Soldiers for the Cause
While escaped slaves were joining the Union army in the South, African Americans in the North were also signing up to fight. In early 1863 the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts became the first African American regiment raised in the North.
“Every black man and woman feels a special interest in the success of this regiment,” declared a newspaper called the Anglo-African. The abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass certainly had a special interest—his sons Lewis and Charles enlisted in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts.
The soldiers of this new regiment made national headlines in July 1863 when they led an attack on Fort Wagner, a strong Confederate fort on an island in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Here’s what happened.
Just before dark on July 18, the men of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts began marching through the sand leading up to Fort Wagner’s walls and guns. The beach was narrow, and some of the soldiers were splashing through ocean water up to their waists. Then the fort’s guns exploded with what Lewis Douglass described as “a perfect hail” of bullets and bombs. “Men fell all around me,” Douglass remembered. “How I got out of that fight alive I cannot tell.”
The Union soldiers charged the last hundred yards up to the fort’s walls. When twenty-three-year-old Sergeant William Carney reached the wall, he saw the soldier who was carrying the American flag go down. Carney grabbed the flag and pounced up the sloping fort wall. He was soon shot in the leg, but he stayed up there, waving the stars and stripes. “In this position I remained quite a while,” he said.
When the surviving members of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts were finally forced to retreat, Carney was hit four more times—in the chest, the right arm, and again in the right leg, and a final bullet grazed his head. Somehow still holding the flag, Carney called to his fellow fighters: “Let us go back to the fort!”
“And the officer in charge said, ‘Sergeant, you have done enough; you are badly wounded …’ when I replied, ‘I have only done my duty, the old flag never touched the ground.’”
William Carney
For his actions at Fort Wagner, Carney became the first African American to be awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor.
The skill and bravery of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts finally silenced the people who were still claiming that African Americans would not make good soldiers. And black men continued joining the army—more than 200,000 served in the Union forces by the end of the war.
“This year has brought about many changes that at the beginning were or would have been thought impossible,” wrote Christopher Fleetwood at the end of 1863. “The close of the year finds me a soldier for the cause of my race. May God bless the cause, and enable me in the coming year to forward it on.”
A Few Words at Gettysburg
In the fall of 1863, Abraham Lincoln got his own chance to talk about the cause for which he was fighting. A cemetery dedicated to the Union soldiers who had died in the battle of Gettysburg was about to be opened, and Lincoln was invited say a few words at the opening ceremony. So he took a train to Gettysburg and said a few words—and they turned out to be some of the most famous words in American history.
In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln spoke of the big goals the Union was fighting for, like democracy and freedom and—well, let’s just listen to the speech.
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address lasted just two minutes. A photographer was racing to set up his camera (which took a long time in those days). By the time he was ready, Lincoln had finished speaking and was back in his chair. After sitting down, Lincoln turned to his bodyguard Ward Lamon. “Lamon,” he said, “that speech … is a flat failure and the people are disappointed.” Many newspapers agreed, calling Lincoln’s words “silly” and “flat” and “dull.”
But over the years people have come to appreciate the power and beauty of the Gettysburg Address. In ten carefully crafted sentences, Lincoln presented a bold dream for the future of the United States—and for people everywhere. Union soldiers, he said, were fighting for the ideals of freedom and democracy. By winning this war, the Union would prove that democratic government could work. And as a result, freedom would continue to expand, both at home and all over the world.
The night after his speech, Lincoln rode the train back to Washington. Too tired for conversation, he stretched out across several seats with a wet towel over his face. He had explained as clearly as he could what he believed the Union was fighting for. But he had no idea if the Union could actually win.
10,000 Battles
There were more than 10,000 large and small battles in the Civil War. Now we will review all of them.
Well, maybe not. But we do need to check in on two big fights from late 1863—battles that helped answer Lincoln’s question about whether or not the Union could win this war.
Let’s begin at Chickamauga Creek in Georgia. In September about 60,000 Confederate soldiers led by General Braxton Bragg attacked 60,000 Union soldiers under General William Rosecrans. Bragg’s forces smashed through the Union lines, sending thousands of Union troops—including General Rosecrans—sprinting from the battlefield.
“They have fought their last man, and he is running!” shouted the Confederate general James Longstreet.
Not all the Union soldiers were running away, though. The Union general George Thomas kept thousands of men on the battlefield, fighting until dark. One of the Union “men” who stayed and fought was a twelve-year-old drummer boy named Johnny Clem.
