Individual
trading card from the "GENERALS OF THE LATE CIVIL WAR" set, reproduced in 1991. "A Nostalgia Reprint".
Please note that these cards were re-printed (in 1991) from a Historic Set issued by H. Ellis & Co.,Tobacco (of Baltimore, Maryland) in 1890, for "Recruit" Cigarettes, only one generation after the Civil War.
Robert Edward Lee (January 19, 1807 – October 12, 1870) was a Confederate general best known for his service to the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, during which he was appointed the overall commander of the Confederate States Army. He led the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy's most powerful army, from 1862 until its surrender in 1865. During the war, Lee earned a solid reputation as a skilled tactician, for which he was revered by his officers and men as well as respected and feared by his Union Army adversaries.
A son of Revolutionary War officer Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III, Lee was a top graduate of the United States Military Academy and an exceptional officer and military engineer in the United States Army for 32 years. During this time, he served throughout the United States, distinguished himself during the Mexican–American War, and served as Superintendent of the United States Military Academy. Lee married Mary Anna Custis Lee, adopted great-granddaughter of George Washington. When Virginia's 1861 Richmond Convention declared secession from the Union, Lee chose to follow his home state, despite his desire for the country to remain intact and an offer of a senior Union command. During the first year of the Civil War, he served in minor combat operations and as a senior military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia in June 1862 during the Peninsula Campaign following the wounding of Joseph E. Johnston. He succeeded in driving the Union Army of the Potomac under George B. McClellan away from the Confederate capital of Richmond during the Seven Days Battles, although he was unable to destroy McClellan's army. Lee then overcame Union forces under John Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run in August. His invasion of Maryland that September ended with the inconclusive Battle of Antietam, after which he retreated to Virginia. Lee then won two decisive victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville before launching a second invasion of the North in the summer of 1863, where he was decisively defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg by the Army of the Potomac under George Meade. He led his army in the minor and inconclusive Bristoe Campaign that fall before General Ulysses S. Grant took command of Union armies in the spring of 1864. Grant engaged Lee's army in bloody but inconclusive battles at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania before the lengthy Siege of Petersburg, which was followed in April 1865 by the capture of Richmond and the destruction of most of Lee's army, which he finally surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House.
In 1865, Lee became president of Washington College (later Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia; in that position, he supported reconciliation between North and South. Lee accepted "the extinction of slavery" provided for by the Thirteenth Amendment, but opposed racial equality for African Americans. After his death in 1870, Lee became a cultural icon in the South and is largely hailed as one of the Civil War's greatest generals. As commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, he fought most of his battles against armies of significantly larger size, and managed to win many of them. Lee built up a collection of talented subordinates, most notably James Longstreet, Stonewall Jackson, and J. E. B. Stuart, who along with Lee were critical to the Confederacy's battlefield success. In spite of his success, his two major strategic offensives into Union territory both ended in failure. Lee's aggressive and risky tactics, especially at Gettysburg, which resulted in high casualties at a time when the Confederacy had a shortage of manpower, have come under criticism.
Lee was born at Stratford Hall Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, to Henry Lee III and Anne Hill Carter Lee on January 19, 1807. His ancestor, Richard Lee I, emigrated from Shropshire, England to Virginia in 1639.
Lee's father suffered severe financial reverses from failed investments and was put in debtors' prison. Soon after his release the following year, the family moved to the city of Alexandria which at the time was still part of the District of Columbia (it retroceded back to Virginia in 1847), both because there were then high quality local schools there, and because several members of Anne's extended family lived nearby. In 1811, the family, including the newly born sixth child, Mildred, moved to a house on Oronoco Street.
In 1812 Lee's father moved permanently to the West Indies. Lee attended Eastern View, a school for young gentlemen, in Fauquier County, Virginia, and then at the Alexandria Academy, free for local boys, where he showed an aptitude for mathematics. Although brought up to be a practicing Christian, he was not confirmed in the Episcopal Church until age 46.
Anne Lee's family was often supported by a relative, William Henry Fitzhugh, who owned the Oronoco Street house and allowed the Lees to stay at his country home Ravensworth. Fitzhugh wrote to United States Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, urging that Robert be given an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Fitzhugh had young Robert deliver the letter. Lee entered West Point in the summer of 1825. At the time, the focus of the curriculum was engineering; the head of the United States Army Corps of Engineers supervised the school and the superintendent was an engineering officer. Cadets were not permitted leave until they had finished two years of study and were rarely allowed off the Academy grounds. Lee graduated second in his class, behind only Charles Mason (who resigned from the Army a year after graduation). Lee did not incur any demerits during his four-year course of study, a distinction shared by five of his 45 classmates. In June 1829, Lee was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. After graduation, while awaiting assignment, he returned to Virginia to find his mother on her deathbed; she died at Ravensworth on July 26, 1829.
On August 11, 1829, Brigadier General Charles Gratiot ordered Lee to Cockspur Island, Georgia. The plan was to build a fort on the marshy island which would command the outlet of the Savannah River. Lee was involved in the early stages of construction as the island was being drained and built up. In 1831, it became apparent that the existing plan to build what became known as Fort Pulaski would have to be revamped, and Lee was transferred to Fort Monroe at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula (today in Hampton, Virginia).[citation not found]
While home in the summer of 1829, Lee had apparently courted Mary Custis whom he had known as a child. Lee obtained permission to write to her before leaving for Georgia, though Mary Custis warned Lee to be "discreet" in his writing, as her mother read her letters, especially from men. Custis refused Lee the first time he asked to marry her; her father did not believe the son of the disgraced Light-Horse Harry Lee was a suitable man for his daughter. She accepted him with her father's consent in September 1830, while he was on summer leave, and the two were wed on June 30, 1831.
Lee's duties at Fort Monroe were varied, typical for a junior officer, and ranged from budgeting to designing buildings.[citation not found] Although Mary Lee accompanied her husband to Hampton Roads, she spent about a third of her time at Arlington, though the couple's first son, Custis Lee was born at Fort Monroe. Although the two were by all accounts devoted to each other, they were different in character: Robert Lee was tidy and punctual, qualities his wife lacked. Mary Lee also had trouble transitioning from being a rich man's daughter to having to manage a household with only one or two slaves. Beginning in 1832, Robert Lee had a close but platonic relationship with Harriett Talcott, wife of his fellow officer Andrew Talcott.
Life at Fort Monroe was marked by conflicts between artillery and engineering officers. Eventually, the War Department transferred all engineering officers away from Fort Monroe, except Lee, who was ordered to take up residence on the artificial island of Rip Raps across the river from Fort Monroe, where Fort Wool would eventually rise, and continue work to improve the island. Lee duly moved there, then discharged all workers and informed the War Department he could not maintain laborers without the facilities of the fort.
In 1834, Lee was transferred to Washington as General Gratiot's assistant. Lee had hoped to rent a house in Washington for his family, but was not able to find one; the family lived at Arlington, though Lieutenant Lee rented a room at a Washington boarding house for when the roads were impassable.[citation not found] In mid-1835, Lee was assigned to assist Andrew Talcott in surveying the southern border of Michigan. While on that expedition, he responded to a letter from an ill Mary Lee, which had requested he come to Arlington, "But why do you urge my immediate return, & tempt one in the strongest manner[?] ... I rather require to be strengthened & encouraged to the full performance of what I am called on to execute." Lee completed the assignment and returned to his post in Washington, finding his wife ill at Ravensworth. Mary Lee, who had recently given birth to their second child, remained bedridden for several months. In October 1836, Lee was promoted to first lieutenant.
Lee served as an assistant in the chief engineer's office in Washington, D.C. from 1834 to 1837, but spent the summer of 1835 helping to lay out the state line between Ohio and Michigan. As a first lieutenant of engineers in 1837, he supervised the engineering work for St. Louis harbor and for the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Among his projects was the mapping of the Des Moines Rapids on the Mississippi above Keokuk, Iowa, where the Mississippi's mean depth of 2.4 feet (0.7 m) was the upper limit of steamboat traffic on the river. His work there earned him a promotion to captain. Around 1842, Captain Robert E. Lee arrived as Fort Hamilton's post engineer.
While Lee was stationed at Fort Monroe, he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis (1808–1873), great-granddaughter of Martha Washington by her first husband Daniel Parke Custis, and step-great-granddaughter of George Washington, the first president of the United States. Mary was the only surviving child of George Washington Parke Custis, George Washington's stepgrandson, and Mary Lee Fitzhugh Custis, daughter of William Fitzhugh and Ann Bolling Randolph. Robert and Mary married on June 30, 1831, at Arlington House, her parents' house just across the Potomac from Washington. The 3rd U.S. Artillery served as honor guard at the marriage. They eventually had seven children, three boys and four girls:
George Washington Custis Lee (Custis, "Boo"); 1832–1913; served as major general in the Confederate Army and aide-de-camp to President Jefferson Davis, captured during the Battle of Sailor's Creek; unmarried
Mary Custis Lee (Mary, "Daughter"); 1835–1918; unmarried
William Henry Fitzhugh Lee ("Rooney"); 1837–1891; served as major general in the Confederate Army (cavalry); married twice; surviving children by second marriage
Anne Carter Lee (Annie); June 18, 1839 – October 20, 1862; died of typhoid fever, unmarried
Eleanor Agnes Lee (Agnes); 1841 – October 15, 1873; died of tuberculosis, unmarried
Robert Edward Lee, Jr. (Rob); 1843–1914; served in the Confederate Army, first as a private in the (Rockbridge Artillery), later as a Captain on the staff of his brother Rooney; married twice; surviving children by second marriage
Mildred Childe Lee (Milly, "Precious Life"); 1846–1905; unmarried
All the children survived him except for Annie, who died in 1862. They are all buried with their parents in the crypt of the Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
Lee was a great-great-great-grandson of William Randolph and a great-great-grandson of Richard Bland. He was a second cousin of Helen Keller's grandmother, and was a distant relative of Admiral Willis Augustus Lee.
On May 1, 1864, General Lee was present at the baptism of General A.P. Hill's daughter, Lucy Lee Hill, to serve as her godfather. This is referenced in the painting Tender is the Heart by Mort Künstler. He was also the godfather of actress and writer Odette Tyler, the daughter of brigadier general William Whedbee Kirkland.
Lee distinguished himself in the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). He was one of Winfield Scott's chief aides in the march from Veracruz to Mexico City. He was instrumental in several American victories through his personal reconnaissance as a staff officer; he found routes of attack that the Mexicans had not defended because they thought the terrain was impassable.
He was promoted to brevet major after the Battle of Cerro Gordo on April 18, 1847. He also fought at Contreras, Churubusco, and Chapultepec and was wounded at the last. By the end of the war, he had received additional brevet promotions to lieutenant colonel and colonel, but his permanent rank was still captain of engineers, and he would remain a captain until his transfer to the cavalry in 1855.
For the first time, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant met and worked with each other during the Mexican–American War. Close observations of their commanders constituted a learning process for both Lee and Grant. The Mexican–American War concluded on February 2, 1848.
After the Mexican War, Lee spent three years at Fort Carroll in Baltimore harbor. During this time, his service was interrupted by other duties, among them surveying and updating maps in Florida. Cuban revolutionary Narciso López intended to forcibly liberate Cuba from Spanish rule. In 1849, searching for a leader for his filibuster expedition, he approached Jefferson Davis, then a United States senator. Davis declined and suggested Lee, who also declined. Both decided it was inconsistent with their duties.
The 1850s were a difficult time for Lee, with his long absences from home, the increasing disability of his wife, troubles in taking over the management of a large slave plantation, and his often morbid concern with his personal failures.
In 1852, Lee was appointed Superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point. He was reluctant to enter what he called a "snake pit", but the War Department insisted and he obeyed. His wife occasionally came to visit. During his three years at West Point, Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee improved the buildings and courses and spent much time with the cadets. Lee's oldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, attended West Point during his tenure. Custis Lee graduated in 1854, first in his class.
Lee was enormously relieved to receive a long-awaited promotion as second-in-command of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Texas in 1855. It meant leaving the Engineering Corps and its sequence of staff jobs for the combat command he truly wanted. He served under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston at Camp Cooper, Texas; their mission was to protect settlers from attacks by the Apache and the Comanche.
In 1857, his father-in-law George Washington Parke Custis died, creating a serious crisis when Lee took on the burden of executing the will. Custis's will encompassed vast landholdings and hundreds of slaves balanced against massive debts, and required Custis's former slaves "to be emancipated by my executors in such manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease." The estate was in disarray, and the plantations had been poorly managed and were losing money. Lee tried to hire an overseer to handle the plantation in his absence, writing to his cousin, "I wish to get an energetic honest farmer, who while he will be considerate & kind to the negroes, will be firm & make them do their duty." But Lee failed to find a man for the job, and had to take a two-year leave of absence from the army in order to run the plantation himself.
Lee's more strict expectations and harsher punishments of the slaves on Arlington plantation nearly led to a slave revolt, since many of the slaves had been given to understand that they were to be made free as soon as Custis died, and protested angrily at the delay. In May 1858, Lee wrote to his son Rooney, "I have had some trouble with some of the people. Reuben, Parks & Edward, in the beginning of the previous week, rebelled against my authority—refused to obey my orders, & said they were as free as I was, etc., etc.—I succeeded in capturing them & lodging them in jail. They resisted till overpowered & called upon the other people to rescue them." Less than two months after they were sent to the Alexandria jail, Lee decided to remove these three men and three female house slaves from Arlington, and sent them under lock and key to the slave-trader William Overton Winston in Richmond, who was instructed to keep them in jail until he could find "good & responsible" slaveholders to work them until the end of the five-year period.
By 1860 only one slave family was left intact on the estate. Some of the families had been together since their time at Mount Vernon.
In 1859, three of the Arlington slaves—Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and a cousin of theirs—fled for the North, but were captured a few miles from the Pennsylvania border and forced to return to Arlington. On June 24, 1859, the anti-slavery newspaper New York Daily Tribune published two anonymous letters (dated June 19, 1859 and June 21, 1859), each claiming to have heard that Lee had the Norrises whipped, and each going so far as to claim that the overseer refused to whip the woman but that Lee took the whip and flogged her personally. Lee privately wrote to his son Custis that "The N. Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather's slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy."
Wesley Norris himself spoke out about the incident after the war, in an 1866 interview printed in an abolitionist newspaper, the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Norris stated that after they had been captured, and forced to return to Arlington, Lee told them that "he would teach us a lesson we would not soon forget." According to Norris, Lee then had the three of them firmly tied to posts by the overseer, and ordered them whipped with fifty lashes for the men and twenty for Mary Norris. Norris claimed that Lee encouraged the whipping, and that when the overseer refused to do it, called in the county constable to do it instead. Unlike the anonymous letter writers, he does not state that Lee himself whipped any of the slaves. According to Norris, Lee "frequently enjoined [Constable] Williams to 'lay it on well,' an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done."
The Norris men were then sent by Lee's agent to work on the railroads in Virginia and Alabama. According to the interview, Norris was sent to Richmond in January 1863 "from which place I finally made my escape through the rebel lines to freedom." But Federal authorities reported that Norris came within their lines on September 5, 1863, and that he "left Richmond ... with a pass from General Custis Lee." Lee freed the Custis slaves, including Wesley Norris, after the end of the five-year period in the winter of 1862, filing the deed of manumission on December 29, 1862.
