Search Results

Soon after the fall of Fort Sumter, the Navy Department realized that the fleet's rapid wartime expansion would require thousands of sailors, and it sent navy recruiters out to recruiting stations, called rendezvous, in large eastern cities and small coastal and river towns to lure men into the service. Only about 300 African American men reported to these stations, and by the end of 1861 they accounted for only about six percent of Union Navy crews. These numbers soon grew, however. According to Howard University's Black Sailors Project, 18,000 African American men (and 11 women) served in the Union Navy over the course of the Civil War. African American sailors constituted about 20 percent of the enlisted force, nearly double the proportion of black soldiers who served in the Union Army during the war. The largest number of black men joining the Union Navy listed their place of origin as either Maryland or Virginia.

Enforcing a blockade of the southern coast constituted the Union Navy's principal Civil War mission, but federal gunboats and other vessels frequently supported Union Army operations by providing gunfire support, convoying and landing troops, defending army depots and supply bases, and participating in joint army–navy expeditions or raids into the interior. Union Navy vessels cooperated with the army in attacks on James Island and Fort Fisher, the capture of Fort Pulaski and Plymouth, North Carolina, and dozens of smaller operations. African Americans provided intelligence that prompted or supported these operations, contributed to them by acting as guides, and served as crewmen on navy vessels or as rank-and-file soldiers in U.S. Colored Troop units. These missions included liberating slaves as a means of recruiting able-bodied men for the newly formed black army regiments. As more such black regiments were created, these expeditions increasingly included African American infantry units, accompanied occasionally by cavalry or artillery.

This chapter examines the divide that existed between Union soldiers and civilians in the North during the Civil War. It argues that the separation between soldier and civilian was caused by the “hardening” of soldiers as a result of their experiences in combat. It considers how the harsh experiences led to a decline in traditional moral values and insensitivity to death and suffering as soldiers set aside the civilian morality that defined their prewar existence. Hardening, the chapter suggests, was a subtle process that culminated in the detachment of the soldier from prewar ideals, as evidenced by their declining acceptance of traditional social mores. The chapter also discusses the morally hardened Union Army's attitudes toward the Confederate Army and newspapers, as well as the soldier's casual acceptance of violence and death. Finally, it looks at letters from home as a means of correspondence between soldiers and families, along with the Union soldiers' flimsy sense of connection with residents of the Border States.

This essay will examine how northern partisanship tainted the promotion of Union officers and how these detrimental effects on partisan politics challenge the reigning paradigm that the North's two-party system offered it a decisive advantage. In 1958 David Potter and others argued that the North's two-party system benefited its war effort because action taken by the “loyal opposition” subdued harsh measures enacted by a paranoid Republican administration. The records of the adjutant generals’ offices of the various northern states, however, do not uphold this paradigm and reveal that the North's two-party system created conflict, not muted it. The North's two-party system compelled rival groups to engage in fierce confrontations that nearly unraveled the Union military affairs. In this case, partisan confrontations corrupted the promotion of Union officers. In almost every Union regiment, the politics of promotion became dishonest and often limited the meritocracy of combat service. Northern governors retained the authority to commission officers from second lieutenant to colonel, which in some states meant thousands of commissions. Throughout the war, northern applicants for officers’ positions tapped their partisan associations to advance in rank, retarding the development of an effective Union Army.

This chapter follows Mary Edwards Bryan’s second period of residence in Louisiana and her attempted reconciliation with her husband Iredell Bryan. As civil war approaches the Red River region, Mary gives birth to her first daughter, and Iredell increasingly absents himself in connection with Confederate service. Mary struggles to maintain her connections with Southern Field and Fireside, but that relationship lapses. She begins writing for the Natchitoches Union and its publisher Louis Dupleix. The frankness and challenging nature of her essays stir controversy, although the essays evidence the continuing development of her effective use of humor. By 1863, New Orleans has fallen, Union armies are advancing, and communications across the Mississippi are threatened. Mary seizes upon the opportunity to return to Atlanta to find a way to maintain an independent career and existence.

The process of emancipation played out in a more comprehensive way in the western theater than in the eastern. Western officers were forced to deal with huge numbers of slaves across a vast region and implement appropriate policies and programs to carry out emancipation. In particular, the Border South proved especially difficult in managing the legal and political questions surrounding emancipation. At the war’s beginning, the government in Washington had clearly stated that its goal was to preserve the Union and not free the slaves, a view shared by many western officers. But as the war dragged on into its second year, the armies and the government became more emancipationist. Many officers also came to support emancipation and even the use of black troops. However, most officers only embraced emancipation out of pragmatism and military necessity, and their policies reflected their lack of moral idealism. Officers in the western armies liberated slaves for the army’s benefit. As Reconstruction began, many in the North were not very concerned about securing political equality for former slaves. While the war had pushed Northerners to emancipate the slaves, it did not transform them into racial egalitarians.

This chapter presents Tally Simpsonsʼ wartime letters to his family in South Carolina dated from July to September 1863. Tally's last letter was written from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania on June 28 as General Robert E. Lee's army began its invasion of the North. His next letter was on July 17 as Lee's army slowly wound its way back home after they were defeated by the Union Army. This was the Battle of Gettysburg.

