riot turned out to be a premature indicator of Maryland true sentiments overall. In a serious political fight, Maryland settled back into the Union as a free state.
Lincoln suspended civilian rights in the North to an extent that was almost shocking even compared to our home security conduct in the World Wars. At one point in late 1861 it looked like Maryland was going to call an emergency meeting of the legislature to vote on secession. The war had already been under way for months and Lincoln would not stand for this. He had the pro-secessionist legislators arrested before they could vote. The voting results of course was no surprise. Maryland decided to stay “loyal.”
As mentioned earlier, Lincoln decided to arrest anyone he felt was a threat, and too bad about the habeas corpus. He reportedly told a friend, “they’ll get a hearing before a judge all right … over my dead habeas corpus!”
Critics accused Lincoln of failing to respect the laws of the Constitution. Lincoln snapped back that the Confederacy had already broken all of the laws of the Constitution. Was it fair for him now to be asked to lose the war in order to not break one of its laws?
Touche!
Kentucky was crucial for many reasons. Its northern border was the Ohio River, the key to security and transportation in the heart of the Midwest. The Tennessee and Cumberland rivers were arteries of the Ohio that ran directly south into Tennessee. From there an army could use water transport to invade the Georgia and Alabama regions. Control of these rivers would constitute a crucial strategic victory.
Missouri was also important for its river artery, the mighty Mississippi. A four-year state-wide civil war would be waged there by regulars and irregulars on both sides before this slave state settled back securely into the Union. Missouri never seceded, but it was never fully secured for big blue until 1865
The Confederacy never fully accepted the reality that Missouri and Kentucky had remained loyal, even if it was a loyalty obtained at bayonet point. For the duration of the conflict the Rebel flag included two stars for these states and both Union-controlled states sat representatives in the Confederate Congress.
Delaware remained loyal even though it had some slavery. When Lincoln was told the news he said, “that’s good” and went back to the letter he was writing. Delaware has never been terribly important.
HOLIDAY SESSION
Lincoln called a special session of Congress for July 4 1861. Much was discussed.
SEWARD'S FOLLY
Secretary of State Seward is remembered by history as the author of “Seward's Folly,” the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 for 12 million bucks and some beads. But he almost went down ingloriously in history for the folly of his foreign warmongering policy in the summer of 1861.
Secretary Seward kept making statements to England, France and others in Europe that the United States was more than ready to go to war with them. William Seward was making threats to England so often in so many forms, private and public, that the English diplomats in D.C. were sending back messages to London to be prepared for a sudden declaration of war upon the UK from the USA!
Seward sent formal notes to Lincoln explaining that if the US could start a war with Europe, it would unite the country. That didn't just mean the North. Seward thought that a war with a European power would cause the South to rethink secession and come back to help fight for the one true flag.
In the meantime, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was named chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. In this role he quickly won the respect and trust of President Lincoln. Sumner was a man of two continents and spoke fluent French. Charlie had no desire to start a senseless unprovoked war with England, which seemed to Sumner to be the gist of Seward's plans.
Sumner went to Seward's house in Georgetown and yelled at him that, “The issue of war and peace with England is not up to you! From now on everything you write or say will be carefully watched before it goes out in any official capacity.” As Sumner stormed out, Seward shouted at him to “Go back to Boston.”
Lincoln began consulting regularly with Sumner on foreign policy and it is safe to say that in effect the Chairman of the SFRC became an alternate Secretary of State during the Civil War years. Lincoln let Seward say whatever he wanted but he stayed close to Sumner for balance.
Seward may have been playing a shrewd game. He wanted Europe to think that the USA was trigger happy for a war. That way the European countries would think thrice before recognizing the Confederacy. He wanted the Euros to think, 'If these guys are nuts enough to start a war for no reason, they certainly would start one if we recognize the stars and bars.' Seward's belligerence, as he played bad cop, would make life easier for Lincoln as he played good cop saying nothing along the same lines as his hothead Secretary of State. If this is true then Seward really had no intention of sparking up a European war, he just wanted Europe to think he was about to. All of the European countries didn't want war, almost all courted trade with the USA, and all were involved in the complex alliance systems in Europe. War with the United States for any reason was not a tempting idea anywhere in Europe. Seward may have known this and exploited it. Otherwise, Seward perhaps was simply insane.
The orthodox take on it is that Seward irresponsibly overreached himself with looney proposals that appalled everyone around him, and offended Lincoln too, but Abe was such a great guy that he forgave him with a gentle disciplinary moment or two and then Seward settled down and made up for it with fine service as Secretary of State for the rest of the war.
BULL RUN/MANASSAS JUNCTION 7-21-61
“Forward to Richmond!” was the cry in the North. Civilian experts scolded the US armed forces for not acting aggressively while a declared war was supposedly on.
Few had a mind to criticize Lincoln since he was leading the critics. Abraham too, had no patience with Armies that just sat around while there was a war on. This would be the big argument he would have with his generals for the first three years of the war. Abe spent half the war writing telegrams to his generals asking them, “Exactly when are you guys going to get movin and start fightin? What are we paying you guys for?”
In a way, it seemed unfair. Abe had only served briefly in a militia back in 1832 looking for Indians that weren’t found. He didn’t appreciate that it is more difficult to train an army than it is to employ it in combat.
The Union commander was General McDowell and he tried to convince Lincoln that it was best to wait until the Army was better trained before striking out on a decisive offensive. There were valid rumors that the Rebs were planning to attack Washington in a big strategic war-winning offensive. McDowell tried to convince Lincoln that this would be exactly what would help the North militarily.
McDowell would be fired soon after the battle that was looming, but he was actually prescient before it. He understood that the defense had the advantage when two large but inept armies prepared for a major clash.
“Let them come to Washington,” Little Mac told Lincoln. “There is no better place to take them on. We can defend the city with short interior lines and they will expend themselves and go back to Virginia in a battered condition.”
Lincoln understood the logic but said, “I can't take that chance. If you're wrong we lose the capitol city to the Rebels. Besides, the entire country is clamoring for an offensive against the South, not a defensive.”
“But Mr. Lincoln, if we st...”
“Enough, Mr. McDowell, I have made my decision.”
“But Mr. Lincoln, if we build up our def...”
“Please, Mac. I have enough problems without your attitude.”
Being chased verbally from the rear, McDowell made his move with his big undertrained army. The offensive failed at the Battle of Bull Run and the Union Army retired in shame back to D.C.
This first major battle of the war took place just a few miles south of Washington at Manassas Creek on July 21, 1861.
It was Rebel Beauregard versus Union McClelland. The Southern Civil War buffs still worship Beauregard, but I have low regard for Beauregard, because I am a prejudiced partisan Yankee.
Beauregard had less than 10,000 troops to match against 30,000 of the newly “organized” AOP, the Army of the Potomac.
There was a secondary front of two opposing forces in the Shenandoah Valley. Rebel Johnston was squared off there against Union Bob Patterson. These forces would prove to be the makeweight of Bull Run. Whenever two sides are slugging it out for ten rounds, whoever gets the reinforcements usually wins. The South got the reinforcements at Bull.
Both armies were lame trained. They lacked the invaluable training of combat experience, so most of the two months of drilling and marching and rehearsing would not pay off much in the first battle. Both Johnny Reb and Ulysses Union were training and fighting simultaneously, and that would be true for many of the early battles of the war, particularly Shiloh (1862.)
Crowds of well-dressed civilians followed the Union troops to watch the battle of July 1861 from the North Virginia hillsides. They were there to watch the killing like spectators at the Roman Colosseum. It was a disgraceful scene. The spectators all got what they deserved in the end.
Once the battle was joined, Jeff Davis sent word to get all CSA forces to the spot if at all possible, as soon as possible, force concentration of force.
The famous Davis telegram read, “Johnston, get your boys to Manassas, and don't be slow as molasses!” To get his 8,000 states-rights boys over to Bull he would first have to get them onto the Manassas Gap Railroad. The South in general was famously second rate in railroad infrastructure throughout the war, but in Northern Virginia it wasn't bad, and that paid off in the first big fight.
For the whole first afternoon the Union was pushing the confused Rebels around and winning ground slowly but steadily.
But then Rebel Stonewall Jackson got his nickname by stopping the Union momentum with a fierce stand. Soon the men of Beauregard's HQ spotted a distant army heading their way from a western and new direction. But whose forces were they?
It was the CSA forces of J. Johnston, not the complacent forces of Union Patterson who had sat there passively, not realizing that the force he was supposed to keep in check in the Shenandoah Valley had slipped away to win a battle elsewhere.
The Southern reinforcements arrived by train. It was the first tim in world history that a major battle had been decided my the arrival of troops by rail transport. Johnny Rebs pulled up at the station and leapt from the trains yelling yi-haa and heading straight for the battle in progress.
The Rebs arrived like cavalry in a kids western movie and the battle was turned. After winning for a day, the Union was defeated in an hour. McDowell quit the field.
It was at first an acceptably professional retreat from a field that neither side had dominated overall, but it evolved into a flight of panic for blue. The scene of the Union retreat in chaos and panic has given rise to the myth that the CSA KO'd the USA at Bull Run.
Casualties weren't that one-sided and the Union had been dominant for most of a whole day, so it wasn't a whipping. The South won overall by a little, not a lot. It was the retreat, not the battle, that made it a Union loss. The psychological and political fallout from the panic scene made it a Southern victory, but the battle itself was a draw.
The Northern Army fled Manassas Junction in desperate chaos, in violation of all principles of military discipline and wisdom. The shameless gallery of civilian voyeurs were part of the panicked flight back to D.C. Once the civilians panicked and clogged up the roads, the defeatist chaos spread to the army and then to the press and the public. Lincoln spit out his coffee when he heard the bad news. These crowds of rubberneckers were expecting to see the home team give these hillbillies a sound drubbing. Instead the North got caned and now they were panicking and making things significantly worse for their cause.
Thus began the myth of superior Southern generalship in the Civil War. The 1st Bull Run was poor generalship on the part of the South up until that train whistle blew for the arrival of Johnston, who saved the day.
The North suffered about 3,000 casualties, the South about two thousand.
Although Bull Run (called the First Battle of Manassas by the South) was a humiliation for the North, it is the unanimous historical consensus that this event helped the North more than the South. The North smartened up and realized it was in it for the long haul against a serious opponent. The South became drunk with overconfidence, which is dangerous in any game. After 1BR the Rebs felt that any Southerner could lick any 15 Yankees, and freely boasted so. Before Bull Run it was only 10.
Lincoln may not have appreciated it at the moment, but the sense of urgent danger to the USA created by the “loss” at Bull Run definitely helped the North mobilize for a real war far better than a Bull win could ever have done.
The South rejoiced but complained too. Why didn't Beauregard, Johnston and Stonewall chase the running Yankees all the way back to Washington? The Civil War Monday Morning quarterbacking, which still goes on to this day, had begun.
The South had its golden chance to win the war right then and there. A golden chance at the enemy capitol, and these timid souls blew it. Beauregard tried to explain than an offensive required even better organization than a defensive, and that his army had already shown him that it wasn't very capable of handling the latter. Attack sounds good in the heart and in simple logic. They're retreating, therefore, chasing them down will be easy and will end in victory. But it's not that simple. Many historians are still steamed at Beauregard for not chasing McDowell back to Washington.
WEST VIRGINIA SECEDES ... FROM THE CONFEDERACY
The counties of western Virginia had long felt oppressed by the eastern establishment of that state. They long felt left out of Virginia politics while nominally members of that old Dominion. In the election of 1860, the compromise candidates, who wanted to avoid secession had fared well in western Virginia, and not well in the east.
When the Virginia politicians met in Richmond to vote on secession in April, the western representatives voted three to one against secession. But the overall Virginia vote was to secede from the United States.
The Wheeling Intelligencer called for a meeting of those opposed to secession for May 1861. The question now was what to do to protest the secession ordnance of Virginia. Would the people of western Virginia passively not cooperate with the burgeoning Confederacy, or should they form a new state and ask to remain in the Union under new terms?
The first Wheeling Conference of dissatisfied western Virginians adjourned with plans brewing to secede from the secession. Shrewd leaders pointed out that the Virginia upper house had not ratified Virginia's secession, so it was best to wait and make sure that Virginia officially seceded from the USA before western Virginia seceded from Virginia.
Virginia, of course, did secede and the second Wheeling Conference was held in June. The west Virginians decided to adopt a capitol 'w.' A new state called West Virginia would ask - asap - to become one of the United States.
In July two new Senators went to Washington from West Virginia. The US Senate expelled the the Old Dominion Senators and gave them new names. They were from here on to be known as “null” and “void.”
Western Virginia was by this time in the control of Union Armies. If the Rebs had been all over western Virginia there never could have been a West Virginia. This was no peaceful political decision respected by both sides. West Virginia had to fight its way out of the CSA.
On July 11 a two hour fight took place between Union and Rebel troops in the vicinity of Rich Mountain. The South suffered 280 casualties as opposed to only 45 for the North. Rebel General Tom K Garnet was killed in the battle. There was another fight at Philippi. West Virginia was in Union hands by the end of July.
The overall Commander of United States forces in western Virginia was George McClellan. His brigade level commanders made most of the smart moves that enabled the Union to sever the western counties from Virginia, but McClellan understandably enough, got most of the credit.
The North needed a military hero and the glory fell on Mac's lap. The Northern press dubbed him “The Young Napoleon.” McClellan began to pose for pictures with one hand in his coat and another behind his back, just like Napoleon. He was developing the ego of a comedian or tennis player, and it would in the long run do some serious damage to the cause of Union victory.
We'll hear plenty more out of George McClellan. I don't like him. And I really tried.
BAD NEWS OUT WEST - FILLMORE FALLS - JULY 1861
Texas had long been lost to the Confederacy, joyously seceding in February. That wasn't a close call. But the Union still hoped to hold on to the Federal territories west of Texas. These far west territories were New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. They couldn't secede because they weren't states. But since all was fair in love and civil war, there was every chance that the Rebs might manage to conquer the far west and change the balance of power in the big picture. If the South won in the west it would mean a gold mine, and that's not a figure of speech. Capture of the far west would fund the Confederacy with gold and silver.
Since the Rebs already owned powerful Texas, they were in good strategic military position to attack due west and maybe even make it as far as the Pacific coast or at least the Gulf of Baja. If the CSA took over in California, the entire Anaconda plan would be in jeopardy. The Federal blockade would be set way back, perhaps so far back that Europe would deny it recognition.
Late in July a key fort just north of El Paso, but in New Mexico territory fell to the Confederacy. The commander of Fort Fillmore was named Isaac Lynde. He defended the fort more like he was Paul Lynde. Isaac is one of the Yankee goats of the Civil War. After a series of maneuvers and skirmishes Lynde offered to surrender his 500 Union men to an attacking force of 300 Confederate men. His soldiers were so appalled that they heckled their own commander during the negotiations.
The Confederate leader, Donald Baylor at one point had to stop and yell, “Who the hell is in charge here, Isaac? Who is making the decisions you or your subordinate officers?”
Lynde signed off on surrendering Fort Fillmore without a fight, ignoring the protests of his officers who stormed out in protest as he put quill to paper.
The 500 Union men were paroled, meaning they could march back east on their own as long as they made a vow never to re-enlist. They had to march over a deadly stretch of 100 dry desolate miles to get back to safety and victuals. This 500 blue man group had to surrender their modern firearms, but mercifully were given antiquated muskets and pistols to defend themselves against Indians, bobcats, and bears. Some of them dumbly filled their canteens with whiskey instead of water with predictable bad results later on down the sandy road.
The loss of Fort Fillmore put the entire southwest in danger for the Union. Lincoln got word of the disaster one day after Bull Run.
The President was already on a short fuse and immediately issued an order that Commander Lynde was permanently relieved of duty in the United States Army.
In 1866 President Johnson overturned the verdict and reinstated Lynde so he could collect his pension and face his relatives without bowing his eyes. Ulysses Grant had just married into the Lynde family, which had something to do with that.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS – MEXICO AND EUROPE
Now that we know how it all turned out, and considering how much more powerful the North was than the South, it is interesting to know that most of Europe at the beginning of the war thought the South was going to win. European diplomats were sending back reports that the South would maintain its independence and soon join the family of nations. And that was before the South won big at Bull Run. After July of 1861 the Europeans were that much more certain.
Why this illogical conclusion coming from Europe?
Part of it was wishful thinking. Europe believed what it wanted to believe. The monstrous United States was getting to be a problematic rival for the old European countries. The United States merchant marine was cutting into the profits of Europe. The United States had recently developed a loud and arrogant attitude towards Europe, especially about the superiority of American institutions and systems. The United States was not yet a great military power, the victory over Mexico notwithstanding, and Europe dreaded that it might reach that status. The American Civil War was, for Europe, the perfect solution.
The more the USA became bigger and stronger, the more the European countries became smaller. After being large and powerful countries for hundreds of years, the United States was slicing their egos in half. So Europe was happy to see the United States divided into two. The European states could get back that half a size they had lost.
In fact the European diplomats eagerly speculated immediately that civil division could lead to the creation of several countries out of the old United States, an idea that suited them fine. Who knows, with a little luck the old USA might devolve into a modern China or Poland, with outsiders carving up slices for themselves.
The other big rub for the Europeans was the damned Monroe Doctrine. Europe hated the Monroe Doctrine.
Europe in the mid-19th century was having a great time all over the globe with imperialism. It was party time for imperialism. European military supremacy, especially naval, enabled the old countries to travel all over the far seas and capture new and weak countries, especially ones falling off of crumbing empires. But there was one area where the party came to a halt. The stupid Monroe Doctrine was ruining the imperialist festivities in the western hemisphere. The USA had declared that any new occupation of North or South American lands by Europeans would be considered an act of war against the United States. It was an extreme position, and the United States didn't have a strong navy to enforce it, yet the Europeans reluctantly respected the Monroe Doctrine out of a desire to court the economically powerful United States.
Now along comes Southern secession and that opened up a world of opportunity to at last defy the Monroe Doctrine. The USA was now so tied up in taking on the CSA that for four years the Monroe Doctrine became a dead letter. Europe could look again with covetous eyes at the lands south of the Rio Grande River, controlled by weak Spanish dictatorships. If England could whip China in two wars (as it did in the 20 years before the Civil War) then it certainly could take a Bolivia or a Mexico. They were weaker, and closer.
So Europe welcomed the Confederacy as a way to cut down their new upstart rival, the USA. Europe for the most part had the Confederate battle flag in the back window if their station wagon, but for purely selfish and greedy reasons, not because they agreed with anything the Confederacy stood for.
In fact, the Rebel philosophy of slavery was one of the main reasons why the European combined invasion of South America never took place. If the South had seceded for some other reason, it would surely have gained European recognition quickly.
France could never get England to go along with invasion schemes because England definitely detested slavery and was not so blind that it did not see what the Confederacy was all about. England had the expedient reasons to root for the Confederacy, but the slavery thing was enough that England could never pull the trigger and get on board with any plans for concerted action in the western hemisphere in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. England was not so much afraid of the Monroe Doctrine as it was afraid of the Al Stephens doctrine, which said that the cornerstone of the Confederacy was a belief in the natural inferiority of the African race. England was essentially torn between morals and greed and chose to stand back and watch and make absolutely sure the South would win before it even thought about granting full recognition to the Confederacy, or sending out an invading task force to seize , a Guatemala. By choosing not to act when the Union was down and out and vulnerable, Great Britian did a great good.
France was a little more racist and a little less democratic and a little more greedy than England at the time. France spent the entire Civil War trying to get England to go along with a combined operations idea against Central or South America. France wanted to recognize the Confederacy. But France would not take the Nestea Plunge unless England would go along. So the French waited, and waited for Britian until Lee surrendered, and it was so much for that idea.
It should be noted that both England and France immediately recognized the belligerency of the Confederate nation. This is a half-baked form of recognition, and a standard for the situation in international relations. It means that it recognized that the South was a viable fighting entity taking on the North, and that it deserved some respect. But belligerency was a cautious, safe, reserved recognition that also meant we aren't going to do a thing to help you and you're on your own if you start losing. Recognition of belligerency is probationary recognition. You'll only get recognition by winning but we respect that you are “in this corner in the grey trunks at 212 pounds, from Charleston South Carolina, the CSA!” a legitimate belligerent.
France failed to get England to go along with recognition of the Confederacy, but it did get England to go along with a combined French-British diplomatic approach to the Civil War. The two old states informed the United States that their policy would be decided in concert, whatever those policies may be. France and England might argue with each other before turning to the United States with a diplomatic decision, but a two-state consensus would always have to be reached.
One summer 1861 D.C. morning Secretary of State Billy Seward was on his way to work when the British and French Ambassadors approached him requesting a serious meeting that afternoon. Seward replied that it would be inappropriate to receive the two as one. They would have to make separate appointments. Seward's refusal didn't prevent Britain and France from acting as a team anyway, but he made it clear that the United States opposed this diplomatic approach in principle.
Seward's rejection opened the door wider for the Confederacy to make deals with France and England. The South was more than willing to go along with the two-for-one diplomatic approach, England and France as as one unit. Whatever it takes. The CSA had already re-written the U.S. Constitution to make it officially endorse slavery, it was no big deal to ignore standard diplomatic procedures and recognize a two-for-one European diplomatic mission to Richmond.
THE MEXICAN QUESTION
The North and the South each sent a diplomatic representative to Mexico. Each was asking for recognition. The North had a big advantage since Mexico already had diplomatic relations with the United States. The US envoy in Mexico City was Tommy Corwin.
The South had a long hill to climb to get Mexican recognition. Not only was this idea a daring and risky step for Mexico in general in terms in international diplomacy, but there was the slavery issue. Mexico had abolished slavery quite a while back and did not look too favorably on the new CSA.
Revisionist historians can try to claim 160 years later that the Confederacy was not about slavery, but the Rebel envoy to Mexico, Tony Pickett, had a tougher time with that claim. Pickett had to deal with the reality of the time, which was that his Confederacy was an over-the-top racist slavery empire. Pickett had to somehow convince Mexico that this was not true. The Mexicans treated him with a stiff discourtesy. The Mexican government agreed to informally see Tony only once or twice, and made it clear to him that he was whistling Dixie in Mexico City. Pickett continued to plead and cajole the Mexicans into recognizing the Confederacy. They weren't very nice to him, but he had to turn the other grey cheek because he had a job to do. Pickett couldn't just tell them all off and go home.
This Kentucky Southerner (a relative of the man who became famous in the 1863 'Pickett's' Charge at Gettysburg) was basically on a mission to convince the Mexican government that the sky was not blue, that the Pacific Ocean was 11 miles wide, and that Abe Lincoln was short, obese, and incapable of telling corny stories.
In the meantime, Mexico treated USA Ambassador Tom Corwin with all of normal diplomatic courtesies. Mexico didn't exactly love the Northern Union. After all, it was the USA, not the CSA, that had waged the war of 1845-6 against Mexico. But compared to the pro-slavery Confederacy, it was easy for the Mexican foreign office to pick which side to support. Support of course didn't mean overt help for the Union, but it certainly meant non-recognition for the Confederacy.
There was something else that made things much worse for Pickett in his quest for recognition. The dim-wit was sending vicious letters back to Jeff Davis ripping the Mexicans to shreds. Pickett's pen was calling them every foul name in the book in every sentence. The Mexicans were intercepting and reading these letters, and then even not passing them on to Davis at all. Pickett was poison penning himself into a corner, killing what little chance he ever had for success by calling the Mexicans a whole slew of very bad racist names.
Pickett's purloined pouches were proving that his diplomatic mission was malevolent and dishonest, and along the way he was also proving what everyone except the South seemed to know was true; that the South was racist, and that they were only slightly less racist towards Mexicans.
Lincoln's choice of “TC” Corwin to head the Mexican diplomatic mission was a shrewd and excellent one. Corwin was already a legendary hero in Mexico for his famous left-wing comments during the War of 1845. Corwin was in the US Senate at that time and was so ardently against the War that he said that if he were a Mexican he would be only too eager to fight the Americans and would be happy to “provide a hospitable graveyard for the invaders.” The comment about the hospitable graves became famous and hurt Corwin's chances at higher ambition, but he also became a hero of the left. Horace Greeley for one, thought that Corwin was an excellent choice for the White House. Greeley officially nominated him but nothing came of it.
All of this made him in 1861 the ideal man for Ambassador to Mexico during the Cicil War. The Mexicans loved Corwin, seeing him as the only important American who really had stood up for them during the War with the United States. Mexico treated Tommy like royalty from the time he arrived in Vera Cruz. In Mexico City he was practically a visiting crown prince. Tom Corwin had a lifetime pass to all the bullfights.
In the middle of all this Mexico defaulted on its foreign loans creating an American and an international crisis. The Mexican government didn't have a peso to its name and the bill was due on some hefty foreign loans to France, Spain and England, among others.
There was a standard procedure for these situations in these times. The creditor nations would gather up a punitive expedition to take over the biggest port city of the defaulting nation and take the owed money from customs revenue. The United States did it well into the 20th century in the Caribbean. It was no shock to the United States, the Confederacy, or Mexico that in 1861 France and England were prepared to sail to Vera Cruz and collect their vig by force. And it was only the vig that was due. The Mexicans were obviously not able to pay the principle on their foreign loans either. What the Europeans were demanding was the payment of 3% interest that was now due on these loans. Mexico couldn't pay for a glass of watered down beer right then, it certainly couldn't pay 3% on a 23 zillion dollar outstanding loan.
The last thing Seward and Lincoln wanted right now was European military presence on the North American continent during the Civil War.
Seward and Corwin came up with a good idea. They presented it to Lincoln who approved. What if the United States loaned Mexico the money to pay the interest on its foreign debt to Europe? Then the French and British navy and marines could stay right where they are on the other side of the ocean. Mexico would be free to treat with the United States on various maters without this European “dunning expedition” mixing up the batter.
Mexico really appreciated the gesture and became that much more friendly to Union Corwin. The USA did ask for collateral however. Mexico would have to put up four of its northernmost states to guarantee the US loan. If Mexico defaulted after six years it would have to turn over Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Sonora and Baja to the Yankees. Mexico did not act offended by the terms. The USA on the surface might seem just as avaricious as the CSA, but there were differences. The South had been preaching about expansion to the south of the South for decades, and the North had not. The South was openly and avowedly going to expand to the Latin-American south to expand the empire of slavery. The North never said that. The North was offering a loan to save Mexico for now. The CSA was offering nothing but conquest (while feigning friendship and fooling no one.) The North was by far the lesser of two vultures.
The loan however, still had to be approved by the United States Senate. The Hill Brothers debated it at length. Many months went by and finally the Washington Senators rejected the loan. But the loan was a success story because of the interest the United States collected in Mexican good will while it was being debated. By the time the loan was voted down in the US Capitol, a new president was in power in Mexico, the North had won a couple of battles, and the Confederate Ambassador was in a Mexican jail.
France and England meanwhile had decided that even if the United States paid for the interest due, Mexico was still in default on the principal so they would still send the dunning flotilla to Vera Cruz and they did. ('dunning' is a fancy name for strong-arm bill collecting– when Visa calls you on Sunday morning about a 15 year old credit card loan, you are being 'dunned.')
In the middle of all this is a grand, but too real to be called grandiose scheme by the French to take over Mexico.
Napoleon 3 and his gold-digger girl-friend were going to take advantage of the temporary weakness of the United States to defy the Monroe Doctrine, and re-establish French colonial power on the American continent. Nap's woman was always on him about restoring French greatness in America. She convinced him to take over in Mexico and set up a puppet French emperor on the throne of a French-Mexican kingdom.
The bill-collectors expedition provided the opportunity to make a quick strike. England went back to England after collecting some gold and property in Vera Cruz, but France stayed on and marched to Mexico City like Win Scott in 1847. France in 1864 set up a colonial government and became the ruling power of Mexico. More later on that one.
The Confederate Ambassador, by the way, John T. Pickett, was not thrown into a Mexican jail for spying, nor as a political reprisal against the pro-slavery regime he represented. Pickett was jailed because of a personal brawl with a Northern critic who was also on business in Mexico City at the time. Pickett did 30 days in the Mexico City drunk tank because of a fistfight he started by giving the critic a standard Southern slap across the face. This wasn't the place to do stuff like that. This wasn't Milledgeville, you idiot.
Pickett smacked him because the guy had been drinking in bars in Mexico City saying loudly that the Confederates were “traitors.” That was his crime. Pickett found out where the guy lived, knocked on his door and when the man opened his door Pickett stepped forward called him a “Yankee Scum” and slapped him hard. Pickett at this point presumed that the guy would now do the proper thing and accept this challenge to a duel. The two of them would meet the next morning with their seconds like Hamilton and Burr at Weehauken. But the guy was from Utica and didn't get it. He instead grabbed a fire iron and tried to crash Pickett's skull with it. Pickett rushed forward into the guys belly and the two of them went into a knock-down drag-out movie-fight that lasted until the Mexican police arrived.
Pickett honorably admitted that he had thrown the first slap. The Mexicans released the other guy and told Pickett that he had to apologize and pay a fine. He refused to apologize to “that “ignoramus lizard.” Pickett did 30 days and only got out when he bought his way out with a sum that was larger than the original fine he had refused to pay.
As soon as he got out he naturally wanted to go home. Not only was he homesick, it was also clear by now that his mission was a complete waste of time. The Mexican government was clearly and openly against the Confederacy and in favor of the USA.
Hooray for the Mexicans!
CSA DIPLOMATIC MISSION TO EUROPE
The Rebel nation clearly believed at the start of the war that it would have little or no trouble getting recognition from Europe. The Confederate States of America probably would not have taken on the completely new nation approach after state-by-state secession if not for this confidence that Europe would validate the ticket.
The thinking of Davis and other Reb leaders was that cotton was king and that Europe would not dare risk losing the supply of Southern cotton. The Confederacy would threaten to cut off the supply of cotton to English and French textile mills. Soon the cities of England would become “The Cafe Depresso,” towns full of unemployed and rebellious workers who would march on London and demand recognition of the Confederacy.
This was naïve, but the South really believed this. It was typical Southern arrogance.
Montgomery and Richmond took the possibility of European recognition very seriously. Another city also took it very seriously, that city being Washington. It was not taken very seriously in London or Paris, but no one in Washington or Richmond had any way of knowing that.
USA Secretary of State William Seward was very upset at the possibility that England and/or France might recognize the Confederacy. Seward (or “The Schnoz” as Stanton called him behind his back) thought that this was the only chance the South had for military victory.
Seward became belligerent with Europe. Willie warned them, with an uncalled-for hostile tone, to stay out of this conflict. More on that later, but first, lets look at how the statesmen “over there” treated the Confederate mission (“over there” the WWI American slang for Europe.)
The 1861 CSA version of the 1778 trio of Adams, Franklin, and Randolph, was Yancy, Rost and Lashua. They had a long tough road ahead.
To their disappointment, the English deputy foreign minister, Earl Berger Sandwich agreed only to meet this Reb delegation at his private residence. He listened to their explanations on why Britian had to recognize the Confederacy immediately.
The Southerners took a threatening tone over cotton. They were polite enough about it, but they definitely hinted that if the UK didn't fall in line with what they wanted, the Europeans could say good-bye to their desperately needed Southern cotton. The English textile industry and the English economy would suffer accordingly, they warned.
One the of the three Southerners didn't like they way his friends were handling this. He was afraid for a moment that Southern belligerence had ruined any chance for British recognition. He wanted to tell the other two to 'cool-it' but couldn't get a private moment to do it, and had to sit back and watch the sparks.
But Berger Sandwich didn't react angrily at all to the cotton-mouth threats. “Sandy” spoke softly and cordially to the Southern diplomats. The Brit charmed them with his friendly airs. In the end he promised that the views of the Southern dignitaries would receive the fullest consideration. In other words the Briton gave them the brush off like a boss who is never going to hire you in a million years saying, “You have excellent skills. We'll keep your application on file. If anything suitable opens up, we'll give you a call.”
The message got through loud and clear. Toombs and his friends were fools going into the meeting, but not on the way out. Sandwich was all smiles, but the three Rebels were not The Three Stooges. They weren't that stupid. They knew Sandwich had subtly punked them, and they knew this was a serious setback for the Confederacy. In a way the war was over for the South when they walked out of his office. The South, to repeat an important point, probably wouldn't have tried to form the Confederacy in the first place if it knew ahead of time that not one foreign nation would recognize it. False knowledge of a upcoming foreign recognition was a foundation of Southern “arrogance.”
The Cotton is Kingston Trio hung around for a year in England trying to get an audience with the Prime Minister. He was always 'out playing basketball' when they came around. And basketball hadn't even been invented yet! That's how deliberately transparent and flimsy his excuses were.
The Southerners were shocked that Bull Run had not roused the British into supporting recognition. A year later, after the North won at Antietam, the three Southern plenipotentiaries ended their European vacation and came back to the battleground states.
BALLS BLUFF AND THE CCW – SEPTEMBER 1861
The only major battle between Manassas 1 and the end of 1861 was at a place called Ball's Bluff in Virginia. This fight wasn't as big and violent as Bull Run but it was big enough, and it ended in a most inglorious Union defeat.
In the wake of the blue-bashing at Ball's Bluff the Congress decided that it wanted a little more say in how the war was being bull run from now on.
Ben Wade and other Rads formed an oversight group that would taunt and criticize Lincoln for the next four years. It was called the Committee on the Conduct of the War. From now until Appomattox and even beyond, the Congress would have its say in what was going wrong with the war and how to correct it. The CCW rarely had anything to say about things that were going right. It was essentially a Congressional panel of nay-sayers determined to make Lincoln's beard turn white.
On the other hand, to its immense frustration, the CCW never had enough real power to implement key decisions. If Lincoln was against one of their resolutions it became a power test between them and Lincoln's strong will, and Lincoln wrestled them down every time like they were Jack Armtrong's little brother. But at least the critics now had an official forum in which they could adopt one critical resolution after another for the next four years.
BULL RUN WEST - WILSON'S CREEK MS – 8-9-10-1861
The war in the west heated up 12 miles southwest of Springfield Missouri at Wilson's Creek at five am on August 9 1861. Union forces clashed for two days and casualties on both sides were about 1,200, 500 of them KIA. Fighting on the tenth was five hours of non-stop savage up close business.
One of the myths of the Civil War is that Wilson's Creek was a Confederate victory. In a strictly local military sense, the Battle at Wilson's Creek between Union Lyons and Rebel McCulloch was a victory for McCulloch.
But the North won on the big map.
The Confederates were the ones on the march trying to take over a state of Missouri that was already largely secured for the North. The Rebs needed to win Missouri, not the Battle at Wilson's Creek. The CSA may have won the better of the day, but the strategic offensive came to a halt at Wilson's Creek. The Rebel invasion of Missouri was over. There had been too many casualties to continue chasing the real prize, control of Missouri.
The grey victory at Wilson's Creek secured Missouri for the blue. Color that state blue on the NBC Election Day map. I can hear an 1861 network TV anchorperson saying,
“NBC is now projecting that Missouri is going to go for the North tonight. As you recall, that's one of those highly controversial border states that Lincoln feels he so desperately needs to carry in order to win. Lincoln, as you recall, announced that that he would not outlaw slavery in Missouri, proving that he will do anything to win this war first, and worry about slavery second. It was a close call in Missouri until Lyons secured most of that state for the Union. Lyons' by the way, died in action during the Battle at Wilson's Creek. Also called the Battle of Oak's Bluff, this was a nice little Southern win and a great big Southern loss.”
This was the beginning of a pattern throughout the war. Tactical victories for the South that are strategic victories for the North. Certainly the same thing could be said of the Battle at Valverde in 61, Shiloh in 62, and the entire Overland Campaign of 1864.
The Rebels managed to keep a hold of the southwest corner of Missouri for most of the war, and the state was never fully tamed. Three weeks after Appomattox, in May of 1865 there was still fighting in the hills of Missouri.
But the South had lost Missouri politically to Yankeedom at Willie Wilson's Creek. The voters of Mighty Mo 1861 helped re-elect Lincoln in the US Election of 1864.
MCFIRED AND MCHIRED -
General McDowell lost the battle and his job at Bull Run. Lincoln wanted wins, not excuses. He hired the fastidious General McClelland to train a better force, which was ironic since that's what McDowell had begged for time to do in the first place.
He told the new guy to take Richmond. Your mission Mac, should you decide to accept it, is to capture Richmond and end the war.
He might as well have asked McClelland to fly to Mars and back.
McClelland was a master at training and drilling troops. He would first of all correct the lessons of the First Bull Run. Never again would untrained United States troops rush helter-skelter into battle to be routed in disgrace.
McClelland took command of the enormous ‘Army of the Potomac.’ (The North named its Army groups after bodies of water, just as it did its battles.)
But McClelland trained too well. He trained and trained. Then he trained and trained. Then he trained some more. Then he trained a while longer. Now he was ready at last ! ... to train a few more months. McClelland trained his troops so long that the entire Union nation was angry with him. If George didn’t declare his Army ready to fight soon Lincoln was going to run to his house at full pace, pound on his door, and when McClelland opened it Lincoln would choke him and scream 'get on with it!” This went on a lot for a long time.
Most historians write about Mac's delay like they are personally still mad at him.
FREEMONT FREE-THINKING TOO MUCH
On the Missouri front, Lincoln had a little bit of a problem with John Fremont, the 'Pathfinder of the West.'
Fremont had almost won the Presidency as a Republican in 1856. A Fremont victory that year might well have caused Southern secession right then and there. Now he was in charge of the Union Army in the west. Fremont had a lot of fame and clout, and a big ego, which of course had helped him become a big famous man in the first place.
It was a lot to now expect I/me monster Fremont to behave himself and defer to Abraham on how the war was to be run. Fremont had his own ideas. In the summer of 1861 Fremont decided that he would enforce his own Union policies in Missouri, and report to Lincoln later on what those policies were, expecting Lincoln not only to endorse them, but to pretty much thank him for such wise and bold initiative.
Fremont was causing trouble with many of Lincoln's policies in the west, especially regarding the great debate about abolition.
Lincoln may or may not have been an abolitionist, but Fremont definitely was, and definitely always had been.
Fremont decided that he was going to first of all hang the pro-slavery governor of Missouri. Then he was going to,
“execute a few dozen more treasonous knaves”
and then send Lincoln back the good reports from the ceremonies.
