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First Battle of Bull Run ‑ Dates, Location & Who Won | HISTORY

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The First Battle of Bull Run was the first major battle of the American Civil War. The battle, fought in 1861 by poorly trained volunteers, ended in Confederate victory. The high casualty count from the battle made both sides realize it would be a long, costly war.

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On July 21st 1861 in Fairfax County and Prince William County, Viginia. The battle of Bull Run was a desicive victory for the Confederacy. This was the first major battle of the civil war.

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1. Battle of Morrisville Station (April 13)

News of Lee's surrender across the border in Virginia reached both armies in North Carolina on April 12. The following day, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's cavalry captured Raleigh and pursued Confederate forces under General Joseph E. Johnston west from the state capital. At Morrisville Station, Union troops shelled the town and attacked its train station to prevent the departure of a rebel train carrying supplies and wounded soldiers westward to Greensboro. The Confederate cavalry held off the attack long enough to decouple the rail cars carrying supplies and allow the wounded to escape, but they were ultimately forced to retreat. The following day, a Confederate courier bearing a white flag rode into the Union camp in Morrisville to begin negotiations that resulted in the largest surrender of the war when Johnston's 90,000 troops laid down their arms on April 26.

2. Battle of West Point (April 16)

Throughout April, Major General James H. Wilson's Union troops swept through Alabama, seizing Selma and then Montgomery. The next target of Wilson's Raid was the South's last major industrial supply center-Columbus, Georgia. Wilson divided his forces and ordered a contingent under Colonel Oscar LaGrange to seize a bridge spanning the Chattahoochee River at West Point, Georgia, 35 miles upstream from Columbus. On Easter Sunday, the day after President Abraham Lincoln's death, LaGrange's forces attacked the badly outnumbered Confederates and seized Fort Tyler, a small earthen defense on the Alabama side of the river, before taking the bridge. The attack claimed the life of Brigadier General Robert C. Tyler, who became the last Confederate general to die in battle.

3. Battle of Columbus (April 16)

As the battle continued at West Point, Union soldiers attacked the trenches, breastworks and earthen forts ringing Columbus. After an afternoon of fighting, Wilson's forces launched a daring nighttime raid that succeeded in breaking the Confederate defenses. The rebels set fire to one of the two covered bridges spanning the Chattahoochee River between Columbus and the Alabama town of Girard (now called Phenix City), but the Union soldiers managed to cross the other. Wilson's forces ransacked Columbus and destroyed Confederate armaments, including the still-unfinished ironclad CSS Jackson, which was burned and sunk.

4. Battle of Anderson (May 1)

Inland in South Carolina-on the opposite side of the state from where the Civil War opened at Fort Sumter four years before-a skirmish broke out between Union and Confederate fighters in Anderson County, where Major General George Stoneman's Union cavalry was searching for Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the Saluda River valley. The exact location of the battle is unknown, but it is thought to have been the last exchange of gunfire east of the Mississippi River during the Civil War.

5. Battle of Palmito Ranch (May 12-13)

The rebels may have lost the Civil War, but ironically they won what some consider the war's final land battle. Days after Wilson's forces captured Davis on May 10, Southern forces in the Trans-Mississippi region had yet to surrender. When Union forces left Brazos Island on the far southern tip of Texas and marched inland toward Brownsville along the banks of the Rio Grande, they encountered rebel outposts. With both sides fully aware of the surrender at Appomattox, a force of 350 Confederates under Colonel John Ford defeated 800 Union troops commanded by Colonel Theodore H. Barrett, who narrowly avoided being trapped in a bend of the Rio Grande. Among the handful of dead was Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana Infantry Regiment, who is thought to have been the last of the more than 600,000 soldiers killed in the Civil War. When Confederate General Kirby Smith agreed to surrender his Army of the Trans-Mississippi two weeks after the Battle of Palmito Ranch (also referred to as the Battle of Palmetto Ranch) on May 26, it ended the organized military rebellion against the Union.