Biographers of Lee have differed over the credibility of the account of the punishment as described in the letters in the Tribune and in Norris's personal account. They broadly agree that Lee had a group of escaped slaves recaptured, and that, after recapturing them, he hired them out off of the Arlington plantation as a punishment; however, they disagree over the likelihood that Lee flogged them, and over the charge that he personally whipped Mary Norris. In 1934, Douglas S. Freeman described them as "Lee's first experience with the extravagance of irresponsible antislavery agitators" and asserted that "There is no evidence, direct or indirect, that Lee ever had them or any other Negroes flogged. The usage at Arlington and elsewhere in Virginia among people of Lee's station forbade such a thing."
In 2000, Michael Fellman, in The Making of Robert E. Lee, found the claims that Lee had personally whipped Mary Norris "extremely unlikely," but found it not at all unlikely that Lee had ordered the runaways whipped: "corporal punishment (for which Lee substituted the euphemism 'firmness') was (believed to be) an intrinsic and necessary part of slave discipline. Although it was supposed to be applied only in a calm and rational manner, overtly physical domination of slaves, unchecked by law, was always brutal and potentially savage."
In 2003, Bernice-Marie Yates's The Perfect Gentleman, cited Freeman's denial and followed his account in holding that, because of Lee's family connections to George Washington, he "was a prime target for abolitionists who lacked all the facts of the situation."
Lee biographer Elizabeth Brown Pryor concluded in 2008 that "the facts are verifiable," based on "the consistency of the five extant descriptions of the episode (the only element that is not repeatedly corroborated is the allegation that Lee gave the beatings himself), as well as the existence of an account book that indicates the constable received compensation from Lee on the date that this event occurred."
In 2014, Michael Korda wrote that "Although these letters are dismissed by most of Lee's biographers as exaggerated, or simply as unfounded abolitionist propaganda, it is hard to ignore them. ... It seems incongruously out of character for Lee to have whipped a slave woman himself, particularly one stripped to the waist, and that charge may have been a flourish added by the two correspondents; it was not repeated by Wesley Norris when his account of the incident was published in 1866. ... Although it seems unlikely that he would have done any of the whipping himself, he may not have flinched from observing it to make sure his orders were carried out exactly."
Several historians have noted what they consider the contradictory nature of Lee's beliefs and actions concerning race and slavery. While Lee protested he had sympathetic feelings for blacks, they were subordinate to his own racial identity. While Lee held slavery to be an evil institution, he also saw some benefit to blacks held in slavery. While Lee helped assist individual slaves to freedom in Liberia, and provided for their emancipation in his own will, he believed the enslaved should be eventually freed in a general way only at some unspecified future date as a part of God's purpose. Slavery for Lee was a moral and religious issue, and not one that would yield to political solutions. Emancipation would sooner come from Christian impulse among slave masters before "storms and tempests of fiery controversy" such as was occurring in "Bleeding Kansas". Countering Southerners who argued for slavery as a positive good, Lee in his well-known analysis of slavery from an 1856 letter (see below) called it a moral and political evil. While both Robert and his wife Mary Lee were disgusted with slavery, they also defended it against abolitionist demands for immediate emancipation for all enslaved.
Lee argued that slavery was bad for white people but good for black people, claiming that he found slavery bothersome and time-consuming as an everyday institution to run. In an 1856 letter to his wife, he maintained that slavery was a great evil, but primarily due to adverse impact that it had on white people:
In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.
Lee's father-in-law G. W. Parke Custis freed his slaves in his will. In the same tradition, before leaving to serve in Mexico, Lee had written a will providing for the manumission of the slaves he owned, "a woman and her children inherited from his mother and apparently leased to his father-in-law and later sold to him." Parke Custis was a member of the American Colonization Society, which was formed to gradually end slavery by establishing a free republic in Liberia for African-Americans, and Lee assisted several ex-slaves to emigrate there. Also, according to historian Richard B. McCaslin, Lee was a gradual emancipationist, denouncing extremist proposals for the immediate abolition of slavery. Lee rejected what he called evilly motivated political passion, fearing a civil and servile war from precipitous emancipation.
Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor offered an alternative interpretation of Lee's voluntary manumission of slaves in his will, and assisting slaves to a life of freedom in Liberia, seeing Lee as conforming to a "primacy of slave law". She wrote that Lee's private views on race and slavery,
On taking on the role of administrator for the Parke Custis will, Lee used a provision to retain them in slavery to produce income for the estate to retire debt. Lee did not welcome the role of planter while administering the Custis properties at Romancoke, another nearby the Pamunkey River and Arlington; he rented the estate's mill. While all the estates prospered under his administration, Lee was unhappy at direct participation in slavery as a hated institution.
Even before what Michael Fellman called a "sorry involvement in actual slave management", Lee judged the experience of white mastery to be a greater moral evil to the white man than blacks suffering under the "painful discipline" of slavery which introduced Christianity, literacy and a work ethic to the "heathen African". Columbia University historian Eric Foner notes that:
By the time of Lee's career in the U.S. Army, the officers of West Point stood aloof from political-party and sectional strife on such issues as slavery, as a matter of principle, and Lee adhered to the precedent. He considered it his patriotic duty to be apolitical while in active Army service, and Lee did not speak out publicly on the subject of slavery prior to the Civil War. Before the outbreak of the War, in 1860, Lee voted for John C. Breckinridge, who was the extreme pro-slavery candidate in the 1860 presidential election, not John Bell, the more moderate Southerner who won Virginia.
Lee himself owned a small number of slaves in his lifetime and considered himself a paternalistic master. There are various historical and newspaper hearsay accounts of Lee personally whipping a slave, but they are not direct eyewitness accounts. He was definitely involved in administering the day-to-day operations of a plantation and was involved in the recapture of runaway slaves. One historian noted that Lee separated slave families, something that prominent slave-holding families in Virginia such as Washington and Custis did not do. In 1862, Lee freed the slaves that his wife inherited, but that was in accordance with his father-in-law's will.
Foner writes that "Lee's code of gentlemanly conduct did not seem to apply to blacks" during the War, as he did not stop his soldiers from kidnapping free black farmers and selling them into slavery. Princeton University historian James M. McPherson noted that Lee initially rejected a prisoner exchange between the Confederacy and the Union when the Union demanded that black Union soldiers be included. Lee did not accept the swap until a few months before the Confederacy's surrender.
After the War, Lee told a congressional committee that blacks were "not disposed to work" and did not possess the intellectual capacity to vote and participate in politics. Lee also said to the committee that he hoped that Virginia could "get rid of them," referring to blacks. While not politically active, Lee defended Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson's approach to Reconstruction, which according to Foner, "abandoned the former slaves to the mercy of governments controlled by their former owners." According to Foner, "A word from Lee might have encouraged white Southerners to accord blacks equal rights and inhibited the violence against the freed people that swept the region during Reconstruction, but he chose to remain silent." Lee was also urged to condemn the white-supremacy organization Ku Klux Klan, but opted to remain silent.
In the generation following the war, Lee, though he died just a few years later, became a central figure in the Lost Cause interpretation of the war. The argument that Lee had always somehow opposed slavery, and freed his wife's slaves, helped maintain his stature as a symbol of Southern honor and national reconciliation.
Both Harpers Ferry and the secession of Texas were monumental events leading up to the Civil War. Robert E. Lee was at both events. Lee initially remained loyal to the Union after Texas seceded.
John Brown led a band of 21 abolitionists who seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859, hoping to incite a slave rebellion. President James Buchanan gave Lee command of detachments of militia, soldiers, and United States Marines, to suppress the uprising and arrest its leaders. By the time Lee arrived that night, the militia on the site had surrounded Brown and his hostages. At dawn, Brown refused the demand for surrender. Lee attacked, and Brown and his followers were captured after three minutes of fighting. Lee's summary report of the episode shows Lee believed it "was the attempt of a fanatic or madman". Lee said Brown achieved "temporary success" by creating panic and confusion and by "magnifying" the number of participants involved in the raid.
In 1860, Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee relieved Major Heintzelman at Fort Brown, and the Mexican authorities offered to restrain "their citizens from making predatory descents upon the territory and people of Texas ... this was the last active operation of the Cortina War". Rip Ford, a Texas Ranger at the time, described Lee as "dignified without hauteur, grand without pride ... he evinced an imperturbable self-possession, and a complete control of his passions ... possessing the capacity to accomplish great ends and the gift of controlling and leading men."
When Texas seceded from the Union in February 1861, General David E. Twiggs surrendered all the American forces (about 4,000 men, including Lee, and commander of the Department of Texas) to the Texans. Twiggs immediately resigned from the U.S. Army and was made a Confederate general. Lee went back to Washington and was appointed Colonel of the First Regiment of Cavalry in March 1861. Lee's colonelcy was signed by the new president, Abraham Lincoln. Three weeks after his promotion, Colonel Lee was offered a senior command (with the rank of Major General) in the expanding Army to fight the Southern States that had left the Union. Fort Mason, Texas was Lee's last command with the United States Army.
Unlike many Southerners who expected a glorious war, Lee correctly predicted it as protracted and devastating. He privately opposed the new Confederate States of America in letters in early 1861, denouncing secession as "nothing but revolution" and an unconstitutional betrayal of the efforts of the Founding Fathers. Writing to George Washington Custis in January, Lee stated:
The South, in my opinion, has been aggrieved by the acts of the North, as you say. I feel the aggression, and am willing to take every proper step for redress. It is the principle I contend for, not individual or private benefit. As an American citizen, I take great pride in my country, her prosperity and institutions, and would defend any State if her rights were invaded. But I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation. I hope, therefore, that all constitutional means will be exhausted before there is a resort to force. Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for "perpetual union," so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or the consent of all the people in convention assembled.
Despite opposing secession, Lee said in January that "we can with a clear conscience separate" if all peaceful means failed. He agreed with secessionists in most areas, rejecting the Northern abolitionists' criticisms and their prevention of the expansion of slavery to the new western territories, and fear of the North's larger population. Lee supported the Crittenden Compromise, which would have constitutionally protected slavery.
Lee's objection to secession was ultimately outweighed by a sense of personal honor, reservations about the legitimacy of a strife-ridden "Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets", and his duty to defend his native Virginia if attacked. He was asked while leaving Texas by a lieutenant if he intended to fight for the Confederacy or the Union, to which Lee replied, "I shall never bear arms against the Union, but it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in the defense of my native state, Virginia, in which case I shall not prove recreant to my duty".
Although Virginia had the most slaves of any state, it was more similar to Maryland, which stayed in the Union, than to the Deep South; a convention voted against secession in early 1861. Scott, commanding general of the Union Army and Lee's mentor, told Lincoln he wanted him for a top command, telling Secretary of War Simon Cameron that he had "entire confidence" in Lee. Lee accepted a promotion to colonel of the 1st Cavalry Regiment on March 28, again swearing an oath to the United States. Meanwhile, Lee ignored an offer of command from the Confederacy. After Lincoln's call for troops to put down the rebellion, a second Virginia convention in Richmond voted to secede on April 17, and a May 23 referendum would likely ratify the decision. That night Lee dined with brother Smith and cousin Phillips, naval officers. Because of Lee's indecision, Phillips went to the War Department the next morning to warn that the Union might lose his cousin if the government did not act quickly.
In Washington that day, Lee was offered by presidential advisor Francis P. Blair a role as major general to command the defense of the national capital. He replied:
Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?
Lee immediately went to Scott, who tried to persuade him that Union forces would be large enough to prevent the South from fighting, so he would not have to oppose his state; Lee disagreed. When Lee asked if he could go home and not fight, the fellow Virginian said that the army did not need equivocal soldiers and that if he wanted to resign, he should do so before receiving official orders. Scott told him that Lee had made "the greatest mistake of your life".
Lee agreed that to avoid dishonor he had to resign before receiving unwanted orders. While historians have usually called his decision inevitable ("the answer he was born to make", wrote Douglas Southall Freeman; another called it a "no-brainer") given the ties to family and state, an 1871 letter from his eldest daughter, Mary Custis Lee, to a biographer described Lee as "worn and harassed" yet calm as he deliberated alone in his office. People on the street noticed Lee's grim face as he tried to decide over the next two days, and he later said that he kept the resignation letter for a day before sending it on April 20. Two days later the Richmond convention invited Lee to the city. It elected him as commander of Virginia state forces before his arrival on April 23, and almost immediately gave him George Washington's sword as symbol of his appointment; whether he was told of a decision he did not want without time to decide, or did want the excitement and opportunity of command, is unclear.
A cousin on Scott's staff told the family that Lee's decision so upset Scott that he collapsed on a sofa and mourned as if he had lost a son, and asked to not hear Lee's name. When Lee told family his decision, he said "I suppose you will all think I have done very wrong", as the others were mostly pro-Union; only Mary Custis was a secessionist, and her mother especially wanted to choose the Union, but told her husband that she would support whatever he decided. Many younger men like nephew Fitzhugh wanted to support the Confederacy, but Lee's three sons joined the Confederate military only after their father's decision.
Most family members, like brother Smith, also reluctantly chose the South, but Smith's wife and Anne, Lee's sister, still supported the Union; Anne's son joined the Union Army, and no one in his family ever spoke to Lee again. Many cousins fought for the Confederacy, but Phillips and John Fitzgerald told Lee in person that they would uphold their oaths; John H. Upshur stayed with the Union military despite much family pressure; Roger Jones stayed in the Union army after Lee refused to advise him on what to do; and two of Philip Fendall's sons fought for the Union. Forty percent of Virginian officers stayed with the North.
At the outbreak of war, Lee was appointed to command all of Virginia's forces, which then encompassed the Provisional Army of Virginia and the Virginia State Navy. He was appointed a Major General by the Virginia Governor, but upon the formation of the Confederate States Army, he was named one of its first five full generals. Lee did not wear the insignia of a Confederate general, but only the three stars of a Confederate colonel, equivalent to his last U.S. Army rank. He did not intend to wear a general's insignia until the Civil War had been won and he could be promoted, in peacetime, to general in the Confederate Army.
Lee's first field assignment was commanding Confederate forces in western Virginia, where he was defeated at the Battle of Cheat Mountain and was widely blamed for Confederate setbacks. He was then sent to organize the coastal defenses along the Carolina and Georgia seaboard, appointed commander, "Department of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida" on November 5, 1861. Between then and the fall of Fort Pulaski, April 11, 1862, he put in place a defense of Savannah that proved successful in blocking Federal advance on Savannah. Confederate fort and naval gunnery dictated nighttime movement and construction by the besiegers. Federal preparations required four months. In those four months, Lee developed a defense in depth. Behind Fort Pulaski on the Savannah River, Fort Jackson was improved, and two additional batteries covered river approaches. In the face of the Union superiority in naval, artillery and infantry deployment, Lee was able to block any Federal advance on Savannah, and at the same time, well-trained Georgia troops were released in time to meet McClellan's Peninsula Campaign. The city of Savannah would not fall until Sherman's approach from the interior at the end of 1864.
At first, the press spoke to the disappointment of losing Fort Pulaski. Surprised by the effectiveness of large caliber Parrott Rifles in their first deployment, it was widely speculated that only betrayal could have brought overnight surrender to a Third System Fort. Lee was said to have failed to get effective support in the Savannah River from the three sidewheeler gunboats of the Georgia Navy. Although again blamed by the press for Confederate reverses, he was appointed military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, the former U.S. Secretary of War. While in Richmond, Lee was ridiculed as the 'King of Spades' for his excessive digging of trenches around the capitol. These trenches would later play a pivotal role in battles near the end of the war.
