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Oliver Wendell

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"We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

By the summer of 1861 Wilber McLean had had enough.

Two great armies were converging on his farm.

In what would be the first major battle of the Civil War, Bull Run, or Manassas is a Confederates called it, would soon rage across the aging Virginian's farm. A Union shell going so far as to explode in the summer kitchen.

Now McLean moved his family away from Manassas, far south and west of Richmond, out of harms way he prayed, to a dusty little crossroads called Appomattox Courthouse.

And it was there, in his living room, three and half years later, that Lee surrendered to Grant.

Wilber McLean, could rightfully say, the war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor.

The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places.

From Val Verde, New Mexico and Telahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albens, Vermont and Fernandina on the Florida coast.

More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, two percent of the population, died in it.

American homes became headquarters. American churches and schoolhouses sheltered the dying, and huge forging armies swept across American farms, and burned American towns.

Americans slaughtered one other wholesale, here in America, in their own cornfields and peach orchards, along familiar roads and by waters with old American names.

In two days at Shiloh, on the banks of the Tennessee, more American men fell than in all previous American wars combined.

In Cold Harbor, 7000 Americans fell in 20 minutes.

Men who had never strayed 20 miles from their own front doors, now found themselves soldiers in great armies, fighting epic battles hundreds of miles from home.

They knew they were making history, and it was the greatest adventure of their lives.

The war made some rich, ruined others, and changed forever the lives of all who lived through it.

A lackluster clerk from Galena, Illinois, a failure at everything except marriage and war, who in three years would be head of the Union Army, and in seven, President of the United States.

An eccentric student of theology and military tactics, a hypochondriac, who in the battle would ride with one hand raised, to keep, he said, the blood balanced.

A college professor from Maine, who on a little hill in Pennsylvania, ordered an unlikely textbook maneuver, to save the Union Army and possibly the union itself.

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Two ordinary soldiers, one from Providence Rhode Island, the other from Columbia Tennessee, who each served four years, and together seemed to have been everywhere during the war, and lived to tell the tale.

The courtly, unknowable, aristocrat, who disapproved of secession and slavery, yet went on to defend them both at the head of one of the greatest armies of all time.

The runaway boy, who stole himself from slavery, recruited two regiments of black soldiers, and helped transform the Civil War into a struggle for the freedom of all Americans.

And then there was a rough man from Illinois, would rise to be the greatest president the country has ever seen.

Between 1961 in 1865, Americans made war on each other, and killed each other, in great numbers, if only to become the kind of country, that could no longer conceive how that was possible.

What began as a bitter dispute over union and states rights, ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America.

At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln said perhaps more than he knew. The war was about a new birth of freedom.

1938, 75th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, President Roosevelt spoke to the remaining few Civil War veterans: "Veterans of the Blue and the Gray, on behalf of the people of the United States, I accept this monument, in the spirit of brotherhood and peace."

Year after year the nation remembered.

In 1930, veterans of the Union Army marched in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Four years later in New York City.

They, and the surviving veterans of the Confederacy, were the last link with the terrible conflict that tore America apart from 1861 to 1865.

The last Civil War veteran would die in 1959, and no longer would there be living memories of long ago battles. Only history, and legends.

Any understanding of this nation, has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us.

The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are, and it opened us, to being what we became, good and bad things, and it is very necessary if you going to understand the American character in the 20th century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe in the mid-19th century.

It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

For me, a picture of the Civil War, as an historic phenomena, is not on the battlefield, its not about weapons, it's not about soldiers, except to the extent that weapons and soldiers, at the crucial moment, joined a discussion about something higher. About humanity, about human dignity, about human freedom.

"Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio River, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author, and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever, or die by suicide."

Abraham Lincoln - 1837

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In 1861 most of the nation's 31 million people live peaceably on farms and in small towns.

At Sharpsburg, Maryland a German pacifist sect, the Dunkards, made their home in a sea of wheat and corn.

In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, population 2400, young men studied Latin and mathematics at the small college there.

Steamboats, filled with cotton, came and went at Vicksburg, on the Mississippi.

In Washington, DC, Senator Jefferson Davis reviewed plans for remodeling the capital.

In Richmond, the 900 employees of the Treadager ironworks, turned out gun carriages and cannon for the US government.

At West Point on the Hudson, officers trained, and friendships were formed they thought would last a lifetime.

"In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky, her grand old woods, her fertile fields, her beautiful rivers, her mighty lakes and star crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, when I remember that all is cursed, with the infernal spirit of slaveholding and wrong. When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are born to the ocean disregarded and forgotten. That her most fertile fields

drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters. I am filled with unutterable loathing."

Frederick Douglass

No day ever dawns for the slave, a freed black man wrote. Nor is it looked for. For the slave, it is all night. All night, forever.

One white Mississippian was more blunt: " I'd rather be dead, he said, than be a niger on one of these big plantations."

A slave entered the world in a one room, dirt floored, shack. Drafty in winter, reeking in summer, slave cabins spread pneumonia, typhus, cholera, lockjaw, tuberculosis.

A child who survived to be sent to the fields at 12, was likely to have rotten teeth, worms, dysentariae, malaria. Fewer than four out of a hundred lived to be 60.

Work began at sunrise and continued as long as there was light. Fourteen hours sometimes, unless there was a full moon, when it went on still longer.

On the auction block, blacks were made to jump and dance to demonstrate their spriteliness, and stripped to show how little whipping they needed.

Buyers poked and prodded them, examined their feet, eyes and teeth, precisely, one ex-slave recalled, as a jockey examines a horse.

A slave could expect to be sold at least once in his lifetime, maybe two times, maybe more.

Since slave marriages had no legal status, preachers changed the wedding vows, to read until death or distance do you part.

"You know what I'd rather do? If I thought, that I'd ever be a slave again, I'd take a gun and end it all right away. Because your nothing but a dog. You're not a thing but a dog."

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Some slaves refused to work. Some ran away.

Still blacks struggled to hold their families together, created their own culture, under the worst of conditions, and yearned to be free.

"If there was a single event that caused the war, it was the establishment of the United States in independence from Great Britain with slavery still a part of its heritage."

"It was because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise. Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising, our true genius is that we compromise, our whole government is founded upon it, and it failed."

"It was never a moment in our history when slavery was not sleeping serpent. It lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional convention. Owing to the cotton gin it was more than half awake. Thereafter, slavery was on everyone's mind, though not always on his tongue."

John J. Chapman

By the time the nation was founded, slavery was dying in the north. There were doubts in the south too, but few could conceive of any alternative.

Thomas Jefferson of Virginia said, "maintaining slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears. You didn't like it, but you didn't dare let it go."

Then in 1793, a northerner, Eli Whitney, taught the south how to make slavery pay.

Whitney's engine or gin made it easier to separate cotton from its seed.

Where before it taken one slave 10 hours to produce a single pound of lint, the cotton gin could crank out 1000 pounds a day.

Production soared, and with it the demand for slaves.

By 1860, the last year of peace, one out of every seven Americans belonged to another American. Four million men, women and children were slaves.

In Boston, in 1831, claiming that which is not just is not law, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing a militant, antislavery newspaper, The Liberator. He called for complete and immediate abolition.

"I am in earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard."

He was heard, and his message was clear. Slavery was sin, and those who maintained it, criminals.

The abolition movement grew, inspired by passionate leaders. Harriet Tubman, called Moses by the slaves, who followed her north to freedom.

Wendell Phillips, named the golden trumpet of abolitionism for his oratory, and Frederick Douglass, the son of a slave and a white man.

"I appear this evening as a thief and robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body, from my master, and ran off with them."

Douglas was so eloquent that skeptics charged he could never have been a slave. In part to prove them wrong, he wrote an autobiography, purchased his freedom with $600 obtained from English admirers, and returned to the struggle.

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"The abolitionists would raise the Negroes to a social and political equality with the whites, and that being affected, we would soon see the present condition of the two races reversed. They and their northern allies would be the masters and we the slaves."

John C. Calhoun

More and more, southerners worried about the growing political, as well as economic power, of the north.

Northerners were increasingly hostile to slavery. Still, most Southerners refused to acknowledge even the possibility of changing their way of life.

"On the north bank of the Ohio, everything is activity, industry. Labor is honored. There are no slaves. Pass to the south bank, and the scene changes so suddenly that you think yourself on the other side of the world. The enterprising spirit is gone."

Alexis DeTouqueville

"We are separated because of incompatibility of temper. We are divorced, north from south, because we hated each other so."

