The Civil War

LOYALISTS AND REBELS

South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas had seceded from the Union prior to the firing on Fort Sumpter. Other states were considering that course of action. After receiving Lincoln's proclamation to raise 75,000 troops, Virginia's governor responded by stating, "The militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington....Your object is to subjugate the Southern States....You have chosen to inaugurate civil war." Virginia seceded. North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee followed.

On a map in which the Confederacy is colored red and the Union is colored blue, the division along the Mason Dixon line and its Ohio River extension makes the Civil War appear to be a clean division between North and South. In practice, it wasn't so neat and tidy. The upcountry area of the Carolina Appalachians, which had spawned the Regulator movement a century ago, was a stronghold of Unionist sentiment. The peckerwood areas of Georgia and the Carolinas also had strong Unionist support. Western Tennessee was a veritable stronghold of Unionist sentiment. Every Southern state except South Carolina furnished troops for the Federals.

Other states saw their own version of civil war, with the larger conflict between the states of secondary importance. Missouri, the scene of bloody violence since 1856, continued to shed blood in its own Civil War. Nominally within the Union, Missouri furnished almost as many regiments to the Confederacy as she did to the Union. In addition, various guerrilla bands were supported by the contending factions, including William Quantrill, whose forces included Frank and Jesse James. In Mississippi, Jones County was held by a guerilla band that fought off Confederate militia and state tax collectors for three years, with no apparent affinity for the larger war being fought.

Kentucky attempted to keep out of the conflict by proclaiming her neutrality. She abandoned it only after Confederate forces crossed her borders. With a secessionist Governor and a pro-Union legislature doing political battle, the legislature finally won. Kentucky remained, technically at least, within the Union and Lincoln assisted the pro-Unionist forces there by countermanding orders from his field commander in August, 1861, emancipating slaves in that state. Lincoln noted, "I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky."

The status of Maryland, a slave state was critical, since it bordered on the District of Columbia. Its pro-Confederate position was revealed early in the war when mobs in Baltimore opened fire on a Massachusetts regiment headed for Washington, ripped up railroad bridges and cut telegraph lines. Lincoln dispatched federal troops to both Baltimore and the state capital of Annapolis, suspended habeas corpus and arrested the Mayor of Baltimore and 19 secessionist minded members of the Maryland legislature. Cowed by Lincoln's demonstration of naked power, the Maryland legislature rejected secession but passed resolutions recognizing the Confederacy and urging Lincoln to allow the seceding states to peacefully go. The last slave state, Delaware, remained solidly in the Union.

Later, when the Supreme Court ruled Lincoln's suspension of the write of Habeas Corpus to be unconstitutional, the President, like Jackson earlier, ignored that judicial body, and momentarily considered removing the Chief Justice. As President he authorized the seizure of over 13,000 persons, without warrant, and without a trial, evidence of the pro-South affinity of many in the North. So much for the privilege of habeas corpus.

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

On paper, military preponderance lay with the North. With a population of 22 million, compared with 9 million in the South, the North had 3.5 times as many men of military age as the Confederacy and eventually 2.1 million of them served in uniform compared to 800,000 who served in the Confederate armies. In addition, 90% of industrial capacity and 2/3rds of the railroad mileage lay in the North. This preponderance perhaps lay behind Lincoln's optimism, shared by others in 1861, that the war would be a short one.

Too frequently, as the historical record shows, such calculations have been the prelude for disaster. In 1776, Britain made such calculations. So did the United States in assessing Vietnam in the 20th century. The South had distinct advantages which she recognized. First, the Confederacy had only to fight a defensive war, to hold its ground. Time was on the Confederate side. Every day it existed increased its appearance of legitimacy. The Union would be on the offensive, and over an area of land as large as the portion of Russia that Napoleon had invaded in 1812 with disastrous results. Every advance by a Union army meant a longer supply line, greater logistical difficulties and more men pulled from front line duty to defend the supply lines. Fighting on interior lines gives a defensive army an advantage. The movement and concentration of troops is greatly eased.

Industrial deficiencies can be overcome. In this respect, the Confederacy proved to be particularly innovative, mobilizing its resources to the point that at no time during the war did it suffer from lack of cannon, musket, powder or shot. Its men may have gone into battle without uniforms and shoes, and often hungry, but not without weapons.

THE CONTENT OF THEIR CHARACTER

Finally there is the intangible element of morale. Fighting a largely defensive war gave Confederate troops an edge; and whereas the preponderance of military opinion held that "Billy Yank" was the better soldier, "Johnny Reb" was the better fighter. In one of those small incidents of war that tells much, a solitary Confederate soldier captured by Union forces was asked why he was fighting. The answer was simple but sufficient: "Because you're down here."

Why some men fight well, and others fight poorly has been a subject of speculation not only for military leaders, but for historians who must account for success or failure in battle. The Civil War produced extremes on both sides. Resistance to military service in both the Confederate and Union forces existed. Desertion rates from both forces were exceptionally high. Yet actions which would strain the metal of a modern army were met with not only individual feats of valor, but collective resolve which speaks highly of the forces on both sides.

In September, 1862, at the Battle of Antietam, 400 Confederates fought off four assaults by 12,500 Union troops over a three hour period. At the Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg, on July 4, 1863, 350 men of the 20th Maine Regiment repulsed five charges by an Alabama Division. In less than half an hour, with over 40,000 rounds being fired, the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment ran out of ammunition. Its commanding officer then ordered a bayonet charge which carried the day. The next day, on the opposite end of the Gettysburg battlefield, 262 men of the 1st Minnesota Regiment countercharged 1,600 Confederates to close a gap in the line. Only 47 of the Regiment were alive after the five minute action, but they plugged the gap. On the paper written by historians, the valor of such actions is muted by the ennui of time. At the point of occurrence, those actions bespoke the intangible qualities of men for which the term heroism was coined.