In the spring of 1862, in the Peninsula Campaign, the Union Army of the Potomac under General George B. McClellan advanced on Richmond from Fort Monroe to the east. McClellan forced Gen. Joseph E. Johnston and the Army of Virginia to retreat to just north and east of the Confederate capital.
Then Johnston was wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines, on June 1, 1862. Lee now got his first opportunity to lead an army in the field – the force he renamed the Army of Northern Virginia, signalling his confidence that the Union army would be driven away from Richmond. Early in the war, Lee had been called "Granny Lee" for his allegedly timid style of command. Confederate newspaper editorials objected to him replacing Johnston, opining that Lee would be passive, waiting for Union attack. And for the first three weeks of June, he did not attack, instead strengthening Richmond's defenses.
But then he launched a series of bold attacks against McClellan's forces, the Seven Days Battles. Despite superior Union numbers and some clumsy tactical performances by his subordinates, Lee's attacks derailed McClellan's plans and drove back part of his forces. Confederate casualties were heavy, but McClellan was unnerved, retreated 25 miles (40 km) to the lower James River, and abandoned the Peninsula Campaign. This success completely changed Confederate morale and the public's regard for Lee. After the Seven Days Battles, and until the end of the war, his men called him simply "Marse Robert", a term of respect and affection.
The setback, and the resulting drop in Union morale, impelled Lincoln to adopt a new policy of relentless, committed warfare. After the Seven Days, Lincoln decided he would move to emancipate most Confederate slaves by executive order, as a military act, using his authority as commander-in-chief. But he needed a Union victory first.
Meanwhile, Lee defeated another Union army under Gen. John Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run. In less than 90 days after taking command, Lee had run McClellan off the Peninsula, defeated Pope, and moved the battle lines 82 miles (132 km) north, from just outside Richmond to 20 miles (32 km) south of Washington.
Lee now invaded Maryland and Pennsylvania, hoping to collect supplies in Union territory, and possibly win a victory that would sway the upcoming Union elections in favor of ending the war. But McClellan's men found a lost Confederate dispatch, Special Order 191, that revealed Lee's plans and movements. McClellan always exaggerated Lee's numerical strength, but now he knew the Confederate army was divided and could be destroyed in detail. However, McClellan moved slowly, not realizing a spy had informed Lee that McClellan had the plans. Lee quickly concentrated his forces west of Antietam Creek, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, where McClellan attacked on September 17. The Battle of Antietam was the single bloodiest day of the war, with both sides suffering enormous losses. Lee's army barely withstood the Union assaults, then retreated to Virginia the next day. This narrow Confederate defeat gave President Abraham Lincoln the opportunity to issue his Emancipation Proclamation, which put the Confederacy on the diplomatic and moral defensive.
Disappointed by McClellan's failure to destroy Lee's army, Lincoln named Ambrose Burnside as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Burnside ordered an attack across the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Delays in bridging the river allowed Lee's army ample time to organize strong defenses, and the Union frontal assault on December 13, 1862, was a disaster. There were 12,600 Union casualties to 5,000 Confederate; one of the most one-sided battles in the Civil War. After this victory, Lee reportedly said, "It is well that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it." At Fredericksburg, according to historian Michael Fellman, Lee had completely entered into the "spirit of war, where destructiveness took on its own beauty."
After the bitter Union defeat at Fredericksburg, President Lincoln named Joseph Hooker commander of the Army of the Potomac. In May 1863, Hooker maneuvered to attack Lee's army via Chancellorsville, Virginia. But Hooker was defeated by Lee's daring maneuver: dividing his army and sending Stonewall Jackson's corps to attack Hooker's flank. Lee won a decisive victory over a larger force, but with heavy casualties, including Jackson, his finest corps commander, who was accidentally killed by his own troops.
The critical decisions came in May–June 1863, after Lee's smashing victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville. The western front was crumbling, as multiple uncoordinated Confederate armies were unable to handle General Ulysses S. Grant's campaign against Vicksburg. The top military advisers wanted to save Vicksburg, but Lee persuaded Davis to overrule them and authorize yet another invasion of the North. The immediate goal was to acquire urgently needed supplies from the rich farming districts of Pennsylvania; a long-term goal was to stimulate peace activity in the North by demonstrating the power of the South to invade. Lee's decision proved a significant strategic blunder and cost the Confederacy control of its western regions, and nearly cost Lee his own army as Union forces cut him off from the South.
In the summer of 1863, Lee invaded the North again, marching through western Maryland and into south central Pennsylvania. He encountered Union forces under George G. Meade at the three-day Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania in July; the battle would produce the largest number of casualties in the American Civil War. With some of his subordinates being new and inexperienced in their commands, J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry being out of the area, and Lee being slightly ill, he was less than comfortable with how events were unfolding. While the first day of battle was controlled by the Confederates, key terrain that should have been taken by General Ewell was not. The second day ended with the Confederates unable to break the Union position, and the Union being more solidified. Lee's decision on the third day, against the judgment of his best corps commander General Longstreet, to launch a massive frontal assault on the center of the Union line turned out to be disastrous. The assault known as Pickett's Charge was repulsed and resulted in heavy Confederate losses. The general rode out to meet his retreating army and proclaimed, "All this has been my fault." Lee was compelled to retreat. Despite flooded rivers that blocked his retreat, he escaped Meade's ineffective pursuit. Following his defeat at Gettysburg, Lee sent a letter of resignation to President Davis on August 8, 1863, but Davis refused Lee's request. That fall, Lee and Meade met again in two minor campaigns that did little to change the strategic standoff. The Confederate Army never fully recovered from the substantial losses incurred during the three-day battle in southern Pennsylvania. The historian Shelby Foote stated, "Gettysburg was the price the South paid for having Robert E. Lee as commander."
In 1864 the new Union general-in-chief, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, sought to use his large advantages in manpower and material resources to destroy Lee's army by attrition, pinning Lee against his capital of Richmond. Lee successfully stopped each attack, but Grant with his superior numbers kept pushing each time a bit farther to the southeast. These battles in the Overland Campaign included the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House and Cold Harbor.
Grant eventually was able to stealthily move his army across the James River. After stopping a Union attempt to capture Petersburg, Virginia, a vital railroad link supplying Richmond, Lee's men built elaborate trenches and were besieged in Petersburg, a development which presaged the trench warfare of World War I. Lee attempted to break the stalemate by sending Jubal A. Early on a raid through the Shenandoah Valley to Washington, D.C., but Early was defeated early on by the superior forces of Philip Sheridan. The Siege of Petersburg lasted from June 1864 until March 1865, with Lee's outnumbered and poorly supplied army shrinking daily because of desertions by disheartened Confederates.
On February 6, 1865, Lee was appointed General in Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States.
As the South ran out of manpower the issue of arming the slaves became paramount. Lee explained, "We should employ them without delay ... [along with] gradual and general emancipation". The first units were in training as the war ended. As the Confederate army was devastated by casualties, disease and desertion, the Union attack on Petersburg succeeded on April 2, 1865. Lee abandoned Richmond and retreated west. Lee then made an attempt to escape to the southwest and join up with Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee in North Carolina. However, his forces were soon surrounded and he surrendered them to Grant on April 9, 1865, at the Battle of Appomattox Court House. Other Confederate armies followed suit and the war ended. The day after his surrender, Lee issued his Farewell Address to his army.
Lee resisted calls by some officers to reject surrender and allow small units to melt away into the mountains, setting up a lengthy guerrilla war. He insisted the war was over and energetically campaigned for inter-sectional reconciliation. "So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South."
After the war, Lee was not arrested or punished (although he was indicted), but he did lose the right to vote as well as some property. Lee's prewar family home, the Custis-Lee Mansion, was seized by Union forces during the war and turned into Arlington National Cemetery, and his family was not compensated until more than a decade after his death.
In 1866 Lee counseled southerners not to resume fighting, of which Grant said Lee was "setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized". Lee joined with Democrats in opposing the Radical Republicans who demanded punitive measures against the South, distrusted its commitment to the abolition of slavery and, indeed, distrusted the region's loyalty to the United States. Lee supported a system of free public schools for blacks but forthrightly opposed allowing blacks to vote. "My own opinion is that, at this time, they [black Southerners] cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the [vote] would lead to a great deal of demagogism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways," Lee stated. Emory Thomas says Lee had become a suffering Christ-like icon for ex-Confederates. President Grant invited him to the White House in 1869, and he went. Nationally he became an icon of reconciliation between the North and South, and the reintegration of former Confederates into the national fabric.
Lee hoped to retire to a farm of his own, but he was too much a regional symbol to live in obscurity. From April to June 1865, he and his family resided in Richmond at the Stewart-Lee House. He accepted an offer to serve as the president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia, and served from October 1865 until his death. The Trustees used his famous name in large-scale fund-raising appeals and Lee transformed Washington College into a leading Southern college, expanding its offerings significantly, adding programs in commerce and journalism, and incorporating the Lexington Law School. Lee was well liked by the students, which enabled him to announce an "honor system" like that of West Point, explaining that "we have but one rule here, and it is that every student be a gentleman." To speed up national reconciliation Lee recruited students from the North and made certain they were well treated on campus and in town.
Several glowing appraisals of Lee's tenure as college president have survived, depicting the dignity and respect he commanded among all. Previously, most students had been obliged to occupy the campus dormitories, while only the most mature were allowed to live off-campus. Lee quickly reversed this rule, requiring most students to board off-campus, and allowing only the most mature to live in the dorms as a mark of privilege; the results of this policy were considered a success. A typical account by a professor there states that "the students fairly worshipped him, and deeply dreaded his displeasure; yet so kind, affable, and gentle was he toward them that all loved to approach him. ... No student would have dared to violate General Lee's expressed wish or appeal."
While at Washington College, Lee told a colleague that the greatest mistake of his life was taking a military education. He also defended his father in a biographical sketch.
On May 29, 1865, President Andrew Johnson issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon to persons who had participated in the rebellion against the United States. There were fourteen excepted classes, though, and members of those classes had to make special application to the President. Lee sent an application to Grant and wrote to President Johnson on June 13, 1865:
Being excluded from the provisions of amnesty & pardon contained in the proclamation of the 29th Ulto; I hereby apply for the benefits, & full restoration of all rights & privileges extended to those included in its terms. I graduated at the Mil. Academy at West Point in June 1829. Resigned from the U.S. Army April '61. Was a General in the Confederate Army, & included in the surrender of the Army of N. Virginia 9 April '65.
On October 2, 1865, the same day that Lee was inaugurated as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, he signed his Amnesty Oath, thereby complying fully with the provision of Johnson's proclamation. Lee was not pardoned, nor was his citizenship restored.
Three years later, on December 25, 1868, Johnson proclaimed a second amnesty which removed previous exceptions, such as the one that affected Lee.
Lee, who had opposed secession and remained mostly indifferent to politics before the Civil War, supported President Andrew Johnson's plan of Presidential Reconstruction that took effect in 1865–66. However, he opposed the Congressional Republican program that took effect in 1867. In February 1866, he was called to testify before the Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction in Washington, where he expressed support for Johnson's plans for quick restoration of the former Confederate states, and argued that restoration should return, as far as possible, to the status quo ante in the Southern states' governments (with the exception of slavery).
Lee told the committee that "every one with whom I associate expresses kind feelings towards the freedmen. They wish to see them get on in the world, and particularly to take up some occupation for a living, and to turn their hands to some work." Lee also expressed his "willingness that blacks should be educated, and ... that it would be better for the blacks and for the whites." Lee forthrightly opposed allowing blacks to vote: "My own opinion is that, at this time, they [black Southerners] cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the [vote] would lead to a great deal of demagogism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways."
In an interview in May 1866, Lee said: "The Radical party are likely to do a great deal of harm, for we wish now for good feeling to grow up between North and South, and the President, Mr. Johnson, has been doing much to strengthen the feeling in favor of the Union among us. The relations between the Negroes and the whites were friendly formerly, and would remain so if legislation be not passed in favor of the blacks, in a way that will only do them harm."
In 1868, Lee's ally Alexander H. H. Stuart drafted a public letter of endorsement for the Democratic Party's presidential campaign, in which Horatio Seymour ran against Lee's old foe Republican Grant. Lee signed it along with thirty-one other ex-Confederates. The Democratic campaign, eager to publicize the endorsement, published the statement widely in newspapers. Their letter claimed paternalistic concern for the welfare of freed Southern blacks, stating that "The idea that the Southern people are hostile to the negroes and would oppress them, if it were in their power to do so, is entirely unfounded. They have grown up in our midst, and we have been accustomed from childhood to look upon them with kindness." However, it also called for the restoration of white political rule, arguing that "It is true that the people of the South, in common with a large majority of the people of the North and West, are, for obvious reasons, inflexibly opposed to any system of laws that would place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race. But this opposition springs from no feeling of enmity, but from a deep-seated conviction that, at present, the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power."
In his public statements and private correspondence, Lee argued that a tone of reconciliation and patience would further the interests of white Southerners better than hotheaded antagonism to federal authority or the use of violence. Lee repeatedly expelled white students from Washington College for violent attacks on local black men, and publicly urged obedience to the authorities and respect for law and order. He privately chastised fellow ex-Confederates such as Davis and Jubal Early for their frequent, angry responses to perceived Northern insults, writing in private to them as he had written to a magazine editor in 1865, that "It should be the object of all to avoid controversy, to allay passion, give full scope to reason and to every kindly feeling. By doing this and encouraging our citizens to engage in the duties of life with all their heart and mind, with a determination not to be turned aside by thoughts of the past and fears of the future, our country will not only be restored in material prosperity, but will be advanced in science, in virtue and in religion."
On September 28, 1870, Lee suffered a stroke. He died two weeks later, shortly after 9 a.m. on October 12, 1870, in Lexington, Virginia, from the effects of pneumonia. According to one account, his last words on the day of his death, were "Tell Hill he must come up! Strike the tent", but this is debatable because of conflicting accounts and because Lee's stroke had resulted in aphasia, possibly rendering him unable to speak.
At first no suitable coffin for the body could be located. The muddy roads were too flooded for anyone to get in or out of the town of Lexington. An undertaker had ordered three from Richmond that had reached Lexington, but due to unprecedented flooding from long-continued heavy rains, the caskets were washed down the Maury River. Two neighborhood boys, C.G. Chittum and Robert E. Hillis, found one of the coffins that had been swept ashore. Undamaged, it was used for the General's body, though it was a bit short for him. As a result, Lee was buried without shoes. He was buried underneath Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University, where his body remains.
Among the supporters of the Confederacy, Lee came to be even more revered after his surrender than he had been during the war, when Stonewall Jackson had been the great Confederate hero. In an address before the Southern Historical Society in Atlanta, Georgia in 1874, Benjamin Harvey Hill described Lee in this way:
He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbour without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guile. He was a Caesar, without his ambition; Frederick, without his tyranny; Napoleon, without his selfishness, and Washington, without his reward.
By the end of the 19th century, Lee's popularity had spread to the North. Lee's admirers have pointed to his character and devotion to duty, and his occasional tactical successes in battles against a stronger foe.
According to my notion of military history there is as much instruction both in strategy and in tactics to be gleaned from General Lee's operations of 1862 as there is to be found in Napoleon's campaigns of 1796.
