The overcast skies of Jan. 1, 1863, ushered in the era of emancipation across the Kansas prairie. The absence of sunshine, though, did not dampen the spirits of the men of the First Kansas Colored Infantry at their camp at Fort Scott. That afternoon they celebrated the issuance of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in what an eyewitness described as the old-fashioned Southern style: barbecue and speechmaking.
Three flags, all sewn by women of color, floated above the gathering of about 500 people. The festivities commenced with a performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and everyone joined in the chorus. Then, the soldiers sat down at tables arranged in a large rectangle outside the regimental headquarters. The men feasted on roasted ox, hogs and chickens, and stuffed themselves with bread, cakes and other delicacies. Regimental officers and special guests sat at a separate reserved table.
After dinner, the men were marched before their officers, and listened to speeches by their colonel and others. An observer declared the remarks of one black captain to be the most original of the day for their humor and earnestness. Read more…
As dawn broke across a cloudless New Year’s Day sky over the South Carolina Sea Islands, Charlotte Forten, a black Pennsylvania missionary who had come south to teach local freed people, set out for Camp Saxton, a waterside settlement on Port Royal Island, near the town of Beaufort. After a short ride on an old carriage that was pulled by “a remarkably slow horse,” Forten boarded a ship for the trip up the Beaufort River.
A band entertained the white and back passengers on the warm winter morning as they steamed toward the headquarters of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment made up of former slaves. By midday a crowd of thousands — comprising not only teachers like Forten but also Union soldiers, northern ministers and ex-slaves — had gathered in the largest live-oak grove Forten had ever seen. Located on a plantation a few miles outside of Beaufort, Camp Saxton was, according to Thomas D. Howard, another Northern missionary teaching in the Sea Islands, “ideal for the occasion.”
Why had they come? It was the first day of 1863, yes, but more important, it was the day that Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was scheduled to take effect. It was, in other words, the moment in which Sea Island bondspeople — indeed, nearly all of the more than three million slaves who resided in rebellious Southern states — were to be officially declared “thenceforward, and forever free.” Read more…
In an op-ed, Eric Foner writes:
Soon after the Union victory at Antietam in September, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a warning to the Confederacy that if it did not lay down its arms by Jan. 1, he would declare the slaves “forever free.”
Lincoln did not immediately abandon his earlier plan. His annual message to Congress, released on Dec. 1, 1862, devoted a long passage to gradual, compensated abolition and colonization. But in the same document, without mentioning the impending proclamation, he indicated that a new approach was imperative: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” he wrote. “We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.” Lincoln included himself in that “we.” On Jan. 1, he proclaimed the freedom of the vast majority of the nation’s slaves.
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There was no joy in the White House on Christmas day in 1862. December had been calamitous for President Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort.
At Fredericksburg, Va., on Dec. 13, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside suffered the most horrific Union defeat to date, losing nearly 12,000 men in a series of brutal and fruitless assaults against Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In Mississippi, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had been forced to abandon an overland push against Vicksburg after Confederate cavalry destroyed his base of supplies. Democrats had badly beaten the president’s Republican Party in midterm Congressional elections the month before. The public was so war weary that the Republican governors of Illinois and Indiana feared open insurrection when the new Democratic-controlled state legislatures convened in the new year. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the specter of British and French recognition of the Confederacy loomed large.
Lincoln’s last hope of salvaging something in the waning days of 1862 rested with an enigmatic major general, William Starke Rosecrans. The 43-year-old West Point graduate possessed many qualities of genius: erudite, animated and indefatigable, he could also be intolerant and mercurial. He was a brilliant strategist, but the strain of combat caused him to issue more orders than necessary and expose himself recklessly to enemy fire. Read more…
Among the countless Northerners shocked by the Union defeat at Fredericksburg, Va., in December 1862 was the Brooklyn poet and journalist Walt Whitman. In Whitman’s case the shock was personal: his brother George was among the wounded. He quickly packed his bags and rushed south to the Union position. When Whitman arrived at the field hospital set up in a mansion, he found a scene from hell, watched over by an imposing angel: Clara Barton moved amid screams of surgery, ministering to youths, bandaging the bleeding and soothing the dying with low-spoken words and water.
Whitman never wrote a poem about her, but Barton’s caring solace to the wounded made a clear first impression on him. Rather than returning to New York after finding his brother, the poet felt compelled to move to Washington and serve as a hospital volunteer. There he could aid the wounded and observe the war firsthand. Read more…
The Civil War featured many dazzling innovations: ironclads, hot-air balloons, the Gatling gun. But if armored warships and more powerful guns pointed to the future of warfare, another innovation, hailed at the time as a forerunner of combat to come, certainly did not: the United States Army’s Camel Corps.
In 1836 an army officer from Georgia, George Crosman, first touted the idea of importing camels to America. The animals were perfect for making the long, grueling treks then being mapped out across the country. Still, not much came of the idea until about 15 years later when, thanks to some publicists like the well-known diplomat and writer George Perkins Marsh, the “Camel Transportation Company” was formed to operate a camel express between Texas and California and down to Panama, later to be called the “Dromedary Line.” It wasn’t alone: there was also an American Camel Company.