Nor were civilians spared from the effects of war. Life in northern Virginia and in particular the Shenandoah Valley region was constantly disrupted by traversing armies. The town of Winchester changed hands 70 times during the war. Civilian pursuits were not merely disrupted, but often destroyed. Cavalry raids on both sides tore up railroads, plundered storage depots while troops foraged for food incessantly. The distinction between civilian and combatant blurred. When Union General William T. Sherman took Atlanta, he ordered the city cleared of civilians. To the protest of that city's Mayor, he replied:

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

In both the North and the South, women participated on a scale hitherto unseen. The unsanitary conditions that characterized the Union Army caused New York philanthropists to organize The Sanitary Commission. Although organized by men, its 7,000 chapters were staffed by women. In Chicago, Mary Livermore organized women's volunteers into 3,000 chapters to bring fresh food to the troops. Clare Barton distributed supplies, ministered to the wounded and lobbied Washington for better medical care. After the war she took a prominent part in organizing the Red Cross.

The indirect consequences for women were perhaps greater than their direct contributions. Women gained organizational experience and confidence in moving within a man's world. Women learned how to handle finances, keep organizational records, conduct public meetings and decide policy. Women also filled in the void created when Northern men left their jobs for the military. So many male teachers went into service that the field of elementary and secondary teaching became and forever after unto today, remained a woman's preserve.

Southern women also worked as nurses. Sally Tompkins in Richmond, with a staff of only six women, tended 1,333 men in her private hospital. All but seven survived their stay, a record for both Northern and Southern hospitals. As a tribute to Ms. Tompkins work, when a new army regulation required that all hospital directors be under direct army control, Jefferson Davis appointed her a captain of cavalry.

Perhaps the longest remembered contribution from women was a poem written by Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist, whose husband helped finance John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Visiting Washington in 1861, Mrs. Howe watched one of General McClellan's grand reviews, returned to her room at the Willard Hotel and awoke in the middle of the night when, she later said, "the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind." The poem, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," set to music, swept the Union camps, and soon thereafter entered the hymnals of the Protestant churches.

Both armies engaged in "foraging," the practice of stealing food (and whatever else wasn't tied to the ground) in the name of expediency. Sherman's famous order on his march from Atlanta to the Sea, to "forage liberally on the country," was converted into a license for indiscriminate plunder by the troops. The Confederacy eventually raised foraging to a legal edifice by permitting field commanders to raise "taxes in kind" from its civilian population, payable in government script.

The concept of chivalry, carried over from earlier time, was manifest early in the war. During the parlaying for the surrender of Ft. Sumpter in April, 1861, an aide to Major Anderson jokingly complained that the garrison's supply of cigars was running low. On their next trip to the Fort, the Confederate negotiators brought not only a supply of cigars, but several cases of claret as well. But by the end of the war, such polite decorum had waned, but not disappeared.

Cruelty and callousness are, of course, part of the human condition during war. But so are acts of chivalry, humanity, and friendliness. That latter spirit was frequently displayed during the war by musical serenades which both sides sponsored. During the siege of Fredericksburg, a Union band on the northern side of the Rappahannock River played a series of patriotic tunes, to the delight of Union troops. Across the river came the shouts from Johnny Reb, "Now give us some of our own." The Union band followed with "My Maryland," "Bonnie Blue Flag," and "Dixie." During the Union siege of Atlanta, a Confederate soldier played on his coronet such ballads as "Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming," "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls," and other tunes. Both armies honored his skill by holding their fire and listening.

At Murfreesboro, both confederate and Union musicians engaged one another the evening before the battle. The Federal band played 'Yankee Doodle," "Hail Columbia," and other war songs. The Rebel band played a medley of Southern tunes. After exchanging several tunes, one of the bands struck up "Home, Sweet Home." The other band joined in. Within moments, thousands of voices on both sides of the lines reverberated with the words of the cherished song, and for a few brief moments the animosities of war faded.

The extent of such acts of humanity was enough to cause officers on both sides to constantly discourage fraternization with the enemy, but to no avail. During the lull of battle, both sides frequently sent flags of truce across the lines to give time for tending the wounded and burying the dead. During such lulls, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank met, talked, smoked together, swapped war stores and traded coffee, tobacco and liquor, all on the best possible terms. The next day they met in combat, cursing and killing their opponent.

Again, in 1864, after Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November a National Day of Thanksgiving, the Union troops from their trenches at Petersburg were served up 120,000 chicken and turkey dinners. The Confederate troops, themselves on short rations of hardtack, held their fire in honor of the feast.

The average soldier in 1861 was twenty-five years of age. Although the minimum legal age was 18, Union records reflect some 100,000 enlistees 15 years or younger, some as young as 9 years old. Billy Yank stood five feet eight and one half inches and weighed just under 144 pounds. His chance of dying in combat was one in 65; his change of dying of disease, one in thirteen; his chance of being wounded, one in ten.

Food rations were appalling. Union troops were issued beans, bacon, pickled beef, dried mixed vegetables, and hardtack - the army's substitute for bread. Coffee was the preferred drink. Soldiers were required to crush the beans with their rifle butts, and drank an average of four pints a day of a brew "strong enough to float an iron wedge," as one soldier put it. Southern troops lived, constantly on short supplies, often ate sloush, a brew of corn meal and bacon fat kneaded into a roll, wrapped around a musket barrel and held over the fire until done. Official rations consisted of a pint of corn and ¼ lb of meat per day.

Troops in both armies drank to excess. When liquor could not be bought, it was brewed. One Union recipe called for a mixture of turpentine, bark juice, alcohol, tar water, lamp oil and brown sugar. Southern troops sometimes dropped raw meat into the mixture, allowing it to ferment a month to yield, as one soldier put it, "an old and mellow flavor."

Union General George McClellan frequently raged against drunkenness in the ranks, but could do little more than that. Most of the general corps drank; several, such as Grant and Hooker did so frequently to excess. At the siege of Petersburg in 1864, Union General James H. Ledlie was relieved after being found with a bottle of rum, inside a bomb-proof shelter while his men attacked Confederate lines. And what was true of the command was also true of the field and company grade officers. From his camp in Washington, D. C. one solder wrote home the following,

Captain Catlin, Captain Hulburt, Lieutenant Cooper and one or two other officers are under arrest. A hundred men are drunk, a hundred more are at houses of ill fame, and the balance are everywhere....Colonel Alford is very drunk all the time now.

