Disunion! Civil War is Proclaimed! (1 Viewer)

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The Limits of Lincoln's Mercy

February 21, 1862. Nathaniel Gordon, a slave trader, becomes the only in American history to be executed for that crime.


The execution of Nathaniel Gordon

When Gordon was convicted, his lawyers only had one recourse open to him: an appeal to the President. During the Civil War, Lincoln was a man who would not countenance taking life if no good would be served. He gained the most notoriety in his actions in military cases. He was “unwilling for any boy under 18 to be shot,” and he had a tendency to pardon youths who had fallen asleep on guard duty or had deserted.

Some of his cabinet members felt that he had to be protected from his kinder instincts. His attorney general, Edward Bates said that he had but one failing, "I have sometimes told him he was unfit to be entrusted with the pardoning power. Why, if a man comes to him with a touching story his judgment is almost certain to be affected by it. Should the applicant be a woman — a wife, a mother or a sister — in 9 cases out of 10 her tears, if nothing else, are sure to prevail.”

However, he did believe that there are some cases where the law must be carried out and the Gordon case was such a case.

When Captain Gordon's family, along with the wife of a strong supporter of Lincoln's, visited the White House to plead for clemency, Lincoln refused to see them.

Why? Although he hated slavery, he did not feel he had the legal right to interfere with the question of slavery as it presently existed. However, he abhorred slave trading and in any event it was against the law. Said Lincoln:

I believe I am kindly enough in nature, and can be moved to pity and to pardon the perpetrator of almost the worst crime that the mind of man can conceive or the arm of man can execute; but any man, who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I never will pardon.​

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Mission to Mason Neck

Though there was little organized fighting along the Union defenses around Washington, they were continuously harassed by Southern skirmishers through the latter half of 1861 and into 1862. The situation was particularly troublesome in southern Fairfax County, Va., not far from Mount Vernon and Alexandria. Rebels repeatedly challenged the Union pickets and effectively blockaded the Potomac River, which enabled them to smuggle mail and other materials across the river from Maryland. The capital's vulnverability to the rebels was worsened by the absence of reliable maps.

The Union commander of the capital, General Samuel Heintzelman, had on his staff Captain William Heine, a Prussian topographical engineers, who had been the official artist on Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan. Heine came across the sketches and maps of Robert Knox Sneden, a private stationed near the capital with the 40th New York Volunteers. Heine was impressed by what he saw; desperate for mapmakers, he recruited Sneden on the spot.


Private Robert Knox Sneden, 40th New York Volunteers

Heintzelman instructed Heine and Snedden to focus their activities on the area in between Pohick Creek (about 10 miles southwest of Alexandria, the forward line of the Union Army) and the Occoquan River, about 5 miles farther south (held by the rebels). This was Mason Neck.

The mapmakers gathered intelligence on the region with help from a local Unionist and an escaped slave, augmented by aerial reconnaissance from balloonist Thaddeus Lowe (who noticed that the Confederates were building earthworks to the south). A raid was organized on Colchester with two goals in mind: to measure these earthworks that Lowe had spotted, and to capture the rebel smugglers.

The raid ultimately proved successful, which resulted in Sneden making several maps of the region. He made dozens of maps of Fairfax County, and more than 300 throughout the war.

The absence of reliable maps continued to have profound consequences for both sides. As one Confederate officer remarked, the Confederates knew no more about the topography of the area around Richmond than they did of Central Africa.

The article can be accessed here.

Note: the article has images of some of the maps made by Sneden that can't be reproduced here.

 

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The Greenback is Born

February 25, 1862. Lincoln signs into law a bill issuing $150 million in legal tender notes.

During the first two months of 1862, the U.S. Government's finances were in dire straits. Expenses were exceeding income: the country’s soldiers and sailors could no longer be paid, for example, and Government revenues, which came chiefly from the tariff, fell from an annual average of $60 million during the prewar years to $42 million once the war began. By the summer of 1861 Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the Treasury, needed $1 million a day to cover expenses; by the end of the year he needed twice that amount.

Secretary Chase proposed to borrow from bankers but the bankers either were not interested in lending money or if they lent, it was not enough. He proposed a system of national banks but that wouldn't take care of the immediate problem.

Congress, through a small group of Congressional Republicans, including representatives Elbridge Spaulding and Thaddeus Stevens and Senator John Sherman of Ohio, proposed printing $150 million of legal tender Treasury notes (or paper money), which bankers and soldiers alike would receive in payment for their services. These bills would be supported by extensive taxes, including an income tax. Once those initiatives were in place, Congress would implement Secretary Chase’s plan for a national banking system.


Congressman Elbridge G. Spaulding


Congressman Thaddeus Stevens


Senator John Sherman

The banks were opposed because they wanted the government to continue to pay interest on bonds in gold and silver, not paper. Although many were opposed, the banks had their way and Lincoln signed the bill into law.

