On Dec. 1, 1862, a clerk delivered Abraham Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress. It appeared to be nothing special until halfway through, when, invoking an earlier promise to address Capitol Hill on compensated emancipation, Lincoln abruptly recommended three amendments to the Constitution. The first two were for federal compensation for any state that abolished slavery before 1900, and for those loyal masters whose slaves became free by the disruptions of war. The third was for an affirmation of Congress’s power to support the colonization of African-Americans.
The message was perplexing, a show of rhetorical fireworks – “we shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth” – dampened by calculations of future population growth. While the president’s contemporaries focused their incredulity on his plans for gradual emancipation and compensation, scholars have struggled more with the third amendment: colonization.
That amendment, Lincoln argued, “Ought not to be regarded as objectionable,” because both Congress and would-be emigrants had to consent before the plan could work. Expressing his confidence in the eventual separation of the races, the president also criticized lurid fears that freedom would drive former slaves northward. Yet on Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation that dropped all reference to compensation and colonization. Indeed, the president’s message of Dec. 1 would be his last ever public appeal for either notion, ideas that had peppered his oratory since the 1850s and underpinned his recent appeals to the border states to quit slavery. What happened? Read more…
On Dec. 1, 1862, Abraham Lincoln submitted his second Annual Message to Congress, in fulfillment of his duties, as spelled out in Article II, section 3 of the Constitution. (“He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”) From that line comes the modern phrase “State of the Union,” to describe a ritual now performed, more publicly, in January. At the time, the message was a written effort, though it was read aloud by the secretary of the Senate. You can see a copy of it here.
The 1862 message was, like Lincoln’s message a year earlier, a long laundry list of government initiatives. As the chief executive, Lincoln needed to report on the vast business of the United States to his stakeholders, the American people, as represented by Congress. This he did meticulously, and many long stretches of the message go into mind-numbing detail about income and expenditures.
But typically, Lincoln added a new value to the exercise that was nowhere spelled out by the Constitution. (Sharp lawyer that he was, Lincoln would have pointed out that it was not prohibited, either.) An Annual Message was, to Lincoln’s thinking, a chance to prosecute the war in one of its most important theaters — the battleground of public opinion. Once again, he rose to the occasion. The 1862 message is not often grouped with the great Lincoln speeches — it is too bulky to reach the higher altitudes, a cargo plane rather than a glider. But this often-overlooked piece of statecraft contains flickers of the literary genius that would reach sublime heights at Gettysburg, seven months later.
Read more…
Gen. Robert E. Lee’s failed invasion of Maryland in the summer of 1862 resulted in the capture of thousands of Confederates, many of whom were transported to Fort McHenry, the so-called Baltimore Bastille. That fall the Union Army released the rebels in batches and escorted them, under guard, into Virginia to be formally exchanged.
Among a group of nearly 200 that left the fort that fall was a pugnacious private from Alabama named Davy Barnum. An aggressive little scrapper with a big chip on his shoulder, Barnum seemed perpetually on the outs with one or more of his comrades in the Fifth Alabama Infantry — among them the unit’s bandmaster, Charles von Badenhausen, a former lieutenant in the Austrian Army.
U.S. Army Military History Institute, Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania David Barnum, pictured as a private in the “5th Alabama Confederate Army,” circa 1862-1864Barnum had reportedly pulled a knife on the veteran musician in May 1862, shortly before the regiment’s first big battle, at Seven Pines, Va.. The two went into the engagement nursing their feud. Early in the action, von Badenhausen patted Barnum on the shoulder and admonished him to “be quiet, keep cool” — otherwise, he said, “I draws my knife on you.” Read more…
Having worked before at the intersection of Hollywood and history, helping a tiny bit with a respectable movie about the Cuban missile crisis called “Thirteen Days,” I approached the new movie “Lincoln” with measured expectations. I had seen how a film could immerse viewers in onscreen time travel without messing up the history too much. But that was the most I hoped for.
“Lincoln,” however, accomplishes a far more challenging objective: its speculations actually advance the way historians will consider this subject.
The movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president, makes two especially interesting historical arguments.
The first is to explain why the passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was overwhelmingly important to Lincoln in January 1865. The issue is not why passage was important; the movie explains that clearly enough. Instead, the problem is to explain the frenzied work to pass it in that month. As the historian Michael Vorenberg has observed, “No piece of legislation during Lincoln’s presidency received more of his attention.” Why the all-out effort in January, in a lame-duck session before a newly empowered pro-Lincoln Congress began? If Lincoln had waited until March, he could have called a special session of the new Congress, confident of having enough votes for House passage. Read more…
Though the sesquicentennial of his death will go largely unremarked, the German-American artist Carl Wimar died on Nov. 28, 1862, succumbing to the ravages of tuberculosis. Hardly recognized today, Wimar, like his mentor Emanuel Leutze, was an immigrant painter who found the promise and character of the American nation the perfect subject, even as that nation was being torn apart by war.
