Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Grant, Lee, and Appomattox: The Story of America Series [Ep. 31]

And we returned to our American Stories. Up next, another installment of our series about Us, The Story of America series, with Hillsdale College professor and author of the terrific book, Land of Hope, Professor Bill McLay. By eighteen sixty-two, the Civil War was in full bloody swing. Casualties were mounting by the day. No end was in sight, and America, to many observers, looked as if it would soon become permanently divided. Today Bill shares the story of the Civil War from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg and to Appomattox. But first, a reading of Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Speech from the Ken Burns documentary, The Civil War.

Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some Transatlantic giants step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever or die by suicide.

It took one battle to reveal the depths of Burnside’s problems. Fredericksburg: twelve thousand Union casualties to the Confederates’ five thousand. By the close of eighteen sixty-two, the morale of the Union forces was very low. They found themselves entrenched in a war that had lasted longer and was much bloodier than even the sharpest prognosticator could have predicted, and there was little hope of a short or easy path to victory. Burnside found himself replaced by General Joseph Hooker. Hooker was a tough character. He didn’t earn the nickname “Fighting Joe” for nothing. He was ambitious, which is what you want
in the commander of an army.
But he was also mean-spirited and vindictive, which meant the odds of things looking up for the Union Army under his leadership were not great. In early May of eighteen sixty-three, these odds would be put to the test in Chancellorsville, Virginia, where he encountered Lee’s army, and he did so with nearly one hundred and thirty thousand Union troops, the largest assembly of troops in a battle thus far in the war, but numbers alone don’t win battles, and those numbers didn’t in Chancellorsville either. Hooker suffered a terrible loss. If there was any good news at all, it was that the Confederacy suffered more casualties, thirteen thousand, than they experienced at Antietam. Perhaps a bigger loss for the Confederates was the loss of one of their great military talents, General Stonewall Jackson, who died from what is known in the fog of war as friendly fire. General Lee considered Jackson not just his top general but nearly irreplaceable. Jackson’s death was a profound loss militarily, but even worse, it was a profound blow to the morale of the Confederate army. On the Union side, Chancellorsville was a shocking setback, no doubt about it. But the impact on the Confederacy and the massive losses they experienced were beginning to take their toll, also, and the most decisive moments of the Civil War were soon to come. In July eighteen sixty-three, the Confederacy suffered two huge defeats, both of which would change the outcome of the war. To the west, there was Vicksburg; the Union had as its goal the control of the mighty Mississippi River. By the spring of eighteen sixty-three, that was nearly complete. New Orleans had been captured by the Union army and much of the river had been, also. What remained: Vicksburg, heavily fortified and standing atop bluffs, which were, when the river was low, nearly two hundred feet in height. After a brutal seven-week siege, Grant captured Vicksburg on, of all days, July Fourth. The Confederacy for all purposes had been effectively split in two. Arkansas and Texas were now isolated, cut off from the Confederacy, all but lost. The next big battle was in the east at Gettysburg. General Lee had decided to take a big gamble and once again invade the North.
If he could win there, not far from a
great northern city like Philadelphia, and even closer to Washington D.C., eighty-five miles away, he might discourage enough Northerners and make them willing to seek peace or even oust Lincoln come the election of eighteen sixty-four. The three-day Battle would become the most important of the Civil War and mark its turning point. A number of efforts by General Lee, including General Pickett’s charge with fifteen thousand troops, did not break Meade’s Union line. Lee’s Confederate army had suffered a monumental blow. Nearly four and a half months later, on November nineteenth, President Lincoln visited Gettysburg. It was the dedication ceremony for the Soldiers’ National Cemetery near the Gettysburg Battlefield, and Lincoln delivered perhaps the greatest speech of his presidency, one of the greatest speeches in American history, one of the greatest
of all time.
A mere two hundred and seventy-two words long, it was a masterpiece, a reverent and elegant statement of national purpose and of national identity, too. It was an urgent plea to continue the war, providing the reasons why Americans should continue the war. It provided a deeper and higher meaning to the effort because the loss of life, the massive loss of life, had to mean something. It was a war to preserve the very idea of the democratic republic that America symbolized and embodied and symbolized to the world. Rather than talk more about this speech, I want to let Lincoln’s words do the work
here.

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We’ve come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It’s altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggle here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here and thus are so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, 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.

Reports vary on the audience’s reaction to the speech that day in Gettysburg. Many newspapers didn’t even mention it, but over time it would become recognized as one of the great speeches ever given. Sir Winston Churchill, himself a great writer and no mean orator, would many years later call the Gettysburg Address the ultimate expression of the majesty of Shakespeare’s language.
Very high praise, that.

When we come back, more of the story of us, the story of the Civil War, here on our American Stories. And we returned to our American Stories and the final portion of our story of the Civil War from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg to Appomattox. It was part of our Story of America series with Professor Bill McLay. Let’s return to the story. Take it away, Bill.

Though the war was not yet over, victory was near. By the close of eighteen sixty-four, Sherman had captured Savannah and soon thereafter marched his troops to Columbia, South Carolina, and burned the city down. He kept pressing and advancing and staying on offense relentlessly through North Carolina. While Grant continued to put pressure on Lee in Petersburg. The Confederacy was not merely on the defensive. It was all but helpless against the overwhelming and relentless attacks of the Grant-led Union army. In early March of eighteen sixty-four, Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address.
And it was another classic.
In it, he pondered the larger meaning of the Civil War and began to lay the foundation for what would come afterward.
We know that.
Lincoln was becoming increasingly reflective about what God’s will might have been. In all of this, Lincoln had searched the Bible for answers to the very big questions about destiny and meaning. Rather than discuss the speech here, it is, weighing in at a mere seven hundred and one words. But what profound and well-crafted. Once, here’s how it began: “Fellow countrymen. At this second, appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then, a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest, which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that…”