Two years earlier, Johnny had left his home in Ohio and tried to join the Third Ohio Regiment. But the commander, Johnny remembered, “said he wasn’t enlisting infants.” Johnny kept trying, and was finally taken on as a drummer boy by a Michigan regiment.
“He was an expert drummer,” said Johnny’s sister. “And being a bright, cheery child, soon made his way into the affections of officers and soldiers.”
Johnny may have been “cheery,” but when a bomb destroyed his drum at the battle of Shiloh, he got pretty angry.
“I did not like to stand and be shot at without shooting back.”
So the soldiers gave Johnny his own rifle—first sawing off the end of the barrel to make it lighter. And he had this gun with him at the battle of Chickamauga. At one point in the battle, a Confederate officer rode up to him and shouted: “Surrender, you little Yankee!”
Johnny shot the man off his horse and escaped.
The two-day battle of Chickamauga turned into the second-bloodiest battle of the war—second only to Gettysburg. Southern soldiers fought their way to a victory that improved the mood of the entire Confederacy. John
Jones, who worked for the Confederate government in Richmond, noticed an immediate change on the faces of people in the streets. “This announcement has lifted a heavy load from the spirits of our people,” Jones wrote in his diary. “The effects of this great victory will be electrical.”
Johnny Clem
General Rosecrans’s army, meanwhile, retreated north to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Southern forces began surrounding the city.
Helps to Be Lucky
Rosecrans had been a pretty good general so far, but now he seemed unable to recover from the shock of Chickamauga. As Abraham Lincoln put it, Rosecrans appeared “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.” Since this was not a quality Lincoln was looking for his military leaders, he sent in a general he trusted more: Ulysses S. Grant. By late November, Grant was ready to attack. And his attack worked, though not quite according to plan.
Part of Grant’s plan at the battle of Chattanooga was to have some of his soldiers march to the bottom of a steep hill called Missionary Ridge. But they were not supposed to charge up the hill—there were way too many Confederate soldiers and guns up there.
Chomping on a cigar, Grant watched the action through binoculars from a nearby hilltop. He saw Union troops fight their way to the base of Missionary Ridge. Then he saw something alarming: the soldiers were charging up the hill! Grant turned angrily to the generals George Thomas and Gordon Granger:
Grant: Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?
Thomas: I don’t know. I did not. Did you order them up, Granger?
Granger: No, they started up without orders. When those fellows get started all *#$%! can’t stop them.
Grant bit down on his cigar. “Someone will suffer for it,” he muttered, “if it turns out badly.”
This was a perfect example of how little control generals had over Civil War battles. Once the shooting started, they really had no idea what was going to happen. At Chattanooga, Grant got lucky. Union soldiers swept up Missionary Ridge, driving off General Bragg’s Confederate forces and charging their way to a huge Union victory.
Southerners, who had been so happy after Chickamauga, were now depressed again. In Richmond, John Jones noted that the bad news put his children in a kind of daze. “Bragg’s disaster so shocked my son Custis,” he said, “that, at dinner, when asked for rice, he poured water into his sister’s plate.”
An even more significant effect of this battle was that Abraham Lincoln decided to put Grant in charge of the entire Union army. Grant set off for Washington to make plans with Lincoln. And to meet him—the Union’s two most important leaders had never seen each other in person.
Miserable Prison Camps
Not all Union soldiers were as lucky as General Grant. John Ransom, a twenty-year-old soldier from Michigan, was taken prisoner during the fighting in Tennessee. He was shipped to Georgia, where he found himself in Andersonville—the most dreaded prisoner of war camp in the South.
Andersonville was simply a large open field surrounded by wooden walls, designed to hold 10,000 prisoners. But by the summer of 1864, more than 30,000 Union soldiers were crowded into the camp. With no place to hide from the sizzling sun, prisoners baked in the filthy open field.
“My heart aches for the poor wretches, Yankees though they are,” said a Georgia woman named Eliza Andrews.
The entire South was short of food, so Union prisoners suffered from hunger along with everyone else. And at Andersonville the only water for drinking and bathing (and using as a toilet) was a thin stream winding though the open field. Ransom wrote in his diary:
“Nothing can be worse or nastier than the stream drizzling its way through this camp … . Dead bodies lay around all. day in the broiling sun, by the dozen and even hundreds … It’s too horrible for me to describe in fitting language.”
John Ransom
Disease and hunger killed quickly in Andersonville—an average of nearly thirty prisoners died every day. Ransom wrote in his diary that it was taking every ounce of energy and willpower he had just to stay alive: “Could die in two hours if I wanted to, but don’t.”
