Anyone who explores Civil War–era history should pay close attention to how people at the time understood and used key words. “Freedom” ranks among the most important of such words. Americans of the 21st century almost always address questions relating to freedom within a context of slavery and emancipation. This approach often yields insights regarding mid–19th century people, across racial lines, who found themselves challenged by the war’s life-changing events. Yet such assumptions about how the White population in the free states used “freedom” also can lead us astray. For a broad spectrum of the loyal citizenry of the United States, including almost all Democrats, the word could have conjured images not of ending slavery but of guaranteeing and extending their own liberty and freedom in a nation where, politically and economically, the cards were not stacked irrevocably against common people.

George F. Root’s song The Battle-Cry of Freedom offers an opportunity to explore this phenomenon. Among the most popular compositions for loyal soldiers and civilians, its sheet music sold more than 500,000 copies in the 19th century. Root’s lyrics not only shed light on what mattered to those who sang and listened to them, but they also demonstrate the importance of ascribing contemporary meanings to language deployed by the Civil War generation. “Freedom” is the key word in the song’s title. A reasonable conclusion might be that Root, writing in the summer of 1862, authored a call for White men to enlist and end the practice of human bondage by force of arms. After all, Congress already had outlawed slavery in the District of Columbia and the Federal territories (on April 16 and June 19, 1862, respectively), and discussion of more general emancipation grew increasingly heated inside and outside Congress.

However plausible, such an interpretation fails to account for the origins of the song and its great appeal in the United States. “I heard of President Lincoln’s second call for troops one afternoon while reclining on a lounge in my brother’s house,” Root recalled in his memoirs. “Immediately I started a song in my mind,” he continued, “words and music together: ‘Yes, we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again, / Shouting the battle-cry of freedom!’” Root thought about the piece through the rest of the day and finished it the following morning. “From there the song went into the army,” he remembered with obvious pride, “and the testimony in regard to its use in the camp and on the march, and even on the field of battle, from soldiers and officers, up to generals, and even to the good President himself, made me thankful that if I could not shoulder a musket in defense of my country I could serve her in this way.”

Emancipation almost certainly did not preoccupy Root as he composed what he termed a “rallying song.” Lincoln’s call for the governors of loyal states to supply 300,000 3-year volunteers, dated July 1, 1862, and released to the press the next day, sought to boost volunteering across the United States. National conscription lay many months in the future, as did large-scale recruitment of African Americans, so anything that might help place more White men in uniform during the summer of 1862 would assist the Lincoln administration and the war effort.

For the song’s targeted audience, “Union” provided the hook, with preservation of existing American freedom as one of the obvious benefits of vanquishing the Rebels. The chorus conveyed the principal message: “The Union forever, Hurrah, boys, Hurrah! / Down with the traitor, Up with the star; / While we rally round the flag, boys, / Rally once again, Shouting the battle-cry of Freedom.” Echoing Daniel Webster’s famous call for “Liberty and Union, now and forever,” the chorus supported the idea of a perpetual Union so dear to Lincoln and countless others.

The second verse tied prospective volunteers to White men who had enlisted earlier and suffered casualties that left military units shorthanded: “We are springing to the call / Of our brothers gone before, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom; / And we’ll fill our vacant ranks / With a million free men more, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.”

The third verse invited all classes of men to step forward with a promise of rights within the Union: “We will welcome to our numbers / The loyal, true, and brave, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom, / And although he may be poor, / Not a man shall be a slave, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.” The last verse spoke to a national effort uniting geographical sections: “So we’re springing to the call / From the East and from the West, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom, / And we’ll hurl the rebel crew / From the land we love the best, / Shouting the battle cry of freedom.”

Root’s lyrics brilliantly engaged the pool of military-age White men in the loyal states—“free men” who, by taking up arms, would guarantee continued “freedom” and prevent their domination by southern slaveholders. These words appealed on the basis of a free labor vision of the American nation with a Constitution and representative form of government designed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” Many in the North believed that slaveholding oligarchs denied such a path, and thus real freedom, to non-slaveholding White people in the South, and that the Slave Power’s inordinate influence in the antebellum federal government had presented a continuing obstacle to greater expansion of political and economic opportunity.

Root translated Webster’s soaring rhetoric into a paean to Union with an infectious melody and well-crafted lyrics that spread through army camps and patriotic gatherings on the civilian front. As the war progressed, emancipation joined restoring the Union as a stated national goal, and Black men entered the army in significant numbers. Those striking changes meant that Root’s memorable song could summon thoughts of both preserving freedom long enjoyed by White Americans and expanding freedom to millions of African Americans who had suffered under the tyranny of slavery.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Civil War Times magazine.

A massive amount of correspondence passed between Union armies and the home front. Chaplain Richard Eddy of the 60th New York Infantry, who also served as the regimental postmaster, noted in April 1863 that he “mailed for the regiment 3855 letters during the month.”  

The Army of the Potomac comprised 238 infantry regiments, 29 cavalry regiments, and 65 artillery batteries during the Gettysburg campaign, some two months after Chaplain Eddy made his count. If men in all units wrote home at approximately the same rate as the New Yorkers, more than a million letters probably left the army in a single month. The amount of incoming mail can never be known but swelled the total impressively. These numbers attest to the impact of widespread literacy among a national population caught up in life-defining events.  

Many letters traveled in envelopes, often called patriotic covers, that reveal important information about political and social attitudes across the North. In Hardtack and Coffee, or the Unwritten Story of Army Life (1887), John D. Billings discussed what he termed the “large number of fanciful envelopes got up during the war.” He heard about “a young man who had a collection of more than seven thousand such, all with different designs,” and had “several in my possession which I found among the numerous letters written home during war-time.” Billings mentioned many with patriotic themes, such as one bearing a portrait of George Washington and the text “A SOUTHERN MAN WITH UNION PRINCIPLES.” A second depicted “the Earth in space, with ‘United States’ marked on it in large letters, and the American eagle above it. Enclosing all is the inscription, ‘What God has joined, let no man put asunder.’” Another had “a negro standing grinning, a hoe in his hand,” related Billings. “He is represented as saying, ‘Massa can’t have dis chile, dat’s what’s de matter’; and beneath is the title, ‘The latest contraband of war.’” Union military figures graced numerous envelopes, as did negative treatments of Jefferson Davis and other Rebels. “[T]he national colors appear in a hundred or more ways on a number,” affirmed Billings, who concluded that the envelopes, “in a degree at least, expressed some phase of the sentiments popular at the North.”   

Billings provided an accurate snapshot of patriotic envelopes that circulated in the United States. They reminded citizens of their democratic republic and its Constitution, often deploying Columbia, the 19th century’s feminine personification of the United States, as a symbol of what the founding generation bequeathed to subsequent generations. One envelope placed her opposite Daniel Webster’s ringing phrase “Liberty & Union Now & For Ever.” In another, Columbia employed legalistic wording rather than phrasing likely to make hearts soar: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.” The Founders appeared on envelopes in various ways, most often in the person of George Washington. Other prominent motifs included United States flags, eagles, the Union shield, soldiers and sailors, and famous generals and politicians. Some envelopes were humorous, others serious or even didactic. Many combined multiple popular symbols and texts; one placed Columbia on the left holding a sword and a large U.S. flag, balanced on the right by an eagle, a column with a shield and the word “Union,” a bust of Washington, and a copy of the Constitution.  

Ubiquitous allusions to “Union” accompanied various symbols. Representative envelopes offered “Union Forever” on an embossed flag, “Union” surrounded by the names of the loyal states, and “Union” in the middle of a large star. Envelopes catered to individual states, typified by one highlighting Columbia, her hands on the U.S. flag and the seal of the state of New York, with “LOYAL TO THE” in white letters behind her and “UNION” in large red, white, and blue letters to her right. On one striking envelope, a locomotive with “Union For Ever” emblazoned on its smokestack smashes through Rebels along a railroad. Should the letter’s recipient miss the obvious message, a caption explained: “The Union locomotive clearing the Secession track.”  

Jefferson Davis turned up frequently as the principal traitor seeking to destroy the Union—sometimes with comical plays on words as part of the message. One example presents the Confederate president dangling from a gallows with text above and below: “Jeff. Davis, ‘President’ of Traitors, Robbers, and Pirates; the Nero of the 19th century.”; and “On the Last ‘Platform’ of the Southern Confeder-ass-y ‘Rope, Beam & Co.,’ Executors.” A second envelope used images in a pair of ovals—on the top, “Jeff the Dictator As He Is,” a booted and spurred figure holding a sword and with a skull-and-crossbones flag behind him; on the bottom, “Jeff the Dig-Tater-er As He Should Be,” a barefoot and shirtless figure digging with a hoe while an enslaved man whips him.   

Relatively few envelopes dealt directly with either emancipation or African Americans, but those that did usually resorted to overtly racist texts and images. Some catered to Democrats who opposed emancipation, including one caricaturing a Black man with large red lips captioned, “The Cause of All Our Troubles.” Others dealt with contrabands (refugees)—a man shining a shoe and alluding to General Benjamin F. Butler, “By golly Massa Butler, I like dis better dan workin’ in de field for old Secesh massa.”; a black couple in grotesque poses with the caption, “Bress de Lor, we am Contraban.”; and a White man holding a Black child, “Him fader’s hope / Him moder’s joy, / Him darling little / Contraband Boy.”  

Surviving evidence does not indicate what percentage of the United States mail traveled in patriotic envelopes. Some political and military figures prominent early in the war appear more frequently than those whose fame came later, which suggests the envelopes declined in popularity as the war dragged on. The Union’s first real martyr, Col. Elmer Ellsworth, was a subject far more often than Ulysses S. Grant or William Tecumseh Sherman. Many of the covers may have been saved rather than used—collected, as with the man with more than 7,000 mentioned by John D. Billings. For current students of the war, the envelopes indisputably offer valuable information about politics and culture in the wartime North.

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Major General John Pope’s actions with the Army of Virginia resonated far beyond the battlefields of August 1862. Often dismissed as a blustering incompetent who supposedly announced his headquarters would be “in the saddle,” he experienced ignominious defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run and then exile to the backwater of Minnesota. Few army commanders on either side inspired more scorn from contemporaries and subsequent historians. Yet Pope’s record in Virginia deserves serious attention as crucial to the shift from a restrained to a more all-encompassing style of war in the Eastern Theater. This shift, in turn, lessened the likelihood of a brokered peace that would restore the nation to anything resembling the prewar status quo.

Pope entered the Virginia theater at a pivotal moment. Orders creating his Army of Virginia on June 26, 1862, consolidated the commands of Maj. Gens. John C. Frémont, Nathaniel P. Banks, and Irvin McDowell, which had faced Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. Charged with defending Washington, Pope also was “in the speediest manner [to] attack and overcome the rebel forces under Jackson and [Richard S.] Ewell, and render the most effective aid to relieve General [George B.] McClellan and capture Richmond.” Less than a week after issuance of these orders, McClellan’s unforced retreat following the Seven Days’ Battles changed everything, persuading Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. Congress that the war would continue much longer and require more drastic measures to crush the Confederate military resistance. Pope soon found himself a leading actor amid a tectonic shift in the nation’s war aims and policies.

McClellan’s failure escalated debates about emancipation, the limits of “civilized” warfare, and the relationship between armies and civilians and their property. Such controversial topics had arisen earlier in Missouri, where Frémont had tried to confiscate slaves owned by pro-Confederates, and anti-Union depredations by irregular forces had prompted discussions between Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck and the German-born scholar Francis Lieber. Prompted by his exchanges with Halleck, Lieber later in the war codified the rules of war in a document signed by President Lincoln and issued as General Orders No. 100 in April 1863. Controversy in Missouri, a secondary military arena, was one thing—controversy in Virginia, where the most famous armies campaigned in proximity to the rival capitals, proved more explosive.

Within three weeks of McClellan’s withdrawal from Richmond to Harrison’s Landing on the James River, both Congress and Abraham Lincoln acted regarding emancipation. The Second Confiscation Act of July 17, 1862, freed slaves held by Rebel owners, authorized seizure of property from several categories of individuals, and empowered the president “to employ as many persons of African descent as he may deem necessary and proper for the suppression of this rebellion.” Senator Charles Sumner, a Radical Republican from Massachusetts, observed that “the Bill of Confiscation & Liberation, which was at last passed, under pressure from our reverses at Richmond, is a practical Act of Emancipation.”

Four days earlier, according to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, the president discussed “the subject of emancipating the slaves by Proclamation in case the rebels did not cease to persist in their war on the govt’ and the Union, which he saw no evidence.” Lincoln believed “the reverses before Richmond, and the formidable power and dimensions of the insurrection which extended through all the Slave States…impelled the administration to adopt extraordinary measures to preserve the National existence.” At Cabinet meetings on July 21-22, 1862, Lincoln discussed emancipation and his intention to issue a proclamation.

These policies contrasted starkly with McClellan’s ideas. Shortly after the Battle of Malvern Hill, “Little Mac” offered the president a gratuitous tutorial about how to conduct the war. The United States should adhere to the “highest principles known to Christian Civilization,” insisted McClellan in what came to be called the “Harrison’s Landing letter.” The conflict “should not be, at all, a War upon population; but against armed forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.”

On August 1, while still ensconced at Harrison’s Landing, McClellan wrote to General-in-Chief Halleck. “I believe that together we can save this unhappy country and bring this war to a comparatively early termination,” he stated, “the doubt in my mind is whether the selfish politicians will allow us to do so. I fear the results of the civil policy inaugurated by recent Acts of Congress and practically enunciated by General Pope in his series of orders to the Army of Virginia.”

New Orders

Pope issued three general orders between July 14 and 23 that drew on his prior experience in Missouri and signaled a sharp departure from McClellan’s conciliatory approach. The first, General Orders No. 5, instructed Union troops to “subsist upon the country in which their operations are carried on” without reimbursement to pro-Confederate owners. Next, General Orders No. 7 held people “throughout the area where the Army of Virginia campaigns” responsible for any damage to railroads, roads, and telegraph lines at the hands of “lawless bands of individuals not forming part of the organized forces of the enemy nor wearing the garb of soldiers.” Anyone connected to “such outrages, either during the act or at any time afterward, shall be shot, without awaiting civil processes.”

Finally, General Orders No. 11 instructed Union officers “immediately to arrest all disloyal male citizens within their lines or within their reach in rear of their respective stations.” Those who refused to take the oath of allegiance would be sent south beyond the pickets of the army and if subsequently found “within our lines or at any point in rear they will be considered spies, and subjected to the extreme rigor of military law.” Anyone who took the oath and later violated it “shall be shot, and his property seized and applied to the public use.”

Pope’s thinking aligned with political leaders seeking harsher treatment of Confederates and their property. Lieutenant Colonel David W. Strother, who served on Pope’s staff, and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase recorded impressions of the general in July. Although not an abolitionist, Pope told Strother “the war had necessarily given the death blow to slavery. Wherever the Union armies move, the old system of master and slave falls.” Describing Pope’s ideas as “clear and strong,” Strother added that his chief believed enslaved people “ought to be taken and used remorselessly whenever needed….They will not make soldiers but as laborers they might be extensively used.” Chase summarized Pope’s thinking about employing Black laborers in almost identical terms, while also observing that the new commander “expressed himself freely and decidedly in favor of the most vigorous measures in the prosecution of the war.”

Divided Opinion

Pope made no effort to disguise his low opinion of McClellan. “[H]e regarded it as necessary for the safety and success of his operations that there should be a change in the command of the Army of the Potomac,” noted Chase, because “Genl. McClellan’s incompetency and indisposition to active movements were so great….” Pope’s widely quoted message to the Army of Virginia on July 14, 1862, can best be read as a critique of McClellan’s type of warfare. “I have come to you from the West,” he began bluntly, “where we have always seen the backs of our enemies; from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary and to beat him when he was found; whose policy has been attack and not defense.” In a direct slap at McClellan, Pope inveighed against a preoccupation with “‘taking strong positions and holding them,’ of ‘lines of retreat,’ and of ‘bases of supplies.’” Discard such ideas, he counseled, and instead “study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Let us look before us, and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.”

Many people in the loyal states responded favorably to Pope’s orders and attitude. William Swinton, a correspondent for The New York Times, believed Pope’s actions were popular in the loyal states. “[T]here is no doubt,” he wrote shortly after the war, “that the declaration of a more vigorous war-policy quite met the views of the mass of the people.” Representative quotations from newspapers in the summer of 1862 buttress Swinton’s view. In this vein, the Republican Chicago Tribune printed and endorsed the orders on July 22: “We like Gen. Pope and the way he falls to work in the Shenandoah . . . . [H]is orders have the right tone, and are based on the right principles of conducting the war. It has been severe enough upon loyal men; it is now proposed to render it unpleasing to the rebels.” 

