Essay: Through the Wilderness with Sam Grant (Abridged)
He took upon his everyman’s shoulders ultimate responsibility for saving our Nation, and he delivered—leaving us responsible for redeeming America’s promise of liberty.
Culpeper should be a national shrine.
From March to May 1864, Ulysses S. Grant made his headquarters in Culpeper, Virginia, and it was from there he planned and launched the ferocious Overland Campaign that ended the standoff along the Rapidan River and turned the momentum toward reelection for Abraham Lincoln and final military victory for Union forces in the Civil War.
If not for these events, slavery would have remained entrenched in the South for decades to come, Grant himself wouldn’t have succeeded to the Presidency in 1868, and America never could have pushed forward the nationwide moral battle for Reconstruction and civil rights that U.S. Grant personally championed from 1865 until 1877—a battle that still, to this day, after a century of stifling suppression, provides a lodestar for our Nation’s continuing collective racial reconstitution.
We in today’s America need to reanimate this history, reinvigorate the spirit of Grant, and reaffirm the moral convictions supporting our Constitution’s great civil rights mandates.
I.
After his bold and unorthodox campaign to take Vicksburg and his brilliant resupply and defense of Chattanooga against dire odds, U.S. Grant emerged from the sweating West into the clear center of President Lincoln’s vision as the singular man who could win the War in the field.
On March 2, 1864, Lincoln made Grant general in chief of all Union forces and asked the Senate to confirm him (as only the second man in history after George Washington) to the preeminent rank of Lieutenant General of the Army, a commission he received on March 9. (Winfield Scott had also been made Lieutenant General, but by brevet, or honorary, promotion.)
Lincoln—who had endured two and a half agonizing years of fitful advances and disheartening reverses on the battlefields of Virginia and Maryland, who had so often interjected himself as tabletop commander, repeatedly adjusting and countermanding the war plans of his generals, who had suffered over and over again such penetrating disappointment and frustration when one after another of his chosen commanders, battered and bloodied by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, gave up pursuit, failed to carry forward the fight, retreated backwards to reorganize and reprovision north of the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers, their military resolve, emotional confidence, and leadership capacity utterly broken and embarrassed—Lincoln finally committed to deliver himself of the crushing weight of the military burden.
In March 1864, he ceded to his new general in chief complete discretion for prosecuting the War to its conclusion—and thus Grant was entrusted to act as the final helmsman for the entire fate of the Nation.
Following brief consultations with Lincoln at the White House, Grant immediately traveled to Brandy Station in the vicinity of Culpeper, where he inspected the Army of the Potomac, more than 100,000 Federal soldiers massed in the surrounding fields, and met with its commanding general, George Meade, on March 10. He then rushed by train back to the West to huddle with his most accomplished and trusted field general, William Tecumseh Sherman, in a series of meetings on March 18-21 in Nashville, Louisville, and Cincinnati hotel rooms.
It was in those hotel sessions with Sherman that Grant sketched the general outlines of his national war strategy, the first overarching coordinated military strategy actually implemented by the Union during the War: Grant would command from the field in Virginia, accompanying Meade’s and General Ambrose Burnside’s forces to battle Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia by a relentless push southward from the Rapidan toward the Rebel capital of Richmond, while Sherman would push toward Atlanta from Chattanooga to cut the Confederacy’s railroad arteries in Georgia—a campaign that eventually included Sherman’s march to the sea and his swing northward through the Carolinas.
Returning to Culpeper on March 26, Grant set up his Virginia headquarters in a stately Federal-style brick mansion, the John Barbour house, which sat sideways at 120 West Davis Street, next to the Culpeper County Courthouse. And within the Barbour house, he and his staff prepared the detailed orders that put the wheels of the grand victory strategy in motion.
John Strode Barbour, Jr., president of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, had abandoned his home and left town to serve the cause of the Rebellion. Most of the buildings in Culpeper, in fact, had been vacated by their owners as the town’s citizens fled south to the protection of Lee’s army, and the Union command staff had occupied Culpeper as a base ever since General Meade aborted his Mine Run Campaign at the beginning of the previous December.
In the predawn darkness of Wednesday morning, May 4, 1864, U.S. “Sam” Grant (so nicknamed by his West Point mates after “Uncle Sam”) began the Overland Campaign by marching two corps of the Army of the Potomac from their camps around Culpeper down the Germanna Road toward Chancellorsville. Per Grant’s coordinated orders, that same morning, south of Chattanooga, Sherman and his forces moved into Georgia.
Grant himself rode out from the Barbour house on his large bay, Cincinnati, and from the elevation of Fort Germanna, the site of a historic colonial settlement of German immigrants, he watched the endless lines of Union infantry crossing Germanna Ford on two pontoon bridges (floating chains of boat shells, overtopped by wooden planking). A third corps, under General Hancock, crossed downstream at Ely’s Ford, and the Army’s supply train of wagons and cattle herds would begin to follow later that day, crossing in between at Culpeper Mine Ford. A fourth corps, commanded by General Burnside, remained in the rear protecting the rail lines to Washington and was to trail the Army of the Potomac over the Germanna Ford a day or two later.
Grant’s objective in crossing the Rapidan was to engage Lee’s army at the earliest opportunity but on the most advantageous ground possible, not by moving directly south from Culpeper along the Orange & Alexandria to meet Lee head-on but by sidling toward the southeast across Lee’s front and drawing Lee to him. Grant’s hope was to march his forces quickly through the dense woods of the Wilderness and then swing west, bringing a challenge from Lee somewhere in the open fields between Mine Run and Todd’s Tavern.
