The 101 men of Hamilton Lieber’s Company B had seen action briefly in October 1861 when they participated in a rout of 300 Confederate cavalry at Eddyville, Kentucky. But the early hours of February 15 marked the first time in combat for most of the Illinois volunteers. Inexperience had led them to position themselves poorly on the rolling terrain, and try as they might, the Union regiments had been unable to stretch their lines all the way to the creek. A thick wet snow hung heavily in the underbrush, rendering visibility poor. To make matters worse, at this early stage of the war the two armies’ uniforms were still unstandardized. Some Union soldiers wore militia gray. Some Confederate companies still dressed in standard-issue United States blue. In the confusion and the disorder, nervous Union troops fired on their comrades. Underfoot, the slippery cold mud from the snow and rain and the swollen Cumberland made movement of any kind difficult at best.
The harrowing rebel assault on the Union right at Fort Donelson nearly reversed what became the Union’s first great victory of the war.
Taking advantage of the gap between the Illinois volunteers and the creek, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry and Colonel Joseph Drake’s Third Brigade of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama troops quickly turned the right flank of the Union line. The green Union soldiers were suddenly exposed on two sides. The Confederates pressed their advantage. Moving forward in large masses six to eight files deep, each rank of Confederate infantrymen fired and stepped aside to allow the next rank to do the same. Under what one Illinois volunteer remembered as incessant fire, the Union troops soon fell into disarray. As the Confederate advance continued and the Union lines broke, the fight became a bitter and chaotic struggle at close range. Men dropped all around. Supply wagons had been late in arriving, and those still standing on the Union side ran low on ammunition. The men of the 9th Illinois must surely have been afraid. It was the first time in the western theater that Union soldiers had heard the high-low call of the rebel yell. But like soldiers in wars before and since, they were stunningly brave. One wounded volunteer officer from Illinois recalled that every single volunteer in his regiment stood and fought, though many must have felt an urge to run. When told to retreat and regroup, men whose ammunition had run out protested that they could fight with bayonets alone.
Lieutenant Lieber and Company B of the 9th Illinois held out as long as any of the first defenders of the Union right. It helped that Company B was held together by tight bonds. Virtually every man of the company was of German-American birth, and most hailed from the close-knit communities of southern Illinois. They were farmers, tradesmen, and artisans with names like Geist, Schwarzkopf, Cropp, and Lugenbuehler. Hamilton Lieber himself was a twenty-seven-year-old farmer whose father had been born in Berlin. He was an officer in part because he had formal military training. Before the war, he had enrolled in the Naval Academy at Annapolis. He quit when he proved unable to master the mathematics curriculum. In Illinois, however, Hamilton had quickly gained a reputation for prodigious strength and bravery. Both were on full display in the Union defense outside Fort Donelson. Again and again he rallied the men of Company B. When a shot struck him in the left arm, he tied a kerchief around it and soldiered on in the snow and the cold trying desperately to hold the right end of the Union line. Around 9 or 10 a.m., a minié ball from a Confederate rifle smashed the elbow of the same left arm that had already been struck. The ball pulverized the bones on both sides of the elbow. Most of the brigade had already retired from the field. Now a badly wounded Hamilton Lieber would too.
Union casualties on that morning were staggering. A surgeon arriving late in the afternoon said it was like the aftermath of a “death storm.” Almost 2,000 Union soldiers were wounded, many (including Hamilton Lieber) seriously. Four hundred Union men lay dead. Only the 8th Illinois and 18th Illinois suffered worse casualties than Hamilton’s 9th that morning. Before the day was out, 201 of the regiment’s 1,000 men had been killed, wounded, or captured. Company B’s casualties were especially gruesome. Nine had been killed and twenty-eight wounded, higher figures than in all but one of the 9th Illinois’s nine other companies. Hamilton was carried to a makeshift field hospital, where he sat untreated and bleeding among the dead and the dying and the amputated limbs, which lay strewn around like terrible surgeons’ trophies. Only that night, after a team of doctors from the U.S. Sanitary Commission arrived and after he was able to catch the attention of a navy surgeon, did Hamilton receive medical attention. The only course of action was to amputate the limb as mortification set in.
