Lincoln took this simple notion of fighting a war to preserve equal opportunity and enlarged it with a global perspective that transcended social class. In a July 1861 message to Congress, he declared, “This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men … to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.” Radical Republicans chafed that he dwelled upon the Union without addressing slavery. For Lincoln, however, equality of opportunity, not only within the United States but also throughout the world, would be impossible without first preserving the Union.28
The Lincoln administration must win the war to accomplish this objective. Both sides believed the war would be short, and neither held the opposing army in much esteem. A Virginian could not think of even one prominent northern-born soldier in American history save for Benedict Arnold. But the superintendent of a military academy in Louisiana, William Tecumseh Sherman, thought otherwise: “I think it is to be a long war—very long—much longer than any politician thinks.”29
Lincoln shared the common assumption that the war would be over quickly. His initial call for seventy-five thousand troops for a three-month enlistment in mid-April reflected that judgment. By July, however, his view was changing. Congress applauded Lincoln’s request for $400 million to raise an additional four hundred thousand volunteers with a three-year commitment. The lawmakers not only met his proposal but raised him to a total of $500 million for five hundred thousand men. The Union did not need to resort to conscripts until more than a year after the Confederacy passed the first American draft. It also benefited from a population at least three times the size of the South’s. The federal force remained primarily a volunteer army organized by individual states to the end of the war. More than two million men served in the Union ranks.30
But in 1861, the regular army consisted of fewer than sixteen thousand soldiers, most posted in the West. Although the great majority of these men threw in with the Union, Lincoln lost one third of the officer corps, including some of the most experienced and highest-ranking officers. Civilian armies would fight the Civil War.
Both armies, consequently, were unprepared for battle. With no pension, army officers usually stayed in the saddle until they died. Of the nine highest-ranking officers in the Union army, eight were veterans of the War of 1812. The general-in-chief, Winfield Scott, at age seventy-four—a very old age in those days—required an entourage to help him mount his horse. State militias would supply the earliest volunteers, but these soldiers were more accustomed to partying than training. Fortunately, a cadre of professional soldiers with leadership skills and logistical expertise existed to create an effective fighting force.
The nonnegotiable objectives of the two sides made a longer war more likely. The North would not stop its armies short of reunion, and the South would not cease the fight until it secured its independence and preserved slavery. When the Union later added emancipation to its war objectives, a negotiated truce or compromise became even more improbable.
The Mexican War had seasoned many Civil War officers, including the leading general officers, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, but that was another war. General Scott’s brilliant lightning march of eighteen weeks from Vera Cruz to the gates of Mexico City over rough terrain benefited from the creativity of engineer Lee and a series of bold offensives against good but poorly led Mexican troops. After raising the American flag over Mexico City, the troops left, the politicians negotiated, a compromise was struck in the Americans’ favor, and Mexico resumed its sovereignty. Quick victories, limited objectives, and a political solution would not characterize the Civil War.
The Lincoln administration understood that Union armies must take the offensive to put down the rebellion. The message only partially registered with General Scott, who proposed to surround the Confederacy with a naval blockade along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and establish defensive lines on the Ohio and Potomac rivers. He would dispatch eighty-five thousand troops down the Mississippi River, taking control of the South’s major commercial highway. The plan had the virtue of threatening the Confederacy from several points. Critics, though, derided Scott’s proposal as the “Anaconda Plan”: instead of beating the enemy on the field of battle, squeeze it to death. Also, it was doubtful that a hundred thousand Confederate troops in Virginia would rest on their guns while Union forces attacked their comrades out west. The naval blockade made sense, however, and it proved effective over time. In 1861, the Union blockade intercepted only one of ten Confederate vessels. By 1865, the U.S. Navy stopped one of two ships.31
A young former regular army officer from Ohio, George B. McClellan, had a bolder plan: invade western Virginia from his Ohio base, strike into Kentucky and Tennessee, and thence to the Gulf of Mexico. To prove how easily he could implement the strategy, he led his Ohio troops into western Virginia in May 1861, sent a small Confederate force into retreat, and enabled local Unionists to organize a government that eventually became the state of West Virginia.
Lincoln’s greatest concern during the war’s first few months was keeping the Border South—Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—in the Union. Maryland surrounded Washington, D.C., on three sides; Virginia, already a Confederate state, completed the encirclement. A crowd of Baltimore residents had already expressed their sentiment during the first week of the war when they attacked a Massachusetts regiment bound for Washington. The soldiers responded by firing into the mob and killing eleven of the rioters, touching off a three-day rampage as roaming gangs destroyed federal property and tore up rail lines to block the transit of Yankee troops to the southern front. General Scott ordered sandbags for federal buildings in Washington so troops could protect the government if the mob rolled south.
