Civil War Fort Sumter to Appomattox PDF
Preview Civil War Fort Sumter to Appomattox
© Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com CIVIL WAR © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com CONTENTS Foreword 7 Introduction: The Nation in Crisis 11 Chronology 19 CHAPTER 1: THE WAR IN THE EAST 1861–MAY 1863 Outbreak: Election, Southern Secession, and Creation of the Confederacy 27 Warring Sides 33 The Fighting: From First Manassas to Chancellorsville 40 Portrait of a Soldier: Robert Augustus Moore 80 The World Around War 84 Portrait of a Civilian: Elizabeth Herndon Maury 91 How the Period Ended: An Uncertain Future 95 CHAPTER 2: THE WAR IN THE WEST 1861–JULY 1863 The Fighting: Struggle for the Heartland 99 Common Soldiers: Billy Yank and Johnny Reb at War 143 Portrait of a Soldier: John Beatty 153 Portrait of a Civilian: Kate Stone 159 How the Period Ended: The Promise of Summer 164 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com CHAPTER 3: THE WAR IN THE EAST MAY 1863–1865 The Fighting: The War Without Jackson to Lee’s Last Stand 167 Portrait of a Soldier: McHenry Howard’s War 225 The World Around War 233 Portrait of a Civilian: Ella Washington and the Federal Army 235 How the Period Ended: From Appomattox to Liverpool 241 CHAPTER 4: THE WAR IN THE WEST JULY 1863–1865 The Fighting: The Final Stages 243 Common Soldiers: Black Soldiers and POWs 292 Portrait of a Soldier: William Wilbur Edgerton 302 Portrait of a Civilian: Emma LeConte 308 How the War Ended: Peace is Declared 311 Conclusion and Consequences – United States 315 Further Reading 321 About the Authors 324 Index 325 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com FOREWORD By James M Pherson C The centrality of the Civil War to American history is indisputable. At least 620,000 soldiers lost their lives from 1861 to 1865. This number constituted 2 percent of the American population. If the same percentage of Americans were to die in a war fought today, the number of war dead would be five and a half million. The war also wreaked havoc and destruction in the South. It wiped out two-thirds of the assessed value of Southern wealth (including slaves), destroyed more than half of the region’s farm machinery, consumed two-fifths of Southern livestock, and killed a quarter of Southern white males between the ages of 20 and 40. In 1865 the South presented a bleak landscape of desolation. Burned-out plantations, fields growing up in weeds, and railroads without tracks, bridges, or rolling stock marked the trail of conquering and defeated armies. The consequences of the war for the country as a whole, however, were more positive than negative. Northern victory resolved two festering issues that had plagued the United States since its founding: whether this fragile experiment of a democratic republic could survive in a world where most republics through the ages had been swept into the dustbin of history; and whether the house divided would continue to endure half slave and half free. Many Americans had doubted whether the republic would survive; many Europeans regularly predicted its demise; some Americans believed in the right of secession and periodically threatened to invoke it; 11 states did invoke it in 1860–61. As Abraham Lincoln said in his address at Gettysburg in 1863, the conflict was a test whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could “long endure” or would “perish from the earth.” It did endure, and in such a way as to give promise of long life. Since 1865 no state or region has seriously threatened secession, not even during the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation from 1954 to 1964. The war also gave America “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg. Before 1865 the United States, a boasted “land of liberty,” was the 7 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com Civil War largest slaveholding country in the world. “The monstrous injustice of slavery,” Lincoln had said in 1854, “deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world – enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.” With the abolition of slavery by Northern victory, that particular “monstrous injustice” and “hypocrisy” came to an end. As Mark Twain wrote in 1873, the Civil War “uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.” How did all this happen? That is the question the four authors of this volume undertake to answer. In four sections that weave together the story of military campaigns in the Eastern and Western Theaters with the impact of the war on the home front, spiced with stories of individual men and women who experienced the conflict, this book sets forth the essential history of the war. The four authors are in the top rank of Civil War historians. Their lucid prose, the clarity of the maps, and the well-selected illustrations offer a rich feast for readers, who will take away an understanding of how and why the war came out as it did. The authors make clear that this outcome was not inevitable. Although the North had superior numbers and resources, these did not assure victory. To win the war, Union forces had to invade, conquer, occupy, and control key parts of the South’s 750,000 square miles (1,942,500 sq km) and destroy its armies and infrastructure. The Confederacy, by contrast, began the conflict in political and military control of this territory. To win the war, it needed only to defend what it already had in 1861 and to wear out the will of its enemy to continue fighting. In these terms the Confederacy came close to winning on several occasions, as this book makes clear. There were many twists and turns in the four years of war, many reversals of momentum that frustrated imminent victory by