Southern troops could average 25 miles a day in a forced march, despite the habitual lack of boots in that army. When forced to march on Maryland's improved roads however, thousands were forced out with blisters and burnt feet. Northern troops with boots that came in three standard sizes (and no distinction between Left and right foot) could average no better. In addition, Northern troops went into battle in woolen uniforms, since Southern cotton was cut off. The campaigns, which usually began in April and ended in October, created an unusually high rate of dehydration and heat stroke among Union troops.

Yet the morale of Johnny Reb and Bill Yank proved remarkably high throughout the war. Several factors account for this. The raising of armies was conducted at the local, rather than the national or state level. Regiments were composed largely of volunteers from local cities or counties. Local philanthropists were expected, and did, expend private funds to outfit the regiments. In the South, cavalrymen provided their own horses. Officers up to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel were democratically elected by the troops. Once under fire, the soldier’s physical fear of dying was compensated by the equal or greater fear of losing the respect of those with whom he had grown up with and would live with after the war. Unit cohesion, an ill defined and intangible, but universally recognized military asset, was high on both sides of the war. The 10th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment was typical in this respect. Composed entirely of men from Flint, it was under the command of the Mayor and its Regimental Physician had taken care of most of the boys since they were born.

The exceptionally high loss of life experienced in the four years of fighting, which claimed more lives than all other American wars before and up to the Vietnam War, can be accounted for by two simple factors. In the 1850's a Frenchman had perfected a bullet whose powder did not clog a rifle's spiraled muzzle grooves. These new rifles, manufactured by Springfield and Enfield in the North, spun the bullet out of the muzzle, giving it increased accuracy over the old smooth bore muzzle loaders used in earlier war. Whereas a smooth bore rifle had an effective range of 80 yards, a rifled Enfield or Springfield had an effective range of 300 yards. Both the smooth bore and the rifled musket had a rate of fire of about three rounds per minute. But the number of rounds which a soldier could get off at the enemy advancing from 300 yards meant a quantum leap in effective fire power. The results were casualty lists that forced the Union war department twice to search for new national buying grounds.

Military tactics did not keep up with this simple technological innovation. The officers who led both Rebel and Union troops had been trained at West Point in tactics taken from the Napoleonic Wars of the 1790-1815 period when smooth bore muskets dominated the battlefield. Advancing troops were expected to close with the enemy, firing one or two volleys and then charge with bayonets fixed. The results of such tactics made most battles short. But the rifled musket and cannon changed battlefield tactics.

In Pickett's famous charge of the center of the Union line at Gettysburg, 1,700 Union troops and 11 cannon decimated 13,500 advancing Confederates crossing over one mile of open ground, exposed to the concentrated fire of the relatively few Union troops in front. Over half of the Confederate forces fell within a matter of thirty minutes during that assault at Gettysburg. In one of the minor ironies of the war, the 20th Maine, which the day before had repulsed the Confederate charge at Little Round Top, had been moved to the center of the Union line - for rest and recovery. It was there to meet Pickett's Division when it advanced across the field.

Increased firepower and the increased range of weapons changed the face of battle. Bayonet charges were rare and hand-to-hand combat almost unknown. The defenders held the upper hand in all engagements. Nine out of 10 infantry assaults failed during the course of the war.

STRATEGY: NORTH AND SOUTH

Tactics deals with the wise deployment of troops in combat. Strategy deals with the over-all plan for ultimate success. Both sides developed their strategic plans only slowly. Overwhelmed by the euphoria or surprise associated with the secession of the South, both sides armed for an immediate battle. Northern volunteers, responding to Lincoln's call, flooded Washington where General Irvin McDowell, the Union field commander, attempted to form them into a cohesive force.

An anxious president, observing that men in the army had only a three month obligation, he pressed for an attack. A reluctant McDowell argued that his troops were green. Lincoln replied that the rebel troops were green also. McDowell obeyed orders. On July 18, 1861, 37,000 Union troops headed for Richmond. In took them two and a half days to march 25 miles to Manassas, Virginia where Confederate forces were gathering to protect a rail juncture. Hundreds of civilians from Washington preceded the Union Army, bringing with them binoculars, picnic baskets and wine. There to meet the Union forces were 22,000 Confederate troops under the command of General Beauregard, who established his headquarters in the farm house of one Wilmer McLean.

On Sunday morning, July 21, a little after 9:00 A.M., the battle began. By 2:00 P.M. the fighting seesawed back and forth. By 5:00 P.M. Union troops were withdrawing. The withdraw became a retreat. The retreat became a rout. The route degenerated into a panic. It was, called, "the great skedaddle." Had the Confederate forces been prepared, they could have walked into Washington and taken the city. But the southern army was almost as disorganized as the forces they faced. McDowell was right. His troops were green. Lincoln was right. The enemy’s troops were green also, but less green.

The first lesson of war was learned. It was not going to be a short one. Lincoln soon signed legislation calling for 100,000 additional troops to serve for three years. The second lesson of the Battle of Bull Run was that the war would require a strategy. One existed on paper, having been drawn up by General Winfield Scott and called the Anaconda Plan. This called for a Union blockade of Southern ports and splitting the Confederacy by control of the Mississippi River. That plan, plus the pressing need to secure the border states, particularly Kentucky and Missouri, guided Union strategy after Bull Run.

Using Cairo, Illinois as a base of operations, a Union army under Ulysses S. Grant was created to guarantee retention of Kentucky and Missouri in 1861. To accomplish this, Grant captured two strategic forts on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. He then headed south to attack Corinth Mississippi, a major railroad junction. A Confederate army met the Union forces before they arrived at their destination in an area so rural that local maps made reference to a single church, called Shiloh, meaning Peace. At Shiloh 77,000 soldiers engaged. After the battle, 23,000 were casualties, but Grant prevailed. Not only did the Confederates evacuate Corinth, but effectively surrendered Tennessee as well. They also opened the back door of New Orleans to an am invasion from the North.

In order to oppose Grant's invasion, the Confederacy had stripped their defenses as far south as New Orleans, leaving that key city guarded by only 3,000 militiamen. Anticipating this, a combined land and naval force under General Benjamin Butler and Admiral David G. Farragut took New Orleans late in April, 1862, and quickly captured Baton Rouge and Natchez upstream on the Mississippi River. By June of that year, only one Confederate force stood between Butler's Union forces in Louisiana and Grant's Union forces at Corinth. That force was at Vicksburg, Mississippi. But taking that fort would require a year for the men and supplies to be mobilized. Events in the Eastern theater would meanwhile overshadow those along the Mississippi Valley.

