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5. CIVIL WAR ... AND RECOVERY

SECESSION AND WAR (1861-1865)

CONTENTS

Comparing North-South leadership

Southern or Dixie "nationalism"

1861:  The first shots of battle

The strategies of war

1862:  Bloody stalemate

1863:  The North begins to dominate

1864:  The South under siege

1865:  Lincoln ... and the end of the war

Taking stock of it all

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 142-151.
COMPARING NORTH-SOUTH LEADERSHIP

Almost immediately upon the announcement of the results of the 1860 presidential elections, South Carolina announced that it would be seceding from the Union.  Soon Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas did the same.  In early February (1861) they met in Montgomery (Alabama) and agreed on the creation of a loose Confederation of Southern states – with Jefferson Davis as the provisional Confederation President.

Lincoln – and Davis.  In contrast to his new adversary, Jefferson Davis, Lincoln had only his limited war experience in the Black Hawk War, and no formal military training.  Davis however was a graduate of West Point and a commanding officer (colonel) in the Mexican-American War.  But Lincoln had a keen mind for strategy, a deep insight into the character of others, and an awareness that he needed wise war counsel – which he got from the elderly Winfield Scott and eventually from his war cabinet.  And Lincoln thought through objectives better than the majority of the military men serving under him – who tended to think mostly in terms of battle strategies – designed to win battles.  Lincoln however thought in terms of war strategies (economics, diplomacy, ideology, morale – as well as military engagements) – designed to win a war.

At the same time, the very looseness of the Confederacy required as a matter of extreme necessity a strong, commanding hand to hold it together.  Thus in the struggle of the South to secure its independence militarily, Davis and his administration would have to take on almost unlimited powers.

Lincoln's Christian faith.  But there was more to Lincoln than just profound political-social wisdom.  Lincoln was a man of deep spiritual character, founded not on human support but instead on Divine support.  Like Washington before him, Lincoln was fully aware of the huge trust that had been placed on his shoulders.  He knew that thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of young men would die because of the decisions that he himself would have to make.  Previous presidents had shrunk back in the face of this growing social division – precisely because of the obvious social costs involved in finally resolving the matter.

Lincoln of course would have his supporters.  He would also have his detractors – and not just in the South.  He even had this problem at home – a wife who very soon tired of the stress his position placed on their family (she wanted Lincoln just to drop the war effort so that their family could get back to normal).

We cannot say that Lincoln going into office was a man of deep Christian faith.  But we can certainly say that as the war progressed, Lincoln found himself turning more and more to the very special support that God provided him during the very dark days of the war (a darkness that lasted almost up until the war's very last days).  Ultimately it was his deep faith that kept him going – when others would have quit.  His faith, not human support, is what kept his leadership of the country strong during these most trying of times.  It was indeed Lincoln's deep Christian faith, even more than his profound political wisdom, that made Lincoln the truly great man that the world would eventually come to appreciate – appreciate as one of America's greatest presidents (some might even say the greatest of all).

SOUTHERN OR DIXIE "NATIONALISM"

At the same time, holding the Confederacy together was mostly the powerful ingredient:  fear – fear White Southerners had of their rapidly growing Black population (both free and slave).  Consequently, the South became an oppressive land – whose laws and cultural vigilance tightened down on society.  Free Blacks living in the South soon found themselves under the threat of being forced into slavery.  And war fever in the South demanded that any Northern Blacks captured in battle (those not just killed outright), or simply captured as farm workers in the process of the Southern armies advancing across the land, would be carried off into Southern slavery.  As both Jeff Davis and his Vice President Alexander Stephens put it, Blacks by their very inferior nature were intended by God to thrive only within the context of eternal servitude to the superior race of Whites.  Enslavement of any and all Blacks was actually a necessary part of the advance of civilization.   This credo was thus the real glue holding the Confederacy together.

1861: THE FIRST SHOTS OF BATTLE

In April (1861) Southerners fired on the Federal Fort Sumter located in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, a grand act of defiance – ultimately forcing the Federal troops there to surrender when no support was able to reach them from the North.  Lincoln now called on the states to take up arms in defense of the Union – Southern states of course refusing.  The real question however was how the border states (Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, etc.) would align themselves.  At first even Virginia hesitated, leading Lincoln to call on General Robert E. Lee to head up the Federal or Union army.  But when Virginia finally chose to join the Confederacy, Lee turned down the request (he would eventually become the South's commanding general).  Maryland was about to join the Confederacy – but Lincoln ordered Federal troops to occupy the state – so that the nation's capital at Washington, D.C., did not get cut off from the North.  Tennessee soon joined the Confederacy – but Kentucky stayed cautiously neutral.  And a deeply divided Missouri simply continued with its own civil war.

