The Emancipation Proclamation freed no slaves initially, because any executive order from Lincoln was inoperative in the Confederacy. It promised freedom only to slaves in rebel hands, not to those within areas already subjugated by Union might or inside the “border states” of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri. By setting a deadline, however, it created an opportunity for the secessionists to rejoin the Union and to retain “domestic institutions.” The order took effect as scheduled, making it a “fit and necessary war measure” in suppressing an armed rebellion. Though warranted by “military necessity,” it also invoked “the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” Its implementation produced no immediate results, except to arouse potential slave insurrections.
Irrespective of the shortcomings, emancipation mobilized blacks to join the armed forces of the Union. On May 22, 1863, the War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops. More than 180,000 African Americans donned uniforms, making them a vital source of manpower at a time when voluntary enlistments in the North were waning. In fact, approximately 80 percent of the black soldiers and sailors hailed from slaveholding states. Placed under the command of white officers, the rank and file encountered prejudice and scorn. They served in segregated regiments, inherited degrading assignments, and received lower pay – $10 per month in contrast to the standard $13. When eventually assigned to combat arms, they fought in 39 major battles and 449 smaller engagements. Hoping to strike a blow against the Confederacy, a black soldier told his commander: “We expect to plant the Stars and Stripes on the city of Charleston.”
Meanwhile, riding with guerrillas offered a popular form of military service among young and restless males of the South. In fact, Confederate leaders authorized the formation of partisan “rangers” for homeland defense. From Missouri to Virginia, they spent much of the war tearing up tracks, blowing up bridges, and holding up trains. As the mayhem spread, their ruthless actions provoked deadly reprisals. While disrupting Union operations behind the lines, the bands of guerrillas drew manpower away from the organized corps of the Confederacy.
With manpower in the South dwindling, the Confederacy enacted a conscription law on April 16, 1862. All white males between the ages of 18 and 35 were required to serve for three years. Before the Civil War ended, the top age for conscription increased to 50. However, substitutions permitted some civilians to stay home. Despite later revisions to the measure, it retained loopholes and exemptions that led to complaints about “a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.” Instead of improving end strength, conscription tended to alienate and to divide the Confederates.
A year later, attrition spurred Washington D.C. to replenish Union forces with conscription. On March 3, 1863, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, which made able-bodied males between the ages of 20 and 45 liable for a federal draft. A number of married men obtained deferments until younger, unmarried males first received calls. Governors, judges, and federal officials were exempted altogether. For a fee of $300, civilians in the North legally dodged military service by paying for a substitute. Conscripts accounted for less than 10 percent of the rank and file, because widespread opposition in the states impeded the enforcement of draft laws.
After the announcement of a draft lottery in New York City, the streets and docks erupted in violence on July 13, 1863. In particular, Irish laborers associated conscription with policies that seemed arbitrary and undemocratic. Mobs assailed offices, factories, and homes, but they directed their fury at African Americans. While lynching more than a dozen blacks, they burned down the Colored Orphan Asylum. During the riots, at least 120 people died. Lincoln sent Union regiments to restore order.
In addition to issues of race and class, the Civil War raised awareness about the significance of gender. Women in both the North and the South sewed uniforms, composed poetry, and raised money for the war effort. With the mobilization of the armed forces, many saw that few men remained at the home front. Several found themselves managing farms, plantations, shops, and schools. Some followed the armies from Virginia to Texas, offering to spy or to cook without pay. Wives, sisters, and daughters even dressed as men and “fought like demons.”
In their most visible role, scores of women volunteered to serve as nurses. Thousands staffed hospitals, infirmaries, and clinics across the nation, although many casualties died before reaching them. They helped to treat gangrene, septicemia, pyemia, and osteomyelitis, which often resulted in amputation. Out of necessity, they encountered piles of arms and legs, corpses covered with flies, smells of rotting flesh, and sounds of suffering humanity. The “ambulance corps” administered first aid and evacuated the wounded from the front lines. Known as an “angel of the battlefield,” Clara Barton oversaw the distribution of medicines and supplies in field hospitals and later helped to found the American Red Cross. In Richmond, Virginia, Phoebe Yates Pember was a “matron” of the hospital wards of Chimborazo. Whatever their sectional orientation, female nurses advanced the professional status of working women.
