On December 2, 1859, Charles Town, Virginia, had a hanging. The condemned was a man named John Brown, whose recent “invasion” of Virginia had polarized a nation already quaking with ideological friction. Seven weeks before, he had descended with a small band of armed partisans on Harpers Ferry with the intention of capturing the armory there and igniting a slave revolt, hoping to precipitate a crusade to destroy the South’s “peculiar institution.” The adventure, unrealistic and poorly planned, failed miserably. Though the armory and arsenal were taken, Brown and his men were eventually surrounded in the town’s fire engine house. Marines commanded by Robert E. Lee stormed the place, killing and capturing most of the defenders. Brown was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia and found guilty.
Though his mission had been foiled, the nature of Brown’s fate was anything but disagreeable to him: the gallows would be as close to a national pulpit as he was ever going to get. He had been committed to the complete annihilation of slavery for years, at any cost, personifying a furious contempt for compromise that was increasingly claiming both sides of the slavery debate. In Kansas, during the grisly guerrilla conflicts that soaked that state in blood during the 1850s, Brown and his sons had hacked five pro-slavery men to death in retaliation for a notorious raid on the community of Lawrence. For Brown, such crude justice was nothing compared to the gargantuan collective sin of human bondage.
His hanging was by invitation only, and most of the honored spectators were soldiers. Nevertheless, the eyes of the world were on the doomed man, and he made the most of circumstances in the oddly punctuated note he left to his jailers. “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood,” he wrote like a prophet.
And so he was. Two years later, in the midst of a terrible war, soldiers put Harpers Ferry to the torch. But the fire engine house where Brown had made his stand remained intact and defiant amongst the smoking rubble, a chilling reminder of the firebrand who foresaw a nation’s self-mutilation.
Whether you viewed Brown as a traitor, a hero, a fool, a messiah, or a homicidal maniac depended on where you lived and how you felt about the slave issue that had driven him to act. The schism between free and slave states had existed since the previous century. Having failed to deal with it for the sake of sectional harmony, the founding fathers in effect passed the buck to future generations. For more than half a century, the United States carried the controversy westward as new territories were added to the republic. Each became a pawn in the ongoing debate, adding votes in Congress for the side that claimed it. Political bargains—particularly the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)—were arranged with the intention of balancing the relative territory and power of slave and free factions, but usually pleased neither. With the passage of time, abolitionist circles became more vocal, more determined against concessions, and more brazen in their extralegal efforts to aid runaway slaves. Incensed by their activities and seeing a growing immigrant North as a threat to the balance of power (by the advent of the Civil War there were four more free states than slave states) and hence to its slave-based economy and culture, the agrarian South cultivated secession from the Union as an increasingly likely option.
It is easy to oversimplify, of course. There were plenty of those in the free North who believed that interfering with the slave laws of Southern states was constitutionally unacceptable. And in areas of the South, some of them quite large, breaking away from the sovereign United States was treasonous, whatever the reason. But these were the exceptions in a mounting tale of angry discord. An immense impasse had been reached between two divergent, irreconcilable, self-righteous cultures.
Abraham Lincoln’s election to the highest office in the land brought it all to a head. Representing the relatively new Republican Party, Lincoln—though a moderate—was a known critic of the spread of slavery. His victory was a model worst-case scenario for fretting Southern secessionists, representing all the requisite horrors: A free state candidate from the party of abolitionists had acquired the very pinnacle of political power. The long years of compromise were over.
South Carolina severed its connection to the greater United States on December 20, 1860, just a month and a half after Lincoln’s electoral victory. Its future Confederate fellows would take a little longer, not least because so many Southerners blanched at the prospect. But by February of the following year, the Palmetto State had been joined by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas (in that order). Meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, delegates from each of them except Texas organized the Confederate States of America with a constitution based closely on that of the United States. In April, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, which worked as a catalyst for four of the remaining slave states to secede: Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Two American nations now existed in fact as well as in theory, and they had already come to blows.
The Confederacy had a couple of distinct advantages in the war that followed. For one, it was the world’s largest producer of cotton, which Europe’s mills—particularly those in the United Kingdom and France—consumed hungrily, making foreign intervention on its behalf a real possibility. And most important, it could take advantage of the defensive: the Union had to come after the Confederacy, not the reverse.
While all the South had to do was not lose, the North had to conquer to achieve its aims. For Lincoln, secession was a mighty test that his civilization must not fail. Should it do so, America was nothing more than a collection of autonomous polities that could cancel their membership when it suited them. The great democratic experiment would be a farce. To coerce the Rebels back into the Union, Lincoln’s forces could draw on advantages that would eventually trump those possessed by the South: a navy, which was to strangle the Confederacy in a blockade; a much larger population; and an overwhelming superiority in arms, factories, railroads, and all the other industrial requirements of war.