But alerted by scouts to Grant’s river crossing, Lee lost no time putting his forces in motion to converge on the Army of the Potomac before it could clear the Wilderness. From their bases east of Orange Court House and south of Mine Run, Lee’s troops hustled up the Orange Turnpike and the Orange Plank Road toward Wilderness Tavern, and their forward brigade confronted the advance corps of the Army of the Potomac early Thursday morning at a small clearing in the midst of the tangled woods. From there the Battle of the Wilderness exploded over two days, May 5 and 6.
The Wilderness in May 1864 was a wide stretch of second-growth forest, thick with saplings and choked with dense underbrush. The opaque curtain of woods at ground level negated the Union’s numerical advantages in troops and artillery and made the battle experience for rank-and-file soldiers a high-tension chaotic horror.
The troops groped through tangled brush and vines and furiously dug and re-dug protective trenches as the lines of battle surged and shifted. Infantry and artillery fired blindly through the leafy thicket, increasing the instances of friendly fire casualties, and much of the fighting occurred in close-range and hand-to-hand combat through sudden convulsive encounters.
Most horrible of all, the exploding shells ignited brushfires that soon developed into fast-moving blazes. Many of the wounded soldiers lying bloodied and in pain on the forest floor were engulfed by the fire and burned to death, and their terrifying cries of anguish rang out across the battle zone all night long and through the remainder of the battle.
May 6, the second day of fighting, was a close thing for the Union forces. The south (or left) side of the Union line under Hancock made an early advance westward down the Plank Road, but that advance was repulsed when the forces of Confederate General Longstreet arrived to bolster Lee, and the left side of the Union line was soon broken and turned. Late in the day, the right side up along the Germanna Road was also turned.
Through much of the afternoon at his headquarters tent just off the Orange Turnpike near Wilderness Tavern, Grant received dire reports of Rebel advances and impending collapses of the Union lines, including a frantic prediction that Lee’s forces were about to overrun the Germanna Road, exposing Grant’s supply trains to the northeast of the Wilderness and potentially cutting off his avenues of retreat. At one point, Confederate shells fell close to Grant’s tent, and he was urged to move his headquarters back to the rear.
He didn’t budge. He and Meade stayed steady and directed that the lines be held and reinforced. Burnside’s corps finally arrived in mid-afternoon and strengthened the Union’s center, and the fighting ended at nightfall in a ragged clenching standoff, overhung with smoke from the burning woods and the stench of burning flesh. Grant’s staff reported that on May 6 he smoked more of his strong cigars—at least 20—than on any other day during the War, and he whittled away at so many sticks that he put holes in his gloves.
Although the battle closed in a rough stalemate, the Federal forces had received a major bloodying, and the level of destruction was staggering. In just those first two days of clashing horror since Grant had crossed the Rapidan, the Union had lost 17,500 men.
Think about the weight of that number—Grant must have received preliminary estimates by the battle’s end, and the fullness of the losses must have been burning in his mind on the evening of the 6th. (Grant initially thought Confederate losses were even larger; Lee’s army had, in fact, suffered around 11,000 casualties, a similar proportion of his forces at hand (about 18%), though Lee had far fewer available reinforcements than Grant.)
The almost unfaceable enormity of what the Overland Campaign would require of the Union Army, in blood and destruction of tens of thousands of lives, and directly of Grant and his subordinate commanders, in terms of the most intense unrelenting concentration of will and steeled nerves, was now truly present for him and obvious.
When dusk finally came that second day of the Wilderness and the fighting had ended for the night, Grant was overcome with grief and emotion. His closest staff members accompanied him into his tent, and for the only time they could ever remember, they saw him collapse, weeping, on his cot, raw and immobilized with emotional anguish. The lonely anguish of his personal Gethsemane spilled out and gradually gave way to weariness, and within about an hour, he was sleeping.
Emerging from his tent later that night, he sat calmly and quietly at the campfire. History, the entire future course of the Nation, hung suspended in the thick acrid air, during a night that tested Grant’s steadiness and resolve even more than the night he endured after the chaos and setbacks of the first day of fighting at Shiloh.
The next morning, Saturday, May 7, after Union probing confirmed that Lee had drawn his lines back with no immediate intention of pressing the battle, Grant gave orders for the Army of the Potomac to pull out eastward, starting with the artillery battalions in the late afternoon, followed after dark the night of May 7-8 by an orderly movement of the many infantry brigades.
Because of the unyielding fierceness of Lee’s springing attacks in the Wilderness and the horrendous losses suffered so abruptly there by the Federal forces, most of the soldiers in both the Confederate and Union ranks assumed (the Rebels with prideful joy and contempt and the Federals with habitual resignation and defeatism) that Grant was executing a retreat.
They expected the Army of the Potomac to fall back through Chancellorsville and then retire north across the Rapidan, where it would return to bivouac and nurse its wounds—perhaps to reorganize under yet another new commander. Just as Meade had done after the fumble of Mine Run, Joe Hooker after the embarrassing disaster of Chancellorsville, Burnside after the bloody futile bashing of Fredericksburg, and George McClellan after his gallant Peninsula Campaign had stalled and lost its heart in the marshes east of Richmond.