6. CSS Shenandoah raids (Summer 1865)

The fearsome commerce raider CSS Shenandoah was purchased from the British and commissioned by the Confederacy in October 1864. Commanded by Captain James Waddell, CSS Shenandoah sailed the high seas from Madeira to Australia on a mission to capture and destroy Union commercial vessels. It achieved its greatest success in the months following Lee's surrender at Appomattox as it decimated the Yankee whaling fleet harvesting the Bering Sea off the Alaskan coast. On June 28 alone, the Confederate vessel seized 10 whalers. On August 2, a British ship captain broke the news to Waddell that Davis had been apprehended and the Civil War had ended. Fearing capture by the U.S. Navy, Waddell dismantled the ship's armaments and disguised its appearance, even painting the hull to resemble an ordinary merchant vessel. For three months, CSS Shenandoah remained at sea before reaching Liverpool, England, on November 6, 1865, and surrendering to British authorities. The raider that had captured nearly 40 ships, more than half of them after Appomattox, fired the last shots of the Civil War and lowered the Confederate flag for the very last time.

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News of Lee's surrender across the border in Virginia reached both armies in North Carolina on April 12. The following day, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's cavalry captured Raleigh and pursued Confederate forces under General Joseph E. Johnston west from the state capital.

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This Battle fought on May 12-13 1865, while very small was fought near Palmito Ranch in Texas. This battle was the last in the Civil War but with a confederate victory

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Construction and Design

Fort Sumter was first built in the wake of the War of 1812, which had highlighted the United States' lack of strong coastal defenses. Named for Revolutionary War general and South Carolina native Thomas Sumter, the fortification was one of nearly 50 forts built as part of the so-called Third System, a coastal defense program implemented by Congress in 1817.

The three-tiered, five-sided fort's coastal placement was designed to allow it to control access to the vital Charleston Harbor. While the island itself was only 2.4 acres in size, the fort was built to accommodate a garrison of 650 soldiers and 135 artillery pieces.

Did you know? There were no casualties during the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War. The only Union deaths came during the evacuation: One soldier was killed and another mortally wounded in an accidental explosion during a planned 100-gun salute.

Construction of Fort Sumter first began in 1829 in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, on a manmade island built from thousands of tons of granite. Building ground to a halt in the 1830s amid a dispute over ownership of the stretch of the harbor, and did not resume until 1841. Like many Third System fortifications, Fort Sumter proved a costly endeavor, and construction slowed again in 1859 due to lack of funding. By 1860 the island and the outer fortifications were complete, but the fort's interior and armaments remained unfinished.

Fort Moultrie

Construction of Fort Sumter was still underway when South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. Despite Charleston's position as a major port, at the time only two companies of federal troops guarded the harbor. Commanded by Major Robert Anderson, these companies were stationed at Fort Moultrie, a dilapidated fortification facing the coastline.

Recognizing that Fort Moultrie was vulnerable to a land assault, Anderson elected to abandon it for the more easily defensible Fort Sumter on December 26, 1860. South Carolina militia forces would seize the city's other forts shortly thereafter, leaving Fort Sumter as the lone federal outpost in Charleston.

Battle of Fort Sumter

A standoff ensued until January 9, 1861, when a ship called Star of the West arrived in Charleston with over 200 U.S. troops and supplies intended for Fort Sumter. South Carolina militia batteries fired upon the vessel as it neared Charleston Harbor, forcing it to turn back to sea.

Major Anderson refused repeated calls to abandon Fort Sumter, and by March 1861 there were over 3,000 militia troops besieging his garrison. A number of other U.S. military facilities in the South had already been seized, and Fort Sumter was viewed by many as one of the South's few remaining hurdles to overcome before achieving sovereignty.

With the inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln in March 1861, the situation soon escalated. Knowing that Anderson and his men were running out of supplies, Lincoln announced his intention to send three unarmed ships to relieve Fort Sumter. Having already declared that any attempt to resupply the fort would be seen as an act of aggression, South Carolina militia forces soon scrambled to respond.

Civil War Begins

On April 11, militia commander P.G.T. Beauregard demanded that Anderson surrender the fort, but Anderson again refused. In response Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter shortly after 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861. U.S. Captain Abner Doubleday-later famous for the myth that he invented baseball-ordered the first shots in defense of the fort a few hours later. The first shots of the Civil War had been fired.