Fremont also proclaimed to the people of the liberated west that the rich farmlands of slavery would now be redistributed to poor black people. As his Union army went about its business in the west, Fremont confiscated slaves and set them free.
Back in D.C. the Radical Republicans were thrilled with Fremont. It was as if Thad Stevens himself was out in front of the Army and making the rules both on and off the military field.
But Lincoln hit the White House roof and would have none of this insolence. Lincoln sent a message in the nick of time telling Freemont to desist,
“Hey, Pathfinder.... Let's get this straight, now. You will not shoot anybody until I send you my expressed approval, nor will you issue needlessly inflammatory proclamations threatening to do so. You will free no slaves. Otherwise you will find the path to civilian life.”
I get a kick out of how Lincoln is always portrayed as a Christlike, gentle, and loving man. But let's face it, no one like that can rise in politics. Lincoln was a tough guy. Abe had the famous gentle side, but he was Cagney tough too.
When Fremont continued his impudence Lincoln relieved Fremont of his command.
Lincoln felt that he alone would run the war, period. He wrestled Fremont to the dirt like the old days. Fremont had met his match, like MacArthur in 1951. Lincoln Harry Trumaned the Pathfinder out of the ring.
Lincoln was right even if he was wrong. For one thing he is the boss and the civilian control over the military is an essential feature of US government, and what the flag is supposed to stand for. It's why the USA was not prepared for almost every war. The military didn't rule the government and couldn't force the Congress to keep up large armies with all the latest weapons in peacetime. The military hadn't managed to dominate any of the three branches in peacetime. Lincoln wasn't going to let it happen in wartime either.
A lot is made of Lincoln as a dictator who trampled the Constitution during the Civil War. Even if that were a bit true, we should at least give him credit for making sure the the military never got close to running the country. An executive dictator is better than a military dictator.
Over and above all that Lincoln did not want Fremont stirring up any political trouble in the desperately needed border states. Lincoln would have lied about slavery if that's what it took to secure the border states where slavery was still legal. These states were being asked to remain loyal to the Union, and no one had ever told them that the price of loyalty included abolition in any form. Indeed the whole war had started with Lincoln pleading with the South that he was not going to interfere with slavery where it already existed. If he let Fremont's orders stand, Lincoln would have been reneging on the terms on which he had asked Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware to stay in the Union. And besides that he could lose the war. If the border states went South, the whole war could go south too. Fremont was stirring up more trouble than he was worth.
POPE QUITS - SEPTEMBER 1861
Down South, LeRoy Pope was not having a great time as Secretary of War in the Confederate cabinet. Someone had to take all the heat for Confederate Army setbacks. Someone had to pay, and the South sure as hell was not going to blame its generals, who were considered infallible Gods. So they blamed it on the Pope.
Most people think of the early part of the war as a string of Confederate victories. But except for a spectacular win at Bull Run, most of the battle news favored the Feds for the first ten months or so. The South in 1862 made a great run in the campaign season, but in the fall of 1861, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville were unknown places in most of the South, and the morale of the South at the end of war year one was already showing signs of flagging.
After a few criticisms, Leroy Pope Walker, the “Brother of Huntsville” quit in a huff on the 16th of September.
Davis was happy to get Pope's resignation. He knew that Pope was not very qualified for the job and and not done very well. Pope's main qualification for the job was that he was from Alabama and Davis wanted every state represented in the Confederate cabinet. Pope was the Kansas City Royal that got named to the All Star team at the last moment.
In the meantime, the ever Jewish Judah Benjamin, one of the most talented political leaders in a South so short of them (talented political leaders, not Jews) was wasting away as Attorney General and Davis immediately saw his chance to get Judah more involved. JD appointed JB to be the second Confederate Secretary of War.
The South never set up much of a judicial system and never established a Supreme Court. It never had a Bill of Rights. So the South had been wasting one of its best men on a Confederate Attorney General's position that had no duties except to look out the window and daydream. The Pope resigned so the Jew could take over.
Pope immediately became a high ranking officer in the Confederate Army and served with distinction. His ego was wounded at the Battle of Port Royal.
PONY DOWN SEPT 24 1861
The famed Pony Express had done a great job transporting mail across the Great American Desert since late 1858. But on September 24 1858 the United States completed the first transcontinental telegraph line. President Lincoln sent the first seacoast to shining seacoast wired message from Washington D.C. to Sacramento. It was a simple one word greeting,
“Ssssup”
Within a week the Pony Express was out of business and the owners were in the bread line.
SEPTEMBER 11 – FORT WINGATE, A VEGAS TALE
In Navaho country in the Southwest, the longhairs had established Fort Fauntleroy. But when the commander in whose name the fort was named went off to the east to fight in the Confederate Army, the name of the fort was changed to Wingate.
Whites and Reds met regularly at the fort to trade and party. Gambling on horse races was a big custom. One day in September 1861 things went bad.
A famous Indian leader named Manuelito was scheduled for the main race against Johnny Stagger Lee. The noon time race had more beads, guns, cattle and blankets wagered on it than any previous race. It was the World Series Game 7 of the 'Wacky Wingate Races.'
Manuelito had the early lead when his pony veered off out of control. Stagger Lee won. But Manuelito went to the judges and showed them that the bridle reigns had been deliberately cut in half. Manuelito had no way to control his pony.
The Indians rioted. The whites retaliated. It was a massacre. Several Indian women and children were murdered in the meelee.
There are four morals to the story. 1- Don't gamble. 2- Don't gamble if you know the other guy can get away with cheating – 3- Don't get in the way of a gambler who just lost a lot of money. 4- Don't trust whitey.
I already knew these lessons, that's why I never made a bet with a mob bookie in my life and I sports gamble legally in Las Vegas. I also stay away from comedians who lost half their pay check at the black jack table. They are miserable company.
SUMNER IN WORCESTER
All of the North watched the Massachusetts state elections of 1861 with interest. This was the home state of the abolition movement. The leader of the Abbies in the U.S. Senate was Senator Charles Sumner. How he fared in the fall election in his home state would show Lincoln which way the wind was blowing. Was the war to be about slavery? Or was Sumner missing the mainstream? If Sumner was too radical, the voters would show him to the door and signal Lincoln to tone done the Abolitionist goals and focus the war on preservation of the Union only.
Sumner for the first months of the war had toned down his rhetoric on abolition in order to cooperate with President Lincoln who was forever trying to make Sumner see the wisdom of at least temporary moderation in order to help win the war. Now that it was close to election time in Mass, Sumner had to come out and make a stand. He was getting it from both sides. The Abolitionists were getting mad at him for toning it down, and the old Whigs, the Dems, and the luke-warm Republicans were urging that he bag the Abolitionist crusade and convert to practical Unionism. They wanted to form a coalition Union Party, dedicated to winning the war as the sole party goal.
Sumner went to the Republican state convention in Worcester and gave a landmark speech. He upped the ante on his real feelings. He let his audiences, plus the reporters for the Worcester Spy who were noting the speech, know that he was now more than ever an ardent Abolitionist and this war was a crusade to free the black people from slavery. It was never anything but that from the day it started, as far as Sumner was concerned.
The speech was one of the first open pushes on Lincoln to take that road from anyone of real political importance and it came early on. The Massachusetts legislature sent its own signal to Lincoln when it voted Sumner back into the Senate and re-elected Abolitionist governor John Dave Andrews in a landslide. The door was beginning to open for Lincoln to walk in and declare this a war to end slavery. Lincoln couldn't kick the door in alone and needed someone to pick the lock and send a whistle that the coast is clear. Sumner was that man. The speech and the election showed Lincoln the the door was cracked, even if Sumner was too.
“MAGGOTT MASON” AND “SLIMEY SLIDELL” OCTOBER 1861
Late in 1861 the Union Navy stopped and boarded a British ship in the Caribbean and seized two Confederate diplomats bound for England. It was sensational news
The seizure of the British ship was clearly illegal under international law. But the captain of the USS San Jacinto was a man named Wilkes and he happened to hate the British so he had no trouble flouting their sea rules. All Wilkes cared about was that two top Confederate politicians named Mason and Slidell were on board and he took what he wanted.
Wilkes was a veteran of the War of 1812 which partly explains why he hated the British. He was also an explorer of some renown.
Wilkes once shared his personally drawn maps of virgin land with a fellow British explorer who sailed back to England with them smiling and thinking, 'sucker!” The Brit twit published them as his own and Wilkes never got satisfaction from the injustice. Seizing a British mail merchant ship was good enough for some satisfaction.
Not only that, but incredibly, Wilkes had years ago been a rival for the same woman with Slidell and had lost. Now when Wilkes learned who the Confederate envoy was he was all the more delighted to arrest and detain them.
England protested with truculence, as to be expected. For two or three weeks it seemed possible if not probable that there would be war between England and the United States at the same time there was war between the USA and the CSA.
The two Rebs were taken to Fortress Monroe, and then all the way to cold Boston and put in prison on George's Island in the middle of the then unpolluted Boston harbor.
The United States eventually released them and they were allowed to finish their journey to England. War was avoided but it was high tension for a while.
The two men were not very lovable. James Mason and Bobby Slidell were two of the most pro-slavey racist white guys that ever walked the planet. They were also two of the most powerful pro-slavery racist white guys who ever walked the planet. It's one thing to be a racist mailman in Peoria in 1950. It's another to be an influential pro-slavery US Senator who joins the CSA and goes to Europe to seek recognition for fascism. You couldn't laugh these two guys off like you can two ignorant unemployed three-toothed clowns yelling epithets at a Klan rally.
James Mason was the most passionate advocate of slavery that ever served in the United States Congress. As Representative and then as Senator, Mason battled against every measure to control or prohibit slavery as if his very life depended on it. Northerners liberals hated Mason right back. The Yanks hated Mason like I hate smug windbag sports announcers who try to be funny for three hours. Now that's some real hate right there, my friends.
Other fire-eaters who went on to more prominent roles in the Civil War are now the great historic names of pro-slavery, but among contemporaries, James Mason was Mr. Slavery. Mason loved it. To this guy, slavery wasn't even a necessary evil that might someday slowly pass with compensation for owners. No, Mason loved slavery. He absolutely loved it.
It was James Mason who wrote the infamous Fugitive Slave Law which meant that any Georgia slave-catcher could travel North by Northwest all the way to Canada and capture their runaway slaves. The North was obliged by the FSL to not only allow the pursuit of runaway slaves, but to assist in the capture. It was against the law for civilian Northern bystanders to fail help the slave-catcher catch the black person. These laws were easier to write than enforce, and many Northern states passed laws contradicting Mason's Fugitive Slave Law. Mason's law was part of the Compromise of 1850 that prevented the Civil War from starting up in 1850.
Almost every description of James Murray Mason includes words like “arrogant,” “hostile,” “ill-mannered” “divisive,” “haughty,” “unreasonable,” “rude,” and “arrogant.” I repeat the word arrogant, because that one comes up most often. In other words he was the perfect man to represent the South as a diplomat. Mason symbolized the Confederate spirit. If he were alive today he probably could make a great living as a conservative talk show host.
Slidell was another pro-slavery nut.
THE SOUTHERN “TREASURY”
The South had to find a way to pay for its war - not easy. When the Secretary of the Treasury Memminger began his tenure in Montgomery, his office had no furniture and there was a hand scribbled card outside the entrance that said “Confederate Treasury Department.”
An officer from Lee's Army came into Montgomery just after Sumter and demanded some Confederate money from Memminger's secretary, a Mr. Hazelhurst.
“Sir, Lee needs at least $2,800 to provide uniforms and weapons for his first organized regiment.”
Hazelhurst stood up, dug into his pockets, pulled out four crumpled Confederate dollars and put them on the table.
“Here you go. This is all the money in the Confederate Treasury.”
Memminger was famous before the war for his sound money policy. Chris had won his public name by representing the State of South Carolina against its own Bank of South Carolina when that bank tried to issue paper money without metallic backing. He helped SC shut down the BSC and became a national man for his belief that all paper currency needed sound backing or else it shouldn't exist. For this he was rewarded with the Confederate Treasury Department where all he did for the rest of the war was issue inflationary paper currency of dubious value.
The South floated many bonds and loans throughout the war to raise real cash, and most of these ended badly. But the opening bond float was a patriotic success.
Before the war went south, the people South were more than willing to send in millions of dollars worth of personal hard currency to support the cause. The first Confederate bond issue for 15 million dollars was a big success. Gold poured into Memminger's coffers until Chris had $26 million to work with. In Gone With the Wind, Melanie (the naïve ditz who never realizes that Scarlett O'Hara is after her man) donated her wedding ring to the Confederate drive for gold.
But in the later, bitter years of the War, the average Southerners wouldn't donate at all. The 65 Rebs were pessimistic and they were hungry. They didn't have money or time to donate to the white cross. Besides, 'My husband already gave at the office' in blood.
Inflation was modest for the South in the first half of the war, which is not to say it was not problematic. But in the second half of the war it was out of control like Germany in the 1920's. In 1860 a one-ounce piece of chewing tobacco in The Richmond City Smoke Shop went for 5 cents. In 1865 the same piece of tobacco cost 23 million CSA dollars.
That's what happens when you just keep printing unsound money to pay for things you have no old money for. Even W Bush would have trembled to pay for the war the way the CSA paid for it. And the CSA paid for it dearly.
The roughest cut of all for Davis and the loyal disloyalists was that in the last part of the war, the Southern people honored and hoarded Yankee dollars and used Confederate dollars to heat their homes. Their heart belonged to Davis but their pocketbook belonged to Lincoln.
THE TOUCH THE FEEL OF COTTON – THE FABRIC OF THE CSA'S LIFE
The Confederacy really dropped the boll weevil on the cotton issue, which is strange since that was the big trump card it knew it had in its deck before the war. Then, when the war got started, it forgot to play it! The South thought that by withholding the cotton card it instead of playing it, Europe would give in to its every demand.
Judah Benjamin alone (the Attorney General at the time) suggested early on that the South should ship most of its cotton at once to Great Britian and France before the Federal blockade began to shape up.
The others in the Davis cabinet, including Secretary of the Treasury Memminger thought that shipping it out asap was a dumb idea. The cotton stayed in the South and most of it eventually rotted away on Southern docks while the people started to get hungry. There would be only two things plentifully left for Southerners to eat by the end of the war; cotton, and their words of 1860.
If the cotton had been shipped quickly it could have financed both the war and the Southern greenback currency. The South might have even won the war. Cotton was as good as currency in Europe and barter was so solid a system that even if the cotton were not converted to gold, it still could have supplied the Rebel army and navy, especially the navy. More Confederate raiders could have been built with cotton cash.
The pro-South historians believe that “Unfortunately for the South, Benjamin's advice was not heeded.” What they really mean of course is, “Unfortunately, the South did not heed Benjamin's advice.” The way I write it is, “Fortunately, the South did not heed Benjamin's advice.”
After the war Treasury Secretary Memminger had an excuse towel for why he failed to endorse Benjamin's wise plan. For one, he said that even if he had approved the idea, the Confederacy did not have the bonds or the recognized currency to buy the cotton. This may be a legitimate complaint, but his other one is very shaky. Memminger said that the South simply didn't have the ships to transport the cotton to Europe, even it it agreed to try.
This wasn't true. And besides, even if was, the French and British certainly had enough ships. Many of them sat around in Southern ports for the first months of the war just waiting for some King Cotton to take home with them. But the South would not allow it (A lot of Southern born historians skip all this info, by the way. The self-imposed cotton dumbargo doesn't get a lot of play in Rebel partisan histories. )
Memminger also blamed the Federal blockade for his inability to send 300,000 bales of cotton to Liverpool and Brest. This is the weakest excuse, since the Federal blockade in 1861 was the weakest excuse for a major blockade under international law in the history of international maritime law. I could have run the Federal blockade out of Charleston in 1861 in an orange sailboat at noon on a sunny day with a three-foot pirate flag flying off the back. And I don't even know how to sail!
What is much more, if I did try to ship a bale across the Atlantic in my sailboat, the South would have been just as much out to stop me as the North!
It's fantastic but true; The South actually welcomed the Federal blockade because it wanted to blackmail Europe by withholding Southern cotton. The CSA thought that cotton-denial would force European recognition. England and France would go into the DT's , writhing around saying, “We need our cotton fix! Name your price!”
Jefferson Davis privately admitted welcoming Federal “help” in enforcing his own embargo as it was happening. But JD shrewdly kept this opinion from the public; But as far as Davis was concerned, Lincoln was enforcing Jefferson's cotton embargo.
The South did not want any Southerners taking cotton to England of anywhere else outside of the South and there were many instances of forced stoppages of Southern cotton shipping by Southern officials. “Pubic Safety Committees” a standard name for vigilante rogue revolutionary bands, went about Southern ports putting a strong arm on any fool that was even thinking about packing up a ship with Southern cotton.
The self imposed punishment embargo failed horribly under Tom Jefferson, yet the South thought that this was the way to do it. All it actually did was lose the war.
The cotton story gets better. To make sure that Southern cotton, the one thing it had to establish a sound currency, did not make its way to Europe or South America, the Rebels decided not to plant any in 1862! They even burned what was leftover from 1861 and then burned thousand of acres in 1862 when they found them! If you hate the Confederacy like I do, you can't help but really enjoy a story like this. All of this shoot myself in the Shelby Foote cotton policy won more giant Northern steps on the road to Appomattox than the Army of the Potomac could ever dream of accomplishing.
The fact of the matter was that Europe could get along quite well without Southern cotton for many reasons. For starters the CSA didn't bother to consider the masses of reserve cotton in European warehouses. When the South shut off the spigot to Europe This emergency fund suddenly went up tenfold in value. Cotton dealers in Europe were dancing with joy over the boycott. The shortage allowed them to price gauge their own people with unheard of profit margins. When the reserves ran out in 1862, the English had by that time established a new line of supply from India and Egypt and even South America. King Cotton had deposed itself through its petulant masochistic embargo.
SCORPION DIPLOMACY
The South could have taken a positive and trustworthy and humble position towards its' European buyers and said, 'we're in a tough spot. Here's 300,000 bales of cotton. Keep our credit strong. Keep our currency strong. We'd like recognition, but if we can't get it, at least know that we are still strong partners depending on each other economically, so lets not rock the boat there.'
That would have done the South a world of good. Jefferson Davis wrote after the war that if the South had done this, it would have won the war. Who knows if that's true or not, but it certainly would have extended it.
But that approach wasn't about to happen. In the macho South, sick with macho, evil with macho, in the super-male in your face militant we fight at the slightest insult and we take the littlest thing as an insult South – a mature generous diplomatic approach like that with Europe was just impossible. They couldn't take a positive approach with the North for the previous 30 years, why would they pick right now to act like gentlemen?
No, the South took one approach to Europe over cotton sales.
It said, 'Look Europe. You need our cotton or else your economy will crash. So you had better give us the international recognition we are demanding, or else. Or else we will withhold our cotton and just stare at it while millions of ragged paupers haunt the city streets of Europe. If that's what you want, that's what you'll get. If you want to treat our diplomats like that, if you won't let them see the King, then you will see then end of King Cotton. We will take a walk and then you'll see how you like it, this business of not giving us recognition.'
That was the Southern approach. Historians call it foolish. But is it “foolish” for a crocodile to eat a tourist who falls into its water? The croc should realize it will be shot to death by the park police, but it can't help itself. That was the nature of the animal. That was the nature of the South.
You know, there's hardly any wimps in maximum security prisons right now. Almost every guy in the can has an admirable skill. He can fight. He can fight good, or better than good. But that very skill is what led him into the violent situation that got him in the can. The South had tremendous fighting skill. It was proud of it. It still is. It showed it off in the Civil War. It was part of its culture before the war and after. But in the critical area of diplomacy and its fruits, it was also the reason it lost. Southern toughness was why the Jeff Davis Administration all went to Northern prisons in 1866.
The Southern scorpion had a mindset that was so rough and tough that it was not genetically capable of positive friendly diplomatic relationships with any foreign countries. The South was trying to intimidate all of Europe after failing to intimidate the Northern half of the United States. At the same time it was pretending to offer friendly diplomatic relations with Mexico while diabolically planning to invade it and turn it into several new slave slates as soon as the North let the South “go in peace.”
The Southerners expected a short war and they always said that “Any Southerner can lick any ten Yankees in a fair fight.” They were so sick with the sin of pride that they really believed this. If they hadn't believed it they certainly wouldn't have started the war outnumbered at least 3-1 by any calculation.
So if these guys thought they were ten to one superior to any Yankee, they must have also thought that any Southerner could lick any 20 Europeans or any 2,722 Mexicans in a fair fight.
This conceit reflected itself in the four year record of Confederate diplomacy. The Southerners were racists and placists. They hated Blacks, Mexicans and Northerners. How can you have good diplomatic relations with states and peoples that you think are inferiors, and say so in all your writings and speeches?
CONFEDERATE CURRENCY CRISIS
Of the $26,000,000 in hard currency that the South managed to accumulate in 1861, more than $6 million was stolen property.
The history books never use that word, 'stolen,' but that's how they got it.
The “honorable” South wanted to “peacefully secede” from the Union. But the first thing the honorable South did was seize all the Federal mints they could surround because these locations had the misfortune to be on Southern soil. It is always said that the Confederates “seized” the federal mints. Yeah. They stole the money from another country. For that alone, a dozen rebel leaders could have been tried and sentenced after the war. They were slave-owners and bank robbers.
Seized. I 'seized' a Credence album from a Boston department store in 1971.
The 26 million in the Southern treasury was a lot of money for 1861, but it really wasn't enough to run a big country and a big war. Maybe one or the other but not both. At the height of the war, the North was spending twice that much money every month. And that was all the South had. It had no collateral except cotton which it burned and hoarded in suicidal petulance.
States rights came back to haunt the South in the currency department as it did in so many others. The U.S. Federal government had long ago made it illegal for states to issue, print and distribute their own money. This had long been proven a positive for national economics. But the states of the Confederacy immediately grasped the implication of being in a union based on the supremacy of states rights. The states jumped right to it and printed their own money, flooding the South with it. All this not to mention the scores of expert counterfeiters at the paper stills.
It was bad enough throughout the war that Confederate money was decreasing in value throughout the war. Now you had states printing their own money. Then counties started following the lead of the states and started printing county currency. Then came cities, towns, and villages. Large businesses began printing their own money, called “shin plasters.” Even individual boarding houses and farmers were printing useless dough.
By 1865 a Richmond wino might get handed a 50 cent piece of scrip with his own picture on it.
THE PARTY ISN'T OVER
When war broke out in April, the Democratic Party in the North closed ranks and supported the Union. Opposition to Lincoln came to a halt.
The situation changed after Bull Run and the first Confiscation Act. Democrats resumed their partisan opposition to Lincoln and maintained it throughout the war.
Now some of might think that this was a bad thing for Lincoln, trying to run a war with a party of opposition throwing monkey wrenches into the war machinery. They also might think that the JD and the CSA had an advantage in running a war with no internal opposition.
Wrong on both counts.
If the North lost the support of the Democratic element, it would be half as powerful. Allowing considerable pluralism to flourish allowed the democrats to remain in the Union with dignity. We don't like Lincoln and we disagree with how he is running the war. We disagree with his war aims. We disagree with his cabinet choices, his picks for generals, and his plans for a post-war nation. But we are allowed to participate in the political process, just like before the war, and we still like being here and being part of this great nation, even if we are opposed to the leadership.
This created a powerful united disunited North.
In the South there was plenty of opposition to Jeff Davis and the Confederacy, but since this was not allowed in the one-party Democracy, it came out indirectly in many destructive ways. Passive silent resistance was massive among those who did not agree with the fire-eaters of the Yancy Rhett stripe. So the opposition did not participate in strengthening the Confederacy while they griped. They griped in a secret spirit of sabotage. Not being allowed their say, they became like the slave who pretends to love the master on the outside while doing as little work as possible when massa wasn't looking. The South had a significant passive resistance movement that might have joined the cause even if they disagreed with it, if only they had been allowed the dignity to disagree.
But the South wasn't like that. Everyone had to agree or be ostracized to the point of fearing for their personal safety. In the months and years leading to war many of those who disagreed with the fire-eaters emigrated to the North out of fear. They loved their homeland, but they loved their skin more.
When the war began to turn sour for the South the opposition became serious and open. But again, the lack of pluralism afforded it no healthy outlet. There was no way to let the steam out of the kettle and make nice with tea. It exploded all over the kitchen. Southern governors by 1863 in Georgia and North Carolina were openly denouncing Davis as a traitor ... to the Southern cause (the poor guy is a traitor twice over now.) States refused to send troops to the CSA Army. They declared that their troops were only going to be used to defend their own state since Davis was obviously a bad leader and the CSA wasn't what it was supposed to be.
With a pluralistic society and legislature, such opposition might have expended itself in rhetoric in a therapeutic public forum. The Northern Lincoln haters could stand before Congress and give him holy hell, leaving no deep psychological need for follow-up sabotage. The South had exactly that problem. Davis became a scapegoat and ended up with almost as many enemies in the South as he had in the North. A tolerant, diverse, pluralistic South wouldn't have had such a problem. But then again, a tolerant, diverse, pluralistic South wouldn't have built slave empire, imposed the Gag Rule on Congress, and seceded from the USA after first waiting to see if their guy won the election.
The Democratic Party's opposition was based on its essentially conservative nature. The Democrats were willing to go along nicely with Lincoln as long as the war aim was to restore the Union status quo ante-bellum. Lincoln pretended to agree with these war aims in order to 1- Keep the make-weight border states in the Union, and 2 – Keep the Democratic party of the North on the side of the Union war effort. But the Democrats fell for Lincoln's clever tricks when they though that slavery would not be interfered with after the war. Lincoln had every intention of exploiting the opportunity of war to change the nation for the better. But for most of the first year of the war he zipped the lip, or worse, made statements that were almost lies about how he didn't care one whit about slavery as long as he preserved the Union (the famous Greeley letter of course the obvious example.)
The Democrats trusted Lincoln that he would work to maintain the way things were, and they enlisted on these terms, but he betrayed them. He had one foot in the Radical Camp, another in the reasonable abolitionist camp and a false third foot in the conservative Democratic camp. The third foot was just jive rhetoric for public consumption. Rads like Sumner, and moderates like Seward knew better the real nature of Lincoln's plans for the war and for the post war.
By the end of 1861 the Democrats knew they had been duped. But what could they do? They had already picked a team. The war was so well under way that they had a stake in it whether they liked it or not. More important, even though the South was looking strong, the war overall was going good enough for the North and the border states had been secure.
Much is made about Bull Run and how well the war started for the South but that is a myth. The North came out ahead in year one. The South won a couple of major battles but the North won quite a few little ones that were strategically more important than Bull Run. The Union Armies had secured Maryland, Missouri and Western Virginia. The South won battles. The North won states. The Dems in the North had only one option and they took it. Stay in the Union, support the war appropriations for troops and supplies, but stand feisty and combative in opposition on almost everything else.
Northern Democrats were “in a bad spot here” (name the movie.) As for Lincoln, “There isn't one damned thing I like about you” (name the movie.) They had lost most of their power base when the South left town. One minute they were a majority in every branch, Legislative, Judicial, Executive. When the party lost the executive, the South took its ball and went home, leaving the Northern Democrats holding the bag. If the South had stayed they still would have controlled the Congress and the Supreme Court. Secession took the Congress out of the Democratic control. All that was left for the Northern Dems was their sacred right to be the opposition party in Congress, and the presence of a majority of Southern Dems on the Supreme Court.
This last factor was largely negated by the war and by time. Lincoln could and would defy the rulings of the Supreme Court during war emergencies. He did a good imitation of Andy Jackson saying “Justice Marshall has made his ruling. Now let's see him enforce it.” Except Lincoln did that to none other than Chief Taney, the same jerk who wrote the Dred Scott decision of 1856 (I hope I got the year right.) On top of that Lincoln got a chance to pack the court with a couple of his own boys before he got shot.
The South thus destroyed on the day it fired on Sumter, the only power base it had, the Democratic party process.
SHIP ISLAND – THE BUTLER TOOK IT DEC 1861
Twelve miles off the coast of the Mississippi is the little thin Ship Island. SI was important to mariners for the past few hundred years. There was an artillery duel in late July 1861 between the Union ships and the guns of the Rebel fort on Ship.
In November the Union sent General Butler with an invasion force of 2,000 men to take Ship Island. The North captured it on december 4, 1861. The Confederates had already almost evacuated it, so there was only a skirmish as a Confederate officer screamed in vain at his retreating men, “Don't give up the Ship!”
THE STONE FLEET - DECEMBER 1861
They say that if you're bad, Santa puts a lump of coal in your stocking for Christmas. The North put a lump of stone in the South's stocking in December of 1861. They tried to blockade Charleston harbor South Carolina by sinking a “stone fleet” outside the entrance.
The Union purchased dozens of relatively inexpensive whaling ships up in New Bedord, filled them with sand and limestone, sailed them South, and sank them outside the entrance of three separate locations to help with the blockade.
The most important concentration the “stone fleet” was at Charleston, where the North tried unsuccessfully to stop sea commerce from entering and exiting for most of the war. The Yankees wouldn't capture Charleston until 1865 by which time the war was so lost that its fall was not all that strategic anymore. 12 ships were sunk outside Charleston on the 19th of December, and 12 more were sunk outside Secessionville early in 1862.
Results were disappointing but not negligible. It made it tougher to get in and out of Charleston harbor but not impossible. The wooden whalers had disintegrated by the fall of 1863 but they did their little part to help win the war. Jeff Davis condemned the North for its “savage tactics at outer Charleston.”
The only good that came out of it was a great poem by Herman Melville called “The Stone Fleet.” It's really a great whale of a poem.
Vandiver claims that Europe was as appalled as Jeff Davis by the Stone Fleet. Isolating Charleston might hurt profits in Europe so they had reason to be mad. But other historians don't cite this great reaction in Europe.
END OF 61
On of the great myths of the Civil War is that the South had the momentum until Gettysburg, and that the prospect for CSA victory was excellent at the end of 1861.
But the North had won key territory while the South was winning battles. The North had locked up Maryland, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri. The South would have gladly lost at Bull Run if they could have kept those four states.
The South was already running short on supplies. The ammo situation was good, but there were already severe strains in the food and medicine supply, and the currency was already beginning to devalue. One-year enlistments from the heady days of spring would be expiring soon and there would soon be a manpower shortage. The South was in a trap because it desperately needed more troop but it also desperately needed people to work the home front to keep the farms and factories cooking. Every time it took in a new soldier it lost a field hand. The field hand was needed to feed the soldier but the poor guy couldn't be in two places at once. Or maybe he could harvest the corn, put it on a horse-cart, jump the next train to battle a thousand miles away and after three days of fighting his corn will arrive to keep him going. It was a vicious cycle in a vicious cause.
Another shameful big problem for logistics was Southern chivalry. The Southern gentleman was above manual labor. It was all a Southern officer could do to manage to get anyone with blue bonnie blood to get down and clean a latrine or did a ditch. That was for blacks free and slave, and for white trash. This was a serious problem for Southern generals, trying to convince their armies that the hard work of digging ditches was vital to the cause and was not demeaning to a soldier.
CIVIL WAR IN 1862
STANTON REPLACES CAMERON – 1.62
Simon Cameron had not done a great job as Secretary of War, at least if the course of the war was at all his responsibility. Lincoln called Cameron into his office on January 11, 1862 and more or less told him that he had a new job for him shoeing horses.
Lincoln got along well with Cameron but his reputation was falling badly and he had to go. Lincoln appointed Cameron as the new US Ambassador to Russia.
The new Secretary of War was Edwin Stanton. “Edzo” took over at War on January 15. To say the least, the post of Secretary of War in the Civil War was a serious job.
MITT ROMNEY EXPEDITION JANUARY 1862
West Virginia had seceded from the Confederacy and Union troops there were a threat Southern plans for a rebel offensive up the Shenandoah Valley.
In January 1862 Stonewall Jackson took 9,000 pro-slavery men on a limited offensive into West Virginia to clear the flank. In this mission it was a successful operation.
The geographic goal was the town of Romney. (By the way I have been to 20 web sites and 20 books and I can't find one damned map of the Romney expedition. Like that wouldn't help make it clear at least as well as all the prolific 'buff' writing.) Jackson pushed Banks and Rosecrans out of Romney and secures the flank for the later Valley campaign, (that ruined McClellan's Peninsula Campaign)
But the Jackson offensive into western Virginia was partly a failure because the idea was to stay put there and perhaps even drive deeper into Union territory and perhaps threaten the recover of lost WV. Instead Jackson had to haul back to old Virginia because of couple of problems. The Rebs had forgot to watch the six o'clock news and listen to the weatherman.
When the Jackson Romney expedition started out the weather was unseasonable warm. That was great. It didn't cross anyone's mind that weather sometimes changes dramatically. These fighting clowns went off to war dressed as though it was going to stay unseasonably warm just because it was right now.
A few days into the expedition the weather suddenly tuned to snow, sleet and cold. Gee, what a shocker. Its January in the high hills of the Appalachian chains produced cold weather and snow. Who would have guessed? Soon the men were wearing white beards of icicles and complaining that their own human toes were cold.
The feet of both animals were problematic. The horses of Jackson's forces were wearing smooth shoes, like they were heading for a 1977 disco. They had to be re-shoed with horse hiking boots. But that operation, plus the shivering men slowed down the whole plan and brought it to an end.
The main purpose of the Romney expedition was a success but the hopes for a major victory in West Virginia was a failure.
The whole expedition lasted from January 1-24 1862.
MILL SPRINGS KENTUCKY – JANUARY 19-20 1862
VALVERDE AND GLORIETA PASS, FEBRUARY 1862
The South formed an expedition to take the lightly defended Southwest by force of arms. The Confederacy wanted the grand prize of the gold and other metals of the American Southwest. If the Rebs could first take New Mexico and Colorado, the way would be open to seize California. The North needed western gold to keep its currency stable and finance the war. If the South could undermine Northern currency and stabilize its own, the entire war might present a different dynamic.
General Sibley led 2,800 Confederate soldiers, mostly Texans to take New Mexico, but his army met a sharp fight at Val Verde on the Rio Grande. Val Verde, means green valley in Spanish but on that day it wasn't green it, was red with blood. More than 100 fell dead on both sides total.
Technically, the South won the Battle at Valverde, and the Yanks retreated back to their nearby Fort Lashua. And the South continued to advance in the Southwest after the clash at Valverde.
But the Southern troops tried on a harsh dose of reality at Valverde and it changed the larger strategic outlook of the offensive. A few days later came a second clash at a place called Glorietta Pass. This second tough battle forced Sibley to call off the offensive and retreat back to the cotton belt.
The Rebs might have had enough élan to fight their way to the California coast, but they certainly didn't have the men and supplies. If Valverde and Glorietta pass were any indication of what was ahead, there was no point in going on. They hadn't been exactly defeated at either place but they had been exactly defeated.
These two small battles were decisive, for the South could have done a lot of damage if it had been able to seize the gold of Colorado and California. It could have embarked on a military spending spree while destabilizing the currency of the North and solidifying the currency of the South. Instead it would the the Confederate paper currency that would be reduced to the same value of confetti by wars end.
JACK ASS AT GLORIETTA PASS
Just before the serious battle at Glorietta Pass, the Union tried a wild and deadly Trojan Horse trick on the Confederates that failed, and must be told. They loaded two mules with 80 pounds of explosives each, snuck up close to the Rebel line at night and pushed the poor animals off towards the Rebs, with slow fuses burning.
The mules took a few steps towards the Confederate position but then stopped when they realized that the Union men were walking the other way. These were their buddies, the humans that had been feeding them for months. The mules began walking back the other way as if to say, “hey fellas, where ya goin? I thought we were friends.”
The men started walking faster away from the mules. Then a trot. Then the mules trotted. “Hey wait for me!,” they cried in donkey language stubbornly with a fuse burning in their cargo hold. Then the men broke into a full scale run for the Rio Grande. The mules broke into a full gallop with the bombs about to go off. Dramatic music please ...
The mules blew sky high just moments before they caught up with the Union troops in the Rio Grande.
That scene has gotta be in a movie. It wrote itself. Which one of those jack asses in the Union command forgot how stubborn mules are?
FORT DONELSON – FEB 1862
Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Rebel Tennessee were the first significant victories for the North.
Although the western front was often smaller in scale than the Virginia campaigns in terms of troop strength, the strategic importance of chopping away the outer edges of the Confederacy more than compensated for the smaller scale.
The Southern generals Polk, Tillman, and Johnson drew a defense line in the west that ran about 50 miles wide and ran west to east along the Northern border of the wide state of Tennessee. They expected a Union attack at Nashville or along the Mississippi aimed at Memphis. Both of these objectives would have been worthwhile for the Union, as they both commanded strategic waterways. But the South simply had too many fine strategic waterways to defend. The Union could look around and fine one that was vulnerable and it did in Forts Henry and Donelson at the upper Tennessee River. There forts were defended by Tillman with only 5,000 Rebel troops as opposed to the commands of Johnston to the east and polk to the west with closer to 20,000 men each.
These two forts commanded the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, waterways that led to the Deep South. If they fell, Grant and the blue would have a free and open highway into central Tennessee and could also threaten the vital railroad juncture of Corinth Mississippi.
The Rebs gave up Fort Henry after a skirmish. Henry was already in danger of being flooded out by the high river even if the Union wasn't attacking it.
The Rebs at Henry fell back into Fort Donelson. Southern reinforcements arrived from Johnston.
The fight for Fort Donelson was a big one, equal, in fact, to a Virginia Theatre CW heavyweight bout. Fort Donelson makes number ten on the top ten list of the Civil War in terms of combined casualties.
The attack began with a brilliant plan to attack Donelson first with a fleet of Union ironclad under Commander Foote. The blue ironclad flotilla bombarded the fort from the Cumberland River but the US Navy got back much more than it dished out. Fort Donelson's cannon had some bite. The guns of Donelson performed like the guns of Navarrone, hitting the Ironclads 168 times. Commander Foote was wounded in the attack. I won't tell you where he was wounded because it would sound like I was making it up. Hint; It wasn't in the hand.
Just to the east of the Fort was the town of Dover. It was here that Nathaniel Forrest and General Floyd hit back with a well planned bait and switch counterattack. But just when the attack was winning the day and a path to escape for the Rebs was opening up, Floyd called retreat and the Confederates fell back in to the town of Dover and into the fort.