Back on the Union right, the heroics of men like Hamilton paid off. The massed lines of Confederate soldiers under Gideon Pillow had been unable to break through cleanly in the opening hours of the battle. When Pillow hesitated, unsure what to do next, Grant rushed reinforcements to the Union right and stopped the Confederate advance. Unable to escape, the Confederate forces at Fort Donelson (now reduced to 15,000 men in all) had no choice but to surrender. They did so the next morning, on Grant’s stern terms: “unconditional and immediate surrender.”
The battle at Fort Donelson provided the Union its first great strategic victory of the war. Along with Grant’s victory the week before at Fort Henry, the capture of Fort Donelson opened up to Union forces the river routes into Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. The fall of Fort Donelson left important Confederate ironworks defenseless and cut off Richmond from one of its principal sources of grain and pork. General Albert Sidney Johnston, the brilliant commander of the Confederacy’s Western Department, called the loss of Donelson “most disastrous and almost without remedy.” Historians have called it a campaign that helped decide the Civil War. Hamilton would etch the date of the battle into the hilt of his officer’s sword. He had missed its conclusion. But his experience that morning set in motion events that would shape the course of the war and remake the laws of warfare in ways no one could have anticipated in the snow and sleet and mud of the Cumberland.
Would to God, I, Too, Could Act!
ONE THOUSAND MILES AWAY, on East 34th Street in New York, Francis and Matilda Lieber waited anxiously for news of their son as the battle of Fort Donelson raged.
Sixty-four-year-old Francis, or Frank as he was known to intimates, was born in Berlin in 1798. His first memory was watching Napoleon’s soldiers march through Berlin past his family home in 1806 after epic battles at Jena and Auerstadt in which Napoleon had swept the Prussians from the field. The Berlin of his youth was full of men committed to casting off the yoke of the French. His older brothers joined Prussia’s secret military. His father, Frederick, served as district inspector for the Landsturm, an organization for Prussian home defense.
Francis was too young for military service in 1806, but he too dreamed of evicting the hated French. At the age of fifteen he decided he would learn French and disguise himself for the purpose of assassinating Napoleon. The plan seems never to have gone very far. But shortly thereafter he took up a leading role in Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s gymnasium movement, the motivation for which was much the same. Jahn aimed to improve the fitness of a new generation and create a body of men that would be “able to expel the French from Germany.” Jahn’s system of youth athletics established modern gymnastics.
When Napoleon returned from exile in Elba in 1815, a seventeen-year-old Lieber at last got his chance to fight the hated French. Lieber and three brothers enlisted in the legendary Colberg Regiment, which had been the last to hold out against the French in 1806 and 1807. In June, the Lieber brothers took part in the fighting at the Belgian village of Ligny. The next day, they waited in reserve as the Prussian and British armies defeated the French at Waterloo.
For a day and a half, Lieber’s regiment chased Napoleon and the French back toward Paris. As his company charged down a hill into the town of Namur, Francis Lieber was shot by a French grenadier. Years later he remembered the event as if it had just happened:
I suddenly experienced a sensation as if my whole body were compressed in my head, and this,
like a ball, were quivering in the air. I could feel the existence of nothing else; it was a most painful sensation.
A PASSING PRUSSIAN told Lieber he had been shot through the neck. As he lay on the field outside Namur, he was struck by another French volley, this time in the chest. He was certain he would die. And when late that evening he was pulled off the field, his comrades thought so too.
Miraculously, the young man lived. Even more miraculously, his wounds left him no less enamored of the life of the soldier. To the contrary, he felt that on the battlefield he had experienced life in its fullest. Five years later, he joined an international brigade of Danes, Poles, Frenchmen, Italians, and Germans to fight for Greek independence against the Turks. Like Lord Byron, he imagined himself to be rescuing the glories of Greece from the clutches of the Ottoman Empire, but he quickly concluded that modern-day Greeks bore little resemblance to the heroes of antiquity. They seemed disorganized, drunken, unreliable, and thieving. On closer examination, he came to think that Turk atrocities were matched by Greek disgraces. The conflict could barely be described as a respectable war. Within weeks of his arrival in Greece, Lieber concluded that “if there should not be any opportunity to engage in warfare,” he would see the sights of ancient Athens.