— Field Marshal Garnet Wolseley
Military historians continue to pay attention to his battlefield tactics and maneuvering, though many think he should have designed better strategic plans for the Confederacy. He was not given full direction of the Southern war effort until late in the conflict.
Historian Eric Foner writes that at the end of his life,
Robert E. Lee has been commemorated on U.S. postage stamps at least five times, the first one being a commemorative stamp that also honored Stonewall Jackson, issued in 1936. A second "regular-issue" stamp was issued in 1955. He was commemorated with a 32-cent stamp issued in the American Civil War Issue of June 29, 1995. His horse Traveller is pictured in the background.
Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia was commemorated on its 200th anniversary on November 23, 1948, with a 3-cent postage stamp. The central design is a view of the university, flanked by portraits of generals George Washington and Robert E. Lee. Lee was again commemorated on a commemorative stamp in 1970, along with Jefferson Davis and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, depicted on horseback on the 6-cent Stone Mountain Memorial commemorative issue, modeled after the actual Stone Mountain Memorial carving in Georgia. The stamp was issued on September 19, 1970, in conjunction with the dedication of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial in Georgia on May 9, 1970. The design of the stamp replicates the memorial, the largest high relief sculpture in the world. It is carved on the side of Stone Mountain 400 feet above the ground.
Stone Mountain also led to Lee's appearance on a commemorative coin, the 1925 Stone Mountain Memorial half dollar. During the 1920s and '30s dozens of specially designed half dollars were struck to raise money for various events and causes. This issue had a particularly wide distribution, with 1,314,709 minted. Unlike some of the other issues it remains a very common coin.
In 1865, after the war, Lee was paroled and signed an oath of allegiance, asking to have his citizenship of the United States restored. However, his application was not processed by Secretary of State William Seward, a radical Republican and firm opponent of slavery, and as a result Lee did not receive a pardon and his citizenship was not restored. On January 30, 1975, Senate Joint Resolution 23, A joint resolution to restore posthumously full rights of citizenship to General R. E. Lee was introduced into the Senate by Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr. (I-VA), the result of a five-year campaign to accomplish this. Proponents portrayed the lack of pardon as a mere clerical error. The resolution, which enacted Public Law 94–67, was passed, and the bill was signed by President Gerald Ford on September 5.
Lee opposed the construction of public memorials to Confederate rebellion on the grounds that they would prevent the healing of wounds inflicted during the war. Nevertheless, after his death, he became an icon used by promoters of "Lost Cause" mythology, who sought to romanticize the Confederate cause and strengthen white supremacy in the South. Later in the 20th century, particularly following the civil rights movement, historians reassessed Lee; his reputation fell based on his failure to support rights for freedmen after the war, and even his strategic choices as a military leader fell under scrutiny.
Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, also known as the Custis–Lee Mansion, is a Greek revival mansion in Arlington, Virginia, that was once Lee's home. It overlooks the Potomac River and the National Mall in Washington, D.C. During the Civil War, the grounds of the mansion were selected as the site of Arlington National Cemetery, in part to ensure that Lee would never again be able to return to his home. The United States designated the mansion as a National Memorial to Lee in 1955, a mark of widespread respect for him in both the North and South.
In Richmond, Virginia, a large equestrian statue of Lee by French sculptor Jean Antonin Mercié was the centerpiece of Monument Avenue, along with four other statues of Confederates. This monument to Lee was unveiled on May 29, 1890; over 100,000 people attended this dedication. That has been described as "the day white Virginia stopped admiring Gen. Robert E. Lee and started worshiping him". The four other Confederate statutes were removed in 2020, and the equestrian statue of Lee was removed on 8 September 2021 at the direction of the state government.
Lee is also shown mounted on Traveller in Gettysburg National Military Park on top of the Virginia Monument; he is facing roughly in the direction of Pickett's Charge. Lee's portrayal on a mural on Richmond's flood wall on the James River, considered offensive by some, was removed in the late 1990s, but currently is back on the flood wall.
In Baltimore's Wyman Park, a large double equestrian statue of Lee and Jackson is located directly across from the Baltimore Museum of Art. Designed by Laura Gardin Fraser and dedicated in 1948, Lee is depicted astride his horse Traveller next to Stonewall Jackson who is mounted on "Little Sorrel." Architect John Russell Pope created the base, which was dedicated on the anniversary of the eve of the Battle of Chancellorsville. The Baltimore area of Maryland is also home to a large nature park called Robert E. Lee Memorial Park.
A statue of Robert E. Lee was one of the two statues (the other is George Washington) representing Virginia in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. It was removed from the Capitol on December 21, 2020 after a state commission voted to replace it with a statue of Civil Rights activist Barbara Rose Johns. Lee is one of the figures depicted in bas-relief carved into Stone Mountain near Atlanta. Accompanying him on horseback in the relief are Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis.
The birthday of Robert E. Lee is celebrated or commemorated in several states. In Texas, he is celebrated as part of Confederate Heroes Day on January 19, Lee's birthday. In Alabama and Mississippi, his birthday is celebrated on the same day as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, while in Georgia, this occurred on the day after Thanksgiving before 2016, when the state stopped officially recognizing the holiday. In Virginia, Lee–Jackson Day was celebrated on the Friday preceding Martin Luther King, Jr. Day which is the third Monday in January, until 2020, when the Virginia legislature eliminated the holiday, making Election Day a state holiday instead.
One United States college and one junior college are named for Lee: Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia; and Lee College in Baytown, Texas, respectively. Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University marks Lee's final resting place. Throughout the South, many primary and secondary schools were also named for him as well as private schools such as Robert E. Lee Academy in Bishopville, South Carolina.
In 1862, the newly formed Confederate Navy purchased a 642-ton iron-hulled side-wheel gunboat, built in at Glasgow, Scotland, and gave her the name of CSS Robert E. Lee in honor of this Confederate General. During the next year, she became one of the South's most famous Confederate blockade runners, successfully making more than twenty runs through the Union blockade.
The Mississippi River steamboat Robert E. Lee was named for Lee after the Civil War. It was the participant in an 1870 St. Louis – New Orleans race with the Natchez VI, which was featured in a Currier and Ives lithograph. The Robert E. Lee won the race. The steamboat inspired the 1912 song Waiting for the Robert E. Lee by Lewis F. Muir and L. Wolfe Gilbert. In more modern times, the USS Robert E. Lee, a George Washington-class submarine built in 1958, was named for Lee, as was the M3 Lee tank, produced in 1941 and 1942.
The Commonwealth of Virginia issues an optional license plate honoring Lee, making reference to him as 'The Virginia Gentleman'. In February 2014, a road at Fort Bliss previously named for Lee was renamed to honor Buffalo Soldiers.
A recent biographer, Jonathan Horn, outlines the unsuccessful efforts in Washington to memorialize Lee in the naming of the Arlington Memorial Bridge after both Grant and Lee.
In February 2017, the City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia, voted to remove a sculpture of Lee, who has no historical link to the city, as well as one of Stonewall Jackson. This was temporarily stayed by court action, though the city did rename Lee Park: first to Emancipation Park, then later to Market Street Park. The prospect of the statues being removed and the parks being renamed brought many out-of-towners, described as white supremacist and alt-right, to Charlottesville in the Unite the Right rally of August 2017, in which 3 people died. As of July 2021, the statue has been permanently removed.
Several other statues and monuments to Lee were removed in the aftermath of the incident, including:
A 60-foot (18 m)-tall monument in the center of Lee Circle (formerly Tivoli Circle) in New Orleans. Installed in 1884, it featured a 16.5-foot (5.0 m) bronze statue of Lee on a marble column. Former Confederate soldier George Washington Cable described it in a tribute: "His arms are folded on that breast that never knew fear, and his calm, dauntless gaze meets the morning sun as it rises." The statue was removed on May 19, 2017, the last of four Confederate monuments in New Orleans to be taken down.
A stained-glass window in the Washington National Cathedral, showing Lee on horseback at Chancellorsville, as well as one in honor of Stonewall Jackson. Sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, they were installed in 1953 and removed in September 2017. The cathedral plans to keep the windows and eventually display them in historical context.
A bust of Lee in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans (the first Hall of Fame in the United States, completed 1900), in what is now Bronx Community College.
A bronze statue of Lee which had been on display at the University of Texas at Austin, and another, with his horse Traveller, in Robert E. Lee Park in Dallas.
Douglas Southall Freeman's Pulitzer prize-winning four-volume R. E. Lee: A Biography (1936), which was for a long period considered the definitive work on Lee, downplayed his involvement in slavery and emphasized Lee as a virtuous person. Eric Foner, who describes Freeman's volume as a "hagiography", notes that on the whole, Freeman "displayed little interest in Lee's relationship to slavery. The index to his four volumes contained 22 entries for 'devotion to duty', 19 for 'kindness', 53 for Lee's celebrated horse, Traveller. But 'slavery', 'slave emancipation' and 'slave insurrection' together received five. Freeman observed, without offering details, that slavery in Virginia represented the system 'at its best'. He ignored the postwar testimony of Lee's former slave Wesley Norris about the brutal treatment to which he had been subjected."
More recent biographies offer a broader variety of perspectives. Thomas L. Connelly’s The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (1977) was an iconoclastic revision of Lee's mythical status in the South. Robert E. Lee: A Biography (1995) by Emory M. Thomas attempted a "post-revisionist" compromise between the traditional and more recent views. Robert E. Lee: A Life (2021) by Allen C. Guelzo focuses on a study of Lee's character.
Lee is a main character in the Shaara Family novels The Killer Angels (1974, Gettysburg), Gods and Generals (1996), and The Last Full Measure (2000), as well as the film adaptations of Gettysburg (1993) and Gods and Generals (2003). He is played by Martin Sheen in the former and by Lee's descendant Robert Duvall in the latter. Lee is portrayed as a hero in the historical children's novel Lee and Grant at Appomattox (1950) by MacKinlay Kantor. His part in the Civil War is told from the perspective of his horse in Richard Adams's book Traveller (1988).
Lee is an obvious subject for American Civil War alternate histories. Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee (1953), MacKinlay Kantor's If the South Had Won the Civil War (1960), and Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South (1992), all have Lee ending up as President of a victorious Confederacy and freeing the slaves (or laying the groundwork for the slaves to be freed in a later decade). Although Moore and Kantor's novels relegate him to a set of passing references, Lee is more of a main character in Turtledove's Guns. He is also the prime character of Turtledove's "Lee at the Alamo". Turtledove's "War Between the Provinces" series is an allegory of the Civil War told in the language of fairy tales, with Lee appearing as a knight named "Duke Edward of Arlington". Lee is also a knight in "The Charge of Lee's Brigade" in Alternate Generals volume 1, written by Turtledove's friend S. M. Stirling and featuring Lee, whose Virginia is still a loyal British colony, fighting for the Crown against the Russians in Crimea. In Lee Allred's "East of Appomattox" in Alternate Generals volume 3, Lee is the Confederate Minister to London circa 1868, desperately seeking help for a CSA which has turned out poorly suited to independence. Robert Skimin's Grey Victory features Lee as a supporting character preparing to run for the presidency in 1867.
In Connie Willis' 1987 novel Lincoln's Dreams, a research assistant meets a young woman who dreams about the Civil War from Robert E. Lee's point of view.
The Dodge Charger featured in the CBS television series The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–1985) was named The General Lee. In the 2005 film based on this series, the car is driven past a statue of Lee, while the car's occupants salute him.
The
American Civil War
was a civil war in the United States fought from 1861 to 1865. The
Union faced secessionists in eleven Southern states grouped togther
as the Confederate States of America. The Union won the war, which
remains the bloodiest in U.S. history.
Among the
34 U.S. states in January 1861, seven Southern slave states
individually declared their secession from the U.S. and formed the
Confederate States of America. War broke out in April 1861 when they
attacked a U.S. fortress, Fort Sumter. The Confederacy grew to
include eleven states; it claimed two more states and several western
territories. The Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by
any foreign country. The states that remained loyal including border
states where slavery was legal, were known as the Union or the North.
The war ended with the surrender of all the Confederate armies and
the collapse of Confederate government in spring 1865.
The
war had its origin in the factious issue of slavery, especially the
extension of slavery into the western territories. Four years of
intense combat left 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers dead, a higher number
than the American military deaths of World War I and World War II
combined, and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure. The
Confederacy collapsed and slavery was abolished in the entire
country. The Reconstruction Era (1863–1877) overlapped and followed
the war, with its fitful process of restoring national unity,
strengthening the national government, and guaranteeing civil rights
to the freed slaves.
HISTORY: In the 1860 presidential
election, Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, supported banning
slavery in all the U.S. territories, something the Southern states
viewed as a violation of their constitutional rights and as being
part of a plan to eventually abolish slavery. The Republican Party,
dominant in the North, secured a majority of the electoral votes, and
Lincoln was elected the first Republican president, but before his
inauguration, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed
the Confederacy. The first six to secede had the highest proportions
of slaves in their populations, a total of 48.8 percent. Eight
remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession.
Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming
Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln's March 4, 1861
inaugural address declared his administration would not initiate
civil war. Speaking directly to "the Southern States," he
reaffirmed, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to
interfere with the institution of slavery in the United States where
it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no
inclination to do so." Confederate forces seized numerous
federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. Efforts at
compromise failed, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates
assumed that European countries were so dependent on "King
Cotton" that they would intervene; none did, and none recognized
the new Confederate States of America.
Hostilities began
on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter.
While in the Western Theater the Union made significant permanent
gains, in the Eastern Theater, battle was inconclusive in 1861–62.
The autumn 1862 Confederate campaigns into Maryland and Kentucky
failed, dissuading British intervention. Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal. To
the west, by summer 1862 the Union destroyed the Confederate river
navy, then much of their western armies, and seized New Orleans. The
1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the
Mississippi River. In 1863, Robert E. Lee's Confederate incursion
north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to
Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. Inflicting an
ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports, the Union
marshaled the resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from
all directions, leading to the fall of Atlanta to William T. Sherman
and his march to the sea. The last significant battles raged around
the Siege of Petersburg. Lee's escape attempt ended with his
surrender at Appomattox Court House, on April 9, 1865. While the
military war was coming to an end, the political reintegration of the
nation was to take another 12 years of the Reconstruction Era.
The
American Civil War was one of the earliest true industrial wars.
Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, and mass-produced weapons were
employed extensively. The mobilization of civilian factories, mines,
shipyards, banks, transportation and food supplies all foreshadowed
the impact of industrialization in World War I. It remains the
deadliest war in American history. From 1861 to 1865, it has been
traditionally estimated that about 620,000 died but recent
scholarship argues that 750,000 soldiers died, along with an
undetermined number of civilians. By one estimate, the war claimed
the lives of 10 percent of all Northern males 20–45 years old, and
30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18–40.
CAUSES
OF SECESSION: The causes of the Civil War were complex and have been
controversial since the war began. James C. Bradford wrote that the
issue has been further complicated by historical revisionists, who
have tried to offer a variety of reasons for the war. Slavery was the
central source of escalating political tension in the 1850s. The
Republican Party was determined to prevent any spread of slavery, and
many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican
candidate, Lincoln, won the 1860 election. After Lincoln won without
carrying a single Southern state, many Southern whites felt that
disunion had become their only option, because they thought that they
were losing representation, which would hamper their ability to
promote pro-slavery acts and policies.