Southern strategy was simple. Avoid defeat and wait until the casualty rates and the cost of the war rose high enough to convince the North to sue for peace. In developing this strategy, the Confederacy placed high hopes upon European recognition and even intervention in the war. Such hopes were note ill conceived. In an earlier conflict called "The American Revolution of 1776," outside intervention had occurred, and was decisive.

In 1865, France, under Napoleon Bonaparte III dreamed of restoring the French North American empire in Mexico. He had reason to welcome the Civil War and a permanent division of the United States. Britain, it was argued, was still smarting from the events of 1776-1783 and would welcome the defeat of the Union. Finally, in influencing European diplomacy, the South had cotton. Cotton, it was argued, was indispensable for the textile mills of both Britain and France. Eighty percent of the cotton used in British mills came from the South. Without it, economic privation at an intolerable level would force British and French recognition and assistance in the Confederate cause.

Briefly it appeared that such reasoning was correct. Early in the war, the Confederacy dispatched two emissaries, James Mason and John Slidell to Britain and France respectively. Traveling on a British ship, the Trent, they were intercepted by a Union warship, without authorization, and both were seized. A diplomatic crisis erupted, with the British Prime Minister making some heated references causing Lincoln to release the pair. "One war at a time," Lincoln cautioned.

But in the long run, hope for European intervention based on "cotton diplomacy," proved to be in vain. Although the Confederacy imposed a form of boycott on cotton exports, planters had other thoughts. Like their Puritan counterparts in earlier wars on the North American continent, Southern cotton growers widely evaded the ban until the Union blockade eventually tightened and did what the Confederacy could not accomplish.

Then too, the war came at a moment when European cotton stocks were at an all time high, due to bumper crops in 1860. Finally, Egyptian and Indian cotton were coming onto the world market, just in time to fill the gap. Although some 400,000 English workers were directly impacted by the shortage of cotton, it proved not enough to cause Britain to extend diplomatic recognition, much less intervention in the Southern cause.

In only one area of diplomacy did the South find success. Although British law prohibited the sale of warships to belligerents, Confederate commissioners contrived to have 18 ships built in British ship yards, and outfitted them with guns elsewhere. These commerce raiders saw action in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans where they wrecked havoc on Union commerce. By 1864 most Union merchantmen were converting to foreign flags and after the war, American merchant tonnage never achieved the status it had held before that conflict.

Of course, none of this was apparent to Lincoln or the Union in 1861 and 1862. And Union defeats at Bull Run and later during the Peninsular campaign of 1862 created exaggerated fears in Washington that European recognition would be forthcoming. From London, Henry Adams, the U.S. Minister, reported on rumors of an impending British change of policy. From Paris, the American minister to France noted an expedition of the French Foreign Legion to Mexico. Other problems faced the Union as well.

Lincoln's first problem was finding a competent general. After Bull Run, Lincoln had replaced McDowell with General George B. McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac. A West Point graduate with prior service in the Mexican-American War, a master of railroad communications and able administrator, McClellan was also adored by the troops. He quickly turned the mob that had retreated from Bull Run into a disciplined military force.

But McClellan had one fault. He was cautious. Constantly overrating the enemy forces before him in every campaign in which he served, he spent an inordinate amount of time in preparation and planning, to the consternation of Lincoln. In the spring of 1862, McClellan attempted an offensive against Richmond from the side door. Rather than march South from Washington as McDowell had done one year earlier, McClellan moved the Army of the Potomac by water to the York and James Rivers east of the Confederate capital. Strategically the plan had merit. With the Union navy supreme in the Chesapeake, supplies would be assured, and the Union army would be in a position to not only invade Richmond, but cut Confederate supply lines South to that capital. First, however, was the small matter of removing a Confederate naval force from mouth of the Chesapeake.

At Hampton Roads, Virginia, an abandoned U.S. naval base, Confederates had raised a scuttled frigate, Merrimack, bolted iron plates upon her, mounted 10 guns to port and starboard, and produced the most formidable warship in the Western Hemisphere. News of its construction had reached Washington, and caused a near panic. Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles approached John Ericsson, a Swedish-born inventor to come up with a counterpart. Ericsson, a cranky if brilliant inventor, was still smarting over fees he felt he had been cheated out of by the navy. Welles had to beg him to gain cooperation. What Ericsson did was come up with the most original design in the history of naval architecture, a ship slung dangerously close to the water line with only two guns mounted in a turret, all built entirely of iron. It looked something like a cheese box floating on a shingle according to one observer. Ericsson's reputation had suffered ever since 1844 when his experimental gun had exploded on board the Princeton, during its christening, killing, among other, Abel P. Upshur, Secretary of State. Many in the Lincoln administration were critical of the decision to employ him now.

One hundred and one days after accepting the commission, on January 30, 1862, John Ericsson's creation slid into Manhattan's East River, carrying with her the results of forty-seven patented devices. With no time for a shake-down cruise to eliminate the inevitable "bugs," the Monitor, as it was named, plowed through snow storms and heavy seas towards Hampton Roads, some 400 miles away.

On Saturday, March 8, the Merrimack left her dock at Hampton Roads to engage the Union blockading fleet. She took dead aim on the fifty-gun frigate Cumberland, the most powerful conventional ship in the squadron. Using her ram, the Merrimack sent U.S.S. Cumberland to the shallow bottoms. She then turned on the U.S.S. Congress, setting it afire, and forced the U.S.S. Minnesota to ground herself. The Confederate ironclad then retired for the night.

At one A.M. the crew aboard Minnesota, drinking coffee and eating cheese and crackers, saw another vessel draw up alongside. As though out of a work of fiction, where victory is snatched out of the jaws of defeat at the last moment, the Monitor had arrived.

Six hours later, at dawn, the Merrimac appeared and headed for the grounded Minnesota to finish off what had been started the day before. What their crew saw was a strange object: no sails, no wheels, no smokestack, no guns were visible. But it was coming at them.