Beauregard's 19 coastal batteries unleashed a punishing barrage on Fort Sumter, eventually firing an estimated 3,000 shots at the citadel in 34 hours. By Saturday, April 13, cannon fire had broken through the fortress's five-foot-thick brick walls, causing fires inside the post. With his stores of ammunition depleted, Anderson and his Union forces had to surrender the fort shortly after 2 p.m. in the afternoon.

No Union troops had been killed during the bombardment, but two men died the following day in an explosion that occurred during an artillery salute held before the U.S. evacuation. The bombardment of Fort Sumter would play a major part in triggering the Civil War. In the days following the assault, Lincoln issued a call for Union volunteers to quash the rebellion, while more Southern states including Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee cast their lot with the Confederacy.

Beauregard and Du Pont

Following Beauregard's bombardment in 1861, Confederate forces occupied Fort Sumter and used it to marshal a defense of Charleston Harbor. Once it was completed and better armed, Fort Sumter allowed the Confederates to create a valuable hole in the Union blockade of the Atlantic seaboard.

The first Union assault on occupied Fort Sumter came in April 1863, when Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont attempted a naval attack on Charleston. Commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, Du Pont arrived in Charleston with a fleet of nine ironclad warships, seven of which were updated versions of the famed U.S.S. Monitor.

While Du Pont had hoped to recapture Fort Sumter-by then a symbol of the Confederate rebellion-his attack was poorly coordinated and met with unfavorable weather conditions. In collaboration with Fort Sumter, Confederate batteries commanded by P.G.T. Beauregard hammered the ironclad fleet with artillery fire, and underwater mines posed a constant threat to the ships' hulls.

Outgunned and unable to properly maneuver in heavy currents, Du Pont's fleet eventually withdrew from the harbor after taking over 500 hits by Confederate guns. Only one Union soldier was killed during the battle, but one of the ironclads, Keokuk, sank the next day.

Five Confederates were killed during the attack, but the damage to Fort Sumter was soon repaired and its defenses improved. Confederate soldiers even managed to salvage one of Keokuk 's 11-inch Dahlgren guns and mount it on the fortress.
READ MORE: 7 Important Civil War Battles
Fort Wagner

In July 1863, Union troops laid siege to Fort Wagner, a valuable post on Morris Island near the mouth of Charleston Harbor. After being met with heavy fire from Fort Sumter, Union General Quincy Adams Gillmore turned his guns on the fort and unleashed a devastating seven-day bombardment.

On September 8, a force of nearly 400 Union troops attempted to land at Fort Sumter and capture the post by force. Union Rear Admiral John Dahlgren mistakenly believed the fort was manned by a skeleton crew, but the landing party was met by over 300 Confederate infantry, who easily repulsed the assault.

Following the failed infantry attack, Union forces on Morris Island recommenced their bombing campaign on Fort Sumter. Over the next 15 months, Union artillery effectively leveled Fort Sumter, eventually firing nearly 50,000 projectiles at the fort between September 1863 and February 1865. Despite suffering over 300 casualties from the Union bombardments, the beleaguered Confederate garrison managed to retain control of the fort until February 1865.

Only when Union General William T. Sherman was poised to capture Charleston did the Confederates finally evacuate. Union forces would reclaim Fort Sumter on February 22, 1865. Robert A. Anderson and Abner Doubleday, the two commanding officers from the original siege of Fort Sumter, would both return to the fortress on April 14, 1865, for a flag-raising ceremony.

Fort Sumter National Monument

After the Civil War, the derelict Fort Sumter was rebuilt and partially redesigned. It would see little use during the 1870s and 1880s and was eventually reduced to serving as a lighthouse station for Charleston Harbor. With the start of the Spanish-American War (1898), the fortress was rearmed and once again used as a coastal defense installation. It would later see service during both World War I and World War II.

In 1948, Fort Sumter was decommissioned as a military post and turned over to the National Park Service as a National Historic Site and part of Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park. Tours are now available, attracting more than 750,000 visitors every year.

Sources

Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie: History & Culture. National Park Service.
Fort Sumter. American Battlefield Trust.
Fort Sumter: The Civil War Begins. Smithsonian Magazine.

