The American Civil War, Part 2 | War is Hell

It is well that war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it.

- General Robert E. Lee, during the Battle of Fredericksburg, December 1862 -

Around him lay the carnage of battle, men killed or nursing wounds. Smoke filled the air and burned the colonel's lungs. His depleted regiment had already repelled three attacks by rebels charging up the hill and was nearing the end of their strength. And yet the grey-coats kept coming. His superior's orders rang in his ears, "You must hold the line." Looking around, he thought to himself, "What more can we do?" Then it came to him, an order not often given in these days of modern war. Standing tall, he gave instructions to his battalion and company commanders, and then shouted a single word to those men still standing—"Bayonets!"

The Turning Points

The Confederate States of America had inflicted serious losses on the Union during the first two years of the American Civil War, especially in the Eastern Theater against the incompetent mediocrities that President Lincoln kept promoting. General Robert E. Lee hoped that with one final victory somewhere northwest of Washington, he could force the Yankees to sue for peace and win independence for the South. In June 1863, his Army of Northern Virginia began to move north through the Shenandoah Valley, using the Blue Ridge Mountains to cover the advance.

In the West, however, the Confederacy was reeling from multiple defeats at the hands of more skilled Union generals. The Union Navy had blockaded every port along the coast, cutting off any hope of supplies or help from the outside world, and it was slowly advancing both up and down the Mississippi River. If the western states of the Confederacy were cut off from the Deep South, the rebel armies would starve for lack of food supplies grown or raised in Texas and Arkansas. This was a key component of the Union's "Anaconda Plan" to slowly strangle the insurgents and end the war. Only time would tell which side could win a major victory in the summer of 1863.

General Ulysses S. Grant's Army of Tennessee faced off against a collection of small, independent armies in Mississippi, and his target was the city of Vicksburg, the last link between the eastern and western Confederate states. Interference from the War Department and poor leadership by some of his subordinates had slowed his advance, but as the weather warmed and summer approached, he grew confident that he could take the city. His naval counterpart, Admiral David Porter, had floated gunships down the Mississippi under the noses of the rebel guns at Vicksburg, and Sherman's army had made it past the city's defenses on the opposite river bank. Grant then advanced northeast toward Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, and captured it in late May. His opponent, John Pemberton, was thus bottled up inside Vicksburg, and Grant laid siege to it four days after the fall of Jackson. For six weeks, his guns pounded the rebel defenses, and several early assaults on the works failed. Pemberton's men held their lines, but they were running out of food, and by the last week of June they had grown desperate. On July 3rd, a grey-coated emissary crossed the lines under a flag of truce with an offer of surrender. Grant accepted and took possession of Vicksburg on Independence Day, 1863. With Vicksburg's fall, the Confederacy had been sundered in two.

Lee's second invasion of the North coincided with yet another change in command for the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln dismissed Joseph Hooker and replaced him with George Meade, a Pennsylvanian who knew the terrain and was quietly confident that he could defend his state from the rebel invaders. The Union army moved out from Washington and gave chase to Lee, and on June 30th, as the Vicksburg defenders were nearing the end of their tethers, a Union cavalry brigade met a rebel infantry division in the small town of Gettysburg. Calls for reinforcements went out from both units, and both Lee and Meade gave orders for their respective armies to concentrate in the small town.

The Confederates managed to capture Gettysburg on July 1st, and the Union troops withdrew to the high ground south of the town. They were lead by General Richard Ewell, who had replaced the fallen Stonewall Jackson the previous month. Ewell was far more cautious than his predecessor had been, and he failed to push the Union late in the day and drive them off the hills. This proved to be a fatal mistake for the rebels at Gettysburg. During the night, the Confederates fortified another line of hills west of the Union position, and as dawn broke on July 2nd, the two armies looked at each other across a mile of open ground. General James Longstreet, who had replaced Jackson as Lee's "right hand," led the attack on the Union's right flank to the south, and he pressed hard to break the line and turn Meade's flank. But the Union soldiers held fast, anchored on two hills known as the "Round Tops," defended by an artillery brigade and the small but valiant 20th Maine Regiment. Their commander, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, held off four enemy attacks before charging down the hill with only a third of his pre-battle strength, and with only a few rounds and their bayonets they swept the enemy off the hill and won the day. Lee was disappointed but not disheartened—he would try again tomorrow.

