Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (40 page)

The number of war dead was equal to nearly 2 percent of the population at the time. Civilian casualties are difficult to measure, but James McPherson, the prominent Civil War historian, puts the number at more than 50,000, mostly in the South. (Using 2000 census figures of a population of some 280 million Americans, an equivalent loss today would be well more than 5.5 million dead.) Thousands more were critically wounded or disabled. A wave of syphilis, fostered by the thousands of young men who had frequented the many brothels that sprouted up in most cities during the war, was spread to many women.

But it is impossible to measure the cost in lives and dollars alone. A generation of America’s “best and brightest”—the young, well-educated, and motivated Americans on both sides—died. It is impossible to calculate the loss of their intelligence, invention, and productive potential. The deep animosity—regional and racial—that had been created in the wake of the bitter war would continue to bedevil American society and politics for most of the next 150 years.

Was Abe really honest?

After George Washington, no American president—or any American historical figure—has been draped in more mythic splendor than Abraham Lincoln. The Railsplitter. The Great Emancipator. Honest Abe. Assailed in office, nearly denied the nomination to a second term, vilified by the South, and martyred in death, Lincoln eventually came to be considered this country’s finest president. Was he?

Unlike other “log cabin” presidents of an earlier era, Lincoln was truly from pioneer family stock. His father was illiterate, his family dirt poor. After his mother’s death, his stepmother encouraged his bookishness and introduced him to the Bible. That was important. Without self-righteousness or false piety, Lincoln was a deeply spiritual man, and he needed every ounce of spiritual reserve for the trials he faced.

Lincoln was that quintessential American hero, the self-made man—reading law on his own, winning local election, gaining the Illinois bar and election to the House in 1847. He was unquestionably tall, at six feet four. And he could tell a good story around the general store—no small asset in American politics, as another, more recent president has shown. He was also honest, generally a political liability. Newsman John G. Scripps once remarked that Lincoln was “a scrupulous teller of the truth, too exact in his notions to suit the atmosphere of Washington as it now is.”

By modern American standards, Lincoln was a racist. By the standards of his day he was liberal, or, in the less polite phrase of the time, a “nigger lover.” Like other presidents who have achieved greatness, Lincoln grew in office. His grudging acceptance of slavery in the states where it existed was gradually replaced by the sentiment voiced in the Gettysburg Address, a recommitment to the Jeffersonian ideal that “all men are created equal.”

A melancholy man who suffered greatly, for both public and private reasons, Lincoln was faced with problems graver than those faced by any other president, and in his ability to bend the presidency to the exigencies of the day, he did things that modern presidents never could have done. While Congress was out of session, he created an army out of state militias, called up volunteers, blocked ports, and, most controversially of all, suspended the writ of habeas corpus in order to detain thousands without firm charges and due process of law. A breach of basic constitutional rights, this suspension was provided for, argued Lincoln, “in cases of rebellion or invasion.”

During the war, he faced opposition from one side by so-called Radical Republicans and abolitionists for his moderation toward slavery. More dangerous opposition came from the Peace Democrats, the remnants of the northern Democratic Party who were given the name Copperheads by a newspaper because they were so poisonous. Sympathetic to the South, the Copperheads wanted to stop the war and considered Lincoln a dictator for his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the draft acts, and even the Emancipation Proclamation.

Lincoln surmounted these challenges, winning the reelection that cost him his life. By the time of his assassination, Lincoln had moved from resolute commander-in-chief, prosecuting the war at horrendous costs, to healing unifier. While some called him a dictator, there is little doubt that a weaker president might have failed in the most basic test of Lincoln’s presidency—preserving the Union from dissolution.

Why did the Union win the war?

The simplest answer is that the Confederacy was fighting history, not just the Union. In many respects, the Confederate states fielded an eighteenth-century army to fight a nineteenth-century war against a twentieth-century power. And while the South fought ferociously, the numbers were finally too great for it.

Outmanned two to one, the Confederate armies were worn away by Grant’s woeful tactics of attrition. The successful blockade of southern ports reduced supplies of munitions, food, and other necessities to the point of bringing the South to starvation. The ultimate failure of the Confederacy to gain foreign recognition further weakened its prospects. The oft-cited superiority of southern military leadership overlooks two factors: the number of these commanders, like Stonewall Jackson, who died early in the conflict; and the rise of Grant and Sherman in the western war against the less brilliant Confederate commanders there. When Grant gained command of the army and Sherman began his march, their willingness to wage total war, matched with the manufacturing strength, wealth, and great population advantage of the North, simply proved too much for the South.

In retrospect, it was a war that also turned on a number of small moments, the speculative “ifs” that make history so fascinating. At a number of turning points, small things, as well as larger strategic decisions, might have changed the course of the war.

If McClellan hadn’t been given Lee’s battle plans at Antietam . . .

If Lee had listened to Longstreet at Gettysburg and attempted to outflank the Union troops . . .

If the 20th Maine hadn’t pushed back a rebel assault at Gettysburg with a bayonet charge . . .

The speculation is interesting but ultimately useless, because it didn’t happen that way, and any of those changes might simply have prolonged the inevitable.

Who killed Lincoln?