Mary Chestnut

On the clear, moonlit night on November 7, 1837, a mob surrounded a warehouse at Alton, Illinois, intent on destroying an antislavery newspaper run by the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy.

When one of the mob moved to set the building on fire, Lovejoy armed with a pistol, came out to stop him.

The slavery men shot him dead, and dumped his printing press into the Mississippi.

The news stunned the nation. A white man had been killed over black slavery.

Protest meetings were held throughout the north.

One abolitionist wrote: "The thousands of our citizens, who lately believed that they had nothing to do with slavery, now begin to discover their error."

In Hudson, Ohio, a clergyman told a church gathering: "The question now before us is no longer can slaves be made free, but are we free, or are we slaves under mob law?"

In the back of the church, a strange gaunt man rose to his feet and raised his right hand.

"Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery."

John Brown

In 1846, a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois was elected to Congress.

He was born in Kentucky, the son of a farmer, who could barely sign his name.

He became a legislator at 24, a prosperous attorney, and after a turbulent courtship, the husband of Miss Mary Todd, the daughter of a slaveholding Kentucky, banker.

For Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence was to be taken literally.

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All men had the right to rise as far as talent would take them, just as he had.

He detested slavery, but he called for its restriction, not immediate abolition.

By mid-century the country was deeply divided.

Southerners fear the north might forbid slavery, northerners feared slavery might move west. As each new state was added to the union, it threatened to upset the delicate equilibrium of power.

"There are grave doubts the hugeness of the land, and whether one government can comprehend the whole."

Henry Adams

Now events accelerated.

In 1852 and Harriet Beecher Stowe published uncle Tom's cabin. Its portrayal of slavery's cruelty move readers as nothing else had.

Queen Victoria wept over it.

Within a year, more than a million and a half copies were in print, world wide.

In 1854 Congress allowed settlers in the Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide for themselves whether or not to permit slavery.

Kansas exploded.

Five thousand pro-slavery men invaded the territory.

Within three months, 200 men died in bleeding Kansas.

The killing would not stop for ten years.

In 1857 the Supreme Court refused to free a slave, Dred Scott, even though he lived for many years on free soil.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taunie said, "A black man had no rights a white man was bound to respect."

"As a nation we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it, all men are created equal except Negroes. Soon, it will read all men are created equal except Negroes, and foreigners and Catholics. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty. To Russia for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Abraham Lincoln

Violence reached the floor of the United States Senate, where Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner with his cane.

Southern sympathizers sent Brooks new canes.

Members began carrying knives and pistols into the chamber.

Meanwhile, the nation's chief executive, James Buchanan, did nothing.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall. But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other."

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On Sunday evening, October 16, 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown, led five blacks and 13 whites into Harper's Ferry, Virginia.

He brought along a wagon load guns to arm the slaves he was sure would rally to him.

Once they had, he planned to lead them southward, along the crest of the Appalachians, and destroy slavery.

Brown was an inept businessman, who failed 20 times in six states, and defaulted on his debts.

Yet he believed himself God's agent on earth.

In 1856, at Pottawattamie Creek, in Kansas, he and his sons had hacked five pro-slavery men to death, with broadswords, all in the name of defeating Satan and his legions.

Brown and his men quietly seized the armory, arsenal and engine house, and took up hostages, including George Washington's great grandnephew.

After that nothing went right.

The first person killed was the town baggage master, a free black.

The slaves did not rise up, angry townspeople did.

The first of Brown's followers to fall was Dangerfield Newby, a former slave.

Someone in the crowd cut off his ears as souvenirs.

On Tuesday morning, federal troops arrived from Washington, led by a US Army Colonel, Robert E. Lee.

Lee's men stormed the engine house, and nine more of Brown's men were killed, including two of his sons.

Brown, severely wounded, was turned over to Virginia, to be tried for treason.

"In firing his gun, John Brown has merely told what time of day it is. It is high noon. Thank God."

William Lloyd Garrison

"An undivided south says let him hang"

Albany Georgia Patriot

Virginia found Brown guilty and sentenced him to death.

Among the troops at the scene of his hanging were cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, led by an eccentric professor Thomas J. Jackson.

Also there was a private in the Richmond Grays. A young actor named John Wilkes Booth.

"December 2nd 1859. Old John Brown has been executed for treason against a state. We can not object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That can not excuse violence, bloodshed and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right."

Abraham Lincoln

Ralph Waldo Emerson likened Brown to Christ.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne declared "No man ever more justly hanged", and Herman Melville called him the "meteor of the war".

Brown had said nothing from the gallows. But he did hand one of his guards a note.

"I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."

"His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the table light. His was as the burning sun. I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for him."

"John Brown, John Brown, very important person in history. Important though for only one episode. Failure in everything in life. Except, he becomes the single most important factor in my opinion in bringing on the war. The militia system in the south which had been joke before this, before then, becomes a viable instrument. As the southern militias begin to take a true form, and the south begins to worry about northerners agitating the blacks to murder them in their beds."

It was the beginning of the Confederate Army.

"The feeling among the Southern members for dissolution of the Union is becoming more general. Men are now beginning to talk of it seriously who 12 months ago hardly permitted themselves to think of it. The crisis is not far ahead."

Alexander Stephens

The country was coming apart.

In the presidential election of 1860, Buchanan happily stepped aside, but not before his ruling Democratic Party was fatally split over the issue of slavery.

The Republicans, a new party, saw their chance, and nominated Abraham Lincoln, a moderate.

His platform pledged only to halt slavery's further spread.

"On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God cannot long retain it."

Radical abolitionists in the north complained that Lincoln's opposition to slavery did not go far enough.

But to most people in the south, the prospect of Lincoln's election posed a lethal threat.

The 1860 campaign had become a referendum on the southern way of life.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with only 40 percent of the vote.

He did not even appear on the ballot in 10 southern states.

"The election of Mr. Lincoln is undoubtedly the greatest evil that has ever befallen this country. But the mischief is done, and the only relief for the American people is to shorten sail, send down the top mast, and prepare for a hurricane."

Richmond Whig

In the south, Lincoln was burned in effigy.

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Now the South Carolina legislature called for a convention to consider seceding from the union.

"Southerners would have told you that they were fighting for self government. They believed that the gathering of power in Washington was against them. When they entered into that federation, they certainly would never have entered into it if they hadn't believed it was possible to get out. And when the time came that they wanted to get out, they thought they had every right."

"Southerners saw the election of Lincoln, as a sign that the union was about to be radicalized, and that they were about to be taken in directions they did not care to go. The abolitionist aspect of it was very strong, and they figured they were about to lose what they called their property, and faced ruin."

Yet many southerners thought secession was madness.

South Carolina, one Southern politician wrote, is too small for Republic, and too large for an insane asylum.

"November 19th 1860, a most gloomy day in Wall Street. Everything at a deadlock. First class paper not negotiable. Stocks failing."

George Templeton Strong

In New York emotions were no less explosive, and George Templeton Strong, a conservative lawyer, who distrusted Lincoln, began to keep track of events in his diary.

"The bird of our country as a debilitated chicken, disguised an eagle feathers. We have never been a nation, we are only an aggregate of communities, ready to fall apart at the first serious shock."

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, there were 33 states in the union, and a 34th, free Kansas, was about to join.

By the time of his inauguration, five months later, just 27 state would remain.

The suddenness of secession took everyone by surprise.

South Carolina led the way on December 20th.

A bell in Charleston told the succession of departing states.

Mississippi on January 9th.

Florida on the 10th.

Then Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana.

In Texas, Governor Sam Houston was deposed when he tried to stop his state from joining the Confederacy.

"Let me tell what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, you may win southern independence, but I doubt it. The North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery impulsive people as you, for they live in colder climates, but when they begin to move in a given direction they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche."

Texas left anyway.

Even Virginia, the most populous southern state, birthplace of seven presidents, seemed sure to follow.

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"All the indications are that this treasonable inflammation, secessionitius keeps on making steady progress week by week. If disunion becomes an established fact we have one consolation. The self amputated members were diseased beyond immediate cure and their virus will effect our system no longer"

George Templeton Strong.

"Charleston Mercury. The tea has been thrown overboard. The Revolution of 1860 has been initiated."

After South Carolina seceded, the handful of federal troops still stationed in Charleston, withdrew to Fort Sumter, far out in the harbor.

Their commander, Major Robert Anderson, said he had moved his men in order to prevent the effusion of blood.

They were quickly surrounded by rebel batteries.

"Thank God, we have a country at last. To live for, to pray for, and if need be, to die for."