During the night, the rest of Longstreet's corps arrived, centered around the Virginians of General George Pickett's division. These fresh troops would be the strike force for the next day's attack. Lee ordered an infantry charge directly across the open ground toward the Union center, and Pickett was eager to send his men into battle. Longstreet disliked the plan but followed his orders, and after a two-hour artillery bombardment, Pickett's division and two others moved out from the trees at the base of the rebel hills. They believed that the barrage had swept the Union positions clear of soldiers, though smoke obscured their vision. The men talked and laughed, confident that the end of the war was at hand. The advance slowed as it reached a fenced road that divided the battlefield, and some Union guns opened fire on them, blowing a few holes in their lines and cutting down several dozen men in grey. But the Confederates continued to advance.

As they approached the Union position, they could see a few enemy soldiers near a little clump of trees. Beneath the ridge ran a low stone wall, but the rebels were unconcerned. Victory was at hand! Then, Union guns from behind the ridge and up on the Round Top hills a half-mile away opened fire and blasted hundreds of Confederate men into the next world. With a shout of "Up!" from General Winfield Scott Hancock, a line of blue-coated men rose as one from behind the stone wall and opened fire. The men of "Picket's Charge" ran forward with the famed "rebel yell," and some reached the stone wall and captured some Union artillery, with General Lewis Armistead, one of Pickett's brigade commanders in the lead, his hat impaled on his sword. But Southern bravery was no match for Union steel, and the attack failed. Nearly nine thousand Confederates lost their lives in Pickett's Charge, and the defeat broke Lee's heart and forced him to withdraw from Pennsylvania. On July 4th, as Ulysses S. Grant took possession of Vicksburg, Lee's army began a retreat to Virginia. They would never again step foot on Union soil.

Union Victory

The triumphs at Vicksburg and Gettysburg did not end the war, and the Confederacy dug in and prepared to fight on. They won a victory at Chattanooga in September, only to have it snatched away when Grant arrived, and as fall turned to winter the fighting died down in the cold. Spring produced a new situation in Washington. Lincoln promoted Grant to commanding general and told him at their first meeting in the White House that he had a year to win the war—Lincoln's popularity was falling fast thanks to new draft orders and riots that had broken out in several Union cities in protest. The president promised not to interfere with Grant's orders; the general had proven his ability to lead, and Lincoln trusted him to see the war through to victory. After spending six weeks planning his coordinated assault on the Confederacy, Grant decided to move with Meade's army in the East to ensure that his orders were followed. He also promoted Sherman to command in the West and ordered him to carry the war into Georgia.

In May 1864, the Army of the Potomac launched a relentless invasion of Virginia that overwhelmed Lee's brave troops. From the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, the offensive cost nearly a hundred thousand men killed or wounded, and it ended with the Union besieging Richmond and Petersburg, a town thirty miles to the south with the last railhead bringing supplies to the rebel capital. The press howled for Grant's removal because he had gotten so many young men killed, but Lincoln stood by him. "I cannot spare this man; he fights," were the president's simple words to several members of Congress urging him to dismiss General Grant.

Meanwhile, in the West, Sherman annihilated the remnants of the Chattanooga defenders and was poised to invade Georgia, the Confederacy's breadbasket. Grant had tasked his mercurial friend with destroying the rebels' food supplies and rail network. When some questioned Sherman's ability to carry out his orders, the steely general replied simply, "I can make this march, and I will make Georgia howl." His attack in May brushed aside the Confederate defenders of the Peach State, and by July he had captured Atlanta. He then burned the city before departing and making his famous—or infamous—"March to the Sea," covered in detail in our biography episode about General Sherman in Season Two. The march burned away the Confederacy's war effort, destroying or carrying off anything the rebels could have used to continue to fight. It also secured President Lincoln's reelection over his Democratic rival, the disgraced General George McClellan, who was advocating a peaceful settlement with the Confederates. When Sherman reached the sea in December, he wired the president a message: "I beg to present to you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah."

