National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

February 6–16, 1862: The Rise of Ulysses Grant and the Fall of Forts Henry and Donelson

Ulysses S. Grant (above) began life as Ulysses Hiram Grant, but because of a mix-up on his West Point application and acceptance, he would afterwards be known as Ulysses S. Grant. It was simply a mistake on the part of the recommending congressman, but it would stay with Grant the rest of his days. His heroics would be recorded under that name—Ulysses S.—and not his given name. The chapters in his life beginning with February of 1862 were to yield another moniker altogether: “Unconditional Surrender Grant.”

Early 1862 brought the need for action to the federal armies in the Mississippi River and Ohio River valleys. In February, General Henry Halleck ordered Grant to reduce Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson, a much more defendable entity, on the Cumberland River, both in northwest Tennessee. On February 6, Grant brought the war to the poorly prepared Fort Henry and it was taken in less than two hours, mainly by the actions of United States Navy Flag Officer Andrew Foote (right).

Over the next ten days, Grant brought 15,000 troops east to Fort Donelson (the sister fort of Henry—some dozen miles away by the thin strip of land separating the two rivers) and the battle for it began on February 13. After being reinforced with several thousand more troops, Grant was able to take Fort Donelson; the terms of capitulation were simply “unconditional and immediate surrender.”

Fort Donelson, photograph by Warren Perry

Grant’s army would fight one of the bloodiest battles of the war at Shiloh within two months of this victory at Donelson. They would be at Vicksburg to lay siege to that city in the late spring and early summer of the following year. The last sword to be handed to Grant in unconditional surrender would be yet another three springs beyond that upcoming season of war in 1862.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Ulysses Simpson Grant / Ole Peter Hansen Balling / Oil on canvas, 1865 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Andrew Hull Foote / Mathew Brady Studio / Albumen silver print, c. 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

1862: Bloody Momentum

What Abraham Lincoln could never know, as 1861 closed its curtains, was what the second act of the Civil War would bring. The characters and the scenery would change rapidly in the coming year. The two generals whose signatures would conclude the war at Appomattox—Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee—would each make substantial contributions to their respective causes in 1862.

In the first six weeks of the new year, Grant (above) would begin his ascent up the ladder of command by vanquishing the Confederate forces at Forts Henry and Donelson in west Tennessee. Lee would be made commander of the southern army on June 1, 1862, and he would conclude the year with an impressive victory at Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Grant and Lee added to the roster of talented West Point graduates embroiled in the fight. And while Grant had never achieved much of merit outside of the military, Lee (below) had a fortune and a family name. Lee was taller than Grant, but Grant, at five feet eight inches, was not a short man for his day. Lee is credited with being more elegant and handsome, though, as Harold Holzer notes, “Lee had by this time lost much hair, and what remained had turned grey.” And though both men have been immortalized in equestrian statuary, Grant’s horsemanship is thought to have been one of his strongest assets.

Of Robert E. Lee's military pedigree, his general and memoirist A. L. Long writes:

From the date of its origin members of the family have gained distinction as warriors, until, through Launcelot Lee, Lionel Lee, and "Light-horse Harry," the culminating point is reached in Robert E. Lee, the greatest commander of modern times, and a military genius who may fairly be placed in comparison with the noted captains of the world as in some respects the noblest and ablest of them all.

Adjectives like “noble” are usually not assigned to Ulysses Grant. Often comparisons are made between Lee and Grant as they appeared at Appomattox; Lee is usually described as resplendent while Grant is pictured as grizzled and war-torn. How Ulysses Grant is depicted by historians matters significantly less than the single word that describes him at the end of the war: victorious.  

The war picked up speed and intensity in 1862, and as it did, both generals' roles would be increased. After Forts Henry and Donelson, large and horrible battles would be fought at Shiloh, Manassas, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. The war, by the end of 1862, was fought from Maryland to Missouri and from the Gulf Coast to the Shenandoah Valley.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Ulysses S. Grant / Samuel Bell Waugh / Oil on canvas, 1869 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Robert E. Lee / Edward Caledon Bruce / Oil on canvas, 1864-1865 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Cited:
Harold Holzer, "Virginians See Their War," in Virginia at War: 1862, ed. William C. Davis and James I. Robertson Jr. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007)

A. L. Long, Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: His Military and Personal History (reprint; Secaucus, N.J.: Blue and Grey Press, 1983).

The Atlantic Commemorative Civil War Issue, Featuring Portraits from NPG

“Lincoln is a president I turn to often…” begins President Barack Obama’s essay in the current Atlantic Civil War commemorative issue.  This edition, to released today, features a special partnership with the National Portrait Gallery in which NPG Civil War images, as well as images from other Civil War collections, are paired with original Atlantic features by such writers as Mark Twain, Charles Francis Adams, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

Of the many excellent moments in this journal, the first is a short essay by President Obama in which he discusses one of the NPG’s prize works, the portrait of Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner in which the photographic plate is cracked.

NPG Historian David C. Ward and Associate Curator of Photographs Frank Goodyear selected the images and worked with the editors of The Atlantic to place them in historical context. Ward and Goodyear note, “In the writings from The Atlantic and photographs from the National Portrait Gallery . . . one can see a people grappling to make sense of life in the cauldron of war. And one can see, in hesitant and undeveloped ways, the emergence of the modern United States of America.”

In late 2010, Ward gave a tour of the NPG “Hide/Seek” exhibition to the Atlantic editors (Ward was a co-curator of the exhibition). Members of The Atlantic staff returned for a visit to the Patent Office Building and the NPG collections.

“That tour sparked the idea of a cooperative venture in which the magazine drew on the NPG’s intellectual and artistic resources in publishing its commemorative issue on the Civil War. Both sides are very pleased with how things worked and hope to do more of this kind of collaborative programming and publishing in the future,” Ward said.

The 150^th anniversary of the American Civil War is being remembered by institutions across the nation in many ways. Few of them, however, have the memory of the Smithsonian or the Atlantic; fewer still have visual and written archives of America’s most divisive years.

Since the magazine’s inception in 1857, it has documented and commented on America’s progress, status, and past, while the Smithsonian’s mission—“the increase and diffusion of knowledge”—and its collections, such as the Civil War holdings, tell the story of the country’s past through its material culture.

Perspectives in this commemorative issue and the accompanying images are diverse and resonant, and many of the photographs—the scars on the back of the beaten slave, the bodies of dead soldiers in the field at Antietam—implore the viewer to seek out a higher meaning in the horror. President Obama characterizes Abraham Lincoln in terms of this imperative when he writes, “But Lincoln saw beyond the bloodshed and division. He saw us not only as we were, but as we might be. And he calls on us through the ages to commit ourselves to the unfinished work he so nobly advanced—the work of perfecting our Union.” 

 

Abraham Lincoln/Alexander Gardner, 1865/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Gordon / Mathew Brady Studio / Albumen silver print, 1863 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Lincoln and McClellan: An Army Ready for War

The Grand Review of the Troops, November 20, 1861

The Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac in November 1861 was the culmination of months of recruitment, training, and effort.  Recently, we spoke with National Portrait Gallery historian James Barber concerning the massive parade of troops.