Lusus Quintus Lemar

On February 18th, a few minutes after noon, Jefferson Davis stood on the steps of the Alabama State House in Montgomery, and took the oath of office as president of the Provisional Confederate States of America.

The crowds cheered, wept, sang fair well to the star spangled banner, and dixie, a minstrel tune written by a northerner.

He was brittle, nervous, often unable to sleep, and partly blind in one eye.

Accustomed to being obeyed, he scorned the bargaining that made democratic government work.

Sam Houston said he was as cold as a lizard, and ambitious as Lucifer.

Like Lincoln, he was a Kentuckian, son of an itinerant farmer, but he had been educated at West Point, fought in Mexico, and served as secretary of war.

As Senator from Mississippi, he resisted secession as long as he could, but when his state withdrew from the union, he headed home to his plantation, Briarfield, south of Vicksburg.

He and his wife Varina were there, clipping roses in the garden, when word came that he had been elected president.

"Reading that telegram he looked so grieved that I feared that some evil had befallen our family. After a few minutes he told me. As a man might speak of a sentence of death."

"Upon my head was showered flowers, plaudits and smiles, but beyond them I saw troubles innumerable."

Jefferson Davis

The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to the United States Constitution.

But it gave the president a line-item veto, a six year term and it outlawed international slave trading.

The Confederate cabinet met for the first time in a hotel room.

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A sheet of stationary pinned to the door marked the President's office.

Where will I find the state department, a visitor asked Robert Tombs the Confederate Secretary of State. In my hat sir, and the archives in my coat pocket.

"Our new government is founded upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal the white man".

Vice President Alexander Stephens

"God forgive us that ours is a monotonous system. Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children. All the time they seem to think themselves patterns, models of husbands and fathers".

Mary Chestnut

Mary Chestnut, and her husband James, a former United States Senator from South Carolina, moved among the highest circles of the Confederacy, and were close to Jefferson Davis and his wife.

Mary was subject to depressions and nightmares, for which she sometimes took opium.

Now, she too, began to keep a diary.

"This journal is intended to be entirely objective. My subjective days are over."

" The impression produced by the size of his extremities, and by his flapping and wide projecting ears, may be removed by the appearance of kindliness, sagacity. The nose itself, a prominent organ, stands out from the face with an inquiring, anxious air, as though it were sniffing for some good thing in the wind. The eyes, dark, full and deeply set are penetrating, but full of an expression that almost amounts to tenderness."

William Russell, London Times

Two days after Jefferson Davis left home, Abraham Lincoln set out from Springfield, Illinois, for his capital.

"Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return. With a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Devine Being whoever attended him I can not succeed. With that assistance, I can not fail. To His care I am commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."

On route to Washington, the President's train stopped at Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany and New York.

In Philadelphia, warned of plots to kill him, Lincoln declared that he would rather be assassinated, than see a single star removed from the American Flag.

Two days later he reluctantly cancelled plans for a grand arrival in Washington, and slipped into the capital by train, at dawn, wrapped in a shawl, and protected by two armed guards.

Inauguration day in Washington was cloudy and cold.

A large, tense crowd gathered beneath the unfinished dome.

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Cannon guarded the capitol grounds. Sharpshooters lined the roof.

Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery, denied the right of any state to succeed, vowed to defend federal installations, and spoke directly to the south.

"In your hands my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

"I do not pretend to go to sleep. How can I? If Anderson does not accept terms, at four, the orders are, he shall be fired upon. I count four St. Michael chimes. I begin to hope. The heavy booming of a cannon, I sprang out of bed and on my knees prostrate. I prayed, as I have never prayed before."

The Civil War began at 4:30 a.m. on the twelfth of April, 1861.

General Pierre Gustave Toussaint Beauregard ordered his Confederate gunners to open fire on Fort Sumter, at that hour, only a dark shape out in Charleston harbor.

Confederate Commander Beauregard was a gunner, so skilled as a artillery student at West Point, that his instructor kept him on as an assistant for another year.

That instructor was Major Robert Anderson, union commander inside Fort Sumter.

"All the pent up hatred of the past months and years is voiced in the thunder of these cannon, and the people seem almost beside themselves in the exaltation of a freedom they deem already won."

The signal to fire the first shot was given by a civilian, Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia farmer and editor, who had preached secession for 20 years.

"Of course", he said, "I was delighted to perform the service".

34 hours later, a white flag over the Fort, ended the bombardment.

The only casualty had been a Confederate horse.

It was a bloodless opening to the bloodiest war in American History.

"The first gun that was fired at Fort Sumter sounded the death nail of slavery. They who fired it, were the greatest practical abolitionists this nation has produced."

"April 13th, 1861. So Civil War is inaugurated at last. God defend the right."

"14 April, Montgomery Daily Advertiser. The intelligence that Fort Sumter has surrendered to the Confederate Forces yesterday sent a thrill of joy to the heart of every true friend of the south. The face of every southern man was brighter, his step lighter, and his bearing prouder than it had been before."

In Boston jubilant volunteers marched past Faneuil Hall eager to avenge Fort Sumter.

In Baltimore, anti Lincoln men rampaged through the streets.

In Richmond, a mob marched on the state house, tore down the stars and stripes and raised the stars and bars.

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There was no longer any doubt that Virginia would secede.

And in New York, a hundred thousand people crowed Union Square, where the Sumter flag now flew.

Walt Whitman, sometimes poet and journalist for the Brooklyn Standard, was stunned by the news.

"All the past we leave behind with Sumter", he said.

"Woe to those who began this war if they were not in bitter earnest."

Mary Chestnut

"Father and I were husking out corn when William Corey came across the field,. He was excited and said, Jonathan, the rebels have fired upon Fort Sumter. Father got white and couldn't say a word."

Theodore F. Upsum

"April 15th. Events multiply. The President is out with a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteers. It is said 200,000 more will be called for within a few days."

On the day Sumter fell, the regular army of the United States consisted of fewer than 17,000 men, most of whom were stationed in the far west.

Only two of its generals had ever commanded an army in the field, and both were long past their prime.

Winfield Scott, the hero of the Mexican War, old fuss and feathers, was too fat even to mount a horse.

"We was treated as good as company could be at every station. We got kisses from the girls at a good many places, and we returned the same to them."

Hercules Standard

"I've got the best suit of clothes I've ever had in my life."

In the north, they came by hundreds and by thousands.

From Boston Massachusetts, from Detroit and Ann Arbor Michigan, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire in the rain.

Whole towns signed up.

The tenth Michigan Volunteer Infantry was made up of Flint boys, their commander was the Mayor, their regimental Doctor, the man who had been taking care of them since they were young.

The sixth New York contained so many Bowery toughs it was said a man had to do time in prison just to get into the regiment.

The elite seventh, on the other hand, set out for Washington with sandwiches from Delmonicos, and a 1000 velvet covered camp stools, on which to sit and eat them.

On his way to war, Lt. George Armstrong Custer, just 22, and less than a month out of West Point, where he had graduated at the bottom of his class, stopped in New York to have himself fitted out with a splendid new uniform, then went to a photographer.

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In Pawtuxet, Rhode Island, 19-year-old Elisha Hunt Rhodes, left his job as a harness makers clerk, and signed on as a Private in the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers.

He would have joined earlier but his widowed mother begged him to stay home.

"We drilled all day and night. Standing before a long mirror I put in many hours of weary work and thought myself quite a soldier. I was elected First Sargent, much to my surprise, just what a First Sargent's duties might be, I had no idea."

After two weeks of drilling, the 2nd Rhode Island moved out.

"Today we have orders to pack up and be ready to leave for Washington. My knapsack was so heavy that I could scarcely stagger under the load. At the Wharf an immense crowd had gathered and we went on board our steamer with mingled feelings of joy and sorrow."

In Baton Rouge, William Tecumseh Sherman resigned as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy and headed north.

"You politicians", he told his brother, Senator John Sherman of Ohio, "have got things in a hell of a fix, and you may get them out as best you can, I will have no more to do with it".

But when Sumpter felt, he put his uniform back on, and reluctantly went to war.

"You might as well attempt to put out the flames of a burning house with a squirt gun. I think is used to be a long war, very long, much longer than any politician thinks."

"There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots, and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter."

Ulysses S. Grant

In Galena, Illinois, 39 year old Ulysses S. Grant was working in his father's harness shop, having failed as a peace time soldier, and considered by some, a drunk.

Now he signed on as a mustering officer, handling the flood of volunteers, at $4.20 a day.