SLAVERY:
Contemporary actors, the Union and Confederate leadership and
fighting soldiers on both sides believed that slavery caused the
Civil War. Union men mainly believed the war was to emancipate the
slaves. Confederates fought to protect southern society, and slavery
as an integral part of it From the anti-slavery perspective, the
issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an
anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the
United States. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was
containment — to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path
to gradual extinction. The slave-holding interests in the South
denounced this strategy as infringing upon their Constitutional
rights. Southern whites believed that the emancipation of slaves
would destroy the South's economy because of the alleged laziness of
blacks under free labour
. Slavery was illegal in the
North, having been outlawed in the late 18th and early 19th century.
It was fading in the border states and in Southern cities, but was
expanding in the highly profitable cotton districts of the South and
Southwest. Subsequent writers on the American Civil War looked to
several factors explaining the geographic divide, including
sectionalism, protectionism, and state's rights.
SECTIONALISM:
Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social structure,
customs and political values of the North and South. It increased
steadily between 1800 and 1860 as the North, which phased slavery out
of existence, industrialized, urbanized, and built prosperous farms,
while the deep South concentrated on plantation agriculture based on
slave labour, together with subsistence farming for poor freedmen. In
the 1840s and 50s, the issue of accepting slavery (in the guise of
rejecting slave-owning bishops and missionaries) split the nation's
largest religious denominations (the Methodist, Baptist and
Presbyterian churches) into separate Northern and Southern
denominations.
Historians have debated whether economic
differences between the industrial Northeast and the agricultural
South helped cause the war. Most historians now disagree with the
economic determinism of historian Charles A. Beard in the 1920s and
emphasize that Northern and Southern economies were largely
complementary. While socially different, the sections economically
benefited each other.
PROTECTIONISM: Historically,
southern slave-holding states, because of their low cost manual
labour, had little perceived need for mechanization, and supported
having the right to sell cotton and purchase manufactured goods from
any nation. Northern states, which had heavily invested in their
still-nascent manufacturing, could not compete with the full-fledged
industries of Europe in offering high prices for cotton imported from
the South and low prices for manufactured exports in return. Thus,
northern manufacturing interests supported tariffs and protectionism
while southern planters demanded free trade.
The
Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote the tariff
laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates so that
the 1857 rates were the lowest since 1816. The Whigs and Republicans
complained because they favoured high tariffs to stimulate industrial
growth, and Republicans called for an increase in tariffs in the 1860
election. The increases were only enacted in 1861 after Southerners
resigned their seats in Congress. The tariff issue was and is
sometimes cited–long after the war–by Lost Cause historians and
neo-Confederate apologists. In 1860–61 none of the groups that
proposed compromises to head off secession raised the tariff issue.
Pamphleteers North and South rarely mentioned the tariff, and when
some did, for instance, Matthew Fontaine Maury and John Lothrop
Motley, they were generally writing for a foreign audience.
STATES’
RIGHTS: The South argued that each state had the right to
secede–leave the Union–at any time, that the Constitution was a
"compact" or agreement among the states. Northerners
(including President Buchanan) rejected that notion as opposed to the
will of the Founding Fathers who said they were setting up a
perpetual union. Historian James McPherson writes concerning states'
rights and other non-slavery explanations: While one or more of these
interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans
and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now
subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states'-rights
argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question,
states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was
always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain
goal more than a principle.
TERRITORIAL CRISIS: Between
1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of
territory through purchase, negotiation, and conquest. At first, the
new states carved out of these territories entering the union were
apportioned equally between slave and free states. It was over
territories west of the Mississippi that the proslavery and
antislavery forces collided.
With the conquest of
northern Mexico west to California in 1848, slaveholding interests
looked forward to expanding into these lands and perhaps Cuba and
Central America as well. Northern "free soil" interests
vigorously sought to curtail any further expansion of slave
territory. The Compromise of 1850 over California balanced a free
soil state with stronger fugitive slave laws for a political
settlement after four years of strife in the 1840s. But the states
admitted following California were all free: Minnesota (1858), Oregon
(1859) and Kansas (1861). In the southern states the question of the
territorial expansion of slavery westward again became explosive.
Both the South and the North drew the same conclusion: "The
power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the
power to determine the future of slavery itself."
By
1860, four doctrines had emerged to answer the question of federal
control in the territories, and they all claimed they were sanctioned
by the Constitution, implicitly or explicitly. The first of these
"conservative" theories, represented by the Constitutional
Union Party, argued that the Missouri Compromise apportionment of
territory north for free soil and south for slavery should become a
Constitutional mandate. The Crittenden Compromise of 1860 was an
expression of this view.
The second doctrine of
Congressional preeminence, championed by Abraham Lincoln and the
Republican Party, insisted that the Constitution did not bind
legislators to a policy of balance – that slavery could be excluded
in a territory as it was done in the Northwest Ordinance at the
discretion of Congress, thus Congress could restrict human bondage,
but never establish it. The Wilmot Proviso announced this position in
1846.
Senator Stephen A. Douglas proclaimed the doctrine
of territorial or "popular" sovereignty – which asserted
that the settlers in a territory had the same rights as states in the
Union to establish or disestablish slavery as a purely local matter.
The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine. In Kansas
Territory, years of pro and anti-slavery violence and political
conflict erupted; the congressional House of Representatives voted to
admit Kansas as a free state in early 1860, but its admission in the
Senate was delayed until January 1861, after the 1860 elections when
southern senators began to leave.
The fourth theory was
advocated by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, one of state
sovereignty ("states' rights"), also known as the "Calhoun
doctrine", named after the South Carolinian political theorist
and statesman John C. Calhoun. Rejecting the arguments for federal
authority or self-government, state sovereignty would empower states
to promote the expansion of slavery as part of the Federal Union
under the U.S. Constitution. "States' rights" was an
ideology formulated and applied as a means of advancing slave state
interests through federal authority. As historian Thomas L.
Krannawitter points out, the "Southern demand for federal slave
protection represented a demand for an unprecedented expansion of
federal power." These four doctrines comprised the major
ideologies presented to the American public on the matters of
slavery, the territories and the U.S. Constitution prior to the 1860
presidential election.
NATIONAL ELECTIONS: Beginning in
the American Revolution and accelerating after the War of 1812, the
people of the United States grew in their sense of country as an
important example to the world of a national republic of political
liberty and personal rights. Previous regional independence movements
such as the Greek revolt in the Ottoman Empire, division and
redivision in the Latin American political map, and the
British-French Crimean triumph leading to an interest in redrawing
Europe along cultural differences, all conspired to make for a time
of upheaval and uncertainty about the basis of the nation-state. In
the world of 19th century self-made Americans, growing in prosperity,
population and expanding westward, "freedom" could mean
personal liberty or property rights. The unresolved difference would
cause failure—first in their political institutions, then in their
civil life together.
NATIONALISM AND HONOUR: Nationalism
was a powerful force in the early 19th century, with famous spokesmen
such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster. While practically all
Northerners supported the Union, Southerners were split between those
loyal to the entire United States (called "unionists") and
those loyal primarily to the southern region and then the
Confederacy. C. Vann Woodward said of the latter group, A great slave
society ... had grown up and miraculously flourished in the heart of
a thoroughly bourgeois and partly puritanical republic. It had
renounced its bourgeois origins and elabourated and painfully
rationalized its institutional, legal, metaphysical, and religious
defenses ... When the crisis came it chose to fight. It proved to be
the death struggle of a society, which went down in ruins. Perceived
insults to Southern collective honour included the enormous
popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the actions of
abolitionist John Brown in trying to incite a slave rebellion in
1859.
While the South moved toward a Southern
nationalism, leaders in the North were also becoming more nationally
minded, and rejected any notion of splitting the Union. The
Republican national electoral platform of 1860 warned that
Republicans regarded disunion as treason and would not tolerate it:
"We denounce those threats of disunion ... as denying the vital
principles of a free government, and as an avowal of contemplated
treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant people
sternly to rebuke and forever silence." The South ignored the
warnings: Southerners did not realize how ardently the North would
fight to hold the Union together.
LINCOLN’S ELECTION:
The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 was the final
trigger for secession. Efforts at compromise, including the "Corwin
Amendment" and the "Crittenden Compromise", failed.
Southern leaders feared that Lincoln would stop the expansion of
slavery and put it on a course toward extinction. The slave states,
which had already become a minority in the House of Representatives,
were now facing a future as a perpetual minority in the Senate and
Electoral College against an increasingly powerful North. Before
Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven slave states had declared
their secession and joined to form the Confederacy.
Outbreak
of the war - SECESSION CRISIS: The election of Lincoln caused the
legislature of South Carolina to call a state convention to consider
secession. Prior to the war, South Carolina did more than any other
Southern state to advance the notion that a state had the right to
nullify federal laws and, even, secede from the United States. The
convention summoned unanimously voted to secede on December 20, 1860
and adopted the "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which
Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal
Union". It argued for states' rights for slave owners in the
South, but contained a complaint about states' rights in the North in
the form of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, claiming that
Northern states were not fulfilling their federal obligations under
the Constitution. The "cotton states" of Mississippi,
Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed suit,
seceding in January and February 1861.
Among the
ordinances of secession passed by the individual states, those of
three – Texas, Alabama, and Virginia – specifically mentioned the
plight of the 'slaveholding states' at the hands of northern
abolitionists. The rest make no mention of the slavery issue, and are
often brief announcements of the dissolution of ties by the
legislatures. However, at least four states – South Carolina,
Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas – also passed lengthy and detailed
explanations of their causes for secession, all of which laid the
blame squarely on the movement to abolish slavery and that movement's
influence over the politics of the northern states. The southern
states believed slaveholding was a constitutional right because of
the Fugitive slave clause of the Constitution.
These
states agreed to form a new federal government, the Confederate
States of America, on February 4, 1861. They took control of federal
forts and other properties within their boundaries with little
resistance from outgoing President James Buchanan, whose term ended
on March 4, 1861. Buchanan said that the Dred Scott decision was
proof that the South had no reason for secession, and that the Union
"... was intended to be perpetual," but that, "The
power by force of arms to compel a State to remain in the Union,"
was not among the "... enumerated powers granted to Congress."
One quarter of the U.S. Army – the entire garrison in Texas – was
surrendered in February 1861 to state forces by its commanding
general, David E. Twiggs, who then joined the Confederacy.
As
Southerners resigned their seats in the Senate and the House,
Republicans were able to pass bills for projects that had been
blocked by Southern Senators before the war, including the Morrill
Tariff, land grant colleges (the Morill Act), a Homestead Act, a
transcontinental railroad (the Pacific Railway Acts), the National
Banking Act and the authorization of United States Notes by the Legal
Tender Act of 1862. The Revenue Act of 1861 introduced the income tax
to help finance the war.
On December 18, 1860, the
Crittenden Compromise was proposed to re-establish the Missouri
Compromise line by constitutionally banning slavery in territories to
the north of the line while guaranteeing it to the south. The
adoption of this compromise likely would have prevented the secession
of every southern state apart from South Carolina, but Lincoln and
the Republicans rejected it. It was then proposed to hold a national
referendum on the compromise. The Republicans again rejected the
idea, although a majority of both Northerners and Southerners would
have voted in favour of it. A pre-war February Peace Conference of
1861 met in Washington, proposing a solution similar to that of the
Crittenden compromise, it was rejected by Congress. The Republicans
proposed an alternative compromise to not interfere with slavery
where it existed but the South regarded it as insufficient.
Nonetheless, the remaining eight slave states rejected pleas to join
the Confederacy following a two-to-one no-vote in Virginia's First
Secessionist Convention on April 4, 1861.
On March 4,
1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President. In his inaugural
address, he argued that the Constitution was a more perfect union
than the earlier Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, that
it was a binding contract, and called any secession "legally
void".[78] He had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did
he intend to end slavery where it existed, but said that he would use
force to maintain possession of Federal property. The government
would make no move to recover post offices, and if resisted, mail
delivery would end at state lines. Where popular conditions did not
allow peaceful enforcement of Federal law, U.S. Marshals and Judges
would be withdrawn. No mention was made of bullion lost from U.S.
mints in Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina. In Lincoln's
inaugural address, he stated that it would be U.S. policy to only
collect import duties at its ports; there could be no serious injury
to the South to justify armed revolution during his administration.
His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union,
famously calling on "the mystic chords of memory" binding
the two regions.
The South sent delegations to Washington
and offered to pay for the federal properties and enter into a peace
treaty with the United States. Lincoln rejected any negotiations with
Confederate agents because he claimed the Confederacy was not a
legitimate government, and that making any treaty with it would be
tantamount to recognition of it as a sovereign government. Secretary
of State William Seward who at that time saw himself as the real
governor or "prime minister" behind the throne of the
inexperienced Lincoln, engaged in unauthorized and indirect
negotiations that failed. President Lincoln was determined to hold
all remaining Union-occupied forts in the Confederacy, Fort Monroe in
Virginia, in Florida, Fort Pickens, Fort Jefferson, and Fort Taylor,
and in the cockpit of secession, Charleston, South Carolina's Fort
Sumter.
BATTLE OF FORT SUMTER: Fort Sumter was located in
the middle of the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina, where the
U.S. fort's garrison had withdrawn to avoid incidents with local
militias in the streets of the city. Unlike Buchanan, who allowed
commanders to relinquish possession to avoid bloodshed, Lincoln
required Maj. Anderson to hold on until fired upon. Jefferson Davis
ordered the surrender of the fort. Anderson gave a conditional reply
that the Confederate government rejected, and Davis ordered P. G. T.
Beauregard to attack the fort before a relief expedition could
arrive. Troops under Beauregard bombarded Fort Sumter on April 12–13,
forcing its capitulation.
The attack on Fort Sumter
rallied the North to the defense of American nationalism. Historian
Allan Nevins says: The thunderclap of Sumter produced a startling
crystallization of Northern sentiment. ... Anger swept the land. From
every side came news of mass meetings, speeches, resolutions, tenders
of business support, the muster of companies and regiments, the
determined action of governors and legislatures."
However,
much of the North's attitude was based on the false belief that only
a minority of Southerners were actually in favour of secession and
that there were large numbers of southern Unionists that could be
counted on. Had Northerners realized that most Southerners really did
favour secession, they might have hesitated at attempting the
enormous task of conquering a united South.
Lincoln
called on all the states to send forces to recapture the fort and
other federal properties. He cited presidential powers given by the
Militia Acts of 1792. With the scale of the rebellion apparently
small so far, Lincoln called for only 75,000 volunteers for 90 days.
The governor of Massachusetts had state regiments on trains headed
south the next day. In western Missouri, local secessionists seized
Liberty Arsenal. On May 3, 1861, Lincoln called for an additional
42,000 volunteers for a period of three years.
Four
states in the middle and upper South had repeatedly rejected
Confederate overtures, but now Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and
North Carolina refused to send forces against their neighbors,
declared their secession, and joined the Confederacy. To reward
Virginia, the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond.
Attitude
of the border states Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky were
slave states that were opposed to both secession and coercing the
South. They were later joined by West Virginia, which separated from
Virginia and became a new state.
Maryland had numerous
anti-Lincoln officials who tolerated anti-army rioting in Baltimore
and the burning of bridges, both aimed at hindering the passage of
troops to the South. Maryland's legislature voted to stay in the
Union, but also rejected hostilities with the South, voting to close
Maryland's rail lines to prevent them from being used for war.