THE STRATEGIES OF WAR

As already pointed out in the section focused on America's war of independence in the 1770s and 1780s, the purpose of war is to get an adversary to stop doing – or even being – what it is that a society pursuing war finds detestable in the thoughts and behavior of that adversary.

For the South, the strategy was quite straight-forward:  simply pull out of the Union, and then dare the North to try to do something about it. Were Southerners truly expecting the all-out war that Lincoln called the Union to?  Possibly not.

For the North, the war was a much less straight-forward matter. Was it just about preserving the Union?  Did it have to involve the highly contentious issue of slavery?  Or was it ultimately all about slavery in the first place?

In short, there was by no means unity of purpose in the North, making Lincoln's job extremely difficult.  Making Abolition the primary goal would undermine Lincoln's support in certain circles in the North – and likely drive the people (such as the Kentuckians) along the neutral border regions separating the North and the South into the arms of the South.  It would also merely strengthen the resolve of the South to fight on.  After all, the purpose of the war was to weaken the resolve of the Southern adversary – not harden it.

For the time being, at least in the initial stages of the war, Lincoln kept matters focused merely on breaking the resolve of the Confederate states to secede from the Union – to force them back into Union membership. To do this, he would have to break their ability to hold out against his efforts.  His major strategy was simply to close down the Southern economy – by surrounding the entire region by land and sea with his army and navy, cutting off the South's ability to break out of this economic strangulation (the Anaconda Strategy) in order to sell the cotton that its dream-world so completely depended on.

This was going to hurt the textile mills of the North, which depended heavily on the ability to acquire Southern cotton.  But that would be merely one of the many costs of war.  And Lincoln was aware that this war was going to be costly – very costly – on a number of fronts.  But the Union had to be preserved at all costs – or there would be no very good future for any of the states, North or South.

But Lincoln was well aware of the fact that military challenges also stood before him.  An invasion of the Southern heartland itself would ultimately be necessary to finally break the Southern will. But here is where he was handicapped.  America's best officers tended to be Southern, not Northern – well experienced from recent service in the Mexican-American War.  Sadly for Lincoln, his most capable general, Winfield Scott, was growing old and would soon have to be replaced by younger blood.  But finding an equally capable replacement would be a trying matter for Lincoln – who would have to go through the less-than-impressive service of a number of commanding officers until finally (roughly two years into the war) he came up with the talent (Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan and others) capable of handling this enormous military challenge.

Thus at first the North seemed outclassed by the Southern armies.  At the first major battle, Bull Run (July 1861, just south of D.C.), the Northern armies were routed – and the good D.C. citizens who had come out to watch the battle as if it were some kind of sporting event, found themselves fleeing back to the safety of the capital (itself well protected by a ring of forts surrounding the city).

By the end of 1861 it became quite apparent that there was going to be no quick end to this growing civil war.

1862: BLOODY STALEMATE

1862 saw some great but ultimately inconclusive battles fought along the Mississippi River; in the Chesapeake Bay (the battle of the strange armor-clad ships Monitor and Merrimac); in Eastern Virginia in June and July when the pompous Union General George McClellan proved to be more interested in winning minor battles that advanced his political career than in advancing the North's cause of winning the war; again at Bull Run in August, which ended in something of a bloody stalemate costly to both sides; at Antietam in September when Lee attempted (unsuccessfully) to take the battle to the North into Pennsylvania; and finally in December at Fredericksburg (Virginia) when the Union effort to take a well-defended Confederate position in the cliffs above the town turned into a bloody disaster for the North.

1863; THE NORTH BEGINS TO DOMINATE

1863 started out even worse for the North when a second attempt was made in January to take Fredericksburg – ending up just as badly as the December attempt.  Meanwhile, Lincoln was having a very difficult time keeping the North in the war.

