Disunion! Civil War is Proclaimed! (3 Viewers)

[jazzeum]

One of the most embarassing moments for Horace Greeley, the powerful publisher of the New York Tribune, was the by-product of his impatient calls for the out-and-out conquest of the South.



While Greeley was ill in the spring of 1861, his Washington correspondent, Fitz Henry Warren, filed a report, bellowing "On to Richmond!"

This was followed a month later by the managing editor, Charles Dana, placing on the masthead the words, among others, "Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!"

When the Union troops were beaten at Bull Run, Greeley was heavily criticized by the public and his competition. Greeley tried to decline responsibility saying the words were his but none would have it.

Publicly, Greeley stood by his paper but privately he was falling apart and on the seventh night of his failure to sleep, he wrote Lincoln in a bleak mood, urging to him seek peace if defeat was on the horizon. Lincoln didn't reply.

Greeley eventually recovered and as the author notes "on more than one occasion as the conflict wore on, Greeley would swing pendulously form wild optimism to perfect anguish. That Lincoln was able to continue on amidst stunning reversals is precisely why he would eventually be considered a great man."

The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

How did the Stars and Bars become the flag of the Confederacy?

During the Battle of Bull Run, the Southern commander, General G.T. Bureaugard, could not tell if a certain unit entering the field was Southern or Federal as he couldn't recognize their flag. As he contemplated withdrawing and thereby handing victory to the Union, at the last moment Bureaugard realized it was a Southern flag, the Confederacy's First National Flag, which had been adopted by the Committee on the Flag and Seal a few months earlier.


First National Flag

The Committee had considered a pattern based on a traditional or upright St. George's Cross. However, a Southern Jew objected to this design and the design was changed to the St. Andrew's Cross, the Stars and Bars. However, the Committee never approved this design, instead preferring the First National Flag.

Bureaugard determined after the battle that a distinctive flag was needed and mentioned this to William Porcher Miles, a Congressman from South Carolina who was on his staff and who happened to be the Chairman of the Committee. Miles brought this before the Committee, which refused to change their mind.

Bureaugard wrote to General Joseph Johnston, who agreed that a distinctive battle flag was needed. The new flag, the Stars and Bars was then introduced into the Virginia Army and then to the Western Theater, when Bureaugard was transferred there.


St. Andrew's Cross or Stars and Bars

Ironically, the Stars and Bars was never an official flag but is the flag by which the Confederacy is known. It became more popular than the First National Flag and was eventually incorporated into the Second National Flag.


Second National Flag

The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

Across from Washington, D.C. sits Robert E. Lee's mansion, then known as Arlington House and today as the Curtis-Lee Mansion. The land around the mansion was occupied in May 1861 and the mansion itself was occupied soon thereafter.


The front of the Custis-Lee Mansion in Arlington, Va.

Lee was resigned to the loss of his home. He wrote to one of his daughters that he would have preferred to have it wiped away from the earth rather than to have been degraded.

The idea for Arlington National Cemetery, which surrounds the mansion, came from Montgomery Meigs after Gettysburg when Meigs was inspired to suggest to President Lincoln that the Lee plantation be transformed into a place of remembrance, a field of honor.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

By the time the Civil War started, observations balloons had been used in war before, as far back as the 1780s. Ballooning caught on in the US in the 1850s and by the beginning of the war there were many "aeronauts" such as Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe, who wanted to place their crafts at the disposal of the U.S. Army.

In June 1861, following a trip from Cincinnati to South Carolina in April 1861 that landed him plumb in the middle of Confederate forces (who eventally let him go), Lowe managed to convince Lincoln that an aeronautic corps was feasible and Lincoln authorized the creation of a Balloon Corps.