Meanwhile, Southern prisoners were just as miserable in Northern prison camps. A Tennessee soldier named Marcus Toney shivered through a bitter winter at the Elmira prison camp in New York. Even as temperatures dropped to twenty degrees below zero, prisoners were not given enough warm clothing or blankets. In a hopeless attempt to get warm, four men crowded into each wooden bunk. Everyone had to sleep on his side, Toney remembered, and no one could move on his own: “When ready to change positions, one would call out, ‘All turn to the right’; and the next call would be, ‘All turn to the left.’ The turns had to be made as stated, or there would be collisions.”
A group of Alabama prisoners decided to bust out of Elmira the only way possible—by going underground. Beginning inside their tent, they dug down six feet, then started tunneling toward the prison walls, sixty-eight feet away.
“We thought we could dig our way out in four or five days,” John Maull remembered, “but soon discovered it was no easy task.”
Knowing that the prison guards would hear any shoveling noises, they dug silently with pocketknives—that slowed things down a bit. Then they ran into two problems that have faced everyone who has ever tried to dig an escape tunnel. First, the lack of oxygen in the narrow tunnel gave them dizzy spells and headaches. Second, they somehow had to get rid of all the dirt they were digging up. Their solution was to stuff the dirt into their pockets and stroll around the camp at night, scattering it casually, little by little.
After about two months of work, the diggers hit the underground base of the prison wall. The men dug a little deeper and went under the wall. Then they dug their way up, broke through the surface, and looked up at a bright moon.
“Half past three o’clock and all is well!” they heard a guard inside the camp shout.
Ten men made it out of Elmira that night. They grabbed some corn and apples from a nearby farm, then split up. Amazingly, nine of them made it safely back to the South.
But tens of thousands of soldiers were still suffering in prison camps, North and South. And they knew they would probably be stuck there until the end of the war. When would that be?
Ulysses S. Grant was thinking about that same question.
U.S. Grant and Son
A clerk stood behind the front desk of Willard’s Hotel in Washington, D.C. It was a late afternoon in March 1864.
The clerk looked up and watched a man and a boy approach the desk. The man was wearing a sloppy and dirty military uniform—the uniform of a general in the Union army. But so what? Generals came and went from Willard’s all the time.
The man asked for a room. The clerk said he might have something, perhaps a small room on the top floor.
That would be fine, the man said.
The clerk pointed to the registration book. The man turned the book toward him and signed: “U.S. Grant and son.”
The clerk’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when he read his guest’s name. Suddenly becoming very respectful, he insisted that Grant take the best suite of rooms in the hotel.
After checking in, Grant and his fourteen-year-old son, Fred, went to the dining room. As usual, Grant was feeling shy and hoping no one would notice him. But other diners were looking over and whispering and pointing. Then a man sitting nearby started pounding his knife on the table. He shouted: “I have the honor to inform you that General Grant is present in the room with us!”
Everyone jumped up and started chanting: “Grant! Grant! Grant!”
Grant stood and made an awkward bow. Then he sat down and tried to finish his meal. A newspaper reporter described the general as “blushing and confused.”
How could it get worse? That evening, Grant was invited to a party at the White House. As soon as he walked into the East Room, he was mobbed by men and women in fancy evening wear. Then Grant saw a very tall man working his way through the crowd—a man he recognized from pictures he’
d seen.
“It is General Grant, is it not?” asked Abraham Lincoln.
“Yes,” Grant replied.
“I’m glad to see you, General.”
And they shook hands.
Next, Grant was paraded around the room, arm in arm with Mary Lincoln. People jumped onto chairs and tables to get a better view.
Someone shouted: “Stand up so we can all have a look at you!”
But Grant was standing—he just wasn’t that tall. So people made him step up onto a sofa. And Grant stood up there for a while, beet red and sweating rivers, and mumbling something about wanting to be “left alone.”
In a brief ceremony a couple days later, Grant was officially placed in charge of all Union forces. Lincoln asked him to stay in town for a dinner in his honor. But Grant politely declined—at this point he just wanted to get back to the war.
“Really, Mr. Lincoln,” Grant said, “I have had enough of this show business.”
We Must Whip Them!
A few weeks later, down in Richmond, Varina Davis walked from her home to her husband’s office, carrying Jefferson’s lunch on a tray. Jefferson Davis was just sitting down to eat when he heard a servant let loose a terrible scream.
The news was awful: Jefferson and Varina’s five-year-old son, Joe, had just slipped off a balcony, falling thirty feet to the brick ground below. Joe died moments later.
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