Lincoln responded by establishing martial law, and unilaterally
suspending habeas corpus, in Maryland, along with sending in militia
units from the North. Lincoln rapidly took control of Maryland and
the District of Columbia, by seizing many prominent figures,
including arresting 1/3 of the members of the Maryland General
Assembly on the day it reconvened. All were held without trial,
ignoring a ruling by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Roger Taney, a Maryland native, that only Congress (and not the
president) could suspend habeas corpus (Ex parte Merryman). Indeed,
federal troops imprisoned a prominent Baltimore newspaper editor,
Frank Key Howard, Francis Scott Key's grandson, after he criticized
Lincoln in an editorial for ignoring the Supreme Court Chief
Justice's ruling.
In Missouri, an elected convention on
secession voted decisively to remain within the Union. When
pro-Confederate Governor Claiborne F. Jackson called out the state
militia, it was attacked by federal forces under General Nathaniel
Lyon, who chased the governor and the rest of the State Guard to the
southwestern corner of the state. (See also: Missouri secession). In
the resulting vacuum, the convention on secession reconvened and took
power as the Unionist provisional government of Missouri.
Kentucky
did not secede; for a time, it declared itself neutral. When
Confederate forces entered the state in September 1861, neutrality
ended and the state reaffirmed its Union status, while trying to
maintain slavery. During a brief invasion by Confederate forces,
Confederate sympathizers organized a secession convention,
inaugurated a governor, and gained recognition from the Confederacy.
The rebel government soon went into exile and never controlled
Kentucky.
After Virginia's secession, a Unionist
government in Wheeling asked 48 counties to vote on an ordinance to
create a new state on October 24, 1861. A voter turnout of 34 percent
approved the statehood bill (96 percent approving). The inclusion of
24 secessionist counties in the state and the ensuing guerrilla war
engaged about 40,000 Federal troops for much of the war. Congress
admitted West Virginia to the Union on June 20, 1863. West Virginia
provided about 20,000–22,000 soldiers to both the Confederacy and
the Union.
A Unionist secession attempt occurred in East
Tennessee, but was suppressed by the Confederacy, which arrested over
3,000 men suspected of being loyal to the Union. They were held
without trial.
WAR: The Civil War was a contest marked by
the ferocity and frequency of battle. Over four years, 237 named
battles were fought, as were many more minor actions and skirmishes,
which were often characterized by their bitter intensity and high
casualties. "The American Civil War was to prove one of the most
ferocious wars ever fought". Without geographic objectives, the
only target for each side was the enemy's soldier.
MOBILISATION:
As the first seven states began organizing a Confederacy in
Montgomery, the entire U.S. army numbered 16,000. However, Northern
governors had begun to mobilize their militias. The Confederate
Congress authorized the new nation up to 100,000 troops sent by
governors as early as February. By May, Jefferson Davis was pushing
for 100,000 men under arms for one year or the duration, and that was
answered in kind by the U.S. Congress.
In the first year
of the war, both sides had far more volunteers than they could
effectively train and equip. After the initial enthusiasm faded,
reliance on the cohort of young men who came of age every year and
wanted to join was not enough. Both sides used a draft
law—conscription—as a device to encourage or force volunteering;
relatively few were actually drafted and served. The Confederacy
passed a draft law in April 1862 for young men aged 18 to 35;
overseers of slaves, government officials, and clergymen were exempt.
The U.S. Congress followed in July, authorizing a militia draft
within a state when it could not meet its quota with volunteers.
European immigrants joined the Union Army in large numbers, including
177,000 born in Germany and 144,000 born in Ireland.
When
the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in January 1863,
ex-slaves were energetically recruited by the states, and used to
meet the state quotas. States and local communities offered higher
and higher cash bonuses for white volunteers. Congress tightened the
law in March 1863. Men selected in the draft could provide
substitutes or, until mid-1864, pay commutation money. Many eligibles
pooled their money to cover the cost of anyone drafted. Families used
the substitute provision to select which man should go into the army
and which should stay home. There was much evasion and overt
resistance to the draft, especially in Catholic areas. The great
draft riot in New York City in July 1863 involved Irish immigrants
who had been signed up as citizens to swell the vote of the city's
Democratic political machine, not realizing it made them liable for
the draft. Of the 168,649 men procured for the Union through the
draft, 117,986 were substitutes, leaving only 50,663 who had their
personal services conscripted.
In both the North and
South, the draft laws were highly unpopular. In the North, some
120,000 men evaded conscription, many of them fleeing to Canada, and
another 280,000 soldiers deserted during the war. At least 100,000
Southerners deserted, or about 10 percent. In the South, many men
deserted temporarily to take care of their distressed families, then
returned to their units. In the North, "bounty jumpers"
enlisted to get the generous bonus, deserted, then went back to a
second recruiting station under a different name to sign up again for
a second bonus; 141 were caught and executed.
From a tiny
frontier force in 1860, the Union and Confederate armies had grown
into the "largest and most efficient armies in the world"
within a few years. European observers at the time dismissed them as
amateur and unprofessional, but British historian John Keegan's
assessment is that each outmatched the French, Prussian and Russian
armies of the time, and but for the Atlantic, would have threatened
any of them with defeat.
MOTIVATION: Perman and Taylor
(2010) say that historians are of two minds on why millions of men
seemed so eager to fight, suffer and die over four years: Some
historians emphasize that Civil War soldiers were driven by political
ideology, holding firm beliefs about the importance of liberty,
Union, or state rights, or about the need to protect or to destroy
slavery. Others point to less overtly political reasons to fight,
such as the defense of one's home and family, or the honour and
brotherhood to be preserved when fighting alongside other men. Most
historians agree that no matter what a soldier thought about when he
went into the war, the experience of combat affected him profoundly
and sometimes altered his reasons for continuing the fight.
PRISONERS: At the start of the civil war, a system of
paroles operated. Captives agreed not to fight until they were
officially exchanged. Meanwhile, they were held in camps run by their
own army where they were paid but not allowed to perform any military
duties. The system of exchanges collapsed in 1863 when the
Confederacy refused to exchange black prisoners. After that, about
56,000 of the 409,000 POWs died in prisons during the war, accounting
for nearly 10 percent of the conflict's fatalities.
NAVAL
WAR: The small U.S. Navy of 1861 was rapidly enlarged to 6,000
officers and 45,000 men in 1865, with 671 vessels, having a tonnage
of 510,396. Its mission was to blockade Confederate ports, take
control of the river system, defend against Confederate raiders on
the high seas, and be ready for a possible war with the British Royal
Navy. Meanwhile, the main riverine war was fought in the West, where
a series of major rivers gave access to the Confederate heartland, if
the U.S. Navy could take control. In the East, the Navy supplied and
moved army forces about, and occasionally shelled Confederate
installations.
By early 1861, General Winfield Scott had
devised the Anaconda Plan to win the war with as little bloodshed as
possible. Scott argued that a Union blockade of the main ports would
weaken the Confederate economy. Lincoln adopted parts of the plan,
but he overruled Scott's caution about 90-day volunteers. Public
opinion, however, demanded an immediate attack by the army to capture
Richmond.
In April 1861, Lincoln announced the Union
blockade of all Southern ports; regular traffic ended. The South
blundered in embargoing cotton exports in 1861 before the blockade
was effective; by the time they realized the mistake, it was too
late. "King Cotton" was dead, as the South could export
less than 10 percent of its cotton. The blockade shut down the ten
Confederate seaports with railheads that moved almost all the cotton,
especially New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston. By June 1861,
warships were stationed off the principal Southern ports, and a year
later nearly 300 ships were in service.
EVOLUTION OF
MODERN NAVY: The Civil War occurred during the early stages of the
industrial revolution and subsequently many naval innovations emerged
during this time, most notably the advent of the ironclad warship. It
began when the Confederacy, knowing they had to meet or match the
Union's naval superiority, responded to the Union blockade by
building or converting more than 130 vessels, including twenty-six
ironclads and floating batteries. Only half of these saw active
service. Many were equipped with ram bows, creating "ram fever"
among Union squadrons wherever they threatened. But in the face of
overwhelming Union superiority and the Union's own ironclad warships,
they were unsuccessful.
The Confederacy experimented with
a submarine, which did not work well, and with building an ironclad
ship, the CSS Virginia, which was based on rebuilding a sunken Union
ship, the Merrimack. On its first foray on March 8, 1862, the
Virginia decimated the Union's wooden fleet, but the next day the
first Union ironclad, the USS Monitor, arrived to challenge it. The
Battle of the Ironclads was a draw, but it marks the worldwide
transition to ironclad warships.
The Confederacy lost the
Virginia when the ship was scuttled to prevent capture, and the Union
built many copies of the Monitor. Lacking the technology to build
effective warships, the Confederacy attempted to obtain warships from
Britain.
BLOCKADE RUNNERS OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR:
British investors built small, fast, steam-driven blockade runners
that traded arms and luxuries brought in from Britain through
Bermuda, Cuba, and the Bahamas in return for high-priced cotton. The
ships were so small that only a small amount of cotton went out. When
the Union Navy seized a blockade runner, the ship and cargo were
condemned as a Prize of war and sold, with the proceeds given to the
Navy sailors; the captured crewmen were mostly British and they were
simply released. The Southern economy nearly collapsed during the
war. There were multiple reasons for this: the severe deterioration
of food supplies, especially in cities, the failure of Southern
railroads, the loss of control of the main rivers, foraging by
Northern armies, and the seizure of animals and crops by Confederate
armies. Most historians agree that the blockade was a major factor in
ruining the Confederate economy, however, Wise argues that the
blockade runners provided just enough of a lifeline to allow Lee to
continue fighting for additional months, thanks to fresh supplies of
400,000 rifles, lead, blankets, and boots that the homefront economy
could no longer supply.
ECONOMIC IMPACT: Surdam argues
that the blockade was a powerful weapon that eventually ruined the
Southern economy, at the cost of few lives in combat. Practically,
the entire Confederate cotton crop was useless (although it was sold
to Union traders), costing the Confederacy its main source of income.
Critical imports were scarce and the coastal trade was largely ended
as well. The measure of the blockade's success was not the few ships
that slipped through, but the thousands that never tried it. Merchant
ships owned in Europe were too slow to evade the blockade; they
simply stopped calling at Confederate ports.
To fight an
offensive war, the Confederacy purchased ships from Britain,
converted them to warships, and raided American merchant ships in the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Rates skyrocketed and the American flag
virtually disappeared from international waters. However, the same
ships were reflagged with European flags and continued unmolested.
After the war, the U.S. demanded that Britain pay for the damage
done, and Britain paid the U.S. $15 million in 1871.
RIVERS:
The 1862 Union strategy called for simultaneous advances along four
axis. McClellan would lead the main thrust in Virginia towards
Richmond. Ohio forces were to advance through Kentucky into
Tennessee, the Missouri Department would drive south along the
Mississippi River, and the westernmost attack would originate from
Kansas.
Ulysses Grant used river transport and Andrew
Foote's gunboats of the Western Flotilla to threaten the
Confederacy's "Gibraltar of the West" at Columbus,
Kentucky. Grant was rebuffed at Belmont, but cut off Columbus. The
Confederates, lacking their own gunboats, were forced to retreat and
the Union took control of western Kentucky in March 1862.
In
addition to ocean-going warships coming up the Mississippi, the Union
Navy used timberclads, tinclads, and armored gunboats. Shipyards at
Cairo, Illinois, and St. Louis built new boats or modified steamboats
for action. They took control of the Red, Tennessee, Cumberland,
Mississippi, and Ohio rivers after victories at Fort Henry and Fort
Donelson, and supplied Grant's forces as he moved into Tennessee. At
Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing), in Tennessee in April 1862, the
Confederates made a surprise attack that pushed Union forces against
the river as night fell. Overnight, the Navy landed additional
reinforcements, and Grant counter-attacked. Grant and the Union won a
decisive victory – the first battle with the high casualty rates
that would repeat over and over. Memphis fell to Union forces and
became a key base for further advances south along the Mississippi
River. In April 1862, U.S. Naval forces under Farragut ran past
Confederate defenses south of New Orleans. Confederates abandoned the
city, which gave the Union a critical anchor in the deep South.
Naval forces assisted Grant in his long, complex campaign
that resulted in the surrender of Vicksburg in July 1863, and full
Union control of the Mississippi soon after.
EASTERN
THEATRE: In one of the first highly visible battles, a march by Union
troops under the command of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell on the
Confederate forces near Washington was repulsed.
Maj.
Gen. George B. McClellan took command of the Union Army of the
Potomac on July 26 (he was briefly general-in-chief of all the Union
armies, but was subsequently relieved of that post in favour of Maj.
Gen. Henry W. Halleck), and the war began in earnest in 1862. Upon
the strong urging of President Lincoln to begin offensive operations,
McClellan attacked Virginia in the spring of 1862 by way of the
peninsula between the York River and James River, southeast of
Richmond. Although McClellan's army reached the gates of Richmond in
the Peninsula Campaign, Johnston halted his advance at the Battle of
Seven Pines, then General Robert E. Lee and top subordinates James
Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson defeated McClellan in the Seven Days
Battles and forced his retreat. The Northern Virginia Campaign, which
included the Second Battle of Bull Run, ended in yet another victory
for the South. McClellan resisted General-in-Chief Halleck's orders
to send reinforcements to John Pope's Union Army of Virginia, which
made it easier for Lee's Confederates to defeat twice the number of
combined enemy troops.
Emboldened by Second Bull Run, the
Confederacy made its first invasion of the North. General Lee led
45,000 men of the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River
into Maryland on September 5. Lincoln then restored Pope's troops to
McClellan. McClellan and Lee fought at the Battle of Antietam near
Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day
in United States military history. Lee's army, checked at last,
returned to Virginia before McClellan could destroy it. Antietam is
considered a Union victory because it halted Lee's invasion of the
North and provided an opportunity for Lincoln to announce his
Emancipation Proclamation.
When the cautious McClellan
failed to follow up on Antietam, he was replaced by Maj. Gen. Ambrose
Burnside. Burnside was soon defeated at the Battle of Fredericksburg
on December 13, 1862, when more than 12,000 Union soldiers were
killed or wounded during repeated futile frontal assaults against
Marye's Heights. After the battle, Burnside was replaced by Maj. Gen.
Joseph Hooker.
Hooker, too, proved unable to defeat Lee's
army; despite outnumbering the Confederates by more than two to one,
he was humiliated in the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. Gen.
Stonewall Jackson was shot in the arm by accidental friendly fire
during the battle and subsequently died of complications. Gen. Hooker
was replaced by Maj. Gen. George Meade during Lee's second invasion
of the North, in June. Meade defeated Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg
(July 1 to 3, 1863). This was the bloodiest battle of the war, and
has been called the war's turning point. Pickett's Charge on July 3
is often considered the high-water mark of the Confederacy because it
signaled the collapse of serious Confederate threats of victory.
Lee's army suffered 28,000 casualties (versus Meade's 23,000).
However, Lincoln was angry that Meade failed to intercept Lee's
retreat, and after Meade's inconclusive fall campaign, Lincoln turned
to the Western Theater for new leadership. At the same time, the
Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg surrendered, giving the Union
control of the Mississippi River, permanently isolating the western
Confederacy, and producing the new leader Lincoln needed, Ulysses S.