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Fort Sumter: Civil War, Battle & Location | HISTORY

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Fort Sumter is an island fortification located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and is most famous for being the site of the first battle of the Civil War.

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Battle of Gettysburg: Summary, Facts & Casualties | HISTORY

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The Battle of Gettysburg, fought over three hot summer days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, is considered the most important engagement of the American Civil War. The South lost the battle—and many men—and it marked a turning point in the bloody war that left the South mostly on the defensive.

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Reconstruction and 1876: Crash Course US History #22

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November 6, 1860- Abraham Lincoln becomes President, commencing outrage from the South.

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July 1-3 1863 Around the town of Gettysburg Penn. This battle totaled the most casualties then any other battle. Resulted in a Union victory and was thought of as the turning point in the war.

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https://www.battlefields.org/

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New governments were formed in the South starting in 1865. As part of being readmitted to the Union, states had to ratify the new amendments to the Constitution

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March 11, 1861 - Confederates create their own Constitution

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northerners moved to the South during the Reconstruction to try and make money off of the rebuilding.

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He was commander of the Confederate States army. He commanded the Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. Lee was a war hero from the Mexican War. He was widely regarded as a military mind.

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On April 12th 1861, near Charleston South Carolina, Fort Sumter was fired apon by the Cenfederate States on the U.S. Army starting the Civil War.

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Kids learn about the reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. Efforts made to admit the southern states back into the Union.

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The black code happened after Lincoln died so that African American people could not vote.

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December 1860 - South Carolina secedes from the Union. More states follow pursuit and create the Confederate State of America.

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He was the General of the Union army. Grant ed the Union army to victory over the Confederacy. Grant was supervised by Abraham Lincoln. He rose through the ranks of the Union army. Later he served two terms as the U.S. president.

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It was a time of great pain and endless questions.

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He was president during this time period. He led the United States through The Civil War. When he became president he wanted to abolish slavery. Abraham gave the Gettysberg Address this same year. He steered the country through its difficulties.

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Coming Apart From the Inside: How Internal Strife Brought Down the Confederacy

By David J. Eicher

Jefferson Davis sat in his second-floor study in the Confederate White House in Richmond and stared blankly into the adjacent room. For all the hard work he had put in managing the war and difficult and disagreeable colleagues, disaster still seemed to be in the offing that fall of 1861. The papers on his desk didn't help his mood; they simply reminded him of a score of arguments about to bubble over between his generals and bureau chiefs and the icy reception with which he had recently been met by the Confederate Congress.

Jefferson Davis faced a staggering challenge: How was he to forge a true nation that could wage war against the United States from a bickering hodge-podge of states that favored keeping their own identity and whose representatives seemed to take delight in challenging his every idea?

For more than a century the politicians and generals on the Confederate side have been lionized as noble warriors who heroically fought for an honorable cause that had little chance of succeeding. In reality, the Confederate leadership was rife with infighting. Davis argued with the Confederate House and Senate, state governors and his own cabinet. Senators threatened one another with physical violence. Some were brutal drunks, others hopeless idealists who would not bend even when it meant the difference between victory and defeat. Commanders were often assigned not on the basis of skill but because of personal connections.

Debates over such issues as whether the Confederacy needed a Supreme Court dragged on, squandering time that would have been better spent on making sure the troops were well fed. Davis frequently interfered with generals in the field, micromanaging their campaigns and playing favorites, ignoring the chain of command and placing trust in men who were utterly incompetent.

Some states, led by their governors, wanted to set themselves up as separate nations, further undermining a unified war effort. Tensions were so extreme that the vice president of the Confederacy refused to live in the same state as Davis-and this while they were trying to win a war.

Davis knew his political existence and those of his colleagues had been built on the concept of states' rights. To have a chance at winning the war, however, he needed sweeping administrative and military central powers. The Confed-erate States of America needed to act as one.

The internal war between Davis and Congress erupted quickly. On Nov-ember 8, 1861, Davis' war clerk, John B. Jones, wrote in his diary, "No Executive had ever such cordial and unanimous support." By the summer of 1862, however, he reported "murmurs" against the president. Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory remarked in August how Congress seemed unhappy with Davis and that a "spirit of opposition" was growing. Meanwhile, South?Carolina Senator Lawrence Keitt openly termed Davis "a failure."