Nevertheless, finding the right generals to exploit these assets would prove difficult for the Federal cause, particularly in the eastern theater. There, after the Confederate government was moved to Richmond in May 1861, the two capitals frowned at each other across less than 100 miles of Virginia real estate, coaxing many on both sides into thinking that the war could be won with one bold charge. In July, bowing to pressure from the masses to do something decisive, Union general in chief Winfield Scott sentIrvin McDowell south to rout P. G. T. Beauregard’s Rebels along a creek called Bull Run. Reinforced by an army under Joseph Johnston, it was the Confederates who did the routing, sending McDowell and most of his green soldiers scurrying back to Washington in a state of unbridled panic. So much for McDowell.
His replacement was George McClellan, who would turn the victims of Bull Run and their reinforcements into a force to be reckoned with through ceaseless drilling and shrewd organization. Sadly, he would take forever to do this. He finally got moving in April 1862, when he landed the Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula between the York and James Rivers with the intention of marching on Richmond. It was a bold stroke, and it should have ended the war. But the Rebel forces were beginning to display a level of resourcefulness and cunning that men like McClellan were unprepared to deal with. By the time of McClellan’s Peninsula campaign, for instance, a former Virginia Military Institute professor named Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was causing sheer havoc in the Shenandoah Valley against superior numbers. Men like Jackson were to prove the undoing of McClellan, especially Robert E. Lee, who ended up assuming command of the Southern forces around Richmond after the Battle of Seven Pines at the end of May. By that time the Army of the Potomac had approached close enough to the Confederate capital to see its church spires. It would get no further. In a series of counterstrokes called the Seven Days’ Battles, Lee’s numerically inferior Confederates maneuvered, pushed, and levered their Northern foes back from the approaches of Richmond toward the ocean and eventual evacuation. The Confederacy had been saved.
It would be saved again. In August, John Pope—yet another general in which the Union cause would invest a forlorn hope—went out to meet Lee and Jackson at the Second Battle of Bull Run and was roundly defeated. Nearly defenseless, Washington quaked with fear and turned once again to McClellan, who managed to catch the sort of break that every commanding general prays for: Through sheer luck, he came to possess his enemy’s plans. Armed with an intelligence coup of the first order, he marched into Maryland to thwart Lee’s invasion of that state and, perhaps, bag the whole Army of Northern Virginia. On September 17, the bloodiest day in American history, the two forces clashed at Antietam Creek. Though offered the first opportunity to destroy Lee utterly, the best McClellan could manage was a draw.
It wasn’t much of a military achievement for the Union. But Antietam marked a turn in American history of enormous significance. Lincoln, having penned the Emancipation Proclamation, was waiting for a shift in the military wind to make it public. Antietam was it: Though Lee hadn’t been destroyed, he had been checked and pushed out of Northern territory. The preliminary proclamation was issued. As of January 1, 1863, all slaves in areas rebelling against the United States that were not already occupied by Federal forces would be considered free. The government in Washington had made official what plenty of Americans already knew: this was to be a war for freedom as well as for the Union.
Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation evoked an indignant uproar throughout the Confederacy. But it also pissed off no small number of Northerners—McClellan, ironically, chief among them—who saw Lincoln’s gambit as a reckless perversion of a just constitutional crusade against secessionists. For them this was supposed to be a fight on behalf of the Union, not black slaves. Nevertheless, the two issues—freedom or slavery, states’ rights or federal sovereignty—had become inextricably intertwined by Lincoln’s visionary document. The proclamation was also a crucial war measure, not least because it attached the Union cause with abolition. To foreign powers, supporting the Confederacy now meant supporting a nation whose economy was founded on a racist institution that they had abolished in their own empires long ago. With a stroke, Lincoln had eliminated the international question.
The Confederacy, then, was on its own. And for the moment, that was more than enough. In December 1862, Lee happily went on the defensive to receive a disastrous Union attack at Fredericksburg. The following May, another Union thrust in Virginia fell to pieces at Chancellorsville, where Lee proved to be more than the sum of his opponents’ parts. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had become more than a match for anything the North could throw at it, and Lee decided to take it on the offensive once again as he had done the previous year in Maryland. Seizing the initiative and forcing his disoriented enemy to react to his actions was sound thinking, but it ended in disaster. At the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac essentially bumped into each other in July 1863. The result was the greatest clash of arms in the history of the western hemisphere and a decisive Union victory. Lee had made his grandest gamble and lost.
Gettysburg was enough of a victory to buoy Union morale. But it came at virtually the same moment as another Federal triumph nearly a thousand miles to the southwest: Vicksburg. Extending from the western slope of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River, the western theater was far vaster than its eastern counterpart and, despite its distance from the capitals, at least as significant strategically. The prizes to be had were Tennessee, which controlled access to the heart of the Confederacy, and the great Mississippi River itself, which—depending on who controlled it—either united or bifurcated the South. Here things had gone mostly the North’s way, beginning in February 1862 when troops under Ulysses Grant captured Forts Henry and Donelson, seizing control of western Tennessee. He nearly lost the gains he had made at the furious and extremely bloody Battle of Shiloh in April, but managed to rescue success from disaster on the second day of the fight. That same month the critical port of New Orleans fell to Flag Officer David Farragut, putting in place all the elements needed to begin an advance on the Mississippi from both directions. A Confederate offensive in Mississippi came to nothing and Rebel general Braxton Bragg’s autumn invasion of Kentucky wasturned back at Perryville, then further mauled at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in the new year.
