Today, Abraham Lincoln is lauded as one of the heroes of the American Civil War, but
he wasn’t universally beloved in the mid-1800s, even amongst Northerners. In fact, this defining
era in United States history is often more complicated than we’ve been led to believe.
There were New Yorkers who instigated a bloody riot in response to Lincoln’s wartime maneuvers,
Confederate leaders who lamented their states’ secession from the Union, and even a Civil
War naval battle that took place thousands of miles from the United States.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, and I’ll touch on those stories and more, today, as we clear
up some misconceptions about the American Civil War. Let’s get to it.
The story of the Civil War is all about division within one’s own country. But the schisms
ran deeper than just North against South—there were also cracks within the Union, even after
the southern states seceded.
Up North, you had a group called the “Peace Democrats” that opposed everything about
Lincoln’s leadership and his war. In time, these dissidents would be nicknamed “Copperheads,”
after the venomous snake. Some of them were Southern loyalists, others were Democrats
who strictly adhered to a reading of the Constitution that privileged states’ rights above federal powers.
One of Lincoln’s most notable critics was New York Governor Horatio Seymour. Tensions
between the two leaders came to an ugly head during the Civil War Draft Riots of 1863.
Many of New York’s working class citizens were incensed over the Enrollment Act of 1863,
which established a draft lottery and provided a means for wealthy draft-eligible men to
avoid conscription by paying a hefty fee instead. What might have begun with principled indignation
towards the legislation soon devolved into terroristic violence and destruction. The
rioters targeted African-Americans and the businesses that catered to them, killing many
and even setting fire to an orphanage.
Governor Seymour, for his part, was not only seen by the public to be potentially siding
with the rioters, he even referred to them as “my friends” in a speech shortly afterward.
Elsewhere in the country, when former Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham made an
anti-war speech, he was seized by Union troops and tried by a military court. Vallandigham
was all set to go to prison until Lincoln decided to commute his sentence and banish
him to the Confederacy.
Jefferson Davis, the man who would eventually become the Confederacy’s first and only
President, was originally a Senator from Mississippi who opposed early calls for secession. But
when Davis learned that his home state officially voted to leave the union in January 1861,
he decided to stick by his state, rather than his country. He did so with a heavy heart,
saying it was “the saddest day of my life.” Remember, this was a time when many politicians
and citizens thought of themselves in terms of state first, country second. In Davis’s
eyes, there was no other choice, and he eventually headed to Montgomery, Alabama, where the heads
of the recently seceded Southern states were planning to meet and form the Confederate
States of America.
Now, let’s be clear—even when Davis had his doubts about secession, his mind was entirely
made up about the war’s defining ideological difference: In 1857, a newspaper reports him
proclaiming that “African slavery, as it exists in the United States, was a moral,
a social, and a political blessing.” Even if there were plenty of racists in the North
and unionists in the South, the question of slavery largely defined the outlines of the war.
Robert E. Lee followed a similar ideological trajectory on the issue of secession. Though
he was initially against it, his real loyalties were with his home state of Virginia. After
Virginia’s state convention voted to secede by a count of 88 to 55 on April 17th, 1861,
Lee resigned from the United States military, where he was a colonel, and went to work for
the Confederate army.
While in command, Lee served under Davis, who apparently got over his whole secession-phobia
in a big way. In a late 1862 speech to the legislature of Mississippi, he declared, “After
what has happened during the last two years, my only wonder is, that we consented to live
for so long a time in association with such miscreants…”
So did Lincoln abolish slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation? Not exactly.
When Lincoln delivered the message on January 1, 1863, it declared: “[All] persons held
as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then
be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever
free.”
Old-timey jargon aside, Honest Abe was basically saying “Slaves in the rebelling states are
free . . . if we win.” It was what many people wanted to hear, but it still had some
important limitations. First, it left out border states like Kentucky and Delaware.
And none of it would really matter if the Union didn’t prevail.
Despite that, it was also a huge win for abolitionists. This was really an announcement that the Civil
War was no longer a war just to preserve the Union; freeing the enslaved population was
now an official objective for Lincoln and his army. It emboldened the abolitionists
in the North and made opposing countries like France and the UK bristle at the thought of
supporting the pro-slavery forces of the Confederacy.
Still, it would be another two years before slavery would actually come to an end in the
United States. In June, 1865 Union troops led by General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston,
Texas, and announced that all 250,000 enslaved people in the state were officially free.
Today, Juneteenth is celebrated on June 19 to honor this occasion, though it’s worth
noting that even after that date slavery continued in some places within the United States. Neither
Delaware nor Kentucky ended slavery during the Civil War, so some historians estimate
there were still around 65,000 enslaved people in 1865.
In December 1865, the end of slavery was finally put into law when Congress passed the 13th
Amendment, which stated “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment
for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United
States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
We’ve discussed some of the underpinnings of the war, but what about the actual warfare?
You’ve seen it in plenty of movies—the wounded Civil War soldier is brought into
a medical tent on one of those old-timey stretchers, where he is attended to by a kindly nurse
and a heavily bearded doctor. The two look at the bloody, pulsating limb and decide to
amputate before gangrene sets in. But this is a battlefield in 1863—there’s no anesthesia
in sight. There’s only a hacksaw, a complimentary bullet for the soldier to bite down on, and
a doctor who’s just dead behind the eyes. It won’t be pretty, but it’s time for that
limb to come off.
If that’s the image that pops into your head—congratulations, you’ve seen Glory.