The Lincoln administration solved the problem of Maryland by a show of force. General Benjamin Butler, leading another Massachusetts regiment, marched to the state capital at Annapolis, placed the city under martial law, dispatched troops to Baltimore, planted artillery on Federal Hill, and promised to blast the city to smithereens if residents impeded federal troops making transit southward. The threat worked. The Maryland legislature voted against secession, and Union soldiers never again encountered violence in Baltimore. By the end of May, Maryland was secure for the Union, if grudgingly so. The state gained one benefit from the crisis. The federals’ massive response so incensed poet James Ryder Randall that he dashed off lyrics to a song he titled “Maryland, My Maryland,” including the line “The despot’s heel is on thy shore,” to remind future generations of the state’s duress.32
The Democrats, though a minority in Congress, vigorously opposed the president’s actions in Maryland and other curtailment of civil liberties. Lincoln believed he had constitutional authority in time of war to suspend habeas corpus, muzzle the press, and arrest those actively aiding the enemy. He summarized his philosophy with one of his folksy analogies: “Often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.” Lincoln did not manufacture conspiracies where none existed. Confederate sympathizers were common in the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, settled by families like Lincoln’s own. Sentiment is not a crime, of course, but organizing secret societies to sabotage or murder endangered the Union war effort. During the course of the war, military and political authorities arrested more than thirteen thousand individuals in the North, revoked their right of habeas corpus, and remanded them for military trial.33
Some Republicans, on the other hand, believed the president did not go far enough. Harper’s stated, “The most convenient government for a nation at war is a despotic monarchy; the most inconvenient—according to general opinion—a democratic republic.” The editor suggested banning the Democratic New York Herald for its criticism of General Scott. While both the Lincoln and Davis administrations erred occasionally in limiting civil liberties, on
the whole, they preserved the basic essence of democratic government during a bloody civil war.34
Lincoln had to tread more carefully with respect to his home state of Kentucky than he had with Maryland. If Kentucky joined the Confederacy, the enemy would be on the banks of the Ohio River with easy access to the Old Northwest. Kentucky captured Lincoln’s heart and attention. It was the state of his birth; his closest friends and his wife were Kentuckians, as was his political mentor and idol, Henry Clay. Lincoln hoped to have God on his side, but he had to have Kentucky. He adopted a gingerly approach. Federal troops steered clear of the state, and Lincoln reassured residents that their property was secure, indeed more secure in the Union than out of it. Kentucky announced its neutrality, but in September 1861 Confederate troops, attempting to preempt a possible advance by Federals across the Ohio under the command of Ulysses S. Grant, invaded the state. The Unionist legislature invited Grant to come in and clear out the Confederates, and he gladly complied. Eventually, eighty-five thousand Kentuckians fought for the Union; thirty-five thousand men joined Confederate forces. Officially neutral, its manpower and resources were under Union control throughout the war.
Missouri remained a problem through most of the war, as it was in the battle over Kansas. Internecine warfare began almost immediately after Sumter. Federal missteps compounded the problem when General John C. Frémont entered the state in August 1861. His incompetence as a military leader matched his poor political judgment. He placed the state under martial law, threatened the execution of any Missourian who aided secessionists, and issued an emancipation proclamation. Even Republicans in the state were aghast at Frémont’s tactless measures. They feared the fallout from Frémont’s anti-slavery activities could tip both Missouri and Kentucky to the Confederates. A Kentucky friend of Lincoln’s warned him that the general’s edict could “crush out every vistage [sic] of a union party in the state.” Lincoln rescinded the emancipation edict and eventually dismissed his errant general. The Confederate national flag included stars for both Kentucky and Missouri. Their presence was strictly symbolic.35
As Lincoln monitored the situation in the border states, he was hopeful that a quick strike into Virginia and the Confederate capital at Richmond would end the rebellion quickly. Tens of thousands of green civilian Union recruits were camped along the Potomac waiting for that opportunity. They included Sullivan Ballou, a thirty-two-year-old Rhode Island lawyer well into his career with a wife and two young children. He could have remained at home, as volunteers filled the state’s quota quickly. He would not stand down, though, and watch men younger than him go off to defend the Union and what it stood for. Joining the 2nd Regiment, Rhode Island Volunteers, Ballou deployed to Washington, D.C. Along with other recruits in that swollen city, he drilled and waited in stifling summer heat, longing for his family and for the cool sea breezes of his native state. On July 14, 1861, rumors darted through the camp that he and his fellow soldiers would finally see the war. He sat down by a tree and wrote to share the news with his wife, Sarah. Like so many other citizen soldiers, he wrote of God and country, of love and of thoughts of death, and of how to sort these conflicting feelings at a time of great peril. This is what he wrote:
The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days, perhaps tomorrow. And lest I should not be able to write you again I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.… “Not my will but thine O God be done.” If it is necessary that I should fall on the battle-field for my Country I am ready.… I know how American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing, perfectly willing, to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt. But my dear wife, when I know that with my own joys I lay down nearly all of yours,… is it weak or dishonorable that while the banner of my purpose floats calmly and proudly in the breeze, underneath, my unbounded love for you my darling wife and children should struggle in fierce though useless contest with my love of country?…
If I do not [return], my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battle-field, it will whisper your name.36
At two o’clock in the afternoon on the following day, July 15, General Irvin McDowell issued an order to all the division and brigade commanders from his headquarters at Arlington Heights overlooking the city of Washington. The officers informed Ballou and his comrades at parade that evening. They were to move out at two o’clock the next afternoon and carry three days’ worth of rations. They would move south toward Richmond. The troops greeted the news with deafening cheers.