Field officers also joined in the attacks against Davis. Robert A. Toombs, a Georgia politician who had briefly served as Davis' secretary of state, was now a brigadier general hoping to win the war by killing Yankees rather than arguing in Richmond. He frequently shared his frustrations with fellow Georgian Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president, including comments like, "As [to] the assignment of Smith's regiment, [Secretary of State Judah P.] Benjamin wrote me that the President instructed him to suggest to me to call Genl. [Joseph E.] Johnston's attention to it; that he was commander of both corps of the army. I replied to Benj[amin] that I had good reasons to know that fact, 'and in common with the army, not without reasons to lament it.' I never knew as incompetent [an] executive officer. As he has been to West Point, tho', I suppose he necessarily knows everything about it. We are doing nothing here, and will do nothing. The army is dying....Set this down in your book, and set down opposite to it its epitaph, 'died of West Point.' "

A week later, Toombs turned his ire more directly toward the president. "Davis is here," he confided to Stephens. "His generals are fooling [him] about the strength of our force in order to shield their inactivity. [Davis] talks of activity on the Potomac but I fear he does not feel it strong enough to move this inert mass."

Colonel Thomas W.?Thomas of the 15th?Georgia also derided Davis, writing that "Pres. Davis was up the other day and reviewed about 12,000 troops at Fairfax Court House. There was not a single cheer, even when some one in the crowd among the staff called out for three cheers there was not a single response, everything was as cold as funeral meats."

The volatile issue of conscription soon shattered relations between Davis, Congress and the state governors. Virginia Governor John Letcher declared conscription "the most alarming stride towards consolidation that has ever occurred," but conceeded he would not fight Davis because the alternative would be ruin. Not so Georgia Governor Joe Brown, who believed that the draft was a measure aimed at destroying the states. "If the State Regiments are broken up, and the conscripts belonging to them forced into other organizations against their consent," Brown told Davis, "it will have a very discouraging effect....This Act, not only disorganizes the military system of all the States, but consolidates almost the entire military system of the State in the Confederate Executive, with the appointment of the officers of the militia, and enables him at his pleasure, to cripple or destroy the civil government of each State, by arresting, and carrying into the Confederate Service, the officers charged by the State Constitution."

Davis was incensed. "I have received your letter," he wrote Brown, "informing me of your transfer of the Georgia State troops to General [Alexander] Lawton commanding Confederate forces at Savannah suggesting that there be as little interference as possible on the part of the Confederate authorities with the present organization of those troops....Interference with the present organization of companies, squadrons, battalions, or regiments tendered by Governors of States, is specially disclaimed." So began a bitter fight.

Davis never knew where or when the next divisive issue would pop up. Governer Henry Rector of Arkansas fueled the Confederacy's internal problems, for example, when he wanted to pull his state away from the Confederacy in the summer of 1862. His state would not, Rector declared in a proclamation, "remain a confederate State, desolated as a wilderness."

Rector threatened to build "a new ark and launch it on new waters, seeking a haven somewhere, of equality, safety, and rest." Responding to Rector's proclamation, Governor Francis Lubbock of Texas wrote the president, reassuring him as best he could that support would come from the Deep South. "This is no time for bickerings, heart-burnings, and divisions among a people struggling for existence as a free Government," Lubbock wrote.

The issue persisted throughout that year, and Davis lectured Congress at the beginning of 1863 that "You can best devise the means for establishing that entire cooperation of the Sate and central governments which is essential to the well-being of both...."

His admonition fell on deaf ears, for on February 5, 1863, the Senate heard a proposed amendment to the Confederate constitution that would allow an aggrieved state to secede from the Confederacy. "It shall do so in peace," read the proposal, "but shall be entitled to its pro rata share of property and be liable for its pro rata share of public debt to be determined by negotiation." The plan was referred to the Judicial Committee. Two days later senators failed to recommend the amendment, and the idea was dropped as being too dangerous.

Sickly Vice President Alexander Stephens was another snake in the grass Davis had to deal with. Early in the war, Stephens had returned to his home in Crawfordville Ga., to conspire and orchestrate a campaign against the president. "What is wanting in Richmond is 'brains,' Howell Cobb, a Georgia general officer who had been president of the Confederate Provisional Congress and a likely candidate for Davis' job, wrote to the vice president. "I did not find the temper and disposition of Congress as bad as I expected, but there is a lamentable want of brains and good sound common sense."

Lawrence Keitt wrote his wife that he had heard "Toombs is on the stump in Geo., and is arraigning Davis in a terrible manner." He added: "I have always feared the divisions, which I saw would spring up among us. You cannot have liason-connexion [sic]-unity-among a planting community. Too many Revolutions have shipwrecked upon internal division. This Revolution proves that canonized imbecility is but a straw before the wrath of masses-it seems to be a law of humanity that generation after generation must rescue its liberties from the insidious grasp of a foe without or within. In our case, we have to seize them from both foes-we have a worthless government, and are reduced to the humiliation of acknowledging it, because we cannot, with safety, shake it."

In early 1864, senators introduced a bill to use blacks in the military, opening up another avenue of internal debate. The bill was referred to committee, and by order of the Senate leadership the committee was discharged from considering the bill on February 5. Meanwhile, in the House, William Porcher Miles, chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, reported that he believed the act to employ slaves and free blacks would increase the army by 40,000 men. John Baldwin of Virginia wanted to exempt any free blacks engaged in food production, particularly in the Shenandoah Valley.

Ethelbert Barksdale of Mississippi objected, saying that free blacks "are a blot upon our [cause], and pernicious to our slave population....[Baldwin] says to the free negro, you shall not bear the burdens of this war-while [the white citizen] must take his place in the army." After further argument and slight massaging of the language, the bill was passed. A discussion about whether or not African Americans would in fact be armed and whether slaves would be emancipated in compensation, like so many other thorny policy and military decisions the South needed to make, was deferred.

By May 1864, with a Union army driving into the Wilderness, members of Congress were thrown into a near panic, and legislators introduced a flurry of contradictory resolutions, amendments and joint agreements. Some members resolved that a congressional company be formed to go out and join the fight. Others wanted to evacuate Richmond and move the government to a place of safety. In opposition to that, a number of congressmen argued that the public needed to be kept calm, and a formal declaration should be passed that stated there was absolutely no danger.

A clutch of harried congressmen pressed to exempt those over 50 from service, a proviso that would have included many Congressmen. Another contingent of lawmakers conversely argued that everyone available would be needed to defend Richmond.

Still others took the floor to suggest that no time existed to refer any response to the Military Affairs Committee, which would only delay any action, or that Congress should rely on the president to tell it what it should do. The Confederacy's leaders were going round and round in debate while Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac pounded deeper into Virginia and William T. Sherman's legions continued to drive on Atlanta.

To make matters worse for the Southern cause that hot summer, the loyalty of state governors to the cause seemed to be splintering. The greatest trouble was growing in Georgia, where the disenchanted Stephens had set up camp.

The vice president had a friendship, not surprisingly, with a cranky anti-administration newspaper editor, Henry Cleveland, who ran the Augusta Constitutionalist. The two struck up a long, detailed correspondence in which they openly discussed what they perceived as the president's incompetence and what ought to be done about it.

The two men also discussed the idea of a peace conference. They believed such an event could wrest responsibility for conduct of the war from the hands of Davis and restore tranquility to the beleaguered South.

On June 8, Cleveland wrote Stephens: "Since my second letter to you, I have received your last, and confess that I did suppose you had hope of terms from Lincoln. For my self (from reasons I will some day give you) I am satisfied that the States can to day get terms and good terms, but Mr. Davis never can." Continued Cleveland, "No human power can change Mr. Davis, and consequently, no human power can save the Confederacy from war and speeches. I am satisfied that the immediate secession of Georgia from the Confederate States would be the best thing we could do, and am equally satisfied that nine-tenths of the people of Georgia will follow the lead of the Administration, until our cause is beyond the hand of resurrection....The Stars and Stripes will float over the Government works in Augusta before a year expires, and Mr. Davis be dead or in exile....To win this fight, under this Administration, would be a result without a reason-an effect without a cause. Is this treason? I am afraid you will think so, but it is difficult to look back at all we have suffered, and see blood and life and desperate valor thrown away, and still think calmly."

