Disunion! Civil War is Proclaimed! (3 Viewers)

[jazzeum]

April 19 - 26, 1861. A wrap up of the week that was: the loss for the Union of Fort Sumter, the arsenal at Harpers Ferry and the Gosport Naval Yard in Norfolk (a story of Union incompetence). Lincoln orders the Navy to blockade the Confederate coastline.


Burning of vessels at the Gosport Navy Yard on April 20

The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

April 25, 1861. The Seventh New York, a regiment of volunteer Northern soldiers, whose membership included men from New York City's elite (including Private Alfred Cutler Barnes) arrive in Washington, and march down Pennyslvania Avenue, with President Lincoln looking down from the White House.


Private Barnes, circa 1860-1861

The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

April 25, 1861. The Seventh New York arrives in Washington. Among their number, besides Private Barnes (see above), is one Private Robert Gould Shaw, of later 54th Massachusetts fame. Shaw wrote many letters describing the journey from New York to Washington, D.C. to save Washington.


Seventh New York on the way to Washington

The article containing many of Shaw's moving letters can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

April 27, 1861. Carl Schurz, the new Minister to Spain, comes to the White House to talk to the President about forming a German Cavalry Regiment. President Lincoln gives Mr. Schurz, a German expatriate, three months leave from his diplomatic duty to do so, according to the entry in the diary of John Hay, one of the President's secretaries.



The article, which can be accessed, here, is a fascinating look at one of our most famous German-Americans, a survivor of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe.

 

[jazzeum]

April 1861. Dorothea Dix arrives in Washington and volunteered to organize a corps of women nurses and she was authorized by the Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, to organize and equip hospitals and appoint nurses.

Although her rise was fast (she seemed to be everywhere in the early months of the War), her fall was even faster and she was compared to George McClellan; Clara Barton is far better known today.



The article can be accessed here.

 

[Rob]

Brad I want to thank you for taking the trouble to post these, theletters in the article are just fascinating

Rob



QUOTE=jazzeum;388118]April 25, 1861. The Seventh New York arrives in Washington. Among their number, besides Private Barnes (see above), is one Private Robert Gould Shaw, of later 54th Massachusetts fame. Shaw wrote many letters describing the journey from New York to Washington, D.C. to save Washington.

View attachment 67883
Seventh New York on the way to Washington

The article containing many of Shaw's moving letters can be accessed here.[/QUOTE]

 

[jazzeum]

Brad I want to thank you for taking the trouble to post these, theletters in the article are just fascinating

Rob

Rob, my pleasure.

 

[jazzeum]

April 27 - May 4, 1861. A wrapup of the week that was: Virginia joins the Confederacy, enticed by the promise of moving the capital from Montgomery, Alabama to Richmond Virginia.

Maryland, on the other hand, decides to stay in the Union. After moving the meeting of the legislature from Annapolis to Frederick, Governor Hicks established a tone of moderation, stating that he was against secession but also against union troops moving through the state. After that, in the end the assembly voted against secession, and proposed reconvening in six months to reexamine the issue.

The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

May 1, 1861. The men of the Sixth Massachusetts who had been killed two weeks ago in the streets of Baltimore come home to Boston to be buried. The silent crowds of Bostonians who watched the funeral procession of the first men who had been killed in the Civil War could not have failed to notice that these men of Boston died on the same day when 86 years earlier in 1775, the first Patriots had been killed at Lexington.


The Lexington of 1861 by Currier and Ives


This fact was noted by both the Confederacy and the Union. One Southern journalist noted that "It is the old Revolutionary fight over -- a fight between the people and a strong Government."

A very interesting article.

The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

In late May 1861, General George McClellan, commander of the Union Army's Department of Ohio, invaded the western portions of Virginia (now the State of West Virginia) and secured them for the Union.

However, according to Professor Susan Schulten in the latest edition of Disunion!, which can be accessed here, the soldiers weren't the only method used to obtain control over these western counties. The United States Coast Survey issued a groundbreaking map of Virginia, the first ever to display census statistics cartographically. The map shows which regions of the state favored slavery and which not.

The article shows these maps, now in the Library of Congres, interactively.

 

[jazzeum]

The two months following Lincoln’s inauguration found Frederick Douglass struggling to understand and bitterly demoralized by the president’s policies, but also exhilarated by the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter. He had no interest in the new president’s oratorical olive branches to the seceded South, which branches he despised. Douglass called the speech “little better than our worst fears,” and a “double-tongued document, capable of two constructions,” concealing rather than declaring a “definite policy.”

However, immediately following Fort Sumter, he acknolwedged that this event had wrought "a tremendous revolution in all things pertaining to the possible future of the colored people of the United States."



The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

In 1861, President Lincoln said “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”

This article focuses on how Kentucky symbolized the "heart" of the United States and why it was so important to both North and South.


1861 cartoon Kentucky Governor Beriah Mafoffin's policy of neutrality.

The article was written by Aaron Astor, a Professor of History in Tennessee, who has a book coming out Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War.

The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

As is well known, the Civil War pitted brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor. In the mountains of the Upper South this was quite evident as counties, towns and families split apart.

People in the mountainous areas of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina were generally pro-union but when war came, they sided with the Confederacy.

This article, which can be accessed here, gives many examples of divisions. For example, in East Tennessee, Representative Horace Maynard was warned not to come to rally unionists.


Representative Horace Maynard

 

[jazzeum]

An endemic problem during the Civil War was war-profiteering. The practice of over-pricing under-quality goods continued throughout the War. Many a New York City millionaire was made this way. These millionaires were known as the "Shoddy Aristocracy."

Typical was the uniforms that Brooks Brothers made for New York soldiers, among them the New York Volunteers. Many of the uniforms lacked buttons and button holes and soldiers who wore them were the butt of jokes from other outfits. Some uniforms, put together from a variety of materials, would fall apart when the rains came.


Sergeant from the New York Volunteers

The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

In the first part of May 1861, violence broke out in Missouri: there were skirmishes between Confederate sympathizers, led by Governor Clairborne Jackson, and federal troops, led by General Nathaniel Lyon. Ultimately, the Union forces took the state capital in June and Jackson declared a free republic in August. The Confederates regrouped in Southern Missouri while the Union forces vacated the state offices and appointed provisional replacements.

St. Louis, however, kept the peace and Confederate sympathizers started to learn to live with opposing forces. Union forces controlled St. Louis while the property rights of Confederate sympathizers were maintained.


Raising the Flag over Camp Jackson

This interesting article by Professor Adam Arenson of the University of Texas can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

Regarding the Civil War in Missouri, normally I don't recommend comments on articles but the comments on the Missouri article are very good, two by the author of the article and several from Missourians, some of whose relatives fought or participated in the conflict.

 

[jazzeum]

Was Randall Lee Gibson, the son of a Southern well to do planter, black or white and did it matter?

In February 1861, just weeks after Louisiana seceded from the Union, Gibson enlisted as a private in a state army regiment. The son of a wealthy sugar planter and valedictorian of Yale’s Class of 1853, Gibson had long supported secession. Conflict was inevitable, he believed, not because of states’ rights or the propriety or necessity of slavery. Rather, a war would be fought over the inexorable gulf between whites and blacks, or what he called “the most enlightened race” and “the most degraded of all the races of men.”

Although Southern society was premised on slavery, the line between black and white was not a fine one. Since the 17th century, people descended from African slaves had been assimilating into white communities. Indeed, the founder of the Gibson clan, Gideon Gibson, was a free man of color.

However, preserving slavery mattered far more than whether your blood was pure. As long as you were a productive members of society that is what mostly mattered.



The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

May 16, 1861. Lincoln had previously said that "Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president." Lincoln, not for the first time nor the last, goes to Matthew Brady's studio on Pennsylvania Avenue to have his photograph taken.

An artist named Arthur Lumley drew Lincoln in the act of being photographed (art imitating art?).

According to the author of the article, the Lincoln that speaks to us from these photographs is one without equivocation: a force of nature who looks like he could break an assailant in half.











This article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

George McClellan has gone down in history as insubordinate to President Lincoln and prone to do what he felt like doing but where did this attitude come from?



In a Legacy of Insurbordination by a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, which can be accessed here, the author makes the point that during the Mexican War of 1846, Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott had a habit of being insubordinate to their superior, President Polk, which, as it turned out, helped secure the American victory. McClellan, then a junior officer, observed the two generals "exercise largely independent judgment" to defeat the Mexicans, whose forces were larger than the Americans.'

This experience was not lost on McClellan who, when he assumed command in 1861, took the same attitude that his superiors had 15 years before.

 

[jazzeum]

May 1861. Texas had voted to secede from the Union. However, Union sentiment would linger; as many as one third of the State continued to support the Union. Some Unionists, as elsewhere, would fight for the Confederacy. Some would say nothing and some would volunteer to fight on the Union side and some would lose their lives to support the Union cause.



The article on how the war affected Texas can be accessed here.