Though Leutze’s name and work were better known, the two worked in tight parallel. While Leutze created “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and decorated the Capitol building as it was being finished during the Civil War, Wimar finished his own magnum opus, comprising murals and frescoes, for the newly completed dome in St. Louis’s federal courthouse. Read more…
Civil War soldiers carried many valuables: letters from home, photographs, and locks of hair from wives, sweethearts and babies. But they held a less romantic article much nearer to their hearts, and sometimes much dearer: their undergarments.
History favors epic battles, stirring speeches, presidents and generals and the economic and political forces that transform the lives of millions. Yet mere underwear has a story to tell, a story that covers the breadth of the Civil War, from home front to battlefield.
A full suit of mid-19th-century men’s underwear consisted of a shirt, “drawers” and socks. Like today, men’s underwear at the time, unlike women’s, did not provide structure to the body. Rather, cover, warmth and hygiene were the order of the day — though the hygiene part did not always work out. The term for undershirt was usually just “shirt”; shirts as we know them today were often called blouses or top-shirts. Undershirts were square-cut pullovers, voluminous and long. Buttons and sometimes laces at the neck fastened them. Read more…
Two days after he replaced a passive George Randolph as the Confederate secretary of war on Nov. 22, 1862, James Seddon took a decisive step — one that, had it played out the way he wanted, could have changed the outcome of the war. Above the two generals currently leading independent armies in the Western Theater, he placed a single commander, Joseph E. Johnston.
National ArchivesJames Seddon, the Confederate secretary of war.Despite being a Virginian, Seddon was among the first in Richmond to recognize that if Gen. Robert E. Lee failed to win the war in the East, the Confederacy could lose it in the West. Eventually, that’s what happened. Lee did not win a second bid for victory at Gettysburg, but thereafter stalemated Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia. Meanwhile, though, the Union’s successive victories in the West, culminating in Gen. William T. Sherman’s campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas, sealed the Confederacy’s fate. As the historian Albert Castel put it, the Confederacy “needed two Lees. It had but one.”
For a while, though, Seddon hoped that Johnston could fill that role. His selection wasn’t unanimously supported; President Jefferson Davis had misgivings about Johnston, but favored him over Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, Seddon’s likely second choice. Read more…
In late 1861, a 27-year-old naturalized Alabamian from Switzerland named Henry Hotze was sent on a secret mission to London. Officially, he would be a Confederate commercial agent, negotiating trade deals between Britain and the South. But his real task, given to him by the Confederate secretary of state, Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter, was much more sensitive: to persuade the British people to support the Confederate cause.
Hotze’s mission represented a departure in Confederate foreign policy. When the war began in April 1861, Confederate officials had hoped that the economic power of cotton alone would force the British government to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf. For much of the 19th century, Britain had carried on a booming trade with the American South; Southern plantations supplied cotton fiber to the bustling textile mills of Birmingham and Manchester, and, in return, Southern planters furnished their homes with British goods and filled their libraries with British books. Few Confederate patriots could have imagined that Britain could long tolerate any disruption to this lucrative commerce. Read more…
On Aug. 28, 1862, Maj. Gen. Richard S. Ewell’s Confederate division was fighting desperately in the fields and pine thickets near Groveton, Va., during the Second Bull Run campaign. Heavy fire was coming from unidentified soldiers in a thicket 100 yards in front. To get a better look, Ewell knelt on his left knee to peer under the limbs. Suddenly a 500-grain (about 1.1 ounces) lead Minié ball skimmed the ground and struck him on the left kneecap. Some nearby Alabama soldiers lay down their muskets and hurried over to carry him from the field, but the fiery Ewell barked: “Put me down, and give them hell! I’m no better than any other wounded soldier, to stay on the field.”
The general lay on a pile of rocks while two badly wounded soldiers nearby cried out for help until stretcher bearers finally arrived on the scene. Despite their own painful wounds, the two men insisted Ewell be carried off first, but he instructed the litter bearers to take them away. Hours after being wounded, Ewell was finally placed on a stretcher and taken to the rear. Dr. Hunter McGuire, Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s medical director, amputated Ewell’s leg the next day. Read more…
In March and April 1862, a handful of photographers, some employed by Mathew Brady, set out from Washington to record the scenes surrounding the Army of the Potomac and to view the destruction left in Northern Virginia in the wake of the Confederate retreat to Richmond.
One of their first photographs, from March 1862, was entitled “Ruins at Manassas Junction.” In his 1866 “Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War,” one of the photographers, Alexander Gardner, wrote that the junction was “one wide area of desolation, but a small portion of which can be represented in a single photograph.”
The desolation captured by the photograph drove home a new reality about the war: above all, that it would be fought, and possibly won or lost, on the railroads, and that the new railroads could be destroyed as easily as they had been built. One of the reasons the Battle of Bull Run (known as the Battle of Manassas in the South) took place where it did was the presence of a railroad junction nearby. Small towns like Manassas and Corinth, Miss., where little other than railroad lines met, had assumed an importance out of proportion to their history and population. Read more…
