Why did the South Secede and so Start the US Civil War?

What caused the American Civil War, and why did the Southern states leave the Union? These are two of the most debated questions in American history. The standard view is that slavery was the sole cause. The North, led by an abolitionist president, Abraham Lincoln, sought to end the institution in the South, and the Southern states left to preserve it. Here, Jeb Smith argues that this is far from the truth.

A depiction of the Union capture of New Orleans in 1862. Source: Public domain, Illustration from Campfires and Battlefields by Rossiter, Johnson, et al. (New York, 1894), available here.

A little digging into the sources from the period shows Lincoln never desired to end slavery in the South, only to prevent its extension into the territories. The Republican platform Plank 4 stated they would not interfere with states’ rights to order their own domestic institutions, implicitly including slavery where it already existed, and condemned any idea of outside military intervention, whether in states or territories. Prominent Republicans and abolitionists, including Lincoln himself many times over, said the same. The last thing they wanted was for free blacks to be running around in their own states or in the territories. The radical abolitionist wing of the North despised slavery but, like Lincoln at the time, were far from wanting to see blacks marrying or working with whites, still less voting.

When the original Deep South states left the Union, the federal government quickly came under considerable fiscal strain and had to borrow money from various banks. The primary form of taxation at that time was through tariffs, which fell heavily on the cotton-producing Southern states, generating most of the revenue. This was why Lincoln could not allow the South to secede: his political agenda involved a massive expansion in taxation and government spending, meaning he could not countenance a massive reduction in federal revenues. So, when his primary income sources left, and his bankers and financial interest groups commanded him not to allow them to go, we were thrust into a war. Money was, in this case, the root of the war’s evils.

From the reverse perspective, tariffs were one of the major reasons the Deep South left the Union. As mentioned, they were burdened with generating more than their fair share of federal income, and the vast majority of their taxes went North, to benefit Northern industry and pay for internal improvements in Northern states and various governmental subsidies. This is clearly stated in various secession documents and speeches leading up to and during the actual breach, and is presented as a vital cause of these states deciding to leave the Union.

A half dozen or so other issues also played a role; among them was, indeed, slavery. But slavery could be split into several separate questions, only one of them centered on maintaining slavery itself (as stated, it was in no danger). But primary among the various strands of slavery as a cause was the maintenance of limited government.

Limited government

Southerners, as well as many Northerners, had long maintained that limited government could only be preserved by adhering to a strict constructionist view of the Constitution, as a document of delegated powers from the states to the central government. The government cannot extend its powers past those limitations, of a few defined and delegated powers, without first amending the Constitution to allow it to do so. If the federal government were to succeed in expanding beyond its delegated authorities and gained a power or authority over the states that was not clearly expressed in the Constitution, no rights would be safe: the Constitution would then be of no value. The Union that delegated certain limited powers to the federal government, reserving all else to the individual states, would be destroyed. And finally, the government would become limitless in power.

For decades, virtually all the South and many in the North opposed any such actions, but there were those who desired undefined (and therefore limitless) central powers, such as the Republicans and Lincoln in 1860. One of those issues, but by no means the only one, was over slavery’s extension into the Western Territories.

The Republicans attempted to place sovereignty with the federal government, not the states, so that they could outlaw or abolish slavery in the Territories without delegated authority. The Southern platform of 1860 said it is up to those territories to decide if they want slavery, not to the federal government, since it has no delegated authority to do so. Southern pro-slavery “fire-eaters” such as William Yancey were great “defenders” of slavery. What often goes unnoticed is that he also admitted that slavery would never extend West. The soil and climate and the resulting agriculture were not suited to it, and the people would never vote for it. Meaning that he, and many other pro-slavery advocates, admitted and knew slavery would not expand, so whyever would they have fought for the existence of something they knew would never occur?

They did so for the principle of the matter, the idea of a limited government, and because of their opposition to handing over undefined powers to central authorities, leading inevitably to the authoritarianism we endure today.

Upper South

Finally, what is rarely taught is that the Upper South left the Union for separate reasons from those of the Deep South. Originally, the leaders and people of the Upper South rejected secession, spoke harshly of its leaders and their reasons for leaving, and voted down secession by wide margins. An enormous wave of Union patriotism swept through these states as they held even closer to the Union. Men who would become leaders, generals, governors, and major politicians in the future Confederacy condemned the secessionists for disloyalty and worse.

But they also warned President Lincoln not to coerce those Southern states into remaining in the Union, because the foundation of all good government was the consent of the governed. And that no matter why a state chose to leave a union of consent, they had every right to do so, to coerce them would be tyrannical and turn the United States into a military despotism that would repudiate the founders and the Declaration of Independence. So when Lincoln ignored them and called on those states to send volunteers to subdue the Deep South, they were enraged. Those who were once overwhelmingly Unionist became secessionists, not because they agreed with the Deep South’s original decision, but because they could no longer maintain their honor and remain in a union of forced obedience while helping Lincoln wage war on the God-given principle of self-rule.

Lincoln’s call for volunteers was the single most fatal event in destroying self-government, the consent of the governed, and liberty in America. The Upper South found out that Lincoln was indeed the devouring dragon the Deep South had warned them about. And we still live in Lincoln’s America, where we are subservient to our government, rather than the government existing for our own benefit. The South fought to preserve liberty, but Lincoln to destroy it.

You can read more from Jeb on the US Civil War here.

About the Author

Jeb Smith is an author, speaker, and historian who has written five books and over 130 articles, and has been featured on various podcasts and on television and radio stations. His works include Defending Dixie’s Land: What Every American Should Know About The South And The Civil War, written under the pen name Isaac C. Bishop, and the soon-to-be-released I'll Take My Stand: Defending the Causes of Southern Secession. For more on Jeb Smith, you can view his work at authorjebsmith.com

This article was originally published at ManifestHistory.com.

Colonel Strong Vincent and the Epic Struggle for Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg: Part II - “Don’t Yield an Inch!”

A 26-year-old Union brigade commander risked being court-martialed when, without orders, he rushed his four regiments to the summit of an undefended hill at a crucial moment during the Battle of Gettysburg. The Harvard graduate’s valor may have saved the Army of the Potomac – but it cost him his life. Timothy M. Gay explains – in part 2 of 2 he looks at how it ended.

Part 1 on the soil of old Pennsylvania is here.

Statue of Strong Vincent at Blasco Library in Erie, Pennsylvania. Source: Pat Noble, photograph taken by self on May 4, 2007, via Wikimedia Commons here, and licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

It took the red (First Division), white (Second Division), and blue (Third Division) Maltese Cross-men of the Fifth Corps the entire night to march to Gettysburg. Famished and spent, they didn’t arrive at the Union camp at Powers Hill, a mile behind the Federal center on Cemetery Ridge and about a mile and a quarter removed from the northeastern edge of the smaller of the two round tops, until around seven o’clock on July 2nd, a couple of hours after dawn.

They were told to eat breakfast and try to catch up on sleep. As the day wore on, the commotion on the far side of the high ground ebbed and flowed – at times nearly deafening, at other times strangely quiet.

Along with rest of the corps, Strong Vincent’s Third Brigade was put in a swing position; depending on how the battle transpired, General Sykes’s men could either be sent to support General Daniel Sickles’s Third Corps to their southwest or General Henry Slocum’s Twelfth Corps to their northwest. Since late afternoon the previous day, Sickles’s men had been anchoring the Army of the Potomac’s left flank, the southern “eye” of its upside-down fishhook defensive line. Slocum’s men, meanwhile, had been assigned the area surrounding Culp’s Hill, the hook’s northeastern “bend.”  

The Federals owed their possession of Gettysburg’s high ground to the guile and cunning of cavalry commander John Buford. On Tuesday, June 30th, the day before the battle began, General Buford was on a reconnaissance patrol to assess the exact whereabouts of the Confederate forces and determine the best ground on which the Army of the Potomac should wage its fight. As soon as he rode through town, Buford recognized the strategic value of the ridges and hills that formed Gettysburg’s southern and eastern sides. Surmising that the Rebels would consolidate their troops and attack the next day from the north and west, Buford positioned his soldiers some three miles in front of the high ground. Once the shooting starts, Buford instructed his 2,700 men, fall back gradually and prevent the enemy from making a full-scale assault on the hills.

Then he sent messengers galloping to General John Reynolds, begging the Pennsylvanian to rush his First Corps to Gettysburg. Reynolds’ men the night of June 30th were encamped in northern Maryland, some eight or nine miles south of Buford’s position. If the Federals were to maintain control of the high ground, thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of reinforcements would be needed before noon; otherwise, the Rebels would gain a decided advantage.

Sure enough, Reynolds arrived early that morning, ultimately slamming his 12,000 men into the Rebel front. Within minutes, Reynolds was killed by a Confederate sniper.

Buford’s fallback strategy worked. For much of the first day, the Union forces were outnumbered and on the defensive, yet at sunset, they were still in charge of the high ground. It was Fredericksburg in reverse. Now, the other side would be forced to launch vertical attacks on entrenched positions.

*

In the aftermath of the war, various theories were put forth to explain how Strong Vincent and his brigade came to defend Little Round Top. Most scholars, however, have come to accept Oliver Willcox Norton’s version of events. Despite the chaos that engulfed them that evening, the Third Brigade’s orderly and bugler was never more than a few yards from Vincent’s side.

Professor Allen C. Guelzo, who once taught at Gettysburg College, writes in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion that Sykes was alerted in mid-afternoon that his corps would be needed to buttress Sickles’s position. An irascible Tammany Hall politician bereft of military training and instinct, Sickles had defied orders and moved his men off the high ground and down into the Peach Orchard at the base of the ridge and round tops. Thanks to Sickles’s gaffe, his corps was now vulnerable to assault from three directions. By late afternoon, Sickles was getting pummeled in and around the orchard by General Lafayette McLaw’s Division of General James Longstreet’s corps.

In one of the war’s most hotly debated moments, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee on the morning of July 2nd had ordered Longstreet to frontally assault the Union left flank. Longstreet protested, urging Lee to swing the entire Army of Northern Virginia to the right around the Union line, get between Meade and Washington, D.C., pick more favorable ground, and force the Federals to attack them. Lee refused, insisting that Longstreet try to dislodge the enemy from the hills and win the battle in front of them. Lee’s obstinance helped sound the Confederacy’s death knell.

It took the South Carolinian the bulk of Thursday to choose a location from which to launch his assault, a delay known – sardonically in Confederate lore – as “Longstreet’s Long March.” But when Longstreet finally did attack, it was with a vengeance. The Union high command’s nightmare scenario was unfolding: the Rebels were again poised to sweep the field with a bold maneuver, just as they’d done at Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville.

*

When word came from Meade’s staff that it was time for the Fifth Corps to join the fight, officers barked the commands – Fall In! . . . Attention! . . . Load! . . . Load at Will! – to their 11,000 men sprawled across Powers Hill. Still, it took the better part of an hour – beginning roughly at four o’clock, Guelzo estimates – before the Fifth Corps was fully mobilized. Sykes knew the situation was dire; he ordered his division closest to the fighting – the First – to move out as soon as possible.

Under the erratic leadership of General James Barnes, the division was at the corps’ point as it began marching toward Sickles’ position a little after quarter past four. Like Sickles, Barnes was another Union officer who had little business being entrusted with command. First Division officers, Vincent among them, knew that when a firefight was imminent, Barnes had a tendency to go hors de combat, often drinking himself into a stupor.

Barnes and his horse were apparently not at the head of the column as it moved toward the fighting, now just a few hundred yards in front of them and growing more cacophonous by the second. The First Division, with the Third Brigade in the lead, was approaching the action, scholars believe, from the north side of Little Round Top.

American military history is full of fortuitous moments, when the right officer happened to be in charge at the right moment. But none loom as large as the presence of bullheaded Strong Vincent and his intrepid Third Brigade at the tip of the Fifth Corps’ spear that late July afternoon. Like Myers and Guelzo, Edwin B. Coddington, author of The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command, embraced Norton’s account of the pivotal moments leading up to the defense of Little Round Top. Coddington, Guelzo, and Myers all say that Vincent spied a young courier racing on a horse, craning his neck as he rode, clearly looking for General Barnes – and not finding him.

Vincent spurred his horse forward and intercepted the messenger, insisting that he disclose the orders he was carrying. At first the junior officer balked, saying they were for Barnes’ eyes and ears only. But Vincent, knowing that Barnes was incapacitated, would have none of it.

“What are your orders?” Vincent demanded. “Give me your orders!”

The orders, the courier eventually spat out, were for Barnes to “send one of his brigades to occupy that hill yonder.” He then pointed to the smaller of the two round tops.

Vincent replied “Very well!” and vowed to hurry his 1,300 men to the top. He then instructed the courier to inform his superiors that he, Colonel Strong Vincent of General Barnes’ Third Brigade, would take responsibility for his action. Vincent was fully aware of the gravity of what he was doing. For a brigade commander to move his men in the heat of battle without explicit orders was a court-martial offense. But there was no time to observe chain-of-command protocol with McLaws’ men about to overwhelm Sickles’ position and run like banshees toward the round tops. Soon, McLaws’ division of Georgians and Alabamians was joined by Texans and Arkansians from General John Hood’s division.

The orders that Vincent intercepted, historians believe, had originated with General Gouverneur K. Warren, a topographical engineer by training and the Army of the Potomac’s chief engineer. Earlier that afternoon, Warren had been in a group of senior officers riding with General Meade to appraise the Union left side, which the high command had been worried about all day.

Warren suggested to Meade that to get a better view of the situation, the chief engineer, his field staff, and his signal corpsmen would ride to the summit of Little Round Top and report back. Once there, Warren was alarmed to discover that Sickles’ precipitous move had left the hill almost completely deserted. Warren recognized right away that the Federals were susceptible to an attack from the enemy right. Some Rebel troops – Guelzo described them as “a pack of ravenous wolves” – had already reached the jagged rock formation at the base of the round tops known as Devil’s Den. The situation was so bleak that Warren directed his signalmen to wave their big flags, hoping it might deceive the enemy into thinking the hill was still occupied.

Warren rode down into the valley, either found Sykes or sent a messenger to him – accounts vary – and urged the corps commander to dispatch a brigade of men onto Little Round Top before it was too late. With confusion rampant and precious minutes slipping by, scholars believe that it took multiple horsebound messengers bouncing among Meade, Warren, Sickles, and Sykes before word of the potential calamity finally reached the head of Sykes’ column – and then only because Vincent seized the initiative and flagged down the nervous courier.

The whole episode was pathetically constipated on the one hand and complete serendipity on the other. “The occupation of Little Round Top at the right time and right place by Vincent’s brigade was the result of a combination of circumstances and a stroke of rare good luck for which no one person in the Union high command could claim the credit,” wrote Coddington more than a century after the battle.

         *

Whether by luck or by pluck, Vincent never hesitated in asserting control. He immediately ordered bugler Norton to sound the alarm that the brigade was shifting its position to the left – and on the double-quick. Vincent then summoned his senior regimental commander, Colonel James Clay Rice of the 44th New York, and directed him to explain the urgency of the situation to the three other regimental commanders in the brigade – and to follow Vincent’s lead up the hill.

