Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  59. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 414.

  60. Dabney, A Defense of Virginia, and Through Her, of the South (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle, 1977 [1867]), 103.

  61. James Henley Thornwell, “The Christian Doctrine of Slavery,” in The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974 [1875]), 4:405–6; Archibald Alexander Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1880), 463.

  62. Clarence C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), 113–27.

  63. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 451.

  64. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation, 113–27.

  65. Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” October 4, 1854, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy F. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:240–47.

  66. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 239–49.

  67. A court clerk misspelled John Sanford’s name as Sandford, and so the case appears as Scott v. Sandford in the court reports.

  68. A Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Opinion of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F. A. Sandford, December Term, 1856, comp. Benjamin C. Howard (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), 404, 423.

  69. At the time the Dred Scott decision was handed down, there was already a case working its way through the New York state courts involving eight Virginia slaves who claimed that a temporary stopover in New York City in 1852 had made them free under an 1817 New York state statute. This case, Lemmon v. New York, might have given Taney the opportunity to overturn every anti-slavery statute in the free states on the grounds that states did not have the right to regulate interstate commerce, and paved the way for the reintroduction of slavery into the free states. The case, however, did not reach the Supreme Court before the outbreak of the Civil War, and Taney never had the chance to hand down a companion ruling to Scott v. Sanford.

  70. Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” June 26, 1857, in Collected Works, 2:404.

  71. Mark A. Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31–32.

  1. Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857–1859 (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), 15–16, 19.

  2. Frank L. Owsley, “The Fundamental Cause of the Civil War: Egocentric Sectionalism,” Journal of Southern History 7 (February 1941): 16–17; James G. Randall, Lincoln the Liberal Statesman (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947), 175; Avery Craven, The Repressible Conflict, 1830–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939), 5, 94; David M. Potter, “The Literature on the Background of the American Civil War,” The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 93–98.

  3. Jimerson, The Private Civil War, 8–9.

  4. Bigelow, in Michael S. Green, Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party During the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 37.

  5. “Vain Hopes,” New Orleans Bee, December 14, 1860, in Southern Editorials on Secession, 336.

  6. James McPherson, “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question,” Civil War History 29 (September 1983): 243.

  7. Robert Taft, “The Appearance and Personality of Stephen A. Douglas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 21 (Spring 1954): 10–11, 16–17; Shelby Cullom, Fifty Years of Public Service: Personal Recollections (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1911), 62; Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 570–72; Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 379.

  8. Damon Wells, Stephen Douglas: The Last Years, 1857–1861 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 27.

  9. Lincoln, “Speech at Indianapolis, Indiana,” September 19, 1859, in Collected Works, 3:463.

  10. Sarah Bush Lincoln, interview with William Henry Herndon, September 8, 1865, in Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews and Statements About Abraham Lincoln, ed. R. O. Davis and D. L. Wilson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 107.

  11. Lincoln, “Speech at Kalamazoo, Michigan,” August 27, 1856, and “Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society,” September 30, 1859, in Collected Works, 2:364, 3:479; “Conversation with Hon. S. T. Logan at Springfield, July 6, 1875,” in An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays, ed. Michael Burlingame (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 36.

  12. Lincoln, “Speech in the Illinois Legislature Concerning the State Bank,” in Collected Works, 1:69.

  13. Gabor Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1978), 15–22, 30–31, 47, 59.

  14. Charles G. Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 47.

  15. Herndon to Jesse Weik, December 9, 1886, and to C. O. Poole, January 5, 1886, in The Hidden Lincoln, from the Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon, ed. Emanuel Hertz (New York: Viking, 1938), 124, 148.

  16. Lincoln, “Fragment: Notes for a Law Lecture,” July 1, 1850, in Collected Works, 2:81.

  17. Herndon to C. O. Poole and J. Henry Shaw, in The Hidden Lincoln, 119–20, 124, 305, 429; Davis, interview with William H. Herndon, September 20, 1866, and Swett to Herndon, January 17, 1866, in Herndon’s Informants, 168, 350.

  18. Herndon, in The Hidden Lincoln, 133; Lincoln, “To John D. Johnston,” December 24, 1848, in Collected Works, 2:16.

  19. Lincoln, “To John D. Johnston,” January 12, 1851, and “Speech in Independence Hall,” February 22, 1861, in Collected Works, 2:96–97, 4:240; Jason R. Jiveden, Claiming Lincoln: Progressivism, Equality, and the Battle for Lincoln’s Legacy in Presidential Rhetoric (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 20–21, 23.

  20. Lincoln Legal Briefs, October–December 1996 and April–June 1998; Mark E. Steiner, An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 17.