Two New York papers took similar stances. The largely Democratic New York Herald claimed the “commonest complaint from our soldiers…has been, that while standing guard over rebel property they have been liable to be shot down by rebel bushwhackers.” The measures Pope learned in fighting guerrillas in Missouri “appear to be working very well among the same customers in Virginia.” The New-York Daily Tribune, a Republican sheet, made the same point with greater emphasis from a special correspondent near Warrenton. “I cannot describe too strongly the intensity of the feeling among the soldiers of this Virginia army,” he wrote, “—how clearly they see, and how strongly they feel that they are fighting in an enemy country. They needed to be convinced that their commanders and the Government also appreciated their situation, and they find in these orders the assurance they have sought.”

Michigan’s Lansing State Republican will have the final word here. Under the heading “New Life in the Army,” its editor cheered: “There is no longer to be that extreme carefulness of the rights, and tenderness at the feelings of rebels, but they are hereafter to be treated as rebels….General Pope intends to make clean work as he goes. This policy will give new life and vigor to the army, and to the people of the loyal States. This looks like putting down the rebellion. Hurrah for General Pope!”

Many Union soldiers echoed such opinions. A New Yorker deployed near Warrenton, Va., who complained that nothing “is more galling to a patriot and Union loving man than to be compelled to guard the property of his enemies,” celebrated Pope’s orders as “a very important step toward ending the war. Until the rebels are made to feel the severity of the war, but little permanent success will be won by our arms.” Lieutenant John Meade Gould of the 10th Maine Infantry praised Pope’s policies as overdue. “It is positively proven that an easy policy is a poor one,” he insisted from near Chester Gap, Va., “the natives laugh at us, jibe us, and when we are gone, pick up our stragglers and sick….WAR is a great and terrible game….Let the terror be with our enemies and not among ourselves.”

Disgust and Anger

McClellan’s loyalists, in contrast, lambasted Pope. They often opposed emancipation and tougher policies regarding Confederate civilians, while also bridling at what they deemed sneering allusions to the Army of the Potomac’s passivity. None vented more fulsomely than Brig. Gen. Marsena R. Patrick, who served as military governor of Fredericksburg in May–June 1862 and later led a brigade in the field. Pope’s orders “demoralized the Army,” the New Yorker noted in his diary on July 18, “& Satan has been let loose” among soldiers who pillaged at will. 

About a month later, Patrick pronounced himself “so utterly disgusted that I feel like resigning & letting the whole thing go—I am afraid of God’s Justice, for our Rulers & Commanders deserve his wrath & curse—” Lieutenant Charles Francis Adams Jr., whose family boasted two presidents and the current U.S. representative to Great Britain, spoke in Washington with members of McClellan’s and Halleck’s staffs and concluded “that Pope is a humbug and known to be so by those who put him in his present place.” “I still believe in McClellan,” affirmed Adams, “but I know that the nearest advisers of the President…distrust his earnestness in this war.”

Criticism emanated from within the Army of Virginia as well. Brig. Gen. Alpheus S. Williams castigated Pope after Second Bull Run: “It can with truth be said of him that he had not a friend in his command from the smallest drummer boy to the highest general officer. All hated him.” Reaching a hyperbolic crescendo, Williams spewed “that more insolence, superciliousness, ignorance, and pretentiousness were never combined in one man.” Lieutenant Robert Gould Shaw of the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, who like Williams served in Banks’ 2nd Corps, also took a scolding position. “Pope criticizes and abuses McClellan with a will,” he observed on August 3, “showing in a man in his position no better taste than appeared in his proclamation and some of his orders….He looks just what we have always understood he was,—a great blow-hard, with no lack of confidence in his own powers.”

George B. McClellan refused even to wish for Pope to succeed against the Rebels. “I have a strong idea that Pope will be thrashed during the coming week—& very badly whipped he will be & ought to be,” McClellan wrote on August 10 in language that flirted with disloyalty, “—such a villain as he is ought to bring defeat upon any cause that employs him.” Two days earlier, he had denounced Pope and the war’s new direction. “I will issue tomorrow an order giving my comments on Mr. Jno Pope,” he told his wife, “—I will strike square in the teeth of all his infamous orders & give directly the reverse instructions to my army—forbid all pillaging & stealing & take the highest Christian ground for the conduct of the war—let the Govt gainsay it if they dare.”

Confederate reactions underscored the powerful ramifications of Pope’s short tenure with the Army of Virginia. On July 22, the United States and the Confederacy agreed to a cartel stipulating “that all prisoners of war hereafter taken shall be discharged on parole till exchanged.” Nine days later, an indignant Jefferson Davis wrote to Lee regarding the “general order issued by Major General Pope on the 23rd of July.” Because of that directive, the Confederate government recognized “General Pope and his commissioned officers to be in the position…of robbers and murderers, and not that of public enemies entitled if captured to be considered as prisoners of war.” For the present, the Confederacy would forego retaliation against Pope’s enlisted soldiers and treat them as prisoners of war. Should the United States continue its “savage practices,” however, “we shall reluctantly be forced to the last resort of accepting war on the terms chosen by our foes, until the outraged voice of a common humanity forces respect for the recognized rules of war.”

On August 1, Davis instructed Robert E. Lee to seek details from the Union general-in-chief about “alleged murders committed on our citizens by officers of the U.S. Army”—including one in Missouri supposedly ordered by Pope. Lee was instructed to allow Halleck 15 days from receipt of the query to reply; failure to do so would set in motion “retributive or retaliatory measures which we shall adopt to put an end to the merciless atrocities which now characterize the war waged against us.”

The Confederate War Department issued General Orders No. 54 that same day. It quoted part of Pope’s General Orders No. 11 and another authored by Brig. Gen. Adolph von Steinwehr on July 13 to show that the United States had “determined to violate all the rules and usages of war and to convert the hostilities hitherto waged against armed forces into a campaign of robbery and murder against unarmed citizens and peaceful tillers of the soil….” If captured, Pope, von Steinwehr, and their subalterns would not be treated as the recent cartel mandated but held in “close confinement so long as the orders aforesaid shall continue in force and unrepealed by the competent military authorities of the United States….” Should the Federals murder any unarmed Confederate civilians under Pope’s orders, whether with or without trial, an equal number of U.S. officers held in custody would be hanged.

On August 18, Davis sent a message to the Confederate Congress accusing the United States of “Rapine and wanton destruction of private property, war upon noncombatants, murder of captives, bloody threats to avenge the death of an invading soldiery by the slaughter of unarmed citizens, [and] orders of banishment against peaceful farmers.”

That Pope did not enforce his orders on a grand scale made little difference. Perception rather than reality held sway, as is almost always the case, and Confederates reacted with a spasm of anger to the threats inherent in the orders and to specific instances of Federal arrests and confiscation. Meanwhile, the increased movement of enslaved refugees toward Pope’s lines inflamed fears of the consequences of emancipation. Confederates coalesced with an outraged sense of purpose, determined to resist a foe who threatened every aspect of their social and economic structures.

Newspapers across the Confederacy engaged in a carnival of outrage that instigated popular fury directed at Pope. Two examples illustrate this phenomenon. On July 24, the Richmond Daily Dispatch printed Pope’s three orders under the heading “GEN. POPE’S ARMY / VIRGINIA TO BE LAID WASTE.” In early August, this paper expressed a hope “to see this execrable villain and his lieutenant[s] expiate their crimes on the gallows.” In North Carolina, Winston’s Western Sentinel deprecated Pope and his “execrable order which exposes all sexes and ages to the severest cruelties of ruffian Yankee troops.” The editor further observed that “North Carolina has hitherto been exempt from the operations of these brutal military decrees . . . only because the minions of Lincoln in this State have not had the force at command to enforce their execution.”

Robert E. Lee joined countless Confederates who read the texts of Pope’s orders in newspapers. He related that his son Rob was “off with Jackson & I hope will catch Pope & his cousin Louis Marshall. I could forgive the latter for fighting against us, if he had not have joined such a miscreant as Pope.” Lee’s use of the word “miscreant” bears close attention. Its mid-19th century meanings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, included “Misbelieving, heretical; unbelieving, infidel” and “A vile wretch; a villain, rascal.”

Others selected comparably harsh epithets for Pope and his troops. A Catholic priest with the 14th Louisiana Infantry deplored “Pope’s abolition robbers,” while a British-born soldier stated that “our men heartily hated him for his ruthless cruelty to the inhabitants of the country, and his extraordinary amount of vanity and bombast.” Colonel Josiah Gorgas, the Confederate chief of ordnance, called Pope the “morally worthless” author of “infamous orders holding citizens responsible for the shooting of his men by guerrillas, or rangers.”

Women left ample testimony about the impact of Pope’s orders, much of which alluded to what newspapers decried as the “uncivilized” and “savage” conduct of Union soldiers. For Lucy Buck, living near Front Royal, the reality of General Orders No. 11 exceeded her worst imaginings. “This is what I have all the time been dreading,” she wrote on July 26, “and now it had come in a more hideous shape than I had ever anticipated.” Neighbors agreed: “We met Mr. Hope and Mr. Hainie and the former had been weeping and seemed to be utterly bewildered by the shock. Oh how intensely I did hate the whole race of Yankees.”

A diarist from outside Virginia reflected the national interest in Pope and his orders. Kate Edmondston clipped the texts of General Orders No. 5 and No. 7 from a newspaper and pasted them in her journal. “Gen. Pope has issued an order…monstrous in its cruelty and contrary to the practices of all civilized warfare,” she commented with obvious anger, “but this is not civilized warfare, nor do our enemies show either the genius of Christianity or the spirit of Civilization.”

Anyone interested John Pope’s impact in Virginia must look beyond the battlefield. His inept tactical performance and defeat at Second Bull Run, however embarrassing, shaped Union military fortunes in only a transitory way. Campaigning in Maryland almost immediately seized the spotlight, relegating operations in July and August to a secondary position they hold to this day. The ratcheting up of animosities during those two months proved far more consequential.

Pope’s orders and conduct played a crucial role in this process, evident in the Eastern Theater and on the respective home fronts, which heralded a kind of war that could engulf untold noncombatants. Lincoln’s preliminary and final proclamations of emancipation, the sack of Fredericksburg by Union soldiers during the Fredericksburg campaign, and other episodes left little doubt that George B. McClellan’s sort of war had ended. The stakes had been raised, hatreds stoked, and the stage set for elemental social, cultural, and ideological disruptions.

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John G. Nicolay, John Hay, and William O. Stoddard served as secretaries to Abraham Lincoln. Nicolay and Hay worked in close proximity to their chief throughout the war, while Stoddard spent significant time in the White House between July 1861 and July 1864. Loyal to “The Tycoon,” as they called the president, the three young men logged endless hours and experienced frustration and exhilaration in generous measure. They also created valuable testimony that Southern Illinois University Press published in a quartet of essential volumes: Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (1997); Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (2000); Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860-1865 (2000); and Harold Holzer, ed., Lincoln’s White House Secretary: The Adventurous Life of William O. Stoddard (2007).

Hay’s observations shed light on innumerable events and personalities. On November 11, 1864, the just re-elected Lincoln spoke to his Cabinet about the famous “Blind Memorandum.” He took the document, written on August 23, 1864, from his desk and said, “Gentlemen do you remember last summer I asked you all to sign your names to the back of a paper of which I did not show you the inside? This is it.” 

The president “had pasted it up in so singular style that it required some cutting to get it open” before he could recite the brief text: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”

Lincoln next explained that in late August he had believed George B. McClellan would receive the Democratic nomination and meant to urge “Little Mac” to “raise as many troops as you possibly can for this final trial, and I will devote all my energies to assisting and finishing the war.” Secretary of State William H. Seward remarked that McClellan would have said, “‘Yes—yes’ & so on forever and would have done nothing at all.’ ‘At least’ added Lincoln ‘I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience.’”      

Hay’s diary underscores Lincoln’s disappointment in the wake of Gettysburg. On July 11, though “rather impatient with Gen Meade’s slow movements,” the president believed his general “would yet show sufficient activity to inflict the Coup de grace upon the flying rebels.” Three days later “the Prest. seemed depressed by Meade’s dispatches of last night. They were so cautiously & almost timidly worded—talking about reconnoitering to find the enemy’s weak place and other such. He said he feared he would do nothing.”

On July 15, Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, “says the Tycoon President [Hay made the substitution] is grieved silently but deeply about the escape of Lee. He said ‘If I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself.’ I know he had that idea.”

A year earlier, Nicolay described reaction to George B. McClellan’s retreat after the Seven Days’ Battles. President Lincoln recently made a “flying visit” to the Army of the Potomac and seemed to have “returned in better spirits.” For the public, in contrast, it “has been a very blue week here among all classes of society….I don’t think I have ever heard more croaking since the war began than during the past ten days.” Many leaders exhibited “little real faith and courage under difficulties,” commented Nicolay, while the “average public mind is becoming alarmingly sensational. A single reverse or piece of accidental ill-luck is enough to throw them all into horrors of despair.” Although Nicolay played down the significance of McClellan’s failure at Richmond, his letter suggests the degree to which the Seven Days’ countered recent Union success in other military theaters.

On August 25, 1864, Nicolay vented to Hay about the volatile political situation that had prompted Lincoln’s solicitation, two days earlier, of signatures on his blind memorandum. “Hell is to play,” he began, “The N.Y. politicians have got a stampede on that is about to swamp everything.” Moreover, “Weak-kneed d—-d fools like Chas. Sumner are in a movement for a new candidate—to supplant the Tycoon.”

With everything in “darkness and doubt and discouragement,” Nicolay thought the nation had reached “a turning point in our crisis.” He lauded Lincoln’s “patience and pluck” and hoped other Republicans would emulate his example. “If our friends will only rub their eyes and shake themselves,” he concluded, “and become convinced that they themselves are not dead we shall win the fight overwhelmingly.”

William O. Stoddard’s recollections of Lincoln, notes editor Holzer, inspired dismissive comments from both Nicolay and Hay. Historians also have questioned some of Stoddard’s claims, as when he insisted the president asked him to manage the substitution of Andrew Johnson for Hannibal Hamlin as the Republican vice presidential candidate in 1864. Yet his autobiography contains ample material of interest. Charged with sorting the mass of unsolicited daily mail addressed to Lincoln, Stoddard had his pulse on the concerns and attitudes of the loyal citizenry and created excellent snapshots of key moments in the war.

One such moment conveys anticipation of public anger over news of Joseph Hooker’s ignominious defeat at Chancellorsville. Nicolay remembered that “[A] terrible, great, black cloud…came rolling across the Potomac and into the White House from the lost battlefield of Chancellorsville.”

John Hay told him that “Stanton says this is the darkest day of the war. It seems as if the bottom has dropped out.” Stoddard knew on that “awful day,” when it “almost seemed as if the White House itself had been transferred to the battlefield,” what the mail would soon bring. “[T]he wails and the mourning…would quickly come down from the North,” he foresaw, “and, mingled with these, would be the sounds of despair and the unsuppressed curses of the unreasoning people who would surely hold Mr. Lincoln and his administration responsible for this one more lost battle and its dead.”

Best read together, Lincoln’s secretaries afford readers an insider’s glimpse into an administration caught in the crucible of a great war. They also remind us of our debt to scholarly editors and university presses.

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A sculpture titled The Council of War occupies a prominent place in my library. Created in 1868 by the artist John Rogers, it depicts a seated Abraham Lincoln holding a large map and flanked by Lt. Gen. U.S. Grant and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Grant points toward the map with his right index finger while Stanton, cleaning his glasses, looks on. The idea for the grouping came from Stanton, who described a meeting in March 1864 when Grant, “after returning from his first visit to the Army of the Potomac, laid before the President the plan of operations he proposed to adopt.” Robert Todd Lincoln pronounced Rogers’ effort the most lifelike sculpted image of his father, and Stanton expressed similar admiration. Whenever I look at The Council of War, I imagine eavesdropping on three leaders who helped steer the United States toward victory during the war’s final tumultuous year.

The Massachusetts-born Rogers (1829-1904) created scores of small-scale plaster sculptures for sale at modest cost to a middle-class audience. Between 1859 and the early 1890s, he sold an estimated 80,000 pieces. More than a dozen Civil War–related works reflected the artist’s staunchly pro-Union and pro-emancipation views. Although The Council of War features famous individuals, most of the works focus on common soldiers, civilians, and African Americans—usually in settings that resonated with the loyal citizenry at a fundamental level. A Boston newspaper characterized the wartime pieces as “packed with far reaching and penetrating suggestions of wide spread trials and joys.”

Two works from 1863 deal with correspondence between soldiers and their families and friends at home. Rogers explained the scene in Country Post Office: News From the Army: “An old shoemaker, who is postmaster also, has just opened the mailbag from the army. He is taking a provokingly long time to study out the address of a letter which a young lady by his side recognizes at once as for her.” One reviewer suggested the woman, eager to get her letter, could have been a wife, sister, or lover—which meant a wide range of viewers might see in Country Post Office their own personal experience. Mail Day reversed the perspective, offering a soldier with a writing table in his lap and a pensive look on his face. “It is the day for the mail to close,” wrote Rogers, “and a soldier is puzzling his brains so as to complete his letter in time.”