Grant’s plan for the Overland Campaign, assiduously worked out in the comfort of the Barbour house, was to keep pushing his forces toward Richmond, outflanking Lee to the south and east after each engagement, receiving supplies via the inlets of the Potomac, Rappahannock, and York Rivers, and compelling Lee to maneuver his own army farther south to stay between Grant and the Confederate capital. The strategy was to grind Lee down in a series of clashes, ultimately forcing the capitulation of the Army of Northern Virginia and the surrender of Richmond.
But, as the great Mike Tyson has so eloquently reminded us, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The Battle of the Wilderness—the loss of 17,500 Union soldiers in two days—was a powerful punch in the mouth, right at the opening bell of the campaign. Every previous commander of the Army of the Potomac had lost his confidence and fighting drive when confronted with just such a painful shock. Those examples show the superhuman pressure and onus of responsibility that military commanders must internalize when they experience so much bloodshed and loss of life suffered under their orders.
History (the reality of history as experienced in pain by those living through it) had now called the question for Sam Grant.
Grant stuck to his plan. The orders he gave Meade on the morning of May 7 were not to retreat but to move the Army east toward the intersections with the Brock Road and then to turn south down the Brock Road and march the Army as quickly as possible through Todd’s Tavern toward Spotsylvania Court House, where Grant hoped to gain a strong position for the next confrontation with Lee. To reinforce his move southward, Grant ordered the pontoon bridges taken up from Germanna Ford and the establishment of supply terminals on the Potomac waterside.
When the Union troops realized in the early morning of May 8 that Grant was leading them onward toward Richmond, not back to bivouac, they broke into cheers—even though they knew this direction consigned them to the unavoidable horror of more battles like the Wilderness and the certainty of death for so many of them.
The cheers erupted again and again down the columns and caps flew in the air that morning as Grant and Meade on horseback passed by the troops as they marched southward along the dirt track of the Brock Road—the very same track Stonewall Jackson had galloped in the opposite direction one year and six days before, when he orchestrated the devastating flanking attack on the rear of Hooker’s forces in the Battle of Chancellorsville, just before receiving his fatal wound from friendly fire.
II.
Sherman declared that Grant’s decision to press on to Spotsylvania, notwithstanding the crushing blow suffered in the Wilderness, was “the grandest act of his life.” In retrospect, Sherman was not quite right: Grant’s grandest acts occurred later, during Reconstruction, but those later acts never would have come about if not for his leadership in the Wilderness.
Up in D.C., the streets of the Federal capital erupted in celebration when news arrived that Grant had moved south beyond the Wilderness, and Lincoln, deeply grateful for Grant’s resolution and perseverance in the face of the stiffest resistance, remarked that “if any other General had been at the Head of that army it would now have been on this side of the Rapidan.”
Lincoln, indeed, was right in believing that Grant was the one commander he could turn to who was capable of carrying the Overland Campaign through to its strategic objective.
The only other potential candidate with the fierce grit needed to lead such a campaign, Sherman, couldn’t have succeeded in Virginia as Grant did. As a subordinate general in the Western theater and one whose psychological stability had been questioned earlier in the War, Sherman never would have been a serious contender for such a commission in early 1864 because he wouldn’t have inspired the necessary loyalty and acceptance from the corps commanders of the Eastern Army and wouldn’t have been endorsed by Lincoln’s senior military advisers. It’s also doubtful Sherman would have had the same tactical vision and willingness to accept extreme risks that were critical to Grant’s success—as evidenced the year before, when Sherman had firmly recommended against Grant’s risky and unconventional Vicksburg Campaign, probably the most brilliant military campaign of the entire War.
Most fundamentally, Sherman couldn’t have taken ownership of the Union’s overall military effort with the same effectiveness as Grant because Sherman, unlike Grant, didn’t really believe the North could win an ultimate victory in the War—not if ultimate victory, as Lincoln and Grant now saw it, meant the elimination of slavery and the pacification of the South. Sherman was convinced that ending slavery and stamping out the slavery-based economy of the Southern States would require the Union Army to wage an all-out war in every county throughout the South, burning and destroying plantations and the structures of civil control held by the recalcitrant ruling classes of the Confederacy, and, most likely, driving into foreign exile or imprisoning two or more generations of hot-headed Southern white males and repopulating the South with abolitionist entrepreneurs from the North. Short of that, he believed, Southern white society would never capitulate. (It was, in part, Sherman’s unvarnished expression of such profound pessimism about the ultimate War effort that got him tagged as unstable.)
Along with the colossal costs of the War, the perception of an unending military stalemate on the fields of Virginia had fueled the growing pessimism that pervaded the citizenry of the North in the spring of 1864, as the Nation headed into the Presidential election season.
The Democratic opposition to Lincoln was crystallizing into two clamorous factions: the Peace Democrats, who advocated an immediate cessation of the War and the negotiation of a peace agreement on terms likely to be accepted by the South, even if that meant recognizing the independence of the Confederacy (basically a total victory for the South); and the so-called War Democrats, who favored continuing the War, at least in the near term, but only for the limited purpose of restoring the Union if possible, thus implying the indefinite perpetuation of slavery and the preservation of the South’s economic and social way of life (essentially a loss for the North in the eyes of the Republicans).
The Northern Democrats’ alternatives for compromise and capitulation were hardly far-fetched.
