Civil War 150th anniversary -- Quick Reality Check

Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant (sitting third from right) with his staff at Cold Harbor, Virginia, where Grant would lose 7,000 soldiers killed or wounded in 20 minutes charging Robert E. Lee's fortified Rebel lines in 1864.   Photo by Matthew Brady.  (Click on it for full size.)

It was exactly 150 years ago today that Rebel batteries in Charleston, South Carolina, under Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard began their 34-hour shelling of Fort Sumter, starting the Civil War.  And so today begins the great Civil War sesquicentennial, what promises to be a non-stop multiyear gluttonous cornucopia of nostalgia, merchandizing, and shameless political exploitation of easily the most interesting, dramatic, and genuinely important event in American history.  


Here at Viral History, we certainly plan to add voice to the chorus.  (How could we not?  All three of my Gilded Age books, Boss Tweed, Dark Horse, and The Gold Ring, start with the War.)   But before getting carried away in the merchandizing part, it's worth remembering that the Civil War was also one of the deadliest, costliest, and most painful events in US history -- accounting for more American deaths than any other War.   

President Lincoln and the Union Army prevailed, ending slavery for four million people, saving the Union, giving the land a "new birth of freedom" as Lincoln called it in his Gettysburg address.  Still, General Sherman put it best:  "War is hell," even what we kid ourselves into calling a "good war" like this one.  

So I prefer to kick off this anniversary by thinking first of the fallen. 

Of the 1,556,000 souls who served in the Union Army from 1861 through 1865- 

         110,070 died in battle;
         250,152 died from disease or other non-combat causes; and
         275,175 were wounded.

Of the 1,082,000 souls who served in the  Confederate Army from 1861 through 1865--

           94,000 died in battle;
        164,000 died from disease, etc.; and                      
        100,000  were estimated as wounded.

That made total deaths of 618,222 and total wounded of 375,000, this at a time when the entire US population was barely 31 million.

There is no reliable count of civilians killed in the War, but any attempt to add them up quickly reaches into the tens of thousands.


The financial cost of the War, including both government outlays and property destruction, is estimated at about $7 billion (1860s dollars), or some $200 billion in modern money.

Add to this the hundreds of thousands of women made widows, children made orphans, men made armless or legless, towns laid waste, lives disrupted, families split, and the oceans of pain from wartime surgeries and separations.  The generation of Americans who fought the Civil War and then produced the great post-war industrial boom truly paid a heavier price for their patriotism than any other.

Here's to them all.   Now let the re-enactments and the merchandizing begin....

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Portraits: President Grant's inaugural ball, March 1869

I love the way that old 1800s tabloids like Harper’s Weekly, Leslie’s Illustrated, and the others, long before photographs could be copied on newsprint, used artist’s sketches to capture dazzling visual scenes. The process was primitive and tedious by modern standards. Artists literally had to take their pencil drawings and carve them by hand onto wooden block or steel plates for the ink-slathered printing machines. But the results could be breath-taking, the first time many American’s in their lifetimes ever saw the faces of famous people, the insides of well-known buildings, or glimpses of how the other half lived.

Here’s a nice one: A full-page panorama of the great gala inaugural ball thrown for Ulysses Grant, newly elected president of the United States, in the great chandeliered hall of the Treasury Department in March 1869. It appeared in Leslie’s Illustrated on March 20th that year, drawn by a young artist named James E. Taylor who earned his wings sketching battle scenes during the Civil War.

Click on the photo to see it full size. Look at the detail, the faces, the clothes, the room, and imagine the hours of labor it took to capture each line and nuance. The drawing is so accurate that you can make out individual faces in the crowd, not just President Grant and his wife Julia but also House Speaker James G. Blaine (standing behind Mrs. Grant’s shoulder), Senator Carl Schurz (over to the right), and several Civil War generals.

Photographs and videos are fine, but some of these artist sketches are true Pop Art masterpieces. Hope you like it.

Why James Garfield over LBJ and the Adamses?

James A. Garfield accepting surrender of US Grant at the 1880 Republican convention after 36 ballots.  

Since I posted my Presidential rankings for the C-SPAN 2009 Historians Survey a few days ago, I've received pointed questions from friends about some of my choices. (See January 18 post below.)

