Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (38 page)

May 4–14
In Virginia, McClellan’s army takes Yorktown, Williamsburg, and the White House, only twenty miles from Richmond. But in spite of his numerical superiority, the overcautious McClellan halts to await reinforcements instead of pressing the offensive.

June 2
Robert E. Lee takes command of the Confederate Armies of Northern Virginia.

June 6
Memphis, Tennessee, falls to Union forces.

June 25–July 2
The Seven Days’ Battles. Lee attacks McClellan and eventually drives him away from Richmond. The Peninsular Campaign, which might have captured Richmond and ended the war, is over.

July
Congress passes a second Confiscation Act that frees the slaves of all rebels. It also authorizes the acceptance of black recruits.

August 9
Battle of Cedar Mountain (Virginia). Confederate forces under Stonewall Jackson defeat Union troops.

August 30
Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas). Confederate generals Lee, Jackson, and James Longstreet (1821–1904) defeat Union forces under General John Pope (1822–92), forcing Union troops to evacuate all the way back to Washington. In less than a month, Lee has pushed two Union armies twice the size of his from the gates of Richmond all the way back to the Union capital. Pope is sacked and McClellan is reinstated. Pope is sent west to Minnesota to quell an Indian uprising there.

September 17
Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg, Maryland). With Pope’s retreat, Lee takes the offensive, but in one of those small moments that alter history, a copy of his orders falls into Union hands, allowing McClellan to anticipate Lee’s strategy. In the single bloodiest day of the war, McClellan’s Union forces meet Lee’s advancing army. The dead and wounded exceed 10,000 for both sides. Lee pulls back, his invasion blunted, but McClellan fails to pursue the retreating Confederate army. The battle is a critical turning point. With Lee’s offensive stalled, the likelihood of European recognition of the Confederacy is sharply reduced.

September 22
With the Union success at Antietam, Lincoln feels he can issue the Emancipation Proclamation from a position of strength. The proclamation is published in northern newspapers the following day.

By itself, the Emancipation Proclamation doesn’t free a single slave, but does change the character and course of the war. Lincoln’s contemporary critics and cynical modern historians point to the fact that Lincoln freed only the slaves of the Confederacy, not those in border states or territories retaken by Union forces; as one newspaper of the day comments, “The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”

Lincoln’s position is that under his war powers he can legally free only those slaves in rebel-held territory; it is up to Congress or the states to address the question of universal emancipation. But abolitionist voices, such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, welcome Lincoln’s decision.

In the Confederacy, of course, the proclamation simply seems to confirm what secessionists have always believed: that Lincoln plans to force them to surrender slavery, a right they believe to be theirs, constitutionally granted and protected. They also see the proclamation as an incitement to slave rebellion, and stiffen their resolve to defend the South against Yankee encroachment.

The proclamation produces two other immediate results. First, because of it, France and England end a tense diplomatic dance, finally resolving not to recognize the Confederacy. To do so would endorse slavery, which is illegal and politically unpopular in both countries. Second, in the North, the proclamation has the effect of making the war considerably less popular. White workers, who were volunteering freely when the cause was the Union’s preservation, are less interested in freeing slaves who they think will overrun the North, taking jobs and creating social havoc. The serious decline in enlistments forces passage of the Conscription Act in March 1863, which applies to all men between twenty and forty-five—unless they are wealthy enough to pay a substitute—and later leads to violent anticonscription reaction.

November 5
Annoyed that McClellan did not follow Lee after Antietam, Lincoln relieves him as the head of the Army of the Potomac and he is replaced by Ambrose Burnside, with disastrous results. General Burnside (1824–81) had enjoyed early successes in devising an amphibious assault on the North Carolina coastline, but when it comes to command of the entire army, even Burnside feels he is out of his depth. He will soon be proved correct. McClellan returns to New Jersey and does not command again, but he will run against Lincoln in 1864.

December 13
Battle of Fredericksburg (Virginia). Despite an overwhelming numerical advantage, General Burnside’s Union troops are routed by Lee with severe casualties, losing 12,000 to the Confederates’ 5,000.

“IN GOD WE TRUST”

The motto was added to money in 1862 under the Legal Tender Act by Salmon Chase. Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Chase was a devout Epsicopalian and abolitionist who sang hymns as he bathed. These “greenbacks” were the first federal paper money. (Previously states had issued paper currency.) Although no politician would dare to contest these words today, one popular American president later wanted to do away with the words. Theodore Roosevelt, as religiously moral and Christian-minded as any president America has ever seen, wanted to remove the slogan for seemingly opposite viewpoints. As a constitutional conservative, he believed that the words were unconstitutional in that they established a religion in opposition to the First Amendment. As a very devout Christian, Teddy Roosevelt also believed putting God on the money was a sacrilege.

1863

January 1
The Emancipation Proclamation is formally issued. The proclamation frees only those slaves in rebel states with the exception of some counties and parishes already under Union control. In England, the news is greeted by mass rallies that celebrate emancipation.

January 3
Battle of Murfreesboro (or Stone River, Tennessee). The Union advance toward Chattanooga, a southern rail center, is checked after a costly draw.