Just a year and a half before, in his December 1, 1862 Message to Congress, President Lincoln himself had proposed a compromise to end the War through a Constitutional amendment designed to induce the gradual abolition of slavery over a period of 37 years by promising the payment of Federal compensation for the emancipation of slaves.
Not surprisingly, Lincoln’s proposal fizzled. There wasn’t enough support in Congress to advance the recommended constitutional amendment, and the leaders of the Rebellion rejected the idea out of hand.
Believing it fundamentally immoral and contrary to the natural rights of man to treat any human being as property, most of the anti-slavery Republicans in Congress would never support the payment of compensation to former slaveholders for the freeing of slaves. A majority of the Republican caucus wouldn’t abide a compromise on slavery.
And neither would the rebelling Confederates, who believed they could hold their ground militarily until the European powers recognized the independence of the Confederacy and the Union lost its will to pursue the fight.
By May of 1864, Lincoln, like most of his fellow Republicans, had come to embrace the end of slavery and the “reconstruction” of the Southern States (a program yet to be fleshed out) as the War’s aims and was no longer openly promoting the idea of a compromise.
Nevertheless, nearly everyone, including the Radical Republicans, realized that if Lincoln lost reelection, the War would probably end by achieving even less progress toward the abolition of slavery than Lincoln had proposed in 1862.
And most everyone also understood that Lincoln had no hope of being reelected without the decided success of Grant’s ambitious military strategy.
As much as Grant’s decision of May 7, 1864 to move on toward Spotsylvania following the Battle of the Wilderness had raised spirits in the North, the public’s recoil from the costly Overland battles that followed and its impatience for a faster end to the War, combined with the growing political gloom of the Republicans, soon swept away the euphoria.
The famous dashing George McClellan, Lincoln’s own prior choice as general in chief and erstwhile face of the Union war effort, had come out very publicly as a War Democrat, and in the spring and summer of 1864 he was actively generating popular support in the North for reining in the conduct of the War and for appeasing the social and economic interests of the South, with which he sympathized. At the end of August, McClellan would accept the nomination as the Democratic Party’s candidate for President opposing Lincoln in the November election. (In hopes of countering the growing popular appeal of McClellan and the Democrats, Lincoln ran under a “National Union” banner, bringing a Democrat, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, onto the ticket as his running mate.)
By July, Grant’s forces had settled into a protracted siege of Petersburg, south of Richmond, while Jubal Early’s Rebel troopers were once again menacing the outskirts of Washington. Respected Republican leaders candidly advised Lincoln that his reelection was “impossible.”
On August 23, Lincoln was so pessimistic that he wrote a note (the so-called “Blind Memorandom,” which he folded up and sealed and had each member of his Cabinet sign on the outside without reading) acknowledging that it seemed “exceedingly probable” he and Johnson would lose the election and pledging that his administration would “so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration” the following March, since the new President “will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”
But while Grant’s action on May 7 may not have guaranteed Lincoln’s reelection, it was a necessary and enabling precondition.
Grant’s (and Sherman’s) entire strategy—thus Lincoln’s reelection bid for all practical purposes—would have been stillborn if Grant had not pressed onward from the Wilderness. Lee would have shifted additional Rebel forces to thwart Sherman’s advance in Georgia, and the public patience in the North wouldn’t have abided another reversal in Virginia. Grant’s perseverance at that critical juncture opened the gate to all that followed.
Lee, too, persevered. Once again, when he detected Grant’s movement down the Brock Road, Lee acted without delay and beat Grant to Spotsylvania Court House, where his men hurriedly built strong defensive works.
Some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the War occurred at the Mule Shoe salient and the Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania, after which Grant again swung east and south to race Lee toward the next major clash of the armies at North Anna River and then onward to the series of battles that ended in early June at Cold Harbor, just about 10 miles east-northeast of Richmond, across the marshy bottoms of the Chickahominy River.
After sacrificing waves of men against Lee’s defenses during the Battle of Cold Harbor with no advantage gained, a despondent Grant knew for certain that what he had feared was true: The Rebel Army of Northern Virginia, despite its casualties, remained bolt strong and could effectively stymie any Union advance on Richmond from the north and east.
Ruminating for several days over his predicament at Cold Harbor, Grant decided on a major phase change in his campaign—a shift in plans that depended, characteristically, on the boldest actions and the greatest risk.
Launching his cavalry toward Charlottesville and the Shenandoah to draw away Lee’s cavalry, Grant orchestrated several pivoting maneuvers to get over the Chickahominy and stealthily shift his infantry corps one last time to the southeast, then executed a stupendous and logistically brilliant crossing of the James River on June 15-17.
Many of the soldiers were ferried across the James on boats from Wilcox Landing, but much of the Army of the Potomac and its artillery and supplies crossed over an amazing 2,200-foot-long pontoon bridge, strung between Weyanoke Neck on the north bank and Flowerdew Hundred on the south, constructed by Union Army engineers in just seven hours—the longest pontoon bridge used in military history since Xerxes crossed the Hellespont.
In the concentrated six weeks of the Overland Campaign, from its launch in Culpeper on May 4, 1864 until Grant’s crossing of the James in mid-June, the Union lost 65,000 men and the Confederacy around 35,000—among the bloodiest military campaigns in American history.