"New Orleans, 1861. I feel that I would like to shoot a yankee, and yet I know that this would not be in harmony with the spirit of Christianity."

William Nugent

"So impatient did I become for startin that I felt like a thousand pins were pricking me in every part of my body and I started out a week in advance of my brothers."

"I found Mobile brimming over with enthusiasm. The young merchants had dropped their ledgers and were forming and drilling companies by night and day."

"Every day regiments march by. Charleston is crowded with soldiers. These new ones are running in fairly. They fear the war will be over before they get sight of the fun. Every man from every little country precinct wants a place in the picture."

The Confederate government, its capital now in Richmond, called for 100,000 volunteers.

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So many southerners volunteered that a third of them had to be sent home.

They came from Catahula and Baton Rouge Louisiana, Greensville, Mississippi, Moonsville, Alabama, and Chattanoga, Tennessee.

Tennessee joined the Confederacy, so did Arkansas and North Carolina.

In Memphis, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a blacksmith's son, who had made himself a millionaire, selling land, cotton and slaves, put up posters, calling on anyone, who wanted to kill yankees, to come and ride with him.

The Clinch Rifles, from Augustine Georgia, started out in May 1861, only the drummer boy would survive.

The odds against a Southern victory were long.

There were nearly 21 million people in the north, just 9 million in the Confederacy, and 4 million of them were slaves, whom their masters did not dare arm.

The value of all the manufactured goods produced in all the Confederate states added up to less than one fourth of those produced in New York State alone.

But none of this mattered to the men who joined the Talapusa Thrashers, the Chickasaw Desperados, and Cherokee Lincoln Killers.

"The histories of the lost cause are all written out by big bugs, generals and renowned historians. Well I have as much right as any man to write a history."

Sam Watkins

One of the first to answer the southern call was 21 year old Sam Watkins of Columbia Tennessee.

He joined Company H of the first Tennessee at Nashville.

Like most rebel soldiers, he owned no slaves.

"The bugle sounded to strike tents and place everything aboard the cars. We went bowling along at 30 miles per hour as fast as steam could carry us. At every town and station, citizens and ladies were waiving their handkerchiefs and hooraying for Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy. Its worth soldiering to receive such a welcome as this."

"If the President of the United States would tell me that a great battle was to be fought for the liberty or slavery of the country, and asked my judgment as to the ability of the commander, I would say with my dying breath, let it be Robert E. Lee."

General Winfield Scott

I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country then the dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation."

Robert E. Lee

The most promising officer in the regular army was Robert E. Lee of Virginia.

On April 18th, four days after Sumter, Lee was summoned to Blair House at Lincoln's behest and offered field command of the entire Union Army.

Lee said he would think about it.

Virginia had voted to secede the day before.

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That night he paced anxiously in the gardens around his Arlington mansion across the Potomac.

At midnight, Saturday the 20th, Lee wrote his letter of resignation from the United States Army.

On the 21st, the Governor of Virginia, asked him to take command of the state militia.

"When he had to choose between the nation and Virginia there was never any doubt about what his choice would be. He went with his state, and he said, I can't draw my sword against my native state, or as he often said my country."

Lincoln had lost his best soldier

"Not by one word or look can we can we detect any change of the demeanor of the negro servants. They make no sign. Are they stupid, or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?"

Mary Chestnut

Both sides thought it would be a 90 day war, and both sides agreed it was to be a white man's fight.

Blacks who tried to sign up, were turned away.

"April 19th. There has been a serious disturbance in Baltimore. Regiments from Massachusetts assailed by a mob that was repulsed by shot and steel. It's a notable coincidence that the first blood in this great struggle is drawn by Massachusetts men on the anniversary of Lexington."

"We are in Washington, and what a city. Mud, pigs, negroes, palaces, shanties, everywhere. As we passed the white house, I had my first view of Abraham Lincoln. He looks like a good, honest man, and I trust that with God's help he can bring our country safely out of its peril."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes

The Rhode Island set up their bunks at the patent office.

New Yorkers slept on the carpeted floor of the House Chamber.

Massachusetts men camped in the Rotunda and cooked their bacon on furnaces in the basement.

Overhead the Capitol Dome remained incomplete.

Despite the war, Lincoln insisted that the work go on.

"I take it as a sign", he said, " that the Union will continue".

"The first thing in the morning is drill. Then drill, then drill again, then drill, drill, a little more drill, then drill. Then lastly drill. Between drills we drill and sometimes stop to eat a little and have a role call."

"Outskirts of Baltimore. My Dear William. I can now march 20 and 25 miles a day, live on short rations of hardtack, raw, rancid bacon, green roasting ears and cold water, sleep out in the rain and heavy dew with nothing but an army coat over me, and enjoy myself capitally."

Edward Hastings Ripley

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"Early in the war there was a young Confederate Veteran, a young country boy on guard duty, walking his post in the woods, and their was an owl unknown to him in a tree nearby, and the owl said whoooo, and the boy, trembling with fear, said its me sir, John Albert, a friend of yours"

In May, Union troops crossed the Potomac by torchlight and took the heights of Arlington.

Robert E. Lee's house would be occupied by Union troops for the rest of the war.

In late June the new general in charge of the union army, Irvin McDowell outlined plans for attacking the Confederates in Virginia, but he did not yet want to fight.

"This is not an army", he warned the president.

"You are green it is true", Lincoln answered, "but they are green also. You are all green alike."

To preserve the Constitution, Lincoln had, for three months, gone beyond it.

Waging war without congressional consent, ceasing Northern telegraph offices, suspending habeas corpus.

To keep the border states from seceding, Lincoln sent troops to occupy Baltimore, and clapped the mayor and 19 secessionist legislators in jail, without trial.

Chief Justice Tawny ruled that the president had exceeded his power.

Lincoln simply ignored him.

"More rogues than honest men find shelter under habeas corpus", he said, and even contemplated arresting the Chief Justice.

"A very mysterious man. He's got so many sides to him. The curious thing about Lincoln to me, is that he could remove himself from himself, as if he were looking at himself. It's a very strange, very erie thing, and highly intelligent. It's a simple thing to say, but Lincoln's been so smothered with stories of his compassion that people forget what a highly intelligent man he was. And almost everything he did, almost everything he did, was calculated for effect."

"Teach the rebels and traitors that the price they are to pay for the attempt to abolish this government must be the abolition of slavery."

Frederick Douglas

From the start of the war slaves fled their plantations for the Union lines.

But Lincoln's policy was clear.

Despite pressure from the abolitionists, he insisted he was making war on secession, not slavery, and ordered the army to return fugitives to their owners.

But now an unlikely figure helped to change men's minds.

General Benjamin Butler was a Massachusetts politician, with crossed eyes and mixed motives, who has once backed Jefferson Davis for President of the United States.

Returning slaves only aided the enemy Butler argued, and he got permission to hold fugitive slaves as contraband of war, and employ them as laborers in the union army.

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"Major Carey of Virginia asked if I did not feel myself bound by my Constitutional obligations to deliver up fugitives under the fugitive slave act. To this I replied, that the fugitive slave act did not effect a foreign country, which Virginia claimed to be, and she must reckon it one of the infelicity's of her position, that in so far at least she was taken at her word."

General Benjamin Butler

The trickle of runaways coming into northern lines now swelled to a flood.

One ex-slave who had recently bought his freedom told a union soldier, "If I had known you gunmen was a coming, I'd have saved my money."

War was breaking out all across the country.

There were engagements at Big Bethel, Virginia, and Booneville, Missouri, skirmishes from Maryland to New Mexico Territory.

At Philipi, at western Virginia, a young Union General, George McClellan, won a small, highly publicized victory, over a tiny Confederate force.

But still, there had been no decisive battle.

"July 9. Our battle summer. May it be our first and our last, so called. After all we have not had any of the horrors of war."

Mary Chestnut

"July 16. It begins to look warlike and we shall probably have a chance to pay our southern brethren a visit upon the sacred soil of Virginia. I hope we shall be successful and give the rebels a good pounding."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes

On July 16th, the volunteer union army of 37,000 men marched into Virginia.

Their aim, to cut the Railroad at Mananas, then move on at last to Richmond.

"Washington Star. The scene from the hills was grand. Regiment after regiment was seen coming along the road and across the long bridge, their arms gleaming in the sun. Cheer after cheer was heard as regiment greeted regiment, and with the marshal music and the sharp, clear orders of the officers, it made a combination of sounds very pleasant to the ear of a Union man."

To stop the Union invasion, 22,000 Confederate troops had moved north from Richmond, commanded by General Beauregard, who knew in advance the Federals were coming.