In his childhood, then at Waterloo, and then again in Greece, Lieber showed a deep attraction to war. He tingled at the “indelible horror” of death and destruction around him. He remembered a bewildered boy who had stumbled into the thick of the action at Ligny and seemed certain to die. He remembered birds trying to protect their young from the “tremendous uproar and carnage” and he remembered pulling cannon “over the mangled bodies of comrades” who writhed “in agony when the heavy wheels crossed over them.” Outside Waterloo, he had threatened to shoot a Belgian peasant for bread after the long day of fighting. (“I told my comrade to hold him while I would seem to prepare to shoot him,” he later wrote.) Days afterward, while he lay on the field at Namur, the local peasants had their revenge, stealing his watch, his money, and his clothes, and aggravating his wounds. War was full of terrors. But terror did not mean repulsion, or at least not repulsion alone. For it was war’s glory that had delivered Prussia from the grip of the hated French.
THE YEARS AFTER Waterloo ought to have been a time of celebration for Lieber. But the political enthusiasms of men like Lieber and Jahn made them suspect in the reactionary politics that descended on Europe after Napoleon’s defeat. In 1819, Lieber was arrested and imprisoned for four months on suspicion of political subversion. He managed thereafter to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the university at Jena. But most universities in Prussia were placed off limits to him.
In 1826, Lieber left the political repression of Prussia behind and traveled to England. In London, he sought out and befriended some of the leading intellectuals of the country, including the aging utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham and a young John Stuart Mill. He also met Matilda (“Matty”) Oppenheim, whom he would marry three years later. Though there was talk of a teaching post for Francis in London, none of his connections produced gainful employment. And so in 1827 he traveled to Boston, where he took up a position as the first permanent director of a new gymnasium that a group of wealthy Boston men had established in the Prussian fashion of Lieber’s old mentor Jahn.
The gymnasium failed after a year. But its connections to the latest European ideas about education launched Lieber into a career as one of the most garrulous and peripatetic public intellectuals of his day. As in London, he eagerly pursued the leading men of the country. In the young United States, Lieber’s cosmopolitan background opened doors more readily than it had in England. President John Quincy Adams swam at his gymnasium. A generation of Europhile intellectuals took him into their social circles: men like the Supreme Court justice and Harvard law professor Joseph Story, the young lawyers Charles Sumner and Francis Hilliard, and the poet and Harvard literature professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Within a few years he was dining with President Andrew Jackson and befriending the U.S. senator from New York and future cabinet member William Marcy.
Casting about for a way to turn his intellectual background into cash, Lieber entered the publishing business with a prominent Philadelphia printer, Matthew Carey. Between 1829 and 1833, Lieber published the Encyclopaedia Americana, a fabulously successful venture whose thirteen volumes and 7 million words quickly found their way into virtually every well-to-do home in the country. President Jackson had a set in the White House. A young frontier lawyer named Abraham Lincoln owned a set in his offices. Later editions would become the second-best-selling encyclopedia in the world, behind only the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
With the success of the Encyclopaedia under his belt, Lieber pursued the possibility of a history chair at Harvard College. But despite his publishing success and his many friends, Lieber would always be an outsider among the Boston elite, and no teaching post at Harvard was forthcoming. With two young boys (Oscar, age five, and an infant named Hamilton), Lieber needed to find a steady source of income. In 1835, the family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where he took a professorship in history and political economy at South Carolina College.
At South Carolina, Lieber proved to be a desultory teacher, but mostly because he lacked the patience to give his students a chance to get a word in edgewise. He loved to talk, and when he could find no one to listen, his torrent of words spilled out through his pen. So prolific was his correspondence and his never-ending stream of pamphlets, books, and articles that he seemed almost never to sleep. He was intellectually eccentric. Even his friends noted that he spoke in strange and idiosyncratic formulations. He had a certain charisma. But he could be egomaniacal and off-putting as well. Joseph Story quipped that Lieber needed conversation and correspondence like he needed food and oxygen. Lieber would die, Story wrote, “for want of a rapid, voluminous, and never-ending correspondence.” The Boston lawyer Rufus Choate wrote that Lieber was the “most fertile, indomitable, unsleeping, combative and propagandising person of his race.”