McDowell’s headquarters had been the home of Colonel Robert E. Lee, late of the federal army. Lee had resigned his commission and cast his lot with the Confederacy. His home held both strategic and symbolic value for the federal government, which promptly seized the property. McDowell had recently advanced to commander of the Union armies as a surrogate for General Scott, who was too infirm to take the field. A West Pointer and a veteran of the Mexican War, McDowell had a strong military background but had never commanded troops in combat. He worried that his green troops were not yet ready to engage an enemy. Lincoln dismissed the concern: “You are green, it is true, but they are green, also; you are all green alike.” The mounting pressure from both the general public and the Lincoln administration to strike at Richmond and quickly end the war forced McDowell to set aside his concerns and move his army south. The New York Tribune blared in large headlines every day for a week in late June, “FORWARD TO RICHMOND! FORWARD TO RICHMOND!” Other newspapers took up the chant. “Forward to Richmond!” became the nation’s war cry. The fact that the three-month enlistment period was coming due for thousands of soldiers also factored into Lincoln’s order to McDowell.37
Sullivan Ballou marched south with his Rhode Island neighbors and thirty-five thousand other young men to face combat for the first time. As the West Point manual prescribed, one regiment of skirmishers preceded the army to draw the first enemy contact and guard against an ambush. One regiment of infantry followed, then the artillery, and two infantry regiments completed the brigade. Another brigade followed. Baggage wagons brought up the rear. Up and down the rolling hills of northern Virginia they marched, bayonets glistening in the sun and the artillery rumbling along as if heralding a thunderstorm. The procession took several hours to pass a given point. Residents along the line of march either fled in fright or watched the scene sullenly. A few paid no attention and kept on tending their fields.38
Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, congregated his twenty-thousand-man force on the south bank of a stream called Bull Run near Manassas, an important railroad junction about twenty-five miles south of Washington and seventy miles north of Richmond. His orders were to turn around the federal advance on Richmond. A classmate of McDowell’s at West Point, Beauregard confidently awaited the arrival of his former colleague. A Confederate force of twelve thousand under the command of General Joseph E. Johnston, the highest-ranking federal officer to resign, guarded the entrance to the Shenandoah Valley at Winchester. General Robert F. Patterson, one of the Union army’s War of 1812 veterans, was charged to keep Johnston pinned down in the valley to prevent him from reinforcing Beauregard. Instead, while Patterson watched the road, Johnston took the railroad. McDowell’s ponderous march from Washington allowed Johnston’s army to arrive at the battlefield in time to bring the Confederate armies to roughly equal strength with the enemy. Johnston knew exactly where and when to deposit his men from the information President Davis conveyed via Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a Confederate spy in Washington, D.C. She and about one thousand other Washingtonians knew precisely the route and movements of McDowell’s troops.
Although the first federal soldiers had arrived in the area as early as July 18, it was not until Sunday, July 21, that McDowell had
his novice troops fully in place. By that time, General Johnston’s men had almost completed their train trip from the valley. It would not be the last time that tardiness played a role in a battle’s outcome.
The opposing armies marched into the valley of Bull Run on an idyllic early Sabbath morning preparing to send shot, shell, and shrapnel into each other’s bodies. A group of congressmen, reporters, and other curious residents of Washington packed picnic lunches and drove out in an assortment of conveyances to watch the festivities. A Union shell crashed into the kitchen of the McLean house, where General Beauregard was eating his breakfast. The battle had begun.
As the West Point manual directed, both sides opened up with booming artillery along a line that extended for five miles. The Union infantry advanced smartly on the Confederate batteries, forced the Rebels back, and threatened to collapse their left flank, leaving the center and right exposed. General Barnard Bee, commanding the Confederate left with his South Carolina troops, shouted for reinforcements under the command of Virginian Thomas J. Jackson, whose reserves moved up quickly and halted the Yankee advance. General Bee rallied his troops, shouting, “Look, men! There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Let us determine to die here and we will conquer!” Though General Bee fell mortally wounded, he had given his new nation a legend. Fresh troops led by Jubal A. Early and Edmund Kirby Smith boosted the wilting Confederate forces, and they mounted one final charge into the Union battle line, accompanying their thrust with a high-pitched curdling scream—the Rebel yell—that startled the raw Union soldiers.39
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