On Friday, April 14, 1865—Good Friday—Lincoln met with his cabinet and then lifted the blockade of the South. His mood was high in those days, and he was preaching moderation and reconciliation to all around him, preparing a moderate plan of reconstruction that would bring the rebellious states back into the Union fold with a minimum of recriminations and punishment. That evening he took his wife and a young couple they knew to see a play called
Our American Cousin
at Ford’s Theatre in downtown Washington. The Washington policeman guarding the president left his post, either for a drink or to get a better view of the play. There was a pistol shot. Lincoln slumped over. A man jumped from the president’s box to the stage, in the process catching his spur on the bunting that draped the box and breaking his shin. He brandished his gun and shouted either
“Sic semper tyrannis!”
(“Thus be it ever to tyrants.”) or “The South shall live.” Then he escaped through a back exit to a waiting horse.

A second assassin had assaulted Secretary of State William Seward at home with a knife. Attacks on General Grant and vice president Johnson were planned but never carried out. Lincoln was taken to a lodging house across the street from the theater, where he died the next morning, throwing the shocked nation into a profound grief of a kind it had never experienced before. Hated and derided during the war years by the Copperheads, Radical Republicans who thought him too moderate, and a host of other groups who found fault with him for one reason or another, Abraham Lincoln had become, in death, a hero of the entire nation. Even leaders of the Confederacy spoke of his death with regret.

Secretary of War Stanton took charge, and martial law was announced in Washington. The assassin, it was soon discovered, was John Wilkes Booth, an actor like his more famous father, Junius Brutus Booth, and his brother Edwin Booth. A fanatical supporter of the South—though he never joined the Confederate army—Booth first plotted with a small group of conspirators in a Washington boardinghouse to kidnap Lincoln. Then he planned instead to assassinate the president along with other key government figures.

An intensive, unprecedented manhunt followed in which a $50,000 reward was placed on Booth’s head and hundreds of people with any connection to the actor were arrested. Booth was finally trapped in a Bowling Green, Virginia, tobacco-drying barn on April 26 after the Union army was tipped off to his whereabouts. After Booth refused to surrender, the barn was set afire by a Union officer. Limping from his broken leg, Booth moved toward the barn door and was shot. He lived another two and a half hours; it was his twenty-seventh birthday.

A military tribunal sentenced four other captured conspirators, including boardinghouse owner Mary Surratt, to be hanged. Although conspiracy theories involving Jefferson Davis and most other prominent leaders of the Confederacy abounded in the press, they were all dismissed and disproven. Davis was captured and held for two years without trial, but eventually released to go home to write his version of events in the war. (Another more farfetched conspiracy theory had Secretary of War Stanton plotting Lincoln’s death, but it is completely unsupported by evidence.)

Must Read:
April 1865: The Month That Saved America
by Jay Winik.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

“O Captain! My Captain!” by
WALT WHITMAN
(from 
Memories of President Lincoln
):

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman (1819–92) was a self-educated son of a house builder. He learned the printing trade and edited newspapers in New York and Brooklyn between 1838 and 1855, the year in which produced the 12-poem first edition of
Leaves of Grass.
(By the time of his death, it included more than 350 poems.) Now considered a classic of original American literature, it was not thought so in antebellum America. Reviewers were shocked by his references to anatomy and “body electric.”

During the Civil War, he served as a “wound dresser,” or nurse, to soldiers in Union hospitals and camps, and his prose reports of the carnage he witnessed are extraordinary accounts of the suffering. In addition to “O Captain,” which the public liked but critics did not, Whitman wrote “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and two other elegies to the dead Lincoln.

“I have not gained acceptance in my own times,” he said himself before his death following a series of crippling strokes. But he would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest and most original of America’s poetic voices.

What was Reconstruction?

In the aftermath of the war, the southern states were devastated—physically, economically, even spiritually. The postwar South, it has been said, was worse off than Europe after either of the twentieth-century world wars. Provisional military governors were established in the rebellious states, but Lincoln’s plans for restoring the secession states to full membership in the Union were moderate and reconciliatory. Southerners could become citizens once more by taking a simple loyalty oath. When 10 percent of the citizens of a state had taken the oath, the state could set up a government. Radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Ben Wade of Ohio, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, wanted stricter terms, and the situation was at a standstill when Lincoln died and was succeeded by Andrew Johnson (1808–75).

Johnson’s life was an incredible American success story. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, perhaps even poorer than Lincoln, Johnson was the son of a hotel porter who died when the boy was three. He never attended school, and the impoverished Johnson family indentured him to a tailor, at nine years old. He ran away six years later and set up his own tailor shop in Greenville, Tennessee, at age seventeen. At eighteen, he married his sixteen-year-old wife, Eliza, and she later taught him to read, write, and do mathematics more effectively. He entered politics on a local level and devoted his energy to the free laboring class. Although he held slaves, he had no love for the South’s planter elite. A Jackson Democrat, he served as a U.S. representative, Tennessee’s governor, and senator from Tennessee, where he was one of the architects of the Homestead Act, which granted free public land to settlers. He campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860, but he stayed loyal to the Union after Lincoln’s election, the only senator from a seceding state to remain in Congress, proclaiming in 1861, “Show me the man who makes war on the government, and fires on its vessels, and I will show you a traitor.” In 1862, he was appointed military governor of Tennessee, and in 1864, Lincoln saw Johnson as a “war Democrat,” a loyal southerner who would help win votes in the border states. The choice was not widely applauded by northern Republicans. “To think that one frail life stands between this insolent, clownish creature and the presidency! May God bless and spare Abraham Lincoln,” said the
New York World
in 1865. Johnson did not help his cause when, because of an extreme case of the nerves, he had a few too many whiskeys before he was sworn in as Lincoln’s vice president, resulting in a rambling, drunken speech. One of the co-conspirators in the Lincoln assassination, George Atzerodt, had been assigned to target Johnson, and he stalked the vice president, but his courage failed at the last minute.