Rogers addressed disparate themes in a pair of works whose titles highlighted the war’s human damage. Wounded Scout: A Friend in the Swamp (1864) reflected his interest in Union combatants and emancipation. The dominant figure is a tall escaped slave who steadies a White soldier with an injured right arm. A political message resides in a copperhead snake that, Rogers observed, raises “its head to strike the negro while he is doing his friendly act.” The artist sent a copy to Abraham Lincoln, who thanked him for the “very pretty and suggestive, and, I should think, excellent…piece of art.” Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child thought the sculpture offered “a significant lesson of human brotherhood for all the coming ages.” Among Rogers’ most popular pieces, Wounded to the Rear, One More Shot (1864) portrays two soldiers, one struck in the arm and the other in the leg. Ordered to leave the firing line, they have stopped to fire a last round at the Rebels. This tribute to Union courage proved a favorite with veterans. For Joseph R. Hawley, a division commander during the war and long-time senator from Connecticut, “Nothing relating to the war in painting or sculpture surpasses ‘One More Shot.’”

Several of the sculptures echo Winslow Homer’s treatments of daily life among Union soldiers. The Camp Fire: Making Friends With the Cook (1862) presents a seated soldier reading from a newspaper to an African American standing over a kettle. The two men’s body language suggests a comfortable familiarity across racial lines. The Town Pump (1862) places an infantryman holding a cup and a woman with a bucket beside a common well, evoking the plight of thirsty soldiers on the march, while Camp Life of the Card Players (1862) shows two bare-headed Zouaves who have re-purposed a large drum as their playing surface.

Most of Rogers’ audience would have interpreted the Black figures in Wounded Scout and The Camp Fire as contrabands—Civil War parlance for African American refugees. Union Refugees (1863) deals with displaced White Unionists in the Confederacy. The three-person grouping, comprising an obviously exhausted couple and their small boy, received considerable praise when exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1863.

Rogers devoted his last Civil War–related piece, titled The Fugitive’s Story, to emancipation. It served as an artistic bookend to The Slave Auction (1859), a commercial failure that nonetheless had garnered some national attention for Rogers. As in The Council of War, he chose three major historical figures for The Fugitive’s Story—in this case abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Ward Beecher. Grouped around a desk, the three listen to an African American woman, who holds her child and tells about escaping enslavement. The Independent, a New York weekly Beecher had edited early in the Civil War, reported that Sojourner Truth wept upon seeing Rogers’ treatment of an enslaved mother who had shepherded her child to freedom.

Truth’s response suggests the emotional appeal of Rogers’ sculptures. A photograph of George Armstrong and Elizabeth Bacon Custer at Fort Abraham Lincoln in the early 1870s includes Wounded to the Rear on one end of a small table and Mail Call on the other. Mrs. Custer’s Boots and Saddles (1885) mentioned “two of the Rogers statuettes that we had carried about with us for years….our attachment for those little figures, and the associations connected with them, made us study out a way always to carry them.” Close examination of Rogers’ Civil War sculptures helps illuminate why so many Americans joined Sojourner Truth and the Custers in linking the artist’s work to important elements of the conflict.

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One of the great benefits of working in the field of Civil War history derives from the generosity of other scholars. Their sense of shared exploration promotes the circulation of materials that otherwise would remain unknown. More than 25 years ago, I met Donald E. Witt, a scholar of French literature with a deep interest in the American conflict. He had spent years translating the French newspaper Le Temps (The Times) for the period 1860-65. Because historians had frequently quoted the British press but paid relatively little attention to French newspapers, the materials he showed me seemed especially fresh. Happy to know someone else shared his enthusiasm for the project, he gave me seven thick binders containing more than 3,500 pages of translations.

A perusal of Le Temps revealed a rich body of descriptive and analytical evidence. The newspaper’s correspondents pursued an expansive approach to the American war that addressed politics, military affairs, swings of national morale, diplomatic maneuverings, and other topics. Political and military leaders figured prominently in the articles, which suggests Parisians exhibited a desire for such news.

Fourteen newspapers served Paris in 1861. Napoleon III’s government sponsored Moniteur and received largely favorable treatment from several other papers deemed “semi-official press.” Le Temps, which would become one of the important French dailies, supported the house of Orleans. With a pro-Union, antislavery editorial slant, it stood at odds with a pro-Confederate imperial press. In October 1861, Le Temps made a distinction regarding slavery’s role in the American crisis. “Yes, slavery is at the root of the war,” read the piece, “since it is the institution of slavery that, in the North and in the South, has made two nations, has created hostile interests between them…that has determined for her (the South) the rupture of the pact…” But it was not a war to kill slavery because “the abolitionist opinion has ever been, in the North, only that of an intimate minority.”

Le Temps allocated considerable attention to the Emancipation Proclamation. Noting that President Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation of September 22, 1862, finally “placed the debate between the North and the South on its true terrain,” the editors labeled it a military expedient forced on Lincoln by Rebel victories in the Eastern Theater. The paper found it “regrettable that the President hesitated for so long a time” and quoted from his letter to Horace Greeley dated August 22, 1862, concluding that “[t]his policy has only one aim, the re-establishment of the Union.” The newspaper responded to the final proclamation, which it termed “very important news from America,” on January 15, 1863. “This proclamation,” read the perceptive article, “…can hardly have any immediate effect; but it is not any less one of these utterances destined to have repercussions in history, to be converted into acts, and to become definitive.”

The prospective dual between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in 1864 generated sustained coverage in Le Temps that praised both commanders. “General Grant has acquired in his western campaigns habits of vigor” that would allow him “to lead the Army of the Potomac to victory,” while Lee, a general of “remarkable talent,” had won victories that showcased “the courage and energy of the Confederate troops.” Le Temps initially predicted Union triumph, largely because of faith in “the military capacity, but especially in the tenacity and the character of Grant.”

After the Battle of the Crater, the editors adopted a more ambivalent stance. “Whatever will be the denouement of this campaign in Virginia,” observed a piece treating Lee and Grant as equals, “it will remain a testimony of the indomitable tenacity of the two armies and the two generals who resist each other for so long…without any perceptible advantage on either side.”

Grinding operations in Virginia between early May and August 1864 set up a long piece in early September. Analyzing the two societies at war, a correspondent explored the combatants’ national morale and chances for victory. Confederates had faced “bankruptcy, despotism, famine” and “no longer have anything to hope for except independence; they no longer have anything to lose except their life.” The author admired “the courage that they deploy in this long resistance” and resoluteness in “this obstinacy of a common people who, for two years, block[ad]ed, invaded, decimated, found resources, [and] faced immense forces from the Union.” The Confederate economy lay in ruins “from top to bottom; all able men from fifteen to fifty-five are under arms….One no longer sees but women in the families and Negroes in the fields.” Yet Confederates manifested discipline born of “a unity of will” and still “held on, and no one can say when they will succumb.”

The United States presented a vastly different picture. It “has not renounced its richness,” asserted the author, “the war has interrupted neither its industry, nor its commerce.” Daily life progressed essentially as in peacetime, and Northerners shrank from “extreme measures, acting little and spending a lot, placing mercenaries opposite seasoned men, wasting immense resources without breaking down a poor enemy.”

The Union effort lacked the sense of collective direction evident in the Confederacy. Writing before the full impact of Sherman’s capture of Atlanta had become evident (travel across the Atlantic took 10 days or more), this writer perceived a possibly disastrous lack of will above the Potomac: “The North can yield to fatigue; then the war would have served only to substitute a national hate for a political rivalry; and to ruin more profoundly the Union.”

Four months later, on January 2, 1865, the paper had changed its tone. It celebrated the “re-election of Mr. Lincoln, and the manner in which it was accomplished” as “the gage of an indestructible liberty, and will remain in history as an imperishable testimony of political and moral grandeur.” The editors accurately predicted the difficult road that remained ahead: “[If] it is no longer hardly possible to doubt the re-establishment of the Union, the final success, and especially the final pacification do not appear still less a rather lengthy operation.”

Whenever I see the seven binders on the bookcase in my library, I think of Donald Witt’s great generosity and the trove of French evidence he made available to me.

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Winfield Scott’s accomplishments place him among the five greatest soldiers in U.S. history—in company with George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George C. Marshall. Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, Scott did as much as anyone to forge the nation’s professional army and served as its general in chief between 1841 and 1861. His campaign from Veracruz to Mexico City in 1847 prompted the Duke of Wellington to laud him as “the greatest soldier of the age.” Many junior officers in Mexico gained knowledge under Scott that they applied when in charge of their own armies during the Civil War. For his accomplishments in Mexico, Scott was brevetted lieutenant general, a regular rank held only by Washington until conferred on Grant in early 1864.

Yet the Winfield Scott of 1861 invites caricature. Nearly 74 years old, he sometimes nodded off during meetings. Once a striking figure at 6-feet-5 and partial to uniforms that explained the nickname “Old Fuss and Feathers,” he had inspired West Point cadet Ulysses Grant to call him “the finest specimen of manhood my eyes ever beheld.” But more than 350 pounds draped his large frame by 1861, gout and other ailments tormented him, and mounting a horse required the help of special winches. His strategic suggestions in the spring of 1861, which featured a coastal blockade and seizing control of the Mississippi River to choke the Rebel states, received considerable scorn as the “Anaconda Plan.” Most of the loyal citizenry preferred a shorter, more direct approach that would smash Confederate forces and end the rebellion in a single dramatic stroke.

During the summer and autumn of 1861, Scott and Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan increasingly locked horns. One of the young officers in Mexico who profited from Scott’s example, McClellan initially spoke well of his superior. “All that I know of war I have learned from you,” Little Mac wrote while operating in western Virginia, “& in all that I have done I have endeavored to conform to your manner of conducting a campaign.” Forty years Scott’s junior, McClellan changed tone as he imagined himself in overall charge of U.S. forces. He oozed condescension and self-aggrandizement when remarking of his superior in August: “I do not know whether he is a dotard or a traitor! I can’t tell which. He cannot or will not comprehend the condition in which we are placed & is entirely unequal to the emergency.”

Ailing and fed up with McClellan’s behavior, Scott decided to retire. Attorney General Edward Bates’ diary noted on November 1, 1861: “A Memorable Day. C.[abinet] C.[ouncil] called at the unusual hour of 9 a.m. to consider of Gen. Scott’s letter to Sec: [of] War, declaring his wish, by reason of age and increased ill health, to retire from active military duty….The order was drawn up by the President himself…and was done chastely and in excellent taste….The Prest. made a neat and feeling address, and the Genl. briefly replied, from the depths of his heart—”

McClellan’s claim that Scott proved unequal to the crisis of 1861 did the old soldier a great disservice. Although physically declining, the general in chief retained a first-rate mind and drew on vast experience as he pondered how best to defeat the Confederacy. The example of Mexico in 1846-48 probably guided some of his thinking. The United States had blockaded Mexican ports on the east coast and struck the northern provinces of Alta California, New Mexico, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Chihuahua. When those strategic elements proved insufficient, Scott’s famous campaign directed U.S. military power into the heart of Mexico.

On May 3, 1861, Scott laid out his thinking to McClellan. He proposed a “complete blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf ports” together with “a powerful movement down the Mississippi to the ocean.” The latter would require perhaps 60,000 “of our best regulars and of three-years’ volunteers, all well officered, and with four months and a half of instruction camps….” Forces on the Mississippi would turn successive Confederate strongholds and establish garrisoned posts as the campaign progressed. Impatience on the part of “our patriotic and loyal Union friends” posed the “greatest obstacle in the way of this plan,” thought Scott: “They will urge instant and vigorous action, regardless, I fear, of consequences.”

Scott’s letter to McClellan showed a mature grasp of the need to prepare and carefully train green volunteers and avoid the chimera of a quick, decisive battle. It also signaled a willingness to wait while possibly slow-moving operations cut sources of supply and sheared off the Trans-Mississippi section of the Confederacy. Critics at the time and later labeled the plan too passive, a case of Scott’s willingness to sit back and allow the blockade and seizure of the Mississippi River to precipitate a Confederate collapse. Where was the equivalent of his campaign against Mexico City?

In fact, Scott foresaw large-scale invasions of the South as a possible feature of Federal operational strategy. On March 3, 1861—long before the Confederacy showed it could mount an impressive military effort—he advised incoming Secretary of State William H. Seward that the U.S. might have to “[c]onquer the seceding States by invading armies.” The effort could take two or three years and “three hundred thousand disciplined” soldiers, many thousands of whom would be lost “by skirmishes, sieges, battles, and Southern fevers.” “The destruction of life and property on the other side would be frightful—however perfect the moral discipline of the invaders,” counseled Scott, and would entail a toll of “enormous waste of human life to the North and Northwest” and bitter postwar feelings that would frustrate the national goal of speedy reunion.

Scott’s letters to Seward and McClellan proved remarkably prescient regarding the war, its cost, and its messy and violent aftermath. Although underestimating both length of time and number of invading troops, he anticipated the Union’s winning strategy—blockade the Rebels, divide their territory by seizing the Mississippi, and send armies into the Confederate hinterlands. Scott spent most of his retirement at West Point, where he wrote his memoirs and watched the war unfold much as he had envisioned. He died in 1866 and lies buried in the Academy’s cemetery.

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Confederate women are far better represented than their Union counterparts in published diaries, memoirs, and sets of letters. Accounts by Mary Boykin Chesnut, Phoebe Yates Pember and Sarah Morgan, among others who wrote across the South, are widely known and cited. No Northern testimony has achieved comparable familiarity or impact on historical writing, though Louisa May Alcott’s slim “Hospital Sketches” attracts attention because of its author’s fame as the creator of “Little Women.”

Yet many fine titles illuminate the war from Northern women’s perspectives, including two by a young African American who taught in South Carolina and the wife of a Democratic judge in New York City.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Charlotte Forten was born in 1837 into a prominent Black family in Philadelphia, enjoyed a privileged youth and worked in the abolitionist community during the late 1850s. She decided in 1862 to seek a teaching position among freedpeople in Union-held areas off the Carolina coast, arriving at Hilton Head in late October. “The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké,” edited by Brenda Stevenson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chronicle Forten’s activities during more than 18 months among formerly enslaved people, Union officers and soldiers, and other northern civilians who dealt with the immediate challenges and consequences of emancipation. Forten encountered a profoundly foreign cultural and physical landscape.

“Never saw anything more beautiful than these trees,” she wrote of first seeing live oaks. “It is strange that we do not hear of them at the North. They are the first objects that attract one’s attention here.”

The Black children on Hilton Head seemed, on the whole, “eager to learn,” and for the new teacher “their singing delighted me most …. They sang beautifully in their rich, sweet clear tones …. Dear children! Born in slavery, but free at last?” Music and songs — secular and religious — form a theme in Forten’s descriptions of African American life and culture in the islands.

On Christmas Day in 1862, the children sang “Look upon the Lord,” which Forten pronounced “the most beautiful of all their shouting tunes. There is something in it that goes to the depths of one’s soul.” As she worked among the freedpeople, Forten compiled biographies of individuals, heard about the travails endured under slavery, described religious practices and details of dialects, and otherwise immersed herself in the Low Country’s Gullah culture. Although sometimes patronizing in tone, she nonetheless forged a strong bond with children and adults on Hilton Head.

Meeting Civil War Notables

Forten also encountered a number of notable individuals. Meeting Harriet Tubman on Jan. 31, 1863, left the Philadelphian somewhat awestruck: “She is a wonderful woman — a real heroine …. How exciting it was to hear her tell her story …. My own eyes were full as I listened to her …. I am glad I saw her — very glad.”

Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton, the senior Union commander in the area, and Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, head of the First South Carolina Volunteers — both abolitionists — appear repeatedly in the journal. On New Year’s Day 1863, Forten dined with Higginson. “Col. H. is a perfectly delightful person in private,” she observed, “— So genial, so witty, so kind. But I noticed when he was silent a care-worn almost sad expression on his earnest, noble face. My heart was full when I looked at him.”

Robert Gould Shaw, colonel of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, also impressed her. His death at Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, left Forten desolated.

“It makes me sad, sad at heart,” she confessed. “It seems very, very hard,” she continued, “that the best and the noblest must be the earliest called away.”

DIARY of a Union LAdy

Maria Lydig Daly never experienced the war in person, but “Diary of a Union Lady, 1861-1865,” edited by Harold Earl Hammond (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1962; paperback reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) affords readers a splendid array of colorful and perceptive observations.