Q: What was the significance of the Grand Review of the Troops on November 20, 1861?

A: In an effort to rebuilt the shattered Union army after its demoralizing defeat and chaotic retreat during the First Bull Run campaign, President Abraham Lincoln in the late summer and fall of 1861 appointed General George B. McClellan general and chief of all Federal armies, replacing the venerable Winfield Scott.

Energetic and supremely self-confident, McClellan, 34, set to work, and after nearly four months he was ready to show the president and the nation the fruits of his organizational prowess. On the afternoon of November 20, McClellan presided over a Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac in the northern Virginia countryside near Bailey’s Crossroads.

For three hours some 70,000 polished troops marched passed the reviewing stand, where the president, members of his cabinet, and Washington dignitaries were in attendance. It was the largest military assemblage up to that time in North America.  “The Grand Review went off splendidly,” wrote McClellan that night in a letter to his wife, “not a mistake was made, not a hitch. I never saw so large a Review in Europe so well done—I was completely satisfied & delighted beyond expression.”

Q: How does Julia Ward Howe tie into this event?

A: Among the 20,000 spectators to witness the Grand Review was the poet and social activist Julia Ward Howe of Boston, Massachusetts, who was visiting the Washington area with her husband, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe.

After leaving the review, during the carriage ride back to Washington, she heard troops singing the song “John Brown’s Body.” A companion suggested that she should write new lyrics to the song, the melody of which lingered in her mind that night in her room at Willard’s Hotel in Washington. She awoke “in the gray of the morning twilight” with the song still in her head and “the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind.” She arose quickly and in the dimness of the early hour she began scribbling the verses on stationery “almost without looking at the paper.”

Her poem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was first published in The Atlantic Monthly on February 1862; the magazine paid her five dollars. Soon thereafter her verse was set to music and her inspirational song became a wartime favorite, and is still popular today.

Julia Ward Howe / Sarah Choate Sears / Photogravure, 1907 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Champions of the Union / Currier & Ives Lithography Company / Lithograph with tintstone on paper, 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

A New Man in Charge: George B. McClellan (Part 3)

McClellan at War with the South, and with Lincoln

George Brinton McClellan ascended to the command of the Union army partially as a result of his own self-promotion, but mostly due to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott’s trust in his former protégé. McClellan biographer Stephen Sears notes, "It was . . . no surprise that with the firing on Fort Sumter George McClellan quickly became the most sought-after former officer in the North. By the time the war was a month old he was . . . outranked in the United States service only by the general in chief himself."

Winfield Scott’s service to the United States was meritorious, and his judgment was widely respected. McClellan had served under Scott during the Mexican-American War, wherein—as C. J. Prime writes in the introduction to McClellan’s autobiography, McClellan’s Own Story—“he was brevetted first lieutenant for gallantry at Contreras and Churubusco, captain for Chapultepec.”

McClellan was a young star arcing toward the zenith when he served in Mexico; he then served the army by instructing at West Point (1848–51), working on a survey team in the far western United States (1852–54), and monitoring and recording the status of several European armies while on the Delafield Commission (1855–56).

As an observer on that venture, McClellan and two other soldiers witnessed action in the Crimean War. Upon their return, they provided the United States Army with information on the behaviors of those European armies. One of McClellan’s more impressive academic feats took place in the assembly of his report. Stephen Sears records:

His colleagues were to focus on their specialties . . . while he dealt more generally with the organization of Europe’s principal armies, paying particular attention to engineer troops and cavalry. He had brought back with him from Europe nearly a hundred books and manuals on topics ranging from field rations to veterinary medicine. With his facility for languages, those in French and German posed no problems; for those in Russian he simply set out to teach himself the language. . . . Less than three months after embarking on his study, he had translated on 300-page Russian volume and was starting on a second. As a result, his description of the Russian army was the most comprehensive available to American readers.

George B. McClellan was a smart man.

In the years just before the war, he had left the army to become a railroad executive, but then the call to duty brought him back to serve his country. It was only a matter of time before he would rise to supplant his old boss.

McClellan was young—thirty-four at the war’s onset—as well as talented and ambitious. Scott (right) was much older—seventy-four when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter—and was, as accounts say, too fat to ride a horse. Winfield Scott had had his day. Actually, he had had many days, as he had served in the United States military since Thomas Jefferson’s presidency.

McClellan’s thinking seemed to be that if ever it was time for the young to put the old under a shawl and into a porch chair, this was it. Scott retired on November 1, 1861; McClellan then became general-in-chief of all federal armies.

McClellan then went to war on two fronts. First, and less effectively, he was the agent responsible for conducting the Civil War against the Confederate army. Second, and more bizarrely, he fought against the powers of state in Washington. He treated President Lincoln with unmitigated scorn. Military historian Edward H. Bonekemper III writes:

All too soon, McClellan began openly showing disrespect for the president. When Lincoln arranged a conference with Governor Dennison of Ohio, a Union general, and McClellan, the commanding general chose not to appear. . . . That event was followed in mid-November by an even more blatant snub of the president. On the evening of November 13, the president, [Secretary of State William] Seward, and John Hay came to McClellan’s home to confer with him. After they had waited an hour because McClellan was out, the general returned, went straight upstairs to his room and ignored their presence. When, a half hour later, the three visitors asked the servant to tell him they were waiting, the servant responded that the general had gone to bed.

George B. McClellan chose to answer to no one.

However, he was not unaware of the personalities running the rest of the American government. Bonekemper notes that McClellan’s senior intelligence officer, Allan Pinkerton, kept the general informed of political upheavals inside the capital, “using his lead spy to track events in Washington,” although “a better use of Pinkerton would have been to adequately scout the enemy.”

Time and time again, when Lincoln (right) urged him to attack, McClellan would hesitate or fail altogether to act under the excuse that Confederate numbers were greatly superior or that the time and conditions were not right for an offensive.

Bonekemper’s summary of McClellan’s character is damning, noting simply, “There is nothing in McClellan’s Civil War record to demonstrate that he had the intestinal fortitude to undertake an all-out offensive with his available troops.”

On March 11, 1862, he was relieved of command of the entire Union effort and reduced to the command—no small task—of the Army of the Potomac. Still, the need to prosecute an aggressive war was lost on McClellan.

McClellan’s failure to reinforce in a timely way the Union efforts at Second Bull Run in August 1862, and his failure to strike down Robert E. Lee’s staggering army after the bloody fighting at Antietam in September 1862, paved the way for his dismissal on November 5, 1862.

One year and four days elapsed between McClellan’s assumption of the entire command of the Union army and his complete dismissal. Stephen Sears notes, “Lincoln was straightforward and consistent in stating the military failings for which he dismissed George McClellan, and frequently considered dismissing him earlier: he was the general . . . who would not fight.”