January 4
Grant is ordered by Lincoln to repeal his General Order Number 11, which had expelled Jews from his area of operations. Grant had issued the order because he thought that most of the merchants following his army and charging excessive prices were Jewish. (He was incorrect.)

January 25
The hapless General Burnside is replaced as head of the Army of the Potomac by General Joseph Hooker (1814–79). Despite his failure as a military leader, Burnside earns historical notoriety for his bushy “muttonchop” facial hair, which will come to be called, in a reversal of his name, “sideburns.”

January 26
The secretary of war authorizes the governor of Massachusetts to recruit black troops. While blacks fought in every previous American war, a 1792 law barred them from the army. The 54th Massachusetts Volunteers is the first black regiment recruited in the Union. Eventually, 185,000 black soldiers in the Union army will be organized into 166 all-black regiments. Nearly 70,000 black soldiers come from the states of Louisiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. While most are pressed into support units forced into the most unpleasant tasks, and are paid less than their white counterparts, black troops are involved in numerous major engagements, and sixteen black soldiers will receive the Medal of Honor. Their impact is even greater in the navy, where one in four sailors is black; four of these will win Medals of Honor.

March 3
Lincoln signs the first Conscription Act. Enrollment is demanded of males between the ages of twenty and forty-five; substitutes can be hired or payments of $300 can be used for an exemption.

May 2–4
Battle of Chancellorsville (Virginia). In another devastating battle, losses for both sides exceed 10,000 men. Lee’s army defeats Hooker’s Army of the Potomac. During the fighting, Stonewall Jackson leads a daring rear-end attack, forcing the Union withdrawal. But as he returns to Confederate lines, he is mistakenly shot by a Confederate soldier and dies of pneumonia on May 10, costing the Confederates one of their most effective field generals.

May 14
Battle of Jackson (Mississippi). Union general William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–91), named at birth for the notorious Indian chief and adding the William later, defeats the Confederates under General J. E. Johnston.

May 22
General Grant, in concert with Sherman, begins the long siege of the Confederate citadel at Vicksburg, Mississippi, the key to control of the Mississippi River.

The U.S. War Department establishes the Bureau of Colored Troops to supervise recruitment and enlistment of black soldiers.

June 22
Pro-Union West Virginia, severed from Virginia, is admitted as the thirty-fifth state, with a state constitution calling for gradual emancipation.

June 24
Planning an invasion of Pennsylvania that signals a shift in southern strategy, Lee’s army crosses the Potomac and heads toward Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with the idea that a victory there will give Lee a clear road to Washington.

June 25
General George Meade (1815–72) is put in charge of the Army of the Potomac after General Hooker is removed by Lincoln for his failure to be more aggressive. Meade begins organizing his army for the coming confrontation with Lee, who has begun an invasion of the North.

July 1–3
The Battle of Gettysburg. Confederate troops in search of shoes meet up with a detachment of Union cavalry. Reinforcements are poured in. In three days of ferocious fighting that mark the final turning point in the war, the Union army takes a strong defensive position and turns back repeated Confederate assaults. Confederate losses reach 28,000 killed, wounded, or missing, a third of the army’s effective strength, to the Union’s 23,000. Now severely undermanned, Lee retreats to Virginia, unable to press his drive against the North. His army in tatters, Lee seems ripe for picking, and Lincoln wants the remnants of the Confederate army destroyed, ending the war. But Meade, licking his own wounds, fails to press Lee, allowing him to cross the Potomac and escape safely into Virginia.

July 4
General U. S. Grant’s long siege of Vicksburg ends in victory as he demands an unconditional surrender, giving new popular meaning to his initials. More than 29,000 Confederate troops lay down their arms, and the Union now possesses complete control of the Mississippi River, effectively splitting the Confederacy in two, east from west.

July 13–16
New York’s draft riots. In New York City, resentment against the Conscription Act turns into deadly rioting in which blacks are lynched. Federal troops sent from the Gettysburg battlefield eventually quell the rioting. Similar riots occur in several major northern cities, including Boston, Rutland, Vermont, and Troy, New York. The crowd’s anger has two sources: the idea of fighting to free the slaves, and the unfairness of allowing the wealthy to avoid conscription by paying a substitute. In some northern counties, taxes are raised to pay for large numbers of substitutes so that residents of those counties will not have to fight. Many working-class men raise the slogan, “It’s a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.”

July 18
In the charge made famous by the film
Glory
, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers assault Fort Wagner. Protecting the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, the fort is considered nearly impregnable.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

L
EWIS
D
OUGLASS,
serving the 54th, writing to his fiancée before the second charge on Fort Wagner, describes the previous day’s action:

This regiment has established its reputation as a fighting regiment, not a man flinched, though it was a trying time. Men fell all around me. A shell would explode and clear a space twenty feet. Our men would close up again, but it was no use—we had to retreat, which was a very hazardous undertaking. . . . My Dear girl I hope again to see you. I must bid you farewell should I be killed. Remember if I die in a good cause, I wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops—we would put an end to this war.

Lewis Douglass was one of Frederick Douglass’s two sons serving in the 54th, which lost half its men in the assault. Despite the loss, the bravery of the regiment amazed many whites and encouraged more black regiments. Both of Douglass’s sons survived.