But it wasn’t for nothing. Once the Rebels figured out that Grant had succeeded in moving his troops en masse to the south side of the James, they knew the Army of Northern Virginia’s defense of Richmond was doomed. On the eve of the Battle of Cold Harbor, Lee had remarked to Jubal Early that if Grant’s forces weren’t destroyed north of the James and Grant was able to get to the River, “it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”
And so it was. Once on the south bank of the James, Grant raced west to hit the Rebel forces east of Petersburg and south of Richmond and then dug in for a tight siege of Petersburg and its critical rail hub.
Come September, despite the lack of further military progress around Petersburg, Lincoln’s electoral prospects suddenly brightened. McClellan had been embarrassed, and his candidacy weakened, by the tension between his own positions as a War Democrat and the Peace Democratic planks of his party’s platform. And most decisively, the spectacular news broke in the North that on September 2, Sherman had marched victorious into Atlanta after the Rebel army abruptly vacated the city.
In the jubilation of Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, Lincoln’s reelection was assured.
With Lincoln’s victory, the Union forces advanced. By Christmas, Sherman had taken Savannah, and after a short pause, began his irresistible push into the wetlands of South Carolina, the cradle of the Rebellion.
And in the early weeks of 1865, extending into March, Grant tenaciously gnawed away at the Petersburg defenses. During this time, Lincoln visited Grant at his City Point headquarters and they discussed Lincoln’s vision for the world after the War.
Finally, on April 2, after a nine-and-a-half-month siege, Grant broke through into Petersburg. Lincoln met Grant in Petersburg on April 3, and they spent their last 90 minutes together, discussing Grant’s plans for defeating Lee and Lincoln’s desire to show leniency to the surrendering Rebel armies.
For his part, Lee had no intention of surrendering. He tried one last time to evade Grant, abandoning his defenses around the Rebel capital on the night of April 2-3 and fleeing west in a desperate effort to rendezvous with Johnston’s forces in North Carolina.
Hearing news he had despaired of ever hearing, that Richmond had fallen, Lincoln, accompanied by his son Tad, rushed to the Rebel capital by boat on April 4, and he spent a dream-like afternoon, a gift from the God of history, strolling, tall and gangly, dressed all in black with his stovepipe hat, among enthralled crowds of freed slaves on the shattered streets of Richmond. He managed, with a small military escort, to make his way on foot as far as the Confederate White House, which had been occupied two days before by Rebel President Jefferson Davis.
Ignoring Richmond for the moment, keeping his eyes fixed on his military objective, Grant dashed after what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia, harrying and penning in the Rebel troops, who were starving and growing thinner in numbers and strength by the day. Until, on April 9, 1865, Grant had them corralled, and Lee was forced to offer his surrender outside the village of Appomattox Court House.
Grant saw no need to take Lee and his exhausted men as captive prisoners of war; Lee’s surrender effectively ended the War, and, indeed, the other armies of the Confederacy that remained in the field elsewhere in the South quickly surrendered to their opposing Union commanders in the days that followed.
As much as he hated the cause for which Lee and his army had fought, Grant, consistent with Lincoln’s inclination, treated the Rebel soldiers with empathy and respect in surrender. He allowed Lee’s forces to leave freely (to be paroled on good behavior provided they laid down their weapons and pledged not to take up arms again against the Union), and he let the officers keep their sidearms and permitted many of the men to keep their personal horses, which they would need to work the fields when they returned to their homes.
Just five-and-a-half days after the surrender at Appomattox, President Lincoln was shot in Washington by a vigilante from Maryland who sympathized with the Confederacy, supported slavery, and violently opposed Lincoln’s developing ideas for Reconstruction of the South and citizenship rights for freed slaves. The next day, April 15, Lincoln died, and Andrew Johnson became President.
III.
At the time of the first great battle of the Civil War, the First Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, Wilmer and Martha McLean resided in a plantation home in the vicinity of Manassas, where they found themselves caught up in the battle. A portion of the fighting spilled across their property, and Rebel General Beauregard used their home as his headquarters before a Union shell burst down the chimney into the kitchen.
After that brush with fire, the McLeans relocated 150 miles south to a large brick house located on farmland near the county seat of Appomattox, where Wilmer could peacefully ply his trade as a provisioner to the Rebel armies. Three years, eight months, and 19 days after First Bull Run, the War came knocking on their door again, and it ended in their front parlor.
After the War, Wilmer McLean defaulted on his debts, and his Appomattox house was sold at public auction in 1869. Eventually, in the 1890s, the McLean “Surrender House” was purchased by speculators who had it carefully dismantled with the intention of reconstructing it in Washington and charging an admission fee. That plan fell through, but pieces of the house were preserved on site and it was later rebuilt by the National Park Service and is maintained as a national historical monument.
U.S. Grant’s home in Galena, Illinois was also preserved, as was Lee’s house, the former Custis-Lee Mansion in Arlington, Virginia (now called “Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial,” a National Park Service property). And Stonewall Jackson’s house in Lexington, Virginia is a historical museum open to visitors today. And so with George Washington’s winter headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, and hundreds of other historic structures of significance to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.
But not Grant’s Culpeper headquarters. It remained intact for 44 years after hosting Grant and the launch of the Overland Campaign, but the Barbour house was torn down in 1908. How was that allowed to happen? Who made the decision to let the Barbour house be demolished instead of preserved as a landmark, especially when it had already survived so long after the end of the War?