McClellan, for all his education and experience and his efforts at assembling a war machine, would prove to be a nemesis to Abraham Lincoln, not just during the tenure of McClellan’s commands, but also as the opposing candidate for president of the United States in the 1864 election.

—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

 

George Brinton McClellan / Mathew Brady Studio, undated / Modern albumen print from wet plate collodion negative / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Winfield Scott / Mathew Brady Studio, 1861 / Albumen silver print/ National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Lincoln/Alexander Gardner, 1861/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Cited:

Edward H Bonekemper III, McClellan and Failure (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2007).

George B. McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story (New York: H. J. Hewitt, 1886).

Stephen W. Sears, George McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1988).

A New Man in Charge: George B. McClellan (Part 2)

Part II: Young Napoleon Builds an Army

 

When Abraham Lincoln placed George McClellan in charge of the Army of the Potomac in the summer of 1861, Lincoln and others at the seat of power in Washington believed that McClellan had scored victories over the Confederate forces at several engagements in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Those parties also believed McClellan to be the man for the job of marching the Federal army into Richmond. In truth, McClellan was neither the victor they believed him to be, nor the man who would eventually put down the rebellion. McClellan was the right choice, however, to assemble the mightiest army ever to march in the Western Hemisphere.

In the early days of the war, it is generally agreed that McClellan received battlefield credit for victories he did not administer or engineer. Still, in his reports to General Winfield Scott, the ancient soldier in charge of all Union armies, McClellan served himself quite favorably, so much so that he was summoned to Washington to replace Irwin McDowell after the flawed efforts at Manassas.

Military historian Edward H. Bonekemper III writes, “The dearth of Union victories elsewhere and McClellan’s successful claim of credit for the victories at Philippi, Rich Mountain, and Corrick’s Ford catapulted him to senior command in the East.”

So George McClellan came east. On July 26, 1861, he noted that when he entered the city to take command, “Not a regiment was properly encamped, not a single avenue of approach guarded. All was chaos, and the streets, hotels, and barrooms were filled with drunken officers and men absent from their regiments without leave—a perfect pandemonium.”

He formally took over the Division of the Potomac on July 27, 1861, and, again, in his own words, “I assumed command and lost no time in acquainting myself with the situation and applying the proper remedies.”

By early November 1861, McClellan had assumed command of all the Union armies by order of President Lincoln. Less than one month later, as Stephen Sears records in George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon, he paraded the army he had built, drilled, and outfit in the four months since he had taken command:

The grandest of the grand reviews was held on November 20. Seven divisions, some 65,000 men, wheeled through their maneuvers in a scene that Harper’s Weekly called “brilliant beyond description.” It was the review of the French Imperial Guard McClellan had seen in the Crimea, multiplied many times over. Bands played and fifteen batteries of artillery crashed out salutes and massed cavalry thundered past. President Lincoln, Cabinet secretaries, and the diplomatic corps headed the dignitaries in attendance. Newsmen estimated the spectators at 30,000.

The Union now had an army; the question that was asked often in President Abraham Lincoln’s office was, “When will George McClellan go to war?”

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits

Next week: Part III: McClellan at War with the South, and with Lincoln

George Brinton McClellan / Currier & Ives Lithography Company / Hand-colored lithograph on paper, c. 1861-1865 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

George Brinton McClellan,/ Unidentified artist / Painted wood relief, c. 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Cited:
Edward H Bonekemper III, McClellan and Failure (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2007).

George B. McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story (New York: H. J. Hewitt, 1886).

Stephen W. Sears, George McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1988).

A New Man in Charge: George B. McClellan (Part 1)

Part 1: Fooled by the Guns at Munson’s Hill

The Union army first came to occupy Munson’s Hill, Fairfax County, Virginia, on September 28, 1861.

Entering the fall of 1861, the Union army’s setback at Manassas provided the impetus for a change in leadership. One of the key figures to emerge from this shake-up was George B. McClellan, a career soldier who—like so many of his contemporaries, both northern and southern—was trained at the United States Military Academy.

As the armies jostled for position in northern Virginia after Manassas, McClellan began building and training his large number of recruits, many of whom had never experienced life away from home. McClellan inspired these young men and turned them into a significant army. By the time he paraded his troops before President Abraham Lincoln on November 20, 1861, his force was 70,000 strong. It was and still is the largest military parade on American soil.

McClellan is something of a paradoxical figure in U.S. military history. While he was clearly talented and charismatic, he was also reluctant to fight. He listened to his chief spy, Allan Pinkerton, to a fault. Pinkerton’s information was sometimes incorrect, and McClellan, in response to the information, often hesitated or failed to act aggressively enough for Lincoln.

One of McClellan’s poorest episodes took place in late September 1861, just outside of Washington, D.C. The incident at Munson’s Hill was so bleak that McClellan falsely accounts for it in his memoir, McClellan’s Own Story. McClellan wrote, “Towards Manassas the very important advanced points of Upton’s and Munson’s Hills were held by strong works, with some small batteries near by.”

Later, after the Confederate forces removed to another position, McClellan described the Union takeover of these locations, stating, “The maneuvering in advance by our flanks alarmed the enemy, whose center at Munson’s and Upton’s was much advanced. As soon as our pickets informed me that he had fallen back I rushed forward and seized those very important points.”

The facts of the matter, however, eluded McClellan in his autobiography, probably out of shame. Military historian Jon Latimer succinctly describes the entire episode in his tome on military legerdemain, A History of Bluff in Wartime:

At this time the Union intelligence service was run by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, founded by the ex-Glaswegian Allan Pinkerton, which later became renowned throughout the West. As a military intelligence bureau, however, it was hopelessly inadequate and provided wildly exaggerated reports of rebel strength in the area immediately south of Washington. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, Pinkerton reported Confederate forces at totaling 270,000 men, with 150,000 within striking distance of Washington. [McClellan] refused to move until he had 270,000 men of his own. . . .Then, in September rebel pickets were driven surprisingly easily from a position they had occupied within a few miles of Washington, revealing that the guns McClellan’s spies had assured him were trained on the capital were nothing more than stripped logs, painted black with wagon wheels tacked onto the side: one scornful reporter christened them “Quaker Guns.”

In the two months and one week since the Battle of Manassas, the Union army had been kept in place, at least in this little field in northern Virginia, by so many harmless sections of tree trunks and archaic wagon parts. Sadly, McClellan would fall victim to this “Quaker Gun” strategy more than once, as it was an easily deployed measure for a Confederate army that had significantly less artillery than its opponent.

Such encounters with make-believe weapons and inflated interpretations of the enemy’s numbers would take a toll on McClellan’s reputation during the war, and give McClellan's detractors ammunition to use against him.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits

Next week—Part II: Young Napoleon Builds an Army

 

George Brinton McClellan / Julian Scott / Oil on canvas, 1888 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; bequest of Georgiana L. McClellan, 1953

The Battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, August 10, 1861: The Death of a General

The American Civil War was replete with educated men to conduct it. Generals on both sides of the fight graduated from West Point—the United States Military Academy—and the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was also an alumnus. Robert E. Lee, destined to command the southern armies, was not only a West Point graduate but also the former superintendent of the school.