Married to Judge Charles Patrick Daly, the son of immigrant parents from Ireland, Maria Daly personified loyal Democrats who supported a war to save the Union but heavily criticized Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. Well-placed in New York City’s society, the Dalys interacted with, and she commented about, a range of prominent people. Her diary entries discuss, among other topics, military leaders and operations, attitudes toward emancipation and African Americans (she manifested typically prejudiced opinions about Black people), politics, Irish Americans in New York and social affairs.

No Love of Lincoln

Daly directed considerable vitriol toward Abraham Lincoln. In late September 1862, she railed against the preliminary proclamation of emancipation.

“What supreme impertinence in the railsplitter of Illinois!” she fumed: “There is no law but the despotic will of poor Abe Lincoln, who is worse than a knave because he is a cover for every knave and fanatic who has the address to use him.”

Even the “dreadful news” of Lincoln’s assassination elicited scant praise for the victim.

“It will make a martyr of Abraham Lincoln,” wrote Daly coldly, “whose death will make all the shortcomings of his life and Presidential career forgotten in, as Shakespeare says, ‘the deep damnation of his taking off.’”

May God comfort and change the hearts of our so long vindictive foes!

Maria Lydig Daly

Partial to Democratic and Irish military officers, including Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan and Brig. Gen. Michael Corcoran, Daly questioned many of Lincoln’s choices regarding leaders. In the wake of McClellan’s removal from command of the Army of the Potomac in early November 1862, she recorded that soldiers “curse the Administration as the cause of all the reverses of the Union army.” Following Lincoln’s assassination, she remained upset that the president’s “political jealousy kept one of our ablest generals unemployed for two years” and because of his “vanity and self-sufficiency lost us Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg.”

Joy and an impulse toward reconciliation marked Daly’s reaction to news of the Rebel surrender at Appomattox.

“Glory be to God on high; the rebellion is ended! … and peace soon to descend to bless this land again,” she wrote on April 10, 1865.

Ulysses S. Grant’s generous terms, Daly hoped, meant “the animosity that has so long reined will now pass away. May God comfort and change the hearts of our so long vindictive foes! They will have much to suffer for their folly and ambition.”

The journals of Forten and Daly remind modern readers of the great variety of attitudes among loyal citizens who supported a war to suppress the rebellion. Union victory, in the end, required a sustained national effort.

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It has become commonplace that current political and cultural fissures rival those at any other point in U.S. history. The Civil War is frequently offered as a comparative example to highlight contemporary disagreements. A New York Times piece from December 2021, titled “We’re Edging Closer to Civil War,” reflected this phenomenon in sketching an ominous national mood. Whether stemming from genuine ignorance about American history or from a cynical attempt to abet partisan political agendas, such claims and comparisons distort both mid-19th-century and 21st-century disruptions and, by extension, threats to the stability of the nation. In fact, as the United States enters the third decade of the 21st century, it is not witnessing an almost unprecedented breakdown of national civility. Public acrimony of the past decade pales in comparison to that of the period that included systemic political failure climaxing in secession, a cataclysmic military conflict, and wrenching postwar aftershocks that lingered for more than a decade.

A few examples will illustrate the profound difference between the Civil War era and the recent past. Prominent actors increasingly use awards ceremonies as a platform to express unhappiness with political leaders. On April 14, 1865, a member of the most celebrated family of thespians in the United States expressed his unhappiness with Abraham Lincoln by shooting him in the back of the head. Similarly, Americans regularly hear and watch members of Congress direct rhetorical barbs at one another during hearings and in other venues. On May 22, 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts into bloody insensibility on the floor of the Senate chamber because Sumner had criticized Senator Andrew Butler, one of Brooks’ kinsmen, for embracing “the harlot, Slavery” as his “mistress.”

Recent presidential elections have provoked a good deal of posturing about how Texas or California might break away from the rest of the nation. The election of a Republican president in 1860 prompted seven slaveholding states actually to secede between December 20 and February 1, 1861. Four of the remaining eight slaveholding states followed suit between April and June 1861, and Americans grappled with the reality that the political system established by the founding generation had failed to manage internal tensions during an election no one claimed had been tainted by fraud.

Events on January 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., provide a final example. Often described by politicians and pundits, and even by some historians, as the gravest threat to the republic since the Civil War, the chaotic occupation of parts of the Capitol Building yielded deeply troubling images. But the incident lasted only a few hours before order was restored. The heated presidential canvass of 1860, in contrast, positioned the United States and the newly proclaimed Confederacy to engage in open warfare that stretched across four agonizing years of escalating bloodshed. More than 3,000,000 men eventually took up arms (that would be equivalent to more than 30,000,000 today). Between 618,000 and 750,000 perished (imagine between 6.2 and 7.5 million dead today). Hundreds of thousands of African American and White civilians became refugees (the number would be millions today). Four million enslaved people emerged from what Frederick Douglass called the “hell-black system of human bondage.” And the country soon entered a decade of virulent, and often violent, disagreement about how best to order a biracial society in the absence of slavery.

The key to mid-19th century political and cultural turmoil, and eventually to slaughter on battlefields, lay in the existence of the institution of slavery. Slavery’s toxic presence provoked debates about the gag rule in the House of Representatives, halted the untrammeled dissemination of printed materials to parts of the nation, affected diplomatic decisions relating to Mexico and Cuba, split mainstream Protestant denominations, hastened the breakdown of the second party system, and, in the late 1850s, triggered a low-level guerrilla war in “Bleeding Kansas” and John Brown’s quixotic raid on Harpers Ferry. The key issue centered on whether slavery would be allowed to expand into federal territories, creating a series of crises between 1820 and 1860 that ultimately proved intractable.

No political issue in 2022 approaches slavery in terms of potential explosiveness, which bodes well for the long-term stability of the republic. More broadly, to compare anything that has transpired in the past few years to the political, military, and social upheavals of the mid-19th century represents a spectacular lack of understanding about American history that is potentially destructive to current political discourse.

Public ignorance about U.S. history, or its willful manipulation for political ends, often gets in the way of fruitful debate about issues of surpassing importance that have ties to American past. The discussion of immigration, for example, too often betrays little appreciation of comparable public debates throughout U.S. history—or of the vitriol characteristic of some of those debates that makes the current ones seem almost tame.

Once again, the Civil War era provides useful context. The Know Nothings of the mid-1850s (formally the American Party), with a strong focus on nativist issues, won control of the Massachusetts Legislature, polled 40 percent of the votes in Pennsylvania in 1854, and significantly affected politics in numerous other states. Moreover, mid-19th century statistics attest to the fact that percentages of foreign-born residents currently are not at unprecedented levels. In 1861, as the Lincoln administration prepared to go to war to restore the Union, almost one-third of the military-age White males in the loyal states had been born outside the United States, and the proportion of foreign-born residents in 1860 and in 2020 was almost the same (the 1860 percentage rose in the censuses of 1870, 1890, and 1910).

A careful examination of U.S. history leads to an inescapable conclusion: A more certain sense of their national past would allow Americans, as a people, to know that almost no issue or debate is new, that earlier generations overcame far greater problems than the present generation faces, and that the nation almost certainly will emerge from current controversies intact.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Anyone interested in the military history of the Civil War owes a debt to William F. Fox and Frederick H. Dyer. Both Union veterans, they engaged in almost unimaginably tedious research, organized a mass of statistical and descriptive information, and compiled their findings in accessible formats. Although more recent publications that draw on manuscript materials unavailable in the late-19th and early-20th centuries have provided a fuller statistical picture of many particular aspects of the war, they have not superseded the pioneering volumes by Fox and Dyer as invaluable reference works. 

Fox’s Regimental Losses in the American Civil War 1861-1865, an oversize volume of nearly 600 pages published in 1889 and reprinted by Morningside Bookshop in 1974, originated in “the patient and conscientious labor of years” marked by “[d]ays and often weeks…spent on the figures of each regiment.” An officer in the 107th New York Infantry during the war, Fox devoted more than half of his text to a long chapter titled “Three Hundred Fighting Regiments—Statistics and Historical Sketch of Each.” This roster featured regiments “which sustained the heaviest losses in battle.”

The cutoff was for regiments with 130 killed or mortally wounded for the war, “together with a few whose losses were somewhat smaller, but whose percentage of killed entitles them to a place in the list.” Aware that some veterans might take offense at having their units excluded (his own 107th New York did not qualify), he acknowledged that other regiments undoubtedly “did equally good or, perhaps, better fighting, and their gallant service will be fully recognized by the writers who are conversant with their history.”

Each unit’s page offers a table of casualties by company for the war (killed and mortally wounded in action and deaths due to disease and accidents), percentage killed during the entire conflict, losses at most important battles, and “Notes” filled with miscellaneous information. Every regiment of the Iron Brigade made the list, headed by the 7th Wisconsin’s 281 killed or mortally wounded in action as the highest total and the 2nd Wisconsin’s 19.7 the highest percentage loss. Nineteen of the 20 regiments with the most combat fatalities served in the Army of the Potomac. Among African American units, Fox included the 79th USCT, which served in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, the 8th USCT, and the famous 54th Massachusetts. 

The “Notes” sections reward a close perusal. Regarding the largely forgotten 137th New York Infantry, which under Colonel David Ireland anchored the Union right on Culp’s Hill on July 2, 1863, Fox wrote: “This regiment won special honors at Gettysburg, then in Greene’s Brigade, which, alone and unassisted, held Culp’s Hill during a critical period of that battle against a desperate attack of vastly superior force.” Fox also commented about the far more celebrated service of the 20th Maine Infantry at the other end of the Union line: “Chamberlain and his men did much to save the day at Gettysburg, by their prompt and plucky action at Little Round Top. Holding the extreme left on that field, they repulsed a well-nigh successful attempt of the enemy to turn that flank, an episode which forms a conspicuous feature in the history of that battle.”

Apart from the 300 fighting regiments, Fox tabulated casualties by regiments in one battle, for the war, and in comparison to losses in European armies. He devoted chapters to Union corps, to “Famous Divisions and Brigades,” and to “The Greatest Battles of the War.” Primarily interested in the U.S. side of the conflict, he also allocated one chapter to Confederate losses and strengths. 

Dyer’s A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion, a massive tome of nearly 1,800 pages, was published in 1908 and reprinted in three volumes in 1959 (Thomas Yoseloff; introduction by Bell I. Wiley) and in two volumes in 1978 (Morningside; introduction by Lee A. Wallace Jr.). Dyer’s service had been in the ranks of the 7th Connecticut Infantry, first as a young drummer boy (he enlisted under the name Frederick H. Metzger) and then as a private.

His preface explained why he undertook the project. Pronouncing the 128-volume Official Records “practically impossible to use except by a specialist,” he sought to present “certain statistics and data of great interest and value” in a more usable fashion. Divided into three parts, the Compendium provides detailed information about the organization and commanders of U.S. military forces by department, army, corps, division, brigade, and regiment, followed by a list of more than 10,000 military events arranged by state that includes date, nature (battle, skirmish, siege, action, affair, etc.), location, and troops engaged. A very useful table on “National Cemeteries and Their Locations” provides the number of known (176,397) and unknown (148,833) burials as of the early 20th century, informing readers that the figures included 9,300 Confederates.

Brief histories of nearly 2,500 Union regiments and artillery batteries fill the last 750 double-column pages of the Compendium. Arranged by state or territory and varying in length from a few lines (e.g., Ohio’s 2nd Independent
Battalion of Cavalry and New York’s 28th Independent Battery Light Artillery) to more than a page and a half (for example, 6th Michigan Cavalry and 47th Illinois Infantry), the entries begin with the date of organization, trace all deployments during the war, and conclude with the date of mustering out. Dyer also provided figures on deaths due to wounds and disease for officers and enlisted men. After more than a century, this last section of the Compendium remains the most convenient place to look for basic information about Union regiments and batteries.

One bibliographer noted that Dyer inevitably recorded “a few incorrect dates, a number of incorrect assignments, and omitted some commanders” but insisted that the work remains “among the most comprehensive, important, and useful of this type.” Bell Wiley reached a similar conclusion, pronouncing the Compendium “outstanding from the standpoints of organization, scope, comprehensiveness and richness in detail. It is unquestionably the most valuable Civil War reference work complied by one author.” I keep copies of both Fox and Dyer close at hand in my own library, shelved with other titles I often consult. For anyone whose bookcases lack space for additional large volumes, full texts of Regimental Losses and the Compendium await interested users online. 

George B. McClellan, Robert E. Lee, and a watershed campaign.

Readers might assume from the title that this article will explore the Battle of Antietam. After all, Antietam, together with Gettysburg and Vicksburg, often appears on lists of the war’s crucial turning points. The arguments for all three are well known. Antietam brought emancipation to center stage via Abraham Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation five days after the battle, Gettysburg marked the “High Water Mark” of the rebellion and sent Confederate fortunes tumbling toward Appomattox, and Vicksburg dealt a fatal blow to the Rebels by closing the Mississippi River. But this article addresses a turning point more important, though far less often acknowledged, than any of those three—the Seven Days Campaign of June-July 1862. In the broader sweep of the conflict, George B. McClellan’s failure and Robert E. Lee’s successful effort marked a decisive moment in the Eastern Theater that in turn profoundly shaped the larger direction of the conflict.

A brief narrative of the campaign will set up an assessment of its consequences. Between March and the end of May 1862, McClellan led the Army of the Potomac, approximately 100,000 strong, up the Virginia Peninsula to the outskirts of Richmond. On June 1, Robert E. Lee replaced Joseph E. Johnston, who had been wounded the previous day at Seven Pines, in command of the Confederate army defending Richmond. The next four weeks provided a striking contrast between the two commanders. No general exhibited more aggressiveness than Lee, who believed the Confederacy could counter the Union’s superior numbers only by seizing the initiative. When “Stonewall” Jackson’s troops arrived from the Shenandoah Valley and other reinforcements arrived, Lee’s army, at more than 90,000 strong, would be the largest ever fielded by the Confederacy. By the last week of June, the Army of the Potomac lay astride the Chickahominy River, two-thirds of its strength south of the river and one-third north of it. Lee hoped to crush the portion north of the river and then turn against the rest.

Heavy fighting began on June 26 at the battle of Mechanicsville and continued for the next five days. At Mechanicsville, Lee expected Jackson to hit Union Maj. Gen. Fitz John Porter’s right flank. The hero of the Valley failed to appear in time, however, and A.P. Hill’s Confederate division launched a futile assault about mid-afternoon. Porter retreated to Gaines’ Mill, where Lee struck again on the 27th. Once again Jackson stumbled, as more than 50,000 Confederates attacked along a wide front. Late in the day, Porter’s lines gave way, and he withdrew across the Chickahominy to join the rest of McClellan’s army. By this point, both Lee and McClellan had made their most important decisions: Lee to press the offensive relentlessly; McClellan to abandon all momentum and think only of retreat.

In the wake of Gaines’ Mill, McClellan changed his base from the Pamunkey River to the James River, where U.S. naval power could support the Army of the Potomac. Lee followed the retreating Federals, seeking to inflict a killing blow as they withdrew southward across the Peninsula. The Confederates mounted ineffectual attacks on the 29th at Savage’s Station and far heavier ones at Glendale (also known as Frayser’s Farm) on the 30th. Time and again they failed to act in concert. By July 1, McClellan stood at Malvern Hill, a splendid defensive position overlooking the James. Lee resorted to unimaginative frontal assaults that afternoon, leaving more than 5,000 Confederate casualties littering the slopes of Malvern Hill. Although some of McClellan’s officers urged a counterattack against the obviously battered enemy, “Little Mac” retreated down the James to Harrison’s Landing, where he hunkered down, awaited Lee’s next move, and issued endless requests for more men and supplies.

Confederate losses at the Seven Days exceeded 20,000 killed, wounded, and missing, while the Union’s surpassed 16,000—only Gettysburg produced more casualties in a single battle. The campaign’s importance, however, extended far beyond setting a new standard of carnage in the war. Lee had seized the initiative, dramatically altering the strategic picture by dictating the action to a compliant McClellan.

Four questions provide a helpful framework to gauge the importance of the Seven Days. The first involves military context: How did the campaign shaped by choices McClellan and Lee made in June and July figure in the entire tapestry of war during 1862? The first months of the year proved decidedly favorable to United States forces. Along the Mississippi River, they made excellent progress toward the strategic goal of taking control of the great waterway and dividing the Confederacy into eastern and western parts. Well before the first shots at Mechanicsville on June 26, Federal land and naval operations had seized Confederate strongpoints on the upper and lower Mississippi from Columbus, Kentucky, to New Orleans. The stretch of river between Baton Rouge and Vicksburg remained in Rebel hands, but as a conduit for transporting goods and as an outlet to the Gulf of Mexico for exports, the Mississippi had ceased to be a Confederate river.