Lowe in his balloon Intrepid, preparing to observe the Battle of Fair Oaks, Va. In 1862

Although the Corps. had many contributions, such as Lowe's signalling Union troops of the location of Confederate troops in September 1861, it was not entirely popular with Army officers, who tended to see at useless. It was an idea whose time had not come yet. Eventually it would come under the command of an officer who had no use for Lowe or his ideas and he slashed its budget, leading Lowe to eventually quit and the Balloon Corps. to end.

The article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

August 3, 1861 - Harpers Weekly publishes the account of William Tillman, a 27-year old African-American sailor born a free man in Delaware. Tillman had been on the crew of the Yankee merchantman the S. J. Waring. On July 6 the 300-ton schooner had left New York bound for Montevideo, Uruguay, but three days into its voyage, the ship was captured by a Confederate privateer, the Jefferson Davis.


The S.J. Waring

Harpers detailed how Tillman was determined not to be put into slavery and his liberation of the S.J. Waring from Southern hands. Tillman's actions struck a responsive chord among the Northern population.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

According to some, the 37th Congress, which ran from 1861 to 1863, was a Congress of little note. However, as the author of this piece notes, "the new Congress was able to pass laws of incredible breadth and significance for both the immediate stability and future growth of the United States. Congress’s work in these early years of the Civil War helped lay the track not simply for the Union’s victory, but the groundwork for the nation’s educational, socio-economic and physical expansion."


Capitol Dome Under Construction, 1861

Among the acts passed were the following:

Revenue Acts of 1861 and 1862 - Created the first Federal income tax, to help fund the war effort.
Ended slavery in the District of Columbia (1862).
Creation of the Department of Agriculture, which led to the Homestead Act
Pacific Railway Act of 1862 - Began the construction of the first transcontinental railroad.
Morrill Land Grant Act - set aside over 15 million acres for the founding of agricultural and mechanics schools.
False Claims Act (also known as "Lincoln's Law") - combat abuses by federal contractors, which is still in use today.

These laws were passed by a Republican Congress, which had won huge majorities in each chamber in 1860 (not to mention that many Democrats had resigned from the Congress and joined the Confederacy). Many Republicans before the formation of the party in the 1850s had been Whigs, who believed in a program of economic progress, and some of the laws enacted was a demonstration of the ideas that the now defunct Whig Party believed in.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

In late July or early 1861, a Manhattan businessman wearing a silk hat, frock hat and luxuriant side whiskers picked up a gun in Weehawken, NJ and shot Jefferson Davis.

This was Hiram Berdan, who had just appointed Colonel of the First US Sharpshooters and was recruiting men for his new regiments, and he wasn't really shooting Jeff Davis, but an effigy of him.


Berdan’s rifle and the “Jeff Davis” target, in Harper’s Weekly


Colonel Hiram Berdan

Although some would salute Berdan for what he and his men did, others would not and the rebels would later refer to him as a "snake in the grass."

The full article can be accessed here/URL].

 

[jazzeum]

What is a birds eye view?

In late July 1861, lithographer John Bachmann published a visual picture of Virginia, offering Northerners a different way to follow the ongoing conflict. What set this one apart was perspective. Looking westward with the Chesapeake Bay in the foreground, it offered a bird’s eye view, a novel look at the unfolding conflict. His “wide angle lens” approach enabled viewers to follow not just the actual location of the battles, but the terrain of the conflict and a larger sense of the geography of the eastern theater.


Bachmann's bird eye view of Virginia in 1861

Bachmann’s birds’ eye views enabled some sense of the actual landscape of the war. He took care to issue these maps as contiguous documents: each was issued and sold separately, but designed to be laid together to create a composite view of the entire Confederacy. Together, these three offer a view, however contorted, of the contours of the coastal theater of war, a particularly valuable way to see the progress and military relevance of the blockade.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

August 10, 1861. The Battle of Wilson's Creek, Missouri. The two armies — 12,000 Confederates against 5,400 Federals — fought in the fields and on the oak hills bordering a meandering stream called Wilson’s Creek, producing extremely high casualties. The Union force lost 24 percent of its command in the battle, while Confederate losses totaled 12 percent.