The Barbour house was demolished at a time when pro-Confederacy revisionist historians, exemplified by William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University, were at the height of their influence across American academia. The so-called “Dunning School” of scholars taught that Reconstruction was an illegitimate, corrupt, and politically ruinous program concocted by the Radical Republicans to wreak vengeance on the white Southerners who had rebelled against the Union and to oust them from power unjustly by military force—military force directed and supervised by U.S. Grant.
Even by the summer of 2021 in Culpeper, no plaque or marker commemorated the site of Grant’s headquarters. Instead (I kid you not), there stood a large monument to Confederate soldiers on the very property once occupied by the Barbour house:
This monument was erected by Confederate veterans in 1911, and its placement on the site of the Barbour house next to the county courthouse on West Davis Street could not have been a coincidence. Hard to fathom why it wasn’t taken down years ago and replaced with a prominent marker commemorating Grant and the importance of the Overland Campaign.
The Museum of Culpeper History, located by the town’s railroad station, offers displays on, among other things, local Indian culture, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War period, highlighting Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and “Gallant” John Pelham, a young artillery officer in J.E.B. Stuart’s corps of Lee’s army who was wounded in a nearby battle and died in Culpeper in March 1863. There are no displays on Grant or his use of the Barbour house as his headquarters.
Culpeper’s official “History of the Town,” a paper adopted and made part of the town’s Comprehensive Plan in March 2002 (based on a master’s thesis submitted by Genevieve Keller to the University of Virginia in 1975), does include a quick reference to Grant’s time in the Barbour house in advance of the Battle of the Wilderness and the bivouacking of the Union Army, which, according to local tradition, it says, “denuded” the countryside of firewood for 20 miles around. But the paper places these events in the middle of what it terms “the Federal Occupation of 1863/64.” And the Civil War section of the paper closes with a full-page parlor portrait photo of Culpeper’s favorite son, Rebel General A.P. Hill.
The town also commemorates the famous Culpeper Minute Men, a local militia battalion of riflemen formed on July 17, 1775 that marched under a white and black flag depicting a rattlesnake with the words “Liberty or Death” and “Don’t Tread on Me.”
The Minute Men joined the Virginia Patriot militia commanded by William Woodford and saw action in early engagements of the Revolutionary War, including the December 1775 Battle of Great Bridge in Chesapeake, where the Patriots succeeded in driving the British Governor and his troops out of Virginia. (Many of the Patriots were particularly incensed with the Governor for issuing a proclamation offering freedom to any slave in Virginia who would fight for the British.) The future Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, was a member of the Minute Men and fought at Great Bridge.
There’s a monument along a nature trail in Culpeper’s Yowell Meadow Park marking the very spot where the Minute Men first organized under a large oak tree in what was then known as “Clayton’s Old Field,” a spread of open bottomland just west of Mountain Run.
The original battalion disbanded in early 1776 and its members joined other units in the Continental Army.
But in 1860, with the potential for a secessionist conflict looming, a group of locals met again at the same spot under the same oak tree to revive the Culpeper Minute Men under the same rattlesnake flag. After Virginia voted to secede from the Union and war broke out in April 1861, the reconstituted Minute Men mustered into a Rebel infantry company and fought for the Confederacy throughout the Civil War.
In 1861-1862, Clayton’s Old Field became a recruiting and training camp for the Rebel army called “Camp Henry”—named after Patrick Henry, father of the rallying cry “Give me liberty or give me death,” who had stood opposite John Marshall and James Madison at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in June 1788 and argued against ratification of the U.S. Constitution because of concerns that the new Federal Government could usurp the legal rights of citizens protected by State law, including property rights in slaves.
On October 24, 2020, the Town of Culpeper and Foundation Forward, a non-profit educational organization, held a ceremony in Yowell Meadow Park to dedicate Virginia’s first “Charters of Freedom Monument” (the 32nd such monument placed by Foundation Forward).
The monument is a large impressive set of brick and concrete display cases enclosing thick bronze plates on which are etched full-scale replicas of the Declaration of Independence, the original Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, just as you would see the parchment versions on display in the Rotunda of the Charters of Freedom in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. And next to the monument in Yowell Meadow Park is a new polished granite marker honoring the original Culpeper Minute Men of 1775-1776.
The Charters of Freedom Monument does not include the Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution (also known as the Reconstruction Amendments): the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, which abolishes slavery for all time in the United States; the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which guarantees equality of rights for all citizens of the United States, including former slaves, as well as due process and equal protection of the laws for all persons residing within our Nation; and the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, which protects the right to vote of all U.S. citizens regardless of race, color, or status as a former slave.
Back in 1861, the Rebels, too, put forward their own putative charter of freedom. When representatives of the secessionist States met in convention in Montgomery, Alabama in March of that year, they adopted what they called the “Constitution of the Confederate States of America.” The Rebel charter was identical in nearly all respects to the U.S. Constitution of 1787 (plus the first twelve Amendments) except for certain telling modifications.
Many of the constitutional modifications adopted by the Rebels were structural reforms designed to limit further the power of the central government and enhance States’ powers relative to the original Constitution, and most of these reforms had long been under discussion and did not originate in the minds of the secessionists.
But the most significant changes adopted in the CSA Constitution were those specifically designed to preserve and promote the institution of “negro slavery” and to protect the property interests of slaveholders. These changes would have resolved the major slavery issues left open at the framing of the original U.S. Constitution decisively in the South’s favor.
Considering the various modifications approved at Montgomery, taken altogether, it’s evident that the CSA Constitution provides conclusive documentary proof that the prime motivation for the Southern States to secede from the Union and the reason they started the Rebellion and fought so tenaciously to advance the cause of the Confederacy (thus the reason the entire Civil War happened) was slavery.