The Confederate commander of Fort Donelson was Gideon J. Pillow, a hero of the Mexican War, back when he knew how to choose the correct side. When it was time to surrender, Floyd and Pillow handed the fort over to General Simon Bolivar Buckner. It was late in the game, so lets hand the fort over to Bol Buckner so he can play the goat that let the Union army through his legs. Floyd and Pillow really copped out on that one.
Ironically, Buckner had advised from the start that Donelson and Henry were not defensible and that the Confederates should withdraw to a better place to take a stand. Now he had to surrender for his team.
It was at Donelson that Grant earned his famous nickname of “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.
Simon Bol Buckner sent an emissary to with a letter asking terms for an armistice. Grant sent him back a letter that simply said,
“I will accept nothing less then unconditional surrender or I will smash you to smithereens in the morning.”
Although some critics said he should have fought longer. Buckner surrendered Fort Donelson on February 16, 1862. In Pillow's case, it was the right thing to do.
Pillow had surrendered his Fort. Later in the war he coincidentally served in the attack on Fort Pillow. That was a horrible day.
The Grant line about “Unconditional Surrender” became a morale booster for the North and the men on the blue brigades began to refer to the whiskey and cigar loving general as “Unconditional Surrender Grant.”
The entire Deep South was in deep straights. A hole had been created through which our, excuse me, the Union forces could pass.
The Rebs immediately abandoned most of Tennessee. Nashville was captured without a battle before the end of 1862, and a temporary reconstruction TN state government was set up. General Grant ordered all country music sheets burned, but this order was not carried out, and it has unfortunately survived to the present day.
FORTS FALLOUT
The loss of the Heilman, Henry and Donelson Forts was so decisive that there is a recent book out about it that is called The Battle that Decided the Civil War.
I agree. From here on in the Civil War in the South Central Theatre would go generally and consistently well for the Union, give or take a Chickamuaga while the Virginia situation was an endless bloody stalemate like World War One with the South getting the best of most of the big battles. The South lost the war on the outer edges. These edges closed in on the CSA slowly but surely in the Anaconda plan.
The loss of Don and Hank caused a multiple panic for Southern military strategists. First of all the South had three Armies in Kentucky, and here was Grant pushing into the state of Tennessee. The three grey armies in Kentucky could get cut off and were certainly outflanked right away. The Tennessee portion of the Mississippi was also under siege and might fall too, placing these Kentucky Armies in that much more danger of being cut off. These Armies would have to be withdrawn to the South. The loss of Donelson essentially conceded the border state of Kentucky to the Union. The loss of Donelson turned Kentucky and pretty much doomed the South. Lincoln was right when he said that he wanted God on his side but he absolutely had to have Kentucky.
The loss of Donelson/Henry also opened up the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers to the superior Union Navy, which could combine forces with the large but not exactly superior Union Army. Grant and Halleck could sent the Navy ahead and have the troops follow. This was not lost of the Confederate leadership. They saw right away that Tennessee was going to now be nearly impossible to defend, although they were willing to give it a try. They conceded Kentucky and didn't have much hope left for Tennessee.
The capture of Donelson had another strategic bonus. The Union Army was now threatening to cut the Memphis-Charleston Railroad, the only good east-west railroad in the CSA.
Think about those two words and think of the map. The Memphis-Charleston.
Today, if they shut down the Interstate due to a truck rollover, we have 45 options to get where we need to go. There's small highways, small roads, railroads, planes, and buses, motorcycles, tunnels, and fast ships large and small. No big setback.
But the 1862 South the railroad was 80 times ahead of the next best way to get there (river and portage) and 800 times ahead of the next best way to get there after that (horse and buggy over horrible roads.) The railroad was not only the best way to go east-west long distance, it was the only way. There was no river that went east to west either in the South; No Hudson, Ohio or Missouri River for the South. The Memphis-Charleston was the only major thruway from east to west across the entire Confederacy. It was the “vertebrae of the Confederacy.”
Lincoln and Grant communicated frequently but it was short and impersonal for the most part. As the forts fell, they were in full agreement that the next target on the Anaconda map was the MCRR. Lincoln in fact brought it up first when he telegraphed Grant, who cabled back that he was thinking the same thing.
The threat of losing that railroad was so serious that Davis authorized the transfer of CSA troops to Tennessee from several coastal regions where they were desperately needed in case of a federal combined op invasion. The Rebs stripped their vulnerable coasts of defense power in order to make sure that they held on to the Memphis-Charleston. If that railroad fell not only would the Union men be on the verge of cutting the South in half north-south along the Mississippi, but now it was threatening to also cut it in half in an east-west direction along the Memphis Charleston RR, like a giant cross.
Even Confederate troops in New Orleans were sent up and over to help in Tennessee. This, even though the South was well aware that Farragut was planning to attack New Orleans in the near future.
DEATH OF WILLIE LINCOLN FEBRUARY 20 1862
Lincoln lost a son in the Civil War, but it wasn't in combat. His little boy, Willie Lincoln, succumbed to illness on February 20, 1862. It is needless to add that Abraham suffered greatly. Mrs. Lincoln was never the same after that and some think it contributed heavily to her later insanity.
HAMPTON ROADS MARCH 9, 1862
Both sides began the Civil War with wooden warships. But both teams were working to build “new ironsides.” Like the Nazis and the Allies racing to develop the atom bomb, both sides were scrambling to be the first to get out onto the water, warships with iron plating capable of withstanding cannonballs.
If either side could insert a mere one such ship into the fight before the other, such a vessel could wreak havoc with impunity. It would be a singular strategic ship capable of changing the entire dynamic of the conflict.
Just by coincidence, both sides floated such a futuristic warship on exactly the same day in the same theatre and the two slugged it out on their inaugural voyage.
The North had the Monitor, a “cheese-box on a raft” that had a moving turret with a 360-degree swivel fitted with two cannon, resting on a flat steel base.
The South converted the captured wooden warship Merrimack into the steel plated Virginia. (The South stole all kinds of stuff from the North at the start of hostilities – The North stole next to nothing from the South)
The Virginia had way more cannon, but in fixed positions. The ship had to move to line them up to target. Each ship had strengths and liabilities on offense and were impregnable on defense.
They battled at close quarters for almost three hours and neither side could destroy or sink the other. Neither ship was very pretty. They were both improvisations built from keels that were never intended to support an ironclad. Monitor vs Merrimack was like a wrestling match between Roseanne Barr and Whoopee Goldberg. They were both powerful performers, but it was hard to decide which one was more ugly.
Late in the day one lucky shot from Virginia took out the
Monitor’s visual capability and she retired.
Historians properly refer to the battle as a draw, even though the Monitor withdrew first. In a way, the draw was a victory for the North for Merrimack was about to destroy every Union wooden ship it could line up its guns on. Yale was ahead by 60 at half time and the game ended in a tie on a last minute surge by Harvard. The stop by Monitor was a key battle in the War of Northern Aggression even if she did not destroy the former USS Virginia in Virginia.
The Merrimack turned Virginia never retuned to battle. During the Union invasion of the York/James Peninsula a few weeks later the Rebels had to scuttle the ugly beauty because it was too deep to pull upriver to safety. The Monitor, never very seaworthy in the first place, sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras late on New Year's Eve 1862.
I built these two plastic model ships as a boy. A neighborhood bully destroyed the Monitor and damaged the Merrimack. He recently e-mailed me after 35 years and wants to be friends. I don't know if I should write him back. It's a moral dilemma. I don't know if I can forgive him for destroying my ships.
Other innovations in the war included the machine gun, (which could have been used in considerable numbers late in the war but not enough people believed in it - .. wow), the observation balloon, (which was used extensively), and the grooviest weapon of all, the rifle, (as opposed to the smooth bored weaponry - The rifle has grooves in the barrel to give the bullet spin as well as thrust, which increases power and accuracy.)
BATTLE FOR ISLAND NUMBER 10 – APRIL - 62
The Battle for Island Number 10 in early 1862 began the difficult fight for control of the Mississippi Rivers. When the Union overran it after a two month campaign, the road was open to Vicksburg.
Island Number 10 is located halfway up the western side of Tennessee. It is near New Madrid (home of the greatest earthquake in American History back in Monroe's time)
The North took the Ten finally on April 7 1862. The road South was now open as far as Fort Pillow.
Anyone could look at a map and figure out in 1861 that control of the Mississippi was one of the keys to winning the war.
When Henry and Donelson were lost, the Confederates were forced to back down at least 60 miles along the Mississippi to a place where the river snaked twice so sharply as to create two squash shaped peninsulas side by side. I'm confident you have no idea what I'm talking about, that's why I always include maps.
10
The Confederates held two fortified positions at these bends in the Mississippi, separating the states of Missouri and Tennessee. At the top of one peninsula they held the small town of New Madrid, Missouri. At the bottom of the bend they held a fort on Island Number 10. It was named that because it was such a great place that it was considered a ten on a one to ten.1 Island Number 10 is located halfway up the western side of Tennessee. It is near New Madrid (home of the greatest earthquake in American History back in Monroe's time)
10 was garrisoned by 7,000 disloyal United States troops wearing grey uniforms. 10 had 125 cannon and six Rebel gunboats. These river warriors were precious to the Confederate cause. The Rebs were were protective of these six boats. They were all the Rebs had for naval power and so the South understandably tried to avoid toe-to-toe combat with Union river forces. One bad day at the office and the entire Mississippi would be open to the Navy of the USA.
Commanding the offense was General Union Jack Pope with 20,000 troops and a lot more than six gunboats. Pope's biggest problem was the spring floods surrounding the 10. It was not going to be easy to try any land-based flanking movements.
First order of blue business was to take out New Madrid, which would leave 10 still strong but almost outflanked from the northwest.
Pope attacked New Madrid from the land side of Missouri and successfully excommunicated the Confederate troops from the town in a one day fight that cost each side about 30 killed. The running Rebels headed South to Number 10 to supplement the forces there.
A preliminary raid by the North in the middle of the night on April Fool's Day 1862 dismantled most of the Island's best cannon.
If the US Navy could get just one or two ironclads past .the Island, it would be effectively taken out, for there was only one road to the Island one supply line, and if the Union gunboats could get past the Island they could cut off that road fairly easily. 10's position would instantly become untenable. Pope's Army tried to bypass 10 by building a canal that would lead to New Madrid and cut 10 off at the pass. They more “sawed” a canal than dug it, if you can dig it. The canal route was a submerged forest, so the worker boats were fitted with underwater saws, and they sliced a path four feet deep in the water.
Unfortunately, the Ironclads needed 6 feet of draught so the canal was dug for nothing. Then a couple of dashing Union Commanders volunteered to run the gauntlet past the guns of 10 in the middle of the night. They assured the Pope that they could get through and that their ships could withstand a few cannonballs (am I allowed to call them “ships?”)
Sure enough, two Union Ironclads made it past Island 10 in the darkness without any damage taken. The battle was over before it started. Confederate Colonel Commander Humptis, in charge of 10, put up a brief fight and surrendered the Island on April 7 1862.
The Union bagged more than 7,000 prisoners and 79,454 cannon2
The road South on Ole Man River was now open as far as Fort Pillow. After that the way would be clear to the great city of Vicksburg.
Artist Must Have Been From NYC – He Doubles the Size of the Fed Fleet.
The fall of Island number #10 would have gone down much bigger in history if not for the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing that was stealing the headlines at the time. It was like the celebrity who dies the same day as some much bigger celebrity. Bad timing; Go to page three, fool.
But 10 was an important step in the conquest of the Southwest, although at least one book says the opposite for reasons that escape the other authors and me. A semi-official history of the US Navy says that the fall of New Madrid and 10 was of little consequence.
Lincoln didn't think so. He sent Pope a telegram, “A mighty big win for the good guys. You have scored a perfect ten.”
SHILOH - APRIL 6-7 1862
The South usually named the major battles after the towns where they were fought or towns nearby. The North named the fights after the nearest river. As a result many Civil War battles have two names. One of the truly big battles of the war was called “Shiloh” in the South and “Pittsburgh Landing” in the North. In this case it as named after the Shiloh Meeting House Church, which was poignantly located at the heart of the battle.
Grant moved south through Tennessee towards the key railroad junction of Corinth in Northern Mississippi. When his Union Army reached Pittsburgh Landing he rested. Grant was certain that the Rebel Army of Tennessee was still at Corinth 30 miles to the South.
But the Rebs were secretly on the march to attack the attacker while he rested off guard. The Confederate Army of Tennessee was a disorganized march by a motley crew of grey, but they were spoiling for a fight. Grant was 25 mile North of his Army upriver taking it easy, looking at maps and staring at a whiskey bottle but not touching it. Grant was thinking that the enemy was on the run, desperately trying to avoid a fight. The opposite was true.
The conservative way of war would dictate that the South should husband its resources and fall back to a place where a combined Southern Army could establish a powerhouse compact line to fight on.
But Johnston and Lee did not agree. They went with the theory that the best defense is a good offense. Lets take the war to the Yankees before they take it to us. This theory of warfare is too often foolish. Attack when you're outnumbered is a big jelly doughnut. It's a pleasing idea, it tastes great going down at the time, but a few hours later, you know deep down inside that you made an unhealthy mistake.
As the CSA divisions approached the Union lines, hundreds of soldiers fired off practice rounds to make sure their weapons would fire in the damp weather. The Union sentries heard these shots but presumed they were US troops doing the test firing. Union intelligence fell sleep at Shiloh and nearly handed the South a complete victory.
On the morning of April 6, 1862 the South hit Grants troops hard with a massive surprise attack. The blue was not prepared, and even though the numbers were about even (2.7 million troops for each side) the Rebs pushed the Union soldiers back to the edge of the Tennessee River. A high ground near the river was chosen for a last Union stand. If the Rebs broke through here, the Union Army could either surrender, drown, or get shot to pieces.
General Reb Beauregard had led quite a successful fight up till dusk. His men were frazzled and needed rest. They had made a hard all-night march of 30 miles before they charged at Shiloh. He ordered the grey to halt for the night.
It was a fatal error. When Beauregard disregarded military strategy for humane strategy he lost a big chance for the South to win an overwhelming victory. If he had ordered his men, delirious from victory and lack of sleep or rest, to keep charging, the Union divisions at Pittsburgh landing would probably have surrendered. Grant would have become the goat of Shiloh and probably never would have gone on to become President of the United States from 1869-1877.
While the Rebels slept, the cause of the USA in the South central was rescued by the arrival of fresh divisions from General Donny Union Buell.
On the morning of the 7th the Rebels had their cup of watery coffee and noticed that all of a sudden they were decidedly outnumbered.
The Union counterattacked in the morning. They didn't rout the Rebs but they slowly pushed them back all day. The Union men were no longer pinned against the river and they were arm wrestling the position away from the Confederate troops. At the end of the day the Rebs had to quit the field and return to Corinth Mississippi by the way they had come.
The death toll at Shiloh was a shock to the nation. more than 1,750 on each side gave up the ghost. The wounded on each side was as usual, far more than that. The the combined casualties were more than the Revolutionary, the 1812, and the Mexican War combined!
Shiloh was the first battle that truly horrified the nation. No one was counting on slaughters like this. America's experience in war
up to now was distant and limited. War heroes of the first three wars were celebrated. War didn't seem all that bad, if the cause was just, the casualties were low, it didn't last too long, and the right side won. Shiloh put and end to that fantasy.
The South had lost a rough one by a close margin, and in losing they had won in two ways.
One: Grants invasion of South central was stopped dead. Two: The carnage put a deep psychological fear in the Union Army that war is hell and you Yanks better be ready for more where that cam from. The decision of Beauregard to surprise attack in full force had value.
It clearly depends on you you look at it. Some historians consider Shiloh a Union victory because even though it ended in a draw and the North barely avoided a catastrophe, the South did quit the field. But there was a larger point that superseded that; South had proven its weakness in showing off its strength. Shiloh revealed that if the South it gave the North everything it had in one spot, the best it could do was gain a draw and then fall back. It was a portent of Gettysburg. That was not a good sign at all for the Rebel cause. Winning a draw against a larger foe is something to be proud of, but pride doesn't turn the strategic tide.
GENERAL TAGETING
The South lost one of its best generals at Shiloh. General Johnston (not Albert Sidney Johnston who survived the war) was shot in the leg during the battle, and instead of seeking medical attention he kept directing traffic and eventually dropped dead off his horse from bloodletting.
This was a problem for the South throughout the war, their best generals getting killed in action. Southern historians always moan about their sides' poor luck in losing too many of their ablest generals in the war. They speak of the death of Stonewall and Johnston and others as a keynote portion of their excuse towel on why they lost the war, “Imagine if Stonewall hadn't been shot! We might have won, they lament.” I heard a Southern C&W song last month that said this exact thing.
First of all, why would you ever wish that Stonewall lived and went on to lead the South to victory? Second; As if that isn't one of the objects of the war for the North, to kill the enemy generals in combat, and as if that isn't one of the almost inevitable consequences of starting a full-scale war against an enemy who has both the troop numbers, and a big advantage in all aspects of military industry. If a super-computer played out 40 different versions of the Civil War with different strategic plans on both sides, the South would still have lost many of its best generals in combat. “Of all the rotten luck!,” they moan. “We fought against these massive armies of the heavily industrial North and some of our genius generals fell in combat, leaving us short on leadership. If not for that unforeseeable misfortune the entire war might have turned out quite differently” We never hear the end of that one.
That's like saying, “Of all the rotten luck. I took the entire family mountain climbing in the Alps in January in short sleeve shirts, sandals, and Bermuda shorts, and little Jimmy got frostbite and we had to abandon the climb. Of all the rotten luck.”
THE BEST DEFENSE IS A GOOD DEFENSE
The Rebs did well overall at Shiloh in terms of actual battle analysis. But the Rebs retreated the war of attrition made it a brutal defeat. They stopped Grants invaders and expended far too much in precious resources in doing it.
Throughout the war the macho South hung itself on its I attitude of 'I am a man and I will attack! Nothing else will suit my manly Southern mind-set/ego.'
If the Confederacy had fought a clever defensive war like George Washington in the Jerseys in 1777 it might have done much better. But instead the South always tried attacking first. Whenever the Rebs attacked the Union Army in force they were in effect attacking their own storage depot, burning up gas trying to find a gas station. World War II is loaded with instances of armies on the defensive embarking on initially successful counterattacks, and then hurting themselves in the long run by depleting all of their resources that were desperately needed for an effective defensive operation. France fell faster than it had to for this reason and Hitler's winter offensive at the Bulge was another case of such proud idiocy.
GRANT ON THE OUTS – HALLECK TAKES CORINTH
One of the post-game repercussions of Shiloh was the fall in status of US Grant. He had been irresponsibly too far away from the battle when it broke out because he did not expect an attack from the Confederates. The Union won in spite of Grants leadership. If Buell had not arrived in time to save the day, Grant would have taken the full blame for a thorough Union loss and would never have risen again to the greatness he so achieved in the long run. After Shiloh Halleck tried to get Grant sacked, and even spread false rumors to Lincoln about Grant's' drinking until Lincoln demanded proof. Halleck backed off and stopped trying to stab Grant in the back. But Ulysses was demoted to something like deputy commander and would have to work his way back to the top.
Grant was so mad at “that bozo Halleck” that he decided to send in his written resignation from the Army (for some reason soldiers can't resign, but leading officers can.) But General Sherman talked Grant into staying in the Army.
“Just tie a rope and hang on,” wrote Sherman. “You stood by me when everyone called me insane. Now I will stand by you while everyone calls you an incompetent drunk.”
Grant wrote back that “I wish you hadn't told me that people were calling me that. Besides, you know I keep a bottle of whiskey on my desk, not because I can't resist it. I keep a bottle of whiskey on my desk to prove that I can resist it!”
All that was true. The rumors about drunken Grant were partly based on the sight of that tester whiskey bottle that Grant kept in plain sight throughout the war in order to make it clear to everyone that he was strong enough to resist the temptation. It was also true that powerful people were concerned that General Sherman was a certified looney (Sherman proved them wrong in 1864 by setting fire to half the unarmed Southern civilian towns between Atlanta and Savannah.)
So Halleck was moving towards Corinth at the pace of a snail on quaaludes. He was receiving ridiculously inflated reports about Rebel strength at Corinth and he bought them. Sorry, Hal: but in fact there were not 200,000 Confederate troops in Corinth waiting to give you a triple-shot of Shiloh. But Halleck feared there was and he trenched his way to Corinth instead of marched.
Halleck took a corps from his army and sent it east to take Chattanooga. This expedition was led by Buell, the Shiloh savior, and it dallied its way across Tennessee towards 'The Chat Room' in the same needlessly slow pace as Halleck was trenching towards Corinth.
The Rebels decided to abandon Corinth to the enemy but managed a cool deception that made a fool of Halleck and enabled the Confederate Army of Mississippi to retire without a loss of men or supplies.
As Halleck closed on on Corinth and prepared for a big battle, the Rebels ran the same train in and out of town over and over and the same group of men jumped off over and over to the cheering of the others on the ground. This was a deception to make Halleck's spyglass observers to think that the Rebels were building up for a grand battle when in fact they were laying smokescreen for a grand retreat.
The Union forces attacked Corinth on May 30 1862 and found to their surprise that the city was ghost town. Now as much as Scranton, Troy, or Reno today, but it was pretty empty.
But Halleck wasn't as dismayed by the empty Corinth as he should have been. Hal was content to occupy enemy territory. He had no desire to seek and destroy enemy forces unless they happened to be in his way. Halleck had a long way to go before he understood Clausevitz. Now that the good guys controlled the Memphis-Charleston junction at Corinth, Henry felt he had nothing left to do except hold it. The further the Rebel army was away from his the better! What a dumbo!
Some historians believe that if both Halleck and Buell had taken the fight to the Rebs at this time in frenzied fashion, the entire war might have been won, at least in the west, by the end of 1862.
NEW ORLEANS APRIL 1862
The 29th of the month is not a good luck charm for the city of New Orleans. On August 29th 2005 Hurricane Katrina destroyed half the city. On April 29th 1862 the Union Navy and Army occupied it.
The two events were not completely disconnected. Most of the 1,000 dead in 2005 from the hurricane were poor black people who were still paying the price for their slavery heritage. Their race had started out so far deep in the hole that 150 years later they were still in the position of poverty in the New Orleans economy.
Northern war strategy was to cut the Confederacy in half by taking complete control of the mighty vital Mississippi. Taking the great river would ruin Southern lines of communication, while denying their armies vital supplies food, gutta percha canes, and whips.
The plan was to take the Mississippi from both direction. From the North came Porter's Navy. From the South, up the Gulf Coast to the river came the Dave Farragut Fleet for the blue.
I passed a giant statue of Farragut perhaps 3,000 times on a causeway in South Boston Harbor. I spent my childhood thinking he was from Boston. In reality the presence of a Farragut statue in Boston is merely a testimonial to the national acclaim he achieved with his naval victories in the War of the Rebellion. Pranksters have several times painted the Southie statue pink.
Taking New Orleans was an important part of the Anaconda strategy come true early in the war. The Union Navy invaded Louisiana from the Gulf of Mexico and handed the South a major defeat, probably the worst setback of the year for the Davis cause. The Union Navy in April captured the great port and city of New Orleans Louisiana.
The South did not become too alarmed when the Union Navy seized Ship Island late in 61 but they probably should have been. SI was close to the mouth of the Mississippi and it should have ben obvious that the North was planning to break into the mighty Miss with a mighty naval force. The initial deployment of 2,000 Union troops was fortified to 15,000 by the beginning of April 1862.
Two Reb forts defended the entrance to the Mississippi. Fort Jackson and Fort Phillip were in good shape and well armed. Farragut understood that he did not have to defeat or destroy the forts, just get past them. but on April 24 Admiral Farragut shouted “Damn the forts, full speed ahead!” and ran his entire fleet daringly past their cannon. New Orleans was now dead ahead upriver.
In April of 1862 Farragut’s fleet entered the mighty Miss.. The admiral’s flagship was the U.S.S Hartford. The river was heavily defended by powerful forts with heavy cannon.
The battle was joined immediately. The rebels set one of their own ships on fire and sent it after the Yankee squadron as a burning ram. The CSA ship Flambo went crashing into the USS Hartford. The strategy worked. Hartford was soon burning and fighting simultaneously.
Hartford survived and helped to break the boom, a barrier the Confederates had set up across the river. Farragut’s fleet steamed past the forts. Now the forts were useless.
Next stop New Orleans. The forts guarding the city saw the situation as untenable and surrendered. The Rebs cleaned all the currency out of the banks and fled New Orleans on the 28th.
At the beginning of the year the 15,000 Union troops that coagulated near New Orleans threatening to attack would not have been enough to take down N'Orleans. But a lot had changed in four months. Davis and his Secretary of War both were willing to drain troops from all over the lower and coastal South to help Bragg and Lee in Tennessee and Virginia. Now the price for the daring Rebel offensives would be the fall of New Orleans. The light forces left to defend the city were too few.
Farragut's tinclad marines took over the city on April 29, 1862. A few days later the Union cleared the river of secession clear to Baton Rouge.
Ben Butler of Massachusetts would rule New Orleans throughout the war. Butler though of himself as a wise leader and a great conciliator. The people of New Orleans hated him. They gave Butler a nickname: “Scum.”
The loss of the New Orleans was devastating for the Confederacy. It was the most important foreign port in the Southern economy. The loss of New Orleans cut off the far west and the Texas supply depot (even though a thin funnel at Vicksburg still was open.) New Orleans was considered vital to the United States even in the time of Jefferson. All the more so for the CSA in 1862. Losing NO gave Southern morale a right cross from Joe Louis in his prime.
What might be just as bad for the grey, the fall of New Orleans opened European eyes as to who was likely to win this war. From now on, no one in Europe took he South's chances of winning seriously enough to consider recognition of the CSA.
The Old World awoke to the fact that the American Civil War was hitting where it hurts; in the pocketbook, and that this original idea, when the war first began, that Europe could benefit from the USA breaking up into two nations was not going o happen. So Europe as a whole was rooting for a Union victory from this point on. This explains the cold treatment that Confederate emissaries were handed by the heads of state in Europe with the singular exception of Napoleon III.
Europe lost trade with both parties. Loss of profits with the Confederates created that much more European desire for a Union victory so they could least resume trading in Southern staples with someone. A long stalemated war would not help Europe get its old profits back. Blockade running in the South gets a lot of glory in the war books, but business wasn't anything close to as good as it was.
CORINTHIAN LEATHER
Halleck's army with a demoted Grant in the mix, next set its sight on Corinth. This of course had been the original goal before the rebs surprised the blue at Shiloh. Now, after burying the dead and repairing the damage, the Union force under Halleck, some 100,000 strong began to march towards Corinth.
But the Army moved as slow as a rich fat veteran designated hitter running out a ground ball in an exhibition game for charity in the off-season. Instead of marching, Halleck kept digging trench lines. He was covering two miles a day by trench advancement, instead of moving forward standing up and getting it done. The men were grumbling that Halleck was “a squid” and “about as resolute as a dead zebra.” These criticisms from letters of soldiers, were essentially on the mark. Grant had almost lost at Shiloh, but no one yet knew that he had a secret talent, one that would have come in very handy right now if he had been given command in the field. Grant liked to get the business of war over with in a decisive and efficient manner and he did not have an ounce of paranoia in his system. he though nothing of hurling thousands of troops into battle simply because that was their job and that was his job. This simplistic quality of 'this is what we do and lets go do it' was worth a billion dollars in hard currency to the Union because no one seemed to have it in the Union brass. Lincoln's beard turned Rebel gray as the war went on and not one of his generals displayed this quality. It was caution taken to a deadly extreme in one general after another. Lincoln's general's took the axiom 'measure a thousand times and cut once' much too literally.
Halleck the hack also fell for false reports of exaggerated enemy strength, another fault that cost the Union in one campaign after another after another until Grant took over in 1864. Grant didn't care if he was outnumbered or not. He simply took his army and hurled it at the enemy as a matter of course. False reports of enemy strength wouldn't change the ay he operated because it didn't matter whether they were true of false. Armies had a job to do and that was fight, and grant was always restless if he did not take his resources and put them to work at killing people.
Halleck was not burdened by such an instinct. The perfect is the enemy of the good. By seeking the perfect plan at all times, Halleck let chances slip.
JACKSON'S VALLEY CAMPAIGN MARCH 23-JUNE 9
The Valley Campaign and the Peninsula Campaign are interrelated and partially simultaneous. I'm going to start with the Valley Campaign which was a support operation for the larger force on both sides. The winner of the Valley Campaign would send reinforcements to the main battle and virtually determine the winner.
The main armies would slug it out in the heart of central Virginia, but in the meantime to the west was the Shenandoah Valley. It was the interstate highway and the breadbasket of the region. Shenandoah was the left flank for the Rebs and the right flank for the Union. The Valley Campaign was the key to the overall Civil War in 1862. The McClellan Campaign was the big one, the Normandy D-Day of its time and it failed. And it failed because the South won the Valley Campaign on the flank and changed the balance of military power in Virginia.
The star of the VC was Stonewall Jackson. It was here that he became the God of Stone Mountain. Military historians study his Valley performance to this very day. This is how you do that.
Important Battles in the Valley Campaign include Kernstown where Jackson actually lost, and Lashevilli.
The Battles;
March 23 1862 was the date for the Battle of Kernstown, in which the Union defeats Stonewall Jackson for the first last and only time if his short but laureled military career. After the battle Jackson passed the buck to a completely innocent Southern General named Kelvin Garnett. Jackson had the poor guy arrested for retreating from the battlefield when if Jackson had been in the exact same spot he would have done the exact same thing. Anyone would have. Garnett was out of ammo, and was being overrun on both flanks. Garnett ordered a well-executed retreat. The Rebel forces that Garnett saved to fight another day went on to help significantly win the Valley campaign overall. And for that service the great infallible Stonewall, the Jesus Christ of the Stone Mountain crowd, had poor Garnett arrested and court-martialed.
Garnett got a command back just in time to restore his good name by storming Missionary Ridge at Gettysburg. General Garnett died in the carnage of Pickett's Charge.
McDowell- May 8 – I forget who won.
The next important battle of the Valley Campaign was at Sam McDowell on May 8.
Front Royal – May 23 – This was a one-sided victory for the Confederacy, one of the crowning moments for the Stars and Bars. Jackson whipped the Union like Simon LeGree handling a slave problem.
1st Winchester May 25 – This was a Confederate victory with the Union taking 2,000 casualties to only 400 for the grey area.
Cross Keys - June 8 – This battle only serves to remind me that I lost my keys two months ago and am still not over the trauma. Is there anything more disorientating and demoralizing than losing your keys?
Port Republic – June 9 1862 – This was the last and the decisive battle of the VC. It wasn't so much that the Union was routed here, but more a matter of maintaining the pattern and what each army did afterwards. Port Republic was yet one more battle where the Confederates got the best of it. The Yanks took 1,000 casualties and the Rebs 800. Fremont's army showed up near the end to stabilize the situation for the Northern troops, but in the end the Union decided to pack up and head back north. The South packed up and headed South where the decisive battle was emerging. The North had three times as many troops and it retreated when all was said and done in the Valley Campaign. The South had stopped a superior force, and in doing so stopped it from saving the day in the Richmond theatre. Instead it was Jackson's forces that would play the role of Blucher's Prussians at Waterloo.
PENINSULA CAMPAIGN
First the short version. The Union tried to win the war in the spring of 1862 with an end around flank attack designed to capture the Confederate capitol of Richmond. Instead of attacking straight down the heart of central Virginia in an overland campaign, General McClellan opted to sail his big army down the Chesapeake, land it at the tip of the York/James peninsula and march west to Richmond.
One of the reasons Lincoln and the North needlessly pushed the Union Generals for a victory in Virginia was because it wanted to match the victories in the west with victories in the east. It was thought that if the South took it on the chin in both places in a short period if time they might consider surrendering. It was a greedy policy, since it failed. If it had worked it would have been brilliant.
A large Union force of 60,000 men was left behind under General McDowell to defend Washington D.C. and to march south at a key moment and help McClellan take Richmond.
The two McClellan and McDowell made Mcfools of themselves before it was all over. McClellan overestimated the size of the forces against him and used a ridiculous amount of caution, slowing down to the point of ruining any chance of victory. McDowell was stonewalled by a Southern counteroffensive up the Shenandoah Valley and refused to go south and save the Richmond offensive. The only reinforcements that went south to Richmond were Confederate. Instead of Union reinforcements helping McClellan take Richmond, it was Confederate reinforcements that helped the Rebs save Richmond and drive McClellan's army back to the sea and back on the boats from which they had arrived. The Union invasion crawled back to Washington to report to Lincoln, “Got any other bright idea's?”
Now the long version.
George McClellan is without a doubt one of the great goats of the Civil War. “Big Mac” was a famous and glorified military leader at first who ended up with a most un-glorious war record at last. He also ran against Lincoln for President in the Election of 1864, adding more mud to his already muddied name, at least historically.
Now ordinarily I go out of my way to try to play iconoclast and defend the goats of history. That's my game. But a man has to draw the line somewhere. I won't defend this bozo. Unfortunately for him, McClelland left a great deal of his writing behind. He should have burned it all. Any objective person that reads his material can only come to one conclusion; what an egotistical drip. Lincoln ripped him to shreds behind his back, and Abe was no back-stabber. GM was just one of those people who, like a bad in-law, is so self-righteous and arrogant that ripping them behind their back is the only way you can deal.
But at the time he was appointed, no one really knew what a big jerk he really was. McClellan was a big hero that was supposed to save the day after the disaster at Bull Run. Instead his ego and timidity made things worse.
In August of 1861 McClellan was famously put in charge of the new Army of the Potomac. he drilled and trained and his men loved him. He was the savior, the man that was going to save the inept Union war effort. McClellan was good, but he was under the impression (and God only knows where he got it) that civilian leadership was supposed to have absolutely no say in what grand strategy was decided on by the North. He was appalled if Lincoln dared to make a suggestion. Lincoln realized he was stuck with this ignoramus boor, and made the best of it until McClellan failed, at which time he was more than delighted to fire “that insolent toad.” In other words, McClellan might have been given a second and third chance if he wasn't so personally insufferable.
As the campaign season for 1862 unfolded McClellan was ready to take the offensive, but he needed plan, not just a will. Mac was the last guy that would risk his troops without a plan.
Mac decided that the shortest distance between the two points of Washington and Richmond was not a straight line. The flanking attack on Richmond from the seaboard side was the plan. Lincoln did not like the plan and said so plainly to George. But other Union Generals supported McClellan's strategy and Lincoln went along. At first the landing was planned for Urbana on the Rappahannock, not so far south as the York-James peninsula, but the Rebs smelled it coming like a staggering wino about to turn the corner on a hot summer day. Gray general Joe Johnston (“JJ”) shrewdly pulled his troops back some due south.
The next Union plan was to land the army further south at the end of the York/James Peninsula. McCLellan's Army landed on the same York peninsula where the original settlers of Virginia had broken ground in 1607. The Young Napoleon was going to do to the rebels what the founding fathers of the Virginia Commonwealth had done to the Indians; drive their warriors out. For the second time in 260 years the York Peninsula would be the stage at the crossroads of history. It was a solid plan militarily, but a lot of things went wrong and things didn't quite work out. Richmond would not fall in fact until bloody 1865.
The Yankees landed in 59,000 man force on April 2 1862 at Fort Monroe at the tip of the peninsula for which the campaign is named.
Throughout the campaign McClellan was misled by false intelligence, some of it due to a clever ruse by Reb Jeb Magruder, and some of it die to bad work by his crack(pot) Pinkerton hired detectives. Magruder marched troop formations in circles when he knew the Union was watching through field glasses. It was similar to what the Soviet Union used to do on May Day celebrations for western observers when they sent bomber formations overhead in 12 mile circles so that the West would think they had more clout than they really did, (thus needlessly escalating the Cold War btw.) McClellan fell for it.
In addition the Union had hired the famous Pinkerton Detective agency to spy on the CSA Army. 'Pinky' sent back wildly exaggerated estimates of Confederate strength, thus causing the already overly cautious McClellan to take caution to asinine extremes. McClellan estimated by these sources that his troops faced an army of 3.8 million Confederates3. Now Mac, falsely thinking himself badly outnumbered, felt it was crucial that McDowell join in the attack from the north.
Why was the Pinkerton work so poor? Probably because if he erred on the side of underestimating the size of the enemy and the Union suffered a bloody defeat, Pinkerton would get blamed and would be out of a contract. It was better safe than sorry, so the hired intelligence doubled the size of the Rebel army opposing McClellan.
The first major stop on the Richmond road was Yorktown, the place where the Revolutionary War was decided. Was it this town's destiny to decide two major wars?
McClellan set up a siege operation against Yorktown. He set up huge mortar batteries close to the rebel defense lines. Just when he was ready to unleash the mortar barrage, McClellan discovered that there was nothing worth shooting at. The Rebels had abandoned Yorktown and fell back towards Richmond. Mac had wasted many days preparing for an attack that he couldn't execute.
The next confrontation came at Williamsburg, another throwback location from Revolutionary days. This time there was a real battle. The Confederates built a makeshift earthen fort and tried to hold on. Jeb Magruder asked his men what it should be named. They voted to call it Fort Davis. He thought it over and overruled them deciding instead to name it Fort Magruder.
In the battle of Williamsburg on May 5, 1862 nearly 500 Union troops were killed. The Confederates lost half as many, but in the end, quit the spot and fell back further on Richmond to make an even tougher stand somewhere else.
In the meantime the Stonewall Jackson had pushed his way up the Shenandoah Valley creating the possibility of a flanking attack on Washington D.C. Union forces that were supposed to march South to help McClellan went after Stonewall instead. The North had gone for the bait.
Not only did these Yankee fools not stop Stonewall, they got whipped. The goat of this campaign is Union Nathaniel Banks.
The USA troops got to within sight of the church towers of Richmond (churches being of course, the supreme irony of the pro-slavery Confederacy,) but it was a false spring. The Union troops drew no closer than that until 1865. Victory was so near yet so far away.
Stonewall's infantry and Stuart's ostrich plumed cavalry division came back to Richmond to join the battle.
