CHAPTER X: GONE WITH THE WIND
(SHERMAN’S MARCH DOWN THE COAST)
Sherman Spares Savannah and the End of the War
Although the guns and trenches around Richmond still bristled with fire and dead bodies piling up on each other, the war was, essentially, over. Thus, by the time Sherman reached Savannah he did something remarkable. He sat outside the city. Surrounded it, to be sure, but just sat. His army was posed, guns pointed at the city, the two makeshift forts with boys and old men defending it, but that was it. Sherman reached Savannah and paused. Reynolds took Atlanta and then rejoined Sherman, reuniting the army as a whole.
The still silence of Savannah was deafening. The birds chirped. The winds howled. The waves cracked upon each other. Union warships sat along the coast. Flags fluttered in the wind. The 16th Ohio Infantry cut the last railroad lines into the city. Like a medieval siege, Sherman just waited. Like a medieval siege, and knowing the war was over, Sherman saw no reason for any more casualties of the fighting. While several regiments guarded the flanks of units destroying the last bits of Georgia’s infrastructure, the Confederate militias that had managed to evade confrontation never made a last “heroic” attack on the Union forces.
Sherman offered terms of surrender to the 1,000 or so Confederate defenders in the nearby earthworks. Colonel Jacobs, the highest ranking Confederate officer, willingly obliged. He sent a letter to the mayor of Savannah informing him he had negotiated the surrender of the city to Sherman under the stipulation that Sherman would not burn down the city. Sherman was true to his word, and entered the city on December 9, 1863. The Union forces marched through the ghostly city streets. The bands were playing merry songs. Men sang and celebrated. The naval ships, upon hearing the news, sounded off with cannonades. Two months after the fall of Savannah, Richmond fell and Lee surrendered. The war was over.
The fighting at Petersburg and Richmond raged on for nearly eight months, during which the Confederate Army of Virginia was otherwise eviscerated over the duration of the sieges. Over 100,000 casualties fell on the Union and Confederate sides during the eight months of trench warfare and brutal fighting. The Fall of Richmond on Feburary 3, 1864. Twenty days later the Civil War ended.
An etching depicting Sherman’s parade through the city of Savannah. After a brutal campaign down the coast, which saw Sherman lay waste to the “Old South” and most of the North and South Carolina’s and Georgia’s, logistical infrastructure, Sherman did not bring onto Savannah the same fate as to Raleigh, Wilmington, Charleston, and Atlanta.
***
The end of the Civil War marked a turning point in American history. Although the War of Independence marked the birth of America, the Civil War undoubtedly marked the transformation of America into a modern, industrial, superpower, with a strong centralized government and economy. The war, which lasted from April 18, 1860, had come to rest on February 23, 1864. The Confederacy was defeated, it lay in ruin, and the Union was stronger than ever.
The Civil War purged slavery from America’s legal and political institutions, the fight for Reconstruction was to follow. More importantly, though, the Civil War transformed the cultural and political sphere of America for good. It marked, as I noted in Chapter VIII, the Republican Ascendancy. From 1860 through 1896, a Republican occupied the halls of the Presidency. Though the Republican Party in Congress did not have universal majorities during these same 36 years, it did for 26 of them.
Thus, the Civil War began the Third Party System which was dominated by the Republican Party at the Federal level, but also marked the new struggle between agrarian populism and industrial capitalism that would give rise to populism, Bryan, the ascendant Midwest and Great Plains, and eventually exhaust itself into the Progressive Era, which, contrary to popular misimagination, was really the rise and triumph of technocratic capitalism mixed with progressive social political policies like women’s suffrage, minimum wage, and some labor rights, but as eminent historian David Montgomery notes, the progressive era really destroyed the challenges to capitalism that were emerging in the American South, Midwest, and urban cities by progressive reformers who constructed a welfare state to stabilize lower class discontent and conceded on a few labor issues to keep laborers in line.
It is, then, the understatement of all understatements, to described the Civil War as James McPherson has, “The War that Forge [the] Nation.” It birthed a new America, as Vice President Lincoln said at his inauguration as President, “a new birth of freedom,” a new republic, a new democracy, and a new way of life, “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The war also catapulted Lincoln to stardom. Although Vice President, Lincoln became the de facto President by the summer of 1862. Lincoln transformed the Vice Presidency from Adams’s honorific seat of no worth, to one of immense important. In fact, later Presidents would quarrel with their Vice Presidents because of this. Part of the presidential political game from the 1870s-1890s, until the election of Bryan, was attempting to reassert the prominence and superiority of the Presidency over the Vice Presidency. Lincoln, the hero and man of fame and stature that he was, had no problem with this. Ulysses Grant, for his part, never found need to critique and criticize the man whom he had grown to know and love over the course of the war.