Vincent and Norton galloped to the base of Little Round Top, desperately searching for a trail. It took a few minutes, but they found an old logging path winding up the mound’s southern face near the swale with Big Round Top. The taller hill’s woods were so thick it made it almost impassable. But loggers had removed so many trees from Little Round Top over the years that a hellbent foe could assault it from its northern, western, and southern sides. Vincent hollered at his men to sprint to the summit as the equestrian whipped his horse up the trail.

When he and Norton got to the top, Vincent looked down on “a scene of pure disaster,” Guelzo writes. By then, hundreds of Longstreet’s men from both divisions were beginning to pick their way through the rocks at the bottom of the hill, Rebel-yelling every step. Many hundreds more were minutes away from joining them.

Norton was still dutifully displaying the brigade’s colors as musket shots started crashing into the rocks behind the pair.

“Down with that flag, Norton!” Vincent shouted, according to color bearer’s own account. “Damn it, go behind the rocks with it!”

Vincent handed the reins of his horse to his orderly. Then the colonel raced along the spur of the summit, trying to determine the best strategic positions for his men to defend. He hurriedly placed the 16th Michigan, the first unit to arrive, on the right flank facing almost due west; Rice and the 44th New York he put in the right-center, also looking west; the 83rd Pennsylvania he put in the left-center, facing southwest; and the 20th Maine he placed on the extreme left, also facing southwest, with one company looking almost due south across to Big Round Top. Vincent reminded Rice that the Butterfield Twins, the 44th New York and the 83rd Pennsylvania, had fought side-by-side many times; the brigade commander wanted them to do so again.  

As Vincent situated the 20th Maine, regimental commander Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, before the war a professor of philosophy and rhetoric at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, and after it, a public servant and orator nonpareil, thought the Pennsylvanian addressed him “with a voice of awe.”

“I place you here,” Vincent thundered at Chamberlain. “This is the left of the Union line. You understand?”

Then the great-grandson of two Revolutionary War stalwarts delivered what is arguably the most consequential military order in the Republic’s history: “You are to hold this ground at all costs!”

Any retreat at all, both officers understood, could brook disaster for the Army of the Potomac, eroding its entire defensive posture, and throwing the outcome of the battle into doubt.

Vincent then ran back to the middle of the line, hollering at a staff officer to climb a bluff and keep him apprised of the enemy advance. He then turned to the 83rd’s adjutant, Lieutenant John M. Clark, and ordered him to return to the valley, find someone in command, and have him send reinforcements at once. Shouting into the ear of the Allegheny College alumnus who’d served at his side for two years, Vincent told him to deliver this message: “The enemy are coming against us with overwhelming force!”

Vincent instructed a third aide to procure more ammunition from Fifth Corps munitions officers down below. The Rebels were now getting so close that Norton put down his bugle, grabbed a musket, and jumped into the left-center of the line with his mates from the 83rd.

Things were so muddled that General Warren at this point apparently did not know that Vincent’s brigade had filled the void on Little Round Top. On his horse at the bottom of the hill, Warren spotted his old outfit, the 140th New York Infantry, commanded by Colonel Patrick O’Rorke, an immigrant from County Cavan in the North of Ireland. Warren ordered Paddy and his men to get to the top post-haste. When O’Rorke protested that his superiors expected him to follow the rest of the corps into the valley, Guelzo has Warren replying: “Never mind that, Paddy. Bring your regiment up [to the top] and I will take the responsibility.”

Warren also urged O’Rorke not to bother dressing his unit’s line once he got to the summit – there’d be no time for it.

The chief engineer was proven prescient. By the time O’Rorke and his men reached the peak, the Texans and Arkansians attacking the 16th Michigan on the right flank of Vincent’s line had begun breaking through.

“Here they are men! Commence firing!” O’Rorke shouted. A moment later, Paddy was shot through the neck, killed instantly.

The 526 men in O’Rorke’s unit had arrived in the nick of time. Together with the 44th New York and the remnants of the 16th Michigan, they succeeded in damming the Rebel surge. Soon they were buoyed by the 91st and 115th Pennsylvania and the 146th New York, whose clutch presence most likely can be attributed to Lieutenant Clark’s plea for reinforcements with the Fifth Corps’ brass.

Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, furious and bloody. In his The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby Foote writes that no fewer than five charges and counter-charges were mounted that evening on Little Round Top; each time the Rebels gained a toehold, they were shoved back. Vincent’s hastily-constructed line buckled but never broke.

The biggest threat came on the Federal right. In the middle of the maelstrom, Norton, Judson, and others remember Vincent running to his right to rally the Michiganders, shouting at them to get back into line. Waving Lizzie’s riding crop, he jumped onto a boulder, making himself, Nevins and Styple write, “an ideal target for hundreds of Confederate muskets.”

Moments after yelling, “Don’t yield an inch, boys, don’t yield an inch!”  Vincent was shot through the left groin. The Minié ball ended up lodged in his right thigh, shattering his pelvis and damaging other bones. He most likely collapsed on the boulder’s surface, perhaps languishing for some time before help arrived.

Amos Judson’s history of the 83rd has Vincent saying through gritted teeth, “This is the fourth or fifth time they have shot at me, and they have hit me at last.” He was carried to safety behind the 83rd’s position, which held steady throughout the carnage.

Colonel Rice of the 44th New York assumed command after Vincent was wounded. The Rebel attacks against the Federal middle and right began to wane toward sunset. But the Georgians and Alabamians on the southern side of Little Round Top kept heaving up the hill against Chamberlain and the 20th Maine. At twilight, virtually out of ammunition, Chamberlain famously ordered his remaining men to fix bayonets and countercharge down the hill.

The gambit worked, aided by the company of men close to Big Round Top. At a pivotal moment, they suddenly turned and fired into the exhausted Rebels, then joined Chamberlain’s pursuit down the slope. Before they spread themselves too thin in the darkness, Rice reeled back in the 20th Maine. Like the rest of the men in blue that night, they had more than done their job.

*

It had been complete mayhem, but somehow the four regiments of the Third Brigade and the four other Fifth Corps regiments that stormed to the top of the hill kept the Rebels from gaining control of Little Round Top. The human cost was ghastly: of the roughly 1,300 men in the Third Brigade, more than 530 of them had been killed or wounded.

As darkness settled that evening, Generals Meade, Butterfield, Sykes, Warren, et al., weren’t sure how, but they knew that Vincent had saved the day. Without Strong’s initiative, the left flank of the of the army may well have crumbled. If they had gotten clear of Little Round Top, the Army of Northern Virginia might have swung to its left and crushed the Union center in a maneuver painfully reminiscent of past fiascos.

Vincent stopped that scenario from happening – an exemplary bit of valor not lost on the high command. When Union generals made gaffes in previous battles, there was no one there to pick them up. Without the Third Brigade’s leader, Sickles might well be viewed in American history in the same ignominious light as Benedict Arnold.

*

It was pitch dark when Vincent was transported to the gruesome field hospital inside Jacob Weikert’s farmhouse on the northeastern slope of Little Round Top. Colonel Rice, Vincent’s successor, dispatched Oliver Norton to find more horse-drawn ambulances and – if the bugler could – the wounded Colonel Vincent. Groping in the darkness, Norton was not able to redirect more ambulances to Little Round Top. But he encountered injured soldiers from the 16th Michigan who said Vincent had been taken to the Weikert house.

The home was something out of Dante’s Inferno. Norton walked past dozens of men in screaming in anguish before he found Vincent. His boss had lost a lot of blood. Vincent was barely able to speak but recognized Norton and held out his hand. Norton grasped it, saying, “The boys are still there, Colonel.”

Vincent smiled and squeezed his hand, Norton wrote in The Attack and Defense of Little Round Top, his book that commemorated Gettysburg’s 50th anniversary. Norton tried to tell Vincent how much he meant to the men of the Third Brigade but was overcome with emotion and had to take his leave.

“That was my last sight of one of the most gallant heroes of the war,” Norton remembered in 1913, seven years before he died.

The Weikert home apparently proved too susceptible to stray shelling. Cannon fire the next day forced the medical staff to transport Vincent and many others to the Louis Bushman farm a mile removed from the action. By then, it was clear to the doctors that Vincent would not survive. Vincent asked to be taken to Erie to be with his wife and family but the physicians refused. He was in no condition to travel.

 “I presume I have done my last fighting,” Vincent supposedly said when told the assessment. He must have known his prognosis was bleak.

On July 4th, America’s 87th birthday, Adjutant Clark was told to find a functioning telegraph station and wire the sad news to Vincent’s family back home. He rode to Westminster, Maryland, twenty miles southeast.

The telegram reached the Vincent household late on July 5th or early the next morning. Lizzie, seven months pregnant, couldn’t possibly make the trip to Gettysburg, despite her husband’s wishes. B.B., her-father-in-law, immediately boarded a train; once there, he made arrangements to be taken to the battlefield.

When B.B. finally got to Gettysburg on July 8th or 9th, it was next to impossible to get straight information about his son’s status or pinpoint where he had been hospitalized.

By then, of course, it was too late. In his book, Judson noted that Vincent began “gradually sinking away” on July 5th, slipping in and out of consciousness. Judson wrote that Vincent believed it was “unworthy” for a soldier to display “outward manifestation of suffering.” So, Vincent kept his lips pursed through the agony.

Word that Vincent was at death’s door reached the Union high command as Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia slipped across the Potomac on their trek back to their Virginia sanctuary. Generals Meade and Butterfield petitioned President Lincoln’s War Department to give Vincent a battlefield promotion. The request was granted overnight.

Sykes, Barnes, and other senior officers came by the Bushman farm to pay their respects. It’s doubtful that Vincent was coherent enough to appreciate his elevation to brigadier general or discuss how he’d ended up at the summit of Little Round Top. By the morning of July 7th, four-and-a-half days after Vincent was wounded, it was clear that the end was imminent.

Judson described a scene in which Vincent was struggling to recite the Lord’s Prayer “when the soul of this young hero passed away to another world.” Vincent was embalmed that day so his body could be transported for burial.

Crawford Countian Clark, who’d been with Vincent since Erie Regiment days in the spring of ’61, was assigned to accompany Vincent’s corpse to Erie and help arrange the brigadier general’s memorial service. Clark headed out on Wednesday, July 8th, apparently unaware that Vincent’s father was then looking for his son around the battlefield. Strong’s body was already aboard a train when B.B. learned the awful news. Despite his grief, B.B. helped get the body of another 83rd Regiment martyr, Captain John Sell, embalmed, coffined, and sent home to Erie.

Then B.B. himself departed for home. His son’s funeral services would take place on Monday, July 13th, at the Vincent house in Erie and at St. Paul’s Episcopal.

Mourners filing through the Vincents’ parlor that day saw a coffin draped in black crepe with an American flag entwined around it. Wreaths of flowers and evergreens adorned the casket.

A detachment of U.S. Regulars from Waterford, the Vincents’ ancestral home, were pressed into duty as an honor guard. The Regulars led a lengthy procession to St. Paul’s that featured rolling cannons, members of the Erie County legal profession, foundrymen from Vincent, Himrod & Co., and a panoply of horse-drawn carriages.

The Erie Weekly Gazette reported that those who heard the “melancholy and imposing obsequies” at the service would not soon forget them. Once Reverend J.F. Spaulding concluded his funeral rites at Erie Cemetery, the honor guard fired a volley over Vincent’s grave.

“While we lament his death, and condole with his bereaved and stricken wife, father, mother, brothers, and sister, we yet point to his example as worthy of imitation by all ‘the truly noble’ and patriotic,” the reverend’s homily ended.

Colonel Rice, now the Third Brigade’s commanding officer, that week issued an announcement to his troops about Vincent’s demise. “A soldier, a scholar, a friend has fallen. For his country, struggling for its life, he willingly gave his own,” Rice wrote.

Less than a year later, Rice himself would die on another abhorrent killing field, the Wilderness battlefield in Virginia.

A friend of Lizzie’s described her as so distraught in the days after Strong’s funeral that she did not want to sleep for fear that she’d have more nightmares. Two months after her father’s death, Blanche Strong Vincent came into this world. The baby was sickly at birth and never gained full health. Blanche would not live to see her first birthday, an occurrence that was far too common in the 19th century.

Now grieving twice over, Lizzie chose to stay a member of the Vincent household. She never remarried and moved with Boyd Vincent’s family when the Episcopal priest was transferred, first to a church in Pittsburgh, then to another parish in Cincinnati. Lizzie was active in church and community work, conducting art classes for women and authoring two books: Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and Madonna in Legend and Art. She remained fluent enough in German, French, and Italian to provide translation services and collected a library full of books on art and literature. Lizzie also devoted much of her life to caring for her mentally impaired brother-in-law, Ward Vincent.

She lived for five full decades after her husband’s death, passing away at age 76 in 1914. The equestrienne was buried next to Strong and Blanche in Erie Cemetery. At the center of the family plot is a “Vincent” granite memorial with a large Maltese Cross – the Fifth Corps talisman that Oliver Willcox Norton, Strong Vincent’s flag bearer, carried to the summit of Little Round Top – engraved beneath the name.

Lizzie knew how much Norton had meant to her husband and was grateful to the bugler for keeping Strong’s legacy alive. In her will, she left him two hundred dollars to buy the best cigars he could find. Norton gently refused the money, donating it instead to a church charity.

In 1889, a quarter-century after the battle, a monument to the 83rd Pennsylvania was erected on Little Round Top. Back then, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s rules governing Civil War statues forbade memorials that honored individual soldiers. Although it’s clear that the bronze likeness atop the monument was inspired by Vincent, there’s no plaque that explicitly identifies him.

The monument shows the 83rd officer drawing a sword out of a scabbard affixed to his waist, which is not an accurate depiction of Strong Vincent’s actions on the evening of July 2, 1863. In his memoirs, Norton wrote that Vincent was so rushed when he dismounted at the top of the hill that he forgot to grab the scabbard from his saddle. The only “weapon” Vincent was carrying in those fateful minutes was his wife’s riding crop.

The statue of Vincent at Erie’s Blasco Memorial Library, unveiled in 1997, got his heroic stance correct. Not only is he seen waving the riding crop in a menacing way, but he’s depicted looking down – which given the proximity of the enemy when he jumped onto that boulder, was surely the direction he was staring when struck by the fatal bullet.

*

The men that Vincent trained and with whom he fought side-by-side had plenty of war left. After Gettysburg, the Third Brigade and its 83rd Regiment fought in a dozen skirmishes and in such major battles as Spotsylvania, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and in April of 1865, the final throes of the conflagration at Appomattox Court House. No brigade in the Union Army fought with greater tenacity, perseverance, or élan.

One of those fighters, John M. Clark, returned home to Meadville, started McCauley & Clark, a wholesale dealership in fine wines, liquors, ales, and cigars. He also ended up the proprietor of two different hotels and, for eight years, served as chief of Meadville’s fire department.

Clark married a local lass named Bessie Banyard in 1862. They had three children and eventually relocated to Snyder in the Oklahoma Territory, where Clark died in 1905, two years before Oklahoma became a state.

