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

by Allen C. Guelzo

  96. “The Black Military Experience, 1861–1867,” in Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 199.

  97. Jimerson, The Private Civil War, 106; Lincoln, “To Andrew Johnson,” March 26, 1863, in Collected Works, 6:149–50.

  98. Lincoln, “To James Wadsworth,” January 1864, in Collected Works, 7:100.

  1. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Harper & Bros., 1901), 1, 31; W. H. Russell, My Diary North and South, 139, 161.

  2. Dan Elbert Clark, The Middle West in American History (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1966 [1937]), 107; Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 22–33.

  3. Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815–1830 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 195–96; The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1859, 169, 214; Russell, My Diary North and South, 137.

  4. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 562–69; Maury Klein, Unfinished Business: The Railroad in American Life (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), 11.

  5. “Hurd et al v. Rock Island Bridge Company,” in The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases, ed. Daniel W. Stowell et al. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2007), 3:308–83.

  6. Lincoln, “To Orville H. Browning,” September 22, 1861, in Collected Works, 4:532.

  7. Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 235.

  8. Thomas L. Snead, The Fight for Missouri: From the Election of Lincoln to the Death of Lyon (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 21–22, 65–66, 88, 122–23, 163, 170–71; Louis S. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 97–125.

  9. “Mr. Dixon’s Speech” and “Governor Magoffin’s Proclamation,” in The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, ed. Frank Moore (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862), 1:76, 264–65; Elizabeth Leonard, Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 138; Davis, in Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, 133; Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors, 209–10.

  10. “Addresses of the Convention of the Border States,” in Rebellion Record, ed. Moore, 1:352.

  11. Steven E. Woodworth, “The Indeterminate Qualities: Jefferson Davis, Leonidas Polk, and the End of Kentucky Neutrality, September 1861,” Civil War History 38 (December 1992): 289–97.

  12. McClellan to Buell, January 6, 1862, in The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 148; R. M. Kelly, “Holding Kentucky for the Union,” in Battles and Leaders, 1:387–92; Thomas L. Connolly, Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 96–98.

  13. John F. Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies: A Life of General Henry W. Halleck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 48–82, 109; William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, ed. Charles Royster (New York: Library of America, 1990), 274; The Military Memoirs of General John Pope, ed. Peter Cozzens and R. I. Girardi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 13.

  14. Halleck to McClellan, January 20, 1862, in The War of the Rebellion, Series One, 8:509.

  15. “On Floating Batteries: A Lecture Given by Capt. Fishbourne, R.N., on Monday 19 April 1858,” United Services Institute Journal 2 (1858); “The Grand Review—The Fleet at Spithead,” News of the World, April 27, 1856; D. K. Brown, Warrior to Dreadnought: Warship Development, 1860–1905 (London: Chatham, 1997), 11–13.

  16. Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” in Memoirs and Selected Letters, ed. M. D. McFeely and W. S. McFeely (New York: Library of America, 1990), 142, 144–45; Joan Waugh, U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 45.

  17. Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” 142, 158.

  18. Manning Ferguson Force, From Fort Henry to Corinth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881), 28, 30–31; Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 101–8; “Attack on Fort Henry,” February 6, 1862, in War of the Rebellion, 7:133–35; Ron Field, American Civil War Fortifications, vol. 3: The Mississippi and River Forts (Oxford: Osprey, 2007), 14.

  19. “Capture of Fort Donelson, Tennessee,” in War of the Rebellion, 7:157–253; Field, American Civil War Fortifications, 14; Kendall D. Gott, Where the South Lost the War: An Analysis of the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson Campaign, February, 1862 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2003), 256–58; Spencer C. Tucker, Unconditional Surrender: The Capture of Forts Henry and Donelson (Abilene, TX: McWhiney Foundation Press, 2001), 84–95.

  20. Grant to Buckner, February 16, 1862, in War of the Rebellion, 7:161.

  21. Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” 166.

  22. Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Allen Lane, 2010), 355–56; Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961), 2; Richard Brooks, Solferino 1859: The Battle for Italy’s Freedom (Oxford: Osprey, 2009), 23, 25; Michael I. Handel, War, Strategy, and Intelligence (Totowa, NJ: F. Cass, 1989), 57; Alexander William Kinglake, The Invasion of the Crimea, Its Origin and an Account of Its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan: The Winter Troubles (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1880), 384–85.

  23. John Hill Brinton, Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, Major and Surgeon, U.S.V., 1861–1865 (New York: Neale, 1914), 239.

  24. Waugh, U. S. Grant, 53; Howes, The Catalytic Wars, 574–76.

  25. John Keegan, The Mask of Command (New York: Viking, 1987), 187–94, 210–11; Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” 160–61; Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 134.

  26. Grant to Julia Dent Grant, March 21, 1862, in The Papers of Ulysses Simpson Grant, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 4:406; Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” 214.

