Abraham Lincoln (12 February 1809–15 April 1865)
A self-educated lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln had been involved in politics for a number of years before he was nominated to run for president by the newly formed Republican Party. Because of his outspoken opposition to slavery, Southern slaveholders feared that if Lincoln became president, his first act would be to ban slavery. When Lincoln was elected in November 1860, the State of South Carolina seceded from the United States. Ten other states followed to form the Confederate States of America.
Abraham Lincoln, by D. Van Nostrand
The Confederacy repeatedly insisted that they wanted to be left in peace. But when the Union refused to surrender fortifications in the Confederate States, war erupted.
Lincoln’s priority was the preservation of the Union, and holding the fledgling country of the United States together. He refused to acknowledge South Carolina’s right to secede and prepared for war. Over the next four years, he looked for a general who could lead the army to a speedy victory while he performed a balancing act with the politics and personal interest groups that descended upon Washington. His generals included Winfield Scott, George B. McClellan, Henry Hallack, and finally, Ulysses S. Grant. His first choice, at the recommendation of his first commander-in-chief, Winfield Scott, had been Robert E. Lee, but Lee chose to become commander-in-chief of the Confederate army instead.
In November 1862, Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, a document that freed slaves held within the Confederate States. It went into effect on 1 January 1863 and paved the way for the Thirteenth Amendment which outlawed slavery in the United States entirely.
While attending a dedication ceremony at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address. Although he was not the guest speaker, as president he was asked to speak and delivered his comments in less than two minutes.
In 1864, Lincoln was nominated to run for re-election and won. As a moderate Republican, he was at odds with the radical element of his party who wanted the South punished for their impertinence of attempting to separate themselves from the country. Lincoln wanted reconciliation between the North and South, and encouraged a speedy recovery from the destruction the South had suffered for four long years.
The strain of responsibility took its toll on Lincoln. During his time in the White House, he was known to have suffered periods of depression and fatigue. Amid the turmoil of war and politics, his son, Willie, died aged eleven, while Lincoln was in office. The Lincolns had already lost one child to tuberculosis in 1850. His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was a Southern belle from a slaveholding family in Kentucky. It made things difficult for her as a First Lady in a Union-held capital city.
On 14 April 1865, just days after the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, Mary urged her husband to attend a play at Ford’s Theatre. The play, Our American Cousin, was a comedy that the First Lady hoped would lift her husband’s spirits. As Lincoln sat in his box that night, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and fanatical Southern sympathizer, slipped into the box and shot Lincoln in the back of the head. Lincoln was carried across the street to a house where he died at 7.22 the following morning.
With Lincoln gone, his successor, Andrew Johnson, tried to enforce Lincoln’s plans for the South. He was no match for the Radical Republicans who pushed through their policies. During Lincoln’s lifetime, Southerners had despised him and seen him as a threat but after his death, more than few were heard to comment that the South had lost its best friend.
Jefferson Finis Davis (3 June 1808–6 December 1889)
Jefferson Finis Davis was among the many graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point who found themselves on opposite sides when war came to their own country. Davis was a senator at the outbreak of the war, and it was he who announced to the US Senate that his home state of Mississippi would be withdrawing from the Union. Davis attended the convention in Montgomery, Alabama, where the provisional government for the Confederate States of America was formed. Davis was hoping for a commission as commander of a military unit. Instead, he found himself the provisional president of the seceded states. When general elections were held, he was elected to serve for the full term of six years. He was the Confederacy’s first, last and only president.
Jefferson Finis Davis
One of Davis’ first acts as president of the Confederacy was to appoint a peace commission. Their job was to travel to Washington DC to negotiate payment for any Federal facilities in the South along with the South’s share of the national debt. The bombardment of Fort Sumter, South Carolina came before the commission had set out for Washington. Any hope of a peaceful secession was gone.
Although Davis was better suited to life of warfare than of politics, he failed to find a strategy to defeat the Union, which was bigger, stronger and better organized. The North was industrialized while the South was agrarian. The North had been training armies for almost a hundred years while the South was starting from scratch. The support of foreign countries would have been helpful, but none were prepared to officially support the Confederacy.
After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, Davis was arrested and charged with treason. He was held at Fort Monroe for two years before being finally released. The charges against him were later dropped.
After the war, Davis travelled and wrote two books – The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government and A Short History of the Confederate States of America.
Two months after the completion of the second book, he died in New Orleans, Louisiana, of an undetermined cause. He was eighty-one.
George B. McClellan (3 December 1826–29 October 1885)
George B. McClellan was another West Point graduate who went on to a successful military career. He commanded a company of engineers in the Mexican-American War and was an engineering instructor at West Point. He was often sent on scouting and exploration expeditions, including one journey into the wilderness to gather information that would be used to plan the transcontinental railroad. He was also part of a group sent to observe European armies. He later wrote cavalry manuals and designed a saddle, both of which were adopted by the United States cavalry.
George B. McClellan, by Mathew Brady
In 1857, McClellan resigned from the army to become chief engineer and vice-president of the Illinois Central Railroad as well as president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad in 1860. He married Ellen Marcy in New York that same year. McClellan was opposed to Federal interference with slavery. He was approached by colleagues to side with the Confederacy, but he disagreed with secession. He returned to the military and was involved in two conflicts that were minor, but drew enough attention to make him a national hero.
He formed the Army of the Potomac and built defences for Washington DC that were nearly impregnable. They included 48 fortified positions with 480 guns manned by 7,200 artillerists. He favoured the Napoleonic style of campaigning which imposed minimal impact on the civilian population and would not require the emancipation of slaves. This was one of many things that put McClellan at odds with Abraham Lincoln.
The two men did agree on one thing. They opposed the Radical Republicans. McClellan was also at odds with Lieutenant General Winfield Scott to the point that Scott resigned to be replaced by McClellan as commander-in-chief of Union forces. But McClellan was again at odds with Lincoln when he refused to share details of his campaign strategies. He was also criticized for his overly cautious action in battle.
In March 1862, Lincoln relieved McClellan of his duty as commander-in-chief, leaving McClellan still in command of the Army of the Potomac. He retained that command until after the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the war. When McClellan did not pursue Lee after the battle, Lincoln relieved McClellan of his command.
In October of 1863, McClellan declared for president. He was nominated by the Democratic Party as their candidate, but lost to Lincoln by a vast margin.
McClellan resigned his military commission on election day, 8 November 1864. After his defeat to Lincoln, he took his family to Europe where they remained for several years. He died at the age of fifty-eight in Orange, New Jersey, after having complained of chest pains for several weeks.
Robert Edward Lee (19 January 1807–12 October 1870)
Lee was another graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Soldiering ran in the family; his father, known as ‘Light Horse Harry’ Lee, had been a hero of the Revolutionary War. Lee’s career as a combat engineer included service in the Mexican-American War, as superintendent of West Point and in leading the US Marines who arrested John Brown and his band of abolitionists at Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
Robert E. Lee, by Mathew Brady
In 1831, he married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the step-great-granddaughter of America’s first president, George Washington. Of their seven children, all three sons served in the Confederate army while his four daughters all died unmarried.
When Lee’s father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, died in 1857 he left his everything to his only child, Mary, Lee’s wife. The estate, which was poorly managed and in debt, and included hundreds of acres of land and hundreds of slaves, was in chaos, and the terms of Custis’ will required that all his slaves be emancipated within five years. Still, Lee and his wife managed, in spite of the war, to free all the slaves by 1862.
Besides his determination to liberate his father-in-law’s slaves, Lee supported his wife’s efforts to relocate freed slaves to Liberia, and supported her illegal school for slaves at Arlington Plantation. Lee further suggested, near the end of the war, that slaves should be enlisted into the Confederate army and emancipated in return for military service.
When war came, Lee was strongly conflicted. He saw secession as ‘revolution’ and told his son that it would bring ‘calamity’. Lee stated that he would never bear arms against the Union, but that he might find himself having to defend his native state of Virginia. Winfield Scott, commander of the Union forces, wanted Lee among his commanding officers, but on the day Lee received Scott’s offer, the State of Virginia seceded from the Union. Lee turned down the role of major general in the Union army to accept the same rank in the Confederate army. It was the end of a thirty-two-year career in the United States army. Even after being promoted to full general in the Confederate army, Lee continued to wear three stars on his uniform, the insignia of a colonel, the last rank he held in the US army.
Lee’s career throughout the war saw a series of successful tactical manoeuvres until Chancellorsville in 1863 when a brilliant plan by his general, Stonewall Jackson, was thwarted by Jackson’s accidental death at the hands of his own men. Lee’s next campaign was to take the battle north, into Pennsylvania. But when his men faced Union forces near the small market town of Gettysburg, three days of fighting marked a turning point in the war.
Shortly after Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant was appointed commander-in-chief of the Union forces, and Lee had finally met his match. Grant’s Overland Campaign pushed Lee’s troops back, with nowhere to go and no reinforcements to be had, whilst Grant’s generals were keeping Confederate forces busy elsewhere. On 9 April 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
After the war, Lee was not arrested, but did temporarily lose his right to vote. He supported President Andrew Johnson’s efforts to continue Lincoln’s plans for reconciliation with the South and opposed the Radical Republicans. He supported civil rights, free public schools for African-Americans, and became the icon of reconciliation between the North and South.
Lee had hoped to retire to a farm after the war, but was too high-profile a figure to be left in peace. He was appointed president of the Washington and Lee College in Lexington, Virginia (the Lee was added later in his honour), and served in the position until his death.
Lee suffered a stroke on 28 September 1870. Two weeks later, on 12 October, he died of pneumonia, aged sixty-three.
Dorothea Lynde Dix (4 April 1802–17 July 1887)
Known primarily as an activist for the indigent insane, Dix spent much of her life working on behalf of mental institutions and their inmates. During the American Civil War, she served as the superintendent of army nurses.
Dix established guidelines for nursing candidates and stipulated that they must be between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, and plain looking. She required her nurses to wear drab black or brown dresses with no jewellery or cosmetics. Dix was of the opinion that younger, more attractive women would be vulnerable to exploitation by the patients and doctors.
Dorothea Lynde Dix, by Samuel Broadbent (The Boston Athenaeum)
Constantly at odds with army doctors over control of medical facilities and nursing staff, she also had to deal with medics who were opposed to female nurses. The War Department issued an order giving Dix and the surgeon general shared responsibility for the hiring and firing of nurses, but put control of the assignment of employees in the hands of the doctors.
This left Dix as little more than a figurehead and she resigned in August 1865. She later referred to the episode as a failure.
She was known for treating Union and Confederate patients equally, which did not sit well with the Radical Republicans. When General Robert E. Lee retreated from Gettysburg, more than 5,000 Confederate wounded were left behind. It was Dix’s nurses who looked after the men.
After the war, Dix resumed her campaign to help prisoners, the disabled and the mentally ill. But in later years, her health began to fail. In 1881, she moved into the New Jersey State Hospital at Morris Plaines where the state had provided her with private rooms. She remained there as an invalid until her death on 17 July 1887, at the age of eighty-five.
Clara Harlowe Barton (25 December 1821–12 April 1912)
Known as the founder of the American Red Cross, Barton was a pioneer teacher, nurse and humanitarian. She began nursing at the age of eleven when her brother, David, was injured in a fall. Clara tended to him for three years, learning to administer his medications and the art of leeching.
Barton began caring for civil war patients from its outset. The US Senate chamber in Washington DC had become a makeshift hospital where she tended soldiers from Massachusetts. It was after the First Battle of Bull Run that she established an agency for acquiring and distributing medical supplies to the wounded. In 1862, she finally received permission to travel in ambulances to the battlefields where she was to witness some of the bloodiest scenes of the war.
Clara Barton, by Mathew Brady
In 1865, Lincoln appointed Barton to search for missing Union soldiers. It was a former inmate of Fort Sumter in Andersonville, Dorence Atwater, who made it possible to find the remains of so many Union soldiers who died at Andersonville. Fearing that families of the dead would never be notified, Atwater had copied a list of their names that he managed to conceal from the officials at the notorious prison. He still had it when he was released. The ‘Atwater List’ provided the names of 13,000 soldiers and Atwater and Barton travelled to Andersonville to mark the graves of the dead. The two became known as the ‘Angels of Andersonville’.
After the war, Barton travelled extensively, giving lectures about her experiences. She supported women’s suffrage and was active on behalf of civil rights for African-Americans. On a visit to Geneva, Switzerland, she encountered the Red Cross and Henry Durant’s book, A Memory of Solferino, which encouraged neutral voluntary relief efforts.
Barton realized that such an organization was needed in the US. The American branch of the Red Cross was founded on 21 May 1881 in Dansville, New York.
Barton continued to travel the world, encouraging formation of Red Cross operations and tending to wounded soldiers, refugees, and victims of catastrophe. Her last relief effort as president of the American Red Cross was the Galveston, Texas hurricane of September 1900.
In 1904, at the age of eighty-five and after seventy-two years of nursing, Barton finally resigned. Seven years later, on 12 April 1912, she died in Glen Echo, Maryland, at the age of ninety.
Mathew Brady (18 May 1822–15 January 1896)
Brady might well be considered the first photojournalist and has been called the ‘father of photojournalism’ for his role in documenting the American Civil War. Because of the extensive work by Brady and his associates, we know much more about the American Civil War and the latter half of the nineteenth century than we would have otherwise.
As a young man, Brady studied under daguerreotypist Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the Morse code. By 1844, Brady was already working from his own studio in New York. A year later, he began exhibiting portraits of famous Americans. In 1849, he opened a studio in Washington DC, where he met and married his sweetheart, Juliet Handy, in 1851.
Mathew Brady
Brady’s work began with daguerreotypes, but in the 1850s he started working with ambrotypes (images created on sheets of glass), and later with albumen (prints that could be reproduced on paper). It was the albumen prints that were most common among his civil war work.
It was during the war that Brady developed his travelling darkroom so that he could take his studio into the field. He employed more than twenty men, including Scottish photographer Alexander Gardner and fellow American Timothy H. O’Sullivan, to go out to the battlefields, each with a darkroom on wheels. Many of the photos he and his men took were graphic visions of the aftermath of battle. For many Americans, Brady’s exhibitions of such photos gave them their first look at the realities of war.
Brady invested more than $100,000 of his own money and created some 10,000 plates of the war in anticipation of being reimbursed by the government. But the government refused and he was forced into bankruptcy. Congress finally granted him $25,000 in 1875, but Brady was still heavily in debt. Depressed, he lost his eyesight and his wife, who died in 1887. Following a streetcar accident, he died a pauper in Presbyterian Hospital in New York on 15 January 1896.
Hiram Ulysses Grant (27 April 1822–23 July 1885)
Hiram Ulysses Grant earned the name Ulysses S. Grant when it was incorrectly used for his nomination into the United States Military Academy at West Point. He adopted it and was known to classmates as ‘Uncle Sam’. Grant graduated from West Point in 1843 and later joined the ranks of West Point graduates who fought during the American Civil War.
Hiram Ulysses Grant, by Mathew Brady
But Grant’s claim to military distinction did not come as quickly or as easily as it did for many of his colleagues. He graduated in the lower percentile of his class and was assigned to quartermaster duty in spite of his obvious skill as a cavalryman. His duties carried him across the growing United States, at times requiring him to leave behind his wife, Julia Boggs Dent, whom he married in 1848.
Grant was promoted to captain in 1854, but later that year, in July, he resigned without explanation after a confrontation with a superior officer.
Grant’s post-military life can only be described as a failure. He was unsuccessful at every attempt at business or employment, including work at the family leather shop in Galena, Illinois.
When the American Civil War broke out, Grant raised a volunteer company and accepted an appointment to train military troops. He was later promoted to colonel and given command of the District of Cairo in Illinois. He served primarily in the western theatre until the Vicksburg Campaign.
In 1862, the Union realized the importance of taking control of the Mississippi River. Admiral David Farragut, the Union’s rising star, had managed to defeat every obstacle from the Gulf of Mexico to Memphis, but he had failed to take Vicksburg. But where Farragut had been routed, Grant succeeded and he put the city under a siege that lasted until 4 July 1863. With the surrender of Vicksburg, the Union gained complete control of the Mississippi River.
The day before the surrender, Confederacy leader Robert E. Lee had been defeated in the bloodiest conflict of the war at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Lincoln recognized Grant as the general he had been searching for, the man who could end the war. Grant planned the Overland Campaign that led to victory for the North and the fall of the Confederacy. While Grant pushed Lee back toward Petersburg, Philip Sheridan ravaged the Shenandoah Valley, and William T. Sherman pushed across Georgia with the help of George Thomas and his crew of engineers. After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on 9 April 1865, his fellow Confederate generals surrendered one by one.
After the war, Grant was named General of the Army of the United States. He dealt with the invasion of Mexico by the French and the attempt by the Fenian Brotherhood to invade and hold Canada hostage in return for Irish independence. He deployed troops to the South to enforce the rights of loyal white citizens as well as freed slaves. He divided the South into five military districts, where occupying troops enforced civil rights until the Compromise of 1877.
In 1868, the Radical Republicans in Congress nominated Grant for president. He won and served two terms as the eighteenth president of the United States. Grant made advances in both civil and human rights during his presidency. He dealt with the rise of organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts and the White League who interfered with the rights of African-Americans.
It was Grant who signed the first civil rights bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which mandated equal rights in public accommodation and jury selection.
In spite of his advances in civil rights, Grant’s administration suffered from no less than eleven scandals and corruption incidents. After leaving office, he travelled the world. But the travel exhausted his savings and so he invested in a banking partnership, only to be swindled by his partner who fled, leaving Grant to pay debts and facing bankruptcy.
Around the same time, Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer. His pension had been forfeited when he became president, leaving him destitute. A series of literary works salvaged his family finances and Congress reinstated his retirement pay. He died only days after completing Memories, his memoir. It sold 300,000 copies and is regarded as one of the most outstanding works of its kind.
Grant died at the age of sixty-three on 23 July 1885 in Mount McGregor, New York. His body lies in Grant’s Tomb in New York City, the largest tomb in North America.
Winfield Scott (13 June 1786–29 May 1866)
Even though Winfield Scott’s direct involvement in the American Civil War was brief, it was his strategy for bringing it to an end that turned the tide in favour of the Union.
Born in Virginia, Scott became a soldier and fought in the War of 1812, the Seminole War, the Black Hawk War and the Mexican-American War. He was promoted to brevet brigadier general in 1814 and full brigadier general later that same year. His career in the military spanned fifty-three years in total.
Winfield Scott c.1861
Library of Congress
It was Scott who was given the responsibility of removing the Cherokee from the Trans-Mississippi region in 1838. Scott’s troops spent months rooting out every Cherokee they could find in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. They were held in appalling conditions, awaiting removal. More than 4,000 died in confinement before they began the march west in what became known as the Trail of Tears.
And yet, Scott is said to have insisted that his soldiers treat the Cherokee humanely. Women, children, the elderly and anyone with physical problems that made travel difficult were given assistance.
Scott ran for president in 1852 but, known for his anti-slavery sentiments, was undermined by the South.
When the American Civil War began, Scott was commander-in-chief of the Union army. But Scott was too old and poor of health for field duty, suffering from gout and rheumatism. He weighed more than 300 pounds and was unable to mount a horse.
An ambitious young officer named George B. McClellan and his supporters forced Scott to retire in 1861. Scott had served under fourteen presidential administrations, from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln. He survived to see the end of the war and the Union’s defeat of the Confederacy, using a plan very similar to one Scott had proposed. What became known as the ‘Anaconda Plan’, used by Grant, commander-in-chief at the end of the war, it involved taking military occupation of key locations, giving the Union control of the territory. It would wrap their forces around the country like an anaconda before moving on Atlanta. The strategy was implemented by Grant, but it had been Scott’s brainchild, and it won the war for the North.