Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

the way was now open for every immigrant, every day laborer, every “penniless beginner in the world” to acquire “a patch of wild, vacant public land, and convert it into a homestead and productive farm.” In July 1862 Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Bill, which put government-backed loans at the disposal of the single greatest internal improvements project in American history: the transcontinental railroad.79

Lincoln and his Congress understood both the war and the politics of the war to be devoted to a single goal, and that was the ushering in of a great free-labor millennium in which middle-class culture in the form of free schools, small-town industry, and Protestant moralism would spread peace, prosperity, and liberal democracy across the continent. “Commerce and civilization go hand in hand,” proclaimed Pennsylvania Republican James H. Campbell, “civilization of that high type which shall spread the cultivated valley, the peaceful village, the church, the school-house, and thronging cities.”80 In that respect, Lincoln was as much the last Whig president as the first Republican one, and his presidency marked the triumph of most of Henry Clay’s old “American System” over the political legacy built up since 1800 by successive Democratic administrations.

CHAPTER SIX

THE SOLDIER’S TALE

The ordinary soldier of the Civil War was in almost every case a temporary volunteer. Unlike most of the European nations, which either used a universal military draft and a trained national reserve (as did France or Prussia) or relied upon an army of long-serving professionals (Britain), the armies of the American Civil War were filled with untutored amateurs who had left their plows in their fields or their pens by their inkwells and fully expected to return to them as soon as the war was over. What their officers knew about tactics, combat, and war in general could have been fitted onto a calling card without crowding. Although both the Union and the Confederacy eventually resorted to a compulsory draft to keep their ranks filled, the number of men who were actually drafted for war service was comparatively small. Even when the draft itself was a motivation, right down to the end of the war it was the volunteer, signing the enlistment papers of his own volition, who shouldered the burden of war.

These volunteers had almost as many reasons for enlisting as there were ordinary soldiers to volunteer. In the first weeks of conflict, Confederate secretary of war Leroy P. Walker was swamped with offers from 300,000 men to serve in the Confederate army, and not a few of them were straightforward in their frank willingness to fight for slavery. When asked why he had enlisted, Douglas J. Cater, a musician in the 3rd Texas Cavalry, “thought of the misguided and misinformed fanatical followers of Wm. Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe” who had driven the issue of slavery through Congress until the Southern states “saw no other solution than a peaceful withdrawal and final separation.” Cater owned no slaves himself, but he was convinced that slavery was the right condition for blacks. Northerners “had now become fanatical, and wrote and preached about it, without considering the condition of the Negro in the jungles of Africa as compared to his happy condition (of course there were exceptions) with his master in the cultivation of the fields of the southern states.” As a result, secession was merely the South’s “exercise of Constitutional rights in their desire for harmony and peace.”1

For many more Southerners, it was individual local patriotisms rather than the defense of slavery or even the Confederacy that tipped the tide toward enlistment. Joseph Newton Brown, who enlisted in the 1st South Carolina Rifles in 1861, dismissed secessionist political rhetoric as claptrap and insisted, “The war was brought on by the politicians and the newspapers.” He enlisted anyway, and stayed in the Confederate army all through the war out of a sense of responsibility to his community. Similarly, Patrick Cleburne, a well-born Protestant immigrant from Ireland, owned no slaves and had no interest in slavery, but he enlisted in the 1st Arkansas in 1861 because “these people have been my friends and have stood up to me on all occasions.”2

Others cast the war in dramatic terms as a war of national self-defense, protecting hearth and home from invaders. However protracted the debates over secession had been before the war, the Confederacy was no slaveholders’ coup. Texas lieutenant Theophilus Perry believed that he “was standing at the threshold of my door fighting against robbers and savages for the defense of my wife & family.” Georgian William Fleming declared that he was fighting “not only for our country—her liberty & independence, but we fight for our homes, our firesides, our religion—every thing that makes life dear.” Then there was Philip Lightfoot Lee, of Bullitt County, Kentucky, who offered a whole calendar of loyalties as his reason for joining the Confederacy. At first, he explained, he was for the Union; if that split apart, he was for Kentucky; if Kentucky failed, he would go for Bullitt County; if Bullitt County collapsed, he would fight for his hometown, Shephardsville; and if Shephardsville was divided, he would fight for his side of the street. And of course there were always those such as John Jackman, who enlisted simply on the impulse of a friend’s suggestion while walking to the local railroad station to buy a newspaper.3

Northern soldiers found themselves enlisting for an equally wide variety of reasons. For some Northerners, the war was a campaign to keep the American republic from being torn in two and made vulnerable to the hungry ambitions of foreign aristocracies. Ulysses S. Grant was moved by the fear that “our republican institutions were regarded as experiments up to the breaking out of the rebellion, and monarchical Europe generally believed that our republic was a rope of sand that would part the moment the slightest strain was brought upon it.” Wilbur Fiske, who enlisted in the 2nd Vermont, believed that “slavery has fostered an aristocracy of the rankest kind,” and