The hill that Clark, Oliver Willcox Norton, and Strong Vincent climbed under duress on the evening of July 2, 1863 was a far cry from the arid West. It looked over jagged rocks, some small creeks, a batch of fertile farmland, and off to the north, a charming village with a seminary and a college. It’s not known if Elizabeth Carter Vincent left a remembrance for Clark’s heirs; surely, though, she had a special place in her heart for the Crawford Countian who comforted her while her husband’s body was being laid to rest.

In the months after Gettysburg, Norton enrolled in a special officers training class and become a lieutenant with the Eighth Colored Regiment. In February 1864, he helped lead the Black unit at the Battle of Olustee near Jacksonville, Florida. Olustee did not go well for the Union side. Norton was fortunate that he wasn’t captured, since the Rebels had vowed to execute any White officer caught commanding Black troops.

It took three decades, but Norton finally accepted credit for composing “Taps” in 1862 with General Dan Butterfield, then a Fifth Corps brigade commander. The two worked together in taking an old French marching tune and reshaping it as a 24-note homage to the end of a soldier’s day. After more than a century and a half, the Norton-Butterfield collaboration remains a staple of solemn military occasions, a melancholy tribute to the sacrifice of American soldiers that never fails to move its listeners.

It’s not known if Norton played “Taps” on the evening of July 1, 1863, as the Third Brigade troops pitched their tents outside Hanover, but for posterity’s sake, let’s hope that he did. Soon enough that night, Vincent ordered him to blare “Assembly!”, which eventually sent scores of his mates to their deaths.

Norton became a successful Gilded Age entrepreneur. He and his brother devised a cost-effective method of manufacturing metal cans. At the turn of the 20th century, their company was acquired by the American Can Company, a spinoff from Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel.  

In 1889, the onetime schoolteacher was among the speakers as the 83rd’s monument was being unveiled at Gettysburg. “Throwing himself into the breach, [Vincent] rallied his men, but gave up his own life,” Norton said that day. “In the very flower of his young manhood, full of the highest promise, with the love of a young wife filling his thoughts of the future with the fairest visions, proud, gentle, tender, true, he laid his gift at his country’s altar. It was done nobly, gladly.”

General Dan Butterfield, Norton’s “Taps” collaborator, wrote after the war that, “No man who lived and fought in the Battle of Gettysburg did more for his country than Vincent. He was a magnificent soldier, a gentleman of high education and great ability.”

That gentleman of high education was honored by Erie in 1930 when Strong Vincent High School opened. To this day, the school takes up a full city block. Its grand sweep and classic columns are meant to inspire the ideals that Butterfield saw in Vincent: discipline and high moral character. Inspirational quotes are inscribed on the school’s facade, along with the Vincent family coat of arms, an azure shield with a silver and white half-ram above this motto: Vincenti dabitur laurea, “The laurel will be given to the victor.”

After 87 years – Abraham Lincoln’s revered four score and seven – it closed as a high school, having been consolidated with two other city schools. It was converted into a junior high and is still going – as it should – strong.

“Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great jurist and brevet colonel with the 20th Massachusetts Regiment, wrote of the Civil War generation. “It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” 

Norton and Clark lived long enough to see the Great War, World War I, decimate a different continent. The pair had fought not only in a great war, but in a Great Cause War.

In the decades following the war, Medal of Honor recipient Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain became something of a beau idéal for the celebration of that cause. Chamberlain delivered scores of speeches all over the country – North and South – saluting the Third Brigade’s heroics. But his most memorable remarks, like Norton’s, came a quarter-century after the battle at the dedication of the 20th Maine’s memorial at Gettysburg.

“The lesson impressed on me as I stand here and my heart and mind traverse your faces, and the years that are gone, is that in a great, momentous struggle like this commemorated here, it is character that tells,” the teacher of rhetoric said that day.

“What I mean by character is a firm and seasoned substance of soul. I mean such qualities or acquirements as intelligence, thoughtfulness, conscientiousness, right-mindedness, patience, fortitude, long-suffering and unconquerable resolve.”

Vincent exhibited all of those qualities, Chamberlain said, when with “earnest and prophetic eyes,” he issued his seminal order not to retreat, no matter the circumstance.

Chamberlain reminded his listeners that Vincent had bellowed into his ear “You understand?”, as Rebel Minié balls tore into the trees around them.

“I did understand with a heavy weight on my mind and spirit,” Chamberlain shared with his mates. “You understood – and it was done. Held – and at what cost?!”

The cost, of course, was grievous – but in the end, utterly worth it. Surely, Strong Vincent sensed what would happen when he leapt onto that boulder. He was our Republic’s Horatius at the most epochal gate in American history.

Now read more on the Battle of Gettysburg here.

Timothy M. Gay is a Pulitzer-nominated author of five books and dozens of articles about history and culture. His most recent book is RORY LAND, which looks at the life of golf superstar Rory McIlroy through the prism of Ireland’s troubled past. A graduate of Georgetown University, Gay grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, the proud home of a host of Little Round Top heroes in the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment.

Colonel Strong Vincent and the Epic Struggle for Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg: Part I - The Soil of Old Pennsylvania

A 26-year-old Union brigade commander risked being court-martialed when, without orders, he rushed his four regiments to the summit of an undefended hill at a crucial moment during the Battle of Gettysburg. The Harvard graduate’s valor may have saved the Army of the Potomac – but it cost him his life. Timothy M. Gay explains – in part 1 of 2.

Colonel Strong Vincent. Source: Public domain, Library of Congress, available here.

The bugle blare ordering the men to break camp that steamy Wednesday evening could not have come at a worse moment. Having not eaten a restful meal in days, the 1,300 soldiers of the Third Brigade, First Division, Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac had just settled down to supper when the dreaded “Assembly!” call came screeching through their campground.  

Now the infantrymen weren’t just ravenous, they were spitting mad. No doubt muttering curses while gulping a last bite of salted beef, they doused their fires, struck their tents, grabbed their equipment, and scrambled into formation. A dozen miles off, they could hear sporadic cannon fire. At first the noise was muffled, like distant thunderclaps from the summer storms that stalked them on their grueling trek north from Virginia. But as the Fifth Corps’ ten brigades – nine infantry, one artillery – hustled west, kicking up clouds of dust in what was already searing heat, the sounds grew sharper and more ominous.

General George Sykes, who had taken command of the corps just days before when President Lincoln elevated Major General George Meade to overall head of the Army of the Potomac, pushed his men past the brink of exhaustion. By the middle of the night, one Fifth Corps soldier recalled, “all human endurance was on the verge of utter collapse.”

Private Oliver Willcox Norton, a former northwestern Pennsylvania schoolteacher, was lucky. As a bugler, color bearer, and orderly, Norton was given a horse to keep abreast of the Third Brigade’s commanding officer. But almost every other enlisted man in the corps that night was struggling to stay upright, dragging one foot in front of the other.

Squinting their eyes in the purplish predawn, the men could make out a pair of hills to their left, a slight ridge dead ahead, and a mound to their right. They knew that beyond that high ground, a fierce battle was raging outside a crossroads called Gettysburg. It was now Thursday, July 2, 1863.

Third Brigade veterans had no illusions about the cataclysm that awaited them. At Gaines’ Mill in June of 1862, mired in the swamplands of Virginia’s Chickahominy River, they were caught in an ambush, losing close to half their men. Eight weeks later at Second Bull Run, many of them were forced to make a reckless charge into Confederate General Stonewall Jackson’s entrenched line; again, they suffered horrific losses. Four months removed from the Manassas debacle, under withering fire at Fredericksburg, elements of the Third crept as far up Marey’s Heights as any Federal unit. In frigid weather, they spent the better part of two days hunkered down within a stone’s throw of the Rebel front, trying to drown out the cries of wounded comrades. When their mates expired, as Michael Shaara described in The Killer Angels, they used the dead bodies as macabre shields against enemy fire.

Halfway through another year, their new brigade leader was predicting that a decisive clash was on the horizon. “We move tomorrow for the Pennsylvania border,” he had written two days earlier to his 25-year-old bride. Seven months pregnant with their first and only child, Elizabeth Carter Vincent was at their home some 330 miles northwest in Erie, Pennsylvania. Like her husband, “Lizzie” was a graceful equestrian. Acquaintances marveled at what a handsome couple they made while riding in tandem. Lizzie was also an accomplished scholar in an age when few women received formal educations; she was fluent in four languages and a devotee of religious art.

“A general battle must ensue soon,” the colonel penned in what proved to be his final letter to his wife. “[The enemy’s] fate is sealed.”

Lizzie’s husband did not suffer fools gladly. He knew his stern visage and burly frame were intimidating – and learned to use them to full effect. Thick-necked and barrel-chested, he had powerful arms, deep-set eyes, and a pair of bristly side whiskers that matched a flinty temper. As a youngster, he had won more than his share of fistfights and wrestling bouts.

It wasn’t just the Army of Northern Virginia whose fate was sealed in the early summer of 1863. At noontime on July 1stas the brigade crossed into his native commonwealth, the colonel ordered that the tattered colors of the Pennsylvania regiment under his aegis – the 83rd Infantry, the outfit that two years earlier he had helped organize – be unfurled, including a banner with its designated corps insignia, a crimson Maltese Cross. The cross symbolized the Fifth Corps’ devotion to God in eradicating evil; in the Union Army’s troop identification system, the color red meant it belonged to the corps’ First Division.

With the 83rd’s flags fluttering, the colonel rode through the brigade, directing his men to give three cheers for the Keystone State. “Hip, hip, hooray, Pennsylvania!” they hollered three times, happy to be north of the Mason-Dixon Line for the first time in more than a year. As dusk descended and the brigade neared its campsite outside Hanover, the colonel again ordered that the 83rd’s colors be uncased, but this time with a drum corps providing ceremonial pomp.

Once the sun disappeared that evening, Private Norton in all likelihood serenaded the men with “Taps,” the mournful end-of-day bugle call he had cowritten a year earlier with General Dan Butterfield. Butterfield, a veteran Fifth Corps officer, was now serving as General Meade’s chief of staff.

Norton and his old cohorts in the 83rd Pennsylvania were an eclectic mix. They hailed from different parts of the commonwealth, but mainly from Erie and its neighboring counties: Warren, Crawford, Venango, and Mercer. Before the war, Norton had taught school in Girard, a farm village southwest of Erie. Besides teachers and farmers, the 83rdincluded boatsmen, blacksmiths, bricklayers, barmen, carpenters, wagon drivers, railroaders, store clerks, shop owners, a few foundry workers, and a smattering of immigrants from Ireland and Germany – plus one notable second-generation Scottish-American. They fought with such ferocity in so many battles that at war’s end it was determined that only one regiment in the entire Union Army – the Fifth New Hampshire – had suffered a higher casualty rate.

They were proud to be called “Mud Turtles,” after an episode early in the war when one of its charges stuck a small Confederate flag onto a turtle's flipper and let it waddle around in the muck, to the cackling amusement of men from other units.

But none of the Mud Turtles were cackling as their colors were being presented at sunset on the outskirts of Hanover. To the martial thump of drums, Colonel Strong Vincent, the Third Brigade’s brand-new commander and the former head of the 83rd, removed his hat, bowed his head, turned to his adjutant, a lieutenant of Scottish descent from Meadville in Crawford County named John M. Clark, and uttered: “What death more glorious can any man desire than to die on the soil of old Pennsylvania fighting for that flag?”

 *

“What death more glorious?” It’s such a poignant phrase that authors James H. Nevins and William B. Styple used it as the title of their 1997 book about the unflinching young man who sacrificed his life for something beautiful and profound: the preservation of the American Republic.

Did the 26-year-old Strong Vincent, a Harvard graduate and scion of one of Erie’s most prominent families, truly wax thatpoetic the evening before being mortally wounded? Well, none of us were there, so it’s impossible to know.

We know this much, however: amid all its bloody fratricide, the mid-19th century was an intensely romantic age. As filmmaker Ken Burns lovingly captured in his series The Civil War, combatants and non-combatants alike – from Abraham Lincoln to the spouse of the lowliest private – tended to emote in lyrical terms, often citing biblical passages and classic verse.

Indeed, a National Park Service essay on the Battle of Gettysburg suggests that Vincent’s “glorious death” prophesy may have been inspired by poet Thomas Babington Macaulay. The Englishman’s epic 1842 work, known informally as Horatius at the Gate, saluted the Roman martyr’s courage in defeating the invading Etruscans in 509 BC. During Vincent’s schoolboy days at the private Erie Academy, Horatius was surely assigned as must-memorize literature:

Then out spake brave Horatius,

The Captain of the Gate:

“To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his gods.”

Still, the enlisted man who ascribed the death musing to Vincent – his orderly Norton who, a half-century later, wrote a pair of memoirs that had a lasting effect on Civil War scholarship – was doubtless eager to trumpet his dead boss’s heroics. The “Taps” cocomposer may have exercised some literary license. Perhaps Vincent’s actual words that evening were a bit more prosaic.

But there was nothing prosaic about Vincent’s gallantry the next night astride Little Round Top. Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment – heralded by Shaara, Burns, a host of other chroniclers, and not incidentally, the publicity-and-legacy-seeking future governor, Chamberlain himself – are justly revered for their twilight stand on Little Round Top’s southwestern slope. Too often overlooked, however, is the brigade commander who, with Minié and cannon balls shrieking through the air and thousands of wild-eyed enemy infantrymen clambering up the hill, brilliantly positioned the 20th Maine, the 83rd Pennsylvania, and his two other regiments, the 44th New York and the 16th Michigan. Despite his Horatius-like role in repelling the attackers, Vincent got nary a mention in Professor James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, the much-admired book that cracked the bestseller lists.

Amid the pandemonium that night, Vincent had the presence of mind to tell Chamberlain that his 360 Mainers now represented the extreme left flank of the Army of the Potomac. Any retreat whatsoever, Vincent admonished, could spell catastrophe.

“You understand?! You are to hold this ground at all costs!” Vincent yelled into Chamberlain’s ear as the bedlam below grew louder. Then the Pennsylvanian raced off to rally the rest of his troops.

Within minutes, the Rebels were threatening to swamp the right side of the Third Brigade’s line; they were as close to Vincent’s position as he had gotten to theirs at Fredericksburg. He leapt atop a boulder, brandishing the riding crop that Lizzie had given him as a keepsake, bleating, “Don’t yield an inch, men! Don’t yield an inch!”

Seconds later, he keeled over, shot through the hip and groin.

*

It would have come as no surprise to Thomas Babington Macaulay that the ashes of Strong Vincent’s forebears burned deep. Ancestors on both sides of his family fought in the American Revolution. His paternal great-grandfather, Cornelius Vincent, along with two of his sons, Strong’s great-great uncles, were captured in 1779 by British infantry at the Battle of Fort Freeland in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania; all three were exiled to a prison camp in Quebec, where they spent the next three years in captivity. His maternal great-grandfather, Timothy Strong, enlisted in a Litchfield County, Connecticut, volunteer outfit at age 55 and helped underwrite the Patriot cause.  

Strong Vincent was born in Waterford, a picturesque village a dozen miles south of Erie, in the spring of 1837, the first-born child of Bethuel Boyd (B.B.) Vincent and his wife, Sarah Strong Vincent. Seven siblings were to follow, but only four survived their childhoods. Waterford is most noted for being the home of Fort LeBoeuf, the frontier outpost where a cheeky 21-year-old Virginian named George Washington delivered Great Britain’s ultimatum to the French in 1753, helping to trigger the French and Indian War.