For the next four hours the two ships fired away at one another. Eventually the Merrimac withdrew undamaged, but fatigued and running low on ammunition. Watching from the bridge of the grounded Minnesota, its captain observed that "wooden vessels cannot contend successfully with iron-clad ones, for never was anything like it dreamed of by the greatest enthusiast in maritime warfare." The Merrimac did not appear the next day, and was scuttled two months later when the Confederates were forced to evacuate Norfolk.

In Europe, foreign offices and naval departments watched in worried fascination as the Union set about building more Monitors. Each recognized that every other navy in the world was now, or soon to be, obsolete. But closer at home, the elimination of the Merrimack, opened the way for McClellan’s' Peninsular campaign.

On April 4, 1862, the campaign began. McClellan and 121,500 men, 14,592 horses and mules, 1,150 wagons, and 44 batteries of artillery set out for Ft. Monroe at the mouth of the James River. It took 400 Union vessels the better part of three weeks to move the Union Army into position there. To meet them were mere 11,000 Confederate troops, dug in at Yorktown under General Magruder.

The difference between effective strategy and tactics is execution, a gap all too apparent in The Peninsula Campaign. This fiasco saw McClellan hesitate when he should have advanced, appeal for reinforcements when his troops already outnumbered the enemy, and refuse to accept casualties when the enemy was prepared to do so. General Robert E. Lee, newly appointed commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia lost twice as many men as did the Union Army under McClellan in the vital "Seven Day's Battle" during the campaign. But it was McClellan who lost his nerve.

Bobby Lee, as he was universally called by friend and foe alike, (but always out of his hearing) had his first field command of the war in the spring of 1862 facing McClellan. He was still something of an unknown to the average Johnny Reb. A promising engineer, Porter Alexander, in the confederate forces, asked an older officer, Colonel Joseph Ives, who had served under Lee earlier in the war, about the general’s fighting spirit. Ive’s reply was pointed: "Alexander, if there is one man in either army, Confederate or Federal, head and shoulders above every other in audacity, it is General Lee! His name might be Audacity. He will take more desperate chances, and take them quicker than any other general in this country, North or South…" Lee’s audacity paid off. The Union army retreated to Washington once more, leaving Lee free to move North once again and inflict yet another defeat upon Union forces at the Second Battle of Bull Run.

Emboldened by this exploit, Lee's army crossed into Maryland in September, 1862 where he again met McClellan's forces at the little town of Sharpsburg. McClellan not only had the advantage of size, (95,000 to 18,000 at one point) but of military intelligence as well. On September 13, a Union corporal found three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper near Frederick where the Confederates had camped. The paper contained Lee's battle orders, which revealed he had divided his forces, making them vulnerable to attack. Yet, even armed with this, McClellan did nothing for the next sixteen hours. After the war, an aide to General Lee recalled of the Battle of Sharpsburg:

There was a single item in our advantage, but it was an important one. McClellan had brought superior forces to Sharpsburg, but he had also brought himself.

September 17, 1862 was to be the bloodiest day in American history, taking a toll of life never before or since exceeded, including June 7, 1944 – D Day – the invasion of Europe during W.W.II. Eighteen generals were killed during this three day battle, nine Northern and nine Southern. Almost 25% of the Confederate forces were killed, wounded, or missing, and union casualties were numerically higher than those of the Confederacy. Technically, the battle was a draw. But in the end, Lee retreated. Lincoln hurried to the battle site to urge McClellan to follow up on the victory. McClellan agreed, or so the President thought. Twenty-five days later, McClellan's army was still in camp. Lincoln sent a one-sentence message to McClellan: "If you don't want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while." Not receiving a satisfactory answer, Lincoln removed McClellan.

Lincoln's next choice was Ambrose E. Burnside, whose main accomplishment to that point was in growing his famous side-whiskers. Burnside, it must be said, had been honest enough to twice before turn down the responsibility on the grounds he felt unfit for high command. Now called to a high position that exceeded his ability, Burnside proved the same by advancing South from Sharpsburg, Maryland in pursuit of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. The two met just west of Fredericksburg, Virginia in December, 1862.

The Confederate forces had seized the high ground just outside the city. Union forces attacked from the level ground below on December 13th. By the end of the day, 9,000 of their forces lay dead on those plains. At one point on the field of battle, the 20th Maine Regiment pinned down at the base of the heights waited for darkness to fall. Night finally came. The temperature fell below freezing and a stiff wind picked up. The field of battle fell silent. As Joshua L. Chamberlain later recounted,

But out of that silence, rose new sounds more appalling

still; a strange ventriloquism of which you could not

Located the source; a smothered moan, as if a thousand

discords were flowing together into a key note - weird,

unearthly, terrible to hear and bear - yet startling with

its nearness; a rising concord broken by cries for help;

some begging for a drop of water, some calling on God for

pity, and some for friendly hands to finish what the

enemy had so horribly begun.

The Union army suffered 12,000 casualties in 14 futile assaults at the Battle of Fredericksburg against entrenched Confederate forces. A weeping General Burnside eventually ordered a withdrawal north of the Rappahannock River and was relieved of command at his own request. The President finally took him at his word.

In the spring of 1863, Joseph Hooker, Burnside's replacement, took over control of the Army of the Potomac that still just north of the Rappahannock outside Fredericksburg. Now with 120,000 men strong, Hooker attempted to strike Lee's army from the rear by marching the bulk of his troops upstream, crossing the river and encircling the Confederates. But Lee was not to be outsmarted. Although outnumbered nearly two to one, and risking certain defeat by dividing his forces, Lee sent General Jackson around the flank of Hooker's army as it crossed the river. It was the Confederate army that struck from the rear - and it was Hooker's army that was thrown into confusion. The Battle of Chancelorsville saw 17,000 Union dead. But it cost the Confederacy 13,000 and the loss of Lee’s best commander, General Thomas Jackson.

From Slavery to Emancipation

A second problem that gnawed at the President in the opening years of the war was that of slavery. Although officially the war was being pursued by the North to preserve the Union, it was increasingly apparent that the institution of slavery would not survive the outcome of the war, regardless of who won. Wherever the Union army appeared, a second army formed. This one consisted of runaway slaves. Initially, the Union treated these slaves as contraband - enemy property subject to seizure. They were "seized" and then put to work behind the lines.