Rose Greenhow, a prominent socialite in Washington, and a Confederate spy, had alerted him.

Now Beauregard made his headquarters in Wilbur McLane's farmhouse.

The Confederates formed a meandering eight mile line along one side of Bull Run Creek.

They were less than 25 miles from Washington.

And there they waited.

Hundreds of Washingtonians in holiday mood rode out to Mananas hoping to see a real battle.

Some brought field glasses, picnic baskets, bottles of champaign.

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"We saw carriages, which contained civilians, who had driven out from Washington to witness the operations. Connecticut boys said, 'there's our Senator', and some of our men recognized other members of Congress. We thought it wasn't a bad idea to have the great men from Washington come out to see us thrash the rebs."

Private James Tankim

On the morning of the 21st, McDowell sent his men across Bull Run.

They smashed into the left side of the Confederate line, driving the rebels from one position after another.

The civilian onlookers waived hats, fluttered handkerchiefs.

It was not yet noon, and all was going just as they wanted.

"On reaching a clearing separated from our left flank by a rail fence we were saluted by a volley of musketry which was fired so high that all the bullets went over our head. My first sensation was astonishment at the peculiar whir of the bullets, and that the regiment immediately laid down without waiting for orders."

"We fired a volley and saw the rebels running. The boys were saying constantly, in great glee, 'we've whipped em, we'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, they're running, the war's over."

An onlooker remembered that the advancing Union army looked like a bristling monster, lifting himself by a slow wavy motion, up the laborious ascent.

Union victory seemed so sure that on one part of the battlefield men stopped to gather souvenirs.

But holding a hill at the center of the southern line was a Virginia brigade led by General Thomas Jackson.

While other southern commands wavered, Jackson's held firm.

On Confederate officer, trying to rally his own frightened men, shouted, "Look, there's Jackson with his Virginians, standing like a stone wall".

The name stuck.

"He had a strange combination of religious fanaticism and a glory in battle. He loved battle. His eyes would light up. They used to call him old blue light because the way his eyes would light up in battle. He was totally fearless, he had no thought whatsoever of danger at any time the battle was on. And he could define what he wanted to do. He said, 'Once you get em running you can stay right on top of em, and that way a small force can defeat a large one every time'. He knew perfectly well that a reputation for victory would roll and build."

It was the turning point.

At 4 o'clock Beauregard ordered a counter attack.

Jackson urged his men to yell like furries.

The rebel yell first heard that day would echo from a thousand battlefields.

Confederate re-enforcements began to arrive.

The first came on horseback.

More arrived by train, something new in war.

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The northern army fell apart.

The retreat soon became a rout, as union guns became entangled with the carriages of fleeing spectators.

"We tried to tell them that there was no danger, called upon them to stop, explored them to stand. We called them cowards, put out our heavy revolvers and threatened to shoot, but all in vain."

"Along the shady little valley through which our road lay, the surgeons have been plying their vocation all the morning upon the wounded. Tables about breast high had been erected, upon which screaming victims were having legs and arms cut off. The surgeons and their assistants, stripped to the waist and all this spattered with blood, stood around, some holding the poor fellows, while others armed with long bloody knives and saws, cut and sawed away with frightful rapidity. Throwing the mangled limbs on a pile nearby as soon as removed."

Lt. Col. W. W. Blackford, First Cavalry, Virginia

"What a horrible sight it was hearing a man grasping his gun firmly in his hands, stone dead. Several with distorted features, all horribly dirty. Many were terribly wounded, some with legs shot off, others with arms gone. Some so badly wounded they could not drag themselves away, slowly bleeding to death. We stopped, many times, to give some a drink, and soon saw enough to satisfy us with the horrors of war."

Lieutenant Josiah Favle

"I struggled on clinging to my gun and cartridge box. Many times I sat down in the mud, determined to go no further, and willing to die and end my misery. But soon a friend would pass and urge me to make another effort, and I would stagger a mile further. At daylight, we could see the spires of Washington, and a welcome sight it was. The loss of the regiment in this disastrous affair, was 93 killed, wounded or missing."

"There's a Congressman, I believe from Alabama, I've forgotten where from, who said there would be no war, and he offered to wipe up all the blood that would be shed with a pocket handkerchief. That was his prediction. I've always said someone could get a PHD by calculating how many pocket handkerchiefs it would take to wipe up all the blood shed. It would be a lot of handkerchiefs"

From the Confederate White House in Richmond, Jefferson Davis rejoiced.

"My fellow citizens. Your little army, derided for its want of arms, derided for all its lack of the essential material of war, has met the grand army of the enemy, routed it at every point, and it now flies in glorious retreat before our victorious columns. We have taught them a lesson, in their invasion of the sacred soil of Virginia."

"Today will be known as Black Monday. We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped, by secessionists."

George Templeton Strong

"London Times. The inmates of the White House are in a state of upmost trepidation. Mr. Lincoln in despair. Why Beauregard does not attack Washington, I know not, nor can I well guess."

It was remembered as a great skedaddle.

For days discourage troops straggled back into Washington.

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"I saw a steady stream of men, covered with mud, soaked through with rain, who were pouring irregularly up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the capital. A dense stream of vapor rose from the multitude. I asked a pale young man, who looked exhausted to death, if the whole army had been defeated. 'That's more than I know', he said, 'I know, I'm going home. I've had enough of fighting to last my lifetime'".

The North was appalled at the 5000 casualties.

Both sides now knew it would be no 90 days war.

Two days later, canny real estate speculators bought the battlefield to make a second kind of killing, as a tourist attraction.

"What upon earth is the matter with the American people. Do they really cover the world's ridicule, as well as their own social and political ruin. The national edifice is on fire. Every man who can carry a bucket of water or remove a brick is wanted. Yet government leaders persistently refuse to receive as soldiers the slaves. The very class of men which has a deeper interest in the defeat and humiliation of the rebels then all others. Such is the pride, the stupid prejudice and folly, that rules the hour."

Frederick Douglas

"Little did I conceive of the greatness of the defeat. The magnitude of the disaster which had entailed upon the United States. So short lived has been the American Union, that men who saw it rise, may live to see it fall."

William Russell, London Times

"Washington, August. I found no preparations whatever for defense. My regiment was properly encamped, not a single avenue or approach, guarded. All was chaos, and the streets, hotels and barrooms were filled with drunken officers and men absent from their regiments without leave. Perfect pandemonium"

George McClellan

Five days after the disaster at Bull Run, a new General took over what was now called the Army of the Potomac .

George Britain McClellan, only 34, seemed just with the North needed.

He brought with him to the demoralized capital, what one aide called, 'An indescribable air of success'.

He replaced inept officers with regulars.

He laid out tidy camps around Washington to accommodate the 10,000 new volunteers arriving each week.

Drilled them 8 hours a day. Staged grand reviews to boost moral.

"All the attention was upon the young general with the calm eye, with the satisfied air who moved around followed by an immense staff, to the clanking of sabers and the acclamation of the spectators."

Regee Detrabien

"I find myself in a new and strange position here. President, the cabinet and General Scott all deferring to me. By some strange piece of magic, I seem to have become the power of the land. I almsot think that were I to win some small success now, that I could become dictator, or anything else that might please me. But nothing of that kind would please me. Therefore I wont be a dictator. Admirable self-denial."

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The newspapers called him young Napoleon, and he could not help seeing the resemblance himself.

But 100,000 untrained volunteers had become an army.

McClellan's army.

His men, who loved him for having made them proud of themselves, called him little Mac.

"His specialty was preparing troops to fight. And he did that superbly. McClellan trained that army. Whatever the Army of the Potomac did in the after years, was largely due to the training McClellan gave them in that first year."

With Lincoln, McClellan and his staff devised a three-pronged attack on the Confederacy.

One army would drive into Virginia and take Richmond.

Another would secure Kentucky and Tennessee, then push into the heartland of the Confederacy and occupy Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

Meanwhile the Navy would clear the Mississippi, surround the Confederacy by sea, and choke off supplies.

The war would be fought along a 1000 mile front.

That fall, Lincoln elevated McClellan to General in chief, replacing the aging Winfield Scott.

"I can do it all", McClellan said.

But he did nothing.

As summer turned to autumn, it became increasingly clear, that having made a magnificent army, George McClellan had no immediate plans to lead it anywhere.

"As we approached the brough of the hill, my heart kept getting higher and higher, til it felt to me that it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois. But I kept right on. When the valley below was in full view, I halted. The enemy's troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. And it occurred to me at once, that he had been as much afraid of me, as I of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before, but it was one that I never forgot afterwards."