Resistance to the draft (which both North and South had instituted in order to keep their ranks full) turned violent in New York City when Irish immigrants discovered that in applying for citizenship they had also signed themselves up for the draft – at a time when wealthier Americans could buy their way out of the draft.  To the Irish this smacked of the treatment they had received from the English upper class who dominated their lives back in Ireland.  They were livid.  Troops finally had to be called in to help the police put down the rebellion.

Also, a group labeled "Copperheads," headed up by the politically ambitious Clement Vallandigham, had been working fervently to deepen further an anti-war mood growing in the North.  Vallandigham was ultimately forced to escape to Canada.  But Lincoln was well aware that this would hardly be the end of the growing anti-war fever infecting the North.

Vicksburg and Gettysburg.  But finally, two major events broke in clear Northern favor on virtually the same day, the 4th of July, 1863 – the news adding tremendously to the country's (the North's anyway) national holiday!   The Rebel (Southern) position along the Mississippi River had been cleared earlier by Union General Ulysses S. Grant – except for the strategic site atop huge cliffs towering over the river at Vicksburg.  Grant had been trying since January all sorts of maneuvers to bring down this last Mississippi stronghold – and finally on the 4th of July brought Vicksburg to surrender – and sent the news to Lincoln to give him finally something to cheer about.

But also on that same day ended finally the four-day battle at Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) which had erupted when Union forces stopped Lee's Confederate army in its second attempt to take the war into Union territory (Lee had been hoping to encourage the growing movement in the North of simply quitting the war effort and letting the South go on its way with its slaves).  It was a great victory for the North.  But once again, the commanding Union General, George Meade, decided to let his troops rest from their exhausting victory – and consequently let an even more exhausted Lee escape to the South – to fight another day.  This inevitably led Lincoln to replace Meade with the tireless and relentless Grant.

At this point, with two key victories and a truly strategic Grant at the head of the Union armies, the fortunes of war began to turn decidedly in favor of the North.

Meanwhile Northern and Southern forces clashed repeatedly at the front along the Tennessee River in the middle of the states.  The battles began as another Southern offensive – but instead resulted in a very costly stalemate at Chickamauga (September) and a rout of the Southern troops at Chattanooga (November), forcing Southern General Longstreet to have to give up his effort to take Knoxville from the North.

1864; THE SOUTH UNDER SIEGE

1864 turned out to be a grand disaster for the South.  Grant led Union forces into Virginia – fighting battle after battle against Lee's troops, neither side willing to give up (Grant would not break off his effort to allow his men to rest – except in one instance, which he would regret and learn from not to repeat).  Thus Lee was forced constantly to give a bit of ground at each battle in order not to be outflanked and surrounded by Grant's larger forces.  Eventually Grant made a wide swing around Lee's forces who were attempting to protect the city of Richmond and instead put the town of Petersburg below Richmond under Union assault.  But Petersburg proved quite defiant – and the battle there seemed to settle into a stalemate.

Meanwhile Union General William Tecumseh Sherman was ordered to slice through the middle of the South, starting at the Union position in Tennessee and swinging south from there to Atlanta – which the Union forces were able to take in September after a long summer-time assault on this key city in Georgia. From there they then headed southeast (November-December) to the town of Savannah on Georgia's coast, Sherman's troops cutting a 60-mile wide swath of destruction along the way – in order to break the spirit of Southern resistance.

1865: LINCOLN ... AND THE END OF THE WAR

Lincoln re-elected (November 1864).  Lincoln was facing another national election in November that year – quite aware that no president had been reelected since 1832.  But the fortunes of war had clearly by election day turned in the North's favor – and Lincoln's Republican Party was quite clear in its political goal: unconditional surrender of the Confederacy and a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery everywhere within the U.S.  Thus it was that Lincoln overwhelmingly defeated his Democratic Party opponent, the self-important Union General McClellan.

The Collapse of the South.   Once in control of Savannah (Christmas 1864), Sherman turned his army and headed it north through the Carolinas, again burning and pillaging as it went – to arrive at a besieged Petersburg from the south.  Very little Southern opposition at this point seemed to block Sherman's path.