Grant.
WESTERN THEATRE: While the Confederate forces had
numerous successes in the Eastern Theater, they were defeated many
times in the West. They were driven from Missouri early in the war as
a result of the Battle of Pea Ridge. Leonidas Polk's invasion of
Columbus, Kentucky ended Kentucky's policy of neutrality and turned
that state against the Confederacy. Nashville and central Tennessee
fell to the Union early in 1862, leading to attrition of local food
supplies and livestock and a breakdown in social organization.
The
Mississippi was opened to Union traffic to the southern border of
Tennessee with the taking of Island No. 10 and New Madrid, Missouri,
and then Memphis, Tennessee. In April 1862, the Union Navy captured
New Orleans, which allowed Union forces to begin moving up the
Mississippi. Only the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi,
prevented Union control of the entire river.
General
Braxton Bragg's second Confederate invasion of Kentucky ended with a
meaningless victory over Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell at the Battle of
Perryville, although Bragg was forced to end his attempt at invading
Kentucky and retreat due to lack of support for the Confederacy in
that state. Bragg was narrowly defeated by Maj. Gen. William
Rosecrans at the Battle of Stones River in Tennessee.
The
one clear Confederate victory in the West was the Battle of
Chickamauga. Bragg, reinforced by Lt. Gen. James Longstreet's corps
(from Lee's army in the east), defeated Rosecrans, despite the heroic
defensive stand of Maj. Gen. George Henry Thomas. Rosecrans retreated
to Chattanooga, which Bragg then besieged.
The Union's
key strategist and tactician in the West was Ulysses S. Grant, who
won victories at Forts Henry and Donelson (by which the Union seized
control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers); the Battle of
Shiloh; and the Battle of Vicksburg, which cemented Union control of
the Mississippi River and is considered one of the turning points of
the war. Grant marched to the relief of Rosecrans and defeated Bragg
at the Third Battle of Chattanooga, driving Confederate forces out of
Tennessee and opening a route to Atlanta and the heart of the
Confederacy.
TRANS-MISSISSIPPI: Extensive guerrilla
warfare characterized the trans-Mississippi region, as the
Confederacy lacked the troops and the logistics to support regular
armies that could challenge Union control. Roving Confederate bands
such as Quantrill's Raiders terrorized the countryside, striking both
military installations and civilian settlements. The "Sons of
Liberty" and "Order of the American Knights" attacked
pro-Union people, elected officeholders, and unarmed uniformed
soldiers. These partisans could not be entirely driven out of the
state of Missouri until an entire regular Union infantry division was
engaged.
By 1864, these violent activities harmed the
nationwide anti-war movement organizing against the re-election of
Lincoln. Missouri not only stayed in the Union, Lincoln took 70
percent of the vote for re-election.
Numerous small-scale
military actions south and west of Missouri sought to control Indian
Territory and New Mexico Territory for the Union. The Union repulsed
Confederate incursions into New Mexico in 1862, and the exiled
Arizona government withdrew into Texas. In the Indian Territory,
civil war broke out within tribes. About 12,000 Indian warriors
fought for the Confederacy, and smaller numbers for the Union. The
most prominent Cherokee was Brigadier General Stand Watie, the last
Confederate general to surrender.
After the fall of
Vicksburg in July 1863, General Kirby Smith in Texas was informed by
Jefferson Davis that he could expect no further help from east of the
Mississippi River. Although he lacked resources to beat Union armies,
he built up a formidable arsenal at Tyler, along with his own Kirby
Smithdom economy, a virtual "independent fiefdom" in Texas,
including railroad construction and international smuggling. The
Union in turn did not directly engage him. Its 1864 Red River
Campaign to take Shreveport, Louisiana was a failure and Texas
remained in Confederate hands throughout the war.
THE END
OF THE WAR: Conquest of Virginia - At the beginning of 1864, Lincoln
made Grant commander of all Union armies. Grant made his headquarters
with the Army of the Potomac, and put Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh
Sherman in command of most of the western armies. Grant understood
the concept of total war and believed, along with Lincoln and
Sherman, that only the utter defeat of Confederate forces and their
economic base would end the war. This was total war not in killing
civilians but rather in taking provisions and forage and destroying
homes, farms, and railroads, that Grant said "would otherwise
have gone to the support of secession and rebellion. This policy I
believe exercised a material influence in hastening the end."
Grant devised a coordinated strategy that would strike at the entire
Confederacy from multiple directions. Generals George Meade and
Benjamin Butler were ordered to move against Lee near Richmond,
General Franz Sigel (and later Philip Sheridan) were to attack the
Shenandoah Valley, General Sherman was to capture Atlanta and march
to the sea (the Atlantic Ocean), Generals George Crook and William W.
Averell were to operate against railroad supply lines in West
Virginia, and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks was to capture Mobile,
Alabama.
Grant's army set out on the Overland Campaign
with the goal of drawing Lee into a defense of Richmond, where they
would attempt to pin down and destroy the Confederate army. The Union
army first attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles,
notably at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbour. These
battles resulted in heavy losses on both sides, and forced Lee's
Confederates to fall back repeatedly. An attempt to outflank Lee from
the south failed under Butler, who was trapped inside the Bermuda
Hundred river bend. Each battle resulted in setbacks for the Union
that mirrored what they had suffered under prior generals, though
unlike those prior generals, Grant fought on rather than retreat.
Grant was tenacious and kept pressing Lee's Army of Northern Virginia
back to Richmond. While Lee was preparing for an attack on Richmond,
Grant unexpectedly turned south to cross the James River and began
the protracted Siege of Petersburg, where the two armies engaged in
trench warfare for over nine months.
Grant finally found
a commander, General Philip Sheridan, aggressive enough to prevail in
the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Sheridan was initially repelled at the
Battle of New Market by former U.S. Vice President and Confederate
Gen. John C. Breckinridge. The Battle of New Market was the
Confederacy's last major victory of the war. After redoubling his
efforts, Sheridan defeated Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early in a series of
battles, including a final decisive defeat at the Battle of Cedar
Creek. Sheridan then proceeded to destroy the agricultural base of
the Shenandoah Valley, a strategy similar to the tactics Sherman
later employed in Georgia.
Meanwhile, Sherman maneuvered
from Chattanooga to Atlanta, defeating Confederate Generals Joseph E.
Johnston and John Bell Hood along the way. The fall of Atlanta on
September 2, 1864, guaranteed the reelection of Lincoln as president.
Hood left the Atlanta area to swing around and menace Sherman's
supply lines and invade Tennessee in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign.
Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield defeated Hood at the Battle of
Franklin, and George H. Thomas dealt Hood a massive defeat at the
Battle of Nashville, effectively destroying Hood's army.
Leaving
Atlanta, and his base of supplies, Sherman's army marched with an
unknown destination, laying waste to about 20 percent of the farms in
Georgia in his "March to the Sea". He reached the Atlantic
Ocean at Savannah, Georgia in December 1864. Sherman's army was
followed by thousands of freed slaves; there were no major battles
along the March. Sherman turned north through South Carolina and
North Carolina to approach the Confederate Virginia lines from the
south, increasing the pressure on Lee's army.
Lee's army,
thinned by desertion and casualties, was now much smaller than
Grant's. One last Confederate attempt to break the Union hold on
Petersburg failed at the decisive Battle of Five Forks (sometimes
called "the Waterloo of the Confederacy") on April 1. This
meant that the Union now controlled the entire perimeter surrounding
Richmond-Petersburg, completely cutting it off from the Confederacy.
Realizing that the capital was now lost, Lee decided to evacuate his
army. The Confederate capital fell to the Union XXV Corps, composed
of black troops. The remaining Confederate units fled west after a
defeat at Sayler's Creek.
CONFEDERACY SURRENDERS:
Initially, Lee did not intend to surrender, but planned to regroup at
the village of Appomattox Court House, where supplies were to be
waiting, and then continue the war. Grant chased Lee and got in front
of him, so that when Lee's army reached Appomattox Court House, they
were surrounded. After an initial battle, Lee decided that the fight
was now hopeless, and surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on
April 9, 1865, at the McLean House. In an untraditional gesture and
as a sign of Grant's respect and anticipation of peacefully restoring
Confederate states to the Union, Lee was permitted to keep his sword
and his horse, Traveller. On April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was
shot by John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer. Lincoln died early
the next morning, and Andrew Johnson became the president. Meanwhile,
Confederate forces across the South surrendered as news of Lee's
surrender reached them. On April 26, 1865, General Joseph E. Johnston
surrendered nearly 90,000 men of the Army of Tennessee to Major
General William T. Sherman at the Bennett Place near present-day
Durham, North Carolina. It proved to be the largest surrender of
Confederate forces, effectively bringing the war to an end. President
Johnson officially declared a virtual end to the insurrection on May
9, 1865; President Jefferson Davis was captured the following day. On
June 2, Kirby Smith officially surrendered his troops in the
Trans-Mississippi Department. On June 23, Cherokee leader Stand Watie
became the last Confederate General to surrender his forces.
DIPLOMACY DURING THE AMERICAN WAR: Though the Confederacy
hoped that Britain and France would join them against the Union, this
was never likely, and so they instead tried to bring Britain and
France in as mediators. The Union, under Lincoln and Secretary of
State William H. Seward worked to block this, and threatened war if
any country officially recognized the existence of the Confederate
States of America. In 1861, Southerners voluntarily embargoed cotton
shipments, hoping to start an economic depression in Europe that
would force Britain to enter the war to get cotton, but this did not
work. Worse, Europe developed other cotton suppliers, which they
found superior, hindering the South's recovery after the war.
Cotton diplomacy proved a failure as Europe had a surplus
of cotton, while the 1860–62 crop failures in Europe made the
North's grain exports of critical importance. It also helped to turn
European opinion further away from the Confederacy. It was said that
"King Corn was more powerful than King Cotton", as U.S.
grain went from a quarter of the British import trade to almost half.
When Britain did face a cotton shortage, it was temporary, being
replaced by increased cultivation in Egypt and India. Meanwhile, the
war created employment for arms makers, ironworkers, and British
ships to transport weapons.
Lincoln's foreign policy was
deficient in 1861 in terms of appealing to European public opinion.
Diplomats had to explain that United States was not committed to the
ending of slavery, but instead they repeated legalistic arguments
about the unconstitutionality of secession. Confederate spokesman, on
the other hand, were much more successful by ignoring slavery and
instead focusing on their struggle for liberty, their commitment to
free trade, and the essential role of cotton in the European economy.
In addition, the European aristocracy (the dominant factor in every
major country) was "absolutely gleeful in pronouncing the
American debacle as proof that the entire experiment in popular
government had failed. European government leaders welcomed the
fragmentation of the ascendant American Republic."
U.S.
minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams proved particularly adept
and convinced Britain not to boldly challenge the blockade. The
Confederacy purchased several warships from commercial shipbuilders
in Britain (CSS Alabama, CSS Shenandoah, CSS Tennessee, CSS
Tallahassee, CSS Florida, and some others). The most famous, the CSS
Alabama, did considerable damage and led to serious postwar disputes.
However, public opinion against slavery created a political liability
for European politicians, especially in Britain (which, through the
Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, had begun to abolish slavery in most
of her colonies in 1834).
War loomed in late 1861 between
the U.S. and Britain over the Trent affair, involving the U.S. Navy's
boarding of the British mail steamer Trent to seize two Confederate
diplomats. However, London and Washington were able to smooth over
the problem after Lincoln released the two. In 1862, the British
considered mediation – though even such an offer would have risked
war with the U.S. British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston reportedly
read Uncle Tom's Cabin three times when deciding on this.
The
Union victory in the Battle of Antietam caused them to delay this
decision. The Emancipation Proclamation over time would reinforce the
political liability of supporting the Confederacy. Despite sympathy
for the Confederacy, France's own seizure of Mexico ultimately
deterred them from war with the Union. Confederate offers late in the
war to end slavery in return for diplomatic recognition were not
seriously considered by London or Paris. After 1863, the Polish
revolt against Russia further distracted the European powers, and
ensured that they would remain neutral.
UNION VICTORY &
AFTERMATH OF THE WAR: The causes of the war, the reasons for its
outcome, and even the name of the war itself are subjects of
lingering contention today. The North and West grew rich while the
once-rich South became poor for a century. The national political
power of the slaveowners and rich southerners ended. Historians are
less sure about the results of the postwar Reconstruction, especially
regarding the second class citizenship of the Freedmen and their
poverty.
Historians have debated whether the Confederacy
could have won the war. Most scholars, such as James McPherson, argue
that Confederate victory was at least possible. McPherson argues that
the North's advantage in population and resources made Northern
victory likely but not guaranteed. He also argues that if the
Confederacy had fought using unconventional tactics, they would have
more easily been able to hold out long enough to exhaust the Union.
Confederates did not need to invade and hold enemy
territory to win, but only needed to fight a defensive war to
convince the North that the cost of winning was too high. The North
needed to conquer and hold vast stretches of enemy territory and
defeat Confederate armies to win. Lincoln was not a military
dictator, and could only continue to fight the war as long as the
American public supported a continuation of the war. The Confederacy
sought to win independence by out-lasting Lincoln; however, after
Atlanta fell and Lincoln defeated McClellan in the election of 1864,
all hope for a political victory for the South ended. At that point,
Lincoln had secured the support of the Republicans, War Democrats,
the border states, emancipated slaves, and the neutrality of Britain
and France. By defeating the Democrats and McClellan, he also
defeated the Copperheads and their peace platform.
Many
scholars argue that the Union held an insurmountable long-term
advantage over the Confederacy in industrial strength and population.
Confederate actions, they argue, only delayed defeat. Civil War
historian Shelby Foote expressed this view succinctly: "I think
that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back ... If
there had been more Southern victories, and a lot more, the North
simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back. I
don't think the South ever had a chance to win that War."
A
minority view among historians is that the Confederacy lost because,
as E. Merton Coulter put it, "people did not will hard enough
and long enough to win." Marxist historian Armstead Robinson
agrees, pointing to a class conflict in the Confederates army between
the slave owners and the larger number of non-owners. He argues that
the non-owner soldiers grew embittered about fighting to preserve
slavery, and fought less enthusiastically. He attributes the major
Confederate defeats in 1863 at Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge to this
class conflict. However, most historians reject the argument. James
M. McPherson, after reading thousands of letters written by
Confederate soldiers, found strong patriotism that continued to the
end; they truly believed they were fighting for freedom and liberty.
Even as the Confederacy was visibly collapsing in 1864–65, he says
most Confederate soldiers were fighting hard. Historian Gary
Gallagher cites General Sherman who in early 1864 commented, "The
devils seem to have a determination that cannot but be admired."
Despite their loss of slaves and wealth, with starvation looming,
Sherman continued, "yet I see no sign of let up – some few
deserters – plenty tired of war, but the masses determined to fight
it out."
Also important were Lincoln's eloquence in
rationalizing the national purpose and his skill in keeping the
border states committed to the Union cause. The Emancipation
Proclamation was an effective use of the President's war powers. The
Confederate government failed in its attempt to get Europe involved
in the war militarily, particularly Britain and France. Southern
leaders needed to get European powers to help break up the blockade
the Union had created around the Southern ports and cities. Lincoln's
naval blockade was 95 percent effective at stopping trade goods; as a
result, imports and exports to the South declined significantly. The
abundance of European cotton and Britain's hostility to the
institution of slavery, along with Lincoln's Atlantic and Gulf of
Mexico naval blockades, severely decreased any chance that either
Britain or France would enter the war.