For Union forces in the West, 1862 had been a good year. But the winter offensive against Vicksburg itself—the city whose lofty bluffs, bristling with guns, continued to command the Mississippi—had failed. It wouldn’t be until the summer of 1863 that Grant, employing daring and unorthodox tactics, was able to invest Vicksburg and pummel it into submission. The city surrendered on July 4, essentially completing the Union conquest of the continent’s greatest waterway and cutting the South in two.
The twin victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg were joined that summer by the capture of Chattanooga, a Northern success that Bragg, with James Longstreet’s help, nearly reversed at the epic Battle of Chickamauga and the siege of Chattanooga that followed. But the vital Tennessee rail center remained in Federal hands, further hindering the Confederacy’s ability to maneuver troops where they were most needed throughout its embattled territory. The war was now indisputably going poorly for the South, narrowing its hopes down to one month: November 1864, the date of the North’s presidential election. Should Lincoln lose, his successor might well be willing to offer peace. All the Confederate armies had to do was hold on until then—and make their enemy pay dearly for every inch of ground, pouring fuel on the glowing embers of Northern antiwar sentiment.
It may seem in hindsight that Dixie was doomed. But the Army of Northern Virginia had long since proven itself to be a tough and enterprising adversary, even in the most dire of situations. And the Confederacy was still a seriously big place; lancing its innards with great thrusting columns was a lot easier said than done.
Nevertheless, that is what the newly appointed lieutenant general Ulysses Grant intended to do. With so much riding on the clock, 1864 was slated to be the year of final victory. The two principal instruments of that victory were to be the Army of the Potomac, ostensibly commanded by George Meade, and the combined armies of the west, under William T. Sherman. Commander in Chief Grant, in charge of all the Union armies, would ride with Meade. There were other weapons in Grant’s arsenal:Benjamin Butler coming up from the Virginia coast, Franz Sigel in the Shenandoah Valley, and others. But Meade and Sherman were to be the principal pincers in a conclusive squeeze play meant to crush the Rebel armies and their supply depots from north and west.
Grant bore down on Lee like the relentless hammer he was hired to be. In his unsparing Overland campaign through Virginia, his troops grappled with the enemy in battles that continue to signify violent excess: The Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor. Until then, Lee had been able to dazzle his enemy, then regroup while the other side came back to its senses. Grant, by contrast, was something new: Matching Lee’s movements, he held on to the enemy and kept coming at him, thrashing and maiming until his tireless wrath took its toll. The cost in lives was appalling. It was a brave new war, and Lee knew it. In a series of controlled retreats, he retired into the defenses of Petersburg, drawing the Army of the Potomac into a siege replete with trenches, enormous siege guns, snipers, and—above all—stalemate.
Sherman, out in the northwest corner of Georgia, had his own version of total war, advancing toward Atlanta through the summer. When his columns stalled before the defenses of Atlanta just as surely as Grant’s had halted at Petersburg, it seemed as if the Confederacy’s plan of deciding the November election bore hope. Despite an overwhelming superiority in troops and matériel, the North sank into a slough of despond even as ultimate victory seemed closer than ever. Then, on September 3, Washington received a wire from Sherman: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” Like a lightning bolt, Lincoln’s reelection campaign was reinvigorated. Two months later Sherman left Atlanta for his famous “march to the sea” and Honest Abe was securely back in the saddle.
With Lee’s army anchored at Petersburg to defend Richmond, and Federal offensives in Alabama and the Carolinas, the Confederacy had embarked upon its final days. Lee, having made desperate and futile attacks against Grant’s besieging army, abandoned Petersburg on April 2, leaving Richmond to the enemy. By that time Sherman had marched his army up into North Carolina, leaving what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia no choice but to flee west. It didn’t get far. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered his weary forces to Grant at Appomattox Court House. The remaining Confederate forces would end up surrendering over the ensuing two months.
Lincoln would never receive word of them. On April 14, he was shot in the head while watching a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington and died the next morning. The man had skulked into the White House with the hope of preserving the Union as it was; he died having changed it beyond recognition. On December 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery.
The war cost 620,000 lives. And the era of Reconstruction that followed would be one of the most contentious and unstable periods in American history. But in addition to abolishing legal slavery throughout the country, the war had begun to forge a centralized nation that was impossible before—the United States had become more “United” and less “States.” Perhaps the unfinished business of the founding fathers was at last complete.