The war was still not over, and the decision would come in the East. As Sherman moved northward, capturing the Carolinas and wreaking his particularly vicious brand of punishment on the slaveowners in Charleston who had seceded from the Union, Grant tightened his hold on Richmond and Petersburg. Lee hoped to disengage from the capital, reach the Appalachian Mountains, and either link up with General Joseph Johnston's tiny army that was being mauled by Sherman or else wage a prolonged guerrilla war against the Union. He moved in late March 1865, but his numbers were dwindling fast while Grant was receiving more reinforcements by the day. Lee's target was the town of Lynchburg, VA, at the base of the Appalachians, but every time he tried to reach it the enemy blocked his path. Desertion rates in the Army of Northern Virginia skyrocketed, and by the first week of April Lee had only a few thousand men still under arms. When he reached the town of Appomattox Court House on April 9th, he found two Union corps waiting for him, and after a brief skirmish, Lee knew that the game had ended. He met with General Grant in the home of Wilmer MacLean, the only white resident of Appomattox still in the town, and signed the surrender terms. The American Civil War continued for a few weeks in remote parts of the country until Confederate War Secretary John Breckenridge, who had come in second to Lincoln back in the 1860 election, signed a general surrender of all Confederate forces on April 26, 1865.

Aftermath

President Lincoln's assassination by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theater on April 14th was probably the greatest tragedy of the Civil War apart from the deaths of so many Americans. In his second inaugural address months earlier, Lincoln had advocated peaceful reconciliation with the South with the words, "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."

Sadly, his Republican colleagues and many in the North were so outraged at the war's devastation and the murder of their great leader that they resolved to make the South pay a harsh price for their treason. Reconstruction, the postwar period that saw the Union military occupation of the former Confederate states, laid the groundwork for the political and racial tensions that marred the next century of American history and are still felt today. When Reconstruction ended thanks to a disputed outcome in the 1876 presidential election, Democratic Southern governors imposed "Jim Crow laws" and racial segregation, and Northern efforts to aid freed slaves as they built a new life came to an end. The legacy of Reconstruction was one of the unfulfilled promises, bitter resentments, and lingering racism in the United States.

Learning from History

If this podcast were called "Ten Thousand-Minute History," then I might be able to scratch the surface of all the lessons the United States learned—and failed to learn—from the Civil War. So with profound apologies to Civil War buffs everywhere, I want to just briefly conclude with a couple of key lessons learned from the darkest days in American history.

In the military sphere, the Civil War proved the effectiveness, if not the morality, of what is known as "total war," in which any person or piece of property that contributes to an enemy's war effort becomes a legitimate target for destruction. Sherman's "March to the Sea" is the prime example of total war, matched only in its destruction by the American bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan during the Second World War. Going forward, the United States would often employ its vast military might against civilians and private property in an effort to end a war more quickly—in line with General Sherman's maxim that "War is cruelty, and there is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over." In Germany and Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East, America put Sherman's words into practice with devastatingly-effective results (most of the time).

Politically, the Civil War transformed the United States almost beyond recognition by its Founding Fathers. The country was originally structured as a federal union of mostly-sovereign states, with the central government being mostly responsible for national defense, protection of commerce, and the coinage of money. But after the Civil War, when so much power had been concentrated in President Lincoln's hands, the federal government assumed almost total control over every aspect of national policy. His successors, especially with the rise of the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century, made the presidency and Congress the prime agents for social reform and change in the country. No longer would states be the "laboratories of innovation" as described by Thomas Jefferson—they were to be instruments of carrying out national mandates from Washington.

Finally, in matters of race relations, the Civil War should have been the moment for America to finally rid itself not just of slavery, which it did, but of legal repression toward its African-American citizens entirely. Obviously, this did not happen, and it teaches students of history one of the most important lessons possible—and one we have discussed previously when covering civil rights in America. You cannot change people's hearts or minds by pointing a gun at them, and Reconstruction proved this with tragic results. The Union forced the defeated Southern states to accept Republican governors and mandated racial equality, but it did not try to encourage social acceptance of integration through education and public policy. Instead, it rightly punished anyone who committed racial crimes, such as members of the Ku Klux Klan, but it did not mobilize the collective social condemnation of racism in speech or behavior outside the legal sphere. I am not talking about locking up racists; I am talking about reframing conversations to gradually ostracize racists from polite society. This takes decades to accomplish, and perhaps it was impossible given the circumstances in the aftermath of the war. But it has worked in other countries, most notably in Nazi Germany, where the Allies and the postwar German government banned the National Socialist Party but also pushed Nazis to the fringes of German society. The greatest lesson that can be applied today from the Civil War and Reconstruction, at least in my humble opinion, is that leaders must have the understanding that not every problem in society can be solved by a government mandate. They must have the convictions to do what is right even when it is not popular and when others say that it is impossible. And they must have the courage to stand up for what they know is right, as Abraham Lincoln did, even if they must stand alone.