McClellan, author of the book “Always Call Retreat” fell back after his forces were stopped outside Richmond.
There were a series of serious battles as Little Mac proved himself a little man and fell back to Harrison's Landing.
There was the especially savage battle of June 19 in Henrico County. At the Battle of Savage Station the Union (typically) suffered more casualties butt he fight was a draw as McClellan continued to withdraw. Many of the Union losses were due to the sudden evacuation of a field hospital leaving the Rebs to care for the Union wounded (it's a good thing it wasn't the 1942 Japanese that came in and took over.)
There was the bloody Battle of Malvern Hill on July 1, 1862. MV was the last big battle on the reverse march back to the sea for McClellan. The Union beat the cotton out of the Rebs at Malvern, but stupid McClellan did not exploit the advantage. Instead he kept retreating as though Mal had ben a defeat for the blue (The Union Army wore blue, by the way, because it was modeled after the French, and the frogs wore blue.)
There was the Battle of Glenville.
There was the Battle of Fort Humptis on July 3 between drunken farmers armed with pitchforks and antiquated muskets on both sides near Point Pleasant. No one was killed so some historians don't count this as a battle.
There was the Battle of Fair Oaks at which Joe Johnson was wounded in the shoulder and the chest. Replacing JJ was Robert. E. Lee. Fair Oaks was the beginning of Lee's entry onto the glorious center stage of the Civil War.
McClellan had 115,000 troops and the Confederates under Joseph Johnston had 90,000.
One factor that overshadowed the fighting was the need to protect Washington D.C. Lincoln and his generals had to make sure that a large Union Army always stood between Virginia and the Capitol building. If you capture the King the chess game is over.
The Peninsula Campaign was a failure for the Union because it failed in it's objective of capturing Richmond, and its related goal of making Washington D.C. safe and secure.
The P.C. demonstrated to Southern strategists that Lincoln was possibly obsessive in his concern for the safety of the capitol, and perhaps his person. A Union Army of this size might well have been put to better use in areas where the Confederate forces were weak, while the strong Virginia rebel forces could sit where they sat and read about these disheartening Union victories in the paper. They say that the best defense is a good offense, so that was the Lincoln strategy in approving the Peninsula Campaign. But half of that army could have lived by the more simple dictum that the best defense is a good defense, while the other half tore Tennessee in half to the aid of forces already there. Lincoln thought it imperative to win a decisive battle in Virginia or else always live with a risk of losing the war in some flash strike from Virginia.
For the rest fo the war, the South realized they could push Lincoln's buttons just by threatening an offensive anywhere near Washington, and they played this card on several occasions before 1865. Lincoln's Virginia offensives never really made Washington completely safe for democracy, but he did tie down the heart of the Southern Army in Virginia and thus weakened the South's ability to send many great armies out to defend the west.
The hero of the Peninsula Campaign was Stonewall Jackson. Apparently he performed “brilliantly.” Why does the military man have a near monopoly on that word? Anyway, the VMI professor could do no wrong, marched at speeds that awed his enemies, and was always in the right place at the right time to inflict timely defeats on damn Yankees. The Peninsula Campaign made Stonewall Jackson the indispensable man for the South.
The way they made him a God after this campaign with their lustful war-hero worship probably hurt them down the road when he was shot and killed by one of his own men at Chancellorsville. If they hadn't made him a God they could have handled his death with aplomb.
7 Days was one Rebel Victory After Another
The South pushed Porter and McClelland back in a series of five major battles in the suburbs of Richmond.
Battle 1 took place at Mechanicsville on the 26th, also called the Battle of Beaver Dam Creek. The Union troops fell back but held.
Battle 2 was fought at Gaines Mills on the 27th where many Union troops were turned into Gainesburgers.
By now the forces of Porter under the overall command of McClelland were in full but organized retreat back towards the sea from which they came. Lee's divisions of the divisive tried to cut Porter off, but the Union fought its way past the attempted trap at the following battles,
But the Rebs had taken the offensive in Virginia and had put an end to the so-called “Peninsular Campaign” of Big Mac McClelland. Richmond was saved and would not be threatened again until near the end of the war in late 1864. The Holy Trinity of Longstreet, Lee and Stonewall had begun the history of Southern worship of its fab generals.
The spring 1862 round of the five-year Virginia heavyweight bout was a win for the South but it also began the process of attrition which would eventually decide the war. Heavy casualties favored the North over the South, for the North could replace them. In spite of its blunders, as long as it kept the Rebel Army engaged in full-scale battles, the Union Army was still doing its job. Richmond was saved but both sides took more than 20,000 casualties and only one side could afford it. I say the Peninsula campaign was a major Union victory!
The South would die of shortages in the end. It started running out of soldiers and food before McClellan set foot on the York Peninsula. This first giant military campaign taxed an already weakening animal. Eventually the South became short of everything but oxygen and boll-weevils. In the end, in the words of Frank Vandiver, “The South consumed itself.”
VIVA LA PAPA
The failure of the Peninsula Campaign meant the end of glory days for McClelland. Lincoln replaced him with General Pope. Now both sides had their own Pope. LeRoy Pope was head of the Confederate War Department.
Lincoln liked Union Pope partly because his Pope did not say rosaries for Southern civilians. The new Papal policy was to make sure that Southern civilians in Union controlled territory knew that if they aided an abetted the Rebel Army they would have their homes and farms destroyed and they would be evicted to the deep South to go live with their heroes.
The pro-South historians love to ridicule Pope with biased editing. They love to quote the quote from a Mr Sturgiss, a prominent Yankee who once said that Pope wasn't worth “a pinch of owl dung.” Neither is any book that is laced with one-sided unfair unbalanced selections of quotations where you go out of your way to find quotes praising Southern War heroes and then single out the goats of the north and compare them to owl dung all the while letting the quotation game play the cats paw while you play innocent story teller. Well I say that all of the Southern war heroes weren't worth a pinch of owl dung, and there's no quotations involved. I'm saying it and I'm not hiding behind the history craft to sneak up on the reader with yellow post war compensatory excuse-towel bias, the way the southern born historians do. Its absolutely incredible how many obviously biased Civil War historians have degrees from Southern Universities and how we're all supposed to pretend not to notice and still respect their work at face value.
And the first tell-tale sign of biased vicious editing is when the author goes out of their way to quote opponents speaking badly of their own side. All (not some) of the Bush bashing books 2001-2008 are lopsided in quoting Republicans who criticized Bush, not Democrats. Oh, I get it. If my own side hates my own side, I really must be on the wrong side. The same with the owl dung quote. If a prominent Union guy like Sturgess calls Union guy Pope a sack of owl dung, then he really has to be.
Just whoooo do they think they're fooling?
Besides, what does it matter that your generals out performed ours? That's the big issue with these Southern chauvinist scholars. Our war heroes were better macho men than yours.
So? Okay, Southerners were fighting men as a way of life long before Fort Sumter and Northern men were by comparison men of peace. That means that your men were more manly than ours, is what a thousand historians seem to be saying. Southern men whipped slaves and fought duels to the death for the slightest insult at a dance while most Northern men were trying to go to school or earn an honest living at a factory or farm, and they weren't heavily armed at all times. Yes, the average Yankee had to be trained to use firearms while Southern men had to be trained not to. This was an advantage for the South in the first half of the war, but by the second half, the Yanks were fighting just as mean and as hard as their grey opponents. Given time, the peaceful democracies can fight just as well as slave empires. Just ask the Nazis, who thought the British a bunch of softies.
Southern macho pride over their battle performance in the Cicil War is just a pathetic consolation prize for white supremacy racists. There probably isn't a single person in America today who gloats with pride over the exceptionally fine performance of the American Expeditionary Force in World War One. And we won. Yet the Southerners cling to the Civil War heroes and the battle performance of their troops like it really matters at face value, slavery and race issues aside. If the AEF comparison is valid then the Southern military glories are beards for inner emotional hatreds never dropped.
You lost the war and you fought for evil. Those are the only two facts that really count. Everything else is in the long run isn't worth a vial of parakeet urine.
A key point of Northern war strategy was to cut the Confederacy in half by taking complete control of the mighty vital Mississippi. Taking the great river would ruin Southern lines of communication, while denying the Grey armies access to vital food, gutta percha canes, and whips. Admiral Farragut was sent out from the North with a fleet of modern warships to accomplish the task.
I passed a giant statue of Farragut perhaps 3,000 times on a causeway in South Boston Harbor. I spent my childhood thinking he was from Boston. In reality the presence of a Farragut statue in Boston is merely a testimonial to the national acclaim he achieved with his naval victories in the War of the Rebellion. Pranksters have several times painted the Southie statue pink.
INDEX CARD OF SOUTHERN PROPAGANDA
The South really tried hard to influence the political opinion of Europe through propaganda.
In England a new newspaper appeared on the London streets called The Index. It was written by Englishmen with an odd passion for the Confederate cause. Of course, some Englishmen honestly wanted the Confederates to win for either expedient or other less cynical reasons. But he British writers taking checks from the Index seemed to have as much conviction for the cause of the CSA as any given leaders fo the CSA. It almost didn't add up, but the British Index writers had solid reputations and the English reading public never really caught on that they were being duped.
The fact of the matter was that these British writers were paid prostitutes who were taking bribes to write pro-Confederacy articles, while pretending it was their honest political opinion. The Index itself was entirely bought and paid for out of the Confederate treasury. The first edition hit the stands of Piccadilly on May 1, 1862. Index kept publishing until the last year of the war and not one article ever appeared that favored the cause of the USA.
In addition, these writers went off to publish their free lance articles in other reputable English periodicals that were not bought and paid for. But the writers still were in the payola of the slavery powers while they were submitting free lance articles to the London Times and the Manchester Clarion.
The leader of the scheme was Hank Hotze, a Southerner who apparently understood propaganda while Goebbels was still in Nazi diapers. He wrote secretly to Davis that the Government leaders all read the papers and there was a much better chance to influence British policy towards the CSA by planting articles in periodicals than by trying to influence diplomats and politicians directly. In addition, “the value of the paper as an agency through which connections can be established through other journals is scarcely less.” In other words Hotze bribed himself a small army of whore journalists in Britian who just needed the dough to pay the bills, and he got two payoffs for the price of one. These guys were all free-lancers or, in the parlance of the time, “Professional leader writers.” The Index wasn't all that widely read, and in fact it was distributed to subscribers for free. But the bums who wrote insincerely for the Index went on to spread their lies to other papers, knowing they would be rewarded by another paid gig at the Index for a job well done.
The Index did a lot to promote the Southern cause and at face value, at ground level it was a fantastic success. But for the big picture it failed. That's because every time the CSA saw it's opinions growing in favor in the UK it his a brick wall over slavery. Many Englishmen were nodding their heads in agreement over everything these guys wrote. But when they put the paper down and sipped their tea they sighed and said, 'its too bad about the slavery issue. Otherwise I could really support these rebel blokes.”
It rarely occurred to the British people, the paid soulless writers or their whip-master pseudo managing-editors, that this little old slavery issue made the entire propaganda mission hopeless from the start. The writing was on the index cards from the start of the war. Index whores were never going to get past the slavery issue. It was the foundation of the Confederacy according to Alexander Stephens, its Vice President. Hotze was so pro-slavery that he actually didn't understand why it should be an insurmountable obstacle on the road to British recognition. The South would have been better off throwing in the towel and putting its money into Rebel rifles. They spent over $100,000 in secret bribes and publishing costs in order to win the minds and lose the hearts of British people and their leaders. No amount of bribes or reputable writers penning brilliant essays could change the larger opinion on the Island about slavery. Nor could they convince the British, any more than the souther writers can convince me today, that the Confederacy was not all about slavery.
THE DAVIS PLAN TO INVADE THE NORTH
If you want to get inside the Confederate mind all you have to do is read the writings of Jefferson Davis. He had an argument for everything. He was good. He was the intellectual yet visceral spokesman for the South. JD's politics were the Confederacy's politics and his attitudes were the South's. The CSA didn't make him Prez was by accident.
Davis decided that his army should attack the North on two fronts, east and west. If Lee could invade Maryland with his Army of Virginia, and Beauregard or Bragg at the head of the Army of Tennessee could simultaneously invade the west and march up to the Ohio River, the United States might reconsider the idea that the South should not be allowed to leave the Union.
If the rebs could reach the Ohio and cut off the Union from it's western end, the Confederacy might be in a position to dictate terms for leaving the Union, let alone merely be allowed to leave. The Bragg boys might even continue north after crossing the Ohio. Davis wanted to do to the Union in 62 exactly what Grant and Farragut in actuality did to the Confederacy in 1863,; slice it in half.
Davis and his gang had high hopes, partly because of a growing mysterious rumor that some Northern copperheads were conspiring to end the war by giving the Confederacy a couple of northwestern states.
It sounds ludicrous now that we know that the South lost the war, but in the spring of 1862 a lot of the country (or two countries) thought the South had a very good chance to win. The newspapers of both sides reported these rumors that something was in the works to negotiate a peace that not only allowed the South to leave, but actually granted it more territory in exchange for agreeing to leave the North alone!
The rumors often included C. L. Vallandigham, a northern pol so copperhead that before the war was over Lincoln threw him in jail for sedition. For now CLV's proud name lent credence to these fantastic stories.
There was in fact no such Aaron Burrlike conspiracy developing anywhere, but Jeff Davis didn't know that. Davis naturally hoped that there could be something to it.
Davis was confident that Lee and Bragg could wipe up the map with the Yankees on the battlefield. Then he would follow up with a shrewd hearts and minds campaign for the civilians.
Davis and the generals also had very high hope, an expectation, that the invading butternut divisions would stir up a hornets nest of copperhead support along the way. The CSA anticipated mass enlistments of Northerners in the Southern Army as the invaders passed through Maryland and Kentucky.
Davis wrote a telling handbill that Lee and Bragg were
supposed to distribute to the citizens of the North when they invaded. The handbill stated that the South has only one political goal in this military affair; a desire that the United States of America allow the South to “go in peace to pursue our own path to happiness.”
Yeah. The path that includes owning slaves.
The South was claiming that didn't want to make war on the North. It merely wanted the North to stop making war on the South.
Then the note added a states rights twist of large proportions.
“The Confederate Army comes to your state to make the North the theatre of hostilities. With your sovereign state rests the power to put an end to this invasion of your homes. If the United States of America will not conclude a general peace with the Confederacy, you own state governments should exercise its sovereignty and make a separate treaty with the South on more just and liberal basis.”
That was quite a concept, Ohio or Maryland concluding a Peace treaty with the Confederate States of America without any consultation or coordination with Washington D.C. The South had seceded ostensibly over states rights, so this was a supreme extrapolation of the theory.
But the South was offering the North an extreme version of states right to the North that it was not willing to honor for itself. Jeff Davis would not have allowed Georgia to make a Separate Peace with Lincoln at any point in the war on any terms. But he waved the flag of states rights as a war expedient for his invading corps.
The South was always tying itself in a knot over this alleged love of states rights. It seceded to show how much it believed in states rights, yet immediately found it necessary to federalize, smacking down states rights, in order to wage a war The South seemed to have a remarkable pride in the new nation it had formed in the name of state sovereignty. The Confederacy was full of impossible contradictions on this state sovereignty business and this hypocrisy came back to bite it during the war when Southern states looked out for number one instead of the central government in Richmond, as was their right, unfortunately for the federal cause of the stars and bars.
The Confederacy didn't give a damn about states rights when its agents went into a thousand Southern towns after 1863 and impressed men into the Rebel Army.
ERLANGER LOANS SCAM THE SOUTH
The South was desperate for money. Even more so than I am right now! That's how bad things were for the Confederacy in 1862. The Europeans had refused recognition. The South had choked itself on its own cotton. Confederate currency was beginning to decline steadily in value and all sorts of bogus currency was flooding the Confederacy.
Just when thing seemed financially hopeless, a European banker approached the Southerners in Europe with a plan to help the Confederacy raise its desperately needed funds.
Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell were still hanging around Europe trying to catch a lucky break before they went back and this time it seemed that they did.
The banker happened to be in love with Slidell's Daughter Matilda. The man was named Emille Erlanger. He looked up the Southern diplomats (a contradiction in terms perhaps) and made them an offer they couldn't refuse. They would float a bond for futures on Southern cotton, sell it all over the world and put up to $26 million in hard currency in the bank with the South's name on it.
The cotton supply was poor at the moment. But the South seemed like it was going to win the war and many English speculators in particular believed this and wanted it too.
The bonds were to be sold for futures on Souther cotton that would only be delivered after the war.
The details are a complicated, but essentially the investor buys $100 dollars worth of cotton today, picks it up in two years, and only pays half price. The missing half is either his profit if things work out and his loss if things do not work out (like if the South loses the war. It was Las vegas gambling on the Civil War for European investors. It was something that would have interested me if I was a rich Englishman. I would have played that game and lost.
50 cents on the dollar is an invented figure to simplify the concept. But that was the idea. The bankers were playing the same game at another rung on the ladder when they made the offer to their investors. Enlarger's bankers would get as cut when the investors put up the money for their 50 cent dollars.
At first the bonds sold well and all of a sudden the South had 2 million dollars in the bank in Europe. Just like that!
But there were villains out there like in every movie. There were northern agents in Europe spreading gossip about the bad credit of the South and making it clear that anyone who invested in the South was essentially planning on burning up their kitty.
“You're investing in Jefferson Davis? That guy was famous for not paying his debts!”
It was true. Davis as Mississippi Senator had led the way to the state of Mississippi repudiating its legitimate debts before the war. It was a controversial decision. It got a lot of publicity at the time and the Yankees in England took out ads in the London papers reminding Englishmen who they were dealing with when they made deals with the CSA.
The propaganda campaign worked well. Sales of the cotton futures dropped steadily. Then in 1863 the Union won at Gettysburg and Vicksburg and the bottom fell out. Now they could only sell the bonds for a dangerously risky margin on 12 cents on the dollar. That is, if they could sell them at all.
When the whole thing became hopeless the South asked for it's 2 million in gold. That's ours in the bank, we need it, it said.
Erlinger's bankers said, sorry, that money goes to pay our interest. Read the fine print on your contract. sure enough the South didn't get a nickel on its cotton futures.
The story developed a relatively happy ending for the South when it became known that those who ran the blockade would get their loans paid. By the end of the war, the South had raised $5 million from the Erlanger Loans, one third of what it was promised. Erlanger pocketed more than 2 million that was sort of promised to the South. But let us not be angry with this Shylock. Erlanger's 2.3 mil saved a lot of Union lives.
Erlanger married Slidell's daughter anyway. Erlanger knew all along that the South would never collect the $15 million unless the bonds sold really well all around and the South won the war. The South got hosed in Paris. Now I don't feel so alone. I got my wallet lifted on a Paris subway and I still feel like a fool about it 9 years later. Me and Slidell got the Paris shuffle.
SLIDELL AND MASON MEET NAPOLEON III
The leader of France wanted to give the support of his nation to the Confederacy, but unfortunately, he didn't have the support of his nation to give.
Napoleon III was heavily involved in the Mexican scheme to put a French puppet on the throne in Mexico City. Nap and Max were taking advantage of the American helplessness.
Napoleon was cautious. He waited until the Yankees made fools of themselves retreating from Bull Run before he sent French marines to Vera Cruz. He awaited the results of the Peninsula Campaign before ordering General Lopez Forey to march on Mexico City by the same route that the US Army took back in 1846. He found himself rooting for the Confederacy because only a Rebel win or draw would enable him to maintain his Mexican empire. Nap 3 had no illusions about the long term result for him if the USA beat the CSA.
So when Mason and Slidell asked to see the Emperor, he said, “Show them in!” and to their surprise, there they were with Napoleon III listening to him tell them how much he was rooting for the Confederacy to win. He wasn't going to be able to help them in any way, or anything like that. He was just rooting for them all the way. In other words the meeting was a shutout disguised as support.
There was a financial twist in the Mexican scheme to violate the Monroe Doctrine and take Mexico for a European power. Very powerful people in France had lent huge sums of money in Mexico in exchange for Mexicans bonds with interest. People very high up in the French government had big percentages of those loans.
Mexico had defaulted on both principle and interest. The war on Mexico would include the booty of the use of force to collect payment of those personal debts to French citizens who just happen to also be very high up in the government.
DOOMED BY THE BELLE 7 29 1862
Belle Boyd was a real flirt. She had a body that turned men on but a face that could stop an atomic clock. This Southern Belle was a spy. BB made her way into the good graces of various Union officers and extracted secret military information from them. She passed the secrets on to the Southern command. She saved a lot of Rebel lives and doomed a lot of Northern ones.
Babe Boyd finally got a taste of her own medicine, when her latest boyfriend walked in on her when she had her ear to the floor. Belle claimed she was practicing Asian yoga techniques, but her boyfriend Yankee officer knew she was listening in on sensitive military conversations from the floor below. He grabbed Bell Boyd by the arm and turned her in to the officers whose conversation she was recording in her head. Belle Boyd was arraigned for espionage on July 7 1862. If she was a man they would have hanged her from the nearest boysenberry tree within three days. The same skirts that had helped procure the information protected her from the death penalty when she got caught.
Boyd retuned to Southern freedom as part of a prisoner exchange later in the war. After the war Belle B. married a Northern officer, went to England and became a professional actress. Like her life hadn't been perfidious enough already.
SOUTH INVADES THE NORTH 1862
Conquering the North was never the goal of the South. So when it took the offensive and invaded the north it was more or less done along the lines of 'the best defense is a good offense.' As long as they could panic the Yankees and have them on the run in their own back yard, the South was safe. Invading the North was a military strategy, not a war aim. Unlike Lyndon Johnson in 1966, Jeff Davis was willing to cross the 50-yard line in order to win the war, or at least to win a stalemate with both sides allowed to exist.
Southern armies invaded Kentucky in late 62 and almost made it to the Ohio River. This was at the same time that the Union was on the march in general in the area. Union Halleck had captured Corinth Mississippi back on May 30. So the General Bragg invasion created a situation where both sides were invading the other. It was as if the Nazis invaded a corner of England two months after Normandy.
In the east, the Confederate Army invaded Maryland, threatening the rear of the Union capitol. The two sides were invading each other simultaneously (not the last time that would happen in the war.)
Extent of Grey Conquest in the West 1862
The map above shows the forces moving towards a decisive battle at Perryville Kentucky. The Union armies start on the map at Nashville. The Confederates started out at Chattanooga,
the gateway to the Southeast.
The Battle at Perryville was fought on October 8, 1862. The North won a huge strategic victory at Perryville, even though the battle itself was close. The Southern offensive was stopped at Perryville. The South would be on the defensive in the west for the rest of the war.
The Bragg offensive even in failure had a consolation prize for the South. It was a limited success in that it forced the North to react to Southern moves for a few months, and kept the North in a defensive mind-set.
But Davis and Brag had to be disappointed when the border states of Tennessee and Kentucky, states where slavery was legal, did not come to their aid with thousands of volunteers. The South could put these states in a star on their flag, but both were wrapped up for the Union early in the war.
Bragg had a visionary best case scenario he couldn't shake, and it hurt him. He was like John Brown at the Ferry in 1859 and the fools who planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. All three thought that if a revolutionary brigade marched though town, it would find a line of enthusiastic new volunteers hopping on board in their rear view mirror. The army would grow and grow and the emerging giant would find victory.
But the Confederate Army that marched through Tennessee and Kentucky in the fall of 1862 had the same number troops after it passed through a town than it did before it got there. If anything, between casualties and deserters, it had less.
The Perryville campaign also produced the South's first goat, the first real whipping boy of for the armchair quarterbacks for the next 150 years, General Braxton Bragg. 'The Braxter' allegedly failed to exploit an initial advantage at Perryville. The South might have emerged from the campaign as the victor, if a more decisive and aggressive general had been in command; you know, like a pencil-pushing bow-tied four-eyed historian who loves to study battle.
As the Army of Tennessee retreated tactfully back into Tennessee all kinds of critics fired a storm of vituperation on Bragg. Nobody likes a braggart, and now nobody liked a Bragg. His own men were taking cheap shots at him behind his back while he was trying to work, from the highest officers down to the boot cleaners in the supply corps.
The Confederate Army of Tennessee was destined to go down in Civil War history as a somewhat overtrained, overrated, disunited, mismanaged failure, some battle victories now and then notwithstanding.
One historian says that the Army of Tennessee was the South's version of the Army of the Potomac. Both were fabulously trained and had a bad war record. They lost battles they should have and could have won. Braxton Bragg ( “The Braxter” as he was known to Beauregard) was great at inspiring troops, keeping their uniforms regular, drilling them, and training them all by the book. That was Potomac McClelland all over. And Bragg, like McClelland, is a goat of Civil War history for not attacking often enough.
But there are too many dissimilarities for the analogy to hold up. When McClelland got nothing good done, Lincoln fired him. Bragg lasted incompetently until 1865.
Also, when Bragg lost battles he also lost the love of his troops. McClellan didn't last long enough to drag Northern morale down like that. But the entire Southern military was of a mind that Bragg should be replaced and month after demoralizing month passed without relief from the endless Bragging.
The Army of the Potomac straightened out its act during the end game, while the Army of Tennessee was being destroyed.
INVASION OF MARYLAND STOPPED; ANTIETAM 9 17 62
Jerry Miller was standing in his Antietam Maryland cornfield one sunny morning in September 1862. He complained about the crows out loud to himself and then he heard a gunshot. Then two more. Then two hundred more. He grabbed his wife and quit the farm due North just in time to avoid witnessing the carnage. Miller's Farm was the center of it all. Antietam was a horrible battle in which almost 4,000 men died. Only four other battles saw more casualties than Antietam (Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania.)
It should be noted that Lee's Army had lost several thousand men to desertion on the way to the Battle of Antietam. There were three reasons for this, the last most noteworthy. The first was that many enlistments were up and honorable men had done their duty as promised and now wanted to go home. Other thousands just couldn't take being shoeless anymore. They just couldn't. The third factor was that many thousands felt that they had signed on to defend the South from Northern invaders. They had never agreed to take part in an invasion of the North. The fact that Lee was invading Maryland and threatening to enter Pennsylvania gave them just cause to drop their muskets and go home, and many did.
McClellan was back in command now, after the Papal disaster at Bull Run II. The historians hate this man so much I wish I could stick up for him, just on instinct. If only the historians had been in command, all would have been done courageously, boldly, daringly and perfectly.
At several moments in the fight, McClellan didn't act tough enough and Lee did.
Lee tried to invade the North and was stopped in this bloody Battle of Antietam, or The Slaughter at Miller's Farm.
Many historians call Antietam a draw, but the Union won big off-the-field. Antietam was a tie, but a victory for the North because the North hadn't even had a tie yet. The South had won every major battle so far and the North was losing confidence.
Also, Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, but he wanted to make sure he was going to win the war before he did it. Lincoln was losing confidence. There was a genuine fear that if the South kept winning very battle, it might actually secure recognition from European governments.
Antietam changed everything. Now Lincoln knew that Europe wouldn't recognize the South. He knew now that his Union Army was capable of fighting the Confederates on even terms. He knew that he was going to be able to build his up his armies better than his opponent could. Lincoln could play a better game of Risk or Stratego than Davis because he had more armies. Antietam proved at last that they were also pretty good.
Antietam was the bloodiest single day of the entire Civil War! More than 2,600 men died on one day of fighting. The Union lost the larger number. The South lost 1,546. The wounded added another 13,000 to the ranks of the martyrs.
The opposing generals were McClelland for the Union and Lee for the Slavery-lovers.
Military historians, especially pro-South ones, often stress that McClellan should have won the Battle of Antietam and that his “timidity” spoiled things for the North. Big Mac was Mr. Inaction. Lincoln spent a good part of the war saying mean things about McClelland and his timidity.
McClelland certainly battled hard at Antietam, and in his mind he won a great victory. The McClelland family celebrated the anniversary of the battle till the end of days.
But some historians seem to be saying that Antietam was a victory of sorts for the South because the North still performed poorly. I think that is their point.
The battle was marked by the famous “Charge of the Iron Brigade.” I had never heard of it until yesterday, but it is famous.
Militarily, the North had stopped a determined attempt at invading the North, not a reconnaissance in force, or a punitive raid. It was the last true chance for the South to win the war outright and defeat the North. Lee had begun the invasion with 50,000 men, but after the bloodiest day in US History he had lost half his force to dead, wounded, captured and straggling. From here on it would be a war goal of surviving and treating for a negotiated settlement.
The “victory” at Antietam gave Lincoln the confidence to go forward with the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in enemy held territory.
The dual theatre invasions of Kentucky and Maryland by Lee and Bragg by the CSA Army resulted in bloody and terrible battles in which neither side won the field for a single day. But it was the end of successful Southern offensive campaigning in the North. More importantly, Washington was safe from being cut of from behind.
The South would try invading the North again in 63 with disastrous results at Gettysburg.
Even though Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg is often called the “high tide of the Confederacy” it probably in reality was the dawn of the Battle of Antietam.
CONFEDERATE FOREIGN RELATIONS 1862
Lord Palmerston dropped hints to the press that the British cabinet might meet soon and discuss the idea of recognizing the Confederate States of America. It was tabled for a date at the end of September.
Gladstone made a speech in Newcastle in the fall in which he said that “The South has not only made an army, the South has made a nation.”
After making the speech someone showed him a bulletin about the Battle at Antietam and he never said anything like that ever again. At that moment Glad was glad that the speech was to a private audience and not to the Parliament. Reports of his speech received wide publicity and he was careful to backtrack and say in London that these Newcastle words were informal comments.
As long as the South could physically disprove the Union blockade while winning one battle after another, there was a real chance at British recognition. The South didn't just desire recognition from Britian. The South desperately needed it. Antietam ruined that hope for two reasons.
One, the battle at Sharpsburg/Antietam demonstrated that the North could win a big battle, or at least stop the South in a bloody draw. England had been sitting on the fence for over a year, waiting to see how things went. Now they saw.
The other reason that the Antietam reports hurt the chance for British recognition was that in this Lee campaign the South was invading the North. The Confederacy needed to paint the Union as aggressors and play victims; Indomitable victims capable of defending themselves, but victims. The recent events from Lee and Bragg's corps conveyed the opposite impression, that the South was the bully. The Southern military invasion successes backfired across the sea in the Halls of Parliament, and then when the Rebel invasion was halted at Antietam, it made it a double whammy. Not only was the South the aggressor, but the bully could be stood up to.
In the meantime Lincoln issued his initial Emancipation Proclamation.
Palmerston and Gladstone decided to wait and see just a little while longer before it decided on recognizing the South. In other words, until hell freezes over.
PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION - SEPTEMBER 22, 1862
Lincoln freed the slaves in September of 1862. That's the schoolboy version of it and it ain't all that far from the truth.
The adult version is that the first Emancipation Proclamation was
equivocal, calculating, incomplete, and forked-tongued. It didn't exactly free the slaves and it wasn't fair to North, South, black, or white, loyal or disloyal. A lot of people criticized various aspects of it. Then a lot of historians did.
Even if we allow that all the criticisms are correct, it was a still a political atomic bomb, changing the course of world history in a heartbeat. It was the hand of God speaking through a powerful man.
It was easy for a white Radical in the North to say that this first Emancipation did not do enough for the black people, that it only pretended to free the slaves, while in reality is was merely a cynical war measure. many historians still argue that Lincoln didn't care any more for the black man than the average white racist did. He only freed them to win the war.
Up until now, Lincoln was so afraid of losing the border states and then losing the war that he dared not say that the war was about slavery. He dared not state the liberation of the slaves as a war aim.
After Antietam, especially with New Orleans in custody and the control of the entire Mississippi a near certainty in the near future, Lincoln felt confident that the time of true danger had passed. Now he could play games with his power without being terrorized by Maryland and Kentucky.
The Proclamation of 9-22 announced a policy that was only going to go into effect officially three and a half months from now. It was not a declaration of change, but declaration of impending change. It was giving the South 100 days to give in and say uncle or else it was going to free all the slaves. The South wouldn't want a rebellion of three million slaves on its hands, would it? So if the South would give in and go back to Union they could keep its slaves! But if they continued in this war of rebellion their property would be set free on January 1, 1863. It would not be a happy new year for slave-owners.
The big criticism of the PEP was that it only freed the slaves in the places where they could not be freed! And it kept them enslaved where they could have been freed! Why kind of lunatic was running the country?
PEP declared that as of next 1-1 all slaves in areas still in rebellion would be officially and permanently free. This meant that slaveowners in Kentucky could keep their slaves because the state had remained loyal to the Union. But slaves in South Carolina would be free even though they would still be in chains on the day they were set free.
The Union army was in actual practice defending slavery behind its front lines while driving to end it in the territory yet to be conquered.
So in reality it was a war measure designed to either get the South to come back to the family or cause it all sorts of trouble behind the lines. The Emancipation did not free a single slave and the ones it could have freed stayed slaves!
The only slaves that were freed were chance liberated by slick interpretation of the rules of war, not by the Emancipation Proclamation. When the Union army marched on CSA slavery lands it captured slaves and declared them to be war booty. If the South could declare people to be property then the North could go along with it and keep the property as “contraband.” Thousands of these black people were freed, but they didn't get a diploma. They just happened to be free in the wake of combat. Thousands of grateful black people chose to trail the Union armies as voluntary labor support units.
Even if it was cynical and hypocritical and expedient to some, it was everything wonderful to others. Free blacks in the North wept on their newspapers. Racist rednecks were furious (what else do we need to know?) This document specified that the liberation of the slaves was one of the official war aims of the United States of America; the Union. From this day on, the war was a moral crusade. Men would march to battle in blue thinking and knowing that they were dying to set others free.
The effect on foreign relations was fantastic. European liberals certainly rejoiced. It was one more major blow for Southern hopes for help and recognition from abroad.
SLAVE TRADE
If Lincoln 'was no abolitionist' he certainly seemed like one when it came to the slave trade. Lincoln didn't wait until 1862 to act on this issue either. In May of 1861 he ordered the Interior Department to supervise the strenuous suppression of the slave trade, which had been illegal since 1808, as ordered by the 1787 Constitution.
In 1861 the Union navy captured a slave ship with almost 1,000 African prisoners on board. They were brought to Liberia and liberated. One American slave trader was brought to trial in Boston and sentenced to six years in Chelsea. New York City was not so lenient. The captain was hung in Times Square. In Liberia on the gold coast, more than 5,000 blacks were emancipated by arrangement with US Government officials. Emancipation did not have to wait for a Union victory when it came to Africa itself. All this happened before Antietam.
POW'S
Let's look at the situation for post office workers in the Civil War. These POW's sometimes became PW's (Prisoners of War.) The North stopped delivering mail to the South after July of 1862, but there was ample opportunity for brave greedy and/or patriotic people to run the mail through the danger zones.
Beginning in mid-1863 the larger cities in the Union delivered the mail for free. It may have had something to do with widows wailing in horror at the post office when they opened the unthinkable letter, (if the story Mark Scalia told me is true he saw it in the History Channel, so it might be suspect even if he heard it right – That's my source.. a comedian saw it on the History Channel and told me about it.)
The regular Post office of the North would send mail South if the Union had taken that area, and in fact the mail got through there quicker than a regular cross-country letter from Worcester to Zanseville. There was so much military supply traffic heading there anyway, it was especially easy to get the mail there too.
The South had a tougher time getting the mail around for some reason.
CENSUS TAKERS
By all accounts the North did a great job taking the census under its leader James Frances Kennedy. He said, “Stat not! To see what they can do for you, stat what you can do for your country!” JFK later served in the Ben Harrison Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-European affairs.
LETS FORGET ABOUT JOMINI
The inconclusive bloody stalemate at Antietam made war-makers on both sides reconsider their entire military mindsets. The West Point brains trust on both sides had long worshiped a French military genius named Hank Jomini. Both sides followed his dictums. But they led nowhere. They were obsolete under conditions in The USA in 1862.
Jomini had a rival in the military guru field and his name was Clausevitz. (It's usually spelled Clausewitz, but I prefer the less common spelling which is closer to as its pronounced.) Jomini believed that occupying enemy territory, especially the capitol city, was the key to winning a war. Clausevitz said no to Jo.
Clausevitz believed that it wasn't terribly important to occupy places or cities. Clausevitz felt that the goal of all military activities should only be to seek out and destroy the enemy fighting forces. Capitol cities weren't worth much to if the enemy army isn't there defending them.
But the men who led the Civil War Armies were disciples of Jomini the Frenchman, not Clausevitz the Prussian. So Lee felt that he had to invade northern territory, and perhaps surround Lincoln physically. Meanwhile Lincoln's generals spent four years desperately trying to capture the Confederate capitol of Richmond. The Rebels spent four years desperately trying to defend Richmond, since the Southern Generals believed in Jomini too.
If both sides had believed in Clausevitz instead of Jomini, the War probably would have gone better for the South because Richmond would have been conceded, the Army of Virginia would have fallen back to gather greater strength and would have only struck back when it was prepared to win.
As it turned out, by 1866 the military scientific lesson of the Civil War being taught at the war colleges was that neither Clausevitz, not Jomini were right anymore. This was a brand new kind of war, a war where the strategy was to devastate the entire country of the enemy until they have nothing left to defend. It was turning this way in 1863 and it really turned in 64 with Sherm and Sheridan. This was a third approach to military goals. This meant that it didn't matter whether you captured the cities, and it didn't entirely matter if you engaged the enemy fighting forces. As long and your corps went about the enemy land destroying it, all was well. Destruction of civilian morale by destruction of civilian property.
USA 1861-5 was the perfect storm for the birth of this kind of war. The Northern United States was the first huge industrial power to find itself in such a full-scale protracted war at just the time when the military science was flowering on a miraculous scale. A huge playing board, industrial might, lots of time, all the latest gadgets, countless men to try things out with, and you end up with a war that changed the art of war.
HOMESTEAD ACT
To stimulate settlement and development of the American West the United States government passed the Homestead Act in 1862. By its term a settler now needed virtually no money at all to receive 160 acres of land in the western regions. The pioneer had to agree to two conditions. One; he or she had to actually settle there. There could be no absentee homestead settlers. Two; the occupants had to improve the land, making it productive in agriculture or in some other capacity.