Among other notable academy alums were Ulysses S. Grant (1843); William Tecumseh Sherman (1840); Leonidas Polk (1827); George Meade (1835); John Sedgwick (1837); Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan, George Pickett (all 1846); and George Armstrong Custer (1861). If there was a single institution responsible for the sophisticated administration of the war both on and off the battlefield, it was West Point.

Because of the nature of the school, West Point also lost many of its former students in combat.

Early in the war, this attrition commenced. Nathaniel Lyon (above), brigadier general and 1841 West Point graduate, had proven his merit during the Mexican American War. Though brave, Lyon was also a man with a severe personality and a penchant for doing things his own way. Writer and Civil War historian Shelby Foote describes Lyon in a bizarre and almost comedic episode that took place only three months before the general’s final fight:

…disguised in women’s clothes, including a bonnet and veil to hide his red hair and whiskers, [Lyon] had ridden in an open carriage to reconnoiter a secessionist camp. Afterwards he surrounded the place, forced its surrender under the muzzles of his guns, and marched the would-be Confederates off to prison, shooting down two dozen civilians when a crowd on the streets of St. Louis attempted to interfere.

Lyon was not one to back down from a fight, and his belief in the cause of the Union was strong. When he was assigned to his Missouri post, Lyon set out to subjugate the rebellion in the region.

By early August 1861, he found his army greatly outnumbered by rebel troops near Springfield. At Wilson’s Creek, early on August 10, General Lyon divided his army and attempted to defeat the much larger Confederate force by striking at them from both the north and the south of their position.

Like the battle at Manassas only a few weeks before, the chief strategy was savagery; complex battle plans gave way to simple killing. “Far from resembling panoplied war,” Foote writes, “It was more like reciprocal murder.” Trying to rally his troops against the greater contingency, Lyon was wounded several times before falling dead to a rebel bullet. He was the first Union general to be killed in the war. Many more from both his country and his alma mater would follow.

—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

 

Nathaniel Lyon / Unidentified Artist / Albumen silver print, c. 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Sources:
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (New York: Random House, 1958).

United States Military Academy at West Point, Notable Grads

 

The 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Bull Run

Neither Irvin McDowell (above) nor Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard could have predicted the outcome of the battle in which they were about to engage on the morning of July 21, 1861.  The soldiers were untested.  Many of the officers were untested.  Also, the soil of Virginia had not seen large scale combat since the British sailed down the Chesapeake after torching Washington, D.C. in 1814, an event that occurred well before the lives of most of those involved in this action.  After almost a half-century of peace, Virginia would again play host to war.

McDowell commanded the Union Army of the Potomac, and his intention was to march west to where a large contingency of rebel troops were encamped at Manassas, Virginia, through which ran a small stream called Bull Run.  The thin few miles—less than thirty—from Bull Run to the White House provided the reason for an urgent campaign against the Confederate occupancy. 

Other than his participation in this coming battle, Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard (right) of the Confederate army had two things in common with Irvin McDowell.  First, they had both served in the Mexican War.  Prior to that, and perhaps more important, they were both graduates of West Point, both class of 1838.  Though both armies were, for the most part, inexperienced, their leaders were not. 

Historian Shelby Foote writes of the battle plans:

. . . Beauregard and McDowell, on opposite sides of Bull Run, had more or less identical plans, each intending to execute a turning movement by the right flank to strike his opponent's left.  If both had moved according to plan, the two armies might have grappled and spun round and round, like a pair of dancers clutching each other, and twirling to the accompaniment of cannon.

July 21, 1861 was a Sunday, and locals of the Manassas area were either in church and or just leaving church as the battle developed.   At first, they heard the sounds of a Union victory falling into place as the rebels fell back from their initial positions, but later, as the southern side was reinforced, the day grew long for McDowell's men.  One southern brigadier general, Thomas J. Jackson (below), earned his nickname "Stonewall" during the afternoon as he held his men steady in the face of the Union fire at Henry House Hill. 

Toward the end of the day, the Confederate forces changed their posture from defensive to offensive, and in so doing, sent the Union Army of the Potomac over Bull Run again, this time in retreat.   As Walt Whitman recorded, "The national forces at the last moment exploded in a panic and fled from the field."  In the disarray following the disaster, the Union army regrouped weakly in Washington, according to Whitman, "…baffled, humiliated, panic-struck."       

Over sixty thousand men fought in this first large battle of the war, with the total killed, wounded, and missing coming to almost five thousand.  The casualties were massive, but that number would be few compared to the battles to come.

—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

 

Irvin McDowell / Mathew B. Brady / Photograph, c. 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. F.B. Wilde

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard / Unidentified artist, Copy after:  Charles DeForest Fredricks / Engraving on paper, c. 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Stonewall Jackson / M. & N. Hanhart Lithography Company, active 1855 –1863 / Lithograph with tintstone on paper, c. 1863 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Cited:

Foote, Shelby.  The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume One, Fort Sumter to Perryville.  New York: Random House, 1958.

Whitman, Walt.  Poetry and Prose.  ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Literary Classics of the United States (Penguin Putnam), 1982.

From Fort Sumter to Bull Run

The Death of Ellsworth by Alonzo Chappel, 1862

By the end of June, 1861, much of the dirty work necessary to start a mighty civil war had been accomplished.  Fort Sumter had been fired upon the previous April.  The southern states, beginning with South Carolina in December of 1860, and then Mississippi less than a month later, had begun to secede.

Virginia and Tennessee—the states wherein the most battles of the war would be fought—were the final two states to leave, with Virginia abandoning her claim to the union in late May, 1861, and Tennessee on June 8.  Like the rest of the states, both north and south, Tennessee and Virginia would pay dearly, as tens of thousands of their sons would be lost in battle.

Tennessee and Virginia also suffered the additional burden of playing host to many of the most horrible moments of the war—Tennessee would see Shiloh and Stones River, as well as battles up and down the rivers that run the length and the width of the state, while Virginia provided the fields for First and Second Bull Run (Manassas), Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and, ultimately, the surrender at Appomattox.

Also, by June of 1861, many of the leaders who were so integral to the war had assembled and had begun to prepare for a fight.  The impending war was becoming infused with its personalities.  The leadership in the north formed around the chief executive, Abraham Lincoln, whose election pushed the issue of secession to the front of the southern agenda.

The southern cause rallied around its own president, Jefferson Davis (right), a planter from Mississippi whose politics had carried him to the highest echelons of the American military prior to his arrival at the presidency of the confederacy.  Each of these men organized their needs around the strengths and potentials of their followers. Often, they chose wisely; almost as often, their choices disappointed them.

At the beginning of the war, the man in charge of the Union army was General Winfield Scott (above), an individual who was not much younger than the nation, itself.  Scott, born in 1786, was a soldier who had seen his more profound and active days.  By the summer of 1861, his advice was still good, but he was in no condition to command an army in the field.  After the first battle at Bull Run, Scott yielded his position to George McClellan, a man who would test Abraham Lincoln’s patience many times, eventually going so far as to oppose Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election.