Congress made this policy official in August, 1861 when it passed the first Confiscation Act, authorizing the seizure of slaves, but saying nothing about their status. Both Lincoln and Congress were cautious, and for good reasons. Four slave states remained in the Union, requiring that Washington walk softly on the issue. Then too there were legal considerations. Slave owners were still protected by the Constitution. Finally, throughout the North, there was a rising tide of criticism, generally headed by dissident Democrats, ready to take advantage of popular prejudice should a change in any policy be apparent.

In the meantime, the Union Army had the immediate problem of doing something with the runaway slaves. Secretary of War Simon Cameron had a solution. He proposed that the Union free the slaves of rebels and enlist them as soldiers. Since he made his proposal public, creating a tide of criticism, Cameron was removed from the Cabinet. But Cameron was only ahead of policy by a few months.

In July, 1862, Congress authorized the enlistment of all blacks, free or slave, into the military and declared all slaves whose owners supported the rebellion to be free. Military recruitment and the pressing demand for manpower had finally determined the issue. Congress, not the President (who had initially opposed the Bill) had taken the first step toward emancipation.

Lincoln’s attitude toward emancipation was heightened greatly by Union losses in the disastrous Peninsula campaign of the spring of 1862. A Union army of 120,000, well drilled, well supplied and under a popular commander had been bested by the Confederate forces. One thing was clear to the President, the available manpower was insufficient to do the job. And in reflecting upon this, he also came to realize what an asset slavery was to the Confederacy. Slaves dug entrenchments and performed other military chores. They raised the food and forage that went to the Confederate armies or slipped out of the blockade and were traded for foreign arms. On the other side of the ledger was the fact that Northern enthusiasm for prosecuting the war was beginning to wane. Enlistments were down and after the Peninsula debacle desertion was on the rise. One solution, and the most obvious, was to bring slaves into the fight – on the side of the Union.

But Lincoln had to move slowly. After all, slave states were still in the Union. So, Lincoln moved slowly. In July, 1862, he proposed, off record, a plan of compensated emancipation in those states, pointing out that the cost to the federal government would be the equivalent of only 87 days of making war at current expenditures. But no state came forward to accept the proposal. Thus on July 22, 1862, the President announced to his cabinet his decision to issue a proclamation which he had been preparing and reduced to a draft. The heats of it was contained in its last sentence: "And, as a fit and necessary military measure," (based on his authority as c-in-c, as of January 1, 1863) "all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained, shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free."

Some 185,000 African-Americans eventually served in the Union Army, most being former slaves.

The South too came to recognize that the need for soldiers required abandoning the slave system. By 1864, members of the Confederate Congress were debating a proposal to offer freedom to slaves who volunteered for active duty in the Southern forces. By April, 1865, with Confederate forces reduced to less than 100,000 and facing Union forces of more than one million, the Confederate government gave way. Thus, civilians in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, witnessed two companies of black troops training in the public parks and commons of that city in preparation for duty in the trenches twenty miles away.

War has its ironies. The South had over 250,000 free blacks at the start of the war. Assuming as most students unfortunately do, that blacks in the South were a homogeneous class, it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the class differences that existed, and the impact these had upon free blacks caused many, particularly among the more affluent, rallied to the Confederate cause.

The elite among free blacks in the South modeled themselves upon the plantation aristocracy, with whom many were (illegimately of course) related. Thus in cities such as New Orleans and Charleston, the relatively wealthy, well-educated, and lighter skinned black elites came to share the social and political outlook of white planters. These blacks lived in elegant houses, intermarried among themselves, kept slaves as domestic servants, and maintained an appropriately wide distance between themselves and poor blacks. Thus, when war came, free blacks raised funds for the Confederacy, helped recruit blacks for work on fortifications and organized military units that saw active service, although none saw combat.

Manpower needs are always critical in time of war. Both the North and the South responded to wartime shortages by turning to the draft. After the first flush of volunteers had rushed to the colors, conscription was adopted by both sides. The Confederacy was the first to feel the pinch and in April, 1862, enacted the first conscription law. All able bodied men between 18 and 45 were inducted into the military for three years. Those already in service were extended for the duration of the conflict. A loop hole in the law exempted an owner or overseer of twenty (later fifteen) or more slaves, causing critics to conclude that it was "a rich man's war but a poor man's fight." Another loophole exempting teachers of twenty or more students provoked an educational renaissance.

Less than a year later, the Union followed suit. In March, 1863, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, making able bodied males between 20 and 45 eligible for the draft. Like the Southern conscription law, this one in the North also contained a major loop hole. Those who could find a substitute or pay a commutation fee of $300 to the government were exempt. Apparently in the North as in the South, it was to be "a rich man's war but a poor man's fight." Two future presidents, Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland, hired substitutes. The fathers of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt also hired substitutes.

Yet few men were actually drafted. Both the Confederate and the Union laws were geared to encouraging enlistment. Throughout the North, enrollment districts offered generous bounties to enlistees, creating a wave of corruption as well as fresh inductees. Bounty hunters appeared by the hundreds. One managed to enlist 32 times before he was apprehended. Consequently only 46,000 conscripts were raised, along with 118,000 substitutes in the North. That was less than 10% of Union troops. In the South, less than 20% of the men serving were of that status.

Manpower requirements then eventually forced the issue of emancipation. "The inexorable logic of events," as Frederick Douglass predicted in 1861, forced emancipation upon the Union.

By 1862, Lincoln was moving towards that policy. In March of that year he proposed compensated emancipation in the border states. Within two months, Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia with compensation to their masters, and abolished it in the territories without compensation.

In July, 1862, Lincoln broached the subject of complete emancipation to the cabinet. Despite objections from that body, the reasons for Lincoln's proposal were patent. Slave labor bolstered the Confederate cause. Emancipation, would bolster the manpower requirements of the North, and by adding a moral element to Union war aims, improve morale. Further, this act would ensure that neither Britain nor France would recognize the Confederacy.

Thus on September 22, 1861, Lincoln announced that as of January 1, 1863, all slaves within the rebellious states were declared to be "thence foreward and forever free." And on January 1 of that year, acting under the war powers, Lincoln fulfilled that promise, and in the same message reaffirmed to blacks the opportunity to enlist in the military.