General Ulysses S. Grant

In September, Ulysses S. Grant took Paducah Kentucky, a strategic city at the mouth of the Tennessee.

But two months later his undisciplined recruits were almost destroyed looting a captured rebel camp, instead of preparing for a counterattack.

Grant was returned to desk duty.

In November, William Tecumseh Sherman was relieved as Union commander in Kentucky, when he insisted that at least 200,000 men would be needed to suppress the rebellion in the West.

No one believed him.

He grew melancholic, prone to fits of anxiety, and rage.

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"Sherman", McClellan said, "is gone in the head".

December found him ta home in the care of his wife, contemplating suicide.

"No, no one thought it would last long. No one on either side thought it would last long. Those few individuals that said that it would, Tecumseh Sherman for instance, were actually judged to be insane, for making predictions about casualties, which were actually low."

In November, a Union warship stopped a British steamer at gunpoint in international waters and arrested two Confederate diplomats found on board.

Britain's Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, was outraged, demanded their immediate release, and dispatched 11,000 troops to Canada.

"One war at a time", Lincoln said, and quietly let the two confederates go.

By December, optimists on both sides were disappointed.

The Confederacy showed no signs of immanent collapse

The North would not abandon its efforts to reunite the nation by force.

By the end of the year, there were 700,000 men in the Union Army.

No one knew how many Confederates there where.

"December 31st. Poor old 1861, just going. It has been a gloomy year, of trouble and disaster. I should be glad of its departure, were it not that 1862, is likely to be no better."

George Templeton Strong

A week before the Battle of Bull Run, Sullivan Ballou, a Major in the Second Rhode Island volunteers, wrote home to his wife in Smithfield.

"July the 14th, 1861, Washington, DC.

Dear Sarah.

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days - perhaps tomorrow. And lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.

I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing - perfectly willing - to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly, with all those chains to the battlefield.

The memory of the blissful moments I have enjoyed with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God, and you, that I have enjoyed them for so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our boys grow up to honorable manhood around us. If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name."

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"Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless, how foolish, I have sometimes been.

But, O Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth, and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be with you, in the brightest day and in the darkest night. Always. Always. And when the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath, or the cool air at your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

Sarah, do not mourn me dead. Think I am gone, and wait for me. For we shall meet again."

Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later at the first battle of Bull Run.

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At the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, the poet, Julia Ward Howe awoke from a spectacular dream.

She had heard a New England regiment singing on parade, and had fallen asleep with the song of John Brown's body ringing in her head.

Now in the dark, she got up and scribbled out the words with a pencil stub.

She sold her poem to the Atlantic Monthly for four dollars.

It became the anthem of the Union.

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage, where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the fateful lighting of His terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on."

By 1862, Russia had emancipated the surfs.

In France, Victor Hugo published Les Miserables

Jean Bernard Fuco, measured the speed of light.

In America, the United States passed the first national income tax, to pay for war.

The Gatling gun was invented, and war itself was changing.

The shocking casualties of Bull Run and Wilson's creek, were dwarfed by battle after battle.

And now, there were new questions.

Would the north's strength be offset by incompetence and low moral?

Would England side with cotton and the south?

Who would control the Mississippi?

For a year, the nation, now two nations, had torn itself apart.

From a bloodless dual over a man made island in Charleston harbor, war had spread along a 1000 mile line, from Manassas, Virginia to Shanghi, Missouri and beyond.

As 1862 began, over a million men were massing for war.

In a fierce struggle for Tennessee, the people of Clarksville on the Cumberland, found themselves prisoners in their own homes.

Far north of any fighting, the people of Deer Isle, Maine, suffered too, with sad news from places most of them had never heard of.

By the end of the war, the little town of Winchester Virginia, had changed hands 72 times.

Sam Watkins, a Confederate private, would see his first big battle, in April on the banks of the Tennessee.

Elisha Hunt Rhodes, a clerk from Providence, Rhode Island, would celebrate his 20th birthday in a Union Camp.

Union General George McClellan, the ideol of his troops, would fashion a mighty army and lead it south toward Richmond, where Robert E. Lee was waiting.

"The struggle of today", Lincoln told Congress, "is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future also."

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Now, in this, its second year, the war was becoming a struggle over the future of freedom.

"It really is one of those ah, one of those watershed things. There was a huge chasm between the beginning and the end of the war. The nation had come face to face with a dreadful tragedy, and we reacted the way a family would deal with a dreadful tragedy. It was almost inconceivable that anything that horrendous could happen. You must remember the casualties in Civil War Battles were so far beyond anything we can imagine now. If we had ten percent casualties in a battle today, it would be looked upon as a blood bath. They had 30 percent in several battles, and one after another you see."

"This afternoon seeing the General alone in the office, I stepped up to him and said, 'General, I want to go home'. ' Want to go home and for what', he replied. As I could not think of an excuse, I blurted out, 'I want to see my mother'. 'Is she sick', he asked. 'No', I replied, 'I hope not'. He then asked me how long since I left home, and if I was ever away from home so long a time before. I told him I had been in the service seven months and never been away alone from home before. 'Well', said the general, 'you have been a good boy, and you shall have a furlough for ten days.'"

Elisha Hunt Rhodes

"I always shot at privates. It was they that did the shooting and killing, and if I could kill or wound a private, why my chances were so much the better. I always looked on officers as harmless personages."

Sam Watkins

The commander of Sam Watkins Company H was Captain William R. Johnston.

His immediate superior was Colonel George Maney of the First Tennessee.

From there, the Confederate chain of command ascended through Colonel William H. Stephens, of the Second Brigade;

To General Benjamin Chetham, Commander of the Second Division;

To General Lyon Idus Polk's First Army Corps;

Then to General Albert Sydney Johnston, Commander of the Army of the Mississippi;

Above that to War Secretary, George W. Randolph;

And finally to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.

For one Union soldier, the chain of command ascended from President Lincoln;

Secretary of War Simon Cameron;

General McClellan, Commander of the Army of the Potomac;

To General Erasmus Keyes, Commander of the Union Fourth Corps;

To General Darius N. Cooch, of Cooch's Brigade;

To Colonel Frank Wheaton, Commander of the Second Rhode Island Volunteers;

Then finally, to Private Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

"January 31, 1862, mud, mud, mud, I'm thinking of starting a steamboat line to run on Pennsylvania Avenue, between our office and the capital. Will the mud never dry, so the army can move?"

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"Of all the detestable places, Washington is the first. Crowds, heat, bad quarters, bad fare, bad smells, mosquitoes and the plague of flies that transcends everything within my experience. Beelzebub surely reins here, and Willard's Hotel is his temple.

George Templeton Strong

"Throughout Lincoln's presidency, and its true of most presidents, he was fairly run crazy by office seekers, especially at the start when his campaign managers had promised jobs to a great many people, who came to collect them. One man saw him one day, and he looked particularly worried, and said 'What's the matter Mr. President', and Lincoln said, There's too many pigs for the tits"

Abraham Lincoln's problems were not confined to fighting rebels alone. The president's unwieldy cabinet included former conservative Whigs, Free Soil Whigs, and Union Democrats. Four had been his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. Nearly all were privately sure that they could do a better job than their chief.

Secretary of State William Seward, hoped to replace Lincoln. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, wanted to replace Seward. Mary Todd told her husband to get rid of both of them.

Instead Lincoln fired Secretary of War Simon P. Cameron, the Pennsylvania boss so corrupt said Lincoln, "the only thing he wouldn't steal was a red hot stove."

The new secretary of War was Edwin M. Stanton, an able, ruthless war Democrat from Ohio, worried about what he believed to be Lincoln's painful imbecility.

On one thing the cabinet was agreed, General George McClellan was not moving fast enough against the confederates. "The army", Secretary of War Stanton said, "has got to fight or run away. Champaign and oysters on the Potomac, must be stopped."

"Dear Ellen. I can't tell you how disgusted I am becoming with these wretched politicians. They are a most despicable set of men. Seward is a meddling, officious, incompetent little puppy. The President is nothing more than well-
meaning baboon."

George McClellan

The President pored over military books, asked officers for advice, and in exasperation, suggested that "if General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time."

Finally, he ordered McClellan to move on Manassas Junction, and then to proceed overland to take Richmond. But McClellan would not move. He took to his bed with a fever.

McClellan did not want to fight the vast Confederate Army he had convinced himself now occupied northern Virginia. Instead, he proposed to float his army to Fortress Monroe, at the tip of a finger of land between James and York Rivers, then race up the peninsula to seize the Confederate capital.

