Transcript
Picnic
July 21, 1861
Sunday, July 21, 1861 Centreville, Virginia · 25 miles from Washington
On a Sunday in July, Washington drove out to watch a war. Congressmen and reporters brought picnic baskets and opera glasses.
A spectator at Centreville That is splendid. Oh, my! Is not that first-rate? I guess we will be in Richmond this time to-morrow.
Five miles away, the war's first big battle had begun. On Henry Hill, the Union line began to break.
By late afternoon, the Union army was running for Washington. The picnickers ran with it.
One New York congressman, Alfred Ely, wandered too close. He spent five months in a Richmond prison.
About 850 men had been killed. After that, Washington stopped talking about a short war.
The North had more of almost everything: people, factories, railroads, ships and money. So why did it take four years to win?
The Sums
1861
The war began in April, at Fort Sumter. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, for ninety days.
Here are the sums. The Union had about 22 million people. The Confederacy had about 9 million. 3.5 million of them were enslaved.
The North had 85 percent of the factories and made 97 percent of the firearms.
Look at the railroads. The North's make a net. The South's make a few loose threads.
The Confederacy was fighting for independence, to keep slavery. It only had to defend, on ground its soldiers knew.
To win, the Union had to conquer an area the size of Western Europe. The Confederacy could win by lasting until the North got tired.
It also counted on cotton. Surely Britain's mills would need it.
The Union's top general, Winfield Scott, was 74 and couldn't mount a horse without help. He also had the best plan.
Blockade the ports. Take the Mississippi. Squeeze. Newspapers mocked it as the Anaconda Plan.
July 21, 1861 Bull Run
A long war is arithmetic. The side that can replace its losses wins. If it has a general willing to do the sums.
The Slows
1861–1862
Lincoln gave the army to George McClellan, 34, the 'Young Napoleon.' He was brilliant at building an army. Using it was harder.
One night Lincoln waited at McClellan's house. The general came home and went up to bed.
In 1862 Lincoln began walking over to the army's telegraph office at night. He read the war as it came in.
That spring McClellan shipped about 120,000 men down the Chesapeake, then crept toward Richmond.
Then Robert E. Lee took command and drove him back.
After midnight, McClellan wired Washington and blamed it for his defeat. A supervisor cut two sentences before the Secretary of War saw them.
In September, Lee invaded Maryland, hoping to bring Britain in. Then two Union soldiers found his battle plan wrapped around three cigars.
McClellan had Lee's plan and far more men. He attacked piece by piece. At Antietam, about 23,000 men were killed, wounded or missing in one day. It is still the bloodiest day in American history.
Weeks later, New Yorkers crowded Brady's gallery to see Gardner's photographs of the dead.
Lee got away. McClellan waited more than a month to follow. Lincoln used the victory for something bigger. That's the next film.
In December, Burnside sent wave after wave at a stone wall at Fredericksburg. The Union lost about 12,600 men. Lee lost about 5,400.
That winter, as his secretary William Stoddard remembered it, Lincoln did a grim sum. Fight that battle every day for a week, with the same losses. Lee's army would be gone.
The Union's would still be huge. Terrible arithmetic. No general yet would do it. In the West, the Union had found a general who would.
The River
1862–1863
In 1860, Ulysses Grant was a clerk in his family's leather store. He had failed at farming and sold firewood on the streets of St. Louis.
In February 1862, Grant's army and Andrew Foote's gunboats took Forts Henry and Donelson.
Ulysses S. Grant No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.
Newspapers said “U.S.” now stood for “Unconditional Surrender.”
Two months later, at Shiloh, about 23,700 men were killed, wounded or missing in two days.
Critics wanted Grant fired. Thirty years later, Alexander McClure wrote that Lincoln replied, “I can't spare this man; he fights.” Only McClure reported it. Grant acted like it anyway.
In April, David Farragut ran his fleet past the forts below New Orleans, and the South's largest city fell.
One fortress still held the river: Vicksburg, high above a hairpin bend. Take it, and the Confederacy splits in two.
All winter, Grant tried to find a way around its guns.
So he tried the front door. On April 16, 1863, Porter's gunboats ran past Vicksburg's guns at night.
Confederates set fires on the far bank so their gunners could see to aim.
Ulysses S. Grant The sight was magnificent, but terrible.
Every gunboat got through, and no one on the fleet was killed.
Grant crossed below the city, cut loose from his supplies, and won five battles in three weeks.
For 47 days, shells fell on the town. Families lived in caves. Food ran short, and people ate mule.
On July 4, Vicksburg surrendered. Nearly 29,500 men gave up their arms. The same day, far to the east, another army started home in the rain.
The Same Week
May–July 1863
In May, at Chancellorsville, Lee beat an army twice his size. Stonewall Jackson marched around the Union flank.
That night, Jackson's own men shot him by mistake. He died eight days later.
In June, Lee marched north again. He hoped a win there would break Northern will and make Europe take notice.
As they marched, Lee's soldiers seized free Black Pennsylvanians and sent them south into slavery.
At Gettysburg, on the last day, Lee sent about 12,500 men across a mile of open fields. More than half fell or were captured.
A British officer beside him wrote down what Lee told a general.
Lt. Col. Arthur Fremantle All this has been MY fault—it is I that have lost this fight.
Gettysburg cost both armies about 50,000 casualties. Lee lost about a third of his army and could not replace them.
Lee started home in the rain, his wagons full of wounded. He never led an army into the North again.
Meade let Lee's army slip back across the Potomac. Lincoln wrote to him.
Abraham Lincoln Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasureably because of it.
On the envelope he wrote: 'To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed.'
Abraham Lincoln The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.