In the south, Joseph Johnston was commander in chief of the rebel army of Northern Virginia until he was wounded and replaced by Robert E. Lee (right) in June, 1862.  Ironically, Lee had been Winfield Scott’s choice to take control of the Union army upon Scott’s retirement.

And even though the highest ranks on each side were filled with enough interesting and disparate personalities to launch the Trojan War, the American Civil War’s first major battle at Bull Run was preceded by a much smaller battle in Alexandria, Virginia, a battle that would provide each side a martyr and give the war further unneeded emotional impetus to begin.  Historian E. B. Long chronicles the events of May 24, 1861 in his tome, The Civil War: Day by Day:

As stealthily as partially trained troops could move, the Federals advanced across the Potomac at Washington and occupied Alexandria, Virginia . .  .  Added to the strategy and the thrill of the first advance, was tragic, dramatic death of youthful Elmer Ellsworth.  Twenty-four, organizer of a famous Zouave drill team, Ellsworth led the First Fire Zouaves, or Eleventh New York.

Colonel Ellsworth with a few companions rushing toward the center of Alexandria saw a secession flag flying from the Marshall House.  Ellsworth and two others dashed in to haul down the enemy flag.  Descending the stairs with the banner, Ellsworth was confronted by the hotel keeper, James Jackson.  Jackson blasted Ellsworth with his shotgun; Jackson was immediately fatally shot by Private Francis E. Brownell.

Ellsworth’s death plunged the North into a patriotic spasm of grief; the body lay in state in the White House.  A friend of the President, Ellsworth became a martyr for the Federal cause.  As the tears and cries of rage spread through the North, so, too, did Jackson become a martyr to the South.

Unlike the somewhat innocuous and blood-free fight at Fort Sumter, the clash at the Marshall House told the nation that the larger, imminent war would be viciously partisan, fierce, and horrible.  That larger war would begin at Bull Run.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

   

 

The Death of Ellsworth / Alonzo Chappel / Oil on canvas, c. 1862 / Chicago History Museum / Charles E. Gunther Collection

Jefferson Davis / Mathew Brady Studio / Modern albumen print from wet plate collodion negative, undated / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Winfield Scott / Mathew B. Brady / Albumen silver print, 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Robert E. Lee / Edward & Henry T. Anthony & Company / Albumen silver print, c. 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

 

Is it Washington's or Lincoln's DC?

Photo by Warren Perry.

As the nation moves further into the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War, one name appears more than any other in papers, symposia, and discussions—Abraham Lincoln.

Washington, D.C., is a city of Lincoln echoes. The capital, named for the first president, contains perhaps a greater presence of Lincoln than it does of the Founding Father. Abraham Lincoln is credited with saving the nation and its capital during the most trying days of the Union’s existence, and Lincoln tributes in Washington are as commonplace as half-smoke vendors.

Photo by Warren Perry.

In addition to the obvious—Ford’s Theatre and the Lincoln Memorial (both shown above)—smaller monuments and markers are everywhere in Washington. The National Historic Landmark building that now houses the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum was built as the Old Patent Office Building and played host to Lincoln’s second inaugural ball in 1865. The White House has the Lincoln bedroom. A plaque on E Street Northwest marks John Wilkes Booth’s escape route, while a plaque on H Street Northwest denotes the Surratt House, home of several of the convicted Lincoln conspirators.

Washington is also the final resting place for the two most famous Lincoln photographers, Alexander Gardner (Glenwood Cemetery) and Mathew Brady (Congressional Cemetery), as well as the home of the most famous photograph of Lincoln, Gardner’s “cracked plate” from early 1865, at the National Portrait Gallery (below).

Both ends of the axis that includes the National Mall are capped with Lincoln tributes—the Lincoln Memorial by Daniel Chester French seals off the west end, while East Capitol Street, the extension of the line that bisects the United States Capitol, has as its penultimate monument site the public space of Lincoln Park, within which is contained a statue of Abraham Lincoln emancipating the slaves (below).

Other large monuments to Lincoln in the district may be found at the United States Capitol rotunda, the White House, Fort Stevens, and the National Cathedral.

Photo by Benjamin Bloom.

Of course, one needs to look no further than one’s own pocket to understand America’s love for Lincoln; he has his own penny and five-dollar note. And though Lincoln does not have a cherry tree legend to his attribution, he does have a set of child’s building logs. The case for Lincoln’s endearment to America continues to be made every day in many different forms. After all, Ford did not build a Ford named Washington; Ford built a Ford named Lincoln.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Gardner, 1865 / Albumen silver print / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

A Quick and Effective Change: Cameron to Stanton, and Administrating the Civil War

Simon Cameron (above) was Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war when hostilities began in 1861. Cameron, however, was a somewhat corrupt and poor administrator; President Lincoln sent him to Russia to serve as minister in 1862. Cameron’s replacement did not necessarily engender positive feelings in everyone he met either, but he performed his job to the highest degree, which was the service Lincoln required.

Edwin Stanton (above) is generally described as short in physical respects, but he was long on character and spirit. And though small in stature, Stanton himself might have thought that the six-foot, two-inch-tall Kevin Kline was appropriate, if not a little diminutive, in his role as the secretary of war in Robert Redford’s current film, The Conspirator.

General William Emile Doster, who served as provost marshal for Washington during the early part of the war, attested that Stanton was a difficult man, but also that he performed well in an environment that needed his talent and ethics.

To relieve McClellan, court-martial Porter [Fitz John Porter, accused of insubordination and failure to obey orders at Second Bull Run], and eliminate all traces of West Point class traditions, uniting by nicknames, I consider victories as important as Appomattox, and [none] but the wooden and numb audacity of Stanton dared to achieve.

Secretary of War Stanton was ornery and direct, parceling out no partiality and having little respect for anyone. He is portrayed in drawing and sculpture as plug-like, and historian Shelby Foote described Stanton as “thick-set, bouncy on short but energetic legs. His voice, which was deep in times of calm, rose to piercing shrillness in excitement.”

In his journals, Walt Whitman recorded seeing Lincoln and Stanton together on one of the president’s excursions:

Sometimes the President goes and comes in an open barouche. The cavalry always accompany him, with drawn sabres. Often I notice as he goes out evenings . . . he turns off and halts at the large and handsome residence of the Secretary of War, on K street, and holds conference there. If in his barouche, I can see from my window he does not alight, but sits in the vehicle and Mr. Stanton comes out to attend him. Sometimes one of his sons, a boy of ten or twelve, accompanies him, riding at his right on a pony.

Stanton administered the war to the end and beyond. He was at President Lincoln’s bedside on the early morning of April 15, 1865, as the president succumbed to the gunshot of the previous night. Stanton said at the president’s passing, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Andrew Johnson, ascending to the presidency upon Lincoln’s death, did not agree with Stanton about the implementation of reconstruction. Johnson’s attempt to fire Stanton resulted in Johnson’s impeachment; upon the president’s acquittal, Stanton resigned.