The Homestead Act was a nice idea but in practice proved far less than a panacea. The figure of 160 acres was good enough if the settler was moving to Vermont or South Carolina. But 160 acres was not enough to make one’s dreams come true in Wyoming or Nebraska Territory. The Great Plains were plainly a great pain in the neck to farm on. The land out there was relatively arid. Farming, while not impossible, was more difficult and demanding, with less reward when completed. And there was the danger of Indian attack to add to the anti-fun.
Over the next quarter of a century less than 400,000 settlers had successfully taken advantage of the Homestead generosity. At least a hundred thousand others settled down and said ‘to hell with this,’ staggering off to California or perhaps retreating back east. The Homestead Act ruined as many dreams as it fulfilled.
Big corporations used the Homestead Act put lowlife schemes into play, what a surprise. They created thousands of ‘dummy’ settlers, people who only existed on paper registration forms, and then took these thousands of acres and used them to build giant private corporate agricultural and mining fields.
FREDDIESBURG
One of the biggest and most famous battles of the Civil War was the clash at Fredericksburg Virginia in December of 1862. It's ten time more famous than the battle for the forts of Donelson and Henry, even though the latter had almost as a many casualties and marked a more decisive strategic turning point in the war.
So why is Fredericksburg ten times more famous than the battle for Fort Donelson, even though Fredericksburg essentially changed nothing and the capture of Donelson changed everything?
The answer is easy. Southern born white historians dominate the study of the Civil War battles and the South won big at Fredericksburg. The Southern University historians almost never write extensively about the final campaigns of the war when the South was getting its stars and bars stuffed. But the campaigns where the South performed very well or won outright, these get countless pages and herculean scholastic dedication. What a coincidence.
Not that the Confederate victory at Fredericksburg wasn't important. Of course it was. 15,000 Union troops went down to death, wound or capture. That's significant. But the war in Virginia was a bloody stalemate before Fredericksburg, and the the war in Virginia was the same bloody stalemate after Fredericksburg. In that sense, the battle for Fredericksburg changed nothing. The capture of Donelson (with 10,000 casualties) opened the entire south central region to Union invasion and in a real sense was the decisive battle of the war. But pretty much nobody writes books or gets misty eyed in the South about the glorious combat at Donelson. But they sure do glow in the glory of Fredericksburg. They make a fake show of feeling sad that war is hell, while gloating in descriptions of how their ancestral heroes shot the bluecoat bums to holy hell.
The Union goat of Fredericksburg was the commanding general of course. That man was Claude Ambrose Burnside.
Poor Burnside. He was given command of the Army of the Potomac because the previous guys hadn't taken the offense enough and Burnside was hired to attack. It didn't matter to Lincoln or the Northern press or the patriot on the street in Buffalo that the advantage in the war was clearly going to the defense. It didn't matter to these people that Burnside didn't think he had any major tactical advantages to exploit. It didn't matter to them because they wouldn't be the ones who got sacked and ridiculed in the attack failed.
Burnside was hired to take the offense and take the consequences, so he did what he was more or less told from the civilians above him to do. When his efforts ended in disaster he was the stupid bum who messed up the cause at Fredericksburg and butchered 5,000 blue guys for no good reason.
You want to find the real goat of Fredericksburg? Try the guy in the stove top hat with the dopey homilies.
Lincoln forced Burnside to do what thankfully, Roosevelt never forced Eisenhower to do in WWII; attack in full scale invasion before the general felt he had the necessary superiority to guarantee a win. Fredericksburg was as if the Americans had hit the beaches at Normandy in late 1942.
One of the reason that Lincoln and his cabinet Rads wanted a victory in Virginia was because it was supposed to compliment the recent Union victories in the west. The idea was that if the North could demonstrate clear momentum in both regions, the South might get the message and consider a treaty settlement soon after. Instead the North threw away the major morale victory in the west by getting greedy and demanding a twin sister W in the east.
But the Army of Virginia was the heart of the Confederate fighting forces. Lee was better than Beauregard or Bragg, (so I'm told – I don't claim to be an expert of who is a great general and who is not) and there were no deep inland waterways in Virginia to add Union naval supremacy to the equation. The terrain of central Virginia was much tougher than the plains of the Mississippi valley. In short, Burnside was up against it at Fredericksburg, and in Virginia in general.
The town of Fredericksburg sits along the edge of the Rappahannock River. The village would be almost destroyed during the battle.
Burnside held the reserves while ahead of him, like blockers for a running back, were the three corps of Franklin, Sumner and Hooker.
The Burnside AOP (Army of the Potomac) planned to cross the Rappahannock by setting up a pontoon bridge at two locations, one across to the town, the other a couple of miles downriver at a rural spot.
The suburban pontoon went down ok, but the engineer brigade that tried to set up the pontoons into Fredericksburg center were shot up at a fairly steady pace by distant Confederate snipers. The casualty rate was too high and the brigade had to retreat without completing the bridge.
Eventually enough men used the pontoons as makeshift ships instead of bases for a bridge. They got to the other side in just enough numbers to slug it out through the town and push the Rebels out of Fredericksburg, but not out a place called Marye's Heights on the western outskirts of town. Thousands of men would die trying to take Marye's Heights.
Thousands.
After the advance divisions of Burnsides' army made it across the Rap River the Union troops sacked the town. The pro-South historians tell this story this with anger. They want the reader to know that the Southern troops fought with chivalry and gallantry but the Union troops looted the town of Fredericksburg. “The Union was sending a message about what kind of war this was going to be” they write. They write of how the Southern gentlemen soldiers on the high ground were watching the sacking of Fredericksburg below and that really got their dander up. The tone says that in a way the Union boys got what was coming to them in the slaughter that went down the next day or two. Style is substance, so when they tell it that way that is what they're saying.
Now these Southern troops, who were shooting to kill up to now, were really mad. These gallant intrepid heroes didn't mind watching a race of millions of people enslaved for several decades, but the sight of Union troops looting the town of Fredericksburg made them furious.
In the meantime, the South, especially Lee, was always raiding Northern areas on supply missions, taking whatever they needed and the Southern born historians never admonish the Rebs for doing that. But the looting of Fredericksburg is told of as if it were a great immorality and a stain and a half on the federal record in the war.
The battle for Fredericksburg Virginia has been described as the worst defeat in the history of the US Army. Union troops were sent into hopeless charges against fortified positions and were cut down like wheat.
The victory was celebrated in the South as if the war had been won. General Lee was seen hugging people who passed him by because he could not contain his elation. Death just seems to bring out the best in some people.
Lincoln was despondent.
The Rebs handed the Yankees one of the worst defeats of the war. Union casualties were four times as high as Confederate. There were other battles where the South won but one could easily argue that in attrition, the Yanks still did ok. But a four to one ratio is another tale. At that rate, the South would win the war for mother slavery.
At one point Burnside stupidly sent one Union brigade after another against an impregnable Confederate defensive position. One row of Yankees after another got mowed down for an entire afternoon. It was very ugly.
Lee established himself as a superior general with his performance at Fredericksburg, and he would enhance it even further at John Chancellorsville.
FOOTE NOTE
Shelby Foote said in the famous Ken Burns TV documentary,
“You know a lot of people talk about the Southern troops
showing superior courage in the Civil War, that the South
had more élan in battle. But I have to disagree. At Fredericksburg
the Yankees kept charging into strong positions and the Southern boys kept mowing them down.
They just kept on coming and they got mowed down
again and again.
So don’t tell me that the Yankees didn’t match the South
in courage. Certainly at Fredericksburg we find a singular example of Union Troops matching the South in bravery.”
I get the feeling that Foote wishes the Confederacy had won the war.
One day while trying to get through another insufferable episode of the documentary I had to call my left-wing author friend Barry Crimmins in New York to complain about it. He had seen it a year or so before me. Without mentioning Foote’s name I started doing an impression of him and one of his sneaky little talks about the war. It was a good impression (I am a professional impressionist.) Barry interrupted. “I remember him. I hated that guy!” Barry has been my friend for 30 years and that was my favorite moment in our entire friendship.
Foote keeps that mellow homespun gentle air about him as he talks, but his words are cruel and unfair. His Civil War books are everywhere. I can't stand him. I may or may not ever bring myself to crack one of his biased books.
The one area where I have to come to Foote's defense is the graphic beneath him that says “writer.” Insufferable snob Burns won't give my buddy Shelby a historian credit because Foote never taught at a university? Give him a break. The guy wrote several prolific volumes that have sold millions of copies. Just because he doesn't have a university degree doesn't mean you can't put the “Civil War Historian” graphic beneath his name. He's one of the giants and you people act like midgets over a title. Look it up. An historian is “one who reads and writes about history.” There is no qualifier for a college diploma! Everyone thinks there is! So he writes history books but he is not an historian. Like these university snobs who write of successful history authors as “amateur historians.” The guy bought a house a boat, and three cars with his history books and you say “amateur historian,” because he never lectured for big taxpayer or big foundation bucks at West Point or the University of Geneva.
SIOUX MASSACRES IN MINNESTOTA 1862
Prior to the attack on the World Trade center in 2001, the worst slaughter of American civilians in US history was the Sioux massacre of 1862. 800 white settlers were murdered by angry Sioux warriors in Minnesota territory. The Native American plan was to use terror to drive the white man out of Sioux territory.
The United States Army struck back and defeated the Sioux braves. They weren't quite as effective against army troops as they were against women and children.
When August of 1862 opened in Minnesota territory, the white folks had no idea a rebellion was coming. They were paying so much attention to the blue and the grey that they lost sight of the white and the red. There was indeed trouble brewing on the reservation.
At this time the Indians were confined to two reservations in Minnesota. One was a little box in the southern part of the territory for the Winnebagos. The other was a long thin strip of land near the Minnesota River in the southwest corner. This strip was divided into two sections, the Upper Agency and the Lower Agency. in was in these two “agencies' that all the trouble started.
On December 26, 1862 the largest mass execution in American history took place. More than 30 Sioux braves were hung at once.
The great Indian hero of the affair was a Christian convert named John Other Day. He was the red Shindler. This brave Indian had a white wife and a true Christian spirit. He put 62 white people in his house and stood outside protecting them. They prayed inside while the sounds of the massacre terrified their ears. After it was all over he herded the poor scared crackers to a safe community.
The United States government rewarded Other Day with $2,500. He bought himself a gold tee-pee, and blew the rest on lottery tickets. Other Day was a great guy.
ASSASSINATION OF A CONFEDERATE GENERAL 9/29/62
On September 29, 1862 a Union spy walked into the Willie Gault House Hotel in Louisville and asked to see General Nelson. He claimed he had an important message for him from General Johnston. The spy went alone to Nelson's room. As soon as the General opened the door, the spy took out a pistol and fired. The spy fled to a waiting carriage and was never caught. On of the most capable generals in the Confederate Army, a man who would probably have served well at Gettysburg had ben killed in an act of perfidious treachery by a Union dog.
Wait a minute, that's not how it happened.
Here's how it really happened.
A Confederate General by the name of Jefferson C. Davis was not getting along well with another General named Tommy “Bulldog” Nelson.
Nelson was consistently being surly and disrespectful to Davis, his superior officer. Davis went and got another Confederate officer to come back to see Nelson with him. He wanted to show the other officer that Nelson was incorrigible and insulting.
So the other Jeff Davis and his officer friend go into the Gault House in Louisville and find Nelson. Davis asks him before witnesses why he always has to be so insulting, and didn't Nelson realize that it was a violation of military code to insult a superior officer.
Nelson said something incredibly bold and vicious back to General Davis. Davis said to his companion, “See, see how this man behaves. He is completely out of control.”
Nelson then walked calmly up to General Davis and said, “well now, this ought to set you straight,” then slapped him hard twice, each Davis cheek taking a choice Nelson backhand. Then Nelson walked off into the next room like he was king tough guy.
But the event was far from over. Davis went into another room and came out with a pistol. Jeff walked into the room to which Nelson had retired. Nelson turned around and saw Davis with the pistol and said, “Davis, I'm in no mood for this.”
General Jeff Davis then shot and killed General Nelson right there on the spot.
It was cold blooded murder, even if Davis was more hard to get along with than a hundred in-laws. Yet General Davis was never tried for the murder of General Nelson! General Rebel Davis even went on to lead several Rebel divisions into several more battles.
Historians are fascinated by Jeff Davis because he also killed a man after the war for making passes at his wife, passes that she apparently accepted. He was never convicted of that one either. Twice he got away with bloody murder. This guy became a Southern hero and legend. Slave-owners had been murdering recalcitrant slaves for decades, so the concept of killing an inferior, or a deserved rascal without a fair fight was part of the Southern code.
The story says it all about Southern justice. Some friends of the late Nelson did everything they could to bring Davis to trial but he had too many friends in high places. His deed was considered honorable by southern standards. Just ask Preston Brooks.
STONES RIVER CAMPAIGN DECEMBER 1862
While Lucky Lee was winning at Fredericksburg, another battle was taking place in the west. It was the Battle of Stone's River or its alternative title the Battle of Murfreesboro.
Bragg had already been chased out of Kentucky and now he was trying to hang on to Tennessee. He was hoping that the Union Army wouldn't “follow me to Tennessee” but they did.
The Union forces in the south central were now under new management, and as is often the case with new management, it made a big deal of a meaningless name change. The new commander was Hector Rosecrans. As of the end of October 1862 Buell was out and Rosy Rosecrans was in. His “Union Force in Kentucky” was re-named “The Army of the Cumberland Farms” later shortened to just “The Army of the Cumberland.”
Rosecrans was a dashing figure who knew a lot about drilling and organization and his men loved him. He was McClellan West. He was known to stray up and work on maps and war books till 4 a.m., and sometimes pulled an all-niter and continue to work through the next day. And this was in the era before coffee and coke!
By December 26 Rosy had marched his 'Cumby Corps' (as the editor of the Louisville Banner called it) to a position near Murfreesboro, specifically just behind the Stones River.
Opposite him was Confederate Commander McBragg. Braxton Bragg had pretty good position to withstand an attack even by a superior force, as long as it wasn't really superior, and it wasn't.
Bragg and Rosecrans had identical pre-game plans to feint at the center and attack the left side (or left 'flank' as the military world has to always call it.) If both teams attacked at the same time and stuck to their game plan, the entire battlefield would slowly turn like a giant wheel. But no battle-plan ever survives contact with the enemy and Stones was no exception.
New Years Eve was the night for the noisemakers as both sides celebrated the holiday in style. The North had about 70 M-1857 12 pound cannon with which to ring in the New Year, and the South had about 50 M-1841 12 pounders. Both sides had 40,000 plus rifles to help pop the champagne. The Stones River that night ran red with wine and nobody was drinking.
The Union attacked but was soon pushed back by a Rebel counterattack. With the help of General Union Thomas (later more famous as 'The Rock of Chickamauga') the Union held, but it was a close one.
The Union had a handful of trouble when the Rebels intercepted a crucial train of ammo that was headed down the Chattanooga Railroad to Rosecrans. The Rebs not only denied the train to the blue, it took it all for the grey. (The number one source of Rebel rifles and powder throughout the war was captured Union supply. Ouch!)
Union lack of ammunition was a key reason why the Rebs had such initial success at the Stones, but that was one of the few times in the war that the Union forces ever had that problem.
On January 1, 1863 Braxton bragged to Richmond that he had won great victory. Bragg telegraphed President Davis that “I have a New Years Day present for you. The state of Tennessee!” - Davis telegraphed back that “I haven't smiled this much since the day I bought my first slave!”
But Braxton had misinterpreted a lot of Union activity as being preparation for a general organized withdrawal. But it wasn't. Rosecrans was digging in to hold the position he had fallen back to. On the morning of January 2, Bragg was dismayed to find a strong Union line across from him complete with entrenchments. He was now embarrassed by his telegram and had to make up for it by attacking Rosecrans and driving “The Cumbies” out of the area.
Bragg attacked in the late afternoon. As usual it was advantage defense. The Union held and inflicted more death that it took. This second phase of the Battle of Stones River went to the Union.
Overall, by most estimates, the Stones was a tie (it should be noted that Grant officially considered it a defeat.) Union casualties overall were higher than Confederate. 1,730 of the good guys died, and 1,234 of the misguided bad guys died on the Rebel side. I know I'm not supposed to take sides like this, but too bad.
When he realized he was never going to drive the Union line back up and out of Tennessee. Braggs made a gradual strategic withdrawal. Most of Tennessee was now under the Betsy Ross flag of Jefferson and Lincoln, not the Simon LeGree flag of Yancy and Rhett.
Even though the South performed well, it lost a state. Typical Southern Civil War performance. Win the battle, lose the state. Stones River was a tactical victory on the Murfreesboro battlefield for the South by a slight margin, but a slight defeat on the national map.
If there was one battle in the entire Civil War that you didn't want to sign up for it would have to be Stone's. It had the highest casualty rate for both armies of any battle in the Civil War. Both sides lost 33% killed, captured, or wounded.
Tennessee was admitted back into the Union officially before the war ended and as as result was spared the ignominies of Reconstruction. There were no more major battles in the central theatre for the next several months.
The Union strategic cause took a hit at the Stones too. Murfreesboro was a Pyrrhic victory for Rosecrans. The Army of the Cumberland took such a beating in 'winning' that it did not go to war again for nearly seven months. That was some consolation for Bragg, who vowed never to send another premature telegram to Richmond.
CHICKASAW BLUFFS DECEMBER 1862
Rebel Pemberton slowed Union Sherman down in this scrap.
THE CIVIL WAR IN 1863
BATTLE OF GAVELSTON 1 1 1863
The Confederates won an important victory in Texas to start the New Year off with a bang. The Union had occupied and blockaded the Gulf coast city of Gavelston Texas in mid 1862, but now it was time to get it back. Colonel Glenn Campbell of the Confederate Army declared war on the Union squadron controlling the harbor.
A little fighting squad of Rebel vessels took on the Union boats and sank the ringleader, the USS Harriet Lane. The scrap was a victory for the SCA and the Union abandoned a key port it had won earlier.
EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION -- 1 1 63
On January 1 1863 Abraham Lincoln freed al the slaves held in the states in rebellion. he did not abolish slavery and he did not free any of the slaves in the border states that had remained loyal to the Union.
So the EP was very qualified and very cautious, even though in a cursory look at history it is a monumental event towards freedom. The critics and cynics always debunk the greatness of the Emancipation Proclamation based on two very different angles. I have my own cynicism towards their cynicism.
The first debunk angle says that Lincoln had no legal Constitutional authority to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The EP proved that Lincoln was a dictator who stepped on the Constitution and muddied it with his illegal un-American gestures throughout the war, and the act of New Years Day 1863 was just about the worst offense of them all.
The other angle is even more annoying and I never hear the end of it. One historian after another says this and I disagree with every last one of them. I don't care how many degrees they have I'll take them all on in a fair argument in which they aren't allowed to interrupt me when it's my turn.
They say that the Emancipation Proclamation was not based on any moral considerations at all. It was strictly a military gesture to win the war. It had no basis in right versus wrong. It was not done out of any love for the black people in Lincoln's heart, nor in the Northern heart.
These are the same historians who say that the North was equally responsible (or worse) for the start of the Civil War because the North declared slavery a sin and sin an issue. Once the North thus “demonized the South” they ruined any chance for compromise and forced the South into a defensive reaction. The North made slavey an evil thing when in fact it was a complex economic and cultural situation which should have been more wisely handled by these high and mighty finger pointing simpletons in the North. I will provide plenty of quotes in the sources section to demonstrate this historical attitude that the North was the aggressors before the war and caused it.
This might seem absurd to some decent hip cool likeable people in the north and south, but it is shocking to know that this isn't some antiquated historical opinion from Southern racists only. There are plenty of Northern modern scholars who still write this way.
The real enemy when anyone is trying to take on the pro-South apologists is not the Southern apologists. They are easy to refute because for starters they are deeply biased to the bone and they reveal that vulnerability openly. The real problem are the Non-Southern scholars who take the split the blame approach. They admonish anyone who is pro-North that they are immature and unenlightened. Any study of the War they claim reveals that both sides were equally responsible for it. If we can put away our infantile passions and prejudices, we could see that things are not so simple, so black and white.
Well I say it is that simple. It is that black and white. The war was a moral crusade. Slavery was a sin. It was simple clear cut case of good versus evil. And you can't say I am ignorant, and that explains my ignorant opinion.
Let's look at the first charge, that Lincoln spit all over the United States Constitution when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that he had no right to issue.
In fact, Lincoln respected the Constitution as much if not more than any President who ever held the office, and that statement comes from a scholar who wrote the definitive history of the document, Burton Hendrick. So how does that statement hold up against the accusations of dictatorship?
Lincoln always believed that the President, nor the Congress had the right to abolish slavery. He had said so during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he said it emphatically when he ran for President in 1860, and he said it during the Civil War. Only the states could abolish slavery in the states that were states. Federal territories were another matter of course.
Lincoln hoped to someday change the Constitution by the legal means available of Amendment, so that slavery could be abolished, but he justly felt that this was a way's off. Lincoln also hoped to overturn the Dred Scott decision by gradually appointing Supreme Court Judges that had the decency to understand the indecency of Scotty. But he didn't expect six judges to die in office just to help him out. This was a hope not a confident goal.
So Lincoln knew that he could not abolish slavery, and they he could not free any slaves in states that were part of his United States of America. He also knew/believed that the Congress couldn't do it either. But he did have some hair-splitting options and he took them.
Lincoln decided, and it is hard to refute, that as Commander in Chief of the United States Armed forces he had the Constitutional authority to take drastic measures to insure the survival of the nation, even if that overstepped normal legal Constitutional authority. Emergency situations authorized emergency measures.
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed all the slaves in the Rebel states, but did not abolish slavery there. The proclamation was a war measure. Since the Confederate States declared themselves out of the country, their slaves did not have any USA Constitutional protection. No USA law applied to the Confederacy. So don't tell Lincoln he can't do that to the Southern states. They weren't USA Southern states, they were SCA Southern states. So propriety was very flexible for Abe.
One of the criticisms we hear goes something like this. 'Lincoln had no more love for the blacks than the Southern whites did. He never freed a single slave for moral reasons. He merely used the slavey issue to force the North's political agenda on the South. The proof is the border states where slavery was legal but they stayed loyal. If Lincoln cared so much about the slaves he would have freed the slaves in the border states also on January 1, 1863. This proves he never really cared about the slaves, only about preserving the Union.'
But Lincoln did not have the Constitutional right to free slaves in border states because they were still part of the USA and had agreed to adhere to its laws and the Election of 1860. It would not be justified Constitutionally. These states did not constitute a national emergency once Bragg had been cleared out of Kentucky, Lyons had saved Missouri, and the New England militia secured Maryland.
Lincoln knew the difference between a Mississippi and a Maryland. And he always made it clear that he was not abolishing slavery anywhere. He was simply taking a war emergency measure.
In areas where the Union army invaded the South the slaves were taken in as Union property. Since the South didn't recognize the slaves as people, but treated them legally as “property,” Lincoln exploited this hole in the line of scrimmage also. 'So you want to declare slaves to be “property” as the argued for 30 years before 1861. OK, fine. Now that the war is on we won't argue the point anymore. In fact, we'll flip the cards and say we agree with you. Slaves are property and when we capture them they are now federal property.'
Lincoln knew that he was inciting slave rebellion by declaring the slaves in the Southern held territory to be free. It helped the war effort and word got out among the slaves pretty fast. The South condemned it as a false morality war measure and Lincoln more or less said, “that's right, that's exactly what it is. Now let's get on with the war before we all dissect that argument later.”
The opening sentences of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1 1 63 says it all about the strict Constitutionality under which it was issued,
I Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion....”
So if the South had seceded in order to maintain slavery, it was secession that gave Lincoln the Constitutional authority to abolish it (in practice) by declaring all the slaves free as a war measure to fight the rebellion. As was often the case, the Southern extremism came back to bite it. If the South had stayed in the Union Lincoln would have had a hell of a time freeing a single slave, even if he had been re-elected and lived out his full second term. But by creating the rebellion it created emergency war powers for the President, powers no greater that those used by Wilson in WWI or FDR in WWII.
BURNS OUT – HOOKER IN
On January 26, 1863 Lincoln fired General Burnside, the goat of Fredericksburg, and replaced him with General Hooker.
Burnsides' failures in Virginia were magnified by the fact that most of the press could make it to Virginia. It wasn’t far away. Many of the Union victories in the west didn’t get the coverage deserved because the press wasn’t there in force. The war sometimes was going a little better overall than readers in the east realized because the press was a bit disproportionately focused on the Virginia theatre.
Two words came to us from the generals of the 26th of January. Burnside wore his beard near his ears in a thick stick. From his we got the word “sideburns.” General Hooker had some rather indelicate ladies that used to tag along with his camp. These became known as “hookers” and from him we get that word meaning a 'prostie.'
Imagine if the names had been reversed. Men today would start the day by shaving their hookers, and ballplayers would go jail for soliciting a sideburn.
KIRBYSMITHDOM IN THE WEST
In February of 1863 the Richmond government sent a new superstar commander to take over things for the Confederacy west of the Mississippi. His name was Edmund Kirby Smith and he was a talented and competent general, besides being the biggest “name” that had ever been sent that far west to run things.
For the Rebs, things were a mess in the west. It was completely cut off from the heart of the Confederacy once the Union had taken control of the Mississippi. The Rebs still held on to a small strip between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, but essentially the Confederacy was cut in half by the time “Smitty” went westward ho.
Union military expeditions, large and small, were wearing down the Confederate west. Things were going worse here than they were in Virginia or Tennessee, for there was no great Army out here to help the Rebels out, and no hero like Lee or Johnston to follow. That was part of the reason for Jeff Davis (the “President” - not the mad general who killed Nelson) picking the slightly famous Kirby Smith to go out there.
Back when the Confederacy was in its ecstatic beginning, the idea was that the west would supply food, the munitions, horses, the mules, and some extra soldiers, while the east did the brunt of the fighting for everybody. The southwest was to be the supermarket for the southeast.
A series of Union victories in Missouri (Lyons), Arkansas, (the Boston Mountains campaign,) Tennessee (the Forts,) Louisiana (Farragut) and the burgeoning invasion of Mississippi by Sheridan and Grant put an end to that thinking.
Now the Reb west was just trying to hang on amid confusion, poverty, Union attacks. and a sense of complete political isolation.
The Union always seemed to have the numbers, even in this theatre where the battles didn't involve such tremendous numbers like in Virginia. Rebel officers desperately needed more men to hold the forts in east Texas. This led to the famous exchange of telegrams between General Phillip David Dinah in Houston and Secretary of War Seddon in Richmond.
Donahue telegrammed from Arkansas,
“You must send us fresh troops or if we are to hold on to
our present positions.”
Seddon wrote back from Richmond,
“I was just going to write you the same thing!”
So instead of sending a crack division of Lee's best to the west, they sent one guy. As if that made up for it. Granted, Kirby Smith was the biggest Army celebrity seen out there in some time. “Smitty” had marched through Tennessee and Kentucky at the head of his own Corps. But no one was really fooled. Richmond was not going be able to help the west at all. Richmond needed help itself.
QUEEN OF THE WEST CHANGES FLAGS ON VD DAY 1863
In central Louisiana on February 14, 1863 the US ram Queen of the West, one of a series of river warriors built at St Louis, was fighting its was along the Southern rivers when it fell under more coastal guns than it could handle. Damaged and helpless, the Queen turned over its crown to the Confederates who renamed her Up With Slave People and repaired her back into fighting condition in three days.
Up With Slave People then helped to batter and capture the US ram Indianola another St. Louis Ram, ten days later. One again, the Rebs repaired the Union ship and renamed her. The Hang Lincoln was ready to go to war against her makers.
But the US Navy cleverly prevented the Hang Lincoln from doing any offensive damage like the Up With Slave People was already up to.
The Navy created a marvelous fake ironclad riverboat made of all sorts of stuff that looked like a real fighter. The cannon was made of logs and the steam funnels of pork barrels. It was covered with Reynolds Wrap to make it look iron plated. At night when the current was just right, the fake ironclad floated courageously past the guns on the southern banks. When the fake war wagon drifted to within a few feet of the Hang Lincoln, the Rebels decided that they didn't want their newly repaired ship to fall back into Union hands and they set it on fire and to the bottom.
Haa haa haa ha ha ha! Indianola was an even more powerful boat than Queen of the West and faking the Confederates out saved a lot of potential trouble for the good guys in the river war.
NATIONAL BANKING ACT FEB 1863
The creation of a uniformed currency in the North did about as much to win the war as a major victorious battle. The nation was plagued by 1,459 different currencies issued by banks in 29 different states. The bank notes all had different terms and conditions and no two banks issued notes that looked exactly alike. Coins were just as chaotic as big bills. It was time to change the change and the paper too.
The Congress passed the National Banking Act of February 1863 by a slim margin. The idea was to make the currency uniform so the war could better be won and the Army and Navy funded more soundly. The gains of the currency situation was a consolation prize for all when the war ended. Even the South would benefit from a war measure it forced the North to adopt.
The NBA had to be rewritten and passed all over again in 1864, but the one of 1863 was the real catalyst for change.
State banks could still distribute their own money, but the downer dough was gradually forced out of circulation. By the end of the war the Federal government had taxed state bank bills by a whopping %10 making their continued manufacture prohibitive. Plus the Treasury department made it clear to state banks that they should discontinue the issuance of state notes as a patriotic duty.
ISLE A VECHE – COW ISLAND CATASTROPHE 1863
Its a 100 mile wide island off the South coast of Haiti and in 1863 some 500 black “contraband” semi-free negroes were given free passage to settle there as US expat exports. This was part of the Lincoln approved plan for “colonization” or as others put it, “recolonization.”
The Isle a Veche venture failed when disease broke out on the ships on the way and then when the settlers got there thy found conditions to be not one twentieth what they had been promised. The black settlers returned to the USA. Many history books say that most or all of them perished from disease but that does not seem to be the last word on that one. In fact less than 100 died and the other 400 made it back.
Lincoln at least until the end of 1862, really did have a dream that millions of freed African-Americans would emigrate to places more naturally suited for them; In other words, places where they were wanted. He had addressed a crowd of prominent free black northern leaders and had told them in plain language that he wanted to help free the blacks but thought it only common sense that they should want to leave and go someplace where they were less maltreated. He said point blank that he knew that they had no reason to feel any love at all for white people and promised to assist them in any way in their attempts at recolonization.
But as one of his closest friends tried to point out to him, even if colonization's best case scenario came true and blacks were emigrating by the thousands, it would not free America of the post-war race problem that Lincoln feared. There were not enough ships to export more blacks than would be reproduced here by the normal birthrate. The fantasy of “recolonization” was never a remote success.
On the other hand, anyone who suggested that the blacks should ever be forced to leave the country during or after the war was met with a sharp Lincoln reprimand. President Lincoln would not countenance the thought of anything but a voluntary ticket 'back to Africa' or elsewhere for the freed slaves.
RICHMOND BREAD RIOTS APRIL 1863
It's not a good sign for your side in a war when women in your capitol city start a riot for bread and then start smashing windows, grabbing bread and running away with it. That was the situation in the Confederacy in April of 1863. Two months later you have armchair generals thinking that if Lee had won at Gettysburg, the South would have won the war. But when you have bread riots at home you know the big picture is not good.
The Southern Belles not only smashed windows while chanting “bread! bread! bread!,” they also seized food vendors who were misfortunate enough to pass by. It was a Rodney King Riot by Southern Women for food. They'd see the pizza vendor go by and grab him, hit him in the head with a rolling pin, and then take his wares. This was how the war was going for the South.
Once they had their fill of bread, the women of Richmond went to the butcher shop and smashed the windows there too while chanting “Where's the beef? Where's the beef?”
The crowd of women (with a few sprinklings of men here and there) kept growing as it kept seizing food. The President of the Confederacy decided to call out the militia. Davis bravely goes out of his mansion and confronts the crowd.
It was an incredible scene out of a corny action movie, but it was real, President Davis emerging from his Southern White House and finding the mob of rioters.
They all spot him and the noise and the action stops. Davis climbs on top of a wagon and begins to make make a speech to the crowd. As he is speaking the Richmond militia is arriving in two's and three's at a trot, some loading their muskets on the way..
“Ladies! People of Richmond. We must have order. Good
manners and breeding must not allow these kinds of violent
solutions to patriotic problems!”
The crowd listened for a sentence or two and then began heckling the beleaguered President.
“Shat Up!”
“Yeah! Give us some food!”
“We're hungry!”
“We hate you!”
Davis became enraged.
“The militia is here at my command and I will order it to fire upon this crowd if it does not disperse!”
The crowd thought he was bluffing and continued to heckle,
“We don't care what you say or think!”
“This is all your fault!”
Jefferson Davis took his watch and held it up to the crowd.
“I am going to give this crowd three minutes to disband and disperse or I will order the militia to fire.”
The crowd started to get scared now. It got quiet. With 60 seconds to go the militia aimed their weapons. That scared the crowd and it dispersed. It did so in a slow and orderly manner.
The bread riots mob broke up just in time. We will never know what sort of Kent State massacre might have taken place in Richmond on April 2 1863 if that crowd had not dispersed. Jefferson Davis might have been tried and hanged as a war criminal if he had given the order and slain 20 Southern women and two old men. The only question would be which side would have hung him. Imagine how such an incident might have affected morale on both sides. It would have certainly been disastrous for the South, a political Gettysburg, three months before the battle.
THE RED BADGE OF CHANCELLORSVILLE
One of the biggest battles of the Civil war took place at Chancellorsville Virginia from April 30 through May 6 1863. The South won. The Southern historians love to write about Chancellorsville because the South beat the North in every facet of a military campaign. The Southern troops fought harder, the Southern generals made better decisions at the highest and the lowest levels of command, and the Northern General in command failed so miserable in so many ways that he was relieved of command after the smoke settled on the battlefield.
The hero of the Battle was Robert E. Lee. It was his greatest victory in the war, and it is still celebrated in the South. The Southern historians and history buffs are like hockey fans after getting eliminated from the playoffs. “We lost the game but we won the fights.” So rather than studying the cause of slavery or the last year of the war, (say for example, the Appomattox campaign,) they study the Bull Runs and Chancellorsvilles till their eyes hurt from study.
The goat of Chancellorsville was General Hooker. Lincoln had sacked Burnside and replaced him with Hooker, who in turn failed the Log Cabin master and was replaced with Meade in late June.
Hooker is the man who gave us the nickname of a certain type of woman that I, for one, have never paid to be with.
Some have falsely written that General Hooker was a frequent customer and that's how we get the name. But that is not true. Hookers wife was a fine lady and he was true to her. But his men were another story. Venereal disease was a major problem among majors and privates alike on both sides throughout the war. The extent of the problem is one of the dirty little secrets of many of America's wars, and I don't care to write about it (as many authors do for immature reasons,) but it is relevant to the man and his maligned reputation.
Hooker came up with the idea for creating a small Washington DC 'combat zone' where all the prostitutes should be confined, a ghetto for tramps and johns. That way at least the entire city wouldn't feel like it was under siege from these skanks. So it was done and as a result the name of Hooker became synonymous with hookers forever. I just wish they would leave me alone when I play Atlantic City and Las Vegas. If General Doubleday had come up the idea we'd accuse our drunken sister in law of “acting like a cheap doubleday at the Christmas party.”
Hooker had an ingenious plan to outflank Lee and Jackson near Fredericksburg. The Union would leave two corps to hold down the Rebel Army at Fredericksburg, then it would take the majority of its forces west, cross the Rappahannock, march south and cut in behind the Rebel lines in force. Lee would be trapped with nowhere to retreat to safety by a force that in combination from both the north and south would outnumber him by about two to one (Hooker 120,000 – Lee 65,000 total troops.)
It was a great idea. So wasn't my idea to be a bass player in a band called Speed Limit 30 back in 1972. But like Speed Limit 30, Hookers' flanking scheme ended in disaster.
When the Union forces attacked at Fredericksburg, Lee correctly surmised that it was a large and luring feint. He guessed rightly that the real purpose of the attack here was to enable the Union troops reported moving in the western end of the battlefront to get into position to cross the Rappahannock and begin a classic “turning movement” on the South.
Lee made a bold decision to take the brunt of his forces west to match the Union moves. Although already outnumbered, Lee was dividing his forces in half. If he was wrong, he would lose big at Fredericksburg. If he was right, and Fredericksburg was just the bait, he would stop Hooker's flanking plan and maybe stuff it back where it came from, which is of course what happened.
The complex movements (see historyanimated.com) all went the Rebel way. The battle lasted off and on for eight days. When it was over the KIA's on each side was 1,600 men. But the Union suffered more casualties when you include wounded and captured.
By the time this battle ended the South had established a sense of military superiority over the Union generals staff. In modern terms, the Northern generals were “psyched out.” The more the South won battles, the more the generals of the North became timid and5 enabled the South to win even more battles. “The South has our number,” complained one general to Lincoln, though not in those exact words, and he was sacked for saying so.
The main character in the fine novel The Red Badge of Courage was a Union soldier who in chapter two ran like a chicken from the Chancellorsville battlefield. It was his first taste of combat and the Confederates scared him bad. The guy then got his act together, and as the war went on became a decorated hero. The moral of the story was that soldiers are allowed to start out as chickens as long as they shoot people to ribbons later on. The movie was better than the book, largely because they didn't force me to watch the movie in school.
The Southern victory at Chancellorsville was costly in two ways however. First of all the casualty lists were not so lopsided in the Confederate favor, like at Fredericksburg. So in attrition, Chancellorsville May 1863 was one major step in wearing the South down.
The other downer for the South was the death of Stonewall Jackson.
DOWN GOES JACKSON
The South's best general by far (by his record in combat – could not some of it have been luck?) was Stonewall Jackson, a former mathematics professor at the Virginia Military Institute. SJ was General Lee's right hand man. He is the God of Stone Mountain. Hear the choir sing when we mention his name at the Klan meeting.
Lee considered Jackson indispensable and so do the pro-South historians. They use his death as # 3 on the Rebel excuse towel for why they lost when they should have won.
Jackson was doing some brave advance reconnaissance along the Union lines near Chancellorsville at about 9 p.m. when shots rang out and Stonewall went down. He was wounded but there was plenty of hope that he would live. His left arm would have to be amputated.
Sentries from a North Carolina Regiment of militia had fired the deadly friendly fire shots. They weren't the best trained men in the Confederate Army and they mistook the General for a Yankee intruder.
