RCWR - The Civil War, con't. (Lesson)

The Union fort on a small island in Charleston Harbor was the site of the first shots of the Civil War. President Lincoln needed to resupply the troops stationed on the island and warned the Confederate militia in Charleston that he had to approach the island to resupply the men and the militia refused. Lincoln did anyway and the Confederate militia fired the first shots on Fort Sumter. The men surrendered and the war was on.

1st major battle of the Civil War. The Union Army under the leadership of General Irvin McDonnell marched from Washington, D. C. with the goal of taking the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia; but 25 miles into the march the troops were blocked by the Confederate Army led by General P.G. T. Beauregard. The Union Army thought victory was a given, but the Confederates held their own; and when Confederate reinforcements arrived in the afternoon, the Union Army retreated to D.C. The Confederate Army didn’t pursue them though; there were 4800 combined casualties. The Union knew that it would be a long war at this point.

By February 1862 the Union had victories in Kentucky and Tennessee. The Union Army moved South to capture the east-west railroad hub of Corinth, Mississippi. Confederate General Albert Johnston reinforced Corinth to defend it. Union Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Don Carlos Buell united and planned to attack Corinth at sunup on April 6, but General Johnston beat them to it in a surprise attack. The Union Army under Grant was surprised by the attack, but they were able to fight all day until Buell’s men showed up overnight on April 6-7. During this battle, General P.G. T. Beauregard was mortally wounded and the Southern army withdrew. (Beauregard was responsible for ordering the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter.) This battle had a total of 23,000 combined casualties.

The battle took place at Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in Tennessee and was one of the first major Union victories, led by then-Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant.

The Confederates initially repelled the attack by Union gunboats. The Confederates seemed to be close to a win, but they halted and retreated to the fort. This gave Grant time to figure out the Confederates’ weak point in the line and exploit it. Confederate Generals Gideon Pillow and John B. Floyd fled and left 13,000 soldiers to surrender to the Union Army. (Yes, the generals really abandoned their men.)

The Confederates asked the terms of surrender and Grant replied nothing but “unconditional and immediate surrender” which earned him the nickname “Unconditional Surrender.”

The victory at Fort Donelson and then Fort Henry nearby left the state of Tennessee open to Union invasion and helped make Grant a national hero.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee decided to move the war North and so he split the army and took supplies to Maryland and Pennsylvania to threaten Washington, D. C.

His plans were intercepted by the Union Army and they marched to confront Lee at Antietam Creek in northern Maryland.

Union General George McClellan, long known for his hesitancy to implement and execute military strategy, took a cautious approach and waited for 18 hours to move his troops. This delay gave the Southern Army time to send reinforcements. The battle was a draw with 23,000 men killed, but it also stopped Lee’s plans to invade the North (for the moment anyway).

Lincoln was ticked off about McClellan’s lack of movement, but he used the time to issue the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect January 1, 1863.

President Abraham Lincoln with General George B. McClellan at his headquarters at Antietam, October 3, 1862. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

This battle was one of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s biggest successes. He divided forces and sent General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson to outflank Union General Joseph Hooker’s forces. After several days of fighting the Union Army retreated. The Union Army suffered 17,000 casualties vs. Lee’s 13,000.

It was a victory for Lee and the Confederacy but at great cost. Jackson was one of the best generals in the Confederate Army and his loss was important. (He died four days after being hit by friendly fire during the battle.)

Vicksburg is located on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River between Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Whoever controls the river controls the situation---trade, military maneuvers, etc. The town sits on the bluff and was heavily defended by the Confederates with trenches, gun batteries, and troops under the command of Confederate General John C. Pemberton.

In May 1863, Union General Ulysses S. Grant led his army toward the west side of the Mississippi River across from Vicksburg and laid siege to the city. By mid-June, the Confederates were running low on supplies and Confederate General Pemberton surrendered on July 4, 1863.

The Battle of Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) marked the only time the Confederate Army invaded Northern territory during the war. It occurred concurrently with the end of the siege of Vicksburg, and together with Vicksburg, these two events marked a turning point in the war. (Plus, it guaranteed that the European nations didn’t recognize the Confederate States of America as a sovereign nation and withheld much needed financial support for the C.S.A.)

The Battle of Gettysburg was a setback for Confederate General Robert E. Lee and the C.S.A.

Earlier that year, President Lincoln had replaced General George McClellan because of his reluctance to implement and execute in a timely manner, but the new generals also lost badly at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and at Chancellorsville in early May 1863. With these Confederate victories, General Lee decided it was time to invade the North and take the war to the Union.

He led the Army of Northern Virginia north and new Union General George Meade shadowed Lee’s men to protect Philadelphia, Washington, D. C., and Baltimore.

The Confederate and Union armies converged at Gettysburg on the morning of July 1. The South had early success, but the men couldn’t oust the Northern troops from their land. Southern reinforcements arrived by the morning of the 2nd, but the additional troops didn’t help the South.