As voluntary female associations proliferated, no other civilian organization achieved the prominence of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Recognized by the War Department in 1861, its 7,000 local auxiliaries distributed clothing, food, bandages, and medicine. Though its national officers were typically males, Dorothea Dix became the first superintendent of female nurses. In addition to fundraising through “Sanitary Fairs,” it dispatched inspectors to military camps to lecture soldiers about latrines, health, diet, and cleanliness. With bacteriology largely a mystery, diarrhea and other maladies threatened to incapacitate armies in the field.
Though commensurable with the standards of the time, the comparative mortality rates for the opposing armies remained shocking. Evidently, two soldiers died of disease for every one killed in action. One of every six wounded graybacks perished. However, only one of every seven wounded bluecoats suffered the same fate. Likewise, the percentage of Confederate soldiers who died of disease was twice the percentage of Union soldiers. Lacking the service networks of their northern counterparts, the southern military operated more or less in the medical “Dark Ages.”
Tragically, both northerners and southerners mistreated war prisoners. Conditions in the stockades appeared poor, though they worsened as shortages of food, clothing, and medicine became more acute. The resource advantages of the Union offered a better chance of survival for rebel captives compared with federal prisoners held in the Confederacy. Prisoner exchanges and paroles stopped in 1863, when Secretary of War Stanton insisted that Confederates not abuse or kill black soldiers in captivity.
The next year, the Confederate prison in Andersonville, Georgia, degenerated into a death camp. More than 33,000 Union soldiers crowded into an enclosure of approximately 16 acres, where a contaminated stream served as both a sewer and a water supply. At the cemetery, the prisoners' graves numbered 12,912. The commandant of Andersonville, Henry Wirz, was later hanged for war crimes.
Given the scale and the scope of military operations, the Lincoln administration grew concerned about the conduct of the war. The War Department tapped Dr. Francis Lieber, a professor at Columbia College in New York and a renowned German American jurist, to serve on an advisory board. With a combination of political philosophy and moral realism, he helped to craft General Order 100 for the president’s endorsement. On April 24, 1863, the War Department disseminated the Lieber Code as the “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field.”
The Lieber Code demanded the humane and ethical treatment of combatants and noncombatants in wartime. It stated that “men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.” Its greatest theoretical contribution, however, was the identification of “military necessity” as a general legal principle governing actions. It explicitly forbade killing prisoners of war, except in such cases that the survival of the soldiers holding th
em appeared in jeopardy. Consequently, it offered a precursor to the first Geneva Convention, which promulgated international rules for the treatment of the sick and the wounded in 1864.
Advance and Retreat
The federal government counted on the armed forces to reverse the rebel momentum. The Confederate tide rolled in thousands of places, which involved separate theaters to the west and to the east of the Appalachian Mountains. Soldiers marched and countermarched month after month, struggling to find their footing in the battlegrounds for the Union.
Confederates led by General Braxton Bragg invaded Kentucky during 1862 and installed a sympathetic government in Frankfort. Cavalry units cut railroad lines and bedeviled hapless bluecoats, melting back into the countryside after their raids. Planning a counterstroke, Buell placed his Union army between Bragg and the Ohio River. On October 8, 1862, they fought the Battle of Perryville to a standoff. The federals counted 4,200 killed, wounded, and missing, while the rebels suffered 3,400 in losses. Afterward, Bragg withdrew to eastern Tennessee.
A few hundred miles away, General William S. Rosecrans commanded dispersed federals in northern Mississippi. While blocking a rebel thrust into western Tennessee, “Old Rosy” prevailed against combined armies at key railroad junctions. In the two battles of Iuka and Corinth, Union and Confederate casualties numbered 3,300 and 5,700, respectively. After Lincoln dismissed Buell, Rosecrans reorganized his command into the Army of the Cumberland.
