Abstract
In the 150th anniversary year of the Civil War, the popular interest in its military history continues unabated, although there are signs that it has been overtaken by World War II and Vietnam as the buffs’ favorite war. Even academic historians are prepared to accept that the military direction of the war should be understood and discussed, though it is often tucked away and wrapped in euphemism. Unlike in 1961–1965, the 150th anniversary has focused far less on the enduring controversies surrounding the conduct of the war and rather more on its coming. Such debates have clearly fed off the rise of the Tea Party in American politics that has featured fevered discussion of “states’ rights,” and the “tyranny” of the federal government. They also anachronistically assume that the issues that provoke disquiet in the second decade of the twenty-first century were similar to those of the 1850s. One way of avoiding unwanted dissension has been to focus on the individual experience of the war; another has been to close eyes: Whenever it is mentioned, the refrain that the Civil War is “the war we want to forget” has underwritten some reluctant commemorative efforts. Alas, the world we live in, shaped by this and so many other great wars, does not permit selective, escapist amnesia. 1
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Notes
Brian Holden Reid, “The Origins of the American Civil War: What Can We Learn from the Way a Society Remembers a War?” RUSI Journal , 154 (December 2009): 88–94. For discussion of what Harold Holzer of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art calls “inhibitions” on commemoration, see
Helen Stoilas and Javier Pes, “The War We Want to Forget,” The Art Newspaper no. 221 (February 2011), www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/With one exception, no US art gallery plans any commemorative art exhibitions. The chief curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which is mounting one, queries: “How do you commemorate something that we haven’t in a sense really gotten over?”
Brian Holden Reid, “Abraham Lincoln as War Leader, 1861–1865,” in George R. Goethals and Gary L. McDowell, eds., Lincoln’s Legacy of Leadership (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2010), 192–193.
For Washington’s strategy, see Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency George Washington (New York: Random House, 2004), 110–112, 114, 118, who both qualifies and enlarges this view.
For the reasons for this indecisiveness, see Brian Holden Reid, America’s Civil War: The Operational Battlefield, 1861–1863 (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008), 441–448.
William O. Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times (New York: C.L. Webster, 1890), 101.
A rare dissenting voice was Congressman James A. Garfield—the future president—who disliked Grant—a move that heralded years of political rivalry. See Allan Peskin, G arfield (1978; Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999), 227.
For Lincoln’s enlargement of Grant’s authority, see David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 437
Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1969), 110–112, 118–119.
Albert Castel, with Brooks D. Simpson, Victors in Blue: How Union Generals Fought the Confederates, Battled Each Other and Won the Civil War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2011), 137, 202, 248, 304.
See T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and his Generals (New York: Knopf, 1952), 11. The quoted phrase is from an interview Williams gave in the late 1960s, “The Civil War,”in
John A. Garraty, Interpreting American History: Conversations with Historians (New York: Macmillan, 1970), I: 311. For the shift in party allegiances, see
Adam I.P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–6
Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 52–53.
Hans L. Trefousse, Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast (New York: Twayne, 1957), 140–145.
O.R ., Series 1, XXXIV, Part 1: 12. Grant came away from a meeting with Butler more impressed than he expected, but he decided to give him an experienced subordinate, Major General William F. ‘Baldy’ Smith. See Adam Badeau, The Military History of U.S. Grant , 3 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1881), II: 246–247.
Ibid , XXXIII: 874. Sigel had graduated from the Karlsruhe military academy and had served as Minister of War for the German revolutionaries in 1848. For his career, see Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Blue (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 447–448. German-Americans increasingly favored Fré mont whose supporters gathered in Cleveland on May 31. See Donald, Lincoln , 502–506
Brooks D. Simpson, “Great Expectations: Ulysses S. Grant, the Northern Press, and the Opening of the Wilderness Campaign,” in Gary Gallagher, ed., The Wilderness Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 1–35. Simpson argues that part of Grant’s problem was the inability of northern opinion to gauge military success in any other way than in the form of Waterloo-like victories (pp.30–31).