Federal gains in the Western Theater rivaled those along the Mississippi. Ulysses S. Grant’s forces captured Fort Henry on February 6 and Fort Donelson 10 days later, opening the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers respectively, and stopped a Confederate counteroffensive at Shiloh on April 6-7. Don Carlos Buell’s army occupied Nashville, with its crucial manufacturing, transportation, and distribution facilities, on February 25; just more than three months later, Henry W. Halleck led 100,000 Federals into the railroad center of Corinth, Miss. In less than four months, the United States had seized control of a vast swath of the Confederate heartland between Kentucky and Mississippi, a region rich in iron, industry, agricultural products, livestock, and other vital resources.

No part of the strategic puzzle loomed larger than Virginia, and Confederates could find little there to counter depressing news from west of the Appalachians. Joe Johnston’s army abandoned its lines near Manassas Junction early in March and retreated from a second position along the Rappahannock River a month later. The action shifted to the Peninsula, where McClellan’s Army of the Potomac landed at Fort Monroe and moved slowly toward Richmond. Confederates gave up Yorktown on the 3rd of May, Williamsburg on the 5th, and Norfolk on the 9th. By the last week of the month, McClellan had reached the environs of Richmond, more than 30,000 troops under Irvin McDowell stood at Fredericksburg, and thousands more lay in the Shenandoah Valley and western Virginia. The Battle of Seven Pines (Fair Oaks) closed the month with yet another Confederate failure, as Johnston’s ill-executed assaults produced several thousand casualties but left intact the strategic status quo. Stonewall Jackson’s small victories in the Shenandoah Valley between May 8 and June 9 cheered Confederates hungry for good news from the battlefield but in no way offset the larger reality that McClellan’s army was closing in on Richmond. Had Richmond fallen in June or July, the Valley Campaign would be no more than an insignificant footnote in Civil War history.

One last point about the military situation in the first half of 1862 bears mention. Operations in the Eastern Theater probably carried more weight than those elsewhere. This is not to say everyone looked to the East as the theater of decision—that surely was not the case. But a majority of civilians in the United States and the Confederacy, members of the U.S. Congress, and foreign observers almost certainly formed their primary impressions about how the war was going by reading accounts of Eastern operations. Several factors explain this phenomenon. The centers of population clustered in the East, as did newspapers with the highest circulations. The largest and most prominent armies commanded by the most celebrated generals fought in the East, and they campaigned in the shadow of the respective national capitals. Some observers at the time, including Abraham Lincoln, lamented what they considered an undue focus on the East, as have a number of modern historians. Yet the fact remains that what happened during the Seven Days would exert all the more influence because of where it occurred.

The second framing question concerns civilian expectations as the armies prepared for their collision at Richmond. People in the United States envisioned success from the Army of the Potomac. This expectation derived from the triumphs on Western battlefields that had prompted newspapers to indulge in lavishly optimistic projections about McClellan’s prospects for a decisive victory. Many editors across the loyal states claimed that Confederate morale had plummeted, as when a New York Times headline in late April described “A PANIC THROUGHOUT THE SOUTH.” A few weeks earlier, Benjamin Brown French, the commissioner of public buildings in Washington, recorded that “news of victory after victory over the rebels has come and over them we have all rejoiced, and appearances indicate that the game of secession is nearly played out.” Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican who did not wish the war to end without emancipation, similarly predicted an early termination of fighting. “It seems pretty certain that the military power of the rebellion will be soon broken,” he wrote to the Duchess of Argyll on June 9. “What then? That is the great question. [Secretary of State William H.] Seward assured me yesterday that it would ‘all be over in 90 days.’ ”

Sentiment in the Confederacy contrasted sharply with that in the United States. Every Union military success promoted war-weariness among the Rebels. Shortages of food, territory lost to U.S. invaders, and stringent governmental actions, most notably the Conscription Act of April 16, 1862, added to a gloomy situation. In mid-May, a bureaucrat in Richmond aptly described deteriorating morale: “Our army has fallen back to within four miles of Richmond… Is there no turning point in this long lane of downward progress? Truly it may be said, our affairs at this moment are in a critical condition.” 

The absence of an army commander around whom the Confederate people could rally deepened the crisis. Four officers had stood out during the first stage of the war: P. G. T. Beauregard, the “Hero of Sumter” and co-victor at First Manassas; Joseph E. Johnston, co-commander at First Manassas and then head of the primary army in Virginia; Albert Sidney Johnston, who directed affairs in the sprawling Western Theater; and Robert E. Lee, who brought to his Confederate service a reputation as Winfield Scott’s favorite soldier. By the time of the Seven Days, A. S. Johnston lay dead of wounds at Shiloh, and Beauregard had fallen out of favor with Jefferson Davis and gone into temporary exile after the loss of Corinth. In Virginia, Joe Johnston had retreated so often that many had come to question his abilities before Seven Pines. Lee stepped into Johnston’s position with his public image tarnished because many Confederates thought he had performed timidly in western Virginia during the autumn of 1861 and while in Charleston during the winter of 1861-62. Upon Lee’s assignment to replace Johnston, one Confederate staff officer recalled, “some of the newspapers…pitched into him with extraordinary virulence, evidently trying to break him down with the troops & to force the president to remove him.” 

This brief review of events and opinion indicates how much was at stake as the armies prepared for a climactic contest outside Richmond—and raises the third question; namely, how did the Seven Days influence morale in the armies and on the home fronts? The Army of the Potomac is a good place to begin. McClellan’s reputation suffered among those who believed he had retreated unnecessarily, given up favorable ground after repelling Lee’s attacks at Malvern Hill, and fumbled a brilliant opportunity to capture the enemy’s capital. Months of hard work had come to nothing because the powerful Union host withdrew to Harrison’s Landing. Mixing sarcasm with disgust, a junior officer in the engineers noted how some of McClellan’s admirers “deify a General whose greatest feat has been a masterly retreat.”

Yet Little Mac remained immensely popular among the majority of his men. Speaking for this element of the army, a private in the 15th Massachusetts credited Rebel generals with movements that compelled McClellan to retreat from the Chickahominy to the James, adding, in the type of language mocked by the junior engineer, that the withdrawal “was one of the most brilliant achievements of the War.” Frederick Law Olmsted, general director of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, conversed with officers and enlisted men at Harrison’s Landing immediately after the Seven Days. He concluded that the soldiers “believe that by the sacrifice of their lives they have secured an opportunity to their country” and with reinforcements would be eager to go after the Rebels again.

The Seven Days exacerbated the already poisonous distrust between Democratic generals in the Army of the Potomac and Republicans in Washington. Radical Republican Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, a member of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, attacked McClellan unsparingly in the committee and on the floor of the Senate. Privately, Chandler called McClellan “an imbecile if not a traitor” who had “virtually lost the Army of the Potomac.” 

Abraham Lincoln journeyed to army headquarters at Harrison’s Landing on July 8-9, where he learned that McClellan had prepared what later became known as the “Harrison’s Landing Letter.” Little Mac called for a restrained form of warfare against the Confederacy. “Neither confiscation of property…,” he insisted, “or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.” Lincoln did not need a lesson in politics from McClellan, and the general’s failure to capture Richmond in fact pushed the president toward the kind of conflict his general sought to avoid. The Seven Days had halted the surging momentum of Union military operations and seemed to foreclose the possibility of suppressing the rebellion through a restrained type of warfare.

Deeply affected by the outcome of the Seven Days, Lincoln moved closer to abolitionists and Radical Republicans who demanded seizure of slaves and other Rebel property. On July 22, he informed his Cabinet that he intended to issue a proclamation of emancipation. The Seven Days, therefore, not Antietam, is the key battle in terms of Lincoln’s decision to take this extraordinary step. Congress, meanwhile, had put the finishing touches on the Second Confiscation Act, passed on July 17 and designed to free all enslaved people held by Rebels. Senator Sumner explicitly tied this act’s passage—five days before Lincoln spoke to his Cabinet about emancipation—to Union military failure in the Seven Days. “[T]he Bill of Confiscation & Liberation, which was at last passed, under pressure from our reverses at Richmond,” wrote Sumner in early August 1862, “is a practical act of Emancipation.” Had McClellan been the victor in July 1862, he certainly could have pressed his case for a softer policy. The war could have ended in the summer of 1862 with slavery largely intact—the institution scarcely had been touched in any significant way at that point in the war, and most of the White loyal citizenry surely would not have demanded emancipation in addition to restoration of the Union as a condition for victory.

McClellan’s retreat hit civilians in the United States especially hard because hopes had been so high. They understood that the campaign had failed, though few of them believed it presaged Confederate independence. Overall, they confronted the unpleasant fact that escalating sacrifice and loss likely lay ahead. New Yorker George Templeton Strong, a staunch Republican, noted in his diary on July 11: “We have been and are in a depressed, dismal, asthenic state of anxiety and irritability. The cause of the country does not seem to be thriving much.” Democrats tended to blame the Lincoln administration and Congress rather than McClellan, stressing that the army should have been reinforced before the final battles around Richmond.

In the realm of foreign affairs, the Seven Days carried far more clout with French and British observers than any of the Union successes west of the Appalachians. On August 4, Lincoln answered a French diplomat who suggested the Confederacy might be winning the war. “You are quite right,” the president conceded about the Seven Days, “as to the importance to us, for its bearing upon Europe, that we should achieve military successes; and the same is true for us at home as well as abroad.” But Lincoln bridled at the importance given events in Virginia compared to those farther west: “[I]t seems unreasonable that a series of successes, extending through half-a-year, and clearing more than a hundred thousand square miles of country, should help us so little, while a single half-defeat should hurt us so much.”

The Union’s “half-defeat” at Richmond profoundly affected the Confederacy’s war for nationhood. The Seven Days thrust Lee into the limelight, and his leadership in June and July 1862 began an 11-month process by which he created a finely tuned military instrument that won notable victories. The Army of Northern Virginia rapidly became the most important national institution in the Confederacy and helped sustain morale in the face of mounting odds and hardships on the home front. Fellow citizens began to compare Lee to George Washington, which made sense because he and his army came to function much as Washington and the Continental Army had during the American Revolution. Beginning with the Seven Days, Lee shouldered an increasing share of the burden of sustaining morale among the Rebel citizenry. Long before Appomattox, most Confederates considered him and his army the fullest expression of their national project—and thus his surrender marked the effective end of the conflict.

The Seven Days also began the phenomenon of Confederates focusing progressively more on the Eastern Theater to determine prospects for independence. Lee had given them their first major victory in nearly a year, helping to erase some of the sting from losses in the Mississippi Valley and Middle Tennessee. Over the next ten months, Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville spread the impression that all good news emanated from the theater where Lee and his army operated. For the rest of the war, with the single exception of Chickamauga, Confederate field armies won no major victories anywhere west of the Appalachians. Under these circumstances, and with the additional importance of Richmond as a psychological, industrial, and governmental colossus, it should come as little surprise that Confederates fixed their gaze, as well as their hopes, on Virginia.

This brings us to the fourth and most important question: Did the Seven Days significantly alter the trajectory of the war? The foregoing discussion surely suggests that the answer is an emphatic yes. In terms of broad-scale impact, the Seven Days stands as one of the great turning points of the conflict. Counterfactual speculation about what might have happened under different circumstances is usually pointless, but Lee’s rise to command offers a clear exception. It is easy to imagine the war taking a very different path if Joe Johnston had escaped his wound at Seven Pines. He almost certainly would have retreated into Richmond, there to be besieged and eventually conquered by McClellan. The avalanche of bad news from other theaters already had threatened to smother Rebel hopes for victory; the loss of the capital might well have destroyed the Confederacy. Lee’s successful defense of the city reversed a downward trend and virtually guaranteed a much longer and increasingly revolutionary struggle. Had McClellan captured the city, the war likely would have ended in the summer of 1862—with slavery largely intact and relatively little destruction across the South.

Much of the campaign’s impact already was apparent by the end of July 1862. Observers on both sides could see the imprint of McClellan’s and Lee’s decisions on political connections to military affairs, on debates over war aims and policy (including emancipation), on civilian morale and attitudes, and on the diplomatic front. During that second summer of the war, people could only guess at some of the longer-term effects that stand out in retrospect. Students of the war should use that retrospective advantage to appreciate the full context within which the campaign was waged and the astonishing range of its immediate and far-reaching influence.

Gary W. Gallagher taught for more than 30 years at Penn State University and the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis. (LSU Press, 2020).

Many years of speaking about Civil War topics has taught me that some military leaders elicit almost universal scorn. Mentioning them prompts members of audiences to smile, chuckle, and nod knowingly, as if they are in on a joke that does not even require a good punchline—the mention itself is the punchline. Brief pauses when saying the generals’ names heightens the effect: for example, Ambrose (pause) Everett (pause) Burnside, or Theophilus (pause) Hunter (pause) Holmes. Adding something about Burnside’s whiskers or Holmes’ nickname “Granny” removes almost any chance that listeners will take either man seriously. The fact that neither Burnside nor Holmes possessed much martial talent renders them easy targets, but soldiers of considerably more substance, including Braxton Bragg and John Pope, also suffer from the punchline syndrome. 

A closer look at John Pope will illustrate this point. Pope’s popular reputation rests almost entirely on his conduct as commander of the Army of Virginia in July and August 1862, a period that ended with the general’s defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run and his reassignment to Minnesota. Public perceptions combine images of Pope as a man widely mocked, just as widely disliked, and removed in September 1862 as a figure of importance during the war.  

Pope appears most ridiculous for allegedly issuing orders that located his headquarters “in the saddle.” None of his orders contained that language, but the slur has stalked him from the summer of 1862 to the present. In late July 1862, a newspaper in Kansas remarked that “Gen. Pope says he means to make his head-quarters in the saddle. Officers usually have their hind-quarters there.” Other Northern papers echoed this sentiment, as did some of their counterparts in the Rebel states. Confederate artillerist Edward Porter Alexander recalled, incorrectly, that Pope’s first general order to the Army of Virginia was headed “Headquarters in the Saddle, 1862.” The fabricated heading “was reprinted in all the Southern papers, &, with it, a sort of defiant reply of the South, that a general who did not know his headquarters from his hindquarters had better be kept out of General Lee’s way.” Alexander employed a dismissive flourish to compare Pope’s overall conduct at Second Bull Run to “a plot from a comic opera.”   

Extending his assault on Pope’s character and military standing to the antebellum years, Alexander asserted that the Union general’s “reputation in army circles…was that of a blatherskite.” Returning to his humorous tone, Alexander mentioned an army ditty about when Pope “was stationed for some years on the ‘Llano Estacado’ or Staked Plains of Texas trying vainly to get water by boring artesian wells. The song had it: ‘Pope told a flattering tale / Which proved to be bravado, / About the streams which spout like ale / On the Llano Estacado.’” 

Union Brig. Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis figured in another anecdote that has clung doggedly to Pope. During a dispute with Herman Haupt, who oversaw the use of railroads during the Second Bull Run Campaign, Sturgis bridled at the suggestion that his conduct might cause “serious delays…in the forwarding of troops to General Pope.” Haupt described how Sturgis, in an “excited tone,” exclaimed: “I don’t care for John Pope a pinch of owl dung!” 

Pope’s statements and actions in the summer of 1862 also provoked vituperative responses from both Federals and Confederates. When he arrived in Virginia from the Western Theater, he promised a new approach to subduing the Confederacy. In line with congressional Republicans who favored applying harsher policies, Pope announced that he would seize civilian property, hang guerrillas, punish civilians who aided them, and otherwise chastise all Rebels. His address to the Army of Virginia dated July 14, 1862, also included a statement implicitly critical of George B. McClellan that offended many of the soldiers who read it: “I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies; from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary and to beat him when he was found; whose policy has been attack and not defense.” 

Pope did not follow through with all of his threats, but Confederates, as well as conservatives and McClellan’s admirers within the Union Army, reacted passionately. Robert E. Lee typified many Confederate reactions to Pope’s vision of a harder war. In late July 1862, he wrote Secretary of War George Wythe Randolph that he hoped to “destroy the miscreant Pope.” (The 19th-century meanings of “miscreant,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, included “depraved, villainous, base” [adjectives] and “a vile wretch, a villain, rascal” [nouns].) Elsewhere Lee stated that Pope must be “suppressed.” Brig. Gen. Marsena R. Patrick, who led a brigade in the Union 3rd Corps, pronounced Pope’s address of July 14 “very windy & somewhat insolent.” Three days later, Patrick claimed, “This Order of Pope’s has demoralized the Army & Satan has been set loose.”   

Although soundly defeated at Second Bull Run and quickly removed from the principal arenas of action, Pope maintained a good reputation among key Union figures. In November 1864, General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant requested that the Departments of the Northwest, Missouri, and Kansas “be erected into a Military Division and that Genl Pope be assigned to the command. I think it highly essential that the territory embraced in these three Depts should all be under one head.” Grant predicted “intelligence of administration” under Pope, and the appointment went forward.