Stonewall was recovering well from his amputation. Lee made his famous statement that “Stonewall last his left arm. I lost my right.” But Stonewall lost more than an arm. He lost it all. Jackson suddenly went into shock, then caught pneumonia and died. The white South mourned.
Every time the Southern born college historians write about the death of rebel General Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville, I have to wonder where all these violins are coming from. They treat his death like it was the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Tiny Civil War histories of 220 pages find room six paragraphs to describe the event. Clearly, some of these scholars are literally crying at the typewriter. I don't get it. Stonewall was a fascist fighting for slavery. He was also fighting against the Stars and Stripes, so why am I supposed to feel sad when I read about his death? I don't get it. He is no hero to me. Stonewall was a scoundrel “like all them other Rebs.” If he had a genius for combat then he was a scoundrel with a genius for combat.
I have to tell you the truth. When I read about the Southern snipers shooting General Jackson down in a case of mistaken identity, I write “Hoo-ray!” in the margin. Sometimes I even draw a primitive cartoon of a man smiling. I feel the same way when I read about Hitler getting his arm permanently damaged in the Valkyrie assassination attempt.
No, I am not comparing Jackson to Hitler. Hitler was a million times worse than Jackson. But both of them fought for racism. The principle is the same. Only the degree of the crime makes them two vastly different cases.
Most of us read war books like we read sports books. We are more often than not rooting for one side vs the other. So why do these writers ask me to pause and get chocked up when they type up extravagant detail about Stonewall dies? Just because these University of Mississippi guys feel that way, doesn't mean I have to. I am glad that Stonewall Jackson got shot by his own men halfway through the Civil War.
Great. Helps the North win. That's what I'm for. Stop telling me that was a tragedy.
VALLANDINGHAM
One of the most important and controversial figures of the Civil War was Clem Vallandigham of Ohio.
'Clem Val' was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1858 to 1862. In May of 1863 this extreme Peace Democrat was testing the limits of war sedition laws in the North.
General Halleck's General Order #38 had made it a crime to say bad things about the war and there was Clem on May 1 1863 calling Lincoln, “an insufferable tyrant!”
“King Lincoln must be deposed!” Clem added, as if calling Lincoln a tyrant wasn't playing with matches enough.
“This foolish war must come to an end now! The draft must be resisted. End the wicked draft!”
“This is not a war for Union. No! This is a war to free the negroes and enslave the whites!” While he was at it Vallandigham might as well have said that he heard that Lincoln's mom was a drunk and a liar.
The Clem Val speech of 5-1 was the last straw for Halleck, the commander in the west, and for Lincoln. On May 5, 1863 Union officials arrested the great Clement Vallandigham on charges of sedition. A former Congressman was going to jail.
Vallandigham had a lot of supporters in Ohio and they burned down the Dayton Republican newspaper in retaliation for the Val arrest.
A few weeks later Lincoln reduced Clem's sentence to exile to the Confederacy. That was a devilish deed by Mr. Lincoln. The former Congressman was taken from his cell and escorted safely to the Confederate line at Tennessee.
Vallandigham went on to run for Governor of Ohio from exile in Canada, and that story will be told after Gettysburg. But a couple of notes about Clem are in order.
In 1864 Vallandigham became the leader of the Sons of Liberty Party, which derived from the Knights of the Golden Circle, that well known racist pro-slavery secret national organization that wanted a circle of slavery extending to Mexico and the Caribbean. its 'castles' containing more than 100,000 members in Ohio alone.
Some historians give Vallandigham a free pass on this Sons of Liberty business. They try to make it seem that Vallandigham was not personally a racist, but the evidence says otherwise.
Val went on to join the Democratic Party in later 64 and if McClelland had won in 1864 Vallandigham would have been the next Union Secretary of War after being in a Union prison for sedition in May of 1863.
Vallandigham died in 1870 in a bizarre way. Clement was a trial lawyer in a murder case and was demonstrating to the court how the victim had accidentally shot himself while standing up and drawing his gun, thus making Vallandigham's client not guilty of murder. For some odd reason this demonstration pistol was loaded and it accidentally went off exactly as Vallandigham was trying to show it could accidentally go off. Clem Val was dead. Vallandigham's client was set free. This defendant had a lawyer who gave his life proving his innocence.
UNCOMMON SIGHT ON BOSTON COMMON 5 28 63
More than 20,000 Bostonians lines the edges of the Boston Common on the afternoon of May 28, 1863 to witness a startling, emotional and historic sight.
From up behind and then over Beacon Hill and then across the Common marched the 54th African American U.S. Army Regiment. It was 1,007 black troops led by 37 white officers led by a fine honky named Robert Gould Shaw.
This was only the beginning of the use of solid black regiments in the Civil War by the Union. More than 100,000 black guys would serve the Betsy Ross flag before April 9, 1865. Not only was their military contribution significant, they took a great deal of pressure off the Union draft boards.
Some say that the Union could have not won the war without them, but that is not true. They did, however contribute significantly to shortening the war.
It was the first time the slaves and their black brothers were given a fair chance to fight back for freedom and revenge. You take that whip and you stick it where the stars and bars don't shine, they screamed in essence as they charged into battle.
Wherever the Union Army penetrated the South, it opened up complex situations regarding the slaves. There were a thousand different racial situations all over the place.
In some areas the slaves retreated loyally to their masters. The pro-Confederacy historians stress the frequency of this happening, while the black historians stress how infrequently this happened. In many areas the slaves were extremely passive, changing hands with Union caretakers with the same resignation they had learned as slaves. In many cases the slaves actively tried to escape at the first sign that the master had lost his magic powers and had fled the farm. Some wanted just to be free, others wanted to join the Union Army.
Enlistment was a choice with many advantages. Most of the liberated slaves lived in rags. They had no job, no money, no future, and even if they did have some skills, the region was in such dismay from war they couldn't have found work even as free blacks. The Army said “Be all you can be.” Army life had the risk of death or dismemberment, but it provided food, job security, a great suit of clothes (no small matter,) and a chance to strike back at the bad white men from the South who had enslaved them, and whipped them, and took their mommas away from them when they were babies, who had violated their sisters and the girl they had a crush on. There was a lot of selfish reasons to enlist. Throw in the selfless noble cause of liberating their brothers too.
Not all the Black regiments acted like angels throughout the war. There were a few stories that Glory forgot to throw in.
My favorite is the North Carolina black regiment in 1864 that started taking a survey among liberated slaves to try and figure out who the meanest slave-owner in the area was. When the votes were counted, the regiment paid the guy a visit at his big house on the plantation. They broke plates, slashed sofas, threw a dresser out of the second story window, and set fire to his crops. One black guy started playing the fancy piano (poorly) while his mates were gradually destroying it. “This thing needs tuning,” he mocked as another guy ripped out a wire. When the white guy said “Six months ago I could have had you shot!” Sergeant Poitier walked over to him and gave the old whip-master an ear-box up side of the head, knocking him down. The guy was quiet after that.
This was wrong, even if the regiment didn't do it to every white plantation owner. And some bad things did happen with black soldiers getting even. But it wasn't a mass movement and Secretary of War Cameron would not have sanctioned it. Its amazing how few stories there are about Black Union troops misbehaving, not how many.
SPRING ELECTIONS OF 1863
Today we hold all of our regular elections in the fall, but in 1863, many of the important local elections were decided in the spring. These early 63 elections would be a test of the war, of the Republican Party and of Lincoln.
The Republicans justly feared the power of the 'Peace Democrats.' These were Union loyalists who weren't too enthusiastically loyal. Many of them had left their Southern Dems behind in 61 with a heavy heart, and favored a compromise end to the war without a United States victory. The PD's were the other extreme as compared to the Radical Republicans.
The Rads wanted victory at all costs and wanted to punish the Southern states in the aftermath. The Radicals said that the South had indeed seceded and should be governed after victory as a conquered territory.
The Peace Democrats didn't feel it was terribly important that the North won the war. They wanted to stop the war and make 'Peace' with their former brother Democrats from the South. In an ironic twist, the Peace Democrats agreed with Lincoln that the South had never actually seceded. The misguided Southern states would come to their senses and re-join the Union in a compromise settlement.
Some authors call the Radicals the liberals, and the Peace Democrats the conservatives, but I'd have to say that the definitions are pretty vague and interchangeable, depending on your bias. (See The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase for the last word on the vague and varied interpretations of all political terms. It's the greatest book of all time.)
The Republicans did very well in the spring elections.
GOOD SCOUTS HANG TOGETHER -- JUNE 9 1863
There was a fine line between a “scout” and a “spy.” All spies claimed to be “scouts” when captured, in hope of avoiding capital punishment. If a Northern civilian moved to Richmond, faked a Southern accent, took a real job, and gathered information and passed it along to the North, that would be safely in bounds under the definition of a 'scout.' If would be a stretch of the rules of war to hang that man or woman.
If a Union solder shed his uniform and did the same thing, and then when caught claimed to be a 'scout,' it would be a borderline call. Imprisonment for the duration of the war would probably be called for in fairness.
But what if two Confederate officers dressed themselves up in the uniforms of United State Army officers, and then entered the besieged Union camp at Franklin Tennessee claiming to be on a personal mission from General Rosecrans and asked to see the commander. Then they inspected all the Union positions, requested $50 for road expenses and went back to report the information to Rebel Bedford Forrest and on the way back to Rebel lines got caught; would that be grounds for hanging? Could these guys claim to be 'scouts' once discovered?
On June 9 1863 the answer came for two Southern spies who had tried this and almost pulled it off. They were hung from two elm trees at Franklin Tennessee before the solemn eyes of the full force of assembled Union troops.
The longer version of the story belongs in a movie.
TIME OUT ON THE EVE OF GETTYSBURG
ARMORY WAR
The North never really ran short of guns or gunpowder, but at first it was a major challenge. Guns were purchased from private companies because the US Arsenals were not capable of filling full-scale war needs. America purchased thousands of muskets and rifles from Europe during the first two years of the war and virtually none after that.
Monty Meigs did a great job as Quatermaster General of the Union. “M&M” had to take care of all the boring stuff that wins wars. Grant and McDowell were headline hunting on the battlefield while Meigs had to take care of food, clothing, sanitation, shelter and maintenance of the supply lines to get them to the front.
Meigs not only had to feed the troops, he also had to feed the horse and mules that brought the supplies. The horses and mules needed to pull their own weight by dragging their own food supply behind them.
Horses were expensive. The average price for a solid horse in 1861 was $120 (a slave sold for $500). Horses were expensive to maintain. The average soldier ate three pounds of food a day. A horse ate 26 pounds of food a day. That's even more than Michael Moore!
Horses suffered from the ignorance, carelessness, and selfishness of troops who didn't realize the importance of treating the animals properly to get the most out of a major government military investment. Union abuse of horses killed more of these beautiful creatures than Southern artillery did. That's one of the saddest stories of the war. All of my history work is dedicated to remembering the suffering of the horses in all wars. They have paid quite a price for befriending us.
The Union won the war and won at Gettysburg because of superior resources.
The South was especially weak in railroad transportation. That was always a key advantage.
The one key area where the South never really had a shortage throughout the Civil War was in weapons and ammo. The South did a good job keeping its army supplied with rifles, pistols, cannons, bullets, and gunpowder. There were rarely instances when Southern commanders had to tell their troops to “don't fire till you see the eyes of the whites!” like at Bunker Hill. No, the Southern foundries at Richmond and elsewhere churned out plenty of small guns and ammo and the Rebs were always free to reload and shoot again. This contributed mightily to Southern performance on the battlefields. The South was never heavily outmatched in cannon either.
The other advantage to the South was the quality of its generals. The tactical decisions on the battlefield overall were better for the grey and the blue, but we shouldn't go so far as to say it way anything like a 2-1 ad. The North made some good moves too, and the Southern generals made plenty of mistakes. But Lincoln gave military jobs to civilians for political rewards, and this proved costly on many a battlefield.
The South may have had the better generals, but the North had the better president. At least it would seem so, Lincolns corny stories notwithstanding.
SOUTHERN PLAYBILL
Let's take a time out at the high water mark of the Confederacy (the nickname given to Picket's Charge at Gettysburg) to look at the Confederate Government leadership.
DAVIS
The Rebel President Jefferson Davis was talented, but not a lovable guy, even according to his friends. His wife loved him, of course, but that's the free square at the center of the board. Most descriptions of Davis are of a highly intelligent and capable man, but down and serious to a fault. Jefferson had such a glum and cheerless. personality that he could brighten up a room just by leaving it.
Jefferson Davis was born in a log cabin in Kentucky. Sound familiar? In fact Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis were both born in a Kentucky log cabin within 110 miles of each other and within one year of each other. Davis was born in 1808 and Lincoln in 1809. By 1863 the two log cabin men lived three billion miles from each other and were centuries apart in time.
Jefferson Davis was born into poverty, but he had a rich older brother who eventually kinged him. Jeff's father was Samuel Davis a dad who never made much money or much of a name for himself in life. If only the father had given his second son his own first name. Then the President of the Confederacy would have been Sammy Davis Jr.
Davis had a good working relationship with his top General, Robert E. Lee, but they didn't play golf together after the war either.
The South and the pro-South Civil War historians usually emphasize Jefferson Davis's bad points more than those writers who are objective, or pro-North like me. That may seem ironic but it isn't. Davis makes a good scapegoat, like the coach of the soccer team that loses six in a row. If feels good to have a reason why you could have won if only this one or that one hadn't messed up. Heap all the abuse on one or two of your own anti-heroes and let the others all be praised in the losing cause.
Davis, by all accounts, had personal integrity to the max. He happened to like slavery, a poor reflection on any man's “integrity” as far as I'm concerned, but what do I know? The historians often speak of slave-owners and Nazi Generals as men of personal integrity and honor. I'll never catch up with that kind of reverence for personal decorum over ideals.
No one could accuse Davis of personal cowardice, or of sending other people's sons off to war when he had never been willing to risk his own life for his country. Davis served bravely in the Mexican War of 1846 and was knowledgeable on military matters. But this experience had a downside when Davis tried to make all the military decisions in the Civil War instead of leaving it up the generals who had a better feel for the situation.
Davis had as many physical ailments as Wilson and Kennedy combined, and which only enabled him to run the war to the best of his debility. He had migraine headaches and neuralgia, which made him prone to violent temper tantrums, and depression. The neuralgia led to one eye being droopy.
Davis also had insomnia. That shouldn't surprise. How can anyone get a good nights sleep while waging a war to preserve and perpetuate slavery?
Davis lost a son during the Civil War but it wasn't on the battlefield. His five year old boy died in 1864 from a severe backyard fall. Both Presidents in the Civil War lost a small boy in the war years. That's either chilling karma, or just part of the high rate of attrition in any two families in the era.
STEPHENS – THE MAD SCIENTIST
The VP of the Confederacy was the physically weak but mentally powerful Georgian, Alexander Stephens. He is the one who said that the cornerstone of the Confederacy was a firm conviction that the negro was the inferior of the white man and that slavery was his natural condition.
That's quite a comment coming from a man who was five feet two and ninety pounds. You read that right. The guy couldn't weight-lift a chihuahua and he's the one saying all black men are inferior to all white men. By his own estimation, on the day he graduated from college, Alexander Hamilton Stephens weighed 70 pounds! People who met him were completely shocked at how frail he was. The man was famous and people were anxious to meet him and touch greatness. Instead they walked away stunned at how pathetic a figure he was physically. He had poor physical energy and suffered from constant headaches. Stephens wasn't a quick and sprightly 5'2” 90 lb. He was weak even for the average Joe who was 5' 2” 90 lb. One Richmond journalist had the nerve to write that “If Stephens were dead in the coffin he would look exactly the same.” So both the President and the Vice-President of the Confederacy had constant headaches. Maybe God was trying to tell them something.
Stephens was a Georgia man to the core. He was one of the most able exponents and crusaders for states rights. Stephens loved the US Constitution and believed that it was a compact between sovereign states. He felt that the American states had not sacrificed their individual nationhood when they confederated in 1787. At least that's what he deluded himself into believing because that helped his pro-slavery cause.
Stephens and Abe Lincoln were friends up until the Civil War. Both had opposed the Mexican War from their seats in the US House of Representatives. Lincoln liked Al's sharp and grim wit.
During the Civil War, Stephens spent most of his time in Georgia or Charleston, not the capitol of Richmond. A lot of Rebs criticized him for this, justifiably so. The CSA Richmond Senate was presided over by someone else.
A lot people considered Stephens to be a slippery character, who could only be trusted to change his mind whenever it suited him. Others loved him and defended him.
First Alex argued against secession right up to the time of the Sumter crisis. One month later he's drafting the Confederate Constitution. A year later he's dropping hints that maybe it's time for the South to give up.
After the war, the North arrested Stephens and imprisoned the former VP on an Island in Boston Harbor. Stephens did time at Fort Warren on George's Island where I have picnicked and walked through the ruins of the old prison. It is allegedly haunted by an old woman. How much of a bad time that must have been at Fort Warren for this old slavery-loving curmudgeon. It was bad enough he lost the Civil War, now he has to do time in Boston Harbor. This was a guy who was in a bad mood on his best day. I wonder if Stephens left any graffiti carved into the stone at Fort Warren.
Al was released in November of 1866.
He actually wrote a short book about his time in the Boston prison and developed some friendships with his guards. He also wrote a significant history of the Confederacy
JUDAH BENJAMIN – JEWISH MAN LOVED BY THE KLAN
A student at Yale was frustrated back in 1829, “We have to catch that thief. Let's set a trap.”
Pens, watches, money and every other thing worth stealing and small enough to hide were vanishing from the student residences all over Yale University. Marked money was finally baited and set for the mystery criminal to fall for.
They caught the guy and his name was Judah Benjamin, the future Secretary of State for the Confederate States of America.
No one suspected Benjamin was the thief because he was so personable, so charming, so well liked, so intelligent, so engaging. The students grabbed Benjamin by the arms and forced him back into his room where they opened up his locked trunk. Sure enough the box was a treasure chest of stolen items. There were so many different stolen things in Ben's box that it indicated the workings of a very disturbed mind. The stealing was compulsive. Judah was stealing things he didn't need. The man was Jewish and he has stolen rosary beads in there and a tiny silver crucifix.
The students gave Benjamin the chance to resign and avoid being expelled. But the authorities at Yale found out about it anyway. They didn't expel him, but they permitted him to resign. When a few years later, Benjamin wrote a letter to Yale pleading forgiveness and reinstatement, the Yalee bosses gave JB a stone cold no.
For the rest of his life Judah Benjamin never talked about his past and made a point to burn every personal letter he ever wrote or was written to him. He died after the war as a mystery man on a personal level. It is significant that Judah had lived in South Carolina, but after he was semi-expelled from Yale he chose to locate in New Orleans. It looks as if he wanted to start life anew as far away from the cheating scandal as he could go. New Orleans was the Las Vegas of the 1800's, a place where you could go start all over when no place else would let you. Benny was a brilliant guy and he passed the bar in N' Orleans easily and soon became a rich and locally popular lawyer.
Judah invested in a sugar plantation when everyone else said cotton was the only way to go. Benjamin became very rich and soon owned a large number of slaves. He entered politics and became a United States Senator before secession brought him under the rebel flag.
Benjamin's nickname was “The Brains of the Confederacy.” That was one his nicknames anyway. The other one? Well let me share a story that my late pal Bob Laz used to tell on stage, based on true facts,
“I'm Jewish. My father was raised in Valdosta Georgia. He had a a special nickname down there. ......'The Jew.'
It was rare for a Jew to rise to political power in the western world. When they did it was an event. In the United Kingdom the famous Jewish leader was Benjamin Disraeli. In the Confederacy it was Judah Benjamin. A few historians have tried to draw a picture of many remarkable similarities between the two men.
Judah Ben and Ben Disraeli were both were Sephardic Jews, the chosen people from among the chosen people. The Sephardic was an Iberian higher caste of Jew, better folk from the Eastern wanderers. Both Benjamin Jews were well aware of their higher caste within the race, and had a snobby attitude for commonplace Jews. Of course, outside of their own race the Benjamin blood was a handicap not an asset. There's plenty of anti-semitism in this world even in the 21st Century, but in the 19th century Jew-bashing was a plague. Both Bennys rose to power in spite of their race, even though they were part of the upper crust within it.
But the very idea that these two men should be compared by historians is inappropriate. One stood for right and the other stood for wrong. One led a life of decency and loyalty, the other was a thief in college and a traitor as a grown man.
It's natural to look at pictures of Judah Benjamin and see a likeable man. He was a quick energetic talker and and great orator. Judah was by all accounts a hard worker, a fine writer, and a gifted leader. He made friends with almost everyone he met. But underneath it all lurked deep trouble. JB was the Aaron Burr of the Confederacy.
The Yale thief story says all I need to know about this man. There is no such story about Lincoln, Cameron, Grant, or Phil Sheridan, or anyone I've ever been close to.
Judah's main task in foreign affairs was to try to gain at a minimum, diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy by some important European nation or nations, and at a maximum gain a foreign alliance. There was a distant hope for these goals early in the war, but by the eve of Gettysburg that horse had long left the Southern barn. France was willing to recognize the Confederacy early in the war if England would go along. But English liberalism was a rising tide and the slavery issue prohibited England from ever joining up with the Jeff Davis gang.
After the war, Judah Benjamin fled to Europe. He eventually became a sitting member of the British Parliament!
MONEY MEMMINGER
The first Confederate Secretary of the Treasury was Christopher Dean Memminger. The German born Memminger had his work cut for him managing Southern finances.
It was Christopher D. Memminger who drafted the declaration of South Carolina Secession in December of 1860. The Confederate secession declaration was so close to his Carolina original that he is considered to be the author of both.
CDM was born in Germany in 1809. His foreign born status made him vulnerable to Southern critics who called him “The Hessian.”
After the war he tried to flee to the Bahamas but ended up in a Union jail for a year, then went back to private law practice.
MALLORY - THE ALABAMA AND THE BLOCKADE
The Secretary of the Confederate Navy was Stephen Mallory. SM was the only member of the CSA cabinet to survive the entire war in the same post.
Shortly after Sumter, Davis held a Montgomery meeting to discuss the state of the navy. Several cabinet members entered and sat in Mallory's office and the proceedings began.
Davis asked Mallory to report on the resources of the Confederate Navy. Mallory stood up, looked around the room slowly and said,
“You see this room? You see the furniture and the pencil sharpener? That my friends, constitutes the resources of the Confederate Navy. This desk right here is what we have to fight the Federals on the sea.”
Mallory had nothing to work with because half the US Navy didn't betray the flag and their oath of allegiance the way half the Army did. Half the Navy Commodores didn't abscond South with large portions of the Union Navy resources, and their souls .The Reb Navy started the war with a floating pencil sharpener. Mallory had a lot of work to do.
Davis let Mallory run the show, partly because Davis, a lifelong Army man, had little interest in Naval affairs. This gave Mallory a free hand, but it also made it tougher for Mallory to get money for Naval appropriations for the next four years. Stephen Mallory spent the entire Civil War in an unsuccessful attempt to get funds to build a navy with. He could never convince Davis and Seddon that the Navy of six oceans and a 2,300 mile coastline needed appropriations just as much as the Army of Virginia.
There is general agreement that although “Mighty Mallory” was largely a geographical (Florida) cabinet appointment, his record was one the few truly good ones in the political CSA.
Mallory was probably sarcastically exaggerating a little at the opening meeting. The CSA had 15 medium sized fighting ships to use at the start of the hostilities. But everything else was a leaky rowboat. No wonder the Confederacy worked so hard to get warships built in England.
Mallory had much to do with successful Confederate acquisition of the these England-built raiders, especially the deadly Alabama.
Mallory's Grey Navy did manage to build 20 ironclads before the war was over, but never did break the ironclad Federal blockade.
One of the reason Mallory isn't on Stone Mountain next to Davis is that he was not an ardent secessionist, and he became a Unionist as soon as the war ended. Mallory did a few months in a Blue prison and appealed to President Johnson with letters describing his entire personal history as having never been pro-slavery or even pro-Confederacy. He wrote as though he took the job of Confederate Secretary of the Navy against his will. Andy Johnson bought it and pardoned Mallory.
DID THE BLOCKADE WORK?
The Southern historians like to brag about how so much Southern commerce successfully ran the Union blockade.
But for every cargo imported or exported by a blockade runner there were two that did not make it through. That cargo either sank, was captured or turned back. So the Federals fell way short of the 97% effective blockade. But the 66% effective blockade was enough to hurt the Confederacy and those who believe that the blockade had little effect on the decline and fall of the CSA are biased delusional.
The Southern planter who bragged that the blockade was not effective couldn't even toast the daring seamen who were allegedly breaking it. The South was so out of booze by the end of 1862 that New Year's Eve was celebrated all over Dixie with “Cold Water Parties.” I kid you not. There was no booze to be found and people played along like little kids playing house with toys, as if ice water was such a treat that it could substitute for whiskey on New Years Eve. The adoption of the Cold Water Parties was supposed to show the fighting resolve of the Southern people but in fact showed their desperate condition long before Gettysburg. Cold water parties. And you're going to say that the Federal blockade didn't really hurt the Confederacy?
Imagine if a business expended $10,000 to take in 13,000, making a profit of $3,000. Then someone robs the store but only makes off with $4,000 out of the $20,000 that was in the safe. Do you then brag that the burglar did limited damage at best because he only absconded with 20% of what was in the safe? That's the logic of Southern historians who take such angry pride in how well the South beat the blockade. So maybe you can prove that the blockade only stopped 20% of Southern foreign commerce. The South was already short on everything, so the profit margin was precarious. Even if you concede the point to the most extreme pro-South historian that the blockade was predominately ineffective, the amount that was effective was still crucial and decisive. The robber leaves with the profit margin and you claim it's only a scratch.
JIMMY SYCOPHANT SEDDON – The third Secretary of War was James A. Seddon of Virginia. Seddon served two terms in the U.S. Congress before the war. James studied in Boston (Cambridge – close enough) as a young man before finishing his studies in Virginia.
Seddon was a weak and sickly little old man who didn't impress anyone very much either in his performance at Secretary of War, or as a person. But people who design South-loving websites today find in James a lot of qualities no one else seemed to notice at the time. Seddon became a human rubber stamp for Davis who ran the war personally down to the medium sized military movement. Davis ran the war far more personally than Lincoln did, and Lincoln was bad enough. No Southern War Secretary had the nerve, the right or apparently the desire, to stand up to their President and try to change his mind like Ed Stanton could and would in D.C.
Seddon was a pet dog for Davis. He went so far as to hate anyone that Davis hated, and liking anyone that Davis was fond of. That includes people a thousand miles away in the field that neither knew very well personally.
Seddon only got the job at War because Randolph refused to be a pet dog for Davis and resigned. Seddon took a lot of the heat for the long and losing war. He was in a very bad spot. If anything heroic can be said for Seddon it was that he did not resign until February of 1865. He had one of the toughest jobs in the world for almost three years. I had a job just as unrewarding, that was at Arby's Roast Beef in 1976 in Austin Texas, but that one lasted only two months. Seddon sat in the Southern hot seat for the heart of the war.
After the South surrendered, the Union began to prosecute Seddon and a few others for the cruel deaths of Northern soldiers in Southern PW camps. (General Omar Bradley precedent - who always writes of them as PW, not POW – We don't live in the USOA) The charges were dropped when Andy Johnson began handing out pardons like confetti. Northern prisons were almost as bad, so it was just pardon.
BOBBY TOOMBS
He was the first Secretary of State in the Confederacy and was more than happy to quit late in 1862. It was a wearying job; unrewarding.
Toombs was considered a front-runner for the Presidency of the Confederacy but it went to Davis at the last moment instead.
JACK REAGAN
The Rebs wanted to balance the cabinet geographically. They wanted every seceded state to get its own cabinet celebrity. So the job of traitorous Postmaster General was given to big the Texan, Mr. John T. Reagan.
Actually, Reagan did a bang-up job at his post at Post. He had to set up an entire new postal service for the South and by all accounts his results were better for what he was trying to than that of any other Southern cabinet member.
For the first few months of the war in 1861 thousands of Southerners were still putting US Postal stamps on letters and mailing them to the North. They wanted to fire cannons at the USA and then have Uncle Sam deliver their letters in the next breath.
The North announced that as of June 1 1863 the North would no longer deliver mail postmarked in the South. A lot of mail ended up in Limbo. Maybe someone in Philly missed out on a mean spirited Dear John letter in Philadelphia and never ever found out that Sally from Tallahassee was “ending it because you are too short.”
GEORGE DAVIS – Davis was the last Confederate Attorney General, serving the Lost Cause when it was a very lost cause. GD was arrested after the war and did almost a year in a Brooklyn cell.
JOE E. BROWN
Governor Joe Brown of Georgia was the Andrew jackson of the Confederacy. Most of the leaders of the CSA were aristocratic slave-owners of snobby royal local heritage. In Georgia a real down to earth man-of-the-people had managed to crawl his way up to the governorship, much to the chagrin of the old establishment.
Brown was from the back country, the mountains of poverty where cotton and rice did not grow. He spoke for those crackers and he was a cracker himself. Joe Brown was Jed Clampett's grandfather's hero.
Even though he was not a slave-owner, Brown was pro-slavery and pro-South. When South Carolina seceded, Brown was crucial in convincing his home state of Georgia to secede. But Brown was not so much a slavery-lover as he was a states rights lover. A lot of Confederates used 'states rights' as a beard for their real motive, which was slavery. Not so with Brown. His deal was states rights and slavery was a distant #2.
Even before the war began, Brown was preparing the Georgia state militia more thoroughly than any other state governor in the South. Brown saw the possibility of civil war and wanted Georgia to be an armed camp, but not for any pro-slavery empire, but for Georgia.
Joe was consistent and it cam back to haunt the CSA in the second half. Brown simply would not produce more troops so that the Confederacy could win distant battles in Mississippi or Virginia. He and Vance of North Carolina really sabotaged the Confederate war effort by their obstructionism over their individual 'states rights.' States rights was the wrong state in which to conduct mass warfare.
Brown was an energized colorful and interesting character, and my most accounts a man of character. But his contribution to history was inglorious. If Brown had not led Georgia into secession, the CSA might never have gotten off the cotton and rice ground. Brown really has a lot of blame of his colorful shoulders for the coming of the Great Civil War. Then, after he helped to bring it on, he contributed heavily make sure that his own side lost it. As my mom from Brown country (Milledegville Georgia) used to say when we spilled milk at the table, ... “Nice goin'”
ZEBULON VANCE – NC
The Governor of North Carolina during the Civil War was Zebulon Vance, the Daniel Webster of the Confederacy. Vance was the greatest orator the Confederacy ever produced. Vance could shout with rage in one portion of a speech, tell an informative and stimulating story in the next portion, and then have the audience rolling in the aisles with a humorous sarcastic quip delivered with the aplomb of a veteran stand-up. It's safe to say that he was several times a better orator than Cyrus Vance. 4But like Webster, Vance was all over the road in his political convictions. Again like Webster, this opportunistic passion led to more problems than solutions.
Vance was an educated man, but a man of the people. Like Brown. he got himself elected over the heads of the aristocratic planter class of the east coast. Vance was of the “Regulator” constituency. ZB was the AJ of NC.
Western North Carolina, Vance country, was rugged, mountainous, lacked a slave-economy and was a source of Union sentiment before, during and after the conflict.
Consistent with his “western” roots Governor Vance opposed secession in late 1860. He led the meetings that called for North Carolina to not follow the lead of South Carolina and leave the federal compact of 1787. Vance used all his fiery oratorical skills to plead that North Carolina was not going to fight South Carolina's battles, and that secession was morally wrong.
But when Lincoln called for an army to suppress the rebellion after the firing of Fort Sumter (April 61) Vance did a 180 and became a die-hard fire-eating secessionist. Now he was making the same tour of halls, this time making speeches for secession. North Carolina seceded, and probably would have seceded no matter who was governor.
But Vance, like the South was going to spend the rest of the war fighting for states-rights, and ruining the chance for victory in the war in the process. The one time when a country has to temporary abandon states rights for a greater purpose in in a full-scale war, an industrial war. What tough luck for the CSA. The one time they needed federal strength to prosecute a war, they were stuck with a country that was based entirely on the concept of states-rights.
When the CSA instituted conscription in 1862, Vance passed laws making its enforcement illegal under NC state law. Such obstructionism continued from the tar heel state for the entire four years of the war.
Both Vance and Brown were quick and proud to point out the large numbers of troops they did supply.
A. DUDLEY MANN – He was a dud of a man. Dudley was one of the CSA diplomats assigned to Europe to convince “that quarrelsome peninsula” that “the South was right.” (An Asian King in 1721 wrote the first quote clip – the second part is the title of the infamous redneck book of the present time.)
MILITARY LEADERS – THE HEROES OF THE SOUTH
Any list of Southern heroes is all about the military men, never about the political men. What good is a new nation if its political leaders are useless and its military leaders are all valiant geniuses? What kind of a nation is that to root for?
Lincoln and the political leaders of the North are the heroes of the Civil War for the North. The Generals were not the greatest, and except for Grant, none of them are household names today. And Grant of course, became a two-term president, so that is not even a fair measuring stick. But the average high school senior on a New York subway doesn't know or care who Sheridan or Admiral Porter was, but in the South the average teenager can name at least six Southern Civil War Generals. Nine if you poll only white males. In neither region are the names of the Southern cabinet members household words. But those Generals are the Gods of the white South.
They say it is “heritage, not hate.” That's the slogan on bumper stickers all over the South; a confederate flag with a defensive explanation that it is not meant as an affront against anybody.
Doesn't it mean anything to these people that to millions of Americans, especially black ones, this symbol does indeed stand for hate? Wouldn't that be enough to make you just give up that symbol and get on with your lives? I'll grant you that the Confederate Battle Flag is one great-looking flag, and the performance of Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War was admirable. Nothing you can say or do can change the basic fact that in the opinion of many millions of Americans, the Confederate battle flag stands for racism and represents an approval of the goals of the Confederacy.
I have heard and read all the standard arguments.
One. “The Civil War was not about slavery.”
Yes it was.
Two; “Lincoln was just as racist as anyone on the South, and he wanted to ship them all back to Africa.”
That is not true at all and is a needly callous phraseology at the end there. In this case style is substance. If you said, “Lincoln favored an experimental re-colonization in Africa with U.S. Federal government help,” that would say one thing about you. But if you said, “Lincoln wanted to ship them all back to Africa,” that says another thing about you. You both would be talking about the Liberian project, yet one of you would be speaking as a caring soul the other as a hostile racist.
“Plenty of blacks stayed loyal, you know. Many of them fought in the Confederate Army.”
What does that prove? That blacks didn't mind being slaves, and were willing to fight to keep the Southern lifestyle going? Please. First of all the image of blacks in Rebel grey on the front lines with a rifle and a bayonet charging at the Union lines saying, “To hell with Lincoln!” are not realistic. A handful fought for the South compared to the North. Maybe a couple of thousand blacks for the South, and more than 100,000 for the North. That ridiculous disproportion proves that the Civil War was about slavery. The two thousand Black Rebel soldier exceptions prove the rule, they don't refute it. The Southern blacks of course helped the war by doing manual labor behind the lines, but they were contributing to the war effort under the rule of slavery, not out of a love for the South.
And as for those Southern blacks naïve enough to have indeed stayed loyal to their kindly white masters, that doesn't prove much either. So what if a half a million blacks out of six million in chains were brainwashed or passive enough to go along with it all? It doesn't add much to anyone's argument. Victims of an evil system are still only human and humans have a selfish streak. Many blacks thought that hanging on with the white master was the safest call in that situation. It didn't really mean that they 'remained loyal to the South.'
“It's heritage, not hate.”
Then why aren't you out re-enacting battles from World War One or the Mexican-American War? That's your heritage too. Why pick only this one war, the one over slavery, and have that the only one that gets you all worked up with emotion over “heritage?” Why aren't you equally proud of the Marines who fought at the Chosen Reservoir? They are all part of your heritage too. But they never enter your thinking very often. They didn't stand for a cause that moves you, the war that moves you. No. The one part of your heritage that makes you so very proud is the one where your side wanted to maintain, perpetuate, expand and improve the institution of chattel slavery, and you wonder why Northerners and blacks are offended by the Rebel battle flag.
“If you think the Civil War is about slavery, that only proves you are ignorant. Anyone who does research soon comes to realize that the Civil War was not about slavery at all.”
I do plenty of research. I say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. '' I'll go one better. I think the Confederacy was doing the devils' work. Slavery was present at every nook and cranny of the Southern world and the Southern constitution. The whole land was under the spell of the evil one. The Civil War was an exorcism that cost a half a million lives to perform. When good people do bad by the millions, war happens. Just ask Berlin.
WILLIE LOWNDES YANCY – I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The blood of Shiloh is on his hands.
JAMES MASON
Not only was he a famous politician and diplomat, he was also a stage actor of some renown. Virginian James Mason starred in the 1857 stage play, South by Southwest. But acting was just a hobby. His full time job was being an abject racist scum-dog.
Mason was one of the most powerful politicians of the 1850's, but more important, he was perhaps the most vociferous and passionate and articulate and powerful proponent of slavey in the United States government. Just as surely as Don Rickles was “Mr. Warmth” James Mason was “Mister Slavery.” James Mason was Johnny Slavery. James Mason was the King of Slavery. James Mason was slavery's best buddy.
So when Civil War broke out, it was pretty easy to guess which side this fire-eater's fire-eater was going to fall in with. Its almost surprising that Mason didn't get a high cabinet post like Toombs of Stephens. But he did get an important job as emissary to Europe on behalf of the CSA.
THE GENERALS
BOBBY LEE
This was the man who led the Southern Armies and he supposedly did not like slavery at all. He went to war to defend it, and he owned quite a few slaves himself, but Lee did not like slavery one single bit.
Lee was all business and all soldier. He didn't like to joke around or go to family picnics or dine with politicians. REL was intelligent but not tremendously eloquent like Davis. Lee just wanted to make war, not love. He was a professional's professional. Whether he won the battle or lost it, there was no place he'd rather be, that Bobby Lee. They say that no one hates war more than a soldier. That's the greatest laughable lie of all time. Lee liked it, not because he was a sadist, but because that's what he did for a living. Lee had been a pro since long before 1861. It defined his personality as most jobs do.