President Ulysses Grant eventually appointed Stanton to the Supreme Court, but Stanton did not live long enough to take the oath and is therefore not listed in records as having served on the Court. Edwin M. Stanton died in 1869 and is buried in Washington, D.C., the city he richly served until the end of his days.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Simon Cameron / John Dabour, 1837-1905 / Oil on canvas, 1871/ National Portrait Gallery, gift of G H Chase

Edwin McMasters Stanton / Henry Ulke, 1821-1910 / Oil on canvas, 1872 /National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; gift of Sophy Stanton to the Smithsonian Institution, 1923

Death Bed of the Martyr President / Currier & Ives Lithography Co.,/ Lithograph on paper, 1865 /  National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Dr. Fred W. Hicks, III

The Eve of War: The Moments and Months Leading to the Attack on Fort Sumter

This Tuesday, April 12, marks the 150th anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter.

The date and the hour are pretty certain. On April 12, 1861, close to 4:30 a.m., after months of escalating tension between the North and the South, a shot was fired across the harbor in Charleston, South Carolina, to the federal contingency occupying Fort Sumter.

Again, that was April 12, 1861. But was that the beginning of the war?

Generally, it is accepted that the hostilities commenced on April 12, 1861, and Charleston harbor and Fort Sumter provided the location for the true beginning of the war—in terms of gunfire, anyway. And while it might be difficult to dispute the location, when the war began is a matter of interest; some historians believe it arrived several months earlier. Union soldiers encamped at Fort Sumter over the winter of 1860–61 were in need of supplies, and a ship, Star of the West, was sent to reinforce the fort. On the approach to the fort, Star of the West was fired upon both from land and from the water; it was unable to complete its mission.

That was January 9, 1861. Was that the beginning of the war?

Historian E. B. Long writes:

The first shots had been fired in Charleston Harbor, and many considered them the first serious shots of the war, though there was actually no war yet. The flag on Star of the West was answered by running up the garrison flag at Fort Sumter. The men manned the parapets, ready for action. Some officers at the fort were incensed that Maj. [Robert] Anderson did not let them fire; there was chagrin that the relief ship had turned away so readily. But the officers varied in their opinions. Anderson did protest to Gov. Pickens the firing of two batteries, Morris Island and Fort Moultrie, upon an unarmed vessel bearing the U.S. flag. Pickens replied that the sending of reinforcements would be considered a hostile act as South Carolina was independent now, and that attack must be repelled. Anderson immediately sent messages north. Charleston itself was in an uproar; it seemed for a moment that real war had come and many people welcomed it. But when it was over Fort Sumter was still in Federal hands and the problem remained much as it had been, only more agitated.

Only one day before, as Long records in The Civil War: Day by Day, “Federal troops fired during the night upon about twenty men who had approached Fort Barrancas.”

That was January 8, 1861. Was that the beginning of the war?

Five years earlier, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, in speaking to the Senate on more than one occasion, had passionately and intensely berated the slaveholding South; South Carolina representative Preston Brooks took umbrage. Brooks, using his walking cane, beat Sumner in the United States Senate chamber, putting Sumner out of commission for three years. Years later, General William Emile Doster, a lawyer before the war and later the provost marshal of the District of Columbia military district, wrote of this assault, “Surely the conflict commenced on his [Sumner’s] skull.”

That was May 22, 1856. Was that the beginning of the war?

Who fired the first shot is also disputed.

Union Major Robert Anderson (above) was the officer in charge at Fort Sumter. Having been unable to receive either men or supplies because of the blockade on his fort, Anderson was insufficiently prepared either to withstand a siege any longer or to wage much of a war. Across the harbor from him was General Pierre Gustave Toutant  Beauregard (right), in charge of the southern forces in Charleston. When shots were fired in the early morning of April 12, it would be but a matter of hours before Anderson capitulated.

Civil War historian Shelby Foote writes:

Roger Pryor . . . had spoken from a Charleston balcony just two days ago. “Strike a blow!” he had urged the Carolinians. Now when he was offered the honor of firing the first shot, he shook his head, his long hair swaying. “I could not fire the first gun of the war,” he said, his voice as husky with emotion as Anderson’s had been, back on the wharf at the fort. Another Virginian could and would—white-haired Edmund Ruffin, a farm-paper editor and old-line secessionist, sixty-seven years of age. At [4:30 a.m.] he pulled a lanyard; the first shot of the war drew a red parabola against the sky and burst with a glare, outlining the dark pentagon of Fort Sumter.

E. B. Long, however, tells another tale of those early moments of the war:

At 4:30 a.m. the signal shot was fired from the post of Capt. George S. James at Fort Johnson, with other batteries opening according to previous orders. Capt. James gave the order and, probably, one Henry S. Farley actually fired the signal shot that arched in the night sky over Charleston Harbor. Edmund Ruffin (below), Virginia agriculturalist and fiery Confederate, did not, apparently, fire the first real shot, despite the legend. He did fire the first shell from columbiad No. 1 of the iron battery at Cummings Point on Morris Island. The rotation of fire, which was followed, brought this battery into action late. But it matters little; the signal shot did it and the war guns spoke.

No matter who fired the first shot, what is certain is this: the actions that took place on April 12, 1861, were irreversible. Whatever could have been done before Sumter could not be done after, and the events at Sumter could not be undone. Anderson’s defense, while valiant, was futile: he had too little of everything—men, supplies, munitions. The major was only capable of putting up a reasonable defense for a short time, and after about a day and a half, he gave up the fort. April 14, 1861, would see the property at Fort Sumter turned over to the rebel troops under Beauregard.

Armies would begin to assemble at this moment. Other moments may have had doubt attached to them; this one would not. This was war.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Edmund Ruffin / Edward Anthony / Albumen silver print, 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Robert A. Anderson / Charles DeForest Fredricks, 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. F.B. Wilde

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard / Unidentified artist / Albumen silver print, c. 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Cited:

E. B. Long, with Barbara Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (New York: Da Capo, 1985).

Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (New York: Random House, 1958).

NPG Civil War Commemoration: Talking to the Scholars

As part of the National Portrait Gallery’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Center for Electronic Research and Outreach Services (CEROS) will be filming NPG curators and historians, as well as outside scholars, discussing the events and personalities of the great conflict. Beginning with David C. Ward’s commentary (above) on the Lincoln life masks by Leonard Wells Volk and Clark Mills, the NPG website will continue to showcase talks that illuminate the lives of those who conducted America through its greatest trial.

Benjamin Bloom, NPG web developer, said of the project, “We are really excited about this work. Our goal is to bring the museum’s collection to light in the context of the Civil War, and we have excellent living resources available to us in our scholars.”

The Patent Office Building—now the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture and home of the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum—will be the location of much of the filming. The building, which was the site of significant activity during the war, was first a hospital for the wounded of nearby battles such as Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Later, President Lincoln’s second inaugural ball was held in the building. Walt Whitman (right), who volunteered during the war, spent much time in Washington and in the Patent Office Building; he called it “that noblest of Washington buildings.” In his journals he describes quite viscerally how it was “crowded close with rows of sick, badly wounded, and dying soldiers.”