Both companies soon failed, but the idea had taken hold. Among its adherents was Jefferson Davis, the secretary of war under Franklin Pierce. A native of Mississippi, Davis was interested in the integration and development of the Southwest, perhaps with an eye toward expanding the Southern economy — and the slave system it relied on — toward the Pacific. But he and others struggled to find ways to overcome what in pre-railroad days was called the “tyranny of distance.” Davis’s belief that camels could be the solution was affirmed by a retired naval officer named Edward Beale, who had become something of a zealot on the subject of camels after reading about them in the French missionary Évariste R. Huc’s “Recollections of a journey through Tartary, Thibet and China, during the years 1844, 1845 and 1846,” a famous account of travels around Central Asia. In 1855 Davis had a ship outfitted and sent to North Africa and the Levant to purchase several camels “for army transportation and for other military purposes.” Read more…
Newly promoted rebel brigadier general John Hunt Morgan set out on a cavalry raid into Kentucky on Dec. 22, 1862. His objective: the railroad between Nashville and Cincinnati, the primary supply line for Gen. William Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland. Rosecrans was getting ready to move his 44,000 men against the 38,000 soldiers under Gen. Braxton Bragg, based in Murfreesboro, just 26 miles from Nashville. The Federal general didn’t have enough cavalry to simultaneously support a movement on Bragg and a hunt for Morgan’s 3,000 raiders, but he could ill afford to let supply disruptions threaten his attack plans: President Lincoln was growing impatient for results.
The same day Morgan’s troops were breaking camp, the Union colonel John T. Wilder arrived in Gallatin, Tenn. to assume command of an infantry brigade. Within days his was one of two infantry units Rosecrans dispatched to catch Morgan’s cavalry. Without horses, it was an unrealistic expectation, and Wilder was completely unsuccessful — an experience that left him seething with anger. Read more…
In December 1862, Gen. Braxton Bragg, commander of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, was encamped around Murfreesboro, Tenn. Nearby, poised to attack him, was Union major general William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland, headquartered just 35 miles away in Nashville.
Bragg planned to stop the Union advance by hitting their stretched supply lines. He first sent a cavalry brigade under Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest into west Tennessee to destroy federal supply lines, then feeding Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s army advancing on Vicksburg, and thus securing his own western flank. More immediately, he ordered a powerful cavalry force under the newly promoted Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan to ride north into federally controlled Kentucky to destroy bridges on the Louisville & Nashville railroad, the vital supply line bringing food and ammunition to Rosecrans’s forces.
Morgan was the ideal commander for the risky task. A daring guerrilla cavalry commander from Kentucky, he had become a Southern hero for his bold raids into his home state to smash railroad lines, destroy federal supply bases and rally pro-rebel sentiment. His force, mostly fellow Kentuckians, knew the landscape thoroughly and yearned to break the federal occupation. Moreover, Morgan’s men were familiar with the L&N, having destroyed part of the rail line earlier that year. Bragg ordered Morgan to repeat the feat. Morgan and his 3,900-man force, a combination of cavalry and artillery, moved out from Alexandria, Tenn., on Dec. 22. Read more…
On Dec. 20, 1862, the cold, clear morning air in the Union-occupied north Mississippi town of Holly Springs rang with shots, the clang of sabers and rebel yells. The streets filled with cheering Southern civilians, surrendering Northern soldiers and wheeling Confederate cavalrymen, who had charged so hard into the town, one trooper recalled, that their horses were “hot and smoking.” Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts to take Vicksburg would go up in the flames of the supplies that the rebels were preparing to burn. All this was happening at the hand of a disgraced, and often disgraceful, man: Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn.
In late November, Vicksburg was all that connected the Trans-Mississippi region – that is, the territory west of the river — to the rest of the Confederacy. Grant had decided to take it by marching his main force from Tennessee down the Mississippi Central rail line to Grenada, 60 miles north of the town. A force led by Gen. William T. Sherman would sail from Memphis down the Mississippi, then up the Yazoo River, disembarking northeast of the city. If the Confederates moved up to meet Grant, Sherman would attack Vicksburg. If not, Grant would swing down to attack the city’s vulnerable rear. Read more…
Prince Loveridge, a free black Northerner, taught at a segregated school on Staten Island during the Civil War. Shortly after the war began, he published a letter in the short-lived abolitionist paper The Pine and Palm, asking why more of his students hadn’t heard about the emigration plan to Haiti. For blacks like Loveridge, who were free but hardly treated equal, it seemed to be on everyone’s mind.
“In conversation with some of them the other day,” he wrote, “I have come to the conclusion that they have not been sufficiently informed as to the great plan of Haytian Emigration. I think, sir, an agent should be here to explain to them the good that might accrue from emigration to a land where they can be men. Here, sir, in prejudiced America, we can never be men.”
Thousands of black Americans at the time shared Loveridge’s views. They dreamed of moving away from white-dominated America to the Caribbean nation of Haiti, where blacks had overthrown their French masters and established an independent country. But the conventional history of black emigration plans has focused on their original advocates: moderate whites who, like Abraham Lincoln, were against slavery, but didn’t see a place for blacks in America. Most of them favored sending blacks to Liberia, a country created by the white-led African Colonization Society. Read more…