The reality of emancipation of course was far removed from the proclamation. Tennessee and the occupied parts of Virginia and Louisiana were exempted, as were those slave states still in the Union. From a cynic’s point of view then, Lincoln had freed all slaves over which he had no power and kept in bondage those over whom he did have power. But cynics miss two points. First, as the historian Benjamin Quarles noted, "the unfree never bother to read the fine print." Second, The Emancipation changed the war from a fight to preserve the Union into a revolution to overthrow the status quo in the South. And by doing so, it changed forever the nature of the Union. Cynics should also remember as another historian, Ray Ginger has noted, "Lincoln's task was literally impossible: to lead a self-contradictory nation to fight a bloody war for a revolutionary objective that nobody believed in."

Eventually, African Americans served in the Union forces, accounting for about 10% of the total. Over 40,000 gave their lives. Although utilized primarily for field work, blacks figured prominently in a few engagements, including Port Hudson, Fort Pillow, Brice's Cross Roads and the Crater. Some 23 were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Their presence on the battle field marked the realization of the greatest fear of Southerners - slaves who were armed. Antipathy toward Billy Yank by Johnny Reb was common enough, but toward Negroes in blue, darker sentiments prevailed throughout the Confederate Armies.

Confederate troops considered captured black soldiers to be rebels and contraband, and not prisoners-of-war. Their fate was to be returned to the condition of bond servitude. But many black troops who surrendered were never captured. In April, 1864, a small battle at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, then held by 537 black troops and a unit of Tennessee unionists saw surrendered black troops murdered by Confederates under order from General N. B. Forrest. The General later explained his reasons: "It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with southerners."

The "demonstration" General Forrest referred to was of no avail. "The inexorable logic of events," spoken of by Frederick Douglas prevailed. On January 31, 1865, congress voted to send the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, to the several states of the Union. The following day by coincidence, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court admitted a Massachusetts lawyer, John Rock, the first black to be so honored, to practice before it.

FINANCING THE WAR

Raising and supplying forces such as those engaged in the battles between 1861 and 1865 proved the inadequacy of Jefferson's philosophy of state's rights and Republicanism more than did the War of 1812. Federal expenditures before the war had averaged a mere 2% of the gross national product of the nation. The average American experienced personal contact with the federal government only through the post office and once every two years when he voted for representatives and electors. War changed both the variable of taxation and the intrusion of government into the lives of its citizens.

Relying, as it had, upon the collection of a tariff for federal financing, the Union found its usual source of revenue greatly diminished. The Morrill Tariff, passed by Congress in 1862, increased rates dramatically, but commercial disruption played havoc with revenue. The Union was forced to turn to alternatives. Excise taxes and the nation's first income tax were enacted. But they brought in only 21% of the Union's wartime expenditures.

By 1862, the Union was printing paper money known as greenbacks, not redeemable in either gold or silver. Eventually $431 million of this "legal tender" paper money was issued. The sale of government bonds, at 6% interest brought in more than taxes, but only after 1864 when the National Banking Act created a new banking system whose members were required to invest part of their capital in government bonds. And it left the Union with a national debt of some $2 billion after the war.

In the South, Confederate President Jefferson Davis attempted to forge a nation out of the eleven states, all of which suspected even the most trivial move toward centralized power. The state of Georgia in particular, maintained a haughty independence, refusing orders from Richmond to the point that its Governor refused to even honor a day of fasting called for by Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Its Governor even threatened secession from the Confederacy at one point.

Raising resources proved to be the bane of the Confederacy. Land taxes were resorted to. But, like the North, the South did not raise a significant amount by taxation, a mere 5% of expenditures. Reluctant to dampen war time patriotism, the South, like the North, looked for alternatives to taxes. The Confederacy too experimented with paper money, which triggered inflation at a rate of 9,000% by wars end. Confederate printing on the notes issued was so poor that frequently counterfeiters were caught by virtue of the superiority of their type set. In desperation, The Confederacy, in effect, turned to confiscation. Farmers were called upon to "contribute" one-tenth of needed goods and slaves were conscripted for labor. In response to the latter, slave owners moved over 150,000 slaves into Texas to escape their impressments.

THE TURNING POINT

At the end of 1862, and into the spring of 1863, Confederate victories multiplied. As earlier noted, Union General Burnside had been defeated at Fredericksburg in December, 1862. His successor, General Joseph Hooker was routed at Chancellorsville, Virginia in May, 1863 despite having twice the number of troops as the Confederate forces.

That last victory caused the first deviation in the Southern strategy. General Robert E. Lee believed that a major Confederate victory on northern soil would influence the upcoming fall elections in favor of Northern Democrats who were increasing voicing a pro-peace policy. With this in mind, Lee moved 75,000 troops across the Potomac and north into Pennsylvania. General George E. Meade, Hooker's replacement, met Lee's forces in early July at the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The meeting was largely by chance. On July 1, an advanced guard of Confederate troops entered Gettysburg searching for a supply of shoes. In yet another of the ironies of war, they entered from the North. Union forces confronted them from the South. Suddenly, all forces in the vicinity converged. The Confederates pushed the first Union troops south of the town. In doing so they crossed the town cemetery, ignoring a posted sign stating "All persons found using firearms on these grounds will be prosecuted with the utmost rigor of the law."

As the Union forces dug into a defensive position, shaped like a hook, General Lee was left without the intelligence normally supplied him by General Stuart. Unaware of the full strength or complete disposition of the Union forces, Lee committed himself to battle.

On July 2, Lee attacked the Union flanks, including the Little Round Top held by the 20th Maine whose collective courage has been mentioned. A Union corps under General Daniel Sickles which had taken a position in front of the Union lines fared not so well. It was subjected to one of the most brutal artillery barrages of the war. When Union reinforcements advanced to assist, a gape opened in the Federal lines which the Confederates immediately sought to exploit. An Alabama brigade raced toward the gap. To close it, the 1st Minnesota Regiment, just 262 men strong, raced down a slope against 1700 Confederates. In a five minute exchange, all but 47 of the 1st Minnesota Regiment remained alive. 82% had fallen, the highest rate of casualties taken by any Union regiment during the war. But the gap was plugged.