The project will also take to the road to feature interviews and footage from area battlefields, cemeteries, and historic properties. Warren Perry, NPG researcher and interviewer for the series, said, “We have the chance to connect the personalities of the Civil War with the geography of the experience. Each small episode will contain the presence of the National Portrait Gallery and will coincide with a sesquicentennial commemorative moment. We will be actively participating in the larger Smithsonian commemoration, but tying our discourse directly to the Smithsonian’s largest Civil War property, the old Patent Office Building.”

The Patent Office Building—now the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture and home of the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Courtesy of Timothy Hursley

The Patent Office Building, circa 1846.

 

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892 / George C. Cox (1851-1902) / Platinum print, 1887 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Feinberg

Patent Office Building / John Plumba Jr. / Daguerreotype, c. 1846 / Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

March 4, 1861: Abraham Lincoln’s Inauguration

James Buchanan, among the lamest of lame ducks, presided over the White House in the last few days before Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office. Buchanan’s presidency had been marked by ineffectual progress toward keeping the nation together. While Lincoln was traveling to Washington from Springfield, Illinois, Buchanan was packing his bags and hoping that no further dissolution of the Union occurred on his watch. Buchanan would be marked until the day he died as a feckless and hollow president.

Lincoln’s train trip to the capital was an event-filled foreshadowing of his impending reign as head of state. He made speech after speech as he journeyed. Close to the eve of his arrival in Washington, rumors circulated that he might be in danger if he spent any public time in Baltimore, so he quietly entered the District of Columbia on February 23 and began preparing to take the seat of power. During this same period, Jefferson Davis had been building a government of the Confederacy in Montgomery, and he had seven states in his hip-pocket by the time Lincoln took his oath on March 4. Squaring off against those who would divide the nation, Lincoln stated in his inaugural speech:

Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

Lincoln closed his speech dramatically by placing the burden of keeping the nation together in the hands of all Americans, but specifically at those in dissent:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Though Lincoln implored those “better angels” of the collective American spirit to work through the crisis of secession and division, he would be in office less than six weeks before his summons would be torched by southern fire.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

For more on Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, please visit the Library of Congress website at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trt039.html.

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Gardner / Albumen silver print, 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Mississippi Joins South Carolina in Secession, January 9, 1861

"The people of the State of Mississippi, in convention assembled, do ordain and declare, and it is hereby ordained and declared, as follows. . . .That all the laws, and ordinations, by which the said State of Mississippi became a member of the Federal Union of the United States of America, be and the same are hereby repealed; and that all obligations on the part of the said State, or the people thereof, to observe the same, be withdrawn; and that the said State doth hereby resume all the rights, functions, and powers which, by any of said laws or ordinances, were conveyed to the Government of the said United States, and is absolved from all the obligations, restraints and duties, incurred in the said Federal Union; and shall from henceforth be a free, sovereign, and independent State."

— from "An Ordinance to Dissolve the Union between the State of Mississippi, and . . . the United States of America"  [signed 15 January 1861, below]     

The Union continued its dissolution on this date in 1861 with the secession of the state of Mississippi. As the nation moved toward war, one Mississippian in particular would be advanced to the highest echelon of the confederacy that would form over the next weeks. Previously a soldier, senator, and secretary of war, Jefferson Davis (above) believed that each state had the right to withdraw from the Union. When the Mississippi legislature voted to do so, Davis resigned from his United States Senate seat. He returned to his plantation in late January, only to be summoned to Montgomery to serve as president of the newly formed alliance of seceded states. Of this journey to meet his new office, Civil War historian Shelby Foote writes:

The train made many stops along the line and the people were out to meet him, in sunlight and by the glare of torches. They wanted a look at his face, the thin lips and determined jaw, the hollow cheeks with their jutting bones, the long skull behind the aquiline nose. . . . He brought forth cheers with confident words, but he had something else to say as well—something no one had told them before. He advised them to prepare for the long war that lay ahead. They did not believe him, apparently. Or if they did, they went on cheering anyhow.

At the war’s conclusion, Davis would spend time in jail while the United States government delved into the issue of what to do with him—was his crime treason, this leadership of open rebellion against the United States? Davis would eventually be released, return to Mississippi, and conclude his years writing memoirs of the war.

Although slavery was at the heart of the conflict, Mississippians like Davis also took the issue of states' rights seriously and mustered up rapidly for their cause. The war was waged most heavily in Virginia and Tennessee, but Mississippi hosted the siege of Vicksburg and many fights for control of the mighty river that runs the length of the state. Like every state on either side of the struggle, Mississippi also sent soldiers into battle, perhaps the most famous of whom were the University Greys, Company A of the Eleventh Mississippi Infantry. The Greys were made up entirely of young men from the student body of the University of Mississippi, and those who survived the war long enough to fight at Gettysburg were all either killed or severely wounded in Pickett's famous charge.

William Faulkner (above) alludes to the ill-fated hopes of these young soldiers in a famous passage from Intruder in the Dust:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances . . . we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think this time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievably victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.

The Civil War and the impact of the enormous loss to Mississippi was a significant theme in Faulkner's work. In The Sound and Fury, Faulkner’s conclusion is embedded with symbols of decay of the old South, as Benjy, the idiot man-child, is driven backwards around the Oxford town square (below), an action provoking him to scream at the statue of the Confederate soldier. Faulkner's South never recovers from the massive catastrophe of the war.

— Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Photograph by Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Special thanks to Chris Goodwin, director, public information, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, for his efforts to provide us with the copy of the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession.

Cited:
Faulkner, William.  Intruder in the Dust
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative
"An Ordinance to Dissolve the Union between the State of Mississippi and . . . .the United States of America" provided by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
For further reading:
http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/getttour/tstops/tstd3-21.htm

 

 

Jefferson Davis / George Lethbridge Saunders / Watercolor on ivory, 1849 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Joel A. H. Webb and Varina Webb Stewart

William Faulkner / Soss Efram Melik / Charcoal on paper, 1962 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The Secession of South Carolina, December 20, 1860

But the means which may be sufficient to prevent diseases are not usually sufficient to remedy them. In slight cases of recent date, they may be; but additional means are necessary to restore health, when the system has been long and deeply disordered. Such, at present, is the condition of our political system. The very causes which have occasioned its disorders have, at the same time, led to consequences not to be removed by the means which would have prevented them. They have destroyed the equilibrium between the two great sections, and alienated the mutual attraction between them, which led to the formation of the Union, and the establishment of a common government for the promotion of the welfare of all.

—John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government and a Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States

The voice of sectionalism had been dead for ten years when South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. John C. Calhoun served his state and country as a representative, secretary of war, vice president, and ultimately, senator. He had been very much a nationalist until he could no longer tolerate the federal threat of increasing the tariff and the abolitionist discourse. Calhoun, however, had spoken loudly enough in his day for the echo yet to be heard in the legislative halls of the state in the weeks after the 1860 presidential election.