Impatient for any action, Lincoln agreed. McClellan would move in mid-March. It had been eight months since the northern army had crawled back into Washington after Bull Run.

"February 9, 1862. Dear Mr. President. General McClellan has almost ruined your administration and the country. He is a do nothing. He is thinking of the presidency in 64. He is placating the rebels. That's what ails him. Depend upon it.

Joseph Medill

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"What shall I do? The people are inpatient. Chase has no money and tells me he can raise no more. The General of the Army, McClellan, has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?"

"Washington. Dear Ellen. I went to the White House shortly after the tea, where I found the original gorilla, about as intelligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the ahead of our affairs now."

George McClellan

In the midst of all his troubles, the President delighted in his sons.

The oldest, Robert, was away at Harvard, but Willie, 11, and eight-year-old Thomas, known as Tad, had the run of the White House.

Willie was studious, like to compose verse, and memorized railroad timetables.

He'd raised a boy's battalion from among his schoolmates, and "invaded" cabinet meetings with his "troops".

In February, he developed what the doctor called Bilious Fever. His parents set up night after night to nurse him. On February 20th, Willie died.

For three months, Mary Lincoln veered between loud weeping and silent depression, and sought to communicate with her dead child, through spiritualists.

"If I had not felt the spur of necessity urging me to cheer Mr. Lincoln, whose grief was as great as my own, I could never have smiled again."

The war left Lincoln little time to mourn. He was soon back working 18 hours a day.

"As she came plowing through the water, she looked like a huge, half submerged crocodile. At her prow I could see the iron ram projecting straightforward."

The Confederacy had begun the war with no navy whatsoever, but by the fall of 1861 Confederate engineers were bolting iron plates to the hull of the steam frigate Miramax. Building a warship more powerful than anything the Union had.

News of the monster quickly reached the north. Secretary of War Stanton feared she would steam up the Potomac, and shell the White House.

There was probably only one man in America who could stop the Merimac, and he was mad at the Navy.

The Swedish born inventor, John Ericson, was proud, vein and cranky, and felt he had been cheated out of payment for services by the government years before.

But when Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells begged him to do something to stop the Merimac,Ericsson came up with an extraordinary design.

His ship would have only two guns to the Miramax's 10, but they would be mounted on a revolving turret. Though his vessel would be made entirely of iron, Ericson assured everybody that "the sea shall ride over her, and she live in it like a duck."

Professional Navy men dismissed the plan, but Lincoln overruled them. In just a hundred days later, on January 30, 1862, Ericson's ship slid into Manhattan's East River.

He called her the Monitor, and there had never been anything like her. The single vessel containing 47 patentable inventions.

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"We ran first to the New York side and then to Brooklyn, and so back and forth across the river, like a drunken man on a sidewalk. We found that she would not answer her rudder at all."

Once at sea water spilled in, ventilators failed, the ship filled with gas, her crew began to faint, but the Monitor kept limping south.

Four hundred miles away, off the coast of Virginia, the Merimac was waiting.

Saturday, March 8th, was wash day for the Union Fleet in Hampton Rhodes, Virginia. Laundry was drying on the rigging of the Union Warships, when the Confederate Merimac headed for the USS Cumberland.

The Cumberland opened fire but the shots bounced hopelessly off the Merimac's sides. The Confederate ship rammed the Cumberland, then stood in so close their muzzles almost touched. The Cumberland sank in shallow water.

The Merimac went on to set the USS Congress afire, drove the USS Minnesota aground, then drew back for the night.

For one day the Confederate Navy ruled the seas.

At one o'clock that morning the crew of the battered Minnesota saw a strange looking ship draw up alongside them in the darkness.

"Close alongside the Minnesota there was a craft such as the eyes of a seaman never looked upon before. An immense shingle floating on the water with a gigantic cheese box rising from its center. No sails, no wheels, no smoke stack, no guns. What could it be?"

The monitor had arrived.

The next morning, the epic battle of ironclads began.

Hull to hull the two ships hammered away at each other, so close they collided five times, as the men inside, half blind with smoke, loaded and fired.

After four and half hours, the Merimac drew off.

It was her only fight. Two months later, rather than surrender their ship, the Confederates blew her up, when they were forced out of Norfolk.

Both sides set to work building more ironclads, while Europe watched in worried fascination.

From the moment the two ships opened fire that Sunday morning, every other Navy on earth was obsolete.

"General Grant habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall and was about to do it."

The year 1862 would introduce two great forces into the war: unspeakable slaughter and Ulysses S. Grant.

While McClellan hesitated in Washington, Grant, back in the field after months of desk duty, won two crucial victories out west.

Launching simultaneous attacks by land and water, he took first, Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, then Fort Donelson on the Cumberland, where he issued an ultimatum to the Confederate Commander: "No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender."

The Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers were now in Union hands. The Confederates had been driven from Kentucky. Dozens of southern towns were now occupied by Union troops.

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In less than a year, Grant had gone from clerk to Union hero.

News stories described him cooly smoking under fire, and admirers shipped him barrels of cigars.

A delighted northern public, now thought they knew what the initials in his name stood for. They called him "unconditional surrender" Grant.

But before Grant's men marched into Fort Donelson, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest slipped out of it, with 1000 men.

"I did not come here for the purpose of surrendering my command", he said, and led his troops 75 miles, through the snow, to safety.

Grant, and the Union army, would meet Bedford Forrest again.

After the Confederate defeat at Fort Donelson, The Female Academy, and Stewart College, in nearby Clarksville Tennessee, were converted to hospitals.

"Sunday the news came. Such panic stricken people were never before seen. The wounded were being brought up. The citizens were running. There were already two hospitals here which were filled with the sick, and they, poor fellas were crawling out from every piece, walking, going on horseback, in wagons"

Nanny Haskins.

The Union Army was right behind the wounded.

They met no resistence.

A white flag flew above tiny Fort Defiance, west of town. Mayor Smith came out to inform the Union Commander, that the Confederate Army had retreated to Nashville.

Farmer John Barker wrote in his diary that there were nothing but Lincolnites throughout the county.

An uneasy federal occupation of Clarksville began.

"Early in the war, some, a Union squad closed in on a single, ragged Confederate, and he obviously didn't own any slaves, and he couldn't have much interest in the constitution, or anything else, and said 'what are you fighting for any how', they asked him, and he said, 'I'm fighting because you're down here'. Which was a pretty satisfactory answer."

On April 4th, George McClellan at last began to move for Richmond.

121, 500 men, 14,592 horses and mules, 1150 wagons, 44 batteries of artillery, ambulances, pontoon bridges, tons of provisions, tents, telegraph wire.

It took 400 boats, three weeks to land it all, at Fortress Monroe, on the Virginia Coast.

"The whole region seems literally filled with soldiery. One of the finest armies ever marshaled on the globe now wakes up, these long stagnant fields and woods. General McClellan is here, and commands in person".

Rev. A.M. Stewart

"I am to watch over you, as a parent over his children, and you know that your General loves you from the depths of his heart. It shall be my care to gain success with the least possible loss"

But at Yorktown, less than 20 miles away, the Confederates waited, vastly outnumbered, but determined to defend their homes and hurl back the invaders.

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For the North, it was slow going.

Roads said to be bone dry were bogs. Union officers, forced to rely on store-
bought maps, lost their way.

Finally, on April 5th, the advance guard reached Yorktown, where the Confederates had taken over the building used by Lord Cornwallis's headquarters, during the Revolutionary war.

There were just 11,000 Southern troops, dug in. Not even a tenth of McClellan's force.

The Confederate Commander was John Bankhead McGruder. A showy Virginian, who loved amateur theatricals. He now outdid even himself.

To fool McClellan, into believing that his small force was enormous, McGruder kept up a sporadic, widely scattered, artillery barrage, and paraded one battalion, in and out of a clearing, in an endless circle, til it seemed to Union observers, a mighty host.

"Corporal Edmund Patterson, 9th Alabama

This morning we were called out by the long role, and we have been traveling most of the day, seeming with no other view, but to show ourselves to the enemy, at as many different points of the line as possible. I'm pretty tired."

"It seems clear that I shall have the whole force of the enemy on my hands," McClellan telegraphed Lincoln, "probably not less than 100,000 men, and possibly more."

McClellan called for reinforcements

General Joseph E. Johnston, the overall Confederate Commander could not believe his luck.

"Nobody, but McClellan", he said, "could have hesitated to attack".