  21. Lincoln, “Speech at Cincinnati, Ohio,” September 17, 1859, and “Speech at New Haven, Connecticut,” March 6, 1860, in Collected Works, 3:459, 4:24; Harry E. Pratt, The Personal Finances of Abraham Lincoln (Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1943), 52–53, 82; “Lincoln’s Landholdings and Investments,” Abraham Lincoln Association Bulletin, September 1, 1929, 1–8; Whitney, in Jesse William Weik, The Real Lincoln: A Portrait (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 194.

  22. Robert Todd Lincoln to Isaac Markens, February 13, 1918, in A Portrait of Abraham Lincoln in Letters by His Oldest Son, ed. Paul Angle (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1968), 55; Lincoln, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” and “Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity,” in Collected Works, 1:115, 382; Lincoln to Josiah Grinnell, in Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 185.

  23. P. M. Zall, “Abe Lincoln Laughing,” in The Historian’s Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History, ed. G. S. Boritt and Norman Forness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 10; J. F. Farnsworth, in Recollected Words, 437–38.

  24. David Davis, interview with Herndon, September 20, 1866, in Herndon’s Informants, 350.

  25. Herndon to Jesse Weik, January 9, 1886, in The Hidden Lincoln, 131; Edgar Conkling to William Herndon, August 3, 1867, and Davis, interview with Herndon, September 20, 1866, in Herndon’s Informants, 349–50, 565.

  26. Lincoln, “Protest in the Illinois Legislature on Slavery,” March 3, 1837, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October 16, 1854, and “To Albert G. Hodges,” April 4, 1864, in Collected Works, 1:75, 2:282, 7:281.

  27. Lincoln, “Speech at Bloomington, Illinois,” September 12, 1854, in Collected Works, 2:232–33, 238.

 
; 28. Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October 16, 1854, and “Speech at New Haven, Connecticut,” March 6, 1860, in Collected Works, 2:255, 4:19.

  29. Lincoln, “Editorial on the Kansas-Nebraska Act,” September 11, 1854, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” July 17, 1858, “Speeches at Clinton, Illinois,” September 2, 1858, and “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October 16, 1854, in Collected Works, 2:229–30, 2:282, 2:514, 3:82.

  30. Lincoln, “To Lyman Trumbull,” December 28, 1857, in Collected Works, 2:430.

  31. “Republican State Convention of Illinois” (June 16, 1858), in The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, ed. E. Earle Sparks (Springfield, IL: Illinois State Historical Library, 1908), 22.

  32. Lincoln, “‘A House Divided’: Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” in Collected Works, 2:461–62, 465–66.

  33. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 640–41.

  34. Douglas, “Fifth Joint Debate,” October 7, 1858, in The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, ed. E. E. Sparks (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1908), 346.

  35. Douglas, “Third Joint Debate,” September 15, 1858, “First Joint Debate,” August 21, 1858, and “Second Joint Debate,” August 27, 1858, in The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, 95, 166, 223, 227.

  36. Douglas, “Second Joint Debate” with “Mr. Douglas’s Reply,” August 27, 1858, in Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 161.

  37. Lincoln, “Second Joint Debate,” August 27, 1858, and “Seventh Joint Debate,” October 15, 1858, in Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 152, 481.

  38. Lincoln, “Third Joint Debate,” September 15, 1858, in Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 230, 235.

  39. Lincoln, “Fragment on Slavery,” July 1, 1854, in Collected Works, 2:222.

  40. Lincoln, “First Joint Debate,” August 21, 1858, in Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 102.

  41. Lincoln, “Seventh Joint Debate,” October 15, 1858, in Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 482, 485.

  42. Richard Sewall, John P. Hale and the Politics of Abolition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 210.

  43. John Hay, diary entry for November 8, 1864, in Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, ed. Michael Burlingame and J. R. T. Ettlinger (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 244; Lincoln, “To Salmon P. Chase,” April 30, 1859, in Collected Works, 3:378.

  44. Buchanan, “Remarks, March 9, 1836, on the Reception of Petitions for the Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia,” in The Works of James Buchanan: Comprising His Speeches, State Papers and Private Correspondence, ed. James Bassett Moore (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1908), 3:26–27.

  45. George Ticknor Curtis, Life of James Buchanan: Fifteenth President of the United States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1883), 2:207.

  46. Jeriah Bonham, Fifty Years’ Recollections: With Observations and Reflections on Historical Events (Peoria, IL: J. W. Franks and Sons, 1883), 196–97.

  47. Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 440.

  48. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Knopf, 2005), 191.

  49. Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 366–67, 373–78; Thomas Goodrich, War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861 (Lincoln: University Press of Nebraska, 2004), 225.

  50. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (New York: Pathway Press, 1941), 249–51, 352–53.

  51. Merrill D. Peterson, John Brown: The Legend Revisited (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 6–7, 11; John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 258.

  52. Reynolds, John Brown: Abolitionist, 309–28.

  53. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 97; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 354.

  54. Brian McGinty, John Brown’s Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 257.

  55. Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 7; Malcolm C. McMillan, The Disintegration of a Confederate State: Three Governors and Alabama’s Wartime Home Front, 1861–1865 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 11; Simpson, A Good Southerner, 211–12.

  56. Dabney, Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson (New York: Blelock, 1866), 144.

  57. Garrison, “Speech of William Lloyd Garrison,” December 16, 1859, in Documents of Upheaval, 265–66.

  58. William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour, a Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 268; Davis, “Relations of the States,” February 2, 1860, Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st session, 658.

  59. J. P. Benjamin, Defence of the National Democracy Against the Attack of Judge Douglas (Washington, DC: National Democratic Executive Committee, 1860), 13–14.

  60. “The Washington Abortion,” in Southern Editorials on Secession, 111.

  61. Jeter Allen Isely, Horace Greeley and the Republican Party, 1853–1861: A Study of the New York Tribune (New York: Octagon Books, 1965), 266; Philip S. Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 15.

  62. “From Illinois,” National Era, November 18, 1858; Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904), 1:322.

  63. Lincoln, “Address at Cooper Institute, New York City,” in Collected Works, 3:534, 549–50.

  64. Ibid.; John A. Corry, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Him President (New York: XLibris, 2003), 99–110; John Channing Briggs, Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 241–50.

  65. Colfax to C. H. Ray, May 28, 1860, The Oliver Barrett Lincoln Collection (New York, 1952), 99.

  66. Robert W. Johannsen, Lincoln, the South and Slavery: The Political Dimension (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 104, 112; Dallas, diary entry for June 2, 1860, in Diary of George Mifflin Dallas: While United States Minister to Russia 1837 to 1839 and to England 1856 to 1861, ed. Susan Dallas (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892), 403.

  67. Tribune Almanac for 1861 (New York: New York Tribune, 1861), 64.

  68. Strong, diary entry for November 17, 1861, in The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 1860–1865, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 63; William C. Harris, Lincoln’s Rise to the Presidency (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 253; Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 398–99; Yates Snowden, History of South Carolina (Chicago: Lewis, 1920), 2:659.

  69. Richards, The Slave Power, 91–94.

  70. David Clopton to William Burton, in Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 57–58; “Joseph E. Brown’s Secessionist Public Letter, December 7 [1860], from Milledgeville,” in Secession Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860, 148–49; J. Randolph Tucker, “The Great Issue: Our Relations to It,” Southern Literary Messenger 32 (March 1861): 174.

  71. Lincoln, “Passage Written for Lyman Trumbull’s Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” November 20, 1860, and “To Alexander H. Stephens,” December 22, 1860, in Collected Works, 4:142–43, 160; Harold Holzer, Lincoln, President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860–1861 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), 177–79.

  72. Lincoln, “To William Kellogg,” December 11, 1860, and “To John D. Defrees,” December 18, 1860, in Collected Works, 4:150, 155.

  73. McMillan, Disintegration of a Confederate State, 14–15.

  74. William C. Davis, Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 394; “The Per
ils of Peace,” DeBow’s Review 31 (October–November 1861): 396–97.

  75. “What Should Georgia Do?” in Southern Editorials on Secession, 242.

  76. “New Lines of Sectionalism,” in Southern Editorials on Secession, 312; Clement Eaton, A History of the Southern Confederacy (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 26.

  77. George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 50–51.

  78. “Meeting of Congress,” in Southern Editorials on Secession, 293; Buchanan, “Fourth Annual Message,” December 3, 1860, in Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 5:626, 628, 631, 635, 636.

  79. Wilson, “Property in Territories,” January 25, 1861, Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 572; Johannsen, Lincoln, the South, and Slavery, 58ff.

  80. Martin Crawford, “Politicians in Crisis: The Washington Letters of William S. Thayer, December 1860–March 1861,” Civil War History 27 (September 1981): 232.

  81. “State of the Union,” December 13, 1860, Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 2nd Session, 96; Philip Shriver Klein, President James Buchanan: A Biography (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), 360–63.

  82. Lincoln, “To William Kellogg,” in Collected Works, 4:150; “Vote on the Crittenden Resolutions, January 16, 1861,” in The Political History of the United States of America, During the Great Rebellion, ed. Edward McPherson (New York: Philp and Solomons, 1864), 64–65.

  83. “Notes by John A. Dix Concerning Certain Events and Transactions in Which He Took Part During the Civil War of 1861–’65 in the United States,” in Morgan Dix, Memoirs of John Adams Dix (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1883), 1:345.

  84. “The Prayer at Sumter,” Harper’s Weekly, January 26, 1861, 49; Thomas Barthel, Abner Doubleday: A Civil War Biography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 62.

  85. Robert Hendrickson, Sumter: The First Day of the Civil War (Chelsea, MI: Scarborough House, 1991), 86; David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 132; Abner Doubleday, Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–61 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876), 93.