The new bills were soon called "greenbacks" because of the color of their ink. More acts were soon to follow: in July 1862 the Income Tax Act became law, and in February 1863 Lincoln signed the National Banking Act.

The transformation of the economy of the United States was beginning to take place.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Our New Home Looks Inviting

During the Civil War, Union and Confederate quartermasters faced the challenge of housing tens of thousands of men in the fields and forests of the South. They issued A-frame tents, rectangles of canvas material raised up off the ground with poles often culled from nearby woodlands. Some soldiers received “Sibley” tents, which provided more interior space and headroom because of their conical shape. As the months passed and the temperatures fell, soldiers adapted.


A federal camp on a South Carolina beach.

Once their houses were built, soldiers turned to their interiors, building all manner of furniture for themselves. Many also demonstrated their talents in home décor. For example, On Christmas Eve, all of the men of Company F of the 3rd New Hampshire Volunteers, who had set up shop in Hilton Head, S.C., “went out gathering brush and boughs to fix up our quarters.” Photographer Alexander Gardner noted that “the forests are ransacked for the brightest foliage, branches of the pine, cedar, and holly are laboriously collected and the work of beautifying the quarters continue as long as material can be procured.”


The camp of the 3rd New Hampshire Infantry in Hilton Head, S.C.

Some soldiers never quite got used to the experience of building houses for themselves in the most unlikely of places. For others, the novelty wore off after they were ordered to build and then abandon two, then three, then four houses over the course of a winter.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[Rob]

Very interesting article Brad, thanks for posting. Its funny that even soldiers going off to War still want their tent to have the touch of home about it, must have been hard for some of those young men who no doubt had not been away from home before and now faced an uncertain future.

Rob

 

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No doubt Rob. The article notes that men such as the soldiers from F Company were far away from home, perhaps for the first time, and had landed in a world that was completely different, even if it was in the same country. The author notes that these were acts of domestication but also self-preservation.

 

[Rob]

No doubt Rob. The article notes that men such as the soldiers from F Company were far away from home, perhaps for the first time, and had landed in a world that was completely different, even if it was in the same country. The author notes that these were acts of domestication but also self-preservation.

Its funny Brad, and I don't quite know how to say it, but somehow the ACW and WW1 are very similar in the way that they are surrounded with emotion and great sadness, maybe its the huge number of casualties or that families and communities were devastated at a sweep, or that young men went off to die in great numbers or suffer terrible injury. I find both totally fascinating , thanks again for continuing these posts, I really enjoy them.

Rob

 

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A Fight to the Last Pike

February 20, 1862. Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia asks the State's blacksmiths and mechanics to make 10,000 "six foot staff with an 18-inch knife." Brown got the idea from fire-eater Edmund Ruffin who sent pikes that he acquired to the governors of each slave-holding state, affixing to the label of each "Sample of the favors designed for us by our NORTHERN BRETHREN."

Now, where had Ruffin gotten the pikes from? None other than John Brown who had ordered 950 of the pikes to be used in Bleeding Kansas but then changed his mind and used them in his ill-fated attack on Harpers Ferry.


One of John Brown’s pikes, on display at the Virginia Historical Society

Governor Brown intended to use them as a defensive measure "to arm every able-bodied person in the state of Georgia." As the South was holding its own on the Civil War battlefields, Deep South politicians were making plans to fight to the last man.

There were reasons to believe that day might not be far off, in fact. Brown’s embrace of the pike as a defensive weapon was a direct reaction to the days-old news from Fort Donelson, Tenn. That victory, which opened the way to the Tennessee heartland and guaranteed Kentucky stayed in the Union, seemed full of bad omens for the Confederacy.

Brown’s pikes emphasized the real military challenges the Confederacy faced. He recognized, as many other military minds have since argued, that a defensive strategy might have saved the Confederacy. But he also saw his pikes as the fitting last defense of a people of principle.

Although many pikes were made and had a certain novelty -- some were produced for state arsenals in Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia -- and had a certain fascination for the public (the periodical The Southern Watchman said "It is said the Yankees exhibit a natural aversion to cold steel — if so, they will scatter when they see these [pikes]”), they were never really used and are a curious relic of the Civil War.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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A Capitol Dilemma

March 5, 1862. Senator Solomon Foot introduces a Senate resolution calling for construction of the Capitol to be transferred from the War Department to the Interior Department so that construction could begin anew. The federal government had begun the project 12 years earlier, intending to add new House and Senate wings at either end of the original building, topped by a majestic cast-iron dome above the old central section.

Construction had ceased nine and a half months earlier because of the onset of the War. In May 1861, Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, the engineer in charge of the project, ordered construction suspended for the duration of the war. For the rest of the year, marble porticoes for the new Senate and House sat unfinished, and most of the new one-piece marble columns that were to girdle the new construction had not arrived. Terraces and steps still needed to be added in several locations.