The Erie County of Strong Vincent’s boyhood was a hotbed of abolitionism and a haven for escaping slaves. Runaways were hidden in “safe homes” in Waterford, Erie, and other places, fed hot meals, then concealed in horse-drawn wagons or spirited through the woods, eventually being smuggled onto Lake Erie ships bound for Canada and freedom

The Vincents, originally “Van Sants” as Strong Vincent biographer Hans G. Myers has documented, were prosperous Huguenots who fled religious persecution in France, arriving in the New World in 1687. His mother’s clan, the Strongs, had been in the colonies even longer: they were direct descendants of the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay. Strong Vincent’s great-great-great grandfather, the felicitously named “Elder John” Strong, was born in Somerset, England, around 1605. He emigrated to Massachusetts in the 1630s and lived another seven decades, purportedly fathering 18 children with two wives!

Strong Vincent’s paternal grandfather, Judge John Vincent, made a fortune by establishing mercantile and freight routes through the wilderness between Waterford and Erie and later along the lake between Erie and Cleveland, exacting fees for the use of his roads, wagons, and vessels.

 His maternal grandfather, Captain Martin Strong, grew up on the family farm in Connecticut before moving to New York State’s Genessee Valley, where he mastered the science of land surveying. In 1795, after surviving a harrowing trip on horseback, he moved to Presque Isle, a peninsula jutting into Lake Erie. For much of his journey, he had to look out for highwaymen and rogue Iroquois warriors.

Martin Strong soon became northwestern Pennsylvania’s leading territorial surveyor, eventually acquiring huge tracts of land, becoming a Waterford/Erie power broker and an intimate of John Vincent. When John Vincent routed his Waterford Turnpike around Martin Strong’s property, Martin – no fool, he – cashed in by establishing a nearby tavern and tollgate. Martin Strong was also a leader in the local unit of the Pennsylvania state militia, which earned him the title of “Captain.”

John Vincent, meanwhile, despite his lack of formal education, was appointed a magistrate, obtaining the “Judge” honorific. When the Judge’s son married the Captain’s daughter in 1834, it was a major event in Erie County social and business circles.

That son, B.B., became an industrial entrepreneur in Waterford and Erie. By 1840, B.B. co-owned Vincent, Himrod & Co., a Mill Creek iron foundry that produced stove plates, scale weights, railroad spikes, and other necessities that fueled the 19th century economy. The acquisitive B.B. also founded a bank and served as a manager of the Erie Canal Company, the commercial enterprise behind the 360-mile-long New York State waterway, completed in 1825, that transformed the northern half of the young Republic by linking the eastern seaboard to the Great Lakes. 

Both families were devoutly Christian. The Vincents were pillars of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Waterford, where young Strong was baptized, and later of St. Paul’s Episcopal in Erie after B.B. moved the family to the fledgling city of some 45,000 souls in 1843. The Strongs, for their part, built an ecumenical place of worship on their Erie County farm that they christened “Union Church”; the family encouraged its use by all Christian denominations.

Boyd Vincent, Strong’s younger brother who became an Episcopal minister, recalled decades later what it was like growing up in a rigorously Christian household. “Bible reading, family prayer, study of Sunday-school lessons, strict Sunday observance, carefully regulated amusements,” Boyd shared in a reminisce unearthed by Nevins and Styple.

Close to six feet tall and weighing 225 pounds, B.B. Vincent was not to be messed with. “When [Father] said ‘Come’ we came, and when he said ‘Go’ we went,” Boyd wrote.

The Vincents and the Strongs were surrounded by – and in some capacity, almost assuredly part of – a secret network devoted to ending the scourge of slavery. Erie County historical societies and Myers, author of the 2022 book The Lion of Round Top, have chronicled that B.B. Vincent’s business partner, William Himrod, was for decades one of northwestern Pennsylvania’s leading abolitionists and a key “conductor” along the Underground Railroad that snuck escaped slaves into Canada.

Erie was the terminus, scholars say, for several branches of the Underground Railroad that tapped old Seneca and Delaware Indian trails. The Senecas’ ancient Brokenstraw Path, for example, went through Sugar Grove near the New York State line in Warren County before meandering around Corry, Union City, and Waterford in Erie County.

Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves from the 1830s through the 1850s gained their freedom via Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York State Native American trails like the Brokenstraw. Sugar Grove became such a wellspring of abolitionism that the great Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, spoke at an anti-slavery convention there in 1854.

Did the young Strong Vincent witness escaped slaves being hurried from one home to the next or rushed onto boats anchored along Lake Erie? Almost certainly. Were the Vincent homes in Waterford and Erie used as safe houses? We can’t know for sure, but given the family’s religious convictions and personal and political connections, it’s a distinct possibility.

Moreover, young Vincent would have heard the Underground Railroad discussed at length at family and church gatherings, especially after slave catchers and federal marshals, emboldened by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a serious federal crime to harbor or aid escaped slaves, began harassing activists like his father’s close friend and business partner.

*

Photography was still in its relative infancy when war broke out in 1861. Picture-making was so primitive that it’s hard to distinguish one Civil War portrait from the next. Whether Reb or Yank, they’re eerily similar: the soldier stuck a hand in his uniform pocket, or inside open coat buttons, and struck a menacing pose – body erect, eyes narrow, mouth unsmiling.

The evolving insignias and epaulets affixed to Vincent’s uniform in one portrait shot after another reflect his promotions through the ranks, from second lieutenant all the way up to colonel in just over two years. There’s no photograph of Vincent as a brigadier general, since he was given that final honor as he lay dying in a Gettysburg farmhouse that, like scores of other dwellings in and around that benighted village, had been turned into an emergency hospital.

His friends recalled that Vincent took great pride in his muttonchop side whiskers; they were so thick and luxurious that they almost met under his chin. At least when having his portrait taken, Vincent kept his lower jaw and upper lip cleanly shaven.

Since a host of eyewitnesses – superiors, subordinates, even enemies – attested to Vincent’s courage, not just at Gettysburg but in earlier encounters, it’s easy more than a century and a half later to consider his Revolutionary War lineage, study the forbidding aura captured in photographs, and perceive greatness.

“There’s no doubt about it,” we tell ourselves. “This young man was destined to lead soldiers in battle.”

But was he?

*

In truth, there was little in Vincent’s boyhood to suggest future battlefield genius. As a youngster at Erie Academy, he was an indifferent student. To teach his 14-year-old son a lesson, his father let Strong leave school to work in the family foundry. After toiling for a few weeks around a red-hot furnace, Strong and B.B. decided the young man’s talents would be better suited to the foundry’s counting room. At a tender age, he began overseeing much of the factory’s labor force, report Nevins and Styple.

Within a couple of years, the Vincents realized that the youngster needed a stronger technical education to help grow the family business. At age 17, he entered the Scientific School at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, then run by his family’s lodestar, the Episcopal Church.

His academic records at Trinity have not survived, but his time in Hartford had its share of controversy. As a sophomore, Vincent began courting Lizzie, Miss Elizabeth Carter, a teacher at Miss Porter’s finishing school in Farmington that – scandalously for that era – taught its female students actual academic subjects, not just social niceties. On one of Vincent’s visits, a security guard at the school apparently said something disparaging about his lady friend – or at least Vincent interpreted the remark as such. It violated Vincent’s code of chivalry, which back in the 19th century was grounds for fisticuffs – and often much worse. Vincent proceeded to pummel the man, which got him into Dutch with Trinity’s Episcopal leadership.

Vincent either was expelled or decided to leave Trinity of his own volition – it’s unclear. Either way, he ended up transferring to Harvard. But instead of entering the Massachusetts school as a junior, he chose – or more likely, Harvard chose for him – to begin his career in Cambridge as a sophomore, essentially “repeating” a grade.

“In light of the event that precipitated his departure from Trinity, it is not known how Vincent managed his way into Harvard,” Nevins and Styple observed, before drolly adding: “Of course, it is possible that his father’s wealth may have made his Harvard welcome more cordial.”

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding his admission, Vincent made his mark at Harvard. Contemporaries remember him as a popular figure around campus, a young man whose commanding baritone could be heard from one end of Harvard Yard to the other.

“He looked many years older than he really was, and in every respect his mind corresponded to his body,” a classmate recalled. “One would have said, on hearing him converse, that he was twenty-five years old.”

But old habits die hard. He was still a middling student, although his grades improved as graduation neared. His final rank in the class of ’59 was squarely in the center – 46th out of 92 students. Vincent’s files also reveal that he was regularly reprimanded for skipping prayer sessions and for indulging his tobacco habit on the grounds.

He continued to court Lizzie through his Cambridge years. The couple became engaged at some point in 1860, after he returned to Erie to study law under the tutelage of William S. Lane, one of the area’s most successful attorneys.

B.B. Vincent, as historian Myers has revealed, served as a delegate to the 1860 Republican convention that surprised many by nominating former Congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois instead of Senator William H. Seward of New York. Strong Vincent then joined his father in campaigning hard for the Railsplitter that fall against Democratic nominee Stephen Douglas and a host of other contenders in what proved to be an incendiary election. The Vincents’ work paid off: Lincoln romped to victory in Erie County with more than seventy percent of the vote and carried the commonwealth with room to spare.

                                                            *

Even before the new president formally asked for volunteers to combat the South’s move toward secession, militia units sprung up all over Pennsylvania, including one originally known as the Wayne Guards in Erie County. Radical separatists began firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor at dawn on April 12, 1861. As soon as he heard of South Carolina’s belligerence, Strong Vincent – according to the research of George Deutsch, the former executive director of the Erie County Historical Society – joined what was now called the “Erie Regiment,” a 90-day enlistment unit organized by Colonel John W. McLane, an Erie native and veteran of the Mexican War. Although transferred to Pittsburgh to be closer to the early fighting in Virginia, the Erie Regiment missed First Bull Run and disbanded before seeing any action. McLane and Vincent, a newly commissioned second lieutenant, then organized a new northwestern Pennsylvania unit that ultimately became the 83rd Regiment. It stayed in the war for the duration.

Vincent persuaded Lizzie that they should get married before he was sent to the front lines. They were wed on April 25, 1861, at the Reformed Dutch Church in her family’s hometown, Jersey City, New Jersey. A week after the ceremony, Vincent was promoted to first lieutenant.

Oliver Norton, the bugler from Erie County, was among the 83rd’s early enlistees. “My first impression of [Vincent] was not favorable,” Norton recalled in his memoirs. “I thought him a dude and an upstart.”

But Norton’s perspective changed once he saw the first lieutenant in action on the drill field. “I soon came to know that he wished to impress on that mob of green country boys, by example as well as precept, the proper way for a soldier to stand and move. It was the beginning for the regiment of a military education.”

Vincent’s own military education was strengthened that fall by a series of tutorials on maneuvers and tactics taught by Colonel McLane. McLane’s protégé became such a stickler for detail and preparation that some of his charges viewed him as a martinet. On George Washington’s 130th birthday in February of ’62, Vincent read aloud to the regiment Washington’s famous Farewell Address.

Norton was far from the only private who worried that a well-bred “gentleman” like Vincent might cower when commanding men in battle. But it didn’t take long for Norton and comrades to recognize that Vincent could translate his insistence on discipline into effective action on the battlefield.

Another member of the 83rd who developed an intimate relationship with Vincent was the regiment’s eventual adjutant, First Lieutenant John M. Clark. Clark had been born in 1837 in Meadville, a village of some 3,000 people forty miles due south of Erie in Crawford County. He was 24-years-old when he signed up for the Erie Regiment and then re-upped with the 83rd. His father was a Scottish immigrant who’d moved his brood from a Connecticut farm to northwestern Pennsylvania. The elder Clark continued to farm in Meadville and also served as a justice of the peace. His son John studied at Allegheny College and clerked for an iron foundry and a pair of grocery establishments in Erie County before the war broke out.

Once the Erie Regiment was disbanded, word circulated in the area that Colonel McLane was organizing a new three-year enlistment outfit. A host of men from Warren County, for example, traveled to Erie to sign up in July and August. Some made the 60-mile trip by horse or horsedrawn wagon; others rode the Sunbury and Erie Rail Road, which had inaugurated passenger service in Warren two years earlier. Most of the Warren County men who joined what soon became the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment were assigned by McLane and Vincent to serve in Companies A and D.

Clark was among the Crawford Countians assigned to Company I. Soon enough, Second Lieutenant Clark became First Lieutenant. It appears he was elevated to regimental adjutant in the aftermath of the Gaines’ Mill melee in June of ’62. After Vincent became the 83rd’s head that fall, Clark became his right-hand man.

Vincent must have had implicit faith in the Scottish-American. Clark served as Vincent’s chief administrative and personnel officer. It was Clark’s job to manage Vincent’s paperwork and to ensure that orders from the brigade and divisional command were promptly carried out.

The Vincent-Clark partnership worked well in one battlefield crisis after another, especially during the nightmarish assault on – and retreat from – Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. Miraculously, both emerged more or less unscathed from one of the war’s most horrific killing fields.

                                                            *

The 83rd was officially mustered into service in September 1861, with McLane as its commanding officer and Vincent as his top aide. Most of its first year was spent in training, often in concert with its Third Brigade compatriot, the Albany-based 44th New York Infantry. The two regiments became so closely linked that they became known as “Butterfield’s Twins,” after their brigade and eventual division commander, General Butterfield, Oliver Norton’s songwriting partner.

The Twins’ baptism under fire came, sadly, in May and June of ‘62 in and around Hanover Court House, Virginia, amid Major General George McClellan’s ill-fated Peninsula Campaign. The Twins and other Union regiments were routed at Gaines’ Mill in what became known as the Battle of the Seven Days. McLane was killed in the Chickahominy wetlands along with five dozen other men from the 83rd. Two hundred more were wounded or captured.

Vincent missed the action at Gaines’ Mill because he had contracted “Chickahominy Fever” – a form of malaria that felled thousands of soldiers on both sides that spring and summer – and was confined to a field hospital bed. When Vincent got word that his regiment had been decimated, he defied doctor’s orders, jumped onto his horse, and raced off to Gaines’ Mill, arriving in time to see his bloodied men in full retreat. Vincent, still feverish, soon collapsed and had to be rushed back to the hospital. He nearly died, spending months in critical care. He was transported by medical boat to New York City, where he was met by his wife and father. The group then spent three weeks in Jersey City so Strong could be nursed at Lizzie’s family home. He improved enough to be taken home to Erie to continue his recovery.

It wasn’t until October 1st of ’62 that Vincent could rejoin the 83rd. The men were then encamped in Sharpsburg, Maryland, where most had been held in reserve at the Battle of Antietam two weeks earlier. Vincent was viewed in such high esteem that, even in his absence, the soldiers of the 83rd elected him their regimental commander.

Two months later at Fredericksburg, Vincent vindicated their faith. Once the Union high command realized its attack had failed, Vincent did a masterful job guiding his men off Marye’s Heights on a bitterly cold December night. He waited until the moon had been obscured by a cloud before ordering the retreat, undoubtedly saving many lives.