The Civil War, then, marked the rise of the strong administrative tradition of American politics. Before the war, the Presidency oscillated between strong leadership (Jefferson and Jackson most visibly) and weak leadership (King and Fremont most visibly)*, between Presidential prerogative and Congressional Supremacy. The Civil War altered this, giving far greater power and importance to the Presidential Administration. The rise of the “imperial presidency,” as some historians call it, can trace its true genesis to the American Civil War, though antecedent roots can still be found in Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson.
The war itself took over 510,000 American lives.[1] More than two million White southerners, and four million Afro-Americans were displaced because of the war, causing a massive migration and refugee crisis in the American South. The Civil War opened the south and west to rebuilding and open settling respectively. Many people, north and south, who had lost their livelihoods because of the war, pushed west to find a new home and new living. In the South, vengeful Confederates would later seize political power when President Hayes withdrew Federal forces from the South, signaling the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the “New South.”
Casualties from the Battle of Valley Pike, 1862. The Civil War was one of the deadliest conflicts in American history, with just under half a million deaths. Countless hundred of thousands more were injured, displaced, and tens of thousands died because of contingent issues from the war and its aftermath.
The Civil War also gave rise to the extensive implementation of a new political doctrine, “States’ rights.” As mentioned in Chapter VII, states’ rights prior to the Civil War is a myth. Southern states never embraced the concept, or knew of it. The states knew of “nullification,” but nullification was not states’ rights. The Civil War brought a new meaning to the 10th Amendment that has now become the default understanding of the 10th Amendment, even though the original intention of the 10th Amendment was just to foster local political governance and control over state matters that were not relevant to 18th century political authority when the Constitution was crafted. The notion that states could enact policies opposite of, or to circumvent, federal law was what states’ rights meant in the post-Civil War era—and it had one target in mind: the Reconstruction Amendments.
As America rebuilt, and the ties separated and ablated by the apostles of disunion withered away, America faced new challenges and crises. In concluding the third part of my history of America, I will turn to Reconstruction. Reconstruction, though brought forth after the war, is very much part of the Civil War historical epoch and history, thus, it seems appropriate to me to include it in this third part of the history that deals explicitly with the Civil War. But before that, I would like to first discuss why some historians consider the American Civil War the first “international war” and the “cause of all nations.”[2]
* Again, this reflects my timeline's presidents. In real life, though, Jefferson and Jackson did wield tremendous presidential power, as did Lincoln. Other presidents like, especially the 1850s presidents: Taylor, Pierce, and Buchanan, had relatively weak presidencies. Some could see the first 80 years of American history as a contest between the primacy of the Presidency (democratic populism and reformism) and Congressional primacy (in the interest of the capitalist merchant and banking classes in the northeast and plantation interests in the south), though this is an obvious oversimplification. We tend forget, in America, that progressive, reformist, pro-democratic, and populist tradition has always looked to a strong presidency, while the economic interests and “elites” have dominated Congressional representatives.
[1] Figure reflects in-game totals, not the historical OTL total which was over one million total casualties: dead, wounded, missing, and died from disease or wounds. While certainly not as bloody and brutal, the Civil War in my game was dragged out as long as possible by me for reasons already stated. In short, one of the main ways I did this was deliberately sabotage some of my smaller armies by fighting battles I knew that they would lose, and also disengaging (and therefore “losing”) battles that I would have likely won if let full procedure take place – but in doing so, would have all but eviscerated the Confederate armies in the process. I also took my merry old time in conquering regions that could have been swept up in a month or two.
[2] Taken from Don Doyle’s splendid book The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War, also listed below in the Suggested Reading section. Kirkus Review of Books listed it as its best non-fiction winner in 2014.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: Red River to Appomattox
SUGGESTED READING:
Avery Craven, Reconstruction: The Ending of the Civil War
Don Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War
Doris Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
James McPherson, The War that Forged a Nation
______, Abraham Lincoln
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor
Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month that Saved America
Elizabeth Varron, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War
).