Lincoln's 2nd inaugural address (March 1865).  At Lincoln's ceremony inaugurating his second term in office, Lincoln presented the nation with an address (found today etched on the north wall of the Lincoln Memorial in D.C.), focusing the entire second half of the speech on the role of God and his judgment in shaping past events and future responsibilities – and thus the necessity of all Americans moving ahead together to bind up the nation's wounds and get on with the larger call by God himself to greater things as a nation.

At first his address surveyed the war experience that the nation had gone through – and God's hand in the matter:

If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."

But he then turned to this matter of the task facing the nation, one to which God had called all Americans:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with a firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

This was another example of how Lincoln had developed the ability to persevere in the face of all this massive uncertainty and risk, simply by trusting that he was merely a servant of God himself.  He made very clear his personal understanding that it was up to God – not Lincoln – to bring the true and the good to bear in this covenant nation that God himself had, centuries earlier, called into being.

Indeed, this was the kind of personal wisdom and spiritual strength that few American leaders after Lincoln would be able to match, even on a partial basis, a wisdom and spiritual strength matured out of having to face overwhelming obstacles, a wisdom and spiritual strength that had brought the Union through very, very dark times, to resolve finally a very, very divisive issue.   Lincoln was truly a gift of God to the American nation.

April 9th: The collapse of the South's rebellion.  While one Union army was smashing South through Alabama (destroying the last of the South's industrial capacity as it went) Lee's army was finding itself overrun in the East at Petersburg, forcing Lee to pull out of both Petersburg and Richmond.  Lee was attempting to link up with other Confederate troops trying to escape further South – but instead found himself surrounded at Appomattox.  Thus on April 9th, Lee surrendered himself and his army to Grant.

Although this did not mark the official end of the war (local skirmishes would continue for a while longer) – for all practical purposes the war was finally over.

April 14th: The assassination of Lincoln.  Lincoln was already at work seeking ways to bring the nation back together – minus slavery.  The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ending slavery anywhere within the United States, had been ratified by the Senate all the way back in April of 1864 and in the House of Representatives at the end of January, just a few months earlier.  It was yet to be submitted to the states – Northern only at that point – for their ratification.  But the amendment was expected to be easily approved by the states.

As Lincoln had stated in his 2nd inaugural address, he was indeed looking for ways "to bind up the nation's wounds; . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace ..."  That would not be an easy task, given the level of hatred still smoldering in many Northern hearts – and given the bitterness Southerners felt about their humiliating loss to the Unionists.  However, achieving a just and lasting peace was where he was now directing all his efforts.

But success in that endeavor was not to be.  On the night of April 14th the actor John Wilkes Booth was able to complete part of his plot to kill Lincoln and Grant while attending together the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in Washington (but Grant had instead left to visit his children in New Jersey) – as well as Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward at their homes.  Lincoln was shot in the back of the head, Booth escaped by leaping from the balcony to the stage and then fleeing the city.  Lincoln died early the next morning.  Meanwhile Seward was attacked and nearly killed the same night by another of the plotters, who after repeated attempts to stab Seward to death finally fled into the night when confronted by other members of Seward's family.  Seward survived.

Booth was found with a co-conspirator in Virginia twelve days later, surrounded and shot.  Arrests of other members of the plot soon followed.  On July 7, four of the conspirators were hanged.

TAKING STOCK OF IT ALL

And so the war was over:  the South found itself desolate and the North simultaneously found itself in a condition of profound mourning.  The whole thing had been a sad tragedy, pushed to monumental proportions by the inability or unwillingness of American leaders before Lincoln to confront the slavery issue directly.

It finally took not political reason, but war and devastation of monumental proportions to bring this burning issue to a resolution.   But so often is this the case.  Passion, not reason, plus the mysteries of circumstances seemingly beyond human control, quite frequently bring human crises to a resolution – not pretty, but well resolved.[1]

Most tragically of all, a Southern bullet had taken the life of the one person who could have healed the nation's wounds and brought the South back to life more quickly than turned out to be the actual case.  As it was, that bullet left many in the North without pity for the South and its vast suffering – and left the South itself to begin a process of recovery that would take generations to complete.  Such is the irony of history.

[1]Of the 2.6 million who had enlisted in the Union army and the 1 million in the Confederate army, 364 thousand Union and 260 thousand Confederate soldiers had died, and approximately 400 thousand each of Union and Confederate soldiers had been wounded for their respective causes.



Go on to the next section:  America Recovers

  Miles H. Hodges