The men in the 83rd and other Third Brigade regiments had been so eviscerated at Fredericksburg that many were kept off of Chancellorsville’s front lines in early May of ’63. By the time it began marching north six weeks later for what became the Gettysburg campaign, the brigade had been refortified with men and equipment – and, as of June 28, had itself a new commanding officer.

Earlier that year, lawyer Vincent was offered the position of Judge Advocate for the Union Army. He turned down the appointment, telling his superiors that he had joined the military to fight, not litigate.

The magnitude of what was at stake brought out something in Vincent he may not have known he had. Raised in a strict Episcopal household and educated at Trinity and Harvard, he prided himself not only on his knowledge of history and literature but his grasp of moral urgency.

“Surely the right will prevail,” Vincent had written to Lizzie when he left for war in 1861. “If I live, we will rejoice over our country’s success. If I fall, remember, you have given your husband to the most righteous cause that ever widowed a woman.”

Now read party 2 on how it all ended here.

Timothy M. Gay is a Pulitzer-nominated author of five books and dozens of articles about history and culture. His most recent book is RORY LAND, which looks at the life of golf superstar Rory McIlroy through the prism of Ireland’s troubled past. A graduate of Georgetown University, Gay grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, the proud home of a host of Little Round Top heroes in the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment.

Three Key Battles of the U.S. Civil War

The American Civil War was one of the defining conflicts fought in American history. Not only did it threaten to divide the nation, but it also challenged the very foundation of American institutions. It would go on to define the morals by which future generations would judge the United States of America. Between 1861 and 1865, the Union and Confederate states engaged in crucial battles that would determine the outcome of the Civil War. From the First Battle of Bull Run (1861) to the Battle of Antietam (1862) and the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), each would have its place in American history for shaping the Civil War's military, political, and moral course.

Caleb Brown explains.

Battle of Antietam by Thure de Thulstrup.

First Battle of Bull Run

On the morning of July 21, 1861, Union forces led by General McDowell would meet with Confederate troops led by Generals Johnston and Beauregard for what would be the first battle of the Civil War, the First Battle of Bull Run.[1] The Union, having high hopes for a quick victory, would see its hopes fade as Union soldiers, lacking proper military training, became weary and began to retreat.[2] Hoping to see a crushing win, many civilians who had come to spectate the battle were also caught up in the confusion as they, along with the Union soldiers, retreated toward Washington.[3] The Confederate victory at the First Battle of Bull Run would shatter the hopes for a short war and boost the morale of the South. As a result of the Northern defeat, General George B. McClellan would rise to command and would write in a letter to his wife, "I am here in a terrible place, the enemy have from 3 to 4 times my force the President is an idiot, the old General in his dotage they cannot or will not see the true state of affairs. Most of my troops are demoralized by the defeat at Bull Run, and some regiments are even mutinous. I have probably stopped that, but you see my position is not pleasant."[4] As a result of Bull Run, the Union now had to concede that the war would not be quick, and more preparation was needed.

Battle of Antietam

On September 17, 1862, America would lay witness to what would be the single bloodiest battle in American history. By day's end, 22,717 Northern and Southern troops would be dead, wounded, or missing as a result of the Battle of Antietam, which was fought in the Union territory of Maryland.[5] The Battle of Antietam would be a result of General Robert E. Lee's plan to invade the North for the first time in the war. Lee, however, would fall victim to the “Lost Dispatch,” which was a copy of Lee’s military plans that would fall into the hands of Union soldiers. The resulting battle would lead to the bloodiest single day in American history, a tactical draw between the North and the South; however, Lee would retreat, handing the Union a strategic victory. The battle would effectively stop the Confederates’ momentum in the eastern theater of the war and give President Abraham Lincoln the victory he needed to announce his plans for the Emancipation Proclamation. The Confederates would also lose the much-needed foreign recognition from Britain and France.[6] So, although the battle may have been a tactical draw, the South would suffer a significant defeat that it would not be able to overcome.

Battle of Gettysburg

The most famous battle of the American Civil War, at least in popular culture today, is the Battle of Gettysburg, which took place in Adams County, Pennsylvania, in July 1863, with Lee's army facing General George G. Meade.[7] The Battle of Gettysburg would be a turning point in the Civil War, and between July 1 and July 3, 50,000 casualties would lie dead, wounded, or missing as a result.[8] General Lee would continue north into Union territory in hopes of a victory that would force an end to the conflict. The battle would unfold over three fierce days of fighting, taking place on geographical terrain known as Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, and the Cornfield. General George E. Pickett would lead what would become known to history as “Pickett’s Charge,” resulting in a failed attack and a 60% casualty rate for the Confederates.[9] This would be the final push for Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg. Facing staggering losses, Lee would retreat to Virginia, and the hopes of a Confederate States of America along with him. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, every battle fought throughout the Civil War has its place in history and contributed to shaping the war's outcome in one way or another. The First Battle of Bull Run would serve as a wake-up call for the North, and as a result of the defeat, the Union would make changes to its army going forward. Many more troops would be requested, and training would improve. The Battle of Antietam would provide a political victory rather than a military victory for the Union. As a result of the bloodiest day in American history, President Lincoln would have cause to reveal his plans for the Emancipation Proclamation. Finally, the Battle of Gettysburg, although not the final battle of the Civil War, would see Lee’s army of Northern Virginia suffer a massive defeat on the fields of Gettysburg, effectively dashing the hopes of a successful invasion of Northern territory. Seeing every battle for its military, political, and moral implications helps provide a broader picture of the American Civil War.

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Bibliography

The Battle of Antietam, May 28, 2019. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2230470087?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=12085&sourcetype=Newspapers.

“First Bull Run." American Heritage.” First bull run, 2011. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=BIC&u=vic_liberty&id=GALE%7CA271594560&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon&aty=shibboleth.

“Gettysburg.” American Battlefield Trust. Accessed November 13, 2025. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/gettysburg.

Woodworth, Steven E. This great struggle: America’s Civil War. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012.

[1] Steven E. Woodworth, This Great Struggle: America’s Civil War (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 47.

[2] Ibid. 49.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “First Bull Run, American Heritage,” 2011, https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=BIC&u=vic_liberty&id=GALE%7CA271594560&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon&aty=shibboleth.

[5] “The Battle of Antietam,” May 28, 2019, https://www.proquest.com/docview/2230470087?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=12085&sourcetype=Newspapers.

[6] Ibid.

[7] “Gettysburg,” American Battlefield Trust, accessed November 13, 2025, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/gettysburg.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

A U.S. Civil War Spy in Europe: Henry Shelton Sanford

Who does not enjoy a good spy story? The Civil War, though fought on American soil, was also waged in drawing rooms, chancelleries, and counting houses across Europe. In that shadow war, few figures were more important—or more obscure—than Henry Shelton Sanford.

Lloyd W Klein explains.

Henry Shelton Sanford.

Sanford was not the kind of man one would cast as a master spy. He did not resemble the polished, worldly intelligence officer of fiction. That was precisely why he was effective. Born in Connecticut to a prosperous family whose wealth came from manufacturing brass tacks, Sanford grew up comfortably connected. One of his ancestors had served as governor of the state. He attended Trinity College and studied in Germany, though he never graduated from either. What he lacked in formal credentials he made up for in money, mobility, and social access.

At just twenty-four, Sanford entered diplomacy, appointed secretary to the American legation in St. Petersburg in 1847. A year later he moved to Frankfurt, and in 1849 to Paris, where he remained for five years, eventually rising to chargé d’affaires. In 1861 Abraham Lincoln named him minister to Belgium. His official portfolio included trade agreements, naturalization treaties, and consular arrangements such as the Scheldt Treaties of 1863, which governed customs duties and navigation rights on one of Europe’s most important commercial waterways. But Sanford’s formal responsibilities were the least important part of his job. His real assignment was counterespionage.

What made Sanford valuable was not diplomacy but deniability. He was wealthy enough not to require a salary, socially connected enough to travel freely without raising suspicion, and unburdened by the technical minutiae that tied other diplomats to their desks. Like many ministers of the era, he was assumed to be a gentleman abroad—sightseeing, attending receptions, and occasionally reporting home. That assumption was his camouflage

In reality, Sanford was one of the principal architects of the Union’s covert war in Europe. Secretary of State William H. Seward entrusted him with authority far exceeding his nominal rank. Sanford was permitted to travel freely across the Continent and into Britain. He was given access to a secret fund of roughly one million dollars—a staggering sum at the time—to finance intelligence gathering, influence, and interference. His mission was straightforward to describe and extraordinarily difficult to execute: prevent the Confederacy from acquiring ships, weapons, credit, and diplomatic recognition.

Jefferson Davis and his government understood that they could not prevail in a prolonged war without foreign assistance. The American Revolution provided the model: French intervention had transformed rebellion into victory. Confederate leaders hoped Britain or France might play a similar role in 1862. Short of recognition, they needed rifles, cannon, powder, ships, and financing—resources Europe could supply in abundance if the Union blockade could be breached.

Seward and Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in London, formed the official diplomatic front. Sanford was tasked with the unacknowledged work behind it. From Brussels, Paris, and London, he assembled a private intelligence service. In Britain, he employed a police detective who ran operatives in major ports and industrial centers. Shipyards, foundries, arms manufacturers, insurers, and brokers were watched closely for signs of Confederate activity.

Identifying Confederate agents was rarely difficult. They were Americans from the seceded states, often with unmistakable accents and known loyalties. Some were serving Confederate officers; others were businessmen acting as intermediaries. The challenge was not knowing who they were, but discovering what they were doing.

In a world without telephones or secure communications, conspiracies traveled on paper and wire. Letters moved through the post. Contracts were telegraphed. Shipping instructions passed between offices and ports. Sanford targeted all of it.

How Sanford Operated

Sanford’s agents bribed postal workers to copy or intercept Confederate correspondence. Telegraph clerks were paid to divert or decode messages. Clerks inside factories and shipyards were induced to hand over specifications, contracts, and delivery schedules. Couriers carried intelligence between Belgium, France, and Britain. At times, Sanford simply “borrowed” Confederate letters long enough to read them before returning them to circulation.

Through business contacts, he tracked cotton shipments, arms purchases, and financial transactions. When necessary, he quietly pressured European firms not to deal with the South. The aim was not dramatic disruption but steady suffocation.

Two Confederate operatives were of particular importance: Caleb Huse and James D. Bulloch. Huse, a West Point–trained officer and former chemistry instructor, served as the Confederacy’s principal arms buyer. Operating across Britain, Austria, Prussia, and beyond, he negotiated most of the weapons contracts that eventually supplied Southern armies. Bulloch oversaw naval procurement, including the construction of commerce raiders in British shipyards. One of them—the Alabama—would devastate U.S. merchant shipping before being sunk off Cherbourg.

Sanford tracked both men closely. He fed intelligence to Adams in London, worked to delay or derail their transactions, and ensured that Washington knew when ships were likely to sail. When formal channels failed, less formal methods were sometimes employed. As Sanford joked to Seward in one letter, “accidents are numerous in the [English] Channel, you know.”

Influence and the Press

Recognition of the Confederate government before 1863 was a central Southern objective. Envoys James Mason and John Slidell were dispatched to Britain and France, though their capture during the Trent Affair nearly triggered war. While Queen Victoria was personally hostile to a slaveholding republic, British politics were complicated. Liverpool merchants depended on Southern cotton. William Gladstone spoke sympathetically of Southern independence. French policy remained opportunistic.

Seward responded with another weapon: influence. His instrument was Thurlow Weed, a veteran political operative, newspaper man, and longtime ally. Weed held no diplomatic title—by design. He could move through London and Paris as a private citizen, cultivating editors, financiers, and politicians while quietly countering Confederate propaganda.

Weed arrived in Europe in late 1861. He subsidized friendly journalists, planted pro-Union stories, hosted salons and dinners, and gathered intelligence—especially regarding Confederate shipbuilding. Like Sanford, he carried funds and used them where persuasion alone was insufficient. If questioned, Seward could plausibly deny everything. Weed was merely a tourist. Sanford was merely a minister in Brussels. Adams remained the sole visible face of American diplomacy.

Sanford’s influence operations extended far beyond Britain. By 1862 his network reached Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, and the German states. Journalists and editors were quietly supported to produce Union-friendly coverage. Articles prepared in Washington circulated abroad as “news.” When Confederate agents planted stories of their own, Sanford’s operatives countered them with rebuttals, leaks, or alternative narratives.

Clergy were targeted as well. American ministers appealed to European priests and pastors, urging them not to grant moral legitimacy to a slaveholding republic. In Britain, Sanford’s agents worked through labor organizations, emphasizing free labor and the degradation of chattel slavery. Antislavery demonstrations were sometimes organized to appear spontaneous. On this terrain, the Confederacy was especially vulnerable.

None of this resembled conventional diplomacy. By any reasonable standard, Sanford violated the norms of neutrality. Had Belgium chosen to protest, it would have been within its rights to demand his recall.

How Secret Was It?

Weed’s presence in Europe was unofficial; he did not hold a diplomatic title. If questioned, Seward could assert that Weed was merely a private citizen traveling abroad. However, in truth, Weed operated with the backing of the State Department, private funds, and political directives, rendering him a covert envoy in all but name. His role was designed to be deniable, which was the intention: Adams could maintain a legitimate front as the 'official' representative of U.S. diplomacy, while Weed undertook the clandestine tasks of influence and propaganda.

Thurlow Weed.

Other Covert Operations

Sanford’s network extended far beyond Britain. By 1862 it reached into Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, and the German states. Intelligence gathering was only one part of the enterprise. The more ambitious—and more dangerous—arm of his campaign was an organized effort to shape European public opinion.

Sanford poured money into the press. Journalists and editors were quietly subsidized to produce stories favorable to the Union. At one point he even attempted to purchase a Belgian newspaper outright. Articles prepared in Washington were circulated abroad as “news.” When Confederate agents planted stories of their own, Sanford’s people countered them with rebuttals, leaks, or alternative narratives.

Clergy were targeted as well. American ministers were sent to Europe to appeal to priests and pastors, urging them not to lend moral legitimacy to a slaveholding republic. In Britain, Sanford’s agents worked through labor organizations, emphasizing the dignity of free labor and the degradation of chattel slavery. Antislavery demonstrations were sometimes organized to appear spontaneous. On this ground the Confederacy was especially vulnerable: however much cotton mattered, slavery repelled too many Europeans for Southern diplomacy to overcome.

None of this resembled conventional diplomacy. When France had attempted similar manipulation of American politics during the 1790s, it had triggered the Genet Affair and nearly wrecked relations between Paris and Washington. By any reasonable standard, Sanford was violating the norms of neutrality and the limits placed on foreign ministers. Had Belgium chosen to protest, it would have been within its rights to demand his recall.

As the Union’s military position deteriorated after the failed Peninsula Campaign, Seward feared that Britain and France might push for mediation—an outcome that would have legitimized Confederate independence. Thurlow Weed was therefore sent back across the Atlantic. His mission was to stiffen Adams’s hand by quietly lobbying elites, feeding sympathetic journalists, and using money and charm to blunt Southern influence. Weed reported that European opinion was deeply divided, and that Confederate agents were tireless in their efforts. That only confirmed the necessity of the counteroffensive Sanford was running.