An overview of John Pope’s military career reveals far more that is positive than negative. Second Bull Run stands as his greatest failure, and partisan treatment of Fitz John Porter did him no credit (though Porter, together with his friend McClellan, could have helped Pope more during the campaign). Apart from Bull Run, Pope’s record boasts two brevets for gallantry in Mexico, success at Island No. 10 and elsewhere in the Western Theater in 1861-62, and credible service in Minnesota and as commander of the military division Grant proposed in 1864. After the war, he played a leading role in Reconstruction and during the Indian Wars (like O.O. Howard, he argued for improved treatment of Native Americans). He deserves better than relegation to a punchline. ✯

Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War has reached a larger audience and generated more interest in the subject than any book, theatrical film, or other influence in the past 50 years. First broadcast on PBS stations in 1990 and frequently re-aired ever since, it also appeared in a digitally restored 25th anniversary version with additional material of various kinds. Most viewers have responded positively to the series, though they often disagree about such things as Burns’ relative treatment of the Union and the Confederacy, the degree to which he highlighted slavery as a cause of secession, and whether he glorified war by emphasizing the bravery and devotion of common soldiers on both sides.

Academic historians have focused much of their criticism on whether Burns spent inordinate time on military campaigns and thereby obscured more important social, political, and cultural issues—especially those related to African Americans, slavery, and emancipation. In the chronological procession of battles and generals, many academics have argued, viewers probably missed the broader context within which the armies contended for supremacy. Agreeing with others who voiced unhappiness with Burns’ “conception of the Civil War as a history of war,” one scholar quoted with thinly disguised sarcasm the filmmaker’s statement that “‘only’ 40 percent of the eleven hours depicted battles.” More recently, another academic claimed, with obvious disapprobation, that Burns adopted a “general focus” for the series that relied on a perception of the conflict centered “almost solely on military history.”

I think Burns strikes a reasonable balance between military and nonmilitary coverage. In teaching my own lecture course on the Civil War at Penn State University and then the University of Virginia for more than 30 years, I allocated about 40 percent of my time to military affairs. It is important to remember that Burns’ subject was a mammoth war that unfolded over four years. Avoiding chronological narrative and muting the role of armies would render the experience of 1861-65 less intelligible to nonspecialists. In fact, any documentary about the Civil War that failed to place military events at least close to center stage would itself be open to charges of distortion.

How sound, however, is Burns’ treatment of military matters? Many parts of The Civil War betray a curious ignorance of modern scholarship. For example, the first episode stresses the North’s industrial capacity and vast pool of manpower and concludes that “the odds against a Southern victory were long.” True as far as it goes, this approach overlooks important Confederate advantages that evened the initial balance sheet. Burns’ appraisal of resources drapes a mantle of hopelessness over the Confederate resistance, echoing Lost Cause writers who attributed Confederate defeat to the enemy’s material strength and larger population.

Other passages reinforce the initial image of badly outnumbered Confederates, as when Burns describes Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia on June 26, 1862, as a “tiny force” facing a juggernaut in George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. The ensuing Seven Days Battles assume the character of an underdog Rebel force vanquishing a much larger opponent—a conception at odds with the facts. By the end of June, Lee commanded approximately 90,000 soldiers in the largest army ever fielded by the Confederacy. Far from a mismatch, the Seven Days featured roughly equal antagonists fighting on Confederate home ground.

The most obvious shortcoming of Burns’ military coverage concerns geographical imbalance. His war is preeminently a struggle between the famous armies that operated in the Eastern Theater. As I have written in earlier Insight columns, I believe that events in the East, for a number of reasons, did overshadow those beyond the Appalachians. But other scholars dispute the primacy of the Eastern Theater—something largely absent from Burns’ series.

The Civil War reinforces the common misconception that Gettysburg towered over all other campaigns. Burns lavishes nearly 45 minutes on Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania versus fewer than 11 on the maneuvering and combat between December 1862 and July 1863 that settled Vicksburg’s fate. Treatment of other operations reflects the same bias. Lee’s march into Maryland and the Battle of Antietam receive 25 minutes, equivalent movements into Kentucky by Confederate forces under Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith only fleeting attention. Similarly, Burns allocates a 12-minute section to Lee’s battle at Fredericksburg in December 1862, while the clash at Murfreesboro, a much bloodier Western counterpart fought two and a half weeks later, winks past viewers in less than a minute.

The Trans-Mississippi Theater fares worst of all. Burns disregards Pea Ridge and Wilson’s Creek (except for mentioning casualties at the latter), battles that helped decide the fate of Missouri. Viewers also learn nothing about Nathaniel P. Banks’ Federal advance up the Red River in the spring of 1864, Confederate General Sterling Price’s raid into Missouri later that year, and other noteworthy, though not decisive, military events farther west of the Mississippi.

Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman rightly dominate Burns’ cast of generals, yet nowhere does the series take up questions about Lee’s generalship that have inspired vigorous debate over many decades. And the Union’s military effort in the West belongs almost exclusively to Grant and Sherman. John Frémont, Don Carlos Buell, and William Rosecrans all held important Western commands but play only the smallest of bit parts. The most obvious omission concerns Henry Halleck, whom Burns casts briefly as a jealous administrator hoping to push Grant aside after Shiloh. On the Confederate side, viewers might infer that Nathan Bedford Forrest—a favorite of talking head Shelby Foote—ranked as the most important officer in the West. His appearances in the series, quite remarkably, outnumber those of Braxton Bragg, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, P. G. T. Beauregard, and others who led Southern armies during major campaigns.

Also absent from the documentary is a well-developed sense of how profoundly military affairs affected, and were affected by, politics, the process of emancipation, and other aspects of the conflict. Too often, campaigns and battles seem to occur in isolation—something impossible in a contest between two democratic republics at war.

I applaud Burns for applying his narrative gifts to a monumental and potentially controversial subject. My disappointment stems from a sense of missed opportunity. The filmmaker chose to maneuver comfortably along well-trodden paths, serving up military campaigns and leaders in familiar interpretive garb and never really challenging his viewers. 

The relationship between soldiers and their commanders can be indicated by nicknames, which also provide insights into how opponents and civilians on both sides thought about various generals. Nathan Bedford Forrest, lauded by Confederates as the “Wizard of the Saddle,” vexed William Tecumseh Sherman as “that devil Forrest.” Rebels cursed Benjamin F. Butler as “Beast” and “Spoons” and mocked Nathanial P. Banks, whose army abandoned supplies during the 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign, as “Commissary Banks.” Saddled with the un-martial nickname “Old Brains,” Henry W. Halleck might have envied James Ewell Brown Stuart, whose three initials created “Jeb,” a splendid piece of luck for a dashing cavalryman. Richard S. Ewell (“Old Bald Head”) and William Farrar Smith (“Baldy”) certainly harbored no doubts about how they acquired their informal monikers.

No general experienced a greater turnaround in nicknames than Robert E. Lee. Scorned as “Granny” or the “King of Spades” early in the war, he remained controversial when assigned to replace the wounded Joseph E. Johnston outside Richmond on June 1, 1862. The ensuing year brought victories that solidified Lee’s reputation as a gifted commander whose soldiers called him “Marse Robert.” An alternative form of “master” typically associated with enslaved African Americans, “marse” carried cultural weight in a patriarchal slaveholding society. For Lee’s soldiers, the nickname combined respect for supreme authority and affection. A North Carolinian explained in early 1864 that comrades “speak of him amongst themselves universally as ‘Marse Robert’ & use it as a term of endearment & affection.” Lee’s troops developed a sense of familial loyalty and obligation that showed when James Longstreet’s Corps returned to Virginia from Tennessee in April 1864. Artillerist Edward Porter Alexander recalled the moment Lee rode onto a knoll to review the men: “The general reins up his horse, & bares his good gray head, & looks at us & we shout & cry & wave our battleflags & look at him again….Each man seemed to feel the bond which held us all to Lee. There was no speaking, but the effect was that of a military sacrament, in which we pledged anew our lives.”

Only George B. McClellan inspired comparable devotion among men in the ranks. His nickname, “Little Mac,” conveyed no sense of military talent or purpose—indeed, as a diminutive version of “McClellan” it could be construed as somehow negative. But the nickname had nothing to do with stature—at 5’ 8” tall, McClellan was slightly above average height—and everything to do with acknowledging a sense of closeness between the general and his troops. McClellan worked hard to build spirit in the Army of the Potomac, making himself accessible through unannounced visits to camps and using reviews to imbue the men with a sense of being part of the republic’s greatest military force. In important ways, the army remained McClellan’s after he departed in the wake of Antietam. A Rhode Islander captured prevailing attitudes in the ranks to McClellan’s removal in early November 1862. “This has been a sad day for the Army of the Potomac,” he wrote: “Gen. McClellan has been relieved from command and has left us. He rode along the lines and was heartily cheered by the men….This change produces much bitter feeling and some indignation. McClellan’s enemies will now rejoice, but the Army loves and respects him.”         

Avuncular imagery usually signaled strong ties between soldiers and their commander. William Tecumseh Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston, known as “Uncle Billy” and “Uncle Joe” by their men, forged reputations as officers who avoided unnecessary bloodshed and looked after their troops. “Uncle John” Sedgwick, chief of the Union 6th Corps, stood, in the words of one soldier who commented about the general’s death at Spotsylvania, as “our friend, our idol…the great leader, the cherished friend, he that had been more than a father to us all.”

“Old” figured in many nicknames and often connoted a reciprocal bond across ranks. Although celebrated as “Stonewall” (surely the best of all Civil War nicknames), Thomas J. Jackson most often was “Old Jack” to his men. Similarly, James Longstreet’s soldiers knew him as “Old Pete” (derived from a boyhood and West Point appellation), though he also earned respect as Lee’s “Old War Horse” and “the Bull of the Woods.” William J. Hardee (“Old Reliable”), William S. Rosecrans (“Old Rosey”), P.G.T. Beauregard (“Old Bory”), and Jubal A. Early (“Old Jube”) inspired quite different reactions among their men, with Early, curmudgeonly and sharp-tongued, probably the least popular. George H. Thomas, “Old Slow Trot” to those who thought his movements too sluggish, was most often called “Pap” by devoted troops or “The Rock of Chickamauga.” 

A positive nickname could be turned against an officer. Joseph Hooker emerged from the Richmond campaign of 1862 as “Fighting Joe,” which many soldiers embraced because it set him apart from overly cautious generals in the Army of the Potomac. Hooker despised it. “Don’t call me Fighting Joe,” Harper’s Weekly quoted him as saying in February 1863. R. E. Lee took a dismissive tone in late February 1863, saying, “I owe Mr. F J Hooker no thanks for keeping me here in this state of expectancy. He ought to have made up his mind long ago what to do.” After Hooker’s ignominious collapse at Chancellorsville, the nickname became a weapon for anyone of a sardonic bent. Similarly, John Bell Hood, known as “the gallant Hood” in the Confederacy, fell victim to a sarcastic twist during his army’s retreat from Nashville in December 1864. To the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas, some of his soldiers, in lyrics that compared Hood unfavorably with Joe Johnston, sang: “I’m going back to Georgia / To find my ‘Uncle Joe’ / You may sing about your dearest maid, / And sing of Rosalie, / But the gallant Hood of Texas / Played hell in Tennessee.”

Soldiers bestowed no nickname on some of the war’s leading generals. Ulysses S. Grant’s initials yielded “Sam” (short for “Uncle Sam”) from fellow cadets at West Point and “Unconditional Surrender” from newspapers after Fort Donelson, and Confederates and some Democrats (especially Copperheads) called him “Butcher” during the Overland Campaign. But no lasting nickname originated with his troops. John Pope, Braxton Bragg, and Irvin McDowell, among army commanders, similarly emerged from the conflict without a nickname. That might have been a good thing in each of their cases. ✯

A landmark study gave African Americans credit for being important actors in their freedom quest

Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 appeared on New York publisher Harcourt, Brace & Company’s list of new titles in 1935. Written by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963), a leading African American intellectual, sociologist, and historian best known for The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903), the book received a good deal of attention from newspapers but less from mainline academic journals. Du Bois challenged the prevailing interpretation of Reconstruction as a dark time when carpetbaggers, scalawags, and their recently freed Black allies ran roughshod over a prostrate White South struggling to recover from the Civil War. That interpretation, widely disseminated by D. W. Griffith’s blockbuster film The Birth of a Nation (1915) and by Claude G. Bowers’ best-selling The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (1929), shaped scholarly and popular attitudes toward Reconstruction for many decades. In a major departure from previous—as well as much subsequent—literature, Du Bois treated enslaved people during the war and freedpeople in its aftermath as important actors, rather than as passive pawns in the political, military, and economic struggles of the era. In doing so, he anticipated scholarship from revisionist studies by Kenneth M. Stampp and others in the 1960s, to the landmark work of Eric Foner in the 1980s, and down to the present. Anyone familiar with Henry Louis Gates’ Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, first aired on PBS stations in 2019, would find many similarities between that documentary and Du Bois’ 750-page masterwork. 

Apart from its detailed examination of Reconstruction, Du Bois’ book offers a great deal to students of the Civil War. It presents a powerful argument for what later came to be called the concept of self-emancipation, whereby African American actions on the ground in the Confederacy forced politicians in Washington to proceed more quickly to end slavery. Du Bois relied on a Marxist-inspired economic analysis that cast the enslaved population as workers who rose up against the aristocratic class in the Confederacy. He sought to explain “How the Civil War meant emancipation and how the black worker won the war by a general strike which transformed his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.” The point regarding Black contributions to Union victory, while overstated, is clear and compelling—as African American refugees flocked to Union positions, they deprived the Confederacy of their labor, worked and eventually served as soldiers for the United States, and by their efforts contributed significantly to suppressing the Southern rebellion. 

Du Bois correctly linked an enslaved workforce directly to the Confederate war effort. “The South counted on Negroes as laborers to raise food and money crops for civilians and for the army,” he noted, “and even in a crisis, to be used for military purposes.” With nearly 4 million enslaved people available to keep the economy running, the Confederacy could mobilize a huge percentage of its military-age White males. But as the war progressed, African Americans, through steady movement to Union lines and work slowdowns on plantations and farms, engaged in what Du Bois termed “The General Strike” that eroded the Confederacy’s capacity to mount an effective military resistance. Overall, the “guns at Sumter, the marching armies, the fugitive slaves, the fugitives as ‘contrabands,’ spies, servants and laborers,” Du Bois observed, furthered the process of emancipation and marked the progress of “the Negro as soldier, as citizen, as voter…from 1861 to 1868.”

Black Reconstruction handles the role of U.S. military forces in ending slavery very well. It sets the stage by identifying the overarching war aim for most of the loyal population. “The North did not propose to attack property” at the outset, Du Bois asserted: “It did not propose to free slaves. This was to be a white man’s war to preserve the Union, and the Union must be preserved.” “Freedom for slaves furnished no such slogan,” continued Du Bois, who estimated that not “one-tenth of the Northern white population would have fought for any such purpose.” Yet when Federal forces “entered the South they became armies of emancipation.” Wherever they marched, regardless of soldiers’ racial attitudes, the armies weakened Confederate control over enslaved people. 

The arrival of blue-clad soldiers swelled the number of African American refugees. In turn, Union planners who oversaw the war effort “faced the fact, after severe fighting, that Negroes seemed a valuable asset as laborers, and they therefore declared them ‘contraband of war.’ It was but a step from that to attract and induce Negro labor to help Northern armies”—and after 1863 to enroll thousands of Black soldiers. 

The impact of armies, not the efforts of the small number of abolitionists in the loyal states, settled the issue of slavery. “Freedom for the slave,” Du Bois insisted, “was the logical result of a crazy attempt to wage war in the midst of four million black slaves, and trying the while sublimely to ignore the interests of those slaves in the outcome of the fighting.” 

By fleeing to Federal camps across the Confederacy, African American refugees “showed to doubting Northerners the easy possibility of using them” to subjugate the Rebels. “So in blood and servile war,” judged Du Bois, “freedom came to America.” 

After Appomattox, the same attitude that sustained the Union as the preeminent focus of the loyal White citizenry undercut the possibility of achieving true racial equality. The postwar tragedy lay in the fact that “the Reconstruction of the Southern states, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy,…[was not] conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort ….” Had the nation made that effort, Du Bois concluded at a time when Jim Crow reigned supreme across much of the United States, “we should be living today in a different world.” 

The meeting between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in Wilmer McLean’s parlor at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, highlights the difficulty of pinning down historical details. One seemingly straightforward question about that famous moment illustrates the larger phenomenon. Was Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan in the room while Grant and Lee discussed surrender terms?

Artistic depictions seemingly provide the answer. An iconic image by Walter Taber, which appeared in Volume 4 of the Century Company’s immensely popular Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1887-88), placed Sheridan on the far right, intently watching the seated Grant and Lee. Eighty years later, National Geographic Magazine commissioned Tom Lovell to paint the scene for the centennial of Appomattox. Lovell positioned Sheridan in the center of his composition, standing beside the parlor’s fireplace as Lee signed the surrender document. Lovell’s rendering earned many enthusiastic compliments as largely accurate (though it mistakenly portrayed George A. Custer as present). Innumerable other artworks also feature Sheridan in the room while Grant and Lee worked out details of the Confederate capitulation.