Grant to Sherman, April 4, 1864, John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 31 vols., (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–2009), X: 252
See Brian Holden Reid, “The American Civil War and the Strategy of Attrition, 1861–1865,” RUSI Journal, 156 (June–July 2011): 90–92.
Douglas Southall Freeman, R.E. Lee: A Biography , 4 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1935), III: 446.
Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Defeat (New York: Free Press, 2008), 374; and O.R., Series 1, XXXIV, Part 1: 4, 19. To his credit, Grant made no attempt to conceal his casualties, see Simpson, “Great Expectations,” 30
O.R ., Series 2, VII: 50; Grant to Butler, April 17, 1864, in Grant, Papers , X: 301–2; Trefousse, Butler , 144; William B. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons (1930; New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964), 214.
On Lincoln’s nomination, see Smith, No Party Now , 102–103, and Harold M. Hyman, “Election 1864,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections , 10 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), III: 168–169; Donald, Lincoln , 504–505. On Madison’s experience in the War of 1812, see
J.C.A. Stagg, Mr Madison’s War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 416–420
Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812 (New York: Knopf, 2011), 416–417.
Donald J. Stoker, The Grand Design: Strategy and the US Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 368.
Steven E. Woodworth, Sherman (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 119.
Lincoln to Charles D. Robinson, August 17, 1864, in Basler, Collected Works, VII: 500. It is likely, however, that this letter was never sent because of its parting flourish, which appeared not to make the acceptance of the abolition of slavery a precondition for negotiations with the Confederacy. Donald, Lincoln, 512–516, 520–525; Peskin, Garfield, 239; Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 228, 230–531
Noah Brooks, Washington in Lincoln’s Time (New York: Century, 1895), 170–171. Cicero’s warnings are found in V Philippic , 24–26.
Sherman to Halleck, September 3, 1864 (telegram), in Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds., Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 696.
“Order of Thanks to William T. Sherman and Others,” September 3, 1864, in Basler, Collected Works , VII: 533. On the divisions in the Democratic Party and the antipathy of the “peace” wing toward McClellan, see Smith, No Party Now ,118–120, and Hyman, “Election of 1864,” 1170–1172; McClellan to Sherman, September 26,1864, in, George B. McClellan, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 604.
See B.H. Liddell Hart, Sherman (London: Ernest Benn, 1930), 343, 353.
George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the Civil War (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 317–318, 320, 322, 330, 350
Sean A. Scott, A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213, notes that to his admirers, Lincoln “is a special gift from God Almighty, … if we reject him … we reject God Almighty.”
Noah Andre Trudeau, Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 40–41, 75–78
William T. Sherman, Memoirs (New York: Appleton, 1875), 218–220
B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach, 4th ed. (London: Cassell, 1967), 150–153.
See Brian Holden Reid, “William T. Sherman and the South,” American Nineteenth Century History , 11 (March 2010): 9–13; Trudeau, Southern Storm , 539–540. For the difficulties found in calculating the destruction, see
Anne J. Bailey, War and Ruin: William T. Sherman and the Savannah Campaign (Wilmington DE: S R Books, 2003), 78–80.
Lord Macaulay, Historical Essays (London and Glasgow: Collins, n.d.), 222; Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4–5.
On the role of politics in strengthening the North’s “vitality and self-confidence,” see Phillip S. Paludan, A People’s Contest: The Union and the Civil War (New York: Harper and Row, 1998), 377–378, 379–381.
Peter J. Parish, The American Civil War (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975), 484.
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© 2013 Iwan W. Morgan and Philip John Davies
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Reid, B.H. (2013). The Military Significance of the 1864 Presidential Election. In: Morgan, I.W., Davies, P.J. (eds) Reconfiguring the Union. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336484_5
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