What did President Lincoln Know About All of This?

Sanford was not a rogue operator. He worked with the knowledge of Adams and under the direction of Seward. The remaining question is how far that knowledge extended.

A letter from Sanford to Seward, dated July 4, 1861, provides an unambiguous answer. It survives in the Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress.

From Henry S. Sanford to William H. Seward, July 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln papers, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.1064500.

“I hope you will act on the suggestion contained in the accompanying letter to get Congress to provide you a larger Secret Service Fund.

I am determined, if it is possible, to get at the operations of these [Confederate] “commissioners” through their own papers, and the man specially occupied with that knows his business. How it will be done whether through a pretty mistress or an intelligent servant or a spying landlord is nobody’s business; but I lay great stress on getting you full official accounts of their operations here!

It will be expensive. Your £600 will not last long if this is continued for a considerable period, but I count on your increasing it as wanted.

I intend on putting an agent or two on my own account on their fellow in Paris. The official agents don’t do all I ask them to and the Chef de Police1 has promised me one of their retired agents in the political department who shall be in relations with the office but not accountable to them for what I set him at.

If you do not approve my way of proceeding tell me so frankly. I go on the doctrine that in war as in love, everything is fair that will lead to success!.”

This was not ambiguous. Sanford was telling the Secretary of State that he intended to use bribery, infiltration, mail theft, and sexual entrapment to penetrate Confederate operations—and that it would be expensive.

Sanford was explicitly proposing bribery, infiltration, mail theft, and sexual entrapment—and requesting additional funds to do so. Seward did not object.

Through foreign nationals, Sanford intercepted correspondence, diverted contracts, identified shipbuilders, and occasionally sabotaged vessels. These acts were illegal under local law. Sanford enjoyed diplomatic immunity; his agents did not. Corruption was intrinsic to the system.

“Sexpionage,” as later generations would call it, was hardly novel. The Civil War had its own female operatives—Rose Greenhow, Belle Boyd, Ginnie Moon—who used intimacy to extract secrets. Sanford’s casual reference to “a pretty mistress” shows he understood the same tools were available to him.

Implications

There is substantial evidence indicating that the United States Government engaged in covert counterespionage through a network involving bribery, as well as mail and wire fraud, utilizing foreign operatives during the Civil War. Secretary of State William H. Seward, likely with the knowledge of President Lincoln, oversaw an intelligence and covert operation in Europe. His operations were conducted through individuals such as Thurlow Weed, Charles Francis Adams, and Henry Shelton Sanford, who served as the U.S. minister to Belgium. Sanford, in particular, was responsible for managing secret surveillance, courier networks, and propaganda efforts aimed at undermining Confederate diplomacy and arms procurement in Europe. 21st Century readers are likely not particularly surprised to learn this.

Had Sanford’s network been exposed, the diplomatic consequences could have been severe. Britain and France maintained official neutrality; revelations of U.S. interference with correspondence, commerce, or the press could have triggered expulsions or demands for recall. Belgium, whose neutrality required delicate balance, might have objected strongly to its territory being used for clandestine operations.

Yet the Confederacy was engaged in its own covert diplomacy and arms procurement. Had Sanford’s actions been revealed, Washington would have argued—credibly—that it was countering Southern subversion. The risk was real, but the calculation proved correct.

If European governments were to uncover U.S. interference with private or diplomatic correspondence, it would be regarded as a significant violation of sovereignty. This could have led to the expulsion of U.S. diplomats (or at the very least, Sanford himself).

Both Britain and France maintained official neutrality. Following the Trent Affair, U.S. diplomacy was cast into doubt. Should Sanford’s bribery, espionage against Confederate agents, and the use of press propaganda have been exposed, London and Paris might have charged the U.S. with breaching their neutrality. This could have jeopardized Adams’ meticulous diplomacy in London, potentially increasing the likelihood of recognizing the Confederacy. Sanford’s host nation might have objected to the use of its territory for clandestine operations.

The damage to the Union’s moral standing could have been catastrophic for global opinion. The Lincoln administration framed the war as a moral battle against slavery and insurrection. If it were revealed that the U.S. was conducting covert influence operations—such as planting articles in newspapers, financing agents, or surveilling Confederate sympathizers—it could have undermined that moral assertion, portraying the Union as Machiavellian rather than principled. There would have been a significant risk to U.S. agents and sympathizers operating overseas. If Sanford’s informants and intermediaries were to be exposed, they could have faced arrest or expulsion. This situation would have severely hindered the U.S. capacity to monitor Confederate arms acquisitions and blockade runners.

Consequently, the immediate repercussions would have included diplomatic embarrassment and a potential loss of influence in Europe. Should the Confederates’ situation have improved, it is uncertain whether Britain’s political stance might have shifted. They were undertaking a considerable risk, and it ultimately proved beneficial.

Following the war, Union leaders minimized or overlooked Sanford’s covert involvement. The official narrative highlighted Lincoln’s moral clarity and Adams’ diplomatic resolve, rather than the obscure tactics that underpinned them. Thus, the justification was both practical at the time and discreetly suppressed afterward to maintain the Union’s image as a principled power.

Conclusion

Henry Shelton Sanford never commanded an army and never signed a famous treaty. His war was fought in post offices, telegraph rooms, shipyards, and newspaper offices. Through bribery, surveillance, and influence, he helped deny the Confederacy the foreign support it desperately needed. Had his activities been exposed, they might have damaged the Union’s standing abroad. That they remained secret helped preserve it.

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References

Primary and secondary on Henry Shelton Sanford’s covert operations, Seward’s diplomacy, and Union intelligence in Europe:

Primary Sources

• Sanford, Henry Shelton. Papers of Henry Shelton Sanford, 1841–1891. Library of Congress Manuscript Division.
  – Contains his dispatches from Brussels, including reports on Confederate activities and his covert countermeasures.

• U.S. Department of State. Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs (Annual volumes, esp. 1861–1865).
  – Includes Sanford’s and Adams’ correspondence with Seward; you can see how carefully they worded reports to obscure covert activities.

• Charles Francis Adams. The Memoirs of Charles Francis Adams, 1835–1917.
  – Adams reflects on his role in Britain and occasionally mentions the behind-the-scenes pressures, though cautiously.

Secondary Works

• Jones, Howard. Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
  – Excellent overview of both Union and Confederate diplomacy; details Sanford’s activities in Belgium and the broader intelligence struggle.

• Merrill, Walter M. Seward and the Balance of Power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.
  – Classic study of Seward’s statecraft, including his reliance on shadow diplomacy and intelligence gathering.

• Thomas, Benjamin P. & Hyman, Harold M. Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War. New York: Knopf, 1962.
  – While focused on Stanton, it provides context on the Union’s broader intelligence operations, including coordination with diplomats like Sanford.

• Hubbell, John T. “The Northern Response to Confederate Diplomacy: The Sanford Missions.” Civil War History 13, no. 3 (1967): 201–218.
  – A focused scholarly article on Sanford’s specific covert operations in Belgium.

• Ferris, Norman B. Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976.
  – Analyzes Seward’s readiness to bend norms and how he used covert measures to protect the Union from recognition crises.

• Elliott, Mark R. Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  – Though focused on Tourgée, it briefly discusses Union propaganda abroad and its tension with the Union’s moral message.

• Klein, Lloyd W. George Alfred Trenholm. https://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/tag/George+Alfred+Trenholm

References for Weed’s Missions

·       Glyndon Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed: Wizard of the Lobby (1947) — detailed account of his European missions.

·       Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy (2010) — situates Weed’s role in the broader Union diplomatic and covert strategy.

·       Norman B. Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861 (1976) — covers Weed’s involvement during the Trent Affair.

·       U.S. State Department, Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs (1861–62) — includes indirect references to Weed’s activities, though sanitized.

Sectionalism: Understanding the Divisions that Led to the U.S. Civil War

The American Civil War still fascinates the public mind for its timeless reminder of when our politics were truly at their nadir. Despite some contemporary warnings about a national separation, fortunately no such moment has come to pass since the cannons ceased and the muskets were put down in 1865. Intense vitriol and hatred over the state of this country is something no specific to the war period. Whether it be 1860, 1828, or the 1800 election that saw friends become bitter rivals in outgoing President John Adams and incoming President Thomas Jefferson cease communicate for several years, national politics endures as a nasty business.

Yet, in our memory of the Civil War and its causes, we tend to let the latter fall by the wayside, consequently forgetting how unique those divisions were in the 1850s, culminating in southern secession in December 1860 after President Abraham Lincoln’s victory. Slavery was the cause as evidenced by the declarations from the southern states[i], but how many grasp slavery as the sectional issue that it was? Where does sectionalism fit into our memory? Without a more holistic understanding of the war through the sectional crisis that preceded it, we let more simplistic interpretations of why it started take over.

Sam Short explains.

John C. Breckinridge in 1860 by Jules-Émile Saintin

Defining Sectionalism

What is sectionalism and why is the period preceding the war defined as the Sectional Crisis? To answer that question, it is important first to define a section. As Professor Richard Bensel puts it, a section is a, “major geographic region.”[1] In this context, the sections that fought would be the North and South. Sectionalism, then, is the unique culture and economic tendencies emerging in those regions that create a politics of their own. A sectional politics does not have a national vision – one for the country as a whole – in mind, but whatever agenda best serves this cluster of states. The Civil War is a war between North and South, but just as accurately, a war of sections. It was not so simple as to say Republicans  and Democrats fought with the former looking to limit slavery’s spread and the latter seeking to keep it.

The Sectionally Divided Democrats

The Democrats themselves were divided over the issue of slavery. In 1860, Southern Democrats did not feel enough assurance was given by candidate and Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas that their institution would be defended. They opted to nominate their own candidate, Vice President John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky. The electoral map speaks to this division with the southern states going for him.[2] When looking at a breakdown of the popular vote, the University of Richmond does not record a single vote for Douglas in the southern state of Texas.[3]

Looking further back, divisions among Democrats over slavery preceded the Sectional Crisis as is exemplified by the Wilmot Proviso. Democratic Pennsylvania Representative David Wilmot introduced a proviso to President James K Polk’s $2 million appropriations bill allocating funds to negotiations with Mexico. This was August 8, 1846 during the Mexican-American War. In that proviso, Wilmot proposed,

as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.[4]

This was effectively Northern Democrats telling their southern colleagues they would not tow a line for slavery only for the sake of party unity.[5] Democrats did not have a pro or anti-slavery platform. They struggled to unify under one position towards the issue.

Geography and Politics

To be sure, from its inception, the Republican Party was northern-based. Multiple southern states did not cast a single vote for their candidate John C Fremont in the party’s first national election, the Election of 1856.[6] The North was not entirely Republican, but the Republicans were – almost – entirely in the North. In the modern era, parties have their strongholds. Democrats do better in New England, other coastal areas, and urban centers while Republicans capture the South and Midwest. Geography does correlate to politics on the electoral map and that observation largely holds true in our elections, but the question during the sectional crisis was not one of partisanship, but of sectional allegiances. For Southern Democrats, never mind where their northern brethren were heading, as they assessed the situation, they needed to make their own way.

An emphasis on the sectional dimension of this conflict dispels later assertions that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. Southern Democrats supported it, but sectional divisions fly in the face of an argument for party unity. Studying sectionalism leaves us with a complex web of geopolitically motivated behaviors and allegiances that historians strive to make sense of in forming a metanarrative for the war’s causes. Studies are made more complicated when considering examples out of the South that push back against the conclusion of consensus being for slavery and against Lincoln. How are we to regard President Andrew Johnson, who, as a congressman from Tennessee – and Democrat –, was the only senator from a seceding state to remain in the Union? This is a man who historians studying his life have admitted it is hard to arrive at any definitive statements about when looking at his character.[7] More broadly, estimates say 100,000 men living in the Confederate states served the Union during the war.[8] Among them, Virginia-born Union General George Thomas, a slave owner before the war, alienated his family who refused to speak to him for fighting against the South.[9]

In history or contemporary politics, neat and tidy conclusions about politics, allegiances, or where one falls of the political spectrum for their views on divisive issues are few and far between. If we are to understand political history, we must understand in our analyses that single-dimension modes of thought with the left against the right or Democrats against Republicans runs the risk of obfuscating more intricate fissures that account for, in the case of the Civil War, sectionalism. In its only through the study sectional divisions that we see the clearer picture.

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[i] See “Avalon Project - Confederate States of America -   Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina From the Federal Union,” n.d. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.

[1] Richard F. Bensel “Sectional Stress & Ideology in the United States House of Representatives.” Polity 14, no. 4 (1982): 657–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/3234469.

[2] “Electing the President,” n.d. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/electingthepresident/popular/map/1860.

[3] “Electing the President,” n.d. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/electingthepresident/popular/map/1860/TX.

[4] “Wilmot Proviso, 1846,” 1846. https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1846WilmotProviso.pdf.

[5] David Wilmot et al., “Wilmot Proviso,” n.d., https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/mex-war/wilmot-proviso.pdf.

[6] “Electing the President,” n.d. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/electingthepresident/popular/map/1856.

[7] Rable, George C. “Anatomy of a Unionist: Andrew Johnson in Tne [sic] Secession Crisis.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1973): 332–54.

[8] Carole E. Scott, “Southerner Vs. Southerner: Union Supporters Below the Mason-Dixon Line - Warfare History Network,” July 12, 2022, https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/southerner-vs-southerner-union-supporters-below-the-mason-dixon-line/.

[9] Christopher J. Einolf,  “George Thomas,” June 2012, https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/assets/files/pdf/ECWCTOPICThomasGeorgeHEssay.pdf.

Northernmost Land Action of the American Civil War: The Confederate Raid on St. Albans, Vermont

The northernmost land action of the American Civil War did not occur during the Confederacy’s twice ill-fated invasions of the north but rather happened in the small city of St. Albans, Vermont, less than twenty miles from the Canadian border. Perpetrated by a small band of Confederate raiders, this was more reminiscent of a wild west style attack than a tactical cavalry raid.

Brian Hughes explains.

A woodcut illustration of the St. Albans Raid. In the image, at the bank, the raiders forced those present to take an oath to the Confederacy.

Introduction

As 1864 was coming to an end the outlook for the Confederacy appeared bleak. The south was under relentless Union pressure from east and west, on land and at sea. In Georgia, General Sherman was leaving a path of destruction in his wake and had captured Atlanta, the second most important city in the South. Simultaneously in Virginia, General Robert E. Lee was endlessly preoccupied with attempting to stymie Ulysses S. Grant during the Peninsula Campaign, inflicting heavy casualties in cataclysmic battles but unable to effectively achieve any substantial strategic objective. Union forces were also devastating the Shenandoah Valley and tightening the noose around the south with their naval blockade.

The increasing demoralization of southern troops and populace manifested itself politically. Becoming increasingly distressed, certain figures began to think outside the box for solutions, even if they were only short term. Twenty one year old Kentuckian and Confederate soldier Bennet H. Young came forth with an unorthodox yet bold proposal. Having taken part in several battles in and around the Midwest, Young had fled a Union prison camp where reaching Canada and returning home via a Confederate blockade runner operating out of Halifax. Young believed he could mount a series of forays into the meagerly defended northern New England states from Canada. Despite the small scale nature of the raids, any amount of fiscal gains would be sufficient to assist the cash strapped Confederate government and act as a sort of monetary life support, extending the conflict just long enough until a more ideal political outcome could be agreed upon for the Confederacy. Similarly, Confederate operations in the far north could potentially divert Union troops away from more active fronts, relieving pressure on the hard pressed farms and plantations necessary to sustain the southern war effort.