I don't see a need to read 12,000 page biographies of this Lee. I can't find the time to read 12,000 page bios of two-term presidents. This guy performed well on the battlefield in a losing and immoral cause. Where's my fascination supposed to come from? But the three-volume Bobby bio by Doug Southall Freeman is so often praised and cited by other historians that I'm beginning to get the impression that the author is what is so great, more than it is his subject. I may try to read it to enjoy Freeman's talents more than to appreciate Lee's.
STONEWALL
There he is! Carved into a mountain of stone! Get it? Stonewall Jackson is the Larry Fine of Stone Mountain. Davis is Moe.
General Stonewall Jackson died in action early in the war and his martyrdom increased his genius tenfold for the CSA faithful. Sure he was a great general, but it's not like he was God great. But now he is because it fits in with a Rebel Flag-waver desire to believe that if only he had lived, the South would have won the war. He is the Bill Hicks of the Civil War. He was great, but just because he died young all of a sudden he's ten times greater than all the others of all time.
LEO POLK
Leonidas Polk was a religious leader who fought hard in battle to enslave other men women and children. Polk was an ordained bishop who didn't believe in taking prisoners on the battlefield.
BEAUREGARD
Some historians have low regard for Beauregard, but I think he was a fascinating dandy. He made some bold moves early in the war and he gets most of the credit for the daring attack at Shiloh that almost routed the Union.
BRAGG
Braxton Billy Bragg didn't make the top 40 war generals in performance, but in fame he did. Bragg lost the war for the South in the Tennessee theatre, if you believe some historians. He is one of the whipping boys
NATHAN FORREST
I call it the Forrest conspiracy. The pro-South historians tell all sorts of bonus biographical stories about all of their favorite war heroes. They can't write about Stonewall without telling us about his side interests in science and scholasticism. Lee was such a prince that we get 1,200 page biographies of him that any real Civil War scholar absolutely must read or else be called a dilettante ignoramus. If a Southern war hero went on to sell paintings or write a novel after the war, we will certainly have to read about that.
But the bonus bio biz comes to a halt with N. B. Forrest and it isn't right. General Forrest was a spectacular and pitiless raider and war hero for the grey. If they made a fourth spot on Stone Mountain you could bet that it would go to Forrest. Yet the white pro-South historians conspicuously fail to mention what Forrest went on to do after the Civil War. Nathan Bedford Forrest went on to become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
They don't like to write about that because it ruins their stupid thesis that the Civil War was not about slavery. They go out of their way to tell us that Lee was personally against slavery and that another general freed his slaves early on in the war. But they avoid the wicked truth that one of their greatest war heroes went on to become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. That's good clever writing; slick wizardry; a grand lie of omission.
LINCOLN'S CABINET
Lincoln's boys are more famously remembered than the Jeff Davis gang.
Many people knew by the middle of 1863 that there were a lot of men in Lincoln's cabinet who did not like each other. But Lincoln welcomed this division because he knew that their bickering at Cabinet meetings would insure that all sides of the arguments would be heard. Lincoln didn't want or need a sycophantic cabinet. In this respect AL was a lot like FDR who delighted in watching his subordinates rip each other to shreds while he sat back and puffed his cigarette holder.
The VP was Hannibal Hamlin. He had a monkey on his back, but performed well anyway. And HH showed a lot of class when he cheerfully agreed to let the party drop him for a Southern-born VP in 1864.
Gideon Welles was the Secretary of the Navy and by all accounts he did a great job. No one ripped him notably after the war or even during it.
Secretary of State Seward was a complex fellow. A lot of people liked him a lot. A lot of people disliked him a lot. Some people thought he did a great job as Secretary of State. Some people thought he botched it completely and only survived in office because of Union victories on the battlefield.
Salmon P. Chase was the Secretary of the Treasury. He had quite a few critics, but he kept the Northern currency fairly stable, which was his primary job.
The Postmaster General was Monty Blair. His family was a royal dynasty of sorts in the North and he had a nasty propensity for showing favoritism towards the interests of the border states because that's where they're from.
Usher was the Secretary of agriculture.
THE WAR CORRESPONDENTS
The Civil War created the war correspondent as a separate profession from regular newspaper correspondent. Men made not only a living covering the war, they made a life. The New York Herald alone had sixty full time war correspondents working around the clock getting their hands dirty with the troops, and taking ear damage from the bombs.
Famous foreign correspondents included Willie Russell of London, and of France, Georges Clemenceau. working for Le Temps. Clemenceau once had harsh words with General Hooker.
These early Ernie Pyles had sketch artists with them to fill out the story. The Brady photographs from the distant front could not get to the newspapers in any practical way, so most of those old great pics from the Civil War were seen be few Americans until long after the Civil War.
The South had far fewer imbedded reporters per thousand troops than the North did. It was a luxury item for the side fighting desperately for survival.
GETTYSBURG – OPENING THOUGHTS
First an overview on some points and then a more detailed chronology of the battle.
G-berg is the most studied thing in all of American history. Not just the most studied battle in all of American history, it is the most studied thing in all of American History. It is an understatement to say that Gettysburg has been overstudied. If half of the scholastic energy that has gone into the study of Gettysburg was put into studying the rise and fall of the League of Nations after World War I, the world would be a better place.
Armchair generals are fighting G over and over with arguments and articles and books and debates at Universities about which general should have attacked when and where, who made what miscalculation and how the South could have won if only they'd done this or that. Gettysburg has been re-enacted with thousands of soldiers firing muskets, and cannon booming all over south central Pennsylvania. Ted Turner made a moving movie about it. Not moving to me. I thought the TNT film Gettysburg was nauseating. It wasn't as pukey as Gods and Generals but still bad. It's pro-South. A Southern billionaire makes a movie re-enacting a battle and paying religious homage to the Southern soldiers and generals in the process. Pickett's charge is made so glorious, its as if its cause of pro-slavey is of no importance. You can separate the two if you want. I'm not doing that. Fighting is only glorious when its done for a just cause.
The noble yacht man Turner never used his billions to make a move depicting the horrors of slavery. He should have. It would have done a service. No one has really made that movie yet. Roots is the closest thing, and its all fiction, was made for TV a long time ago, and there is more to do. Roots was a drama, a novel that was supposedly based on a true story and was later proved a hoax. What about a big real Hollywood movie about slavery based upon one broken up family?
Pickett's Charge was dumb but the Rebs never get called on it. When the Yanks launched the same suicidal charge of infantry at Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor, the Southern historians emphasis is not Yankee courage but Yankee stupidity. Fredericksburg is about the “brilliant” southern generals and the dopey unqualified civilian generals appointed by Lincoln who ordered a futile series of assaults against a way too strong position. Why don't the blue guys at Fredericksburg get the same adulation as Pickett's men?
The books that have no maps and try to describe the battle are a joke. By far the best learning assistant about the battle is to be found at animatedhistory.com. Before anyone even begins to try and comprehend Gettysburg from a military standpoint they should watch the cartoon of the battle 20 times. It's better than any still map on a piece of paper.
The short version of Gettysburg is simple enough. Robert E. Lee tried to invade the North, threaten Washington D.C., win an alliance with a European power, gather needed supplies, and boost Southern morale. His plan was to his way up and slice up the Shenandoah Valley, then cut his way east across central and southern Pennsylvania, and surround and isolate the capitol; Or at least threaten to. Lee made an excellent start in outflanking the Union Armies in Virginia and making his way well into PA before the Union Army could begin to catch up. When the Yankees finally made it back north to stand up to the invaders, the Rebels were ironically attacking from the north to positions at Gettysburg due south. It was as if at Normandy in 1944 the Americans were attacking the Germans from inland positions to the south.
A great battle ended in a Union Victory but it was a close call. If the armchair generals had been in control with 20-20 hindsight they would have made all the right calls, prevented the bad decision. Then the Rebs would have won at Gettysburg. But they didn't. So too bad.
A rebel victory at Gettysburg would not have won the war for the South anyway. Some historians imply this, and a few say so. But it makes for a better story if that's what was at stake at Gettysburg, so the myth has arisen that this was the climax of the war, the final fight scene in the movie between the two stars.
A Rebel victory at Gettysburg would have prolonged the war perhaps, but England still would have not offered an alliance to the South. Lee still would have been vulnerable and overextended in the North. Most important, the South would still be losing every battle that it won because of attrition.
A Rebel victory at Gettysburg might well have aroused the North to a new fury. Volunteers might have come pouring into the Union kitty at a fantastic pace. Up till then, the Southern men were fighting for their land and their homes and their families, and that is often credited with supplying their superior élan. Up till then, the Northern man was not fighting for his home, his land, and his family. Well if the Rebs had won at Gettysburg, the Yanks would then be fighting for their homes. A successful Pickett's Charge might have raised up the true wrath of the North in the long run. The North was always fighting with one hand tied behind its back, because not everyone believed in the cause passionately. If the Rebs had won at Gettysburg, it would have freed up the other Yankee hand.
GETTYSBURG STRATEGY AND BATTLE
Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were not 100% in agreement on Lee's plan to invade the North, but Davis went along with Lee's initiative. Some in the Reb cab wanted Lee's army to move west and try to rescue the situation in Tennessee and Mississippi.
Davis and others suggested that Lee might be able to overwhelm the Union Army opposite him at Fredericksburg. Lee actually agreed, but told Davis and other members of the Rebel cabinet,
“There is little doubt that if I attack all along the line at Fredericksburg the South will probably win. But even in victory I will be defeated. I cannot replace my losses and those Yankee bastards can. Not only that, if I win the battle, Hooker will fall back on Washington and solidify the defenses there and that is not what I want. I need to keep the Union armies in the open field where I can defeat them by superior maneuver. If they close ranks around D.C. it will be bad for the Confederacy. The only way to win is to score a big one in a blitzkrieg of Pennsylvania.”
I was the first time in recorded history that any westerner had used the wold “blitzkrieg.” Lee had studied German military history and got it from Clausevitz.
WAG THE MISSISSIPPI
When the others told Lee that maybe he should exploit the
victory of Chancellorsville by moving west, he responded by saying that he could do more to help in the west by attacking deep into the North than he could by moving directly west. The west, he said was too far away. His super-unbeatable army would wear itself out marching over the length of the country, and supplies would run short as they were plenty short already. Besides, he would have to leave a large force to hold the line in Virginia and it would further weakening his fighting abilities.
So by most accounts of the campaign, Lee was largely motivated in his invasion of the North by a desire to relieve the pressure on Vicksburg and Tennessee. The General felt that if he invaded the North, the Union would be forced to recall much of the force that was threatening to cut the Confederacy in half at the Mississippi, and perhaps even give Reb Rosecrans a chance to win a big one in Tennessee also.
But historian Herman Hattaway debunks this myth in his Civil War history. He explains that this entire myth came from one statement from a commander Reagan in a war memoir he published in 1905 and since then historians have run with it, but it's not true. Lee never thought that invading the North would relieve pressure on the Mississippi, and he had in fact, planned for this invasion since the aftermath of Fredericksburg in late 1862, long before Farragut and Grant had made their way deep into the deep south.
After reading Hattaway's book I was eager to offer the real inside scoop on this famous myth that Lee invaded Pennsylvania to help save the South in Mississippi. I was going to comment on how amazing it is that historians can publish the wrong fact by the hundreds while only one of them has it right, and therefore we have to read all our history books with a cynical eye indeed.
Then I read the memoirs of Robert E. Lee, by Armistead L. Long. Army Stead was in the tent while Lee was speaking on the eve of the invasion and this is what he said that Lee said.
“Lee was satisfied that the Federal Army, if defeated in
a pitched battle, would be seriously disorganized and
forced to retreat across the Susquehanna ... and would
likely cause the fall of Washington D.C. and the flight
of the federal Government. Moreover, an important
diversion would be made in favor of the Western
department where the affairs fo the Confederacy were
on the decline. These highly important results fully
warranted the hazard of an invasion.”
So historian Herm Hattaway is the nit-wit, not the historians who he mocks for their foolishness. He almost made me look as dumb as he is. If I hadn't read Lee's memoir, I would have smugly explained to the reader how foolish it was to buy into this nonsense that Lee invaded the North to help save the Western department. Obviously he did do just that.
Here are some basic facts about Gettysburg.
The climax of the war was the famous Pickett's Charge on day three. The North withstood a series of near suicidal assaults by the South and the three day fight to a draw became a Union victory at the end when Picket's Charge and the continuous assault against Union positions on Cemetery Ridge came up short of home.
Lee wanted to somehow terrorize the North politically, gather supplies and go back to Virginia. He had mixed feelings about setting up a giant decisive battle. Lee would love to win all the gains of an invasion and somehow get back intact. Avoiding a big battle after a successful strategic terror campaign had its appeal. On the other hand he welcomed the “big one” for two major reasons. Firstly, the South needed to demolish the Army of the Potomac because that force was destined to grow slowly but surely stronger and stronger as the war went on. Lee's own army was in the opposite dynamic. The second reason was that Lee was in a bit of use it or lose it position with his overextended lines of communication in Pennsylvania. The Union might be able to cut him off from behind (the angry armchair quarterbacks still insist that the Union could easily have done this) and an equal threat was that the Union could raid and harass Marse Robert all around Pennsylvania while avoiding a pitched battle. The Yanks could hit and run like they were the lesser force even thought they were the larger. This would have frustrated Lee and his invaders to no end. Lee feared this, and the Union just about did him a favor by allowing the Rebel army to close ranks and fight the big one as a great army at Gettysburg. Even though the Rebs lost, the Union still did them a favor by giving them a chance to win. If the Yankee Army had avoided the fight like two punks playing keep-away with the nerds schoolbag, Lee would have gone out of his cotton pickin' mind spoiling for a real fight, and he would have steadily lost strength along the way.
But Lincoln, Stanton, and Meade of course had to respond to what they perceived as the immediate threat to Baltimore Washington and Harrisburg. They weren't about to play the mouse in the cat's body.
A FEW OTHER FACTS ABOUT G-BURG
Lee didn't get along great with his second in command, Longstreet, so both men are goats of history for not getting along at a key moment in the struggle of the Confederate Army.
The Confederate Army was always looking for shoes.
Even if Heth didn't go into Gettysburg specifically for shoes, the fact is that the Rebels desperately needed shoes.
The invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania was as much for food and supplies as it was for military victory.
Lee's horse was named Traveller. Meade's horse was named McGillicutty.
Southern troops went out of their way to pay for what they stole on Union farms in the first phase of Lee's invasion. No women were violated, although one Reb soldier tried to kiss a Union girl he was flirting with and got slapped across the face. But not enough to really hurt. That was in Chambersburg on June 29.
On that same June 29 there was a panic in Philadelphia. When word hit the streets that Lee's advance units were roaming freely around York and Chambersburg, people in Philly started to wig out. Philadelphians were expecting to soon see Rebel troops running up the streets yelling “yii-haaaw!”, setting Independence Hall ablaze, and melting the Liberty Bell to make musket-balls. Philly folk were setting up barricades and breaking out the old hunting guns in the attic.
But Lee and his generals never intended to take Philadelphia like Howe in 1777. Lee was out for supplies and battle.
One of the KIA's on the Confederate side was a woman. Wilma Nixon wanted to be with her husband through thick and thin, till death do us part. She disguised herself as a man, told her husband she wanted to fight side by side with him in battle and stormed the Union lines in Picket's Charge.
FAMOUS PLACES OF G-BURG
The four famous places where the fighting place were Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge, Big Round Top and Little Round Top. All let's make it five and throw in Seminary Ridge. The Rebs marched from the Seminary to the Cemetery. The two Tops were not quite hills or mountains. They were a little piece of a sharp hill and heavily wooded. Lotta fighting at the Round Tops. (They were not commonly known by these names at the time, by the way. If you have a Civil War letter that says “another tough fight on Little Round Top today,” its a forgery.)
There was of course, a large cemetery at the top of Cemetery Hill. There was a warning sign on the front gate that said, “Anyone disturbing the peace by discharging a firearm will be assessed a five dollar fine.” The sign had a bullet hole right through through the dot of the 'i' in fine when the battle was over.
After the war, the sexton sent President Johnson a bill for $32.7 million, which was never paid.
The Confederacy was in the lead and on the offense for most of the battle, but lost by expending itself in failed attacks against a force that was gradually reinforced over the three days of Gettysburg. The North won by fending off an army that was trying to destroy it. By surviving the Rebel attacks, the North won. The North wasn't primarily trying to destroy the Confederate Army. The North was on defense. That is probably partly why Meade didn't chase Lee back into the South in hot pursuit.
STUARTS HORSES - THE REBEL GOATS
The post game analysis of the battle blames Lee as much as anyone else for the defeat.
The #2 big goat of Gettysburg after Lee is Jeb Stuart and his needlessly absent cavalry division. Jeb Stuart (from which we obviously get the Watergate namesake Jeb Stuart Magruder) did a big wide swing all around the Union army just as far away from Bobby Lee's army at one point as two planets on exact opposite sides of the sun in their orbit.
Lee needed Stuarts cavalry for intelligence and without him he fought a dumb battle. The cavalry were the eyes and ears of the Rebel Army. It was supposed to stay close to Lee's forces for intelligence, and it was also supposed to stay close enough to the main body to extend the line of that body and increase its fighting capability.
But Stuart's little corps went on a mission to become an offensive force on its own. His Rebel cavalry would threaten the big cities of Baltimore and Washington and would raid its way around the rear of the Union Armies.
Once Lee realized that Stuart was too far detached from the big army he asked him to come back. But by that time the Union Army stood between Stuart and Lee and therefore Stuart couldn't get back to Lee even if and when he woke up to the danger of his extended position too far from the main Confederate Army.
So on day one at Gettysburg Stuart was too far from home base but he was aware of the situation and was trying to get back. Jeb Stuart had to do the long end around to return to Lee's force. Magruder's men and animals did manage to get back on the afternoon of July 2 and participated in the battle on July 3. So Stuart was absent from Gettysburg when he was needed and helped out when no longer strategically crucial. By the time Stuarts Cavalry attacked the Union lines on July 3, Lee didn't need much reconnaissance anymore.
It seems to me that the Southern historians use the absence of Stuarts cavalry as a big fat excuse towel for losing the battle. The implication seems to be that if Stuart's cavalry had been available and had done it s job better, then the South would have won at Gettysburg and, hey, might well have won the Civil War too.
The Rebs might have lost at Gettysburg anyway.
The grousing over Stuart's absence infers that the South was somehow supposed to win all the battles, and if it didn't there had to be mistakes to explain it. Someone had to make a mistake. Its like the sportswriter who never credits the other team when his team loses. His team lost because the manager made these mistakes; because this player made that mistake. It was never that the other team had some talent and skills. When my team loses it has to be explained. Its not supposed to happen. If my team loses 10 games, each game has to have people to point the finger at on our side, not theirs.
That's how I feel about this constant harping on the absence of Stuart's Cavalry at Gettysburg and how that's why the South supposedly lost.
The North won, but I'm sure they could point to many mistakes that were made on their side, things that were not done. And the North won anyway. The South could have won anyway too but they didn't. The bitter Dixie historians just beat a dead cavalry horse. They continue to stew over Stub's absence at Gettysburg. They need a good excuse why they lost just like the bitter sports fan. Sports is a controlled substitute for the instincts of war. The analogy is not really even an analogy.
The bottom line is that whichever side picked a spot and played defense held all the ad, and Stuarts presence wouldn't have changed that dynamic. Lee still was going to be the one on the attack and that would have been his demise. Plus the North would have kept adding fresh reinforcements if somehow the battle lasted five days instead of three, while the South would have not.
LEE'S POOR OUTING
He is one of the giant heroes of the Confederacy, but even his biggest fans, especially his biggest fans, concede that Lee didn't do a great job at Gettysburg. Not only was the REL strategic plan faulty, the tactical execution was worse once the battle was joined.
Lee's demeanor hurt half as much as his decisions. Most accounts describe Lee and nervous, irresolute, unsure of himself, hesitant.
The leader of any Army has an important psych-op assignment to inspire the officers and the troops by his demeanor. A Washington or a Patton is supposed to make himself highly visible with an inspirational spirit on display all up and down the line. Those who meet such a visage are inspired and pass it along to everyone they come in contact with. The morale from the head honcho trickles down to the entire army. Lee did this job well at Chancellorsville, but that was home turf with better circumstances. Now at Gettysburg, Marse Robert (slang for 'Master Robert') failed as an inspirational leader. This is what the pro-Southern historians say. Don't get mad at me. I really don't have much of an opinion of Bobby Lee beyond what Jack Wilson said of him in Shane.
FAILURE OF LEE TO OCCUPY CEMETARY HILL ON JULY 1
This is another biggie on the Southern excuse towel. At the end of day one, when the Union was falling back rapidly and the South had its way as night fell, the Rebs failed to occupy Cemetery Hill, just south of the village. The Union had it fully occupied and fortified by the morning of July 2 and they managed to hold on to it for the next two days of hard fighting.
Many war analysts think that if the South had chosen to occupy Cemetery Hill at nightfall on July 1, it would have been unopposed and would have made a decisive difference in the battle. The Union right would have collapsed for a second time, the line along Cemetery Ridge would have become untenable, and there would never have been a disastrous Picket's Charge for the South.
HOOKER AND MEADE
Most history books state that General Hooker “was relieved of his command” or that “Lincoln replaced Hooker with Meade.” But Meade wasn't fired. The General quit.
General Hooker resigned from command of the Army of the Potomac on June 28 1863. Lincoln had actually wanted to replace Hooker before that so he gladly accepted the resignation. Lincoln had to wait for Hooker to quit because Abe felt that he had already sacked four commanders (Lashua, McClelland Pope and Burnside) and to do it again might undermine Union morale. You can't fire the coach six times in one season. Besides, Hooker had a few fans in Lincoln's cabinet, especially Salmon Jack Chase.
But one man who didn't like Hooker was Edwin Stanton, the man who got Andy Johnson impeached later in 1868. Stanton managed to undermine many of the orders of Hooker and that's why Hooker resigned. History is rude to Hooker because he had this big ego, but even if he was everything bad that was ever said about him, he still had a legitimate reason to quit as far as I'm concerned. Hooker would issue an important order to someone in the next town and the message would come back. “No. I have been told to ignore the orders of General Hooker by Stanton personally.”
The last straw came at the ubiquitous Harper's Ferry. Hooker was trying to keep his army close enough to Lee to know its movements and possible engage it in battle, but he wanted to build his army up more first. Hooker thought that Lee had well over 100,000 troops when in fact he had no more than 69,000 “effectives” (guys ready to kill for a higher cause at a moments notice.) So Hooker went to Harper's Ferry and requisitioned the garrison of 10,000 Union troops for his Army. You know what happened next. Stanton issued a command to Harper's Ferry that its garrison would stay right where it was and would not join the AOP.
That was it. Hooker would resign on he eve of Gettysburg as the c in c of the army to fight there. GM was leaving his tent on the 28th when one of his long loyal lieutenants approached him;
“Hookaaa! - Is this not what we all prepare for all our lives? The greatest battle is about to happen.”
Hooker responded despondent and angry, “Yes, I know. But I'm not going to be there. They shall have my resignation
as soon as my hand can write it!”
Hooker stormed off while his friend stood in disbelief. Hooker's men loved him, but he had trouble getting along with the bigger egos upstairs because he had a big one too.
So the two questions are; Was Hooker right to resign? and two: If Hooker had been in command at Gettysburg would the South have won the battle?
Many historians say flatly that the South would have won if Hooker had commanded at Gettysburg. I take no stand on that one, but I take Hooker's side on resigning. If a General doesn't have absolute power in his domain, and is being harassed by civilians on the top level deliberately, how can he command with any smooth confidence? If they undermine some of his authority they undermine all of his authority. Hooker was either in command or he wasn't. Other generals were getting orders from the War Department telling them to ignorer whatever Hooker tells you to do. He not only should have resigned, he should have gone to D.C., put Stanton in a headlock, and read him his rights.
The historians are unanimously furious with Meade for not chasing Lee at the end of the battle. Meade let Lee's Army get away and extended the war. General Meade could have tracked Lee down from behind but he didn't. The historians never come out and say that Meade was yellow or a wimp, but its not hard to miss the point.
When a general sends men to slaughter in a foolish attack that fails, he is not one tenth as criticized by historians as a commander who fails to attack when hindsight proves he should have. It's a shameful bloodthirsty double-standard. The military historians respect a commander who sends thousands of men to an needless early grave because at least the guy attacked. But woe to the commander who sits when he should have attacked. And the general who wins a battle but does not pursue the enemy, woe to that poor guy. History will bash him for a thousand years. If only the historian had been in command that day, all would have gone right. As for the commanders who surrender when they shouldn't have, well there is a special room in hell for these guys in the mind of the military historian. Who cares if a thousand civilian lives were spared when the guy surrendered?
Gettysburg is allegedly the “fumbled victory” of the North because Meade didn't follow up and attack Lee all the way back to Virginia. So both Generals messed up at Gettysburg; Lee for a number of tactical reasons, a poor strategic plan, and for losing the battle; Meade for not chasing Lee all the way home. It's pretty hard to live up to the standards of the infallible historians.
BREAKING OUT OF THE FREDDIESBURG BOX
Backtracking a bit, lets take a closer and chronological look at the battle.
It was no simple thing for Lee to invade the North. He was sort of pinned down near Fredericksburg by the big fat Army of the Potomac. So Lee set up some diversionary assaults in the stalemated Virginia front while his invading cavalry forces swept to the west undetected and made their way into the Shenandoah Valley, a great geographic highway to the North.
The Union responded slowly but eventually caught on and tried to stop the invaders long before they got to Pennsylvania or even Maryland for that matter.
There were two significant battles where the Union was basically trying to keep the rebel Army in the box they were trying to sprint out of.
BRANDY STATION
Imagine that it's 1200 a.d. and a battle where 17,000 on each side slug it out in the open field while fighting primarily with swords. It is almost amazing that just by chance such a battle too place at Brandy Station. It was the biggest pure cavalry vs. cavalry fight in the history of the North American continent. I'm not sure if that it all that important a fact but most of the books seem to think so. It was a great cavalry vs cavalry division fight. Cavalry divisions were almost never the major fighting force of an Army, but they were its eyes. Moving three times as fast as an Army, they possessed significant fighting power, but not significant compared to regular army divisions with their slow but devastating artillery. A cavalry division had very few field pieces, but a lot fighting men on the move. The cavalry establishes a position ahead of the regulars who follow up and solidify that point after the cavalry has secured it. In addition a cavalry division has an awareness of the surrounding geography that a regular army division cannot match. So cavalry divisions seldom called upon to engage in a major toe to toe strategic fight. Cavalry is not equipped to take on regular armies and it seldom runs into situations when fighting is its first duty and reconnaissance its second. But thats what emerged at the Battle of Brandy as Reb Stuarts cavalry clashed with Poindexter P. Lashua's cavalry division.
The South got the better of the Brandy. Not by much, but enough that the Southern invaders kept going, which was the object of their mission; to establish and advanced position and tell the army it could follow them up the ladder to the north.
Brandy Station was a horror show that Stephen King couldn't write. Thousands of men on horses slicing each other up with sabers in the dust of western Virginia. There were about 2,000 killed and wounded on each side. Blades killed more than bullets that day. I'm glad I wasn't there. I can't handle a shaving cut. These guys were cutting each other to ribbons for seven hours, and some of these lunatics were probably enjoying it. Moe on the Three Stooges often threatened Larry and Curly that he was going to “tear you limb from limb.” At Brady Station, the warriors actually did that.
WINCHESTER
The same thing was repeated at Winchester, but not with cavalry. Regular units clashed as the Union tried to keep the Rebel invaders in a Virginia box. Again, the South won and continued to press north, now unopposed.
The Union Army of the Potomac was of course “opposing” the Rebs, but the big flanking movement to the west had worked well. The Union was indeed on the march trying to stop the invaders, but they could not get ahead of them to block them. The Potomac Army was chasing Lee and Ewell and “all those other Rebs” (from Shane)but they were doing it from the rear. Lee was running with the football and three Union db's were trying to tackle him before he got to the White House end zone.
Lee “Invades” the North 6-63
So when we see the Army of the Confederacy invading Pennsylvania, it wasn't because the Union didn't have enough force to stop it, it was because they didn't have enough force in the right place to stop it. They had the road block, but they didn't get it to the road in time. Lee and company crossed into Maryland as the citizens stared on in amazement, most of them heckling in his favor. When he crosses into Pennsylvania he met more citizen hecklers, but most of them were telling him to “get off the stage!.”
It might be a little inappropriate to call Lees offensive in Pennsylvania an “Invasion.” It was and it wasn't. In classic sense an invasion is an attempt to take over enemy territory permanently with an in your face superior force that can strike almost anywhere and still win. Even if it makes mistakes it is still destined to win by its in your face superior force. Sicily in 1943 was a definite invasion. If the defenders have superior force, but it's just not deployed at the right spot at the moment, giving the attackers a chance to get a temporary foothold in hostile territory, that does not fit the true description of invader and defender. So by these terms, Lee was conducting a strategic raid, a reconnaissance in super-force. Lee and Davis never intended to settle down and occupy Pennsylvania and put slavery in there too. Its shaky to call the offensive into PA a true “invasion.”
The cat and mouse game of chase and skirmish that allowed Lee to get into PA occupied most of the month of June. As July began there were Confederate regiments all over south central PA, but the Union was making its way back north to confront them.
Meade's army made it back North faster than Lee expected. Much faster. Lee was surprised by “the celerity” of the Blue Army in getting back on defense and closing in on Lee.
Was it a random act of history that the decisive battle just happened to have happened at Gettysburg? A lot of history books comment on the random selection of Gettysburg to decide the fate of the nation but it wasn't entirely random.
Lee before he left Fredericksburg is recorded to have written a list of three towns in Pennsylvania which would be most likely and best suited to host the battle. Gettysburg was number one on Lee's list.
On the other hand, as the situation emerged on June 30-July1 1863, Lee was not happy with the choice of Gettysburg. So Rob anticipated G but did not choose it at crunch time. In any case, Gettysburg was not a completely random town that by freak chance happened to host the battle. Lee saw it hosting the big one in his mind's eye a month before it happened.
To Meade, it was more of a random roll of the dice to fight at Gettysburg than it was to Lee. The Rebel knew where he was headed so he had a much better guess.
General Meade said in the midst of the toughest fighting, “This is as good as place to fight it out as any. My feet hurt.” The last part is usually omitted by the historians, but the Carl Shurtz diary provides the quote and the full version includes the petty complaint.
HETH'S SCOUTS NEED SHOES
Speaking of feet, the legend goes (it has neither been proven or disproved) that small recon units of the Rebel Army went into Gettysburg early morning on July 1 in search of shoes. The Confederate Army had really big shoe shortage that really cost them throughout the war. By 1865 it was ridiculous, it was a 50% a barefoot army. In July 1863 the problem was already serious. I own six pairs of top notch sneakers and I'm not wealthy. Having good shoes is something that we take for granted like sunshine, oxygen, and bad sports announcers. But in 1863 a pair of shoes was a real treat. So a Southern commander named Heth sent in some small units into Gettysburg to find shoes.
Gettysburg started off quiet that day. The town drunk bumped into the tanner and both stopped for small talk while the birds chirped. Then up the road they saw the grey uniforms coming into town to start trouble. Little did these two guys know that within 3 days, 50,000 men would lay dead or wounded within two miles of where they stood.
Small Union units rushed to Gettysburg to fight the little invasion. Then the sequence kept climbing up the ladder. More units on each side went in to help the little fight at Gettysburg. Soon both sides were sending in large units. The whole thing snowballed into the great showdown. By the morning of July 2 1863 it was high noon for the Blue and the Grey. Both sides knew that it was all going to happen here, at stupid little Gettysburg of all places. Prior to this battle the town was about as famous as Oronco Maine. Now it was going to take its place in history as one of the landmark towns in the history of the world.
The outcome was uncertain for some time. The terrible three-day battle cost the North 23,000 casualties and the South 28,000.
The holocaust was highlighted by the famous “Picket’s Charge.” Lee underestimated Union strength on a long line of hills and sent the heart of his forces up there to a glorious defeat.
The Southern army retreated back to the South and the Union was saved. Armchair generals have condemned Union General Meade for not pursuing Lee after he retreated.
Its always too easy to blame any commander who doesn't chase the enemy after he defeats them in battle. This is a constant in military history. But there are sound reasons for not wanting to always pursue the fleeing enemy.
The supply trains have to be left at a dangerous rear distance when a winning army suddenly pursues at a gallop. The chance of the advancing forces being cut of by carefully planned clever counterattack on the flanks is a potentially fatal risk. Well planned maneuvers on a set battlefield have a much higher probability of success than improvised decisions in the chaos of chase and flee situations. The prize is great but the risk factors are equal to the prize. There is also the humanitarian instinct to care for the wounded and burial of the dead as the first line of thinking, and that includes those on both sides.
GETTYSBURG JULY 1
The battle was accidentally joined on July 1. About 2,000 Union troops under the cavalry leadership of General Don Buford reconnoitered into little Gettysburg on the very early morning of July 1. They went there trying to find Lee's army and inform Meade. They weren't there to establish a forward initial position for the biggest land battle in the history of the western hemisphere, but that is what happened.
Union scouts reported Grey troops coming down the Chambersburg Pike from the northwest of the little town of 24,000. They were looking for Yankees and shoes, mostly shoes (again, some historians say that this is a silly myth, but other excellent scholars say 'no. They were looking for shoes.')
About 500 men of Buford's cavalry division deployed just northwest of the village of Gettysburg and took on the first assaults of Heth's division.
Union reinforcements arrived from the south, with General Reynolds at the head of these troops.
The battlefront just northwest of town began to grow bigger and hotter, a full scale war growing like a firestorm.
Just as General Reynolds made it to the front lines, a lucky Rebel bullet struck him dead on his high horse.
Taking command now was Abner Doubleday the man who invented baseball. Not only did this guy invent my favorite game, he fought for the good guys in the Civil War (Some sports historians claim that Doubleday never invented baseball, that it is a complete myth; but let's just say Doubleday did because it makes the story better.)
By mid-day July 2 the action had seen some important twists and turns. The Confederate right was pushed back by the infamous Iron Brigade of Pennsylvania, while the Confederate left did the pushing on its sector.
Federal reinforcements poured in and pushed the Confederate left back. For a brief moment things looked pretty good for the Blue, but Rebel divisions attacked successfully on the Northern end of the line.
Soon the Union troops had formed a defensive position all around the Northern outskirts of Gettysburg in almost a perfect circle. But the right side was a river. The South came down strong on the right-north corner of the Union circle and forced it into a collapse. Once that sector collapsed the strong west line lost its strength and the Union was forced into a retreat through the town and to the south of it. On of the divisions falling back from the north was commanded by Carl Schurtz, a great writer and a great American. He was also a great Republican. One of the best accounts of Gettysburg was provided by this fine man. If he hadn't been born in Europe, General Schurtz would have been a candidate for President in the 1870's. He looks a little bit like Leon Trotsky.
As night fell on July 1 the Union troops formed a defensive position to the South of the town. The Rebs had pushed them around pretty good so far but they were holding fast south of the town and planned to hang on in the morning.
It should be added at this point that in the science of military warfare in 1863, the defense was somewhat ahead of the offense. The North had a key advantage at Gettysburg in that it was on the defense. Whichever side did the attacking was at a disadvantage and many Southern historians weep because they think Lee should have set up a defensive line somewhere and forced Meade to attack. They think that the Confederacy might have won if that had happened.
Anyway, at nightfall the Union occupied a line of defense that ran more or less in a north to south direction, more than an east to west. At the top of it was Cemetery Hill. To the south the blue occupied a long line of Cemetery Ridge. To the west a bit the grey occupied the parallel Cemetery Ridge. The scene was set for a big showdown south of the village on the second.
The entire Rebel force of at least 70,000 traitors pressed against the Union ring, waiting for the battle.
GETTYSBURG JULY 2
July 2 was a long rough day of battle marked by two key events. First was the “Sickles Salient.” I'm the first to give it this title in two capitol letters but I think it fits.
A thousand historians have described the advance of Union General Maurice Sickles just south of the center of the line at Cemetery Ridge.
No one knows for sure why Sickled advanced ahead of his safe and fortified position with the rest of the Union lines. Meade didn't know why Sickles did it and Meade certainly didn't order it. No sane student would fail to see that it was a foolish mistake. You don't circle the wagons to await the Indian attack and then venture out ahead of the wagons with an isolated brigade. But that's what Sickles did on the afternoon of July 2.
The Sickles Salient of Gettysburg gave the Rebs of Lee and Ewell and Longstreet a target to go after, an exposed salient just begging for attacks on its needlessly exposed flanks. For the entire three day battle, the Union accepted that it was on the defensive, one charge by the Iron Brigade on the first morning notwithstanding. Now suddenly one rogue General orders several brigades to advance into an open plain that would have been a good spot for the South to attack even if the Blue flanks weren't also exposed.
The South did not miss the cue and attacked the Sickles Salient in full force and a long deadly brawl ensued. In the end the Union hung on to the salient they didn't need or want in the first place.
Some historians think that Sickles did it just because he wanted personal glory and didn't see any way of getting it if he just stood still and played along with the grand strategy of 'rope-a-dope.' The Yanks wanted to hold tight in the corner while the South drained itself dry trying to attack a far too strong position like. But stupid Sickles came out of his corner and started swinging.
Near the southern end of the long battlefront was the little hill called Little Round Top. An incredible fight took place at the Top on July 2.
The South and the North both noticed at about the same time how important it was to the battle, this little commanding hill near the southern end of the front. There had been a few small Yankee units up there when Meade sent up re-enforcement's for Little Round. When the Union troops reached the top they gasped in amazement at the scene below before them. These men had a bird's eye view of the savage battle for the Sickles salient going on in the little plain just to the northwest of Little Round top. There were horses riding around without humans on them, bayonet fights, pistol duels, fist-fighting, rock throwing and all sorts of endless murderous mayhem. It was chaos and death before them.
But these guys didn't have two minutes to catch their breath when over the top to the west came two brigades of maniacal Rebel troops. The battle for Little Big Top was on. This was one of the roughest fights of the entire Civil War. If the Union men had been impressed by what they had seen in the valley of death below, they were soon more impressed by the one locked in now.