The battle was a victory for the Confederate forces and the head of the Union Army, Gen. Nathaniel Lyons is killed. However, the victory was not decisive enough to tip the balance of power in the state. In fact, despite having achieved a tactical victory, the Confederates did not pursue their advantage but instead withdrew from Missouri, traveling to Arkansas, where their defeat at Pea Ridge the next year ensured that Missouri remained in the Union.



The full article can be accessed here here.

 

[jazzeum]

August 14, 1861. James A. Garfield, a former carpenter, canal boat driver, janitor, schoolteacher, farm laborer, preacher, college professor, college president (of Hiram College), lawyer and state senator (and future President), travels to Columbus, Ohio to accept a commission as a Lieutenant Colonel in the 42nd Ohio Infantry.

His regiment would play a key role in securing Kentucky for the Union. He later commanded troops at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamagua and rose to the rank of Major General.



The full article by Adam Goodheart can be accessed here.

Note: This article is excerpted from the author's more extensive portrait of Garfield in his recent book 1861: The Civil War Awakening.

 

[jazzeum]

Squeezing the South was the goal of the Anaconda Plan - the blockade of Southern ports and waterways, from South Texas to the Chesapeake.


The blockde of Charleston, South Carolina

By August 1861, the blockade was almost complete and, although initially dismissed by both the North and the South, it began to have an impact on the Southern economy. Most of what the South grew were cash crops (i.e., cotton and tobacco), not foodstuffs, which it imported from overseas and the North, and the blockade reduced food imports into the South. Shortages became the order of the day.

Other factors though exacerbated the blockade's effect, e.g. decrease in food production caused by the loss of able bodied men who were not soldiers; deliberate destruction of agricultural production by Northern forces; and reduced production caused by the flight of slaves.

This highly interesting article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

A portrait of John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, who had run for President in 1860 as a Southern Democrat, and his struggle in 1861 as Senator to represent the South.


A political cartoon showing the four presidential candidates in the 1860 election tearing apart a map of the United States. Breckinridge is in the center, pulling at the South.

In the Congressional session called by Lincoln in July 1861, Breckinridge, who had served as Vice President under Buchannan and was now Senator, challenged Lincoln and the Republicans as best he could. However, it wasn't long before his loyalties started to move from the Union to the Confederacy.

At the end of the Senatorial session he returned home to Lexington, Kentucky as both sides invaded Kentucky and Kentucky renounced her neutrality and sided with the Union. Breckinridge became a marked man and fled south where he joined the Confederate Army, becoming brigadier general. He led the Southern forces at the Battle of New Market in 1864.


Breckinridge in his Confederate brigadier general’s uniform

As the author of the piece notes,

It was, in the end, a role he chose willingly. In a manifesto published in October 1861, Breckinridge explained that Lincoln’s despotism had forced him to abandon the Union: “I exchange with proud satisfaction a term of six years in the United States Senate for the musket of a soldier.”

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

In August 1861, Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley arrived in San Antonio to carry out a plan conceived by President Jefferson Davis: with 2,500 men, he would cross the desert, capture the New Mexico and Arizona territories, San Diego, the California gold fields and San Francisco. If their plan succeeded, the Confederacy would become a Pacific power overnight and inflict a grievous wound on the Union.


Brig. General Henry Hopkins Sibley

His plan would come to nought: nearly a third of the men would die in New Mexico as his force would be defeated near Fort Union, New Mexico and then retreat back to Texas. Sibley would be stripped of command.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

A National Anthem A-wanting

In 1861 in the North music was the theme of the day. It seemed that everyone was singing songs such as "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "Hail Columbia," or "The Star Spangled Banner."