"Once more, let me tell you, it is indispensable to you, that you strike a blow. I have never written to you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness than now, nor with fuller purpose to sustain you, but you must act".

"The president very coolly telegraphed me, that he thought I had better break the enemy's lines at once. I was much tempted to reply that he better come and do it himself."

George McClellan

"I don't see the sense of piling up earth to keep us apart. If we don't get at each other sometime, when will the war end? My plan would be to quit ditching and go to fighting."

But McClellan chose to do dig in.

As he settled in for a siege of Yorktown, Union General Phil Carney took to calling his commander, the Virginia creeper.

"During the peninsular campaign, McClellan was working his way up the York/James Peninsula, and he came to a stream, and he and his staff were sitting there, wondering how deep it was, and if they could march across it, and Custer, who was a junior officer, on his staff, just graduated from West Point, a Captain, I think, rode out into midstream, sat his horse and turned around in the saddle, and said, 'this is how deep it is General' ".

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"A man's conceit dwindles when he crawls into an untezeled shirt, trousers too short, baggy behind, coat too long at both ends and a cap as shapeless as a feedbag. A photograph of any one of them, covered with yellow dust, or mosaics of mud, would orniment any mantle, north or south, as a true picture of our boy."

North and South, the average soldier was five feet, eight inches tall, and weighed 143 pounds. His chance of dying in combat was one in sixty-five, of being wounded one in ten. One in thirteen would die of disease.

The average age of a soldier was 25. The minimum age for enlistment was 18, but recruiting officers were not particular. Drummer boys as young as 9 signed on.

There were more than 100, 000 soldiers in the Union Army who were not yet 15 years old.

William Black, was not yet 12 when he enlisted.

Shot in the left arm during battle, he was thought to be the youngest combat soldier wounded in the war.

"Almost every known trade that can fashion a calling has its representatives in our regiment.

Tailors, carpenters, masons, plasterers, molders, and glass blowers, puddlers and rollers, machinists, architects, printers, book binders, and publishers, gentlemen of leisure, politicians, merchants, legislators, judges, lawyers, doctors, preachers.

Some malicious fellow might ask the privilege of completing the catalogue by naming jailbirds, idlers, loafers, drunkards, and gamblers, but we'd beg his pardon, and refuse the license."

"All the appliances of home life possible are being introduced into our encampment. A weekly newspaper, a photographic establishment, a temperance league and a Christian Association.

We have a post office, letter box, postmaster and mail carrier.

Our boys write vastly more letters than they receive. You can hardly imagine the eagerness with which the mailman is looked for, the delight upon the reception of a letter, the sadness, sometimes even to tears, with which those who are disappointed, turn away."

Reverend A.M. Stewart

For the enlisted man army life ment periods of tedium, punctuated by moments of extreme terror.

It also ment long absences from family and home.

"July 1862, Tupelo Mississippi

Dear Sisters:

I would be the last person in the world to see you, and talk with you awhile.

For I see nobody here but men, and they appear to be very sorry company.

I think I can enjoy myself at home, better than anywhere else in the world."

Benjamin Stubbs

For those officers who took their families with them to camp, life was somewhat better.

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"There has been a great battle indeed in the Southwest. A conflict of two days, closely fought, and with varying fortune, and by great armies. It seems entitled to a place among the first class battles of history."

George Templeton Strong

"It was fought in early April, the trees were leafed out, and the roads were meandering cow paths, nobody knew north from south, east from west, they'd never been in combat before, most of them, especially on the southern side, so it was just a disorganized, murderous, fist fight, of a hundred thousand men, slamming away at each other."

In early April, as McClellan continued to sit in front of Yorktown, 42,000 Union troops, under General Ulysses S. Grant, were encamped on the west side of the Tennessee River near Pittsburg Landing.

Grant's invasion of Tennessee had practically cut the state in two, and now he was waiting for Don Carlos Buell's, Army of the Ohio, to join him.

Their combined forces with then to plunge into the heart of Mississippi.

But Buell was late, and in Corinth, Mississippi, 22 miles away, the commander of the western department of the Confederate Army, Albert Sidney Johnston, saw no reason to wait.

Their armies were still evenly matched, and he would attack and end Grant's invasion.

"Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee", Johnston told his staff.

officers in the morning of April 6th.

The Confederates quietly moved toward the Union lines.

"It was a most beautiful morning. It really seemed like Sunday in the country at home. The boys were all scattered around camp, polishing and brightening their muskets, brushing up, cleaning their shoes, jackets and trousers for inspection."

Private Leander Stillwell

At the head of one Union Division, was William Tecumseh Sherman, who had shaken off the melancholy that had sent him home the previous year. His Ohioans were encamped on a hill not far from a little log built Methodist Church called Shiloh, when the sixth Mississippi attacked.

"I saw men in gray and brown clothes, running through the camp. And I saw something else, something I'd never seen before, a gaudy sort of thing with red bars, a rebel flag."

"We were crowding them. One more charge, and the lines would waiver and break. They retreated in wild confusion. We were jubilant, and the officers did not curb the men, to keep them in line."

Sam Watkins

The battle extended along a three mile front. The worst fighting was in the center. "Where the rebels cam on and on, like maddened demons", a Union soldier said.

"The Generals didn't know their jobs, the soldiers didn't know their jobs. It was just pure determination to stand and fight, and not retreat. And the bloodiness of it was just astounding to everyone. It also corrected a southern misconception, which had said, that one good southern soldier, was worth 10 Yankee hirlings. They found out that, that wasn't true by a long shot."

In the peach orchard, the Federals lay flat beneath the blossoming trees, firing as the rebels came. Soft pink pedals, came raining down, on the living, and the dead.	(33)

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By late morning thousands of untried federal troops had seen enough.

Most did not stop running until they reached the river, where almost 5000 men coward beneath the bluff.

"We are sweeping the field", General Johnston told his second in command, Beaurgard, "and I think we shall press them to the river."

Grant's back was to the Tennessee, there was no sign of Buell, and no where else to go. But a thin federal line held in the center, Illinois and Iowa farm boys mostly, prone along a sunken road. Their commander, Benjamin Prentiss, understood the deadly seriousness of Grant's order to maintain that position at all costs.

The Confederates launched a dozen massive assaults, against what became known as the Hornet's nest. Albert Sidney Johnston, himself, led the last charge.

"He came out of it with bits of his clothing nicked all up. One boot sole was shot in half and he flapped it up on horse back and said 'they didn't trip me up that time.' And very soon after that they saw him reel in the saddle, and realized he was hurt, and someone said, 'General are you wounded?' and he said 'yes, and I fear seriously'. And he was shot behind the knee, in the ephemeral artery I suppose, and he bleed to death. They saw blood coming out of his boot. He could have been easily saved with a tourniquet, but he had sent his surgeon off to take care of some federal prisoners."

"Advancing a little further we saw General Albert Sidney Johnston surrounded by his staff. We saw some little commotion among those who surrounded him, but we did not know at the time that he was dead. The fact was kept from the troops."

Sam Watkins

The command of the Western army now passed the General Beauregard.

"Albert Sidney Johnston was looked on by many people, at the time of Shiloh, and especially before Shiloh while he was holding that line up in Kentucky, as the South's number one field soldier. Jefferson Davis viewed him as that and when he lost Albert Sidney Johnston, he said 'that I realized that our strongest pilar has been broken'."

Meanwhile the center of the union line bent back on itself, but would not break. Confederates trained 62 cannon at point plank range and opened fire. The Hornets nest exploded in a hail of splintered trees and shattered men.

At 5:30, Prentiss and 2200 survivors of his division, surrendered. They has held up the southern advance for nearly six hours, and it was growing dark.

Beauregard wired Jefferson Davis that he had won a complete victory. "I had General Grant just where I wanted him", he said, " and could finish him up in the morning."

Everywhere wounded men lay in agony. Neither army had yet devised a system for gathering or caring for them on the field. Scores of wounded collapsed, and died drinking from a mud hole near the peach orchard, staining the water red.

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It began to rain, and flashes of lightening showed hogs feeding on the ungathered dead.

"Some cried for water, others for someone to come and help them. I can hear those poor fellows crying for water. God heard them, for the heavens opened and the rains came."

Grant spent that night beneath a tree rather than listen to the screams of the wounded men in his headquarters. It was there that Sherman found him. "Well Grant', he said, 'we've had the devil's own day, haven't we." "Yes", said Grant, "lick em tomorrow though."

everything he was a ground rents said was so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing in any direction stepping on dead bodies without a foot touching the ground owner him a shot of either same number of dead is warning