  27. Albert Castel, Articles of War: Winners, Losers, and Some Who Were Both in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2001), 142; Charles P. Roland, Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001 [1964]), 347.

  28. Brownlow, Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession, 388–89.

  29. Halleck to McClellan, February 17, 1862, in War of the Rebellion, 7:628; Stephen D. Engle, Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 83.

  30. James Lee McDonough, Shiloh—in Hell Before Night (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), 52.

  31. William Preston Johnston, The Life of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, Embracing His Services in the Armies of the United States, the Republic of Texas, and the Confederate States (New York: D. Appleton, 1879), 569.

  32. Force, Fort Henry to Corinth, 144, 146; Whitelaw Reid, “The Battle of Pittsburgh Landing, Tennessee,” April 19, 1862, in A Radical View: The “Agate” Dispatches of Whitelaw Reid, 1861–1865, ed. J. G. Smart (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1976), 1:130–31, 133; Timothy B. Smith, The Untold Story of Shiloh: The Battle and the Battlefield (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 24, 48; Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” 239; Kenneth P. Williams, Grant Rises in the West: The First Year, 1861–1862, ed. Mark Grimsley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 [1952]), 371–73.

  33. John Russell Young, Men and Memories: Personal Reminiscences, ed. M. D. R. Young (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1901), 2:474; Larry J. Daniel, Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 266; Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 242.

  34. Melville, “Shiloh, A Requiem,” in Selected Poems of Herman Melville, e
d. Robert Penn Warren (Jaffrey, NH: Nonpareil, 2004), 122.

  35. Bierce, “What I Saw of Shiloh,” in Shadows of Blue and Gray: The Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, ed. B. M. Thomsen (New York: Forge, 2002), 212.

  36. Grant, “Personal Memoirs,” 246; Grant, “The Battle of Shiloh,” in Battles and Leaders, 2:485–86.

  37. Military Memoirs of General John Pope, 79; Grady McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat, vol. 1: Field Command (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 265, 267–68.

  38. Military Memoirs of General John Pope, 100; Stephen D. Engle, Don Carlos Buell: Most Promising of All (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 300.

  39. Sherman, Memoirs, 276; Military Memoirs of General John Pope, 75; Carl R. Schenker, “Ulysses in His Tent: Halleck, Grant, Sherman, and ‘The Turning Point of the War,’” Civil War History 56 (June 2010): 175–221.

  40. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Gulf and the Inland Waters (New York: Scribner, 1883), 73–88.

  41. Pollard, Southern History of the War (New York: C. B. Richardson, 1866), 1:326–27.

  42. Michael B. Ballard, Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 121–26, 129–44.

  43. William L. Shea and Terrence J. Winschel, Vicksburg Is the Key: The Struggle for the Mississippi River (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 98–99.

  44. Edward Gregory, “The Siege of Vicksburg,” in The Annals of the War Written by Leading Participants (Philadelphia: Times Publishing, 1879), 133.

  45. Lincoln, “To Eliza P. Gurney,” October 26, 1862, in Collected Works, 5:478; Isaac N. Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1885), 81; William J. Wolf, The Almost Chosen People: A Study of the Religion of Abraham Lincoln (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 36–37, 77–78, 147.

  46. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln, 62–63, 65–67; Charles G. Halpine, in Recollected Words, 194.

  47. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868), 103; Brooks, Lincoln Observed, 43; Browning, in An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln, 3.

  48. Montgomery Meigs, in Russell F. Weigley, Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M. C. Meigs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 131; J. G. Randall, Lincoln the President (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945), 2:241; Strong, diary entry for September 13, 1862, in Diary of George Templeton Strong, 256.

  49. Robert Lincoln to Isaac Markens, February 13 and June 18, 1918, in A Portrait of Abraham Lincoln in Letters by His Oldest Son, ed. Paul Angle (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1968), 56, 62.

  50. Washburne, in William C. Harris, Lincoln’s Rise to the Presidency (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 318; Hans L. Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade: Radical Republican from Ohio (New York: Twayne, 1963), 154, 167; Louis A. Warren, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Declaration: “A New Birth of Freedom” (Ft. Wayne, IN: Lincoln National Life Foundation, 1964), 48; Mark DeWolfe Howe, The Life and Letters of George Bancroft (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 2:132.

  51. David Donald, “Abraham Lincoln: A Whig in the White House,” in Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York: Knopf, 1956), 187–208; John Pendleton Kennedy, “A Defence of the Whigs,” in Political and Official Papers (New York: Putnam, 1872), 320–21; Lincoln, “Speech at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” February 15, 1861, in Collected Works, 214–15.

  52. Swett to Lincoln, January 5, 8, and 19, 1861, and Thurlow Weed to Swett, January 20, 1861, in Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; John Hay, “Letter to William H. Herndon, Paris,” September 5, 1866, in At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings, ed. Michael Burlingame (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 110.