Members of Grant’s staff left several accounts. Colonel Horace Porter discussed the surrender in Battles and Leaders and also in Campaigning With Grant (1897). In both instances, Porter recalled Grant’s having Lt. Col. Orville E. Babcock summon Sheridan, Maj. Gen. Edward O.C. Ord, and others into the parlor before the negotiations with Lee commenced. “We walked in softly and ranged ourselves quietly about the sides of the room,” Porter stated in Battles and Leaders: “Some found seats on the sofa and the few chairs that constituted the furniture, but most of the party stood.” In Campaigning With Grant, Porter located Colonel Charles Marshall of Lee’s staff “on the sofa beside Sheridan and [Brig. Gen. Rufus] Ingalls.”

Adam Badeau’s Military History of Ulysses S. Grant (1881) described “a naked little parlor” that the “generals entered, each at first accompanied only by a single aide-de-camp, but as many as twenty national officers shortly followed, among whom were Sheridan, Ord, and the members of Grant’s own staff.” The “various national officers,” Badeau added, were later “presented to Lee,” who bowed “to each, but offered none his hand.” Lieutenant Colonel Ely S. Parker, Grant’s military secretary, gave a postwar interview in which he identified staff members Porter, Badeau, Theodore S. Bowers, and Seth Williams, as well as “other officers” who either sat on the sofa or “stood in the doorways and hall.” Parker did not mention Sheridan.

Colonel Marshall featured Sheridan in his postwar narrative of the surrender. “I was sitting on the arm of the sofa…,” wrote Marshall, “and General Sheridan was on the sofa next to me. While Colonel Parker was copying the letter, General Sheridan said to me, ‘This is very pretty country.’ I said, ‘General, I haven’t seen it by daylight. All my observations have been made by night and I haven’t seen the country at all myself.’” Marshall also included Sheridan in a discussion about sending Union rations to Lee’s hungry soldiers. He quoted Grant instructing his lieutenant: “Order your commissary to send to the Confederate Commissary twenty-five thousand rations for our men and his men.”

Grant’s own memoirs allocated relatively little attention to what transpired in McLean’s parlor. “When I went into the house,” he noted, “I found General Lee. We greeted each other, and after shaking hands took our seats. I had my staff with me, a good portion of whom were in the room for the whole interview.” Later, while copies of the surrender documents were being prepared, “the Union generals present were severally presented to General Lee.” Grant did not name the generals, and his handling of the conversation with Lee regarding rations did not mention Sheridan. “I authorized him,” wrote Grant of Lee, “to send his own commissary and quartermaster to Appomattox Station, two or three miles away, where he could have, out of the [Confederate] trains we had stopped, all the provisions wanted.”

What about Sheridan’s testimony? In 1878, James E. Kelly, a sculptor and illustrator, interviewed Sheridan, at one point referring to the meeting between Grant and Lee. “Wouldn’t there be any way of showing you in the scene?” asked Kelly. “I would like to be in the picture,” responded Sheridan, “but I was not there.” He had accompanied Grant to McLean’s house, and “General Grant introduced me with other officers. I gave General Lee some papers referring to some of his men, firing on our Flag of Truce in the morning.” But then Sheridan, who was exhausted, excused himself, “went outside and laid down under a tree—although it was raining, I fell fast asleep, but hearing a noise I woke up and saw General Lee coming out of the door.” Kelly subsequently left Sheridan out of his sketch of the officers in McLean’s parlor—a sketch Ely Parker pronounced satisfactory.

Sheridan also wrote about Appomattox in his memoirs, published posthumously in 1888. He included Ord among the Federal officers who first saw Lee in McLean’s house. “After being presented,” observed Sheridan, “Ord and I, and nearly all of General Grant’s staff, withdrew to await the agreement as to terms, and in a little while Colonel Babcock came to the door and said, ‘The surrender has been made; you can come in again.’” Reentering the room, Sheridan observed Grant writing and soon spoke with Lee about the violation of a truce earlier in the day. “I am sorry,” Sheridan quoted Lee as saying, “It is probable that my cavalry at that point of the line did not fully understand the agreement.” Neither of Sheridan’s accounts mentioned Marshall, sitting on a sofa, or anything about rations.

These sources support different scenarios. Sheridan met Lee in McLean’s parlor but left before negotiations began; or was present early, departed, and returned after terms had been agreed upon; or left but returned in time to witness some of the proceedings; did or did not speak with Marshall and Lee and discuss rations. The particulars of Sheridan’s activities, though ancillary to the main story, remind us that recovering the past is an uncertain project. ✯

Visiting Gettysburg National Military Park should be unsettling. The site exists, after all, because of a breathtaking failure of the nation’s electoral system in 1860. Powerful members of Southern society thought Republican victory menaced the long-term viability of slavery and refused to accept the verdict of the ballot box. They dismembered the republic and opened the way for a war whose memory grappled with massive human loss, emancipation’s vast political and social consequences, and anger that lingered for years. As the nation continues to struggle with that memory, a sound understanding of the war and its legacies demands a level of discomfort. The presence of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg will upset some visitors, but that is a price worth paying to protect a valuable and instructive memorial landscape.

The need to accept discomfort merits attention because heated debates regarding the Civil War’s memorial landscape have included calls to remove Confederate monuments at Gettysburg. These debates on social media, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and elsewhere raise the question of how best to handle the conflict’s deeply, and sometimes violently, contested memory. No other era in our history features the unfathomable complexity of political, social, and constitutional fracturing that sundered the republic and unleashed frightful slaughter. Through 12 years of Reconstruction, decades of Jim Crow rule in the South, the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th Century, and beyond, conflicting memories of the Civil War affected national politics and culture.

Gettysburg National Military Park offers superb opportunities to study how the war has been remembered. The battlefield yields insights into memory traditions developed by both the war’s winners and losers. Because most Americans have little or no appreciation for the difference between history and memory, between what actually happened, and how events have been interpreted by different groups at different times, the memorials at Gettysburg hold substantial value as educational tools. As part of this commemorative landscape, which developed over more than a century and a quarter and retains great historical integrity, Confederate monuments should be woven into a touring narrative devoted to how Americans have recalled their defining national trauma. The addition of contextual waysides would enhance the quality of the educational experience by helping visitors recognize ideas and themes associated with various streams of memory.

Before moving on, I will acknowledge that some critics have questioned the educational value of monuments. Education cannot reach everyone, they insist, and in the meantime monuments can offend some people—so we should take them down to make everyone feel safe. These arguments are misguided. Education is not just a convenient rationalization in support of retaining some elements of the memorial landscape; it is the only hope for a serious, productive engagement with our past—warts and all. And no education of any value depends on selective erasure of troubling dimensions of America’s story.

History should not be turned into a simplistic morality play juxtaposing good and evil, heroes and villains, and contrived to serve current political goals. A memory tour at Gettysburg would illuminate controversies relating to secession, slavery, and reconciliation. It is also important to note that Confederate monuments in a national battlefield park, where professional staff are entrusted with preserving and interpreting the materials of Civil War history and memorialization, should not be declared identical to those in front of civic buildings, in public parks, or on campuses (the latter raise a set of their own particular issues).

The Gettysburg park’s website places the number of monuments, markers, and memorials at 1,328, just more than 200 of which (15 percent) can be designated as Confederate. A few deal with soldiers from both sides. The majority of Confederate markers give brigade and battery positions, strengths, and casualties. Others do the same for divisions and corps headquarters and a few regiments. Purely informational, these markers seem ill-suited to provoke outrage.

The most visible and controversial Confederate monuments are the 11 dedicated to individual states. They represent, in stone and bronze along Seminary Ridge, tangible evidence of history’s sharp and uncomfortable edges. They evoke the Confederate republic established to maintain a slaveholding society—and most especially the Rebel armies that pushed the United States to the precipice of disaster. Their presence forces us to acknowledge the messy interplay between history and memory. Without them, visitors might wonder why the Army of the Potomac went to Gettysburg and why more than a thousand Union regimental and other monuments dot the surrounding fields, ridges, and woods.

A memory tour at Gettysburg should stress that Confederate memorialization proved controversial from the outset. In 1887, for example, a veteran of the 73rd Ohio Infantry spoke bluntly at a program in the National Cemetery: “I do not believe there is another nation in the civilized world that would permit a rebel monument to stand upon its soil for a single day, and I can see neither wisdom nor patriotism in building them here.” The earliest Confederate monument, to the 1st Maryland Infantry Battalion, went up in 1886, but with the designation “2nd MD. INFANTRY C.S.A.” carved on the front. The Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association mandated the change because two loyal units—1st Maryland Regiment, Potomac Home Brigade Volunteer Infantry, and 1st Maryland Eastern Shore Infantry—deserved precedence. All three monuments adorn the slope of Culp’s Hill, and visitors can see that “1 MD. CHANGED TO” has been carved in small letters just above “2nd MD. INFANTRY C.S.A.”—a lesson in disputed memory etched on a single piece of stone.

The imposing Virginia monument fits squarely within the Lost Cause tradition. It avoids the topic of slavery, a striking illustration of how memory can mask the reality of history. Its sparse text—“Virginia to Her Sons at Gettysburg”—conveys no political message, but Robert E. Lee, whose mounted figure gazes eastward toward Cemetery Ridge, carried enormous ideological weight among Lost Cause advocates and continues to be a flashpoint. A wayside should instruct visitors that by 1917, when the monument was dedicated, Lee had become a national hero for many Americans, central to a reconciliation memory that would witness, in 1925, a congressional resolution authorizing “restoration of the Lee Mansion in the Arlington National Cemetery” and a U.S. 50-cent piece featuring Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Previously, a statue of Lee had been placed in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall (a Virginia commission voted unanimously to remove it in July 2020).

The Alabama and North Carolina monuments focus on soldiers. The former, erected in 1933, bears the inscription “ALABAMIANS! Your Names Are Inscribed on Fames Immortal Scroll” and the latter, Gutzon Borglum’s sculpture of five Tar Heel infantrymen completed four years earlier, just the words “North Carolina.” A United Daughters of the Confederacy tablet, situated just west of Borglum’s grouping, echoes inscriptions on monuments to fallen Rebels across the South: “To the eternal glory of the North Carolina soldiers. Who on this battlefield displayed heroism unsurpassed sacrificing all in support of their cause.”

Five state monuments and the Memorial to the Soldiers and Sailors  of the Confederacy were erected during the Civil War centennial. The monuments, a wayside should explain, coincided with some of the most famous episodes of the Civil Rights movement and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Soldiers and Sailors memorial casts Confederates as “Heroic defenders of their country,” while Georgia’s granite tribute allows the dead to speak for themselves: “We sleep here in obedience; When duty called, we came; When country called, we died.”

Texas and Arkansas chose to laud the “valor” and “devotion” of their Confederate soldiers with no allusion to states’ rights, and Florida presented a text that celebrates the Floridians’ “courage and devotion for the ideals in which they believed” and, in a gesture toward healing sectional wounds, adds a hope that “By their noble example of bravery and endurance, they enable us to meet with confidence any sacrifice which confronts us as Americans.”

South Carolina’s monument echoes the language of secession in its principal text. “That men of honor might forever know the responsibilities of freedom,” it reads, “Dedicated South Carolinians stood and were counted for their heritage and convictions. Abiding faith in the sacredness of States Rights provided their creed.” Unveiled on July 2, 1963, the monument invites consideration of statements at Gettysburg from two prominent politicians that same summer. Alabama Governor George Wallace claimed “South Carolina and Alabama stand for constitutional government,” in a speech during the ceremony for the South Carolina monument: “Millions throughout the nation look to the South to lead in the fight to restore constitutional rights and the rights of states and individuals.” On May 30, speaking in the National Cemetery, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a very different legacy of the conflict. “Until justice is blind to color,” he said, “until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”

Of the final three state monuments, Mississippi’s makes the strongest Lost Cause statement. The inscription trumpets the Mississippians’ “righteous cause” and how “To valor, they gave new dimensions of courage / To duty its noblest fulfillment / To posterity, the sacred heritage of honor.” Tennessee settled for the prosaic “Valor and courage were virtues of the three Tennessee regiments” and Louisiana the bare-bones “Louisiana July 1, 2, 3, 1863.”

A tour keyed to Gettysburg’s monuments also demonstrates how Lost Cause and reconciliation streams of memory sometimes unite. The Eternal Light Peace Memorial, dedicated on the 75th anniversary of the battle, sought to be “An enduring light to guide us in unity and friendship.” In his remarks that day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt praised Union and Confederate veterans alike. “All of them we honor,” he affirmed, “not asking under which flag they fought then—thankful that they stand together under one flag now.”

More recently, a Maryland state monument from 1994 depicts two wounded soldiers, one Union and one Confederate, helping each other off the field. It “proudly honors” the state’s 3,000 sons in blue and gray “who fought at Gettysburg in defense of the causes they held so dear” and “symbolizes the aftermath of that battle and the war. Brothers again, Marylanders all.” In 2000, Delaware erected a monument just a few yards from Maryland’s to honor “all Delawareans who fought at Gettysburg, both Union and Confederate.” A short distance to the northeast, the 1993 Masonic memorial, with “Friend to Friend / A Brotherhood Undivided” chiseled on the base, shows Union Captain Henry H. Bingham succoring the mortally wounded Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis A. Armistead. These reconciliationist sentiments remind Gettysburg visitors that, for most loyal citizens of the United States, restoration of the Union entailed welcoming former Rebels back into the fold.

Restoring the Union and pursuing genuine reconciliation, two linked but quite different processes, occurred while the generation that experienced the war established what became long-standing memory traditions. Union veterans tried to suppress or counter the Lost Cause, while former Confederates labored to disseminate their version of why 11 states seceded and what transpired during the war. The presence of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg, however disconcerting for some Americans, demonstrates that winners do not always control the memory of historical events and eras. All visitors to Gettysburg should keep that in mind as they contemplate the battlefield. ✯

Gary W. Gallagher is a member of the Civil War Times advisory board.

Prominent historian Gary W. Gallagher argues how Confederate monuments on the Gettysburg battlefield can serve as invaluable teaching tools.

[dropcap]V[/dropcap]isiting Gettysburg National Military Park should be unsettling. The site exists, after all, because of a breathtaking failure of the nation’s electoral system in 1860. Powerful members of Southern society thought Republican victory menaced the long-term viability of slavery and refused to accept the verdict of the ballot box. They dismembered the republic and opened the way for a war whose memory grappled with massive human loss, emancipation’s vast political and social consequences, and anger that lingered for years. As the nation continues to struggle with that memory, a sound understanding of the war and its legacies demands a level of discomfort. The presence of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg will upset some visitors, but that is a price worth paying to protect a valuable and instructive memorial landscape.

The need to accept discomfort merits attention because heated debates regarding the Civil War’s memorial landscape have included calls to remove Confederate monuments at Gettysburg. These debates on social media, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and elsewhere raise the question of how best to handle the conflict’s deeply, and sometimes violently, contested memory. No other era in our history features the unfathomable complexity of political, social, and constitutional fracturing that sundered the republic and unleashed frightful slaughter. Through 12 years of Reconstruction, decades of Jim Crow rule in the South, the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th Century, and beyond, conflicting memories of the Civil War affected national politics and culture.

Gettysburg National Military Park offers superb opportunities to study how the war has been remembered. The battlefield yields insights into memory traditions developed by both the war’s winners and losers. Because most Americans have little or no appreciation for the difference between history and memory, between what actually happened, and how events have been interpreted by different groups at different times, the memorials at Gettysburg hold substantial value as educational tools. As part of this commemorative landscape, which developed over more than a century and a quarter and retains great historical integrity, Confederate monuments should be woven into a touring narrative devoted to how Americans have recalled their defining national trauma. The addition of contextual waysides would enhance the quality of the educational experience by helping visitors recognize ideas and themes associated with various streams of memory.

Before moving on, I will acknowledge that some critics have questioned the educational value of monuments. Education cannot reach everyone, they insist, and in the meantime monuments can offend some people—so we should take them down to make everyone feel safe. These arguments are misguided. Education is not just a convenient rationalization in support of retaining some elements of the memorial landscape; it is the only hope for a serious, productive engagement with our past—warts and all. And no education of any value depends on selective erasure of troubling dimensions of America’s story.

History should not be turned into a simplistic morality play juxtaposing good and evil, heroes and villains, and contrived to serve current political goals. A memory tour at Gettysburg would illuminate controversies relating to secession, slavery, and reconciliation. It is also important to note that Confederate monuments in a national battlefield park, where professional staff are entrusted with preserving and interpreting the materials of Civil War history and memorialization, should not be declared identical to those in front of civic buildings, in public parks, or on campuses (the latter raise a set of their own particular issues).