The Confederacy was cut in two.
A Rich Man's War
1862–1864
Armies run on money, factories and men. The Confederacy built arsenals almost from nothing. Enslaved people did much of the work.
The Union paid with taxes, loans and paper money. The Confederacy mostly printed money, until its dollar was worth under two cents in gold.
Women and girls rolled the cartridges. On the day of Antietam, Pittsburgh's Allegheny Arsenal exploded. Seventy-eight died, most of them young women.
Women nursed the wounded and ran the farms, North and South. One Philadelphia fair raised over a million dollars for army hospitals.
In April 1862, the Confederacy passed America's first national draft. Then it excused one owner or overseer on every plantation with twenty or more enslaved people.
Tennessee private Sam Watkins remembered the mood.
Pvt. Sam R. Watkins …there was raised the howl of 'rich man's war, poor man's fight.'
The Union's draft came in March 1863. A drafted man could pay $300, almost a year's wages for a laborer, or hire a substitute.
Northern Peace Democrats wanted a deal with the South. Lincoln banished Clement Vallandigham to the Confederacy. He ran for governor of Ohio from Canada, and lost.
Blockade and inflation meant hunger. In April 1863, women in Richmond raided the shops. A Northern paper printed this for readers hoping the Confederacy would crack.
In New York, the draft lottery began eight days after Gettysburg. Two days later, a mob burned the draft office and turned on Black New Yorkers.
Mobs hunted Black New Yorkers. They murdered at least eleven men. Many rioters were poor Irish immigrants who couldn't pay $300. None of that explains the murders.
Rioters burned the Colored Orphan Asylum. The staff got all 233 children out. Troops from Gettysburg ended it. About 119 people were dead.
All Summer
March–November 1864
In March 1864, a dusty man and his teenage son checked into Willard's Hotel. He signed the register “U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Ill.” As the story goes, the clerk offered him a small room.
Grant's plan: every Union army would attack at once.
Ulysses S. Grant Lee's army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.
In May, the armies fought in a burning forest called the Wilderness. In three days, Grant lost more than 17,000 men.
Every Union general in Virginia before him had pulled back. Grant turned south, and his men cheered.
In Washington, Lincoln waited for news. When it came, one sentence made every newspaper.
At Cold Harbor, Grant sent his men straight at Confederate trenches. Horace Porter of Grant's staff later wrote that men pinned their names to their coats.
Ulysses S. Grant I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made.
In six weeks, Grant lost about 55,000 men. But the North could replace its losses, and Lee could not. It was Lincoln's arithmetic, paid for in men.
Lee was pinned in trenches at Petersburg for nine months.
Abraham Lincoln This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected.
The Democrats nominated a man Lincoln knew well: George McClellan. Their platform called the war a failure.
On September 2, Union troops entered Atlanta.
Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.
In November, Lincoln won 212 electoral votes to 21. Then Sherman cut loose.
Hard War
November 1864–February 1865
Atlanta's mayor protested the order to empty the city. Sherman wrote back:
Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman War is cruelty and you cannot refine it…
On November 15, 62,000 men marched out of Atlanta, living off the land. The order banned burning buildings where no one resisted. Many burned them anyway.
Soldiers heated rails over bonfires and bent them around trees. Sherman's neckties. The army's path was up to sixty miles wide.
That fall, Sheridan burned the barns and mills that fed Lee's army.
Dolly Burge, a Georgia widow, wrote in her journal:
Dolly Sumner Lunt Burge But like demons they rush in! My yards are full.
For her, the army was a disaster.
To thousands of enslaved Georgians, it meant freedom. They followed it to the sea. The army did not always welcome them.
On December 21, Sherman's army took Savannah. He offered it to Lincoln as a Christmas present.
Christmas, 1864. The telegraph office.
Abraham Lincoln Many, many, thanks for your Christmas-gift—the capture of Savannah.
On February 17, Sherman's army entered Columbia. That night, the city burned. Historians still argue about who set the fires.
By spring, hunger and desertion were emptying Lee's trenches.
The Parlor
April 1865, and coda
Grant broke through at Petersburg on April 2. Fleeing Confederates set Richmond's warehouses on fire. Black soldiers were among the first Union troops in.
Remember Bull Run? A farmhouse there had been a Confederate headquarters. Its owner, Wilmer McLean, moved somewhere quiet: Appomattox Court House.
On April 9, Lee waited in McLean's parlor in his best uniform.
Grant arrived muddy, in a private's blouse. They began by talking about Mexico.
Ulysses S. Grant …each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority…
Grant added a spoken promise: men could keep their horses and mules to plant a crop. He sent 25,000 rations, too.
Ely Parker, a Seneca, wrote out the final copy.
Ulysses S. Grant …a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause,
Ulysses S. Grant though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought…
Lee rode off past officers with their hats raised. Grant stopped the victory salute.
Ulysses S. Grant The Confederates were now our prisoners, and we did not want to exult over their downfall.
Then Union officers carried off McLean's furniture as souvenirs, even his daughter's rag doll.
Grant wired Washington.
Ulysses S. Grant General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon on terms proposed by myself.
Gen. Robert E. Lee After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude,
Gen. Robert E. Lee the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.
Many white Southerners built their whole memory of the war on that sentence.
Lee was half right. The North had the numbers from the start. It took three years to learn how to spend them.
They started to count when Lincoln found generals who would use them, all at once. The blockade and the river. Grant's grip on Lee. Sherman's march.
The Northern home front held. The Southern one cracked.
The arithmetic was made of people. Between 620,000 and 750,000 soldiers died, more than in any other American war.
The Union that won was not the one that went to war. Four million people were becoming free. That's the next story.