WHAT LIEBER LOVED to talk about most was war. As a student in 1821, he had studied military mathematics and geometry of the kind taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. But Lieber thought that the study of war and strategy was irreducibly historical, not mathematical. He was an intuitive student of great battles in history. He dated his correspondence by reference to the Napoleonic battles at Ligny, Leipzig, Jena-Auerstadt, and Waterloo.
As Lieber saw it, modern warfare had undergone a dramatic transformation. The age of gunpowder had transformed war into a mass phenomenon. The “individual,” he wrote, was “lost more and more in the mass.”
But even in an age of mass violence—especially in an age of mass violence, an age in which armies hurled as many as 100,000 men toward one another—Lieber believed that war had a deep and profound moral significance. In his two-volume Manual of Political Ethics, published in 1838 and 1839, Lieber contended that pacifism was a view held “by persons who have an inadequate idea of what war actually is.” Lieber knew war, and in his view war was not only morally permissible, it was morally imperative. War’s moral virtues were the qualities of “energy and independence of thought, elevation and firmness of character, intensity of action.” War brought out in men a “peculiar attribute of greatness of intellect.” It communicated “the spark of moral electricity.”
Indeed, Lieber wrote, the “choicest pages of history” were written of war. “Every single thread of that great web we call our civilization,” he told his students, “has at one time or another been saved by battle or protracted war.” At Marathon, Athens held off the Persians and saved Greek civilization. At Tours in the year 732, Christianity turned back Islam. At Leipzig (“the greatest battle ever fought”), Europe had crushed Napoleon. Battles such as these had been the engines of history, and Lieber said as much time and time again throughout his adult life. (“Blood,” he wrote in 1844, was the “vital juice” of history.) This was the lesson of Pruss
ia in 1806, when Napoleon humiliated Berlin but created the patriotic energy that fueled Prussia’s rebirth. It was the lesson of Prussia’s resurgence in 1813 and 1815. And it was the lesson of American history as well. When, after all, had the United States exhibited the “best and purest examples” of patriotism and public spirit? In the Revolution, of course, for wars such as the War of Independence restored the moral vitality of a people. The “protracted peace” of the years after 1815, by contrast, had produced the culture of “sordid selfishness and degrading submissiveness” that Lieber believed the residents of his adopted country could see firsthand all around them. What, Lieber asked rhetorically, could better exemplify “the nobleness of human nature” than “a devoted, humble citizen bleeding and dying for his beloved country, her laws and liberty, the freedom of his children”? To the pacifist, such glorious virtue counted as nothing. But to Lieber, it was the most honorable calling of mankind.
Lieber held justice, not peace, as the highest ideal. He denied that human life was “the greatest good.” Nor, he insisted, was death “the greatest evil.” By mistakenly making human pleasure their highest aspiration, their summum bonum, philosophers in what Lieber disparaged as the age of happiness had extinguished “that lively feeling of justice, without which no free state can flourish,” producing a “habitual submission to injustice, plunder and insult.” Just wars, by contrast, were “not demoralizing.” To the contrary, when carried on by civilized peoples, just wars were the way civilization spread.
LIEBER’S INTENSE and heartfelt engagement with war led him to take unorthodox positions on some of the most controversial episodes of the day. In 1840 and 1841, for example, he defended New York’s right to prosecute Alexander McLeod for murder in the Caroline episode. Where Secretary of State Webster insisted that the British had used force illegally, but that McLeod had a soldier’s immunity from prosecution, Lieber adopted exactly the reverse view. Lieber’s position—which he personally urged on Webster, President John Tyler, and others—was that soldiers were morally responsible for their actions in war or otherwise. In this he agreed with Governor Seward and the New York prosecutors. He saw no sharp moral or legal divide separating war from peace; moral imperatives governed both. But unlike the New York officials, Lieber insisted that McLeod had committed no crime because Britain had been fully within its rights in crossing the U.S. border and using force against MacKenzie’s expeditionary unit. If he had been on the jury, Lieber wrote his friend Charles Sumner, he would have acquitted McLeod even if he concluded that McLeod had killed the American passenger.
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