  53. Benjamin Wade, “Confiscation of Rebel Property,” July 16, 1862, “Confiscation and Emancipation,” July 16, 1862, “Confiscation,” July 17, 1862, in Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd Session, 3375, 3400, 3406.

  54. Robert Bruce Warden, An Account of the Private Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase (Cincinnati: Wilstach, Baldwin, 1874), 484; John Hay, “To John G. Nicolay,” September 11, 1863, in At Lincoln’s Side, 54.

  55. Allan G. Bogue, The Congressman’s Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 44–59, 63, 74–88, 114, 118, 121–32.

  56. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 252; Kellogg, in Recollected Words, 277; Hay, diary entry for December 25, 1863, in Inside Lincoln’s White House, 133–34.

  57. Warden, An Account, 299.

  58. Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 35–38; William H. Dillistin, Bank Note Reporters and Counterfeit Detectors, 1826–1866: With a Discourse on Wildcat Banks and Wildcat Bank Notes (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1949), 99; Q. David Bowers, Obsolete Paper Money Issued by Banks in the United States, 1782–1866: A Study and Appreciation for the Numismatist and Historian (Atlanta, GA: Whitman, 2006), 185.

  59. Philip S. Paludan, “A People’s Contest”: The Union and the Civil War (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 108–10; Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 243–54; Theodore E. Burton, John Sherman (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), 90.

  60. J. W. Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase (New York: D. Appleton, 1874), 216, 238; Paludan, “A People’s Contest,” 111; Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 45.

  61. Burton, John Sherman, 105, 112–13; Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke: Financier of the Civil War (Philadelphia: G. W. Jacobs, 1907), 1:172–73.

  62. Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), 160–62; Schuckers, Life and Public Services of Chase, 239–41.

  63. Schuckers, Life and Services of Chase, 229; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 251–52; Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, 1:137, 142–43, 187, 232–52; Paludan, “A People’s Contest,” 115–17; Richardson, The Greatest Nation, 31–56; Michael S. Green, Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party During the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 317–26.

  64. Rollin C. Hurd, A Treatise on the Right of Personal Liberty: and on the Writ of Habeas Corpus (Albany, NY: W. C. Little, 1858), 136.

  65. Brian McGinty, Lincoln and the Court (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 65–83.

  66. Lincoln, “To Erastus Corning and Others,” June 12, 1863, in Collected Works, 6:264.

  67. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the United States at December term 1862 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1863), 2:669, 698–99; Stephen C. Neff, Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 24–27, 32–34; Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, 224–32.

  68. Mark E. Neely, Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 190.

  69. Robert Bruce Murray, Legal Cases of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2003), 75–84; John A. Marshall, American Bastile: A History of the Illegal Arrests and Imprisonment of American Citizens During the Late Civil War (Philadelphia: T. W. Hartley, 1869), 84; “Ex Parte in the Matter of Lambdin D. Milligan, Petitioner,” December 17, 1866, in Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States, December Terms 1865–1867, ed. Stephen Williams (Rochester, NY: Lawyers Co-operative Publishing, 1901), 281–303.

  70. Jacob Dolson Cox, “War Preparations in the North,” Battles and Leaders, 1:87; Douglas, “To Virgil Hickox,” May 10, 1861, in Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 512; Adam I. P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 37–38.

  71. Frank J. Klement, “Economic Aspects of Middle Western Copperheadism,” in Lincoln’s Critics: The Copperheads of the North, ed. Steven K. Rogstad (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane, 1999), 48–49.

  72. Robert C. Winthrop, “Great Speech of Hon. Robert C. Winthrop at New London, Conn.,” in Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, 1861–1865, ed. Frank Freidel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 2:1098, 1101.

  73. Joanna D. Cowden, “Heaven Will Frown on Such a Cause as This”: Six Democrats Who Opposed Lincoln’s War (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 15–17.

  74. “Harmony in the Future,” Philadelphia Press, July 1, 1863; Mark E. Neely, The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 89–111; Thomas S. Mach, “Gentleman George” Hunt Pendleton: Party Politics and Ideological Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007), 60–63.

  75. Clement Vallandigham, “There Is a West; For the Union Forever; Outside of the Union, for Herself,” December 15, 1859, in Speeches, Arguments, Addresses and Letters of Clement L. Vallandigham (New York: J. Walter, 1864), 210, 212.

  76. The Trial of Hon. Clement L. Vallandigham: By a Military Commission (Cincinnati: Rickey and Carroll, 1863), 7, 11; McGinty, Lincoln and the Court, 186–90; Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96–99.

  77. Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998 [1970]), 252, 272–77; Lincoln, “To John Brough and Samuel L. Heintzelman,” June 20, 1864, in Collected Works, 7:402.