Canada

Although officially neutral in the conflict, Canada, then still a disunited British colony, harbored great sympathy for the Confederate cause. Heavily reliant on southern cotton and historic enmity with neighboring states (mainly New England) contributed to these sentiments. A multitude of Confederate agents, spies, and fundraisers would operate out of cities such as Montreal and St. Johns some of which were aware of the tactical potential Canada offered geographically. Young made extensive use of these contacts which he garnered throughout his time there.

Why St. Albans

St. Albans was selected for a variety of reasons. Located a mere fifteen miles from the border with Canada, St. Albans was home to several banks. The city was easily accessible with several roads leading in and out of the downtown area, being just close enough to Vermont’s largest city, Burlington. In addition, the town was meagerly defended with no substantial military force in and around the region.

Raid, October 19th, 1864

The original date of the operation was scheduled for the 18th of October, but the Franklin County Farmers Market thwarted these plans with the increase in population and presence of authorities. Delaying the attack by a day or two would similarly ensure the banks were more laden with money following market day.

Young had about twenty men at his disposal, which he split up in subunits of five or six each tasked with striking one of three banks. The raiders dressed in plain civilian clothes and initially disguised their southern accents upon making entry into the city for the purpose of reconnaissance. At around three pm, Young stood on the steps of local hotel unsheathed his pistol and with great braggadocio exclaimed “This city is now in the possession of the Confederate States of America!” This was the signal for the attack as the Confederate operatives sprung forth and furiously rode through the streets toward their objectives.

Their three targets were the St. Albans Bank, The Franklin County Bank, and First National Bank were all situated within a block and a half of one another. The rebels took the locals by complete surprise and quickly rampaged through the three banks, robbing them and forcing civilians with their arms raised to “solemnly swear to obey and respect the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.” Treasury notes and bonds were taken in addition to cash, but the banks were intentionally not thoroughly looted the banks of all their contents given the necessity of the rebels to flee the city swiftly.

Some of the southern raiders took advantage of the ensuing pandemonium to steal horses to better facilitate their escape. The raid was over in less than half an hour but not before the southerners shot one local civilian, Elinus Morrison, mortally wounding him. Morrison attempted to confront the raiders who then shot him in the abdomen. One Southern raider had been wounded during the flight as the Confederates unsuccessfully tried to set fire to the town.

Pursuit

The perpetrators set off with stolen horses in addition to their loot from the banks, this incumbered them slightly. A Union army veteran and St. Albans resident Captain George Conger rapidly organized a posse and gave chase. The Confederates again attempted to light fire to several bridges to better ensure their escape but once again the flames were quickly doused by the pursuers. Eventually the marauders parted in to separate groups and continued, northward, Vermont authorities alerted their counter parts in Canada hoping they would apprehend the intruders. The Canadian authorities decided to cooperate with the Vermonters, capturing a handful of the raiders once across the border, they quickly confiscating their weapons and cash, and called on the militia to further patrol the border. The Canadians confiscated eighty seven thousand dollars in money, roughly equivalent to two million in today’s currency. By wars end in April 1865 the banks of St. Albans had been reimbursed and the remaining captives released.

The St. Albans raid was a revealing act of Confederate desperation in the war’s final months. Though militarily insignificant, it displayed how far the southern operatives were willing to go-violating borders and testing neutrality. The raid temporarily shocked the north and exposed geographical vulnerabilities. In the end the raid failed to divert significant resources, thus ensuring the Confederacy’s inevitable collapse.

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How the U.S. Civil War Made Christmas a National Holiday

We take for granted that the Christmas Season entails children are home from school, festive meals are being prepared, airports are crowded as people rush home to their families and parties are in full swing, all in anticipation of the jolly old elf Santa Claus’s arrival. Not many people realize though that all of those traditions have their origins in the Civil War.

Lloyd W Klein explains.

The religious nature of the holiday season upon us aside, this time of year has been a time of celebration and gift giving for centuries. The Twelve Days of Christmas and many other traditional songs, as well as Dickens’s Christmas Carol, show that this is a celebration time that goes way back in the European culture. This week we are going to trace how the Civil War led to the making of Christmas as a secular, national holiday.

Unsurprisingly, the story is at base a political one. On Christmas Day 1861, President Lincoln chose to host a party at the White House. It was a crucial political moment because Mr Lincoln had a brewing international crisis that he had to stop before it got out of hand.

On Christmas Day 1862, the country was in a national panic. Setbacks in the war had made it anything but a happy season. On this day, Mr and Mrs Lincoln did something that seems so much a part of the responsibility of the POTUS on this holiday that its astounding that it hasn’t always been traditional. And on Christmas in 1863, the Lincoln’s made yet another gesture of good will to the soldiers in the field.

In 1861 President Lincoln sought to limit an international crisis by throwing a Christmas Party at the White House. The Trent Affair had led to the capture of the appointed Confederate representatives to Britain and France, John Slidell and James Murray Mason. War clouds had started to collect as the British Prime Minister insisted that the US had no right to capture these men on open seas. The capture occurred on November 8 and had become an international scandal after November 18. By Christmastime, there were rumors of British preparations for war and also significant diplomatic efforts were in progress. There were rumors of an invasion from Canada .So, there was a lot for Lincoln to “soft shoe” that day.

In 1862, the Lincoln Family began a tradition to counter the public effects of The Battle of Fredericksburg, which had been a military disaster that spawned a political and public relations catastrophe. “What will the country say?” Lincoln asked. But the POTUS was a political mastermind, and he turned crisis into opportunity, The Lincolns pointedly went the various hospitals around Washington and visited and spoke with the wounded. No president had ever done this before. It showed that Lincoln the commander in chief was a sensitive leader who felt the people’s pain.

The hospital visits were so popular, and so necessary, that Lincoln continued them. He brought his son Tad with him on many such days. Tad was deeply moved by the soldiers. So on Xmas 1863, wounded soldiers received gifts of books and clothing from the White House, with a covering note that said, “From Tad Lincoln”.

And in 1864, General Sherman telegrammed Lincoln on December 22, 1864 announcing the capture of Savanah. By 1865, as the image above shows, Christmas was a celebration of victory in. the war.

The soldiers on the battlefield were far away from home, many had never been outside their county in their lives let alone their state. Union soldiers used salt pork and hardtack to decorate Christmas trees. Others were treated to special meals; a captain from Massachusetts treated his soldiers to foods such as turkey, oysters, pies, and apples; Singing carols was popular, ones that remain popular today, but Christmas cards would not become popular until the 1870s.

When we fly or drive home to Grandmothers House for Christmas, the origin of that tradition is the Civil War Fathers on both sides of the war were often given furloughs to return home for the holiday.

Christmas originates with a significant religious meaning and yet it has become secular in its celebration. Almost no one knows that this trend began in the Civil War. And even more surprising to many, without Thomas Nast, Christmas as we know it probably wouldn’t exist. But Nast wasn’t interested so much in Christmas. He was interested in a much bigger issue.

Nast was a cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War. If Nast wasn’t so interested in Christmas, why the recurrent theme? The 2 Nast cartoons depict Christmas experiences during the war. Identify the subjects of each and what was groundbreaking about them.

The fact is that Nast was a first class political cartoonist who was a Union sympathizing propagandist using Christmas to draw on the emotions of the season to bring the country together.

In the top cartoon, "Christmas Eve" (1862), a wreath frames a scene of a soldier's praying wife and sleeping children at home; a second wreath frames the soldier seated by a campfire, gazing longingly at small pictures of his loved ones.

Another illustration features Santa in his sleigh, then going down a chimney, in the top left of the cartoon. Somber scenes below remind of a grimmer reality--an army marching through snow and a row of frozen graves that refers to the Union's recent failure to take Fredericksburg. But there is hope: Santa is coming!

the January 3, 1863 issue of Harper's Weekly, Nast has an early caricature of Santa dressed in an American flag, with a puppet with the name "Jeff" written on it, Nast was inspired by the Belsnickel, part of the folklore in southwestern Germany, You’ll notice his sleigh is drawn by 2 scrawny reindeer.

Nast’s 1864 Christmas cartoon in Harper’s. You can clearly see Lincoln beckoning men outside the door into the Christmas feast. But once again, he is making a political point. . Lincoln is seen ushering in the Confederates to re-join the US in a celebratory setting. of a holiday held in common. It is, of course, pure propaganda, but consistent with the war goal of reunification.

Nast’s Christmas cartoons were so successful that he essentially created much of the holiday we know. Nast was not the only one to use Christmas as a propaganda tool. On the Union side, The New York Herald also engaged in propaganda. One illustration published in the paper included Santa Claus fuming that he could not reach southern children, due to the northern blockade. On the Confederate side, The Richmond Examiner described Santa to its young readers as "a Dutch toy monger" who was a New York/New England "scrub" and Hottentot that had nothing to do with traditional Virginian celebrations of Christmas. Nast had successfully made Christmas a Union holiday, and that is propaganda at a very high level.

“In these two drawings, Christmas became a Union holiday and Santa a Union local deity,” writes Adam Gopnik in a 1997 issue of the New Yorker. “It gave Christmas to the North—gave to the Union cause an aura of domestic sentiment, and even sentimentality.” Nast’s 1863 Christmas cartoon showed the couple shown in 1862 reunited.

Use of a Santa-like figure for propaganda purposes would eventually lead after the war to the elf myth of the jolly old Saint Nick. Between 1862 and 1886, Nast created thirty-three Santa Claus drawings. The iconic version of Santa Claus as a jolly man in red with a white beard and a sack of toys was immortalized in 1881, depicted by Nast in the cartoon attached, But he also gave the definitive appearance to Uncle Sam, America personified. Notice how they both have white beards, but one is tall and thin and the other short and plump. Nast didn’t invent Uncle Sam, as many people believe, but he did standardize his appearance and affect. Santa Claus derives from Sinterklaas, the Dutch rendering of St Nicholas, which was popularized in the 1823 poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas”.

DGCC: Notice that the Santa in the 1881 cartoon is smoking an old-style Dutch clay pipe and has a Civil War saber (?toy) hanging from his waistband. He is carrying a knapsack on his back, not filled with clothes and war supplies anymore, but with toys. These details are deliberate; Nast is immortalizing a new personification: the former Union soldier is now older, happily smoking an old pipe, and raising a family 16 years after the war’s end. But the old soldier is still in him. Nast knew his business.

It was also Thomas Nast who decided that Santa and his reindeer lived at the North Pole. After the war Nast purposely made the North Pole the home of Saint Nick so that no one else could use him for nationalistic propaganda like Nast himself did.

It’s hard to imagine today, but Christmas was not always considered a “national” holiday.

Because of the recognition that soldiers on both sides of the war, and of all religious backgrounds, found end of the year celebrations as fostering community and country, that view began to change. Politicians started to recognize in the post war period that if they wanted to bring the country together and heal wounds, Xmas was a natural solution.

Puritans and Lutherans viewed non-sectarian celebrations of Christmas during the war as sacrilegious. They believed the day should be dedicated to fasting and prayer, and looked askance at such practices.  In Massachusetts, such parties were considered a waste of money and could be fined.

The legal recognition of Christmas as a national holiday occurred when Representative Burton Chauncey Cook of Illinois introduced a bill in the U.S. Congress after the war. It passed in both houses of Congress, and President Ulysses S. Grant signed it on June 28, 1870. On June 26, 1870, Congress — led by Northern legislators — passed a law that made Christmas (along with New Year’s Day, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving) a federal holiday for federal employees in Washington, D.C. This was later extended nationwide. Ulysses S. Grant signed the law, partly as a gesture of reconciliation between North and South during Reconstruction.

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Nathan Bedford Forrest - The Wizard of the Saddle?

Perhaps the most fascinating Civil War general to Jeb Smith is Nathan Bedford Forest. Many think he is not just the best cavalry general of the American Civil War but among the greatest to ever live. He acquired more confirmed kills in war than any America has ever achieved. No general as high a rank as Forrest killed as many men since the medieval period. He had 29 horses shot from under him and said, “I ended the war a horse up.” He was one of the most feared individuals of the war and was said to be a “Superhuman warrior.” One friend who knew him before the war said he looked unrecognizable in battle. His face and eyes would change.

A natural military genius, Forrest rose from the rank of private to lieutenant general. His willingness to mix personally in combat led to him receiving multiple wounds doctors feared would be fatal, all of which he survived. The famed Civil War author Shelby Foote opined that the Civil War produced two geniuses: Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Pre-war

Born into poverty in Tennessee, Forrest received little formal education and no military training. By 1860, he owned two plantations, traded extensively in slaves, and was one of the wealthiest men in Memphis. He was tall, muscular, and powerful even for his size. An adamant believer in states’ rights and secession, the war was not the first violence he engaged in. Before it even began, he had killed several people.

In 1845, in Mississippi, his uncle was killed in a street fight; in retaliation, Forrest then killed two of his uncle’s murderers with a pistol and wounded two more with a knife someone in the crowd threw to him. There are unconfirmed reports that he killed others on two more occasions, including being severely wounded himself during one such engagement and recovering from what had seemed mortal wounds, as he would do more than once later in his career.

The Civil War

Forrest survived and was involved in some truly miraculous combat situations and multiple brushes with death, earning him an immense reputation as a warrior. When the war began, Forrest raised his own regiment, paid for their equipment, and advertised for recruits in Memphis, writing, “Come on, boys, if you want a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees.” Forrest had no trouble gaining men, as his reputation for toughness, aggression, and bravery had already spread widely. The general once told his men, “I have never, on the field of battle, sent you where I was unwilling to go myself.” And he quickly proved his fearlessness and tactical skill to them.

Early on in the war, Forrest led a cavalry charge against a Union line and single-handedly engaged multiple troops despite receiving wounds. A similar situation occurred later in the war when Forrest was mounted on his horse and attacked by four federals at once, receiving horrific wounds to his head and arm. He was able to retaliate and kill one of his ambushers, stating later, “No damn man kills me and lives.” Yet the situation became even worse for him as three more federals came shooting and stabbing at him. He was now surrounded, and on top of that, his horse was then shot [would eventually prove mortal], but riding on his injured horse, Forrest then jumped a wagon that was blocking his retreat. Thirty paces down the road, he was attacked by yet another federal with a saber. Forrest ended his attacker's life soon after.

In another instance, as the Confederates were chasing retraining federals, Forest found he outpaced his men and was surrounded by dozens of retreating federals; he was shot multiple times, and his horse was once more wounded mortally. But before his steed departed, and among a hail of bullets, he escaped, utilizing his revolver to cut a way clear.

In a dangerous and fortunate battle, where Forrest was riddled with 15 bullet holes in his uniform, and his horse fell dead after sustaining seven bullet wounds. Later that day, he had another horse die from under him. Soon after, he received what doctors initially believed to be yet another mortal wound during a confrontation with a subordinate. However, he would heal and return to command.