By February 1862, the Capitol was a mess. It had been used as a barracks early in the War, when Washington was in peril of invasion. Loose pieces of cast-iron dome — $205,000 worth — lay on the grounds, stained and rusted. Inside, there was considerable water damage and mildew caused by seepage through cracks and crevices around the unfinished porticoes. Plaster was decaying in places and falling off the wall. Many stucco ornaments were already destroyed and others were heavily damaged. The Army had gobbled up most of the workforce.


Troops drilled incessantly on the Capitol grounds, producing a din that made it almost impossible for anyone to work inside

There was resistance to commencing the project from Meigs, not to mention the nation was preoccupied with the War.

However, by March 1862, Congress saw the construction of the Capitol as a symbol of the nation fighting to stay united.

On March 25, Senator Foot said

Sir, we are strong enough yet, thank God, to put down this rebellion and to put up this our Capitol at the same time. And when the rebellion shall have been suppressed — as suppressed it soon will be; when this war shall have been terminated … and when this union of ours shall have been restored … it will furnish a fitting and appropriate occasion to celebrate that welcome event.​

The joint resolution passed in both houses with fewer than 10 votes in opposition. Construction resumed in April.


Construction of the new Capitol resumed in 1862. The major task as the war dragged on was to finish the cast iron dome

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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The First Wired President

By 1861, the telegraph had been around for 17 years but governmental agencies weren't sure how to take advantage of it. When the Army wanted to send a telegram, for instance, it sent a clerk to stand in line at Washington’s central telegraph office, a public facility. There was no telegraph station at the White House, the War Department, the Navy Yard or any other vital government installation.


Soldiers Setting up the First Wired Telegraph

Lincoln had seen his first telegraph key only in 1857 and being fascinated with technology (he had a patent to his name) he grilled the operator. When he became President, amidst all his other challenges, Lincoln had to make sense of his country’s industrialization and harness the new technology to his leadership purposes – and to do it in the middle of a civil war. No leader in history had ever faced such a challenge of determining how to use such a revolutionary means of exercising responsibility.

When a telegraph office was opened next door to the White House, in the War Department the president had his online breakout, sending nine telegrams. That week he would send more than all his previous messages, combined. From May 24 forward, Lincoln and the telegraph were inseparable.


An Operator Working on the Telegraph

The new telegraph office became the first Situation Room. Several times a day the president would walk into the telegraph office, sit down at the desk of its manager and begin going through the copies of all telegrams received, whether addressed to him or not. During great battles the president would even sleep in the telegraph office.


A Signal Station

Lincoln used the telegraph to extend his voice and message. In Lincoln's hands, the telegraph became an instrument for making sure that his message would get through, distance and the bureaucracy notwithstanding.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Rashomon at Vicksburg shows how people remember the same event differently, the two people in question being General Grant and General Pemberton, for the South.

In post-war accounts, Pemberton stated that in surrender negotiations he outmaneuvered Grant in that his firm stand against unconditional surrender and resolve to continue the defense of Vicksburg forced Grant into a negotiated end to the battle.

Grant, on the other hand, in an 1884 letter to Century Magazine, asserted that that Pemberton was opposed to any sort of negotiated settlement, because as a Northerner leading a Confederate army he would be in surrender “an object of suspicion, and felt it.” He also asserts in his memoirs that Pemberton in particular wanted to avoid surrendering on July 4, and thus by holding out for better terms he defeated his own purposes.

In his concluding remarks, the author, Thom Bassett, notes that "this episode demonstrates that for both victor and vanquished, what one can say after the fight matters in some ways as much as the battle itself."

The full article can be accessed here, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/rashomon-at-vicksburg/

 

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In Lies, D@mned Lies and the Telegraph, Professor Yael Sternhell of Tel Aviv University, discusses the frustrations that the advent of the telegraph caused.

The telegraph brought the ability of newsmen to transmit news quickly but in the Civil War South it was more likely to disseminate falsehoods and sow confusion. Reporters who rushed to the wires following the conclusion of a battle sometimes sent personal impressions, speculations and rumors.

Although newsmen were aware of the telegraph's problems, when Gettysburga and Vicksburg rolled around, they had little choice but to use the telegraph to transmit the news and updates.

The author concludes that "The telegraph might have betrayed its users consistently by spurting fictions instead of facts, but faulty information was better than no information at all. Facing the torturous uncertainty of wartime, journalists and their readers were willing to settle for rumors, speculation and mistakes, since they simply could not stand living in the dark."

The full article can be accessed here, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/lies-****ed-lies-and-the-telegraph/

Incidentally, the author has written a very well received book, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South.