one side or the other. This book identifies the four major turning points of the war. The first came in the summer of 1862 when counteroffensives by Confederate commanders Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Virginia and Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith in Tennessee and Kentucky reversed the previous four months of Union naval and military success. These Northern victories had gained control of much of the vital interior network of the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi Rivers and of the South Atlantic coast, had captured New Orleans, Nashville, and Memphis, and had approached to within 5 miles of the Confederate capital of Richmond, whose fall seemed imminent in May 1862. The Southern counteroffensives prolonged and intensified the war and created the potential for Confederate success, which appeared imminent before each of the next three turning points. The first of these occurred in the fall of 1862, when battles at Antietam and Perryville blunted Confederate invasions, forestalled European mediation and recognition of the South, perhaps prevented a Democratic victory in the Northern congressional 8 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com Foreword elections that might have inhibited Lincoln’s ability to carry on the war, and set the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation which enlarged the scope and purpose of the war. The third critical point came in the summer and fall of 1863 when Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga turned the tide toward ultimate Northern victory. But one more reversal of that tide seemed possible in the summer of 1864 when appalling Union casualties and apparent lack of progress, especially in Virginia, brought the North to the brink of peace negotiations and the election of a Democratic president. However, Sherman’s capture of Atlanta and Sheridan’s victories in the Shenandoah Valley turned the tide one last time. Only then did it become possible, after Lincoln’s reelection, to speak of the inevitability of Northern victory. The consequences of that victory have profoundly affected the course of American history – indeed, world history – since 1865. This volume provides the essential foundation for an understanding of those consequences. James McPherson 9 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com INTRODUCTION: THE NATION IN CRISIS America in the mid-19th century was a nation of conflicting ideological and cultural identities attempting to forge out of its agrarian traditions and industrial impulses a republic that remained committed to the ideals of its founding fathers. Bound by a common belief in freedom and independence as realized through democratic principles and republican virtues, Americans came to believe that their nation was God’s chosen nation. However, although the country had been unified for more than 60 years, political, economic, social, and cultural differences stretching back to the nation’s origins brought about a crisis for the young republic in 1861. The Development of an Industrial Society In the early 19th century, the United States was predominantly an agrarian society. Land was fundamental to freedom, self-sufficiency, and independence. Most Americans believed that owning land and tilling the soil nurtured freedom and independence, and that those without land, engaged primarily in manufacturing, posed the greatest threat to that freedom. So long as land was plentiful, Americans believed, they could maintain the virtues granted them as the rightful beneficiaries of republican liberties. They could therefore escape The antebellum South was a land of prosperous cotton plantations. Even after the war, cotton remained king of agriculture. (Edimedia) © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com Civil War Like the Mississippi and Ohio poverty, dependency on others, and overpopulation produced by a Rivers, the Tennessee and manufacturing society. Thus, the desire to own land was at the core of the Cumberland Rivers had been initial republican vision, as conceived by revolutionary leaders such as Thomas arteries of economic exchange Jefferson. in the decades before the Civil Few Americans of Jefferson’s generation, however, could have imagined War, but the outbreak of war that the quest for land that sparked the settlement of the west would actually changed them into routes of accelerate rather than deter urban and industrial development. The very nature military invasion. (Harper’s Weekly, public domain) of the migration west was as much a cause as it was a consequence of the ideological differences and sectionalism that prevailed in the decades before the Civil War. Significantly, the migration and settlement of the west transformed an agrarian society that defined itself as a virtuous farming republic into an industrial society that came to accept the free-labor ideology as paramount in achieving republican dreams of a truly free and democratic society. Beginning in the 1820s, westward expansion flowed along America’s natural arteries, such as the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and their tributaries, which allowed western farmers to channel goods south to New Orleans. After the 1830s, however, steamboats, canals, and railroads redirected western trade to the flourishing urban markets of the northeast. The cumulative impact of more effective transportation resulted in widening market opportunities. Simultaneously, the small manufacturing initiatives shifted from artisan shops to small factories, and merchant capitalists in the northeastern cities assumed 12 © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
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