However, there was no national anthem and few could agree on what should be national anthem of the United States. So, a group of Manhattan powerbrokers, calling themselves the National Hymn Committee, decided to find one. From mid May 1861 to August 1861, it held a contest to find "a national hymn so popular and patriotic song appealing to the national heart." The winner would recieve $500.



They received hundreds of entrants and sifted through them all, making quick work of many of them. Participants included the well educated and barely literate, the provincial and the worldly, ministers and musiances and the future author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe, which would become very popular.

In the end, the Committee couldn't find one suitable to be called a National Hymn. George Templeton Strong, the famed diarist and a member of the Committee said most were rubbish.

It wouldn't be until 1931 that the Star Spangled Banner would be chosen as the National Anthem.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

August 29, 1861. The Union forces finally secure one of its first victories as forces led by General Benjamin Butler and Flag Officer (later Commander) Silas Stringham capture Forts Clark and Hatteras, located at Hatteras Inlet in North Carolina. Although the battle was small, it dealt a significant blow to blockade runners in the area and tightened the Union's blockade.


Bombardment of Forts Clark and Hatteras


Commander Silas Stringham

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[debrito]

Very nice Brad, excellent photographs.

Ciau

 

[jazzeum]

Very nice Brad, excellent photographs.

Ciau

Thanks Rod. Glad you're enjoying it.

 

[jazzeum]

Emancipation Prelude?

August 30, 1861. General John Fremont, in a declaration that probably said more about politics in Missouri than nationally, issued a proclamation of martial law which, among other things, declared the slaves of all persons who take up arms against the United States, free.

Lincoln forced Fremont to rescind that part of his proclamation and ultimately Fremont was replaced. In the process, Fremont's wife, Jessie, the daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, would visit the White House and have words with the President.

One of Lincoln's concerns was ensuring that sympathizers with slavery in Union states, such as the border states, be reassured so as to side with the Union. Fremont's declaration would "alarm our Southern Union friends, and then turn them against us -- perhaps ruin our rather fair prospects for Kentucky."

In Lincoln's eyes (and a harbinger of things to come), nothing about Fremont's act was due to military law or necessity (which might have made it excusable). It was a "purely political act...It assumes the general may do anything he pleases -- confiscate the lands and free the slaves of loyal people, as well as of disloyal ones...Can it be pretended that it is no longer the government of the U.S. -- any government of Constitution and laws, -- wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?"

Fremont's proclamation had already led to a company of Union volunteers disbanding. Lincoln said "I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as the lose the whole game."

However, one year later he would issue a declaration similar to Fremont's. However, by then Lincoln argued military necessity justified the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The full article may be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

Baltimore's Unlikely Confederates

As this article makes clear, Baltimore produced 5,000 volunteers for the Confederacy, men who were unlikely to have few ties to slavery or the traditional rural way of life that the the Confederates were claiming to defend. Some shared the hope that secession would rid them of influences brought on by the Know Nothing Party.

In the 1850s, these men had been concerned about working-class militancy and the anti-nativist tendencies of the Know Nothings. Others had worried that the Know Nothings were the precursors of Republicanism (and many Know Nothings did eventually gravitate to the Republican Party).

The author of the piece, Frank Towers, a Professor of History at the University of Calgary (who has written a book entitled "The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War"), concludes that these concerns influenced these men to side with the secessionists.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

Southern Diplomacy

August 1861. Special Agent for the Confederacy Jose Quintero negotiates with Santiago Vidadurri, Governor of the Mexican border states of Nuevo Leon and Coahuilla, who promised border security, the supply of vital war material and an outlet for Southern cotton, and annexation of his territories to the South.


José Quintero, ca. 1880


Gov. Santiago Vidaurri

Jefferson Davis, however, rejects the offer. Among the reasons were that union with Nuevo Leon and Coahuilla would put northern Mexico’s ports within jurisdiction of the Union blockade, chocking a vital outlet for Southern exports. Additionally, annexation would draw the rest of Mexico into war against the South.

The full article can be accessed here.