On July 3 the Confederate Army pushed one more time and Lee ordered what is now called Pickett’s Charge, an assault of 15,000 Confederate troops up Cemetery Ridge.

The charge broke through Union lines, but the Confederates couldn’t push through and ultimately retreated. The Union didn’t pursue Lee’s men as they retreated.

Union General Meade won the battle and stopped the invasion, but he was unable to destroy Lee’s army and end the war.

The Union Army lost 23,000 men and the Confederate Army lost 28,000 men.

President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the military cemetery in the fall of 1863.

Lincoln was not the featured speaker of the day. Orator Edward Everett spoke for nearly two hours and Lincoln spoke for 2 minutes, but Lincoln’s 272-word speech is recognized as one of the best, most important speeches in our history.

Download and read the Gettysburg Address here. Links to an external site.

After fighting at Chickamauga and Chattanooga, three Union army regiments converged and were led by General William Tecumseh Sherman toward Atlanta. A C.S.A. counterattack failed, and Sherman’s army laid siege to Atlanta (the railroad hub and industrial center for the South) for a month from July into August 1864. This battle was the most violent part of Sherman’s March to the Sea with 3700 Union casualties and 5500 Confederate casualties. The capture of Atlanta crippled the C.S.A.’s war effort and the victory provided President Lincoln’s re-election bid a much-needed boost in the 1864 campaign.

Atlanta was the site of warehouses that contained supplies for the Confederate Army as well as munitions factories and weapons caches. Atlanta stood between Sherman’s army and the Union’s most valued targets---the Gulf of Mexico on the west and Savannah and Charleston in the east.

Atlanta was a symbol of Confederate strength and was a source of pride; its loss to the Union made even the most loyal Confederates question whether or not they could prevail in the war.

After they lost Atlanta, the Confederate Army moved into Tennessee and Alabama to the west and attacked Union supply lines.

Sherman divided his men into two groups. Major General George Thomas took 60,000 men to meet Confederates in Nashville. Sherman took 62,000 men on a march to the sea to “smash things.”

The purpose of the 285-mile march to the sea was to scare the civilian population into abandoning the Confederate cause.

Union soldiers didn’t destroy towns in their path, but they stole livestock and food and burned the homes and barns of anyone who resisted.

General Sherman commented that the Confederates’ strength came from material and moral support of Southern white sympathizers rather than the army.

Sherman’s goal was the destruction of factories, farms, and railroads—things the Confederate troops needed. His theory was that, if the Union could destroy the infrastructure and supplies, the Confederacy would collapse.

Additionally, Sherman believed that his troops could make life so miserable for Southern civilians that their morale would be so low that they would demand an end to the war.

Sherman’s men divided into two groups about 30 miles apart for the march to Savannah.

The Confederate soldiers burned bridges and burned barns filled with supplies and provisions to prevent the Union soldiers from accessing them.

The Union soldiers also raided farms and plantations and stole and slaughtered livestock, took all the bread and potatoes they could carry, and burned the rest. These marauders were called “bummers;” and they needed supplies, but they also wanted to teach the Confederates a lesson.

Sherman’s men reached Savannah on December 21, 1864, and the 10,000 Confederate soldiers who had been defending the city had left it unsecured, leaving 25,000 bales of cotton and the city as a “Christmas present” for President Lincoln.

Sherman and his men soon left Savannah and headed for South Carolina with a “total war” plan on the state that they viewed as the reason for the war since South Carolina was the first state to secede. Sherman’s men decimated South Carolina as they made their way back to the North.

Credit: Telegram from General William T. Sherman to President Abraham Lincoln announcing the surrender of Savannah, Georgia, as a Christmas present to the President, 12/22/1864. National Archives Identifier: 301637. National Archives Record Group 107: Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, 1791 - 1948.

Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia is the site of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865. The actual surrender took place in the McLean House parlor near the Appomattox County Courthouse. With the surrender two questions were answered: 1. Could the United States survive a civil war? 2. Would the United States exist without slavery?

The surrender set in motion the surrender of other commanders around the country that had to be negotiated, leading to the end of the bloodiest conflict in American history. The other commanders had to surrender before President Andrew Johnson (President Lincoln had been assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D. C. and he died in a house across the street on the morning of April 15, so Vice President Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president) could declare the war over. Johnson’s formal declaration of the end of the war didn’t occur until August 20, 1866.

The Grant-Lee agreement signaled that the South had lost the war and the agreement served as a model for the remaining surrenders.

In a show of goodwill, General Grant ordered his men to allow the Confederate soldiers to leave the area peacefully to head home after the surrender. (Fighting continued for a while, but the large-scale fighting was over.)

The Anaconda Plan was a military strategy proposed by Union General Winfield Scott at the outbreak of the Civil War. The plan called for a blockade of the coastline of the Confederate States of America from the Atlantic coast to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The idea was to “constrict” the South using Union land and naval forces to starve the Southerners out and make them surrender.