But despite what the silver screen suggests, anesthesia is estimated to have been used
in around 95 percent of all surgeries during the Civil War, according to the National Museum
of Civil War Medicine, which is a very real and very specific museum.
Ether had made its way into medicine as a general anesthetic in 1846, with chloroform arriving the very next year.
That being said, this new-fangled way of putting people under in order to operate was still
somewhat controversial at the time, and the Civil War doctors who used it actually had
very little—if any—hands-on experience with it. Of the two, chloroform was the preferred
method of anesthesia, because it worked faster and was far less likely to, ya know, explode.
Now, there were times when anesthesia couldn’t be used. But according to The Medical and
Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, prepared under the direction of Surgeon General
Joseph K. Barnes, many of those cases might have been shot injuries, where there were
concerns about negative side effects from the drugs. Even then, the report says that there were just
254 cases reported without any anesthesia. Ooph. Brutal.
You probably imagined those injured soldiers as men. And while it’s true that women weren’t
legally permitted to serve in the military at the time, stories have come to light over
the years indicating that anywhere from 400 to 750 women actually managed to sneak through
to the front lines and pick up arms to fight for their country, or for the Confederacy.
While that’s an impossibly small percentage of the 2.75 million soldiers that fought in
the war, the question remains: how did they do it?
Some likely found a way to pass as men during pre-combat physicals, a la Mulan, while others might have
snuck into camps once the fighting began. Once they were in, these women were just as
involved as the men. There are accounts of women directly involved in spy missions, reconnaissance,
and active combat.
One famous individual that may fit under this category is Jennie Hodgers, who fought for
the Union under the name Albert Cashier. I qualify that last sentence because some historians
argue that Cashier is more likely to be a trans man than a disguised woman, even if
we didn’t have the vocabulary to identify him as such in his time. In any case, it’s
a pretty cool story: Legend places Albert at dozens of battles during his three years
at war, and at one point it’s said he escaped from a Confederate prison by overpowering
a guard and fleeing. Albert survived the war and remained under this assumed identity the
rest of his life.
On November 19, 1863, a crowd of 15,000 gathered to witness the dedication of a military cemetery
on the battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers
had died over a three-day span in July.
Coming in at around 270 words, Honest Abe powered through the Gettysburg Address in
less than three minutes. And contrary to what you might have heard, no, Lincoln didn’t
scribble the speech onto an envelope on the way to the battlefield. Lincoln’s secretary
later commented that with all the noise, distractions, and rockings and joltings, it would have been
impossible to write anything on the moving train, and the surviving drafts of the speech
are written in Lincoln’s normal, steady handwriting. She did note that Lincoln finished
up the speech that morning, but romanticizing it as history’s greatest rush job is definitely
overstating it.
One thing that you might not know about the address is that Lincoln wasn’t pegged to
be the main speaker on that day. That honor belonged to Edward Everett, a distinguished
scholar and orator who took the stage before Lincoln.
Everett’s speech would go on for around two hours, totaling upwards of 13,000 words.
It was a speech he poured his heart and soul into, along with months of research. He obsessed
over every account of the battle, from both the Northern and Southern perspectives, in
order to get the words just right. Throughout the speech, he retold the story of the Battle
of Gettysburg, interspersed with flowery ruminations on the idea of liberty and a plea for unity,
saying “these bonds of union are of perennial force and energy, while the causes of alienation
are imaginary, factitious, and transient. The heart of the People, North and South,
is for the Union.”
Kinda beautiful, right? Lincoln sure thought so—after Everett finished his speech, the
president shook his hand and told him “I am more than gratified, I am grateful to you.”
Then the Thunder-Stealer-in-Chief rang out with “Four score and seven years ago...”
and made Everett’s magnum opus a historical footnote in under 180 seconds.
Even Everett himself knew he was one-upped by Lincoln, writing soon after that, “I
should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the
occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”
Gettysburg is, perhaps, the classic vision of a Civil War battlefield: green, hilly fields
ensconced in artillery smoke. In reality, though, the Civil War was far from land-locked.
Naval warfare played a huge role in the conflict, with the Union victory at the Battle of Port
Royal and the standstill at the Battle of Hampton Roads among the most pivotal maritime
clashes. The Civil War also made a little naval history when the Confederacy's Hunley
became the first submarine to sink an opposing warship when it attacked the USS Housatonic
in 1864. You can check out our episode of inventors killed by their own inventions for
a little more on that particular adventure in seafaring technology.
One naval battle is noteworthy because it didn’t take place in the waters of America
at all. In June 1864, the North and South came to blows in the waters off Cherbourg,
France, in the English Channel. The battle began brewing when the Confederate ship, the
CSS Alabama, was docked at Cherbourg Harbor hoping for some repairs. For years, this ship
had been wreaking havoc on U.S. vessels, resulting in the plunder of more than 64 ships and causing
millions of dollars in damages.
The USS Kearsarge, helmed by John A. Winslow, had been pursuing the Alabama for months,
and once Winslow got word from the U.S. minister in Paris that the ship was docked and prone,
he moved in for the kill. Upon hearing that the Kearsarge was ready for a battle, Alabama
captain Raphael Semmes prepped his ship and met his Union foe nine miles off the coast
of Cherbourg. The Alabama was the first to fire—but there was just one problem: the
Kearsarge was draped in a thick anchor chain that protected it from enemy artillery.
Soon, the Alabama was taking on water, the white flag was up, and the Confederate captain,
Raphael Semmes, was all but defeated. Instead of capture, though, Semmes and some of his
surviving men were saved by a nearby British ship. In all, around 20 Confederate troops
died, compared to just one Union soldier.
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