On July 3, Lee elected to assault the center of the Union lines, the weakest point, but over the objection of his corps commander, General Longstreet who had been at the Battle of Fredericksburg and seen what rifled muskets could do to massed troops advancing in the open. Lee however, was adamant.

A Confederate artillery barrage opened up at 1:00 P.M, and after an hour bombardment, three divisions, some 13,000 troops, walking at the rate of 100 yards a minute, started out for the Union line one and a half miles away. The line of Confederates stretched for a half mile as it advanced. "It was," as one Union officer recalled, "the most beautiful thing I ever saw."

Union artillery opened up immediately. The guns planted on the left flank at Little Round top did exceptional good work in ripping gaps in the approaching lines. Behind a stone wall, Union troops waited until the first Confederate column to close to within 200 yards. Then 11 cannons and 1750 muskets opened up in a crescendo of fire that enveloped the Confederate lines. A survivor recalled seeing "men going down on their hands and knees, spinning round like tops, throwing out their arms, gulping blood, falling; legless, armless, and headless. There are ghastly heaps of dead men."

Half of the Confederate forces which began the assault were casualties. Fifteen out of fifteen regimental commanders in that charge were casualties. Sixteen out of seventeen field officers were casualties; as were three brigadier generals and eight colonels. It was the bloodiest battle of the war, the North having suffered 23,000 casualties, the South losing 28,000.

The twenty four hundred civilians of Gettysburg were overwhelmed with the wounded. The number of dead was so high that existing Union cemeteries could not hold them. Thus, for expediency, a new national cemetery was created at Gettysburg. Those who escaped the grave gave thanks. One Union private from his hospital a month later, wrote home to tell his father he had survived, thanks to his brother who had dragged him to an Ambulance station during the battle:

...I was wounded in two places: first through the hip, second, the ball entered the corner of my left eye and came out at the lower tip of my right ear, both are doing fine and healed up. Write to me. I may get the letter.

Your devoted son,

Albert Batchelor

Simultaneously to the Battle of Gettysburg, General U.S. Grant's attack upon Vicksburg, Mississippi, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, met with success. The twin victories proved to be the decisive turning point in the war. In the West, the Mississippi River was now under Union control, and the Confederacy was cut in twain. In the eastern theater, Lee's defeat at Gettysburg left the Confederacy without resources to assume any further major offensive operations.

LINCOLN FINDS HIS GENERAL

Early in 1864, President Lincoln finally found his general. Ulysses S. Grant replaced George E. Meade who had refused to follow up on his victory at Gettysburg by attacking Lee's retreating army. Grant received his third star, making him the nation's first Lieutenant General since G. Washington. His strategy was simple, and one that Lincoln approved immediately. Two offensive operations, one in the east under his personal command, the other in the West under William T. Sherman, would be launched simultaneously.

In May, 1864, Grant at the head of 118,000 men started South towards Richmond. Robert E. Lee met him with 64,000 troops and checked the Union army in a series of bloody engagements known as the Battle of the Wilderness. Grant swung his massive army south and east, trying to outflank Lee. Lee counter-flanked and checked the Union army at Spotsylvania and again at Cold Harbor. The Union army suffered staggering losses, 7,000 men in one hour at Cold Harbor. But by 1864, the Union war machine could replace these losses. The Confederate war machine could not. Grant continued to flank his troops to the east and the south, until they reached Petersburg, Virginia.

In the West, Sherman's Army of the Tennessee, numbering 98,000 advanced from Chattanooga into Georgia, opposed by 65,000 Confederate troops. After a series of engagements in which Confederate men and resources were drained, Atlanta was taken on September 2, 1864. After the fall of that city, Confederate resistance melted. Sherman, finding no army to oppose him, marched his army across Georgia to Savannah on the Atlantic Ocean, ordering his troops to burn every house, barn, bridge along a sixty mile path in a deliberate effort to break the South's will to fight. The Union army succeeded admirably. Savannah fell in December, 1864 and Sherman wheeled the Union army north into South Carolina.

While Sherman's army pushed North, Lee's forces at Petersburg, Virginia experienced the collapse of will that alone brings victory. Desertions in Confederate forces, proportionately about the same as in the Union army to this point, began to rise until it reached almost 200 per day in the winter of 1864-1865. As Lee's lines grew thinner, Grant's forces finally succeeded in flanking the Confederate Army. On April 2, 1865, the Confederate Government fled Richmond, hoping to reach Lynchburg, Virginia where it could use the rail junction to link up with the Confederate forces being pushed North by Sherman. On April 8, 1865, finding Union forces blocking his escape route, Lee asked for terms of surrender. Four days later, at the town of Appomattox, the formal surrender took place in the parlor of the home of one Wilmer McLean. Four years earlier, the McLean family occupied a farm outside of Manassas, Virginia, where Confederate General Beauregard had made his headquarters. One of the first cannon shots of the Battle of Bull Run had ripped through the wall of his house. Determined to escape future battles, McLean had moved his family to Appomattox, Virginia. In yet one more of the ironies of conflict, as he was later to say, the war began in his front yard and ended in his parlor.

That quip was not quite accurate. Three days after Lee surrender, General John B. Gordon, five times wounded during the course of the war, surrendered 20,000 Confederate troops. Receiving the surrender was Major General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain whose 20th Maine Infantry Regiment had been pinned down at the base of the heights at Fredericksburg, and who had held Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg. Chamberlain had been wounded six times during the course of the war, so severely at one point that his obituary appeared prematurely. He was now ready to resume his usual profession as Professor of Rhetoric at Bowdon College. On the high seas, a Confederate raider in the North Pacific continued operations until July when a British ship brought it news that the war had ended. But the war was effectively over after Appomattox.

In Washington, D. C., crowds gathered at the White House upon receiving news of Lee's surrender. A military band also appeared. Abraham Lincoln, too weary to make a formal speech, addressed the crowd with these few words:

I have always thought 'Dixie" one of the best tunes I ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted...that we fairly captured it.... I presented the question to the Attorney General and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize. I now request the band to favor me with its performance.

And so the Union band played "Dixie," as requested by the President in celebration of the end of the Civil War.