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Gettysburg park’s website places the number of monuments, markers, and memorials at 1,328, just more than 200 of which (15 percent) can be designated as Confederate. A few deal with soldiers from both sides. The majority of Confederate markers give brigade and battery positions, strengths, and casualties. Others do the same for divisions and corps headquarters and a few regiments. Purely informational, these markers seem ill-suited to provoke outrage.

The most visible and controversial Confederate monuments are the 11 dedicated to individual states. They represent, in stone and bronze along Seminary Ridge, tangible evidence of history’s sharp and uncomfortable edges. They evoke the Confederate republic established to maintain a slaveholding society—and most especially the Rebel armies that pushed the United States to the precipice of disaster. Their presence forces us to acknowledge the messy interplay between history and memory. Without them, visitors might wonder why the Army of the Potomac went to Gettysburg and why more than a thousand Union regimental and other monuments dot the surrounding fields, ridges, and woods.

A memory tour at Gettysburg should stress that Confederate memorialization proved controversial from the outset. In 1887, for example, a veteran of the 73rd Ohio Infantry spoke bluntly at a program in the National Cemetery: “I do not believe there is another nation in the civilized world that would permit a rebel monument to stand upon its soil for a single day, and I can see neither wisdom nor patriotism in building them here.” The earliest Confederate monument, to the 1st Maryland Infantry Battalion, went up in 1886, but with the designation “2nd MD. INFANTRY C.S.A.” carved on the front. The Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association mandated the change because two loyal units—1st Maryland Regiment, Potomac Home Brigade Volunteer Infantry, and 1st Maryland Eastern Shore Infantry—deserved precedence. All three monuments adorn the slope of Culp’s Hill, and visitors can see that “1 MD. CHANGED TO” has been carved in small letters just above “2nd MD. INFANTRY C.S.A.”—a lesson in disputed memory etched on a single piece of stone.

The imposing Virginia monument fits squarely within the Lost Cause tradition. It avoids the topic of slavery, a striking illustration of how memory can mask the reality of history. Its sparse text—“Virginia to Her Sons at Gettysburg”—conveys no political message, but Robert E. Lee, whose mounted figure gazes eastward toward Cemetery Ridge, carried enormous ideological weight among Lost Cause advocates and continues to be a flashpoint. A wayside should instruct visitors that by 1917, when the monument was dedicated, Lee had become a national hero for many Americans, central to a reconciliation memory that would witness, in 1925, a congressional resolution authorizing “restoration of the Lee Mansion in the Arlington National Cemetery” and a U.S. 50-cent piece featuring Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Previously, a statue of Lee had been placed in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall (a Virginia commission voted unanimously to remove it in July 2020).

The Alabama and North Carolina monuments focus on soldiers. The former, erected in 1933, bears the inscription “ALABAMIANS! Your Names Are Inscribed on Fames Immortal Scroll” and the latter, Gutzon Borglum’s sculpture of five Tar Heel infantrymen completed four years earlier, just the words “North Carolina.” A United Daughters of the Confederacy tablet, situated just west of Borglum’s grouping, echoes inscriptions on monuments to fallen Rebels across the South: “To the eternal glory of the North Carolina soldiers. Who on this battlefield displayed heroism unsurpassed sacrificing all in support of their cause.”

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ive state monuments and the Memorial to the Soldiers and Sailors of the Confederacy were erected during the Civil War centennial. The monuments, a wayside should explain, coincided with some of the most famous episodes of the Civil Rights movement and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Soldiers and Sailors memorial casts Confederates as “Heroic defenders of their country,” while Georgia’s granite tribute allows the dead to speak for themselves: “We sleep here in obedience; When duty called, we came; When country called, we died.”

Texas and Arkansas chose to laud the “valor” and “devotion” of their Confederate soldiers with no allusion to states’ rights, and Florida presented a text that celebrates the Floridians’ “courage and devotion for the ideals in which they believed” and, in a gesture toward healing sectional wounds, adds a hope that “By their noble example of bravery and endurance, they enable us to meet with confidence any sacrifice which confronts us as Americans.”

South Carolina’s monument echoes the language of secession in its principal text. “That men of honor might forever know the responsibilities of freedom,” it reads, “Dedicated South Carolinians stood and were counted for their heritage and convictions. Abiding faith in the sacredness of States Rights provided their creed.” Unveiled on July 2, 1963, the monument invites consideration of statements at Gettysburg from two prominent politicians that same summer. Alabama Governor George Wallace claimed “South Carolina and Alabama stand for constitutional government,” in a speech during the ceremony for the South Carolina monument: “Millions throughout the nation look to the South to lead in the fight to restore constitutional rights and the rights of states and individuals.” On May 30, speaking in the National Cemetery, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a very different legacy of the conflict. “Until justice is blind to color,” he said, “until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”

Of the final three state monuments, Mississippi’s makes the strongest Lost Cause statement. The inscription trumpets the Mississippians’ “righteous cause” and how “To valor, they gave new dimensions of courage / To duty its noblest fulfillment / To posterity, the sacred heritage of honor.” Tennessee settled for the prosaic “Valor and courage were virtues of the three Tennessee regiments” and Louisiana the bare-bones “Louisiana July 1, 2, 3, 1863.”

A tour keyed to Gettysburg’s monuments also demonstrates how Lost Cause and reconciliation streams of memory sometimes unite. The Eternal Light Peace Memorial, dedicated on the 75th anniversary of the battle, sought to be “An enduring light to guide us in unity and friendship.” In his remarks that day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt praised Union and Confederate veterans alike. “All of them we honor,” he affirmed, “not asking under which flag they fought then—thankful that they stand together under one flag now.”

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]ore recently, a Maryland state monument from 1994 depicts two wounded soldiers, one Union and one Confederate, helping each other off the field. It “proudly honors” the state’s 3,000 sons in blue and gray “who fought at Gettysburg in defense of the causes they held so dear” and “symbolizes the aftermath of that battle and the war. Brothers again, Marylanders all.” In 2000, Delaware erected a monument just a few yards from Maryland’s to honor “all Delawareans who fought at Gettysburg, both Union and Confederate.” A short distance to the northeast, the 1993 Masonic memorial, with “Friend to Friend / A Brotherhood Undivided” chiseled on the base, shows Union Captain Henry H. Bingham succoring the mortally wounded Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis A. Armistead. These reconciliationist sentiments remind Gettysburg visitors that, for most loyal citizens of the United States, restoration of the Union entailed welcoming former Rebels back into the fold.

Restoring the Union and pursuing genuine reconciliation, two linked but quite different processes, occurred while the generation that experienced the war established what became long-standing memory traditions. Union veterans tried to suppress or counter the Lost Cause, while former Confederates labored to disseminate their version of why 11 states seceded and what transpired during the war. The presence of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg, however disconcerting for some Americans, demonstrates that winners do not always control the memory of historical events and eras. All visitors to Gettysburg should keep that in mind as they contemplate the battlefield. ✯

Gary W. Gallagher is a member of the Civil War Times advisory board.

No person in the United States from the 1830s through the 1850s thought in terms of an “antebellum” era. Latin for “before the war,” the word came into use only after the Civil War ended and participants, historians, and others sought to label the decades preceding the outbreak of fighting at Fort Sumter. Commonplace in the historical literature for many generations, it summons thoughts of a young republic lurching toward political collapse. Deployment of antebellum can create an impression of inevitability, of citizens increasingly obsessed with sectional differences, and of time ticking inexorably toward bloodshed on a massive scale. Indeed, the word can drain all meaning, except as prelude to four years of war, from a 30-year swath of national events and trends.

We should be wary of such retrospective historical framing. As always with the past, America’s prewar decades present an immensely complicated story rather than one pointing clearly toward secession and military conflict. An observer seeking interpretive themes between 1830 and 1860 could craft a narrative largely devoid of sectional issues. One theme involved a revolution in communications and transportation that dramatically shrank time and space. The electrical telegraph, first demonstrated by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844, opened breathtaking possibilities. By 1861, Western Union’s lines connected the Eastern seaboard and California.

Railroads expanded exponentially from just fewer than 3,000 miles of track in 1840 to more than 30,000 in 1860. The telegraph and trains allowed information, goods, and passengers to move much faster, increasing the pace of life and commerce in ways that left observers somewhat flabbergasted.

A second theme centered on demographics. Population growth maintained a dizzying pace, averaging more than 33 percent a decade between 1830, when Americans numbered just more than 12,800,000, and 1860, when the total approached 31,500,000. Of the latter figure, more than 4,000,000 were foreign-born and approximately 10 percent Catholic—major increases as percentages of the whole population and due largely to German and Irish immigration.

The observer similarly could focus on headlines dealing with significant events unconnected to sectional disputes. Toward the end of the prewar period, for example, the Panic of 1857 and the Colorado gold rush of 1858-59 garnered massive attention throughout the nation. Part of a wider world economic crisis, the panic hit the North much harder than the South and caused considerable dislocation in the railroad industry, agricultural markets, and the banking sector for more than a year. For many caught in its pernicious grasp, the panic far exceeded in importance the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of the same year.

The discovery of precious metals in Colorado, which inspired the cry “Pike’s Peak or Bust,” lured more than 100,000 immigrants to the Rocky Mountain region (a roughly comparable number had flooded into California during the initial year of gold fever in 1848-49). In 1859, news from Colorado easily could overshadow John Brown’s abortive raid at Harpers Ferry in October. To put it another way, most prewar Americans did not wake up every morning focusing on how the North and South differed. They looked first to their jobs, to their businesses, and to their families without knowing that a gigantic war lurked in the years ahead.

New York lawyer George Templeton Strong’s diary reveals that sectional issues did not always prevail. In 1857, Strong’s voluminous entries contain no mention of the Dred Scott decision but accord detailed coverage to the economic collapse. “We seem floundering,” he recorded on October 10. “Affairs are worse than ever today, and a period of general insolvency seems close upon us.” Four days later, with “Wall Street blue with collapse,” Strong exhibited great uncertainty: “Whether we’ve really reached the nadir, no one can tell.” Toward the end of the month he lamented that the “Depression continues….the tide is still running out and everything is drifting down with it, or else stuck fast already on the black mud flats of insolvency and destined to rot there and perish long before the tide comes back again.”

None of this is to say that sectional discord did not roil the national waters. Major disruptive moments that punctuated the timeline of North/South wrangling are well known: the Missouri controversy of 1820, the Mexican War in 1846-48, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1856, the Dred Scott decision in 1857, and John Brown’s Raid. Less overtly political factors such as the establishment of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator in 1831, Nat Turner’s rebellion the same year, publication of Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South in 1852 and 1857, respectively, and splits in major Protestant denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists, create a portrait of Union disintegration.

Some people certainly predicted calamity long before the election of Abraham Lincoln. West Point cadet Stephen Dodson Ramseur of North Carolina, the son of a slaveholder, stood among these individuals. In the wake of James Buchanan’s triumph in 1856, Ramseur, though a staunch Democrat, adopted a gloomy stance. Typical of many young people, who more often than older Americans tended to be less forgiving of those across the sectional divide, he believed “any man of the smallest observation can plainly see, that the Union of the States cannot exist harmoniously; that there must, & can & will be a dissolution, wise, peaceful & equitable, I hope, but at whatever cost, it must come.” “Look out for a Stormy time in 1860,” he added: “In the mean time the South ought to prepare for the worst. Let her establish armories, collect stores & provide for the most desperate of all calamities—civil war.”

Witnesses such as Strong and Ramseur remind us to rely on contemporary sources, in their sometimes baffling complexity, to gauge the degree to which we should understand the antebellum era as one dominated by sectionalism. Mortally wounded at Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864, Ramseur never thought in terms of an antebellum world and, unlike Strong, did not live to experience the postbellum epoch.

Late in the war, General Josiah Gorgas advocated arming slaves to fight

Confederate armies never lost a battle because they lacked sufficient arms or ammunition. This achievement came despite formidable challenges and depended, to a significant extent, on the vision and efforts of Josiah Gorgas (1818-83). “In no branch of our service,” affirmed Jefferson Davis, “were our needs so great and our means to meet them relatively so small as in the matter of ordnance and ordnance stores.” The chief executive looked to Gorgas, “a man remarkable for his scientific attainment, for the highest administrative capacity and…zeal and fidelity to his trust,” to produce results “greatly disproportioned to the means at his command.”

The Pennsylvania-born Gorgas graduated sixth in the Class of 1841 at West Point, served as an ordnance officer during the war with Mexico, and married the daughter of a former governor of Alabama in 1853. He stayed in the U.S. Army until the secession crisis, then resigned his commission and took charge of the Confederate Ordnance Department, at the rank of major, on April 8, 1861. He headed the department throughout the conflict and ended his service as a brigadier general. Among the Confederacy’s logistical high command, Gorgas earned a reputation strikingly at odds with that of Lucius B. Northrop, the widely loathed commissary general, and to a lesser degree that of Quartermaster General Abraham Myers, whose place the able Alexander R. Lawton took in the fall of 1863. 

Gorgas kept a journal for more than 30 years, the Civil War portion of which Frank E. Vandiver edited for publication in 1947. The Civil War Diary of General Josiah Gorgas contains insights into the development of Confederate ordnance as well as a wealth of commentary about events and leaders. Three years into the war, Gorgas recorded a useful summary of his work in the Ordnance Department. “I have succeeded beyond my utmost expectations,” he wrote on April 8, 1864: “From being the worst supplied of the Bureaus of the War Department it is now the best.” He mentioned large arsenals in Richmond, Charleston, Selma, and elsewhere, a “superb powder mill…at Augusta [Ga.], the credit of which is due to Col. G.W. Rains,” as well as smelting works, cannon foundries, armories, leather works, laboratories, and other installations. “Where three years ago we were not making a gun, a pistol nor a sabre, no shot nor shell (except at the Tredegar Works)—a pound of powder—we now make all these in quantities to meet the demands of our large armies.” His tireless labors, concluded Gorgas with understatement, “have not been passed in vain.” General Joseph E. Johnston would have agreed with this sentiment. In the spring of 1864, he gushed that “the efficient head of the Ordnance Department has never permitted us to want any thing that could reasonably be expected from him.” 

Interacting regularly with the top Rebel leaders, Gorgas frequently commented about them. His diary charts the growing importance of Lee and his army as national rallying points across the Confederacy. By the last winter of the conflict, even members of Congress seemed willing to convey great power to Lee. “There is deep feeling in Congress at the conduct of our military affairs,” Gorgas wrote with William T. Sherman’s capture of Savannah, Ga., and John Bell Hood’s fiasco in Tennessee fresh in mind: “They demand that Gen. Lee shall be made Generalissimo to command all our armies—not constructively and ‘under the President’—but shall have full control of all military operations and be held responsible for them.” Gorgas thought Hood’s campaign “completely upset the little confidence left in the President’s ability to conduct campaigns—a criticism I fear I have made long ago.” 

Gorgas retained expectations of possible victory until the final stage of the conflict. Although Lincoln’s re-election “by overwhelming majorities” in November 1864 proved the folly “of disguising the fact that our subjugation is popular at the North,” Gorgas envisioned continued resistance. The Confederacy should apply military pressure until hope for victory among the northern populace “is crushed out and replaced by desire for peace at any cost.” In late January 1865, he confessed having fallen into a “momentary depression.” But his attitude changed “when I think of the brave army in front of us, sixty thousand strong. As long as Lee’s army remains intact there is no cause for despondency….We must sustain and strengthen this army, that is the business before us.” 

The possible effects of emancipation drew Gorgas’ attention in 1862 and 1864. News of Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation in the aftermath of Antietam elicited three brief sentences. “Lincoln has issued his proclamation liberating the slaves in all rebellious states after the 1st of January next,” noted Gorgas matter-of-factly: “It is a document only to be noticed as showing the drift of opinion in the northern Government. It is opposed by many there.” Two years later, with large numbers of black men enrolled in U.S.Colored Troops units, Confederates discussed the possibility of freeing and arming some slaves. The absence of sufficient white manpower, insisted Gorgas, demanded enrollment of African Americans in the Confederate Army. It came down to a question of priorities—protecting slavery as it existed or accepting change in pursuit of Confederate nationhood. “The time is coming now,” he averred on September 25, 1864, “when it will be necessary to put our Slaves into the field and let them fight for their freedom, in other words give up a part of the institution to save the country, or the whole if necessary to win independence.”

Gorgas moved southward with Jefferson Davis’ party after the fall of Richmond, learning of Johnston’s surrender to Sherman at Durham Station. On May 4, he unburdened himself: “The calamity which has fallen upon us in the total destruction of our government is of a character so overwhelming that I am as yet unable to comprehend it. I am as one walking in a dream, and expecting to awake.” Eight days later, in Washington, Ga., Gorgas’ war closed. “We got paroles for ourselves…” began the last sentence of his diary.