The South Carolina Ordinance of Secession—the first signature act that would propel the United States into civil war—was not the first time that the state had reacted against federal sovereignty. In 1832, led by Calhoun, South Carolina approved an Ordinance of Nullification, which was intended to serve notice on the United States government that South Carolina would not tolerate a high tariff. An eventual reduction of the tariff caused the South Carolina state legislature to repeal its act of nullification, but the debate over the rights of the states versus centralized federal control was merely brought down to a simmer from a boil. It would boil again soon, and then catch fire.

South Carolina's secession was the first in a series to occur before Abraham Lincoln's inauguration in March 1861. As if to instruct the rest of the South in the protocol of rebellion, South Carolina not only led the way in secession from the United States, but it would also provide the first battleground for the Civil War when Fort Sumter was fired upon by Confederate troops on April 12, 1861.

 

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Special thanks to James Barber, NPG historian, for discussing sectionalism and secession with me during the preparation of this article.

For an interesting story on the multiple copies of the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession, please visit the South Carolina State Archives link: http://wayback.archive-it.org/1455/20090406143534/http://www.scdah.sc.gov/virtual/ordsec.htm

For a brief account of the Battle of Fort Sumter, please see the National Park Service link: http://www.nps.gov/hps/abpp/battles/sc001.htm

 

Image:  John Caldwell Calhoun, 1782-1850/Unidentified artist/Daguerreotype, 1843/National Portrait gallery, Smithsonian Institution/ NPG.78.64

 

Abraham Lincoln Elected President, Part III: Overcoming Adversaries and Preserving the Union

With a single mission in mind, Abraham Lincoln fought, during his entire presidency, not just against the South, but also against his critics—a cross-section of Americans that included everyone from journalists to generals. For Lincoln, the task was always to preserve the Union. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln said, “Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.”

By the time Lincoln was sworn in as the sixteenth president on March 4, 1861, seven states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—had seceded from the Union. Also by the date of Lincoln’s inauguration, this new confederacy of former states had already elected its own president, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the former United States senator from Mississippi and secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce. Well in advance of his first day in office, Lincoln knew he would preside over a fractious form of the once-united land. He committed himself to the preservation of the Union, but his first task was to bring it back together by whatever means necessary.

One of Lincoln’s early detractors was Horace Greeley, founding editor of the New York Tribune. Greeley believed Lincoln was lethargic in his policies toward both slavery and the war, and used his newspaper as a vehicle to propagate his belief that the president was ineffective. Responding to Greeley’s invective, Lincoln wrote the following in a letter dated August 22, 1862:

As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

Though this statement would seem to imply that Lincoln was not concerned about the plight of the slaves, it would be only a few months later that he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Another of Lincoln’s detractors was George McClellan, Lincoln’s choice to head the Army of the Potomac. Routinely, Lincoln had problems with McClellan’s battle plans and eventually demoted him, only to face McClellan as an opponent in the 1864 presidential election. As with other challenges during the war, Lincoln faced off against McClellan and won the election. Lincoln would live for only one week after the conclusion of the war to see his Union reunited following Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

Many of Abraham Lincoln’s writings and speeches are well known and often quoted, but it is doubtful that anything Lincoln ever said could better sum up his efforts than the closing words of his second inaugural speech of March 4, 1865:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

- Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery 

Abraham Lincoln / William Willard / Oil on canvas, 1864 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Lincoln Elected President, Part II: The War and the Presidency Served to Age the Man

The portraits of Lincoln tell the story of Lincoln’s war.

It is a fairly common observation that being president changes a man. And when the day arrives that a woman holds that office, it will most likely be said of her also. The duty is great, the commitment is long, and the experience is intense. The portraits of the early presidents might lie a little, because the artist might have embellished the images a bit, but the photographs are, perhaps, more truthful to the moment, as they are exact and leave less to man-handling and translation than do works of artistic portraiture—this, before the days of Photoshop, of course.

Images of Abraham Lincoln over a five year period tell the entire story of the burdens of the presidency, leaving no doubt as to the effect of the Civil War's toll on our sixteenth president.

Before the war, Abraham Lincoln had no beard. He was fifty-one years old when the image below was taken by Mathew Brady.

Early in the war, President Lincoln grew a beard. He was fifty-four in 1863 and the war had been on for two years when Alexander Gardner took this second image.

Just before the close of the war, President Lincoln was the subject of this last and most famous image, again the work of Alexander Gardner.

Over the years since Lincoln's death, parallels have been drawn and metaphors have been created between the war that ravaged the face of the nation and the obvious deterioration Lincoln suffered from the same experience; Walt Whitman's O Captain, My Captain is easily the most recognized among those tropes.

Next week we will conclude our opening discussions of the war with some notes on President Lincoln's leadership and the union cause.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Abraham Lincoln / Mathew Brady/ Salted paper print, 1860 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Gardner / Glass plate collodion negative, 1863/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution:gift of the James Smithson Society, CBS Television Network, and James Macatee

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Gardner/ Albumen silver print, 1865/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Lincoln Elected President, November 6, 1860, Part One

Lincoln was elected president of the United States one hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow.

Lincoln is one of the immortals—one of the true American icons—and it is difficult to imagine a United States without having an Abraham Lincoln there at its most dire and poignant moment. Civil War scholars, reenactors, and amateur historians everywhere may believe that the war evolved around the generals or the soldiers or the battles or slavery or states’ rights, but truly the war was Lincoln's war. He did not want it, he did not like it, and he was pleased to see it end, inasmuch as one can take pleasure in winning a war that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

He presided over the nation during its years of division, turmoil, horror, and destruction.

And more than a few have compared him to Moses, because, like Moses, just as the time arrived for peace and renewal, Lincoln was taken away.

Lincoln is the alpha and the omega of the American Civil War. His election, in a greatly oversimplified sense, of course, was the beginning of the war. Lincoln’s 1863 address at Gettysburg—among all the words spoken and written by all the generals, soldiers, journalists, and politicians—are the words at the very core of the prose composed during the war. Lincoln’s murder is the symbolic end of the war, and the trial and hanging of the Lincoln assassination conspirators is the coda that concludes the bloodiest experience ever to trespass upon American soil.

In his journals of the war, Walt Whitman said of Lincoln, “None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.”

And while it is not possible here to capture the complete portrait of Abraham Lincoln, over the next two weeks, in a three-part series, this blog will explore Lincoln and his times in order to lay the groundwork for the National Portrait Gallery’s commemoration of the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War. In the next four years, as we arrive at the anniversaries of many of the war’s events, the staff of the NPG will program, curate, lecture, discuss, and write on the significance of this abject chapter in American history.

Learn more about Lincoln and the Civil War in our online exhibtions CivilWar@Smithsonian and One Life: The Mask of Lincoln.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery 

 

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Hesler / Photograph, 1860 (printed 1956) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution