Halt of Wilcox’s troops in Caroline Street, Fredericksburg, previous to going into battle. Photo courtesy The Saturday Evening Post (January 17, 1863).

No country can win a war if its military strength isn’t matched by the determination of its people. If a war lasts too long, the public’s resolve runs out before the ammunition does. Case in point: it would have been extremely difficult if not impossible for the administration to maintain public support for the Vietnam War for its entire 14 years. More recently, our country’s determination has been challenged by 11 years in Afghanistan that have produced no decisive victories.

It was no easier 150 years ago, when the Union Army was still recovering from its December 1862 defeat at Fredericksburg. A growing number of Americans were demanding that President Lincoln negotiate with the Confederate government.

In this winter of discontent, the Post responded to the “gloom and dissatisfaction which secessionists are striving to spread over the land” by comparing the achievements of the Northern and Southern armies. In “What We Have Done and What the Rebels Have Done” (February 14, 1863), the editors credited the Union with 33 victories and the Confederacy with just 17.

This ratio of battlefield successes—nearly two-to-one—gives the impression the Union Army was outfighting its Confederate counterpart. But, if truth be told, Post editors were fiddling with the numbers for reasons that were hardly journalistic. The publication had an agenda to stir up waning enthusiasm for Lincoln’s war efforts.

There had been plenty of support for the war when it began in March 1861. Young men throughout the North rushed to enlist, their only worry being the war would be over before they had a chance to prove themselves. After all, they presumed, this would be a short, decisive war.

Then the long list of Union defeats began. In July 1861, the Confederates defeated General McDowell at Bull Run. In March 1862, they defeated General McClellan on the Virginia Peninsula. In August, they defeated General Pope, again at Bull Run. In December, they threw back General Burnsides at the battle of Fredericksburg.

The only place where the Union seemed to advance was in the western states, where Ulysses Grant was making a name for himself with a string of river victories. But Kentucky and Tennessee were a long way from Richmond, Virginia, the seeming invulnerable Confederate capital.

So Post editors rewrote the war to put the Union Army and Navy in a more positive light, using standards that consistently favored the North. For example:

• Three of the Union “victories” were not achieved by combat but reflected territories fell into Federal hands after the Confederates abandoned them.
• The “Evacuation of Manassas” was, in fact, a retreat.
• Two of the Confederates’ major wins at Bull Run were listed as just one victory.
• The editors counted five Union victories in the Peninsula Campaign, but gave the Confederates just one for winning the entire campaign. Moreover, everything the Union gained at Yorktown, Williamsburg, Hanover Courthouse, Fair Oaks, and Malvern Hill, they lost when driven from these battlefields as they retreated down the peninsula.
• Overall, the editors also didn’t weigh the Union and Rebel successes on the same scale: the South’s victories at Bull Run, the Virginia Peninsula, and Fredericksburg were a greater feat of arms than the minor battle of Drainesville or Mill Spring, but reading the Post article, you’d never know that.

Southerners would have recognized the true disparity in the two armies’ successes. They knew that, for all the North’s small victories, the South had kept them from advancing into Virginia for two years. What they couldn’t see in 1863 was how these little victories were quietly adding up and reducing their ability to wage war. The Confederacy still put its faith in winning with a decisive victory in one, big battle. It had been true in Napoleon’s day, but was no longer. Modern wars, waged across the breadth of a nation, were won by countless small wins with little glory and savage fighting.

But a campaign that relies on countless small wins, as we’ve seen in our current fighting in the Middle East, doesn’t look like progress.

The Post’s Civil War Half-Time Report The Saturday Evening Post

September 17, 2012, marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single-day battle in American history.

Late in the second year of the Civil War, the Confederate army switched from defense to offense. General Robert E. Lee marched the Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland, which had remained loyal to the Union.

He had recently defeated the Union forces at the Second Battle of Bull Run and decided it would be better to keep the momentum from this victory by a march into Union territory. Maryland was the natural choice; a large number of slaveholders in the state were strong supporters of the Confederacy. Lee hoped they would join his army and bring needed supplies. If he could score a victory against the Union forces, the Confederacy might win recognition from Great Britain and France. If so, the South could resume trade with Europe. The British Navy would break the Union’s blockade so that cotton could be shipped to the mills that were now laying idle from lack of material. Lincoln would have to fight the Confederacy and the British Empire. If Lee could win a victory.

The odds were in his favor. He was opposed by the Union’s General McClellan—an able administrator but a hesitant commander who always over-estimated the enemy. He had resisted Lincoln’s orders to move south toward Richmond. When Lincoln finally ordered him south, he was bluffed out of a strong position outside Richmond, Virginia, so close he could hear the church bells of the city.

Now Lee was coming at him. For the first time, the great Confederate commander would fight an offensive campaign, which was always more risky. It didn’t help that a union soldier found a copy of his strategy, copied for his generals. McClellan would never again have such an advantage. The Southern command soon realized that the orders had been found by the Union, but Lee stayed with his plan. McClellan attached Lee and, at Antietam, had the advantage for once.

Had he been a more decisive general—as determined as General Grant, for example—he might have defeated and captured Lee’s army. But McClellan wasn’t that bold or imaginative a general. And Lee was. The Confederates were able to withdraw their forces in the face of a large Union army.

All the same, it was a rare defeat for the Confederates. And for both sides, it was particularly bloody. In one day, nearly 23,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing.

Lincoln was shocked that General McClellan would not pursue the Confederate army and make it a decisive, war-determining battle. Yet, it was still a victory, and there had been very few for the North. Lincoln used the opportunity to announce a momentous change in policy, and a change in the direction of the war.

The following is taken from “The Recent Contests” from The Saturday Evening Post, September 27, 1862.

A week of anxiety ends with the joyful assurance that the rebel invaders have been forced to fly from “Maryland, My Maryland,” and entirely give up for the present the prospect of overrunning Pennsylvania.

It is evident that it was a most desperate struggle, in which though we can scarcely claim a decisive victory, the balance of advantages was decidedly in favor of the Union forces. The next day both armies were apparently too much exhausted to recommence the contest, the rebels probably secretly employing themselves in commencing their retreat into Virginia. On Friday, judging from our present advices, they completed their passage of the Potomac—with how much loss of men, trains, and artillery, we are yet unable to say. The amount of such loss of course will determine the extent of the disorganization they have sustained, and the character of the defeat they have suffered.

It is probable that the designs of the rebels in their recent movement were as follows:

1. To capture Harper’s Ferry and the 12,000 men at that place, by surrounding it, and moving on it from the North, from which side it is said to be least defensible, the Maryland heights being higher than the Virginia ones.

2. To replenish their supplies.

3. To raise Maryland in their favor, and largely recruit their forces.

4. To menace Baltimore and Washington, and the railroad communications of those cities with the North.

5. To invade Pennsylvania by way of the Cumberland Valley, allow us in this state to feel the ravages of war, supply themselves at will from our overflowing resources, and sicken us of the contest.

Of all these object the rebels have gained the first, and, it may be, in a degree, the second. Owing to shameful incompetency or treachery, Harper’s Ferry was captured. Whether the report of the recapture is true, we are at present unable to say.

But Maryland would not rise—even her secessionists will not put their property and lives in peril on so desperate a venture. For they see that even if the North were defeated, and the Union allowed to be dissevered, the North and Pennsylvania must at least insist on the Potomac for a border line.

To cross the Potomac is in fact to invade Pennsylvania—recent events have impressed this upon the great majority of our population. It therefore does not seem possible for Maryland to be severed from Pennsylvania without exposing both of them to great peril.

Antietam: Our Post-Battle Report The Saturday Evening Post

Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction deserves this prominence for Guelzo’s thorough knowledge of the subject, his ability to draw fresh conclusion, and his exceptional writing skills.

The book encompasses the conflict beyond the war, starting with the early challenges to the union in the 1830s and continuing to the collapse of Reconstruction in the 1880s.

This broad context enables readers to understand how a national conflict went far, far beyond the deaths. Rather than simply ending his account with a reassuring image of Lee and Grant being all gallant and noble at Appomattox, it continued into the decades of Southern intransigence, bitter division in Washington, and the North’s slow abandonment of equal rights for freedmen.

Without this historical framing, the war would be just a solitary, bloody, distant episode in American life. Guelzo returns it to its proper context: the conflict at the heart of the union between property rights and human rights.

Guelzo narrates the events at a brisk pace that makes the book difficult to put down. He has a wealth of knowledge about this era, drawn from his previous seven books about Lincoln, slavery, and Reconstruction.  He is also able to draw in several, diverse threads of social history, such as immigration, women’s rights, economics, the Romantic tradition, and the role played by black Americans to free themselves when they saw the Union army’s hesitant response to help them.

He is able to put his knowledge to good effect in illustrating his points and developing a clarifying insight. For example:

It will be difficult for us to appreciate the degree of desperation produced in the South by Lincoln’s election unless we remember what the presidency meant on the local level in the 1860s… Every federal appointive office—some 900 of them, all told, from the cabinet down to the lowliest postmaster—was filled at presidential discretion and usually according to party or philosophical loyalties…

[Lincoln’s] identity as a Republican was enough to convince most Southerners that he would appoint only Republicans to postmasterships (where they could ensure the free flow of abolitionist literature into every Southern hamlet), only Republicans as federal marshals (who would then turn a deliberately blind eye to fugitive slaves en route to Canada), only Republicans to army commands (and thus turn the federal army into an anti-slavery militia, and federal forts and arsenals in the South into abolitionist havens), and thus make the Republicans, and the anti-slavery attitude, attractive to the non-slaveholding whites of the South without whose cooperation the survival of slavery would be impossible.

Another strength of Fateful Lightning is the author’s skillful writing. Guelzo captures ideas and personalities with a few, well chosen strokes, e.g., “No one in American history has ever looked less like a great general than Ulysses Grant. He was the sort of person one would have to stare at very intently just to be able to describe him.”

Guelzo’s years of researching and writing about this violent epoch has led him to pose some interesting, if not startling speculations.

It would be interesting to speculate what might have happened if Andrew Johnson had obeyed his original impulse in the spring of 1865 to hang a dozen, or even more, of the Confederate leaders, since a punitive action that scale would have decapitated the potential leadership of any future Southern resistance. Instead, Johnson issued more than 13,000 pardons to former Confederate officers and officials, and as the political resolve of President Grant and the Congress evaporated, many of the former Confederate leaders stepped forward to reassert their old roles.

This is the sort of observation that will stir controversy. I expect this book—like any solid account book of the Civil War—will generate criticism. After all, it has been only 150 years, which is no time at all for lingering anger and resentment. And the issues and consequences of the War have come to define our nation.

Fateful Lightning offers countless rewards to anyone who knows the war, or doesn’t know the war, or is simply interested in American history, because the pattern of most of America’s past and future is contained in this conflict.

Fateful Lightning is available from Oxford University Press, USA.

Book Review: Fateful Lightning The Saturday Evening Post

That fact must surely have occurred to John Wilkes Booth in the days after he murdered Abraham Lincoln. He would have preferred being remembered as the greatest tragedian of his time, but he could be content with the enduring reputation as the Confederacy’s great avenger.

But how would he have felt if he knew he’d be remembered as a dark, leathery figure in a sideshow, exhibited to the general public for 25¢ (5¢ for children)?

The mummy, referred to as “John” by its owners, toured the country in the 1920s and ‘30s, oblivious to all the history books. As Alva Johnston reported in 1938,

Historians of the old school allege that John Wilkes Booth was killed in Garrett’s barn in Virginia on April 26, 1865, twelve days after he assassinated Lincoln.

In 1869 the body was turned over by the War Department to the Booth family and buried in the Booth plot in the Greenmount Cemetery at Baltimore. The body was identified by members of the family and by a dentist’s report.

But stories of Booth’s escape sprang to life from the moment of his death. Revisionists soon had two explanations of how Booth escaped from that barn.

Theory No. 1 is that Booth was warned and made his escape several hours before the barn was surrounded; No. 2 is that he escaped by an unwatched door after the barn was in flames.

For years afterward, people came forward with incredible stories of Booth’s escape.

John Wilkes Booth, before he lost his looks.

In April, 1898, American newspapers had carried reports that John Wilkes Booth had been seen in Brazil… This report brought two witnesses to light who testified that Booth had made his escape in 1865.

The first of these was Mrs. J. M. Christ [no relation]… In 1865, according to her story, she and her husband were on board the Mary Porter in Havana six weeks after the assassination when John Wilkes Booth came aboard and sailed with them to Nassau. She stated that, because Booth was still suffering from a broken leg, she gave up her cabin to him, and at the end of the voyage he rewarded her by giving her his ring with “J. W. B.” engraved inside. Having kept the secret for thirty-three years, Mrs. Christ now felt entitled to talk.

On the following day, Wilson D. Kenzie gave an interview to the same paper. He said that he had known Booth intimately at New Orleans and had been at the Garrett barn in Virginia when the man supposed to be Booth was killed. Kenzie said that the slain man was a sandy-headed fellow who bore no resemblance to Booth.

Then, in 1886, Finis L. Bates notified the War Department that he knew where they could get their hands on the real John Wilkes Booth. He was living in Texas under the name of John St. Helen. Bates had been nursing St. Helen through a long illness and, as Johnston wrote, “On what he apparently thought was his deathbed, St. Helen confessed himself to be John Wilkes Booth.”

The War Department expressed “no interest” in the matter, and Bates let the matter rest until St. Helen’s death in 1903.

The reward Finis Bates couldn't collect.

An undertaker at Enid embalmed the body in the expectation that the Booth family or the War Department would claim it. It remained unclaimed for years. Bates finally procured it.

This transfer was sanctioned by an Oklahoma judge, apparently on the theory that he would accord decent burial to his former client. Instead of this, Bates set out to commercialize his acquisition. He leased and rented his old friend… to showmen from time to time.… and wrote a book with the title The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, and the subtitle, “Written for the Correction of History.”

John St. Helen, it turned out, was actually a drifter named David George. Mummified and displayed as John Wilkes Booth, he proved to have none of his namesake’s box-office appeal.

The star's mobile dressing room enabled the owner, when necessary, to leave town quickly.

The post-mortem career of this John Wilkes Booth… has been marked by almost continual failure and disaster. He has scattered ill-luck around almost as freely as Tutankhamen is supposed to have done. Nearly every showman who exhibited John has been ruined.

John … has had a strange knockabout existence. He has been bought and sold, leased, held under bond, kidnapped and seized for debt; has been repeatedly chased out of town by local authorities for not having a license or for violating other ordinances; has been threatened with hanging by indignant [Yankee] veterans. Up until 1937 he has been a consistent money loser.

At the Waco Cotton Palace about eighteen years ago, the mummy attracted the attention of William Evans, the Carnival King of the Southwest, who started John on his big-time career. Evans had intended to use John as the headliner of his carnival, but the new attraction was a disappointment from the start. John never paid expenses.

Bates died. His widow was disappointed in her first efforts to market the Booth chattel, but she finally sold it to the misguided Carnival King for $1000. It brought Evans nothing but bad luck. He suffered setback after setback in the carnival business, until he finally quit and retired to a small potato farm at Declo, Idaho.

Two owners later, “John” became part of the Jay Gould Million-Dollar Show, which toured Minnesota and South Dakota.

The spell of adversity which pursued John for many years was reversed last season, when the Harkins became connected with the Jay Gould Million-Dollar Show which toured Minnesota and South Dakota.

In fact, Johnston told Post readers, it appeared that John Wilkes Booth had just completed his most successful season since 1865.

The mummy toured less frequently over the years, and was last seen in public in 1976, shortly before it became the property of a private collector.

Could the lonely drifter David George have been John Wilkes Booth? Even if Booth had escaped his death in a Virginia barn, would he have denied himself all the recognition and notoriety he’d gain by revealing his identity? As Johnston reflected,

In his days on the legitimate stage, John Wilkes Booth had been a great actor. Some of his contemporaries thought him greater than his father, Junius Brutus Booth, or his brother, Edwin Booth.

John Wilkes Booth was, however, an almost perfect ham. Vanity was his ruling motive. His assassination of Lincoln was an act of pure vanity. Booth had gone through the Civil War without fighting; he could not bear to have the war heroes towering over him; he killed Lincoln in the hope of stealing the show from the fighting men.

The poor ham broke into history, but it might have given him pause, back in 1865, if he could have looked forward to 1920 and could have seen what was left of him competing unsuccessfully with bulldog-faced cows and six-legged sheep.

The Assassin’s Mummy; or, John Wilkes Booth’s Second Career The Saturday Evening Post

On that day, Colonel Ellsworth and his regiment were clearing out the Confederate troops in Alexandria, Virginia, right across the Potomac, within sight of the Capitol and White House. On June 5, 1861, the Post quoted from the Army’s official report:

It appears that Ellsworth was marching up the street with a squad of men to take possession of the telegraph office, when, in passing along, he noticed a Secession flag flying from the top of a building. He immediately exclaimed—“That has to come down” and, entering the building, made his way up to the roof with one of his men, hauled down the rebel emblem, and wrapping it around his body, descended.

“While on the second floor, a Secessionist came out of a door with a cocked double-barreled shot-gun. He took aim at Ellsworth, when the latter attempted to strike the gun out of the way with his fist. As he struck it, one of the barrels was discharged, lodging a whole load of buckshot in Ellsworth’s body, killing him instantly. His companion instantly shot the murderer through the head with a revolver, making him a corpse a second or two after the fall of the noble Ellsworth. The house was immediately surrounded and all the inmates made prisoners.”