This chapter examines how race and the purpose of the Civil War became debatable issues between the Union Army and Northern civilians. The Civil War was touted as “abolition war,” with the goal of ending slavery. The debate over whether the Civil War was an abolition war had significant implications for why soldiers fought, what they represented, and what they wanted the war to achieve. Civilians also debated the abolition issue, offering a variety of opinions on the virtue of abolitionism. Both civilians at home and soldiers in the field did not agree amongst themselves on the purpose of the war, but the latter derived their views from their side of the experience divide. Whereas soldiers experienced slavery and its consequences on a daily basis, Northerners discussed the institution as an abstraction. This chapter discusses three broad categories of Union soldiers with respect to their stand on what the war should achieve relative to the slavery issue: abolitionists, anti-abolitionists, and emancipationists.

This chapter examines the battle between Confederate and Union armies in East Tennessee and southwestern Virginia during the period from October 1863 to March 1864. During this period, East Tennessee became a bloody battleground between the Union and Confederate armies, and while the war had left the mountains of eastern Kentucky, the Union army's movement into East Tennessee brought more pressure to bear on southwestern Virginia.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It examines manhood in the north as it played out in the specific context of the Union army. It attempts to recover the place honor held in northern men's conception of manhood and in their daily interactions with one another. Honor, simply put, is when a man's self-worth is based on public reputation and the respect of others. An insult to such a man is a shaming that requires a public vindication of worth. The book also exposes holes in our understanding of Civil War soldiers and the social landscape of the Civil War north, including the influence of class—a topic obscured by historians' reliance on the letters and diaries of elite and middle-class soldiers. The remainder of the chapter provides a quick summary of the basic structure of the army, military discipline, and military justice to serve as background for readers to understand the chapters that follow.

This chapter discusses northern soldiers' conceptions of manhood and what it meant to be a gentleman. For them, manhood was centered on moral character and domestic values. They expected other men to acquire the same aspect of manliness, judging another man based on their assessment of his character. The war made morality as a defining element of manhood even more urgent to them. They believed that the success of the Union cause depended on the superior morality and character of its citizens. Such an attitude was deeply embedded in the consciousness of nineteenth-century Americans, who had been nourished on ideals inherited from the founding generation. The founders of the republic linked the nation's success to the virtues of its male citizens and warned that the republic would fail if its men succumbed to corruption and vice.

This chapter examines how Civil War officers governed the rank and file. It demonstrates a clear pattern of interactions between officers and privates that began in a very small number of regiments and spread to include seemingly most regiments in the Union army during 1863. It shows that discipline in the Union army became more stringent over time and that its severity was targeted on the post-1862 conscripts. The reason for this was their widespread distrust of the conscripts, bounty men, and substitutes. A core group of volunteers fought for the cause; thousands of other Union soldiers fought because they had to. Without the overwhelming force used against them—on the transports south and on the battlefield—they would not have fought. The use of force and the conflict among officers, roughs, and immigrants changed the Union army. By 1864–1865 it looked more like the antebellum regular army, which had long reflected the social divisions of civilian life.

This chapter focuses on the Union campaign to capture Vicksburg. It details Grant’s strategy; the Holly Springs debacle that forced Grant to retreat north toward Tennessee; and the battle of Chicksaw Bayou. The grand scheme concocted by Grant and Sherman had failed miserably. In their attempt to hurry up the campaign in order to have Vicksburg, they ignored the risks that lengthy supply lines, geography, and weather conditions could impose on an army.

This chapter presents Tally Simpsonsʼ wartime letters to his family in South Carolina dated from May to June 1863. These letters tell about the battle between the Union Army's Joe Hooker and the Confederate Army's Robert E. Lee during the Maryland Campaign. Tally also describes how Lafayette McLawsʼ division prevented John Sedgwick's attempt to cross Fredericksburg in order to get behind Lee and threaten him from the rear.

This chapter covers the process of emancipation in Kentucky, which eventually led to Buckner’s resignation from the Union army in April 1863. It uses the protests from Buckner and other Kentucky officers in the Union army as a lens through which to examine loyal white Kentuckians’ horror and outrage at their perceived betrayal by Abraham Lincoln. If the previous chapter showed the war going well for Buckner, this one shows his world come crashing down. The chapter details Buckner’s reaction to the push by both the federal government and enslaved people themselves to move the process of emancipation forward while loyal Kentucky masters like himself were, for the first time in their lives, powerless to stop either.

This chapter describes events involving the small town of Corinth, which was originally known as Cross City because the railroads, the west-to-east Memphis & Charleston and north-to-south Mobile & Ohio, intersected there. That intersection made the town important to both the Union army and Confederates, for railroads carried supplies and reinforcements. The chapter details the Union’s capture of Corinth, which would remain in Union hands until the latter days of the war.

This chapter examines the Union army's offensive in the Appalachian region during the period from November 1862 to February 1863. Samuel Carter launched a successful raid of East Tennessee that provided additional problems for the Confederate army. These problems involved protecting the saltworks at Saltville and the railroad connecting the Confederacy's east and west. During this time, the Confederates already appeared weak and inept, having been affected by other factors such as outbreaks of disease and military problems of their commanders in the region.

This chapter examines the Battle of Middle Creek, fought in eastern Kentucky on January 10, 1861. During this battle, the Union army was led by future president James A. Garfield, while the Confederate army was led by long-time politician Humphrey Marshall. Garfield successfully led the Union to slow yet systematic Confederate forces from Kentucky, which would ultimately restrict the Southern army to the western wedge of southwestern Virginia.