Forrest led by example. He would not order his men to do anything he would not do. He often would do a mission when no volunteers would offer. He himself would go on dangerous scouting missions and once crossed a frozen river when none of his men would. In Six Armies in Tennessee, historian Steven E. Woodworth wrote that Forest “would fight anyone, anytime.” Perhaps that was no truer than when Forrest and his command were surprised and surrounded by federal forces. The general commanded his men to “charge em both ways,” and his men did, and many escaped. Forrest also stated, “Never stand and take a charge… charge them too.”

Battle Results

A gifted military genius...he was the prophet of mobile warfare. His campaigns [allegedly] studied by German proponents of the blitzkrieg...His operations are more reminiscent of a 20th century panzer leader, such as Heinz Guderian or Erwin Rommel, than of any commander of his age.

-Barry C Jacobsen The ten Best Generals of the Civil war

Likie Jackson, Forrest always attempted to “Get their first with the most,” and his fast cavalry, adaptability, strategy, ambushing tactics, and fearless leadership led to some remarkable results, especially while raiding. He would conduct swift but decisive assaults on the enemy, often utilizing a cavalry charge. In The Civil War, Bruce Catton wrote,  “Forrest ... used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry. He liked horses because he liked fast movements.”

Forest sought to outflank his enemy and create chaos; he was vicious and efficient in attacking any weakness in his adversary’s defenses while also being unpredictable. Attacking the weak spot of the enemy mercilessly, Forest stated, “Get ’em skeered, and keep the skeer on ’em.” He would throw his entire force on the enemy, rarely keeping reserves. He led his men as a warrior of old; he did not hang back but showed courage, leading in charges. He was excited about warfare, observers saying he changed physical features and would “come alive.”

Forrest was one of the few Cavalry commanders who could consistently and successfully utilize the Cavalry charge in the Civil War. In part, because he kept somewhat of a bodyguard made up of about 100 of his best soldiers around him at all times, and would use this elite force to strike the enemy at the right place and time to turn the battle in his favor. Some of his remarkable lopsided battle results are as follows.

Due to the massive trouble Forrest was causing to Union supply lines, and his raiding ability and devastation he was causing on isolated units, General Sherman had had enough, and so decided to make no mistakes about it, to hunt Forest down with a vastly superior force, and take him out of the war. Sherman sent Samuel Sturgis, with a command of 3,300 cavalry and 5,000 infantry, along with 22 guns, to "bag" Forrest's command of 3,200 men. Instead, Forrest drove the Federals 58 miles, captured 19 of the guns, all the Federals' baggage and supplies, 200 wagons, 30 ambulances, 161 mules, 20 horses, took 2,000 prisoners, caused 300 killed, 400 wounded, and the destruction/disorganization of the more significant Union force. Confederate casualties were under 500.

One raid in Tennessee caused 3,500 federal casualties, eight artillery captured, 400 horses and mules, 100 wagons, 100 cattle, 3,000 arms stores, destroyed rail, six bridges, two locomotives, 50 freight cars, and captured/destroyed 50 blockhouses. During the raid, Forrest gained 1,000 men from recruitment and from men who had deserted Confederate general Joe Johnston army to join a commander who would fight, General Forrest. Forrest's losses were 300; he returned stronger than he left.

Of another raid, also in Tennessee, a federal newspaper wrote, “Forrest with less than 4,000 men has moved right through the 96th army corps, has passed within 9 miles of Memphis, carried off 100 wagons, 100 beef cattle 3,000 conscripts, innumerable stores, tore up railroad track, cut telephone wire, burned and sacked towns ran over picket lines. Again, with 1,800 in command, Forrest captured 150 federals, killed 25, wounded another 50, captured 200 horses, a few wagons, and 2 artillery, tore up the railroad, and captured rail cars. He rearmed his entire force with better-captured weapons than when they went into the raid. Forrest Lost 3 killed 5 wounded.

In one of his renowned assaults, with only 1,800 men, he captured 2,200 federals (not including killed and wounded), and he lost only 30 men, 150 wounded. In another battle, the Federal losses were 500 prisoners, 10 killed [ 230 soon after], 16 wagons, and three ambulances. Forrest lost only one killed and two wounded. Another time with just 300, Forrest led an attack on a depot. The results were 400 prisoners and the capture of 1,000 horses, 15 wagons, 600,000 rounds of ammo, 100,000 rations, clothes, etc., and $500,000 worth overall.

 In a month-long campaign that destroyed rail, 2,500 federals were killed or taken as prisoners, and once more, his command came back stronger and better equipped than he left. During the four minor skirmishes, he lost 200 men but killed 350, captured 2,000 prisoners, and captured artillery and wagon. Forrest had to release prisoners on many occasions as he had too many to control, often larger than his own force. Forrest once had prisoners help move artillery wagons through rough roads to be set free.

In a particularly daring attack, Forrest charged his command up a hill against a force twice his size, supported by artillery. Remarkably victorious, he took 75 prisoners, recaptured 60 Confederate prisoners, and captured the artillery. These events were just a few of the kinds of lopsided victories and successes Forest achieved.

Deception

Forrest excelled at scouting, ambushing, and deception. He kept the enemy uncertain of his movements and could cross bridges or “impassable” streams when he was “trapped.” He could also be creative; he once used captured Union infantry drums to make his Cavalry force appear more numerous, thereby preventing an attack by the Union. He once used some of the older men in his command to dress as civilians and give false information to the upcoming federals on the whereabouts of his men. Another time he had his men wear captured federal uniforms to gain information from them. Once, while trying to convince a Union commander to surrender, he made his force of 4,500 appear to be 10,000 to the Federal commander, convincing the general to surrender his command. He did things like have his artillery brought up over and over in circles to appear like he had more guns than he did whilst negotiating with his adversary.

Feared by Many

Follow Forrest to the death if it costs 10,000 lives and breaks the treasury. There will never be peace in Tennessee till Forrest is dead.

-William T Sherman

Few, perhaps none would hesitate to call Forrest the most feared individual soiler of the war, the last man you would not to fight to the death against on the field of battle, but also The Civil War Trust's article on Forest reads, "the most feared commander of the war... no Union commander was able to effectively come to grips with Forrest's cavalry during the war." In 10 Best Generals in American History, Barry C Jacobsen referred to him as "Perhaps the most feared general in American history."

Because of Forrest's fighting ability, fearlessness, aggressiveness, unpredictable and lightning-fast raids and assaults, and great success, he became widely seen as the most feared commander on either side of the war. In one instance, an enthusiastic and confident federal cavalry command was prepared to attack the much smaller Confederate cavalry command. Upon receiving notice that it was, in fact, under the direction of General Forrest, the Union officer called off the attack despite the significant manpower advantage.

Where Does Forrest Rank in Civil War Generals?

Having him [Forrest] in an army was something like operating in concert with a band of formidable but unpredictable barbarians allies...could be an excellent cavalryman for practicality any purpose if he could be convinced to pursue his commanders wishes.

-Steven E Woodworth Six Armies in Tennessee the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns University of Nebraska press

If you were to rank Civil War soldiers just as fighting men, I think Forest would come out on top; if you were to rank the best cavalry commander, he could well be your first choice. Perhaps even If you were to rank generals with a division or less, he might come out on top. However, he was not always reliable enough to work as part of a larger command and perhaps not as great as others with larger groups of men and thus his impact was not as outstanding as a Grant, Jackson, or Lee. So, where does he rank? That, of course, would depend on personal opinion. He is widely regarded as the best Cavalry commander of the war and is usually ranked around 5th overall commander. He excelled in a limited area, such as a division or less, or when allowed to conduct raids. At this, he had no peers. However, he did not have the impact of generals in the regular army on the major battlefields.

Forrest was hard to control and did his own thing. He once threatened to kill Braxton Bragg, the army commander, and so was shipped to Mississippi. This, in part, made it so Forrest could not do what many thought should have been done: work on Sherman's supply during his invasion of Atlanta and turn him back like he did Grant in his first attempt on Vicksburg. Forrest stated in 1864 “There is no doubt we could soon wipe old Sherman off the face of the earth, John, if they'd give me enough men and you enough guns.”

In the end, Forrest is for me tough to gauge. Compared to other great generals of the war. I think with a division to command he would have been as feared as Stonewall, perhaps even more so. But he was more a berserker type general, one you are glad he is on your side and can achieve remarkable outcomes if you let him loose on the enemy, but perhaps not as versatile as a Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee. I think someone like Grant had a larger influence on an entire army than Forest could achieve.

Jeb Smith is an author and speaker whose books include Defending Dixie's Land: What Every American Should Know About The South And The Civil War written under the pen name Isaac C. Bishop,  Missing Monarchy: Correcting Misconceptions About The Middle Ages, Medieval Kingship, Democracy, And Liberty and he also authored Defending the Middle Ages: Little Known Truths About the Crusades, Inquisitions, Medieval Women, and More. Smith has written over 120 articles found in several publications.

A Scientific Look at the Rifled Musket

In Myths of the Civil War: The Fact, Fiction, and Science Behind the Civil War’s Most Told Stories, Professor Scott Hippensteel brings a unique perspective, applying science and skepticism to common claims about the rifled musket.

Here, Jeb Smith looks at the rifled musket.

Springfield Model 1861 rifled musket.

Scott Hippensteel begins with “snipers,” pointing out that no such unit existed during the Civil War; the term and function came much later. Instead, those in the role were better described as sharpshooters and acted as skirmishers. He challenges the various claims of kills at 500 yards or greater, demonstrating some of the most famous supposed long-range killings to be inconceivable as actually happening, and suggesting they were in all likelihood from friendly fire, artillery shrapnel, or at best, from numerous skirmishers who would aim in a general direction and one happened to get lucky and strike an officer. He writes, “It was hopeless for a Civil War sharpshooter to aim at and attempt to kill a single specific officer at more than a few hundred yards; the exterior ballistics and accuracy of the available weapons made this task nearly impossible, regardless of the shooting talent of the soldier.”

Very few rifles were equipped with scopes, and fewer still were the trained individuals who could accurately hit a long-distance target even in training. Imperfections in powder, bullets, the rifle, the scope, and more made long-distance shots extraordinarily difficult. The weather, moisture in the air, wind (which can change the landing spot by a few feet even if VERY light), and other factors impacted long-range shots. Furthermore, the precision required to estimate the target’s distance and account for the bullet’s trajectory makes it unlikely that genuine long-distance kills occurred. Some sharpshooters needed to aim 14 feet above the target’s head and precisely measure the distance from hundreds of yards using old glass scopes that themselves impeded long-range shots. Hippensteel wrote, “Additionally, the front sight of these muzzleloaders was broader than any human-size target at five hundred yards. Between the required holdover and the width of the front sight, any view of the intended victim of the sharpshooter is completely obscured at this range.” To say it would be a shot in the dark is an understatement.

Conditions

Further, ideal conditions, perfect weather timing, etc., would not be the same as battle conditions with fog, smoke, and imperfect visibility. As a straight shot in the open was usually never beyond 125 yards, the eye could not accurately estimate a single target’s distance so as to calculate the trajectory for long-range shots. The enemy was rarely visible due to obscuring terrain, smoke and more at more than 100-150 yards.  Even under perfect conditions, with no human error, “perfectly aimed” shots still would often miss.

In addition, the number of steps that need to be done correctly to load the rifled musket, in the correct order, and the right way to fire a shot amid the noise, screams, adrenaline rush, shouting, smoke, confusion, fear, death and fatigue made getting off an accurate shot near-impossible and the performance in battle staggeringly poor. The best commanders could do with these citizen volunteers was often to maintain a steady fire aimed in the general direction of the opposing side, in order to cause enough damage to hold their position or push the others back over time, often due to the latter running out of ammo. After Gettysburg, 32-43% of the rifled muskets found were loaded with multiple bullets and discarded. Many soldiers whose gun malfunctioned picked up other random discarded ones, weapons they might never have fired before. Using ammo that was not meant for the new musket, that alone can cause mishaps.

Hippensteel conducted an in-depth analysis of weapons used in the U.S. military from 1770 to 2000, determining the “total firepower” and the overall killing ability, particularly in the range of up to 150 yards, the “killing zone” where the vast majority of kills occur. Evaluating bullet size, velocity, reload time, and other factors, he discovered that the lowest point occurred when the United States Army first adopted the rifled musket, and that the smoothbore actually puts out more firepower than the rifled musket. No wonder many commanders rejected the latter. Hippensteel wrote, “When the army adopted the rifled musket, the hitting power of the US infantrymen hit an all-time low. This seems strange for a weapon that was about to ‘revolutionize’ warfare…compared to its predecessor, the smoothbore musket, the rifled musket is 15-25 percent slower to load and has a muzzle velocity of only 950-1050 feet per second, compared with the 1,400-1,500 feet per second of the smoothbore.” Meaning that within the range of non-skirmishing Civil War combat, the smoothbore outperformed the rifled musket. Almost all fire occurred at under 200 yards, the enemy was often not visible beyond. And beyond 200 yards, special training was required to account for the low velocity of the weapon.

Differences

Noting the difference between what the rifled musket could do at distance in target practice vs in Civil War battles, he points out that because “Rifled muskets were much more precise …they could produce smaller groups (‘hits’ in target practice within a specific range or distance), because their rifling guided all the bullets to a more localized space downrange. However, this precision did not necessarily make the rifle more accurate in reality, the tight grouping might have been falling short (bullet has a high rate of drop) or long of the intended target because of the difficulty introduced by the parabolic flight path of the bullets.” He continues, “A precision weapon is only useful in combat if it is also accurate, and low muzzle velocity makes accuracy a challenge.” In other words, in actual combat, where you are not simply shooting at an unmoving target, your adjusted total accuracy equals out even if the rifle is more precise in practice. Unless you could allow for the difference, and the vast majority of soldiers could not, you lost the advantages.

In the end, smoothbore is similar overall to rifled for ranges of 75 yards and under, and is even preferred due to the lethality of buck and ball. At ranges of 250 yards or more, rifled is a waste of ammunition, so it is only between 75-250 yards where it has a hypothetical advantage for the typical soldier. But the smoke, terrain, and other effects of battle largely negated that, meaning that most commanders would not have their men fire until 100-150 yards, seeing shooting at longer distances as a waste of ammunition, or attempting to “shock” the enemy with a deadly volley from around 60 yards or under. So very little combat occurred at distances or under conditions to give the rifle musket an edge. Hippensteel summarizes “So the rifled musket had a limited advantage over the smoothbore on some battlegrounds, in some circumstances; it was, for example a better gun for skirmishers.”

Without machine guns or artillery, a company in Vietnam produced the same firepower as a Civil War corps. A brigade in WW1 did the same, also without artillery or machine guns. Further, modern weapons are smokeless and do not decrease visibility as black powder weapons did. The Civil War was not the first modern war. Hippensteel quotes Allen Guelzo: “Whatever the gains bestowed by the technology of the rifled musket…those improvements were only apparent under ideal conditions (which is to say, not in the middle of a firefight).” David Ward wrote, “The rifled musket did not revolutionize civil war operations because the weapon was not used at long range.” Further, diseases were the leading cause of death among Civil War soldiers, not what one considers “modern” weaponry.

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