The remains of the deceased were brought over to the Navy Yard this morning. The doleful peals of all the bells in the city are announcing the sad news to the citizens. The President visited the Navy Yard and saw the remains of his friend Colonel Ellsworth.

Like Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant, Ellsworth was a representative man of his time. While still a teenager, he left his New York home and travelled to the wilds of Illinois where he took several jobs, worked hard, and lived frugally. In the late 1850s, he was inspired to form an elite militia corps. Its soldiers would wear the distinctive uniform of the French Zouave soldiers, and would be trained for agility and strength. Each man would be moral, sober, and utterly dedicated to the corps and its training. Soon Ellsworth was travelling the country, putting on demonstrations and drill practices with his Zouaves before amazed and enthusiastic crowds.

But it ended when he struck up a conversation with Abraham Lincoln after a demonstration in Springfield. Elmer Ellsworth immediately hung up his fanciful Zoave uniform and disbanded the militia so he could became a law clerk at Lincoln’s firm.

Lincoln appears to have taken Ellsworth under his wing, encouraging him, inspiring him, and acting very much like an older brother. He probably recognized himself in this earnest young man who was taking the hard, solitary road to success. In turn, Ellsworth became devoted to Lincoln and, eventually, a valuable part of his presidential campaign. He followed him to Washington after his election and was a frequent guest at the White House. Then, in May, with a fresh commission from the president, Ellsworth marched off to his fate.

Washington, May 25— The remains of Col. Ellsworth were this morning conveyed to the East room of the White House, where they lay in state for several hours. The President and his family visited the remains and took a farewell look at the face of their much-loved friend, before the crowd was admitted.

Even Lincoln’s closest associates admitted that he rarely shared his thoughts or feelings. But on this occasion, he made no effort to hide his grief, as Senator Wilson of Massachusetts observed when he visited Lincoln on May 24.

As we entered the library we observed Mr. Lincoln before a window, looking out across the Potomac… He did not move until we approached very closely, when he turned round abruptly, and advanced toward us, extending his hand: “Excuse me,” he said, “but I cannot talk.”

We supposed his voice had given away from some cause or other, and we were about to inquire, when to our surprise the President burst into tears, and concealed his face in his handkerchief. He walked up and down the room for some moments, and we stepped aside in silence, not a little moved at such an unusual spectacle, in such a man and in such a place. After composing himself somewhat, Mr. Lincoln sat down and invited us to him. “I will make no apology, gentlemen,” said he, “for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard. Just as you entered the room, Captain Fox left me, after giving me the painful details of his unfortunate death. The event was so unexpected, and the recital so touching, that it quite unmanned me.”

Ellsworth was honored as a hero, and the souvenir hawkers were soon busy.

The flags which Col. Ellsworth seized and carried, the oil cloth on which he fell, &c, have been divided, and the pieces are carefully preserved by curiosity hunters. A resident of Paterson, New Jersey, boasts of possessing and exhibiting a piece of cheese which the gallant Colonel had in his haversack!

For months, newspapers and politicians spoke the name “Ellsworth” to evoke the spirit of patriotism and sacrifice. It was soon obscured by the growing casualty lists and, by war’s end, was barely remembered, just one death among 600,000.

The Final Letter from Elmer Ellsworth

Elmer Ellsworth Last Letter May 23, 1861

THE LAST LETTER— The following letter gives us a higher idea of Colonel Ellsworth than we previously had. We had looked upon him as a dashing, daring, but reckless and somewhat superficial soldier—this letter shows, however, both depth and nobility of character, and that he was at heart a religious and believing man. There is a tone of sadness in the letter, almost ominous of his approaching end;

Head Quarters, First Zouaves, Camp Lincoln:
Washington, D.C., May 23, 1861

My Dear Father and Mother—The Regiment is ordered to move across the river tonight. We have no means of knowing what reception we are to meet with. I am inclined to the opinion that our entrance to the city of Alexandria will be hotly contested, as I am just informed a large force have arrived there to-day. Should this happen, my dear parents, it may be my lot to be injured in some manner. Whatever may happen, cherish the consolation that I was engaged in the performance of a sacred duty; and tonight, thinking over the probabilities of tomorrow, and the occurrences of the past, I am perfectly content to accept whatever my fortune may be, confident that He who noteth even the fall of a sparrow will have some purpose even in the fate of one like me.
My darling and ever loved parents, good-bye. God bless, protect, and care for you.

Elmer

[Saturday Evening Post, June 8, 1861]

Lincoln’s Early Loss The Saturday Evening Post