For the first six months of 1863 Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson had carried out one of the most extraordinary military campaigns in history, smashing huge Federal armies at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Ken Burns, The Civil War: The Universe of Battle
In the south the war had ruined the economy, yet the fighting spirit was stronger than ever before. ibid.
Early in the war a fugitive slave named Alex Turner had made his way north and joined the First New Jersey Cavalry. In the Spring of 1863 he guided his regiment back to his old plantation at Fort Royal, Virginia, and killed his former overseer. When the War was over he went to New England. ibid.
As the sun set the Union left and right still held. Lee was sure an all-out Confederate attack on the centre the next day would work. ibid.
As the rebels staggered back Lee rode out to meet them. ‘All this has been my fault,’ he told them. ibid.
More than once during the Civil War newspapers reported a strange phenomenon: from only a few miles away a battle sometimes made no sound despite the flash and smoke of cannon and the fact that more distant observers could hear it clearly. These eerie silences were called acoustic shadows. ibid.
No conflict in history, a journalist wrote, was so much a woman’s war as the Civil War. North and South women looked for ways to help. ibid.
In July Lincoln ordered the first Federal draft call. All able-bodied men between twenty and forty-five were enrolled. But the law favored the well-to-do. Any man willing to pay thee hundred dollars as a commutation fee or hire a substitute to serve in his place was exempted. ibid.
They constituted less than 1% of the North’s population. Yet by the war’s end they would make up nearly one tenth of the northern army, most of them freed blacks and runaway slaves. ibid.
On November 19th Lincoln travelled to Gettysburg to dedicate the new Union cemetery. ibid.
In 1864 the Civil War was in its fourth year. Union ships controlled the Mississippi. The Union blockade was tightening. Lee had been beaten at Gettysburg. Pittsburgh and Chattanooga had fallen. Ken Burns: The Civil War: Valley of the Shadow of Death
Lee’s sixty thousand men were waiting for Grant in the tangled thicket known as The Wilderness in which they trapped the same army under Joseph Hooker the year before. ibid.
From now on it would be waged without a break. From The Wilderness to Cold Harbor it would not stop for thirty days. It was, one soldier wrote, ‘Living night and day within the Valley of the Shadow of Death’. ibid.
In just six weeks Grant and Lee had all but crippled each other. And now both armies dug in for a siege. The burrowing would go on for ten months. The men lived in a twenty-mile labyrinth of trenches plagued by flies, open to rain and the fierce Virginia sun, and exposed to shell and mortar fire. ibid.
Hospitals were giant warehouses for the dying. ibid.
There was fighting all across the country ... By the summer of 1864 the Union initiative had ground to a halt. The Civil War: Most Hallowed Ground
As the casualty list grew longer opposition to the war increased. With the presidential campaign looming, Abraham Lincoln now knew he would have to do something that had never been done before: submit to a popular election during civil war and win it. ibid.
That summer in the sweltering Mississippi heat Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest would cement his reputation as the most terrifying cavalry commander of the war. ibid.
Forrest was free to slash at Sherman’s forces, slowing his approach to Atlanta. ibid.
The summer of 1864 was the North’s darkest hour. Grant’s losses had been appalling. ibid.
The Democrats wanted an end to the war, with or without victory. Their nominee was General George McClellan, whose ambition had not shrunk since Lincoln removed him from command. ibid.
Lincoln called for more men to end the war; the South had no more men to send. ibid.
‘The Civil War’, a Harvard professor wrote at the time, ‘opened a great gulf between what happened before in our century and what has happened since. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born. The War was over. And it was not over’. ibid.
‘Southerners have a sense of defeat which none of the rest of the country has.’ Ken Burns, The Civil War: War is All Hell (1865), Shelby Foote
By the beginning of 1865 the Confederacy was dying. To the west only the tattered Confederate army of Tennessee remained. ibid.
War is All Hell, William Tecumseh Sherman once said … Sherman’s men tore up railroads … a trademark. ibid.
A single stick of firewood cost $5 in Richmond. ibid.
The Mercury Saturday, November 12th 1864, The Employment of Slaves: The African is of an inferior race, whose normal condition is slavery. Prone to barbarism, and incapable of any other state than that of pupillage, he is at his best estate as the slave of the enlightened white man of this country. ibid. newspaper article
Jefferson Davis issued a proclamation pledging to fight on. ibid.
At Pittsburgh two thousand liberated Union prisoners crowded on to the decks of the steamboat Sultana, gleeful to be on their way at last. Near Memphis a boiler exploded and she burst into flames. More than twelve hundred men died, still hundreds of miles from home. Ken Burns, The Civil War: The Better Angels of Our Nature
Three and a half million men went to war. Six hundred and twenty thousand men died in it. As many as in all the rest of America’s wars combined. ibid.
In Mississippi in 1866 one fifth of the state’s entire budget was spent on artificial limbs. ibid.
Survivors went home and got on with the business of living. ibid.
In Washington fireworks filled the sky. A great crowd gathered around the White House called for Lincoln. He was too weary to make a formal speech but asked the band to play Dixie. ibid.
The Confederate states of America had once stretched from the Rappahannock to the Rio Grande. Its leaders had once dreamed of a tropical empire reaching ever southward. ibid.
Thousands of blacks wandered southern roads, searching for relatives or looking for work or food. Thousands more stayed on their plantations as hired hands or sheer-croppers. ibid.
White supremacy was brutally re-imposed throughout the old Confederacy. The white south won that war of attrition. It would take another century before blacks gained back the ground for which so many had given their lives. ibid.
A million men, it is estimated, are now standing in hostile array and waging war along a frontier of thousands of miles. Battles have been fought, sieges have been conducted, and although the contest is not ended and the tide for the moment is against us, the final result in our favor is not doubtful. We have had our trials and difficulties. That we are to escape them in the future is not to be hoped. It was to be expected when we entered this war that it would expose our people to sacrifices and cost them much, both of money and blood. But the picture has its lights as well as its shadows. This great strife has awakened in the people the highest emotions and qualities of the human soul. Jefferson Davis, 1862
If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: DIED OF A THEORY. Jefferson Davis
Always mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy, if possible. And when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow. The other rule is, never fight against heavy odds if by any possible manoeuvring you can hurl your own force on only a part, and that the weakest part, of your enemy and crush it. Such tactics will win every time, and a small army may thus destroy a large one in detail, and repeated victory will make it invincible. General Stonewall Jackson
God has been very kind to us this day. General Stonewall Jackson
Kill ’em. Kill ’em all. General Stonewall Jackson
The time has come for offering mediation to the United States Government, with a view to recognition of the independence of the Confederates. I agree further that, in case of failure, we ought ourselves to recognize the Southern States as an independent State. Earl Russell, foreign secretary letter to prime minister
It is evident that a great conflict is taking place to the northwest of Washington, and its issue may have a great effect on the state of affairs. If the Federals sustain a grave defeat, they may be at once ready for mediation, and iron should be struck while it is hot. If, on the other hand, they should have the best of it, we may wait a while and see what may follow. Lord Palmerston
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Abraham Lincoln, speech on war with Mexico, 1848
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Abraham Lincoln, August 1858