As Lincoln said in his December 1862 Message to Congress, “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.”
IV.
When the U.S. Constitution was ratified, there were more than 700,000 slaves of African descent in the United States, and they constituted nearly 18% of the total population as counted in the first U.S. census of 1790 (more than 39% of the population of Virginia and more than 32% of Maryland). On the eve of the Civil War, as reported in the 1860 census, the population of slaves totaled 3,950,000, representing more than 32% of the population of the slaveholding States and 12.5% of the total U.S. population.
It is owing to these many Americans, who endured generations without freedom, whose progeny survived the brutal yoke of slavery, that America grew as a racially and culturally diverse nation from its very beginnings. And out of that endurance and survival through bondage and beyond, the descendants of slaves in America have made essential contributions to the vibrant and original fabric of the Nation.
The Union victory in the Civil War and the adoption of the Reconstruction Amendments ushered in the first real opportunity in our history to inaugurate true equal rights for the former slaves and their descendants.
Toward that goal, after Lincoln’s shocking murder (the first assassination of an American President), U.S. Grant took charge of implementing Reconstruction.
As directed by the Republican-controlled Congress, ten of the former Confederate States were placed under the governance of the much-reduced United States Army through military departments, and during the remainder of what would have been Lincoln’s second term in office, under the Presidency of Andrew Johnson, Grant supervised the War Department’s Reconstruction mandate, both as general in chief and for a while as Acting Secretary of War (after Johnson removed the Republican Stanton, an action that gave rise to Johnson’s impeachment).
Grant chose the generals who oversaw the governing military departments and personally directed their actions. Through the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Federal Government assisted former slaves with housing, food, education, and labor opportunities, and Grant deployed the Army as necessary to protect the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau and in response to riots and massacres of blacks perpetrated by former Rebels.
In 1866, over Johnson’s veto, the Republicans in Congress enacted a “Civil Rights Act” to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment (later reenacted to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment) that declared that all citizens of the United States, including former slaves, shall enjoy the same basic rights of citizenship under State law without regard to race or color.
Under the protective supervision of Grant’s Army, elections were held in the former Confederate States, and blacks were able, for the first time in history, to participate effectively as voters and candidates. Many blacks were elected to the reconstructed State Legislatures and appointed to State offices, and several were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and appointed to the U.S. Senate by the new State Legislatures.
Grant was viewed by most Northerners and universally by black Americans as the heir to Lincoln, as the essential man who had orchestrated the defeat of the Confederacy, and as the savior and protector of freedmen. He was also viewed favorably by a good number of Southerners and Democrats for the equable and dignified way he had treated Lee and his Rebel army at Appomattox. As a consequence, Grant was elected President in 1868 with a strong popular mandate. In 1872, he was reelected by a landslide.
As President, Grant led the advancement of Reconstruction and championed the cause of civil rights for former slaves.
In several Southern States, Rebel veterans and insurgents had organized an armed resistance to Reconstruction, including thousands acting under the trappings of the Ku Klux Klan who resorted to violence and nighttime terrors to prevent black citizens from voting, running for public office, serving on juries, and exercising other rights of citizenship enjoyed by whites.
To strengthen his hand in responding to this organized resistance, Grant worked with Congress to establish the U.S. Department of Justice in 1870 and to pass the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, three laws enforcing the Reconstruction Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. One of the three Enforcement Acts, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, authorized Grant to prosecute those who conspired to suppress civil rights and to suspend habeas corpus where necessary to address the insurgency.
Grant made aggressive use of these new statutory authorities. He suspended habeas corpus in nine counties of South Carolina in October 1871, and he deployed his Attorney General, Amos Akerman, along with U.S. Marshals supported by the Army, to bring the Klansmen to justice. Working with amazing dedication and intensity in a period of just a few months, Akerman and the Justice Department succeeded in indicting thousands of insurgents across the South, including nearly 500 in South Carolina.
Through these and other efforts, Grant broke the back of the Klan, and record numbers of blacks were able to vote in elections throughout the South.
Like Lincoln before him, Grant saw Reconstruction as a moral imperative for the Nation—as the necessary last campaign beyond Appomattox, critical for securing the benefits of citizenship to the millions freed from slavery through the great sacrifices of the Union War victory and to their descendants. Grant’s personal commitment to Reconstruction as a national priority and his active leadership in carrying forward these policies were his shining legacy as President.
In the end, to the shame of the United States, the program of Reconstruction lasted only as long as Grant’s Presidency.
Worn down by a deep economic recession in 1873, by several political corruption scandals, and by the persistent complaints of white Southerners about Northern interference in their affairs, most Americans grew fatigued with what seemed like a never-ending coda to the Civil War, and as Sherman had predicted, the majority in the North lost the will to carry on the battles necessary to achieve full civil rights for freed slaves.
With the election of 1874, the Democrats gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time since before the War, and by the election of 1876, it was clear that Reconstruction would not continue once Grant, the unifier, left office. Among other political realities, the Democratic majority in the House would no longer appropriate the funds needed to deploy Federal troops to protect the civil authority of Reconstruction governments.
Reflecting this national mood, the Presidential election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, the Governor of Ohio, and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, the Governor of New York, was tightly contested.