For instance, how could I put Gerald Ford so high on the list, in the top ten, for God's sake? And what was I thinking in ranking James Garfield, who served only four months before being shot in the back, above LBJ and both the Adamses? And, in putting George W. Bush at the near-bottom (#41 out of 43), wasn't I just following a liberal fad that will disappear in a few years, much as Harry Truman has gained popularity over time.

Over the next few days, I will tackle each of these. Yes, Gerald Ford deserves his high spot. Yes, James Garfield outranks LBJ, John Adams, and John Quincy. And no, George W. Bush's bottom status is no passing liberal fancy. Bush is no Harry Truman. He will be considered as much a bottom-feeder a century from now as today.

I'll start with James Garfield, only because this was the first challenge to come up. Stick with me.

The basics are simple: James Garfield, a Civil War veteran and career Congressman, was elected President in 1880, inaugurated in March 1881, shot by Charles Guiteau four months later, and died about two months after that. He was mourned by hundreds of thousands, respected for confronting political bosses, and credited with the modern Civil Service system adopted after his death.

During his term, he prevailed over Sen. Roscoe Conkling, dictator of the NY Republican machine, in a high-profile brawl over abusive patronage. His Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, started the country on a strong foreign policy that culminated in TR's "big stick" approach twenty years later.  Here (above) is my favorite cartoon of Garfield, by PUCK artist Joseph Keppler, showing Garfield accepting the surrender of Ulysses Grant at the 1880 Republican Convention after Grant's 3rd term movement collapsed on the 36th ballot:



It was my friend David Stewart, author of the terrific book THE SUMMER OF 1787: The Men who Invented the US Constitution, who blew the whistle on me. "Whoa, big fella!," he wrote, knowing of my own book about the Garfield assassintion, (DARK HORSE). " James Garfield ahead of Lyndon Johnson and both Adamses? We're dishing out some home-cooking here. Remind us again, what did Garfield do as president?"

Good question. So let's deal with it squarely.

Ranking presidents means making choices. James Garfield's presidency had only a small impact because it was so short. Even giving him maximum credit, he stand mid-pack, slightly above center, which is where I ranked him, at #18.

Now let's look at the competition.

Lyndon Baines Johnson? We can start and end the conversation with one word: Vietnam. I don't recall James Garfield ever going out and getting the country stuck in a full-scale land war half-way around the world, commiting half-a-million troops to the effort, most unwilling draftees, all based on bad intelligence and bad advice, then misleading the country as tens of thousands died, then allowing the war to spin out of control and destroy his domestic agenda, causing the country then to react by electing an even worse leader in Richard M. Nixon.

This is LBJ's legacy. Yes, he had a sterling record on Civil Rights and passed a boatload of Great Society legislation. But his own Democratic Party was ready to kick him overboard when he declined to run for re-election in 1968. Without his Civil Rights record, Vietnam easily would have sunk LBJ to the bottom half of the list. As is, I gave him much credit for his domestic agenda, with an overall rank of #19.  I think he owes me a "thank you."

Then there are the Adamses. Let's start with John Adams, the second president, serving from 1797 to 1801, the first to be voted out of office. Yes, he came across wonderfully in that terrific HBO miniseries where he was play by the fine actor Paul Giamatti, based on the biography by David McCullough. And yes, John Adams was a sterling patriot and fine man during most of his life.

But his presidency was a sorry mess. Its emblem was the Alien and Seditions Acts. I do not recall James Garfield ever pushing Congress to pass a law allowing him to throw dozens of newspaper editors in jail for the simple act of publicly opposing his foreign policy, as well as locking up large numbers of immigrants on trumped up claims of disloyalty -- as did John Adams. The abuse was flagrant.

Adams showed his bad temperament again after losing re-election in 1800 by refusing to act civilly toward Thomas Jefferson, the person who beat him, at Jefferson's 1801 Inauguration. I rated Adams the best I could given a bad record. He ranked #31 on my list, just above Rutherford Hayes and William Howard Taft. Once again, I am ready to accept a "thank you" note from the Adams family.

Finally, there is John Quincy, whom I rate well above his father at #25, though still mediocre. Another fine man; another disappointing president. From the moment he entered office, his political opponents branded his Administration the product of a "corrupt bargain," and for four years the albatross stuck, fair or not.

That's the explanation. I am very comfortable with where I placed James Garfield, notwithstanding LBJ and the Adamses. Tomorrow, I'll talk about Gerald Ford.

Thanks for listening. --KenA