Local politics and business intervened to muzzle Cleveland's public discontent. "A letter from Henry Cleveland informs me that the majority of the stock of the Constitutionalist is now owned by Administration men," wrote Georgia Governor Joe Brown, a fellow conspirator, "and that he will be obliged to change his course, keep silent, or be ousted. Could not enough of the stock be purchased to control and keep the paper on the right lines?"

Despite the shift, more and more Southerners picked up on an increasing and tangled web of conspiracy in Georgia. "Our Vice President is a dangerous man," Brig. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman wrote his friend Louis Wigfall, a powerful anti-Davis senator, "the more so because of his stealthy policy and his bogus reputation for fairness and honesty. I consider him the head of a faction that is ready to betray the Confederacy and sell the blood of the Army. 'Crushing him out' is doing God's service."

In Richmond, meanwhile, the second session of the Second Congress of the Confederate States of America began on November 7, 1864. On that day Davis sent a long message to Congress covering many urgent points that needed to be faced. In many ways it was a last attempt for turnaround and cooperation on a variety of issues that the president felt were sinking the Confederacy if left unresolved. But Congress failed to act decisively on nearly every one of them.

The Confederacy was on its last legs as 1865 began. Siege operations around Petersburg ground on, sapping the remaining resources and supplies that could be brought to bear against the Union army. General John Bell Hood's disastrous campaign in Tennessee had effectively eliminated the Army of Tennessee from further meaningful service in the war. A combined Federal Army and Navy operation was closing in on Wilmington, N.C., the last open Confederate port, and the Lincoln administration had decisively won the election.

The Confederate Congress finally decided to act, doing something of which Davis disapproved-developing peace proposals. As early as January 12, the House passed a resolution to send a peace commission to Washington. The next day Davis reported to the House that an old nemesis, Congressman Henry Foote of Tennessee, with whom Davis had nearly once dueled, had been arrested on his way to Washington. Foote had been detained at Occoquan, Va., while trying to cross the lines on a private peace mission to the Yankee capital. A special committee was appointed to investigate Foote, and it expelled him from the house.

Once the war all but ended in April, the turmoil that had kept the Confederacy continually unsettled was missing from many histories written by Southern politicians and generals. Few wanted to face up to the fact that internal strife had contributed to the Confederacy's ruin. Soon after the Confederate surrender, Southern historians began massaging the political facts to make their leaders look better.

Those revisionists included Davis himself, who even changed the notes of his wartime secretary, Burton Harrison. Davis reworked the claim that he had been "among the keenest and most sagacious of them all in his endeavour to precipitate secession upon the country" to "in his assertion of the rights of the States under the Constitution and of the right of Secession-although the records of Congress show that he cherished the utmost devotion to the Union and consistently opposed extremists of all parties who were endeavouring to precipitate actual secession."

In his first inaugural address, Davis said he was "prophesyzing [sic] peace, but threatened that the enemies of the South would be compelled to 'smell Southern powder, and feel Southern steel.'" He slightly altered that declaration after the war by saying that he was expressing a desire to maintain peaceful relations with the states that had remained in the Union and was asserting that all the seceding states desired was "to be let alone." The threat that they would make the enemies of the South "smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel" would occur only if war were forced upon them.

Davis' postwar embellishments described a harmonious environment that never existed and ignored the bitter squabbles that took place among those who needed to cooperate in order for the Confederacy to succeed. The roll call included men such as Alexander Stephens, Henry Foote and Robert Toombs-Southern leaders who held the principles of states' rights and slavery higher than the existence of their own creation, the Confederate States of America.

This article was written by David J. Eicher and originally published in the January 2008 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!

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Information, Summary and Articles about the Confederate States during the American Civil War Confederacy Facts Confederate States South Carolina Mississippi Florida Alabama Georgia Louisiana Texas Virginia Arkansas Tennessee North Carolina Confederacy President Jefferson Davis Vice President: Alexander Stephens Conferate Capital Montgomery, Alabama (to May 1861) Richmond, Virginia (May 1861-1865) Confederacy Articles Explore articles from the ...