The issue was in doubt for some time at the top of the Round. It was close up fighting. It was the valley fight below but with no horses. Every account I read about Little Round Top makes me say the same thing, “This reminds me a lot of the accounts of the Battle of Bunker Hill.” Then it turns out the one of the commanders at the Round Top battle site was a man named Warren. On of the American heroes at Bunker Hill was Joseph Warren, a politician and a soldier who died there.
GETTYSBURG JULY 3
Dawn came on July 3 with temperatures already hot. The July heat would be chump change compared to to the heat of battle coming up that day.
In the morning the feds and rebs slugged it out for control of Culp's Hill at the Northern end of the Gettysburg front. The Un-Americans had taken the hill the day before, but on the morning of the 3rd the Federals took it back after some rough fighting. The Southern command was already discouraged by this morning setback when they planned the great assault from Seminary Ridge to Cemetery Ridge.
The battlefield was quiet for about three hours when the clock struck one p.m. and about 170 Rebel cannon struck their fuses. For the next hour plus, the Confederate cannon fired away at the Union line. At first there was terror and panic, but the men calmed down fast when they realized that 90% of the grey cannonballs were aimed too high, like the Confederate cause. Most of them were falling far to the rear of the Union lines, causing some disruption there, but not changing the strength of the Union line very much.
When the Confederate cannonade slowed down, Meade opened up with Union cannon, doing more damage in a short time than the Reb cannon had done in a long time.
Yankee cannon could have continued to pound the Rebel positions and might have even forced the Confeds to retreat, but then Meade did something very clever, something the historians don't give him enough credit for, because it did make a difference in the battle.
With the Rebs in clear target central, Meade ordered the Union cannon to completely stop.
Why stop pounding an enemy position when your artillery is clearly performing better and has the enemy dead to rights?
First of all he wanted the Rebels to attack. He didn't want them to retreat. It would put the Union in the role of chase and attack. He wanted Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Ewell and company to come after him, not vice-verse. So he stopped a bombardment that might have been too effective and chased them and forced him to become the attacker.
Meade wanted the South to think that their opening bombardment had been devastating and that his line was weak now. Too much Union cannonading would send the wrong signal, the true one, that his line was strong and was being reinforced all the time. By keeping his return bombardment short, Meade was trying to send Lee a signal that most of the Union cannon had been put out by the initial pro-slavery cannon-fire.
Lee bought the bait and ordered the entire Confederate Army into a series of assaults against the heart of the Union line.
Jimmy Reb Longstreet was famously opposed to Lee's frontal assault plans at Gettysburg. Longstreet favored the long street approach. Go to the end of the long street of the Union line and use the bulk of the force in a decisive end around flanking attack. Longstreet was blunt in his opposition. Lee let Longstreet speak his mind and then some but then overruled him. Lee believed that a flanking attack was far more risky than an old fashioned frontal assault out of the Peloponnesian War. Lee reminded Longstreet that they were deep in hostile territory and these flanking movements were long and complicated and very vulnerable to Union strikes cutting Rebel lines in half. Lee didn't have the horses, the food, nor the reconnaissance capability to guarantee that the Longstreet plan would work.
Longstreet followed orders and sent a few thousand of his men to die in fruitless assaults against a strong Union line at Cemetery Ridge. Then came the brigades of Pickett's Corps. They marched from the north of town and then flung themselves by the thousands up the Cemetery Ridge to meet their death. It was World War One long before World War One. A few Rebs made it to the Union lines and shot a Yankee or two, but they were all quickly shot, clubbed or bayoneted to death if they were unlucky enough to get that far. This was the famous “Picket's Charge.”
Thousand of people have written about this thing as the most admirable, and moving thing of all time. The wistful writing about these gallant and brave men and what a wonder it is to remember the sight of them marching bravely to die in the face of hopeless odds. Millions or people get all teary-eyed about Pickett's Charge. Its not the greatest thing of all time, you idiots, its the worst.
If only it were a cartoon we could laugh at the numbskulls ordering other poor saps to take a numerically inferior force and have it attack an almost impregnable position manned by a bigger army with new brigades and cannon arriving by the hour.
The offense needs a three-to-one ad (advantage) to take a well defended position. Any second lieutenant knows that. And Lee decided to attack without ruse against a strong position at a 2-3 disadvantage. And we're all supposed to wonder why the South lost at Gettysburg? It was Dummysburg.
Gettysburg was the North's answer to Fredericksburg. This time it was the South that gallantly stormed a strong position and just kept getting mowed down like wheat.
The South had attacked the North with everything they had and lost.
Some believe that if for some reason the South had decided to hold their place and the North had attacked the South, the South would have won. In other words, the defense was stronger than the offense due partly to good geographical objects providing what was essentially an extra corps of power. The North held on desperately to the the extra army of geography and fought hard while the South spent itself on offense. Without the geographical assistants, The Cemetery Ridge and the Round Tops, the North might have fled the field.
WOULD THE SOUTH HAVE WON THE WAR IF IT WON GETTYSBURG?
The Monday morning quarterbacks always talk about how the South would have won if this or that had been done or hadn't been done. They seem to imply specifically that the South might have won the war if they had won at Gettysburg. Pro-South historians have said this clearly.
But that is not realistic. So let's say that the Picket's Charge broke through and the Union army quit Gettysburg and fled south a few miles. Even if they lost 5,000 prisoners at Gettysburg the Union Army was still being steadily reinforced and it certainly would have found another spot somewhere and tried it again, this time with Lee a little weaker. Lincoln wouldn't have surrendered the Union if Lee had won at Gettysburg. In the long run attrition would have still won the war for the North, no matter what any stars and bars historian writes a hundred plus years later. One guy in his History of the Confederacy comments proudly that many Southerners said after the battle that if only Stonewall Jackson were still alive he would have won at Gettysburg and the South would have won the war. The first part may be true (but Stonewall was buried under a stone wall so so what?) and the second part is a dopey fantasy. The excuse towel point here is that one lucky bullet from a friendly fire Rebel sentry at Chancellorsville cost the South the war. That's just a sour grapes consolation prize from a chauvinist Southern historian. Its a bit odd that the losing side worships its war heroes more than the winning side. The Germans love Rommell much more than the Americans love Omar Bradley. Or maybe it isn't odd. Its the only glory available for the ...looooosaas.
NO EUPHORIA FOR LINCOLN
Many years later, Lincoln's son wrote that on the night of July 4 1863 he went in to see his father in a spirit of, 'Hey Dad! Isn't it great? We won!”
Instead he saw his father crying with his head on the desk.
“Dad, what's wrong? We won.”
Lincoln looked up through his tears and responded, “Meade had a meeting with his generals and they have decided not to pursue Lee. It was our one real opportunity to end this war.”
Lincoln had even sent Meade a letter urging him to attack at all costs. He instructed Meade that “If you win the battle, take all the credit and burn this letter. If you lose the battle, keep the letter and show it to the world. Blame me for failure, but you must attack Lee before he gets back across the Poto” (his nickname for the Potomac.)
The Confederates captured a war reporter for the New York Herald who noted that the point was not missed on their side either. He wrote that Confederate troops were generally singing and smiling and gloating about how the Yankees had let them all get away. They were marching back to Virginia almost as thought hey had won at Gettysburg.
Lincoln had no proof that pursuit of Lee would have resulted in his annihilation. Neither do the historians and the armchair quarterbacks. Tactical advantage in the war was almost always with the defender, not the attacker. Meade pleaded with anyone who would listen that those who are not here on the battlefield can't understand all the problems involved in going after the retreating ANV. Lincoln's military experience was as a scout in a militia platoon that went looking for Indians and didn't find any. Some historians say that Lincoln was a military genius, and he was probably right when he was anguished over marshmallow Meade.
But there's always a chance that Meade may have been right, and I don't think its right for history to condemn him with such certainty. Only God knows what would have happened if Meade was went after Lee after Gettysburg.
Other writers blame Lincoln for Meade's timidity. They suggest that since Meade had only been command three days, it was too much to ask him to conduct a mass scale pursuit of Lee. Any general would have felt the same way as Meade did. Lincoln was to blame because he was hiring and firing generals too fast and too often for anyone's good. Anyone who loses a big battle gets sacked. That record might have put a bit of caution into Meade. If Lincoln had put Meade in much sooner than on the eve of Gettysburg, then the general would have been better organized and in control of his command structure to go after Lee without giving it a second thought.
VICKSBURG 7-4-63
At the exact same time that the most important battle of the Civil War was being fought in the east, a major strategic event took place in the west. On the fourth of July 1863 the Rebel Mississippi stronghold of Vicksburg Mississippi fell after a long siege. Either of these battles could be described first or second in sequence, I just happened to have picked Vicksburg second. They were simultaneous.
Both side recognized the importance of Vicksburg as the city that commanded the mighty Mississippi. If the Union could create physical disunion in the Confederacy by slicing it up the middle into two slave-loving nations unable to succor each other, the war would take a turn for the better up in Boston and Philly.
The western Confederacy fed the eastern Confederacy. Cutting the east off at the Mississippi meant starvation for the Rebel armies and people. Texas cattle and Missouri corn fed the people and livestock of Virginia and Georgia where local cotton and tobacco could not. Cotton was king according to Southern strategy, but it was the joker in the deck too. You can't feed the troops cotton, or else they'd get cotton mouth and need a cold Pepsi.
Cutting off the Confederacy meant destroying what little was left of east-west lines of communications. It would demoralize the South, revitalize the north and take some of the hurt out of the endless stalemate in Virginia.
The value of the Mississippi was not lost on either side. Both Presidents had grown up in its valley. In fact, one of the main reasons the Lee tried to invade the North in Pennsylvania was to try and force the Union to call off the dogs in the lower Mississippi. If the Union were forced to reassign half of Farragut and Grant's invaders back to the North to save the day there, then the Lee campaign would be a strategic victory even in any defeat short of an utter rout. The South staged minor offensives in the west for the same reason, one in Texas and another in Arkansas. But the North was too rich in resources to make this scheme work. They had enough troops in the North to handle Lee's invaders without slowing down the deadly stranglehold they were putting on Vicksburg.
If Vicksburg fell, it would be the beginning of the end for the South. They could fight on well enough in Virginia, but the outer edges would be slowly but surely closing in around them until even Virginia would fall. And it was always a disadvantage for the South that the area of its greatest military strength, Virginia, was located far from its center and close to Union lines. Its most vulnerable area was also far from its center, and that was the west that was now under attack. And the great Mississippi was deep enough to create an advantage for the superior Union Navy.
Vicksburg had powerful artillery commanding the mighty Mississippi. Ulysses sent a fleet of Union gunboats to get past these batteries rather than to attack and destroy them. The Union boats mission was to support action north of the target. The U boats took some hits but made it past Vicks.
Grant sent his army deep to the west and south of V (map) where they crossed the river at Boston Bruinsburg on April 30.
Lincoln was a little surprised when he learned that Grant had crossed the river at Bruinsburg. he didn't even know that Ulysses was a hockey fan. Plus he thought that Grant was going to continue south and take the Confederate Mississippi stronghold at Port Hudson. Lincoln actually though it was mistake for Grant to leave Port Hudson intact before he made his larger moves on Vicksburg, but he didn't write Grant and snipe at his on the field calls. he let his manager do his job, unlike the South where Jeff Davis ran interference like the rich lady sports team owner who doesn't know the game but thinks she does. Lincoln let Grant cross over at Boston Bruinsburg.
The whole strategy was a big end-around game so that Grant could first nullify the South's ability to re-enforce Vicksburg and combine their Reb armies to attack him at the moment he tried to take Vicksburg, and then, to invest and take Vicksburg with a purely land attack from the east.
To achieve the first objective, Grant attacked in a direction further and further away from his target to points due northeast. He would fight his way northeast, clearing out Rebel country of rebel Troops until he reached the capitol of Mississippi, Jackson. Grant's army fought three battles in this direction. The first was at Port Gibson on May 1 (I'm writing this on May 1 2009,) the second at Raymond on May 12 (that's 11 days from now) and the third at Jackson on May 14.
The South saw what was happening and was divided on what to do about it. Grant was going to try to vaporize Vicksburg and with the capture of Jackson, he could safely call for re-enforcements from the North for the big siege ahead. They were quite sure that Grant was now going to turn west and go after Vicksburg and turn it into Vicks Vapo-rub.
The Southern commander on the spot was Bernard 'Boom Boom' Pemberton, one of the goats of the Civil War, but it really wasn't his fault that he lost Vicksburg to Grant. Jeff Davis was probably more to blame. It was President Davis who insisted from the beginning to the end of the Vicksburg campaign that the city had to held at all costs. This was his directive to Commander Pemberton, the poor guy. At the same time, the commander of all the Southern Armies, Johnston was telling Pemberton to be flexible and be prepared to “abandon” Vicksburg (a euphemism for surrender that no military man likes to use.)
Johnston knew the clause of Clausewitz that says that the object of war is the destruction of enemy forces and the preservation of one's own. It is not the seizure of specific strategic strongholds, their importance notwithstanding.
Sure, Johnston admitted, it would be a disaster if Vicksburg fell to the damn Yankees. But if the place were lost in a hopeless fight, the South would also lose an Army of about 40,000 dependable troops, plus all the guns and ammo. Sitting inside of a defenseless city under siege, the Rebs couldn't even inflict casualties in their losing cause. They could either be shelled into doomsday by Union cannon with high ground and endless ammo, or they could sit and starve to death from being utterly surrounded. They were setting themselves up to play Frenchmen at Dien Bien Phu.
This was the scenario that Johnston could see long before the Union closed in around Vicksburg and he tried to convince Pemberton to keep his eyes and options open. If the Vicksburg army could escape the town they were so desperate to defend, they could combine with another Southern Army and strike back in a big way against the invasive Abbie Army.
But Pemberton sided with his civilian commander Davis, not his military commander Johnston and decided that Vicksburg must be held no matter what. Grant completed his grand encirclement maneuver around Vicksburg with two victories between Jackson and the target.
On May 16 he defeated a Rebel stand at Champion Hill, (for the South it was later often referred to as “Chumps Hill.”) Champion's Hill was a major battle by any military standard, a hard fought contest that more or less decided the Vicksburg campaign. Count me out of this one.
Word note: If the Vicksburg campaign turned the war, then Champion's Hill determined who was the champion. The Union won the war by being the champions of Champion Hill and winning the championship.
May 17th was a big black day for the South when it lost a final stand at Big Black River Bridge. The road to Vicksburg was now open and there were no toll booth in sight.
THE SIEGE OF VICKS MAY-JULY 1863
The siege of Vicksburg began on May 18 and lasted till July 3 1863.
On day two Grant tried a frontal assault on the outer defenses on the eastern outskirts of the city, and it failed. Then on on May 22 he tried it again with a full force of 40,000 Union troops. This attack failed very badly. The defenders were 32,000 strong and fighting for their lives behind strong defensive positions. Grant would have needed 120,000 troops to have won.
This assault was one of the large battles of the Civil War but it never really got a famous name. I'll call it Grants Failed Assault Against Strong Southern Defensive Works Around Vicksburg on May 22; or - GFAASSDWAVM-22
Grant regretted GFAASSDWAVM-22 to his dying day. But he believed there was a consolation prize in the failed effort. If Grant had chosen not to assault Vicksburg and had ordered his men to instead begin the hard work of digging trenches, plus other siege works around the city, it might have led to a lot of grumbling. Men might have put a less than full effort into their digging while they complained that Grant was just a western McClelland who didn't have the guts to attack even when he had the clear advantage. After the horrors of May 22 the Yankee men were glad to dig trenches and no one complained that Grant wasn't sending in any more mass assaults.
During the siege of Vicksburg the inhabitants of the city suffered severely. There were shortages of food that led to desperate measures. Life in Vicksburg under siege was so bad as to have been as much as one tenth as bad as life as a black slave! That’s how much the whites suffered there!
Commander Pemberton later claimed that starvation was not the key to the surrender of Vicksburg, but most of the evidence points to the contrary. Vicksburg was surrounded and the food couldn't get through. The Southern transportation system was so horrible in the region by now that even if the Union had allowed a free gateway to let the Southerners bring food in, they still would have had a severe hunger problem at Vicks. Every Rebel wagon, boat, mule, horse or rickshaw had either been destroyed by the Union Army or was hijacked/requisitioned by the Confederate Army. The CSA army got first dibs on all supplies, even the food, especially the food. The Rebel Army was starving out Vicksburg almost as much as the Union Army.
Tragically, the Army also got first priority on medicine. The soldiers had it bad. The people had it worse. The medicine shortage for the common folk, even rich common folk, was one of the ongoing tragedies of the Civil War for the South from this time on until Appomattox.
Pemberton is deluding himself to think that Vicksburg was not starved into surrender. People in Vicksburg slaughtered all the mules early on. One guy opened up a store with two giant grey ears on the sign. It was named McMule's. Another guy opened up a KFR, where he sold Kentucky Fried Rats. All right, maybe he didn't actually open up a KFR, but people in Vicksburg were actually eating rats. And Pemberton says that starvation was not an issue in the surrender of Vicksburg? A man named Lester Van Krock combined mule-meat and rat-meat and sold them on hardtack buns. He called them “Vicksburgers.” One Southern diarist of the siege claimed that they were “surprisingly, quite scrumptious.” Lester tried to keep selling them after the war, but lost money on the venture.
Grant paroled most the the surrendered Confederates at Vicksburg. A shameful number broke their oath and returned to the Army of the Confederacy to fight in large numbers at Chickamauga.
With the fall of Vicksburg most important river in the nation or two nations, was almost entirely secured for the blue.
PORT HUDSON
On July 9 the Reb garrison at Port Hudson surrendered. Its commander was full of defiance for 48 days as Port Hudson held out under siege even longer than Vicksburg. Commander Whipple was confident that the South would attack from behind the Union lines and relieve Port Hudson.
But when a Union officer gave him his word of honor that Vicksburg had surrendered and produced a copy of the document in Grant's handwriting, the Rebel knew the situation was hopeless.
MORGAN'S RAID -- JULY 2 – 26 1863
What a character. John Hunt Morgan was a dashing handsome slavery-lover who killed people. The Southern 'buffs' love this guy.
Morgan was a cavalry leader and a consummate Confederate raider. In 1862 Morgan men executed a very effective raid into east Tennessee and Kentucky. In 1863 his cavalry repeated the effort.
When July opened in 1863 the CSA wanted to Morgan's raiders to try and easy the pressure on them in the bergs, Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Brax Bragg told Morgan to get moving, and cautioned him not to go to deep into Yankee territory and get himself trapped. Needless to say, that's what he did.
Morgan's raid was materially successful. It destroyed a lot of property and forced Rosecrans to look behind him. But it also did as much political damage as it inflicted in material.
The Ohio River Valley was full of copperheads who were enthusiastically supportive of Peace Democrat Vallandigham. The PD's were those who wanted peace at a price allowing the South many concessions, especially on slavery.
If Lincoln lost the state of Ohio to the 'Digham Dems' it could trigger a wave of support for the Peace Democrats that would undermine the entire war effort, both political and military, and might begin the road to victory for Vallandigham in the Presidential Election of 1864. The whole continent was watching the Ohio Election of 1863very closely. Vallandigham was the biggest leader of his ilk, and if he could be stopped in his home state, the entire “Peace Democrat,” movement would be stopped too.
Morgan's raid created a major backlash against the Peace Democrats. Thousands of Copperheads on a dime and turned in their copper. They would no longer support a party that sympathized with the very cavalry riders who were destroying their infrastructure in torch fire raids. John Hunt Morgan knocked the Southern sympathizer Vallandigham out of the running for the White House in 1864.
He was captured near the end of June near the border of Kentucky and West Virginia, escaped from prison, went back out into action and was killed in a shootout with two Yankees in 1864.
EDITORIAL
I have absolutely no fascination with the intricate details of any of these Civil War battles. I have studied them because I think it is my duty as an aspiring American history writer.
I’d much rather play Scrabble with a wino than study the battle strategies of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville for 10 hours a night. The larger overall strategies of the competing armies have some political significance, but the micro-criticism of every decision of every general and division commander are a waste of time as far as I’m concerned.
For the experienced career military person I can understand. But armchair generals who think Gettysburg was glorious turn me off. I see pictures of guys dressing up as soldiers to re-enact the Civil War battles and I get a shiver up my spine. It literally gives be the chills.
War is crime multiplied by 100 in style and by 1 million in scale, with the backing of legality. It's one thing to study war. It's another to celebrate it. I was a hawk on the First Gulf War in 1991 but I could not bring myself to watch any of the victory celebrations when it was over.
Comedian George Carlin said. “What’s with these people re-enacting the battles of the Civil War? I have a suggestion. Next time use real bullets, will ya, numbskulls!”
( I cleaned it up a little.)
Why don't they do re-enactments of life under slavery?
THE DRAFT IS A REAL RIOT JULY 1863
In recent years they have become deservedly famous, but until the History Channel and the movie Gangs of New York took the subject on, the hideous draft riots of New York City in July 1863 were relatively unknown to most Americans. It was a skeleton in the US history closet that we didn't care to think about. We love to study our bad side now, so its gone from understudied to a hot favorite topic of history.
The War of the Rebellion had been all volunteer until now, but as of mid-1863 Lincoln was going to draft men into the Army to get the divisions he needed to win the war. Abe would rather be called a dictator in a preserved Union than a jolly good fellow in a defeat.
Mobs of rough white New Yorkers were in a state of rebellion over the idea of being drafted into the Army. The hippies of the 1860's were marshmallows compare to these guys
The NYC Draft Riots of 1863 made the Rodney King Riots of 1992 look like a picnic. 25 Los Angeles residents died in the 1992 riot. The NYC Riot took 400 lives. Some estimates run higher than that, but I'm playing it safe with 400.
The first day of the draft was Saturday July 11. That first day didn't go that badly for the Union. A blindfolded man pulled cards from a spun barrel on its side. It was like Las Vegas gambling. The grand prize, you get to die in the Overland Campaign. There was no rioting as the draft lottery called out the names of the unfortunates. New York Democrat Governor Seymour was relieved. Many had warned him that his city was going to see a great riot when the draft started up. Things were looking good.
But on Sunday the 12th the opponents organized all day long for a violent protest on Monday. The word was all about the city that Monday the 13th was going to be hell's kitchen, and it was.
If you were an Irish pyromaniac racist thug in New York City, the night of July 12th was like the night before Christmas. How did these hoods get to sleep at all?
Some of the major newspapers were opposed to Lincoln and opposed to the war. They printed inflammatory accounts of the preparations for a riot that were reportedly going on. They were aiding and abetting the riot by reporting about it in approving tones.
On the 13th the Irish and their poor cohorts coagulated near the battery and made they way slowly uptown committing violence all along the way.
Its fair to ask what was motivating these rioters? The first answer is simple. It was the same motive as 1968. We have our lives and our wives and our barroom and our kids and our personal peace. We don't want go leave our homes and go suffer and die or get our leg amputated, and we don't want the misery of Army life even if we don't die of battle or disease. And we don't like to follow orders. We like to be the boss of our own lives. The rioters of 1863 had that in common with the draft card burners of 1968.
But the similarities stop there. The rioters of 1863 were abject racists who looked down on blacks as inherently inferior and did not want to go to war to fight to free them. I guess if you hate a group, it goes without saying that you won't go off to die in order to help them.
New York was Democrat in 1863 and its still 90% Democrat today. Democrats in 1863 were generally racists and were not gung-ho for the Republican president and his self-righteous war.
Perhaps most important, the USA did not organize a good propaganda campaign for the draft. If they had put out a lot of billboards and newspaper ads depicting the draftee as a patriot and a hero that we were calling on to save the Union, the riots may never have happened. But since nothing like this was done the only other image available to the draftee was an ignoble one. The whole idea of the draft was that we can't get enough volunteers to do their patriotic duty so we will force these yellow cowards to join up whether they like or or not. So if you were drafted you were the most dishonorable group in the entire army. That's another fine reason to resist. The idea of a lottery was upsetting the rioters too. Why should some get killed and others get a free pass just by chance? The rioters didn't like the idea that bounties and substitutes could enable the rich to buy their way out of danger and patriotic service while the poor get the mud end of the stick. So the riot was directed in theory against the rich but carried out in fact against their fellow poor. It didn't help the blacks that they were not going to be drafted at all.
Now some historians also say that it was about jobs. The Irish thugs figured that if the North wins the war it will free six million slaves who will then move north and take their lousy jobs away. I think it's a bit much to think that the crowd was thinking 12 chess moves in geopolitics ahead, this visualized sequence of events inspiring them to hang innocent people from trees. Abject violence, drunkenness, and racism are its own rewards. The goons didn't need complex motives like jobs lost three years from now. Free blacks had been taking jobs in New York for decades and no one had lynched them for it to date. The bottom line is really much more simple. These guys just did not want to get drafted, period.
Back to the riot.
The first quality target was the draft office at 46th and 3rd Ave. The scums smashed it up completely, then set it on fire, much like sending a beheaded prisoner off to the dungeon for more questioning. It wasn't going to be easy for Union officials to hold a draft from an office of ashes. The NYC police chief was John Kennedy and he tried to make a stand here at 46th The mob grabbed him and beat him to a pulp. The Rodney King rioters never beat up the police. This was scary stuff.
Most of the military force that could have theoretically been called out to save the day were away on business at Gettysburg. The Irish mobs (not all Irish, but more than half were) were exploiting the helplessness of the U.S. Army in New York like Maximillian in Mexico.
A few units took up defensive positions around the next intended target, the U.S Army armory on Second Ave. The mob surrounded these Prisoners of Second Avenue and the defense was just about to light the fuses on their cannon and disperse them with canister shot when the mob backed off.
But the day had hardly been saved because nightfall came next. That night of Monday July 13, 1863 was when things really turned to Dante's Inferno. The mob burned buildings all up and down Lexington Ave. They focused their wrath on race. They sought out blacks and attacked them, in many cased murdering them. A few hundred were merely beaten to within an inch of their lives. Many were lynched. Trees about the city were decorated with dead black ornaments. At 43 and Lex the Colored Orphanage Asylum was burned to the ground. The lunatics burned the asylum but the kids got out before it burned, thank God. Horace Greeley had to flee his Tribune office for his liberal life.
They destroyed the draft offices so completely that a draft register was physically impossible. The federal officials running the show either ran away wisely or were thrown into the east river amidst wild cheering.
Late in the day, the mob went to the Shamrock Pub to celebrate their defiant victory.
There's a lot more detail but you'll forgive me if I don't want go go into it. You get the idea. It was Nanking, New York.
To some, these racist riots of July 63 is proof that the North had no right to condemn the South morally over slavery. Southern and other illiberal historians argue that the North was just as racist as the South and point to the Draft Riots as proof.
No. And even if my no is wrong, it all at least proves that the war was in fact, all about slavery.
Just because there's mob of racist rednecks in the cities, doesn't mean that compassionate small a abolitionism wasn't a mass state of mind all across the wide North, while pro-slavery, based on abject mass racism as a foundation was the state of mass mind in the South. One side was more racist than the other, and examples proving that there was racism in the North doesn't mean therefore there was an equal amount. But that's one of the standard arguments of bitter white Southerners for 100 plus years after the war. 'The average Northerner had no more love for the black man than the Southerner did.' Believe me, the historians say this all the time. They cite laws in the North that denied the right to vote for black people. They cite popular Congressmen who say on the record that they did not believe the black man the social equal of the white man. They of course cite Lincoln whenever he said something that fits the argument, even if it was said under duress and only to help save the border states who he knew to be racist and couldn't militarily afford to lose them. And the always cite the Draft Riots. But that's the same as saying that quantitative and qualitative differences are irrelevant in life. That's taking the position that as long as there is some similarity, there is therefore absolute similarity. The draft riots were not a equalizing event compared to the mass crime of Southern chattel slavery. A few weeks on the middle passage alone on six or seven slave ships alone would equal all the crime of the Draft Riots. Three million slaves equals God only knows how many unpunished beatings and homicides in any given week.
As the week went on order was only gradually restored. Militia units from nearby states answered the emergency call but more important, when the Battle of Gettysburg ended, regular troops were free to take the train to New York and settle things up.
DRAFT STATS
Some history books say that the draft filled the Union ranks and made a big difference. Actually only 64,000 Union troops ever served in action via the draft. (The Confederacy by the way, had already started their own draft before the Union did.)
Only 6% of all Union combat troops were draftees. But there was more to that figure than meets the eye. The threat of being drafted inspired a real rise in 'volunteer' enlistments. When my teen-aged friends at 15 or 16 used to talk about what they would do about Vietnam, we all said we were going to enlist in the navy or Air Force. All of us. We were not going to get drafted into the infantry.
Not only could you hire a substitute for money, you could just pay a big bill and get out of it. That was another bonus. Tens of thousands of men bought their way out of serving. History books are so busy condemning this practice as immoral and cowardly and politically divisive, that they forget one important fact. This buying your way out of serving helped raise some serious money for the war effort. $500 was a lot of money in 1863. You could buy Delaware in 1863 for $500.
So the draft helped in three ways. It created 64,000 men worth of new men Secondly it created a rise in enlistments, collateral draftees of a sort, and it helped fund the war. The men like Grover Cleveland who bought his way out of fighting in the Civil War put 2.3 $ million into the US coffers.
In a cruel joke, the draftees were all placed in the Volunteer Army, not the regular old US Army of 1859. In 1863 veteran divisions and brigades were very disappointed when the draftees formed brand new units instead of replenishing the old ones with fresh faces.
This was probably a mistake because the experienced divisions could have been superb at training new recruits and bringing them up to par in a remarkably short time. Brand new regiments (1,000 men) usually were led by brand new officers. Every new draftee division had to learn from baby steps.
Also the veteran regiments were so beaten up they that they didn't feel like a real regiment anymore and couldn't be used like one. Many of these regiments and brigades had been through so many battles that they were at less than 50% strength. 400 man regiments were plentiful.
There was one draft in 1863 and three more in 1864.
THE RUSSIAN FLEET;
During the Civil War the city of New York played host to the Russian Navy. A formidable squadron of Russian ships made New York their home for several months of 1863. The fortunes of the war were in the balance and the support of the Russian navy was helpful to morale. The British and the French had remained neutral, but Russia sent her fleet.
The story of Russian-American friendship in the Civil War became a part of the history of both nations. But unfortunately, the legend is only that. The Russian fleet was only there to protect itself from the threat of other European powers. Russia was it was an autocratic power in an age of democracy.
Russia had recently fought the Crimean War against the combined power of France and England (1855). If a new war broke out, the Russian fleet would be highly vulnerable to the vastly superior navies of Britian and France. But as long as the Russian fleet sat in New York harbor pretending to protecting Lincoln’s Union, it would be safe from John Bull’s navy when the next war broke out.
Tsar Alexander II did not have support of freedom in mind when he sent his ships to Manhattan, although Russia had by coincidence recently emancipated its slaves in a way.
Tsarist Russia had ended serfdom, in 1860. Millions of Russians were long enslaved under serfdom, a milder from of slavery.
A serf had a little more personal dignity than an American slave and, unlike the Southern slave, was considered a valued citizen of the nation. While some slaves in America were allowed to try to make some income for themselves with some private farming, with a Russian serf this was a given right.
Serfdom was similar to slavery in that a serf was owned. However, he was not so much owned by the lord of the land, but by the land itself. The serf could not move. A serf was property of the state via the middleman of the affluent Lord of the Manor. So when the land was sold or the Lord died and a new boss came in, the status of the serf renamed the same. The serf’s status was permanent. A serf could not purchase his freedom at any price. Crimes against serfs by members of the nobility were punishable by fine, not imprisonment, but if a serf injured a noble, they would face swift justice without a trial.
Serfdom was bad and by 1860 Russia had fallen in step with the world march of progress. Even autocratic Tsardom by now made the South look uncivilized by comparison.
FORT WAGNER JULY 1863
On July 18th 1863 Matthew Broderick was killed trying to take Fort Wagner at the head of the first all-black regiment in American History. Denzel Washington shot him in the back.
More than 250 members of the Massachusetts 55th Regiment died that day and they didn't take the fort. The only victory was for the progress of their race in the face of a racist world. Nearly everyone has seen the movie, so it has gone from one of the most obscure stories of the war to one of the most commonly known. I hope Hollywood makes a good movie about Fort Pillow. It's time that one was better known.
MR. COMPROMISE & MR. NO COMPROMISE – RIP 7.63
Two of the famous protagonists of 1860 died in July of 1863 within 10 hours of each other. Back in 60 William Lowndes Yancey was fighting tooth and nail for secession. Yancey was a real slavery-loving Southerner if there ever lived one. The Civil War is largely his fault.
In Kentucky, Senator Crittendon was working so hard to avoid war that he is remembered in history for the compromise that bears his name. The “Crittendon Compromise” was debated by the Congress and rejected at the end of 1860. The CC would have restored the old Missouri Compromise of 1820 and extended it to the Pacific. In the spring of 1861 Crittendon led the Kentucky convention that voted to stay loyal to the Union.
Late evening of July 26 Crittendon read a long account of the Battle of Gettysburg and the Fall of Vicksburg and he went to sleep with a smile on his face and never woke up.
On the morning of July 27, Yancey read the accounts of Getty and Vicksburg and went to sleep with a frown on his face and never woke up. The people that opened the curtain for the Civil War would not all be there to see it end, like LBJ who died in January of 1973 just days before the end of “Johnson's War.”
Crittendon was a ripe 75 when the text message came in. “party's over.” Yancey was a more tragic 47.
The Confederate Congress censured WLY in 1862 for an incident with CSA Senator Benjamin Hill on the floor at Richmond. Yancey was arguing with Hill about a water appropriation for Alabama when the discussion became downright marital in tone. They were just screaming at each other, neither one caring a whit what the other one had to say; an interruption festival that only ended the moment Mr. Hill turned his back and tried to walk away. In the finest Preston Brooks tradition, Yancey grabbed an inkwell and smashed it into the back skull of Hill, who turned and fought. The two wrestled all over the Richmond Congressional Floor until younger men could separate the scrappers.
Hill, who had a huge lump on his head, was willing to forget the whole thing. Yancey, meanwhile, had the nerve to put a Bill before the Confederate Congress asking that it censure Benny Hill! The Congress responded by writing up an official censure of Yancey, completely exonerating Hill, and it passed with flying inkwell colors. Yancey was one of only three that voted against censure.
After the war, Hill went on to a long distinguished career at a Southern Senator although he did first have to suffer two months in a Yankee prison in the summer of Sam (Uncle Sam) 1865. BH often showed off for visitors, the little dent in his skull from Yancey's inkwell.
IAN DURY AND THE BLOCKADE
The first Confederate mission to Europe of Yancy, Rost, and Mann told was a failure in 1861-62 had ended in failure and frustration. The British had given them the politeness run-around, and had refused to see them at all officially, to the shock of the confident Southern “King Cotton Trio.”
In 1863 James Mason was back at it in London, this time doing a solo act. You will recall that James Mason and Bobby Slidell were taken to a Boston Harbor prison late in 1861 and released after an international squabble almost led to war with England and the USA.
Mason when released, continued on his way to England, expecting a Princely welcome as the symbol of British defiance of the stars and stripes. Instead of treating him like the King of diamonds, the British treated Mason like the two of clubs.
The Foreign Secretary was Lord Jack Russell and he politely welcomed Mason to visit him at his home.
This again. In was 1861 all over again. There is a slick contradiction involved when an important personage agrees to met with a foreign emissary, but only at a private residence, and them treats them courteously. It would be better for the emissary to be treated as rudely as I am treated by my mother-in-law, but in an official capacity in an office at the Parliament. Even being criticized and yelled at unfairly over nothing at all in an official meeting at company headquarters is better than being treated nice in a guy's living room at 10 p.m. In this case the key to a positive diplomatic meeting is determined by the same three factors that determine good real estate sales; location, location, location.
Incidentally, Mason was treated quite royally by a lot of royalty that didn't mater, by a lot of counts that didn't count. His memoirs are loaded with social invitations by aristocratic Brits, some even quite famous who were rooting whole heartedly for the Confederacy. Mason had plenty to do hanging and drinking with the greats of Great Britian. But as for getting anything solid done with regards to his mission, he hit a brick wall of polite refusal.
Before describing his first meeting with Lord Russell it is important to not the dramatic sea change in the nature of this second major Confederate diplomatic mission.
Back in 1861-62 Yancy, Rost, and Mann were out for recognition of the Confederacy by England, France and hopefully, then many others. Two years later they pretty much knew that wasn't going to happen. This time they were out for non-recognition .... of the legal status of the Federal blockade of the South. This was the Mason mission of 1863 and it failed as miserably as the one that sought initial recognition, for roughly similar expedient for England reasons.
A good starting point is the “Declaration of 1856.” This was signed by England, the United States, and several other major powers. What is did was define what was and was not a legal “blockade.”
Why was a legal blockade as important as a practical physical one? One would think that a blockade is only as legal as it is effective and vice verse. But such is not the case.
If a blockade by one country over another is recognized by international legal definition, then then other signatories in turn must agree to not try to trade through it. The other signers of 1856 have to send their trading ships elsewhere and respect the legal “blockade.” So whether a blockade is legal or illegal, recognized or unrecognized, makes a huge difference in the amount of trade that is going to try to run it or not run it.
By the agreed definition of 1856 a blockade can only be recognized as legal over a given port if it is demonstrably completely effective. You put a squad in a semi-circle outside the bay so that nothing can get in or out without being blown to bits or captured and you've got yourself a real blockade.
The Federal government had declared a blockade back in 1861 when it was a total joke, yet for some reason England recognized it. What is even more amazing, Federal US ships were seizing British ships that were trying to run the blockade out of Southern ports and England was not officially protesting!
Now, in 1863, the Union blockade was in better shape, but it was hardly legal by the definitions of 1856. Charleston might have a few warships outside the harbor, but it was not impossible to run it if you had the ship and the nerve.
Mason went to see Russell in July of 1863 at the Lord's manor. Russell was most courteous, maybe even charming. A lot of people had warned Mason that Russell could be “as sharp and needlessly surly as Mike Donovan's mother-in law,” but he dismissed that as impossible. In fact, Mason was pleasantly surprised at the kindly tenor of their evening chat at the Russell crib.
Mason began to talk about the great Confederacy of 13 states and the great future ahead of it. After the war, the Confederacy would include all the southwest that
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