Credit: J.B. Elliott. Scott’s Great Snake. Cincinnati: 1861. Printed color map. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress (025.00.00) [Digital ID# cw0011000]

The declaration issued by President Abraham Lincoln on September 17, 1862, to free the enslaved people in the South effective January 1, 1863. However, he freed only the people living in the Confederate states where he had no control, effectively making the proclamation symbolic only. He didn’t free the enslaved people in the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri because he knew he needed the troops there to win the war. Lincoln didn’t want to give the border states any reason to secede from the Confederate States of America. This proclamation signaled Lincoln’s intent to end slavery nationally though.

General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 on January 16, 1865, which confiscated a 245-mile (400,000 acres) swath of land from Charleston, South Carolina south to Jacksonville, Florida as federal property and divided it into 40-acre tracts to be distributed to the newly freedmen. It was the origin of the phrase “40 acres and a mule”--the belief that the emancipated enslaved people would be given the land of former plantation owners in the aftermath of the Civil War. This is also the basis of the modern-day debate over reparations.

The press made extensive use of the telegraph during the war; Lincoln used it to communicate in real-time with the generals in the field at night; news of Fort Sumter and Appomattox Courthouse (the first shots of the war and the surrender four years later) were communicated via telegraph; news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination spread via telegraph; 1861: the Union Army established the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps (USMTC) and a young man named Andrew Carnegie worked for the corps (Carnegie would become famous in the Gilded Age) 1862: the Union Army trained 1,200 telegraph operators and strung 4,000 miles of telegraph wire and sent 1,000,000+ messages to/from battlefields.

U.S. Army Balloon Corps used; just before the Civil War, Professor Thaddeus Love experimented with balloons in government service; President Abraham Lincoln was very interested in technology and had Love demonstrate the balloon on the White House lawn; the Balloon Corps accompanied the Army of the Potomac in the late spring/early summer 1862; observers relayed information to officers on the ground via telegraph—this was the first time aerial reconnaissance had been used in warfare, but the balloons were never used to their full potential.

Railroads had been spreading since the 1830s; their value to the military was obvious at the First Battle of Bull Run (the first battle of the war after Fort Sumter) when Confederate reinforcements arrived for support and led to a Confederate victory and the Union retreat; supplies, weapons, men could be transported hundreds of miles; destruction of railroads became a huge priority; transported Lincoln’s body back to Illinois after his assassination.

Railroad tracks in the North: 22,000 miles; in the South: 9,000 miles at the start of the war; the North had standard gauge tracks which meant that any train car could go anywhere; in the South each state had different gauge tracks, so not all train cars could ride on all tracks (a disadvantage); Union used thousands of soldiers to guard the train tracks to prevent a southern attack.

The process was too elaborate for candid photos—a complicated process that required two camera operators and lots of chemicals and equipment. Images from the Civil War aren’t action shots—they are portraits and landscapes; not until the 20th century were non-posed battlefield images possible. Mathew Brady is well-known as the “first” photographer close to the front.

C.S.A. soldiers tried to sink ironclads using a 40 foot-long tube that was 4 feet wide and could hold a crew of 8 men; in 1864, the Hunley (recovered off the coast of Charleston in 2000), sunk while the sailors tried to destroy the Union ironclad that blockaded Charleston, the Housatonic; the Hunley was sunk in the process.

Rifles created long before the Civil War; used in limited numbers by specialized troops in the Revolutionary War; at the beginning of the Civil War, both sides were mostly using muskets, but they were not accurate and didn’t work for long-range shots because the lead ball bounced in the barrel when fired.

Invented by Richard Jordan Gatling in 1861, and patented in 1862; essentially the first machine gun; used multiple barrels driven by a hand crank for rapid fire; never used on a large scale; required a lot of ammunition, and the Union saw it as wasteful; The U.S. Army formally adopted the weapon in 1866.

Newly designed bullet got widespread use; more efficient than musket balls; had a terrifying whistling sound as it flew through the air; struck its target with huge force and led to shattered bones and worse; these bullets were the main reason for the amputation of so many limbs in the Civil War.

Soldiers made explosives using an assortment of fuses and gunpowder, but there were advances in design and production during the war. The Union-issued Ketchum grenade was a projectile explosive thrown like a dart and it came in 1, 3, and 5 lb versions.

There were no military corps of ambulances at the outset of the war; they were driven by civilians who fled when the first shots were fired; if the civilians left the ambulance behind, soldiers stole it and fled to Washington, D. C. The wounded were left on the field for days at the beginning of the war. The ambulance corps was initially formed within the Army of the Potomac only, but thanks to the efforts of several army officials (ex. Dr. Jonathan Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac, and Surgeon-General William Hammond). After the Battle of Antietam in September 1862 things improved once the ambulance corps was formally established, allowing wounded soldiers to be transported to medical treatment faster and resulting in fewer deaths.

First used in the Civil War; easier to transport and store food long-term; downside: heavy and hard to open.