Davis also reorganized the Confederate forces, sending Johnston to Chattanooga to head the Western Department and Bragg to Murfreesboro to command the Army of the Tennessee. After Rosecrans maneuvered southward from Nashville, the Army of the Cumberland faced the Army of the Tennessee astride Stones River. During the evening of December 30, their bands played a series of northern and southern tunes. When they struck up “Home Sweet Home,” nearly 78,000 opposites in uniform sang together through the night.
At dawn on December 31, the Battle of Stones River began. Rosecrans sent his soldiers against the rebel right, while Bragg ordered a thrust against the federal right. Because of the deafening roar of artillery and musketry, soldiers picked cotton from stalks and stuffed it into their ears. The fiercest fighting occurred at an angle in the federal line inside the Round Forest. By January 3, 1863, each army had lost roughly a third of its effectives. In the aftermath, Bragg decided to withdraw southeast to Tullahoma, Tennessee.
Commanding the Department of the Tennessee, Grant inched federal forces overland to Vicksburg, Mississippi. “I gave up all idea of saving the Union,” he later recalled, “except by complete conquest.” Confederates concentrated on defending Chickasaw Bluffs, which loomed about 3 miles north of Vicksburg. Grant's subordinate, the indefatigable Sherman, resolved to make war “so terrible” that the rebels would realize “they are mortal.” On December 29, 1862, Sherman ordered four divisions to attack the high ground. After suffering 1,800 casualties, he withdrew up the Mississippi River in disappointment.
In early 1863, Grant's command became bogged down in the tangled bayous, woods, and deltas north of Vicksburg. Along the Mississippi and Yazoo River swamps, the death rate from typhoid and dysentery mounted. Eluding Union patrols at every turn, Forrest conducted dazzling raids that threatened Grant's supply lines. In Washington D.C., rumors circulated that the commander was drinking again.
To command the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln turned to Burnside in late 1862. Known for his stylish side-whiskers, he marched 113,000 men “on to Richmond” as winter came. Reaching the Rappahannock River in the bitter cold, he waited for the arrival of his pontoons – flat-bottomed boats anchored in a line to support a floating bridge. With 74,000 men, Lee concentrated the Army of Northern Virginia across 7 miles of hills near Fredericksburg. He placed Longstreet's corps on Marye's Heights west of the town, while Jackson's men scaled Prospect Hill to the south. Rather than preparing entrenchments, the Confederates utilized the high ground to give their cannons and their rifles an edge against the Union. Swampy ground and rough terrain limited the avenues for an attack against the defensive line. Braving sniper fire along the river, Burnside's engineers eventually assembled six bridges under the cover of fog. His artillery shelled the town, while his infantry began crossing the Rappahannock.
On December 13, Union troops entered and occupied Fredericksburg. Formed into three “grand divisions,” one wave surged forward and crashed into the Confederates on the flank. At midday, Jackson drove them back with unyielding cannonades. The main force of federals raced toward Marye's Heights, where Longstreet's riflemen waited along a 4-foot stone wall at the base. From the top, Confederate artillery covered a half-mile stretch of open ground. Burnside decided to test the strength of enemy dispositions, sending his infantry against the belching guns. He ordered 14 assaults, which melted in the deadly barrage. By nightfall, the stone wall remained in rebel hands. Piles of bodies littered the ground in front of it. The Army of the Potomac lost 12,000 men in the Battle of Fredericksburg, while the Army of Northern Virginia suffered 5,300 casualties.
As morale in the Army of the Potomac faltered, Burnside attempted to regain the initiative on January 20, 1863. He ordered the “Mud March,” which involved an aborted movement up the Rappahannock to flank Fredericksburg. His maneuvering achieved nothing. As his division commanders grew insubordinate, he offered his resignation to Lincoln.
A few days later, Lincoln tapped “Fighting Joe” Hooker to command the Army of the Potomac. With a reputation as a drinker and a womanizer, he revived the faltering regiments. Among other things, he increased unit pride by devising badges for each corps. The Union fielded “the finest army on the planet,” or so the bombastic commander claimed.
