Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (70 page)

Below: U.S.S. Cairo
, one of "Pook's turtles," which fought on the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers until sunk by a Confederate "torpedo" in the Yazoo River near Vicksburg in December 1862

U.S. Army Military History Institute

Jefferson Davis

Library of Congress

Robert E. Lee

Library of Congress

Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson

Library of Congress

James E. B. "Jeb" Stuart

Library of Congress

Clara Barton

Library of Congress

Mary Anne "Mother" Bickerdyke

U.S. Army Military History Institute

Wounded soldiers and nurse at Union army hospital in Fredericksburg

Library of Congress

"Before" and "after" photographs of a young contraband who became a Union drummer boy

U.S. Army Military History Institute

Black soldiers seated with white officers and freedmen's teachers standing behind them

Library of Congress

sentimental," wrote southern diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut in June 1861. So far it was "all parade, fife, and fine feathers."
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Many people on both sides believed that the war would be short—one or two battles and the cowardly Yankees or slovenly rebels would give up. An Alabama soldier wrote in 1861 that the next year would bring peace "because we are going to kill the last Yankey before that time if there is any fight in them still. I believe that J. D. Walker's Brigade can whip 25,000 Yankees. I think I can whip 25 myself." Northerners were equally confident; as James Russell Lowell's fictional Yankee philosopher Hosea Biglow ruefully recalled:

I hoped, las' Spring, jest arter Sumter's shame
When every flagstaff flapped its tethered flame,
An' all the people, startled from their doubt,
Come musterin' to the flag with sech a shout,—
I hoped to see things settled 'fore this fall,
The Rebbles licked, Jeff Davis hanged, an' all.
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With such confidence in quick success, thoughts of strategy seemed superfluous. Responsible leaders on both sides did not share the popular faith in a short war. Yet even they could not foresee the kind of conflict this war would become—a total war, requiring total mobilization of men and resources, destroying these men and resources on a massive scale, and ending only with unconditional surrender. In the spring of 1861 most northern leaders thought in terms of a limited war. Their purpose was not to conquer the South but to suppress insurrection and win back the latent loyalty of the southern people. The faith in southern unionism lingered long.

A war for limited goals required a strategy of limited means. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott devised such a strategy. As a Virginia unionist, Scott deprecated a war of conquest which even if successful would produce "fifteen devastated provinces! [i.e., the slave states] not to be brought into harmony with their conquerors, but to be held for generations, by heavy garrisons, at an expense quadruple the net duties or taxes which it would be possible to extort from them." Instead of invading the South, Scott proposed to "envelop" it with a blockade by sea and a fleet of gunboats supported by soldiers along the Mississippi. Thus sealed off

27
. Wiley,
Billy Yank
, 27; Woodward,
Chesnut's Civil War
, 69.

28
. Alabamian quoted in McWhiney and Jamieson,
Attack and Die
, 170; Biglow in Nevins,
War
, I, 75.

from the world, the rebels would suffocate and the government "could bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan."
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