The special sections of our Sunday newspapers were filled with the fact that April 12, was the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. You may have had your fill of this long ago war, but it made me a bit more interested, so I got out my three big volumes of the Civil War. Since I have written about the presidents who served in this historical time I thought I should brush up on some of the facts. There was much more than my feeble brain could consume.
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The American Civil War commenced at 4:30 a.m. April 12, 1861 with Confederate artillery rounds firing into the masonry mass at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. It shattered the tranquility of a divided nation and triggered the bloodiest war in American history. The first shell landed on the parade grounds. Soon the battle lines were drawn in the North-vs-South, brother-vs-brother conflict. For all practical purposes, the war ended three years and 362 days later with Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House. In between, Union and Confederate forces fought 10,000 battles, engagements, skirmishes and affrays. Fighting and disease claimed more than 600,000 dead, another one million Americans were wounded. For a half century after the guns fell silent, maimed veterans used to gather on Decoration Day in town and village squares and county courthouses from Maine to Texas, a repeated and poignant reminder of the war.
The Civil War really began long before the day when the first guns were fired at Fort Sumter. The causes of what one prominent historian has called America’s near suicide, were much more complex with Southern folkways set against the cosmopolitan culture of rapidly industrializing and urbanizing North. But as Abraham Lincoln emphasized in his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865, slavery was the prominent cause.
President Lincoln asserted on his inauguration day, “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it parish, and the war came.” He thought the war was God’s punishment for the sin of American slavery. The Northern triumph meant the Union would be perpetual and indivisible and it removed the fatal contradiction of slavery in a nation founded on equality. It left unanswered the place in national life of some four million former slaves.
Some of us imagine war as a romantic heroism, eager volunteers marching into battle to the blaze of “The Battle Hymn of The Republic” or “Maryland, My Maryland.” We remember Jackson and his irrepressible “foot cavalry” in the Shenandoah Valley, the granitic Joshua L. Chamberlain on Little Round Top, the unflappable Grant’s telegraphic instruction to Phillip Sheridan before the third battle of Winchester – “Go in.” We sometimes forget the squalor of Gettysburg, where the wounded gasped and broiled under the July sun for days after the fighting ended; the physical and psychological wreckage of prison camps at Andersonville, Ga., where hunger, exposure and disease turned men into barbarians; and the cruelties of Fort Pillow, Tenn., where the Confederates dealt red-handed on the battlefield with surrendering black soldiers. This was history’s first modern war, the first total war in which the full resources of the nation were engaged, and mass citizen armies sought to kill from ever-increasing ranges.
Unfortunately it wasn’t the last war to occupy the minds of Americans and claim the lives of America’s youth. But it’s the only time America fought on the battlefield among its own citizenry, and for that, we should all be grateful, especially as we look around the world today.