Hooker led 115,000 soldiers along the Rappahannock, nearly twice the force of Lee. On April 30, he positioned 40,000 bluecoats in Fredericksburg to feign another direct assault against Confederate lines. The rest of his troops headed upriver and then crossed into the Wilderness, an area of scrub forests, thick underbrush, and narrow roads. He planned to catch his enemy in a vise. By the next day, they advanced through the junction of Chancellorsville to flank the unsuspecting graybacks.
In a daring countermove, Lee divided his forces and attacked the overconfident Hooker. After a preliminary skirmish in the Wilderness, he forced his rival to defend Chancellorsville on May 2. Once again, he directed an audacious maneuver that defied military maxims. With the Union flank “in the air,” Jackson took 28,000 troops on a roundabout march to hit their exposed right. Around 5:30 p.m., some of Hooker's regiments were playing cards while cooking supper. Suddenly, Jackson's yelling rebels burst out of the woods and pressed the federal camps.
As darkness fell, Jackson rode ahead to reconnoiter the shifting lines. Nervous Confederates standing guard mistakenly fired three bullets at the shadowy figure. Wounded, Jackson's arm was amputated the next morning. While recovering, he contracted pneumonia and died. “I have lost my right arm,” Lee lamented afterward.
Over the next few days, Union columns withdrew in disarray. With only half of his force engaged in battle, Hooker was knocked temporarily unconscious by an exploding shell. Dazed and confused, he refused to relinquish command. His troops huddled north of Chancellorsville, while Lee directed another strike against federals marching from Fredericksburg. By May 6, the Army of the Potomac had retreated across the Rappahannock. Despite the long odds, the Army of Northern Virginia won an amazing victory in the field. The Battle of Chancellorsville produced 13,000 Confederate casualties compared with 17,000 for the Union.
The Union was down but not out. Owing to the daunting arithmetic of battle, gone were the lingering hopes for an affair of honor. Rifled musketry, which achieved an effective range of almost 800 yards, made the concepts of Napoleonic warfare foolhardy. Though once unthinkable, winning a revolutionary struggle demanded the massing of enough bodies and machines to utterly crush the Confederacy.
Gettysburg
During 1863, Confederate leaders decided upon a
risky strategy. Davis suggested that Lee campaign near Vicksburg or in Tennessee, but the general preferred to launch an invasion of Pennsylvania. He hoped to divert Grant as well as to threaten Washington D.C. Furthermore, a major victory in the northern states might entice foreign intervention.
With over 70,000 men, the Army of Northern Virginia moved northward. Hooker sent Union cavalry under General Alfred Pleasonton to scout Lee's movements. On June 9, they clashed with Stuart's cavalry at Brandy Station along the Rappahannock. While Stuart took three brigades on a pointless raid immediately afterward, the Army of the Potomac followed the rebels without engaging them in battle. Irritated by another inept commander, Lincoln replaced Hooker with General George Meade.
At the crossroads town of Gettysburg, a Confederate scavenging party in search of shoes encountered Union cavalry. Both armies began converging on the town, as the rebels entered from the north and the federals arrived from the south. Neither side planned for the greatest land battle in the history of North America.
On the morning of July 1, Union cavalry under General John Buford clashed with advance parties of Confederates at Gettysburg. While abandoning the town, the former held the high ground to the south. Their decisiveness delayed the onrush of the latter. Soon, Union infantry and artillery arrived to reinforce the cavalry, particularly at Cemetery Hill. That afternoon, Lee ordered General Richard Ewell, who inherited Jackson's old corps, to take the hill “if practicable.” Ewell hesitated, leaving the position in federal hands at nightfall. In the darkness, federals organized their interior lines while massing 85,000 men. They established a position resembling a “fishhook,” with the barbed end curving from Culp's Hill to Cemetery Hill and the shank extending southward for a mile along Cemetery Ridge. On their far left, the Union line ended at two other hills, Little Round Top and Big Round Top. Despite arriving late to the field, Meade resolved to defend the position against Lee.
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