Historian Don
Doyle has argued that the Union victory had a major impact on the
course of world history. The Union victory energized popular
democratic forces. A Confederate victory, on the other hand, would
have meant a new birth of slavery, not freedom. Historian Fergus
Bordewich, following Doyle, argues that: The North's victory
decisively proved the durability of democratic government.
Confederate independence, on the other hand, would have established
an American model for reactionary politics and race-based repression
that would likely have cast an international shadow into the
twentieth century and perhaps beyond."
COSTS OF THE
WAR: The war produced at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of the
population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by
disease, and 50,000 civilians. Binghamton University historian J.
David Hacker believes the number of soldier deaths was approximately
750,000, 20 percent higher than traditionally estimated, and possibly
as high as 850,000. The war accounted for more American deaths than
in all other U.S. wars combined.
Based on 1860 census
figures, 8 percent of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war,
including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South. About
56,000 soldiers died in prison camps during the War. An estimated
60,000 men lost limbs in the war.
Union army dead,
amounting to 15 percent of the over two million who served, was
broken down as follows: 110,070 killed in action (67,000) or died of
wounds (43,000). 199,790 died of disease (75 percent was due to the
war, the remainder would have occurred in civilian life anyway)
24,866 died in Confederate prison camps 9,058 killed by accidents or
drowning 15,741 other/unknown deaths 359,528 total dead In addition
there were 4,523 deaths in the Navy (2,112 in battle) and 460 in the
Marines (148 in battle).
Black troops made up 10 percent
of the Union death toll, they amounted to 15 percent of disease
deaths but less than 3 percent of those killed in battle. Losses
among African Americans were high, in the last year and a half and
from all reported casualties, approximately 20 percent of all African
Americans enrolled in the military lost their lives during the Civil
War.:16 Notably, their mortality rate was significantly higher than
white soldiers: [We] find, according to the revised official data,
that of the slightly over two millions troops in the United States
Volunteers, over 316,000 died (from all causes), or 15.2 percent. Of
the 67,000 Regular Army (white) troops, 8.6 percent, or not quite
6,000, died. Of the approximately 180,000 United States Coloured
Troops, however, over 36,000 died, or 20.5 percent. In other words,
the mortality "rate" amongst the United States coloured
Troops in the Civil War was thirty-five percent greater than that
among other troops, notwithstanding the fact that the former were not
enrolled until some eighteen months after the fighting began.
Confederate records compiled by historian William F. Fox
list 74,524 killed and died of wounds and 59,292 died of disease.
Including Confederate estimates of battle losses where no records
exist would bring the Confederate death toll to 94,000 killed and
died of wounds. Fox complained, however, that records were
incomplete, especially during the last year of the war, and that
battlefield reports likely under-counted deaths (many men counted as
wounded in battlefield reports subsequently died of their wounds).
Thomas L. Livermore, using Fox's data, put the number of Confederate
non-combat deaths at 166,000, using the official estimate of Union
deaths from disease and accidents and a comparison of Union and
Confederate enlistment records, for a total of 260,000 deaths.
However, this excludes the 30,000 deaths of Confederate troops in
prisons, which would raise the minimum number of deaths to 290,000.
While the figures of 360,000 army deaths for the Union
and 260,000 for the Confederacy remained commonly cited, they are
incomplete. In addition to many Confederate records being missing,
partly as a result of Confederate widows not reporting deaths due to
being ineligible for benefits, both armies only counted troops who
died during their service, and not the tens of thousands who died of
wounds or diseases after being discharged. This often happened only a
few days or weeks later. Francis Amasa Walker, Superintendent of the
1870 Census, used census and Surgeon General data to estimate a
minimum of 500,000 Union military deaths and 350,000 Confederate
military deaths, for a total death toll of 850,000 soldiers. While
Walker's estimates were originally dismissed because of the 1870
Census's undercounting, it was later found that the census was only
off by 6.5%, and that the data Walker used would be roughly accurate.
Analyzing the number of dead by using census data to
calculate the deviation of the death rate of men of fighting age from
the norm suggests that at least 627,000 and at most 888,000, but most
likely 761,000 soldiers, died in the war. This would break down to
approximately 350,000 Confederate and 411,000 Union military deaths,
going by the proportion of Union to Confederate battle losses.
Losses can be viewed as high considering that the defeat
of Mexico in 1846–48 resulted in fewer than 2,000 soldiers killed
in battle, and roughly 13,000 killed overall. One reason for the high
number of battle deaths during the war was the use of Napoleonic
tactics, such as charging. With the advent of more accurate rifled
barrels, Minié balls and (near the end of the war for the Union
army) repeating firearms such as the Spencer Repeating Rifle and the
Henry Repeating Rifle, soldiers were mowed down when standing in
lines in the open. This led to the adoption of trench warfare, a
style of fighting that defined much of World War I.
The
wealth amassed in slaves and slavery for the Confederacy's 3.5
million blacks effectively ended when Union armies arrived; they were
nearly all freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves in the
border states and those located in some former Confederate territory
occupied before the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state
action or (on December 6, 1865) by the Thirteenth Amendment.
The
war destroyed much of the wealth that had existed in the South. All
accumulated investment Confederate bonds was forfeit; most banks and
railroads were bankrupt. Income per person in the South dropped to
less than 40 percent of that of the North, a condition that lasted
until well into the 20th century. Southern influence in the U.S.
federal government, previously considerable, was greatly diminished
until the latter half of the 20th century. The full restoration of
the Union was the work of a highly contentious postwar era known as
Reconstruction.
EMANCIPATION: Slavery as a war issue: -
While not all Southerners saw themselves as fighting to preserve
slavery, most of the officers and over a third of the rank and file
in Lee's army had close family ties to slavery. To Northerners, in
contrast, the motivation was primarily to preserve the Union, not to
abolish slavery. Abraham Lincoln consistently made preserving the
Union the central goal of the war, though he increasingly saw slavery
as a crucial issue and made ending it an additional goal. Lincoln's
decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation angered both Peace
Democrats ("Copperheads") and War Democrats, but energized
most Republicans. By warning that free blacks would flood the North,
Democrats made gains in the 1862 elections, but they did not gain
control of Congress. The Republicans' counterargument that slavery
was the mainstay of the enemy steadily gained support, with the
Democrats losing decisively in the 1863 elections in the northern
state of Ohio when they tried to resurrect anti-black sentiment.
EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION: The Emancipation Proclamation
enabled African-Americans, both free blacks and escaped slaves, to
join the Union Army. About 190,000 volunteered, further enhancing the
numerical advantage the Union armies enjoyed over the Confederates,
who did not dare emulate the equivalent manpower source for fear of
fundamentally undermining the legitimacy of slavery.
During
the Civil War, sentiment concerning slaves, enslavement and
emancipation in the United States was divided. In 1861, Lincoln
worried that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss
of the border states, and that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the
same as to lose the whole game." Copperheads and some War
Democrats opposed emancipation, although the latter eventually
accepted it as part of total war needed to save the Union.
At
first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by Secretary of War
Simon Cameron and Generals John C. Frémont (in Missouri) and David
Hunter (in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida) to keep the loyalty
of the border states and the War Democrats. Lincoln warned the border
states that a more radical type of emancipation would happen if his
gradual plan based on compensated emancipation and voluntary
colonization was rejected. But only the District of Columbia accepted
Lincoln's gradual plan, which was enacted by Congress. When Lincoln
told his cabinet about his proposed emancipation proclamation, Seward
advised Lincoln to wait for a victory before issuing it, as to do
otherwise would seem like "our last shriek on the retreat".
Lincoln laid the groundwork for public support in an open letter
published letter to abolitionist Horace Greeley's newspaper.
In
September 1862, the Battle of Antietam provided this opportunity, and
the subsequent War Governors' Conference added support for the
proclamation. Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation on September 22, 1862, and his final Emancipation
Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In his letter to Albert G. Hodges,
Lincoln explained his belief that "If slavery is not wrong,
nothing is wrong ... And yet I have never understood that the
Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially
upon this judgment and feeling ... I claim not to have controlled
events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
Lincoln's moderate approach succeeded in inducing border
states, War Democrats and emancipated slaves to fight for the Union.
The Union-controlled border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland,
Delaware and West Virginia) and Union-controlled regions around New
Orleans, Norfolk and elsewhere, were not covered by the Emancipation
Proclamation. All abolished slavery on their own, except Kentucky and
Delaware.
Since the Emancipation Proclamation was based
on the President's war powers, it only included territory held by
Confederates at the time. However, the Proclamation became a symbol
of the Union's growing commitment to add emancipation to the Union's
definition of liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation greatly reduced
the Confederacy's hope of getting aid from Britain or France. By late
1864, Lincoln was playing a leading role in getting Congress to vote
for the Thirteenth Amendment, which made emancipation universal and
permanent.
TEXAS v. WHITE: In Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700
(1869) the United States Supreme Court ruled that Texas had remained
a state ever since it first joined the Union, despite claims that it
joined the Confederate States; the court further held that the
Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the
United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts
of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to
such ordinances, were "absolutely null", under the
constitution.
RECONSTRUCTION: Reconstruction began during
the war, with the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 and
continued until 1877. It comprised multiple complex methods to
resolve the outstanding issues of the war's aftermath, the most
important of which were the three "Reconstruction Amendments"
to the Constitution, which remain in effect to the present time: the
13th (1865), the 14th (1868) and the 15th (1870). From the Union
perspective, the goals of Reconstruction were to consolidate the
Union victory on the battlefield by reuniting the Union; to guarantee
a "republican form of government for the ex-Confederate states;
and to permanently end slavery—and prevent semi-slavery status.
President Johnson took a lenient approach and saw the
achievement of the main war goals as realized in 1865, when each
ex-rebel state repudiated secession and ratified the Thirteenth
Amendment. Radical Republicans demanded proof that Confederate
nationalism was dead and that the slaves were truly free. They came
to the fore after the 1866 elections and undid much of Johnson's
work. In 1872 the "Liberal Republicans" argued that the war
goals had been achieved and that Reconstruction should end. They ran
a presidential ticket in 1872 but were decisively defeated. In 1874,
Democrats, primarily Southern, took control of Congress and opposed
any more reconstruction. The Compromise of 1877 closed with a
national consensus that the Civil War had finally ended. With the
withdrawal of federal troops, however, whites retook control of every
Southern legislature; the Jim Crow period of disenfranchisement and
legal segregation was about to begin.
MEMORY AND
HISTORIOGRAPHY: The Civil War is one of the central events in
American collective memory. There are innumerable statues,
commemorations, books and archival collections. The memory includes
the home front, military affairs, the treatment of soldiers, both
living and dead, in the war's aftermath, depictions of the war in
literature and art, evaluations of heroes and villains, and
considerations of the moral and political lessons of the war. The
last theme includes moral evaluations of racism and slavery, heroism
in combat and behind the lines, and the issues of democracy and
minority rights, as well as the notion of an "Empire of Liberty"
influencing the world.
Professional historians have paid
much more attention to the causes of the war, than to the war itself.
Military history has largely developed outside academe, leading to a
proliferation of solid studies by non-scholars who are thoroughly
familiar with the primary sources, pay close attention to battles and
campaigns, and write for the large public readership, rather than the
small scholarly community. Bruce Canton and Shelby Foote are among
the best-known writers. Practically every major figure in the war,
both North and South, has had a serious biographical study. Deeply
religious Southerners saw the hand of God in history, which
demonstrated His wrath at their sinfulness, or His rewards for their
suffering. Historian Wilson Fallin has examined the sermons of white
and black Baptist preachers after the War. Southern white preachers
said: God had chastised them and given them a special mission – to
maintain orthodoxy, strict biblicism, personal piety, and traditional
race relations. Slavery, they insisted, had not been sinful. Rather,
emancipation was a historical tragedy and the end of Reconstruction
was a clear sign of God's favour.
In sharp contrast,
Black preachers interpreted the Civil War as: God's gift of freedom.
They appreciated opportunities to exercise their independence, to
worship in their own way, to affirm their worth and dignity, and to
proclaim the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Most of
all, they could form their own churches, associations, and
conventions. These institutions offered self-help and racial uplift,
and provided places where the gospel of liberation could be
proclaimed. As a result, black preachers continued to insist that God
would protect and help him; God would be their rock in a stormy land.
LOST CAUSE: Memory of the war in the white South
crystallized in the myth of the "Lost Cause", shaping
regional identity and race relations for generations. Alan T. Nolan
notes that the Lost Cause was expressly "a rationalization, a
cover-up to vindicate the name and fame" of those in rebellion.
Some claims revolve around the insignificance of slavery; some
appeals highlight cultural differences between North and South; the
military conflict by Confederate actors is idealized; in any case,
secession was said to be lawful. The two important political legacies
that flowed from the adoption of the Lost Cause analysis were that it
facilitated the reunification of the North and the South, and it
excused the "virulent racism" of the 19th century,
sacrificing African-American progress to a white man's reunification.
But the Lost Cause legacy to history is "a caricature of the
truth. This caricature wholly misrepresents and distorts the facts of
the matter" in every instance.
The interpretation of
the Civil War presented by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard in The
Rise of American Civilization (1927) was highly influential among
historians and the general public until the Civil Rights Movement of
the 1950s and 1960s. The Beards downplayed slavery, abolitionism, and
issues of morality. They ignored constitutional issues of states'
rights and even ignored American nationalism as the force that
finally led to victory in the war. Indeed, the ferocious combat
itself was passed over as merely an ephemeral event. Much more
important was the calculus of class conflict. The Beards announced
that the Civil War was really: [A] social cataclysm in which the
capitalists, labourers, and farmers of the North and West drove from
power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the
South.
The Beards themselves abandoned their
interpretation by the 1940s and it became defunct among historians in
the 1950s, when scholars shifted to an emphasis on slavery. However,
Beardian themes still echo among Lost Cause writers.
CIVIL
WAR COMMEMORATION: The American Civil War has been commemorated in
many capacities ranging from the reenactment of battles, to statues
and memorial halls erected, to films being produced, to stamps and
coins with Civil War themes being issued, all of which helped to
shape public memory. This varied advent occurred in greater
proportions on the 100th and 150th anniversary. Hollywood's take on
the war has been especially influential in shaping public memory, as
seen in such film classics as Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the
Wind (1939), and more recently Lincoln (2012). Ken Burns produced a
notable PBS series on television titled The Civil War (1990). It was
digitally remastered and re-released in 2015.
Books:
Gone with the Wind (by Margaret Mitchell); An Occurrence
at Owl Creek Bridge (by Ambrose Bierce); Texar's Revenge, or, North
Against South (by Jules Verne)
Films:
The
Birth of a Nation (1915, USA); The General (1926, USA); Gone with the
Wind (1939, USA); The Red Badge of Courage (1951, USA); The Horse
Soldiers (1959, USA); Shenandoah (1965, USA); The Good, the Bad and
the Ugly (1966, Italy-Spain-FRG); Glory (1989, USA); Gettysburg
(1993, USA); The Last Outlaw (1993, USA); Cold Mountain (2003, USA);
Gods and Generals (2003, USA); North and South (miniseries); Abraham
Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012, USA); Lincoln (2012, USA); 12 Years a
Slave (2012, USA)