Tilden won the popular vote but failed to gain a clear electoral college majority; he had 184 uncontested electoral votes to Hayes’s 165, with 185 required for victory. The outcome turned on 20 disputed electoral votes—those from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana and one from Oregon. There were claims of electoral fraud and intimidation of black voters in the three Southern States, and each of the States with disputed votes submitted two competing electoral tallies to Congress. Hayes needed all 20 of the disputed votes to gain the Presidency; Tilden needed only one.
With Grant’s approval, on January 29, 1877, Congress created a special Electoral Commission, which voted 8 to 7 (along party lines) to award the disputed electoral votes to the Republican Hayes. But the Democrats in Congress threatened to block the counting of the electoral votes and delayed the resolution of the election through filibusters and adjournments in the House.
Finally, in the early hours of Friday morning, March 2, 1877, just three days before Inauguration Day, the Democratic Speaker of the House ended the filibusters and allowed the vote to conclude after Hayes let it be known that he would agree to remove the remaining Federal troops from the Louisiana and South Carolina Statehouses and allow the restoration of local control in the South, provided the restored governments pledged to respect the civil rights of all citizens. Hayes was declared the winner and sworn into office.
As soon as the Southern Democrats regained control in their States, they acted in disregard of any pledges made: They quickly imposed voter qualification requirements that effectively disenfranchised most blacks, flouting the Fifteenth Amendment; they adopted “Jim Crow” laws and local policies that expressly required pervasive racial segregation throughout Southern society; and they permitted and encouraged, through the systematic withholding and failure of State civil rights enforcement, private vigilante groups like the Klan to combine and conspire to deprive blacks of the privileges and immunities enjoyed by white citizens.
Every one of these discriminatory enactments, segregationist policies, and failures of State enforcement violated the plain terms of the Federal civil rights laws and of the Fourteenth Amendment by abridging the rights of citizenship on the basis of race and color or by denying blacks the equal protection of State laws.
President Hayes continued to support Federal civil rights enforcement as a national policy and succeeded by veto in preventing Congress from repealing the civil rights acts, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, but the Democratic majority in the House refused to appropriate the money required for effective Federal enforcement of these laws.
Reconstruction as an active enforcement program of the Federal Government was over. And for black citizens in the South, the demise of Reconstruction was followed by nine grinding decades of disenfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation, and vigilante repression unconstrained (if not encouraged) by local law enforcement.
It was to this history—the contested electoral college process of 1876-1877 and the baneful decades of racial repression that came in its wake—that Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina so trenchantly referred in his powerful floor speech to the Senate on the night of January 6, 2021.
V.
Today, looking back, the Reconstruction Era is often minimized as a sorry failure, a brief interlude of action and resolve by Grant and the Radicals that was soon overwhelmed by an opposing tidal wave of popular animosity. That perspective seems to be reflected in the permanent exhibition layout of the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where Reconstruction is given only compressed treatment in the Museum’s permanent exhibitions, constricted into a short set of wall panels running along a ramp between two floors. (In September 2021, to its credit, the Museum opened an expanded exhibit on Reconstruction in its special exhibitions space, but that exhibit is only scheduled to remain in place until August 2022 and, in any event, focuses almost entirely on the broken promises and futilities of Reconstruction.)
It’s certainly true that the national cause of civil rights for black Americans took a major step backwards with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, and the ground abruptly lost that year was not regained for nearly 90 years, until the tide turned with passage of the comprehensive Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But the Civil War Amendments, the principles and policies animating Reconstruction, the civil rights laws Congress enacted during that period, the executive actions taken by Grant to implement those laws and carry forward the principles, and the courageous efforts and risks taken to advance the policies by countless Americans in the 1860s and 70s, like Amos Akerman and the U.S. Marshals, the workers of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and those brave citizens, black and white, Northern and Southern, who jeopardized their lives to serve the Reconstruction governments of the South—none of these was in any way a sorry failure.
All of them inspired and are reflected (if you will, they are recharged and resurrected) in the civil rights statutes of the 1960s (even in the precise words and phrases and concepts incorporated in those laws) and in many of the enforcement actions and policies pursued to advance the rights these statutes enshrine.
How shall we, in 21st-century America, tend the flame of this inspiration and carry forward the legacy of U.S. Grant’s victory in the Overland Campaign, his faithful stewardship of Lincoln’s vision, and his firm and undaunted leadership of the Reconstruction program?
Based on the unique history of America and the central place that slavery has played in that history—including the cataclysmic national War to abolish slavery, the fight for Reconstruction and civil rights for freed slaves, and the hundred-plus-year up-and-down journey in pursuit of effective enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments—the extent to which we realize true equal liberty for the descendants of slaves in relation to all other citizens of the United States is a fit and proper measure of America’s progress toward freedom.
Of all Americans, the African American descendants of freed slaves have known historically the most pernicious and persistent barriers to full and free participation in the mainstream of American commerce and society. Others in the melting pot of America, including generations of destitute and persecuted immigrants who came to this Nation from overseas in great waves after the Civil War, had the opportunity (often begrudgingly given and with no mercy shown) to fight and claw and compete their way into the mainstream. But black Americans have had a very different experience.
As tough a challenge as any population of immigrants has had breaking into mainstream life in America, black Americans have had it much harder. So much suffering, so much suppression, hatred, and denial of rights, so many brutal challenges, so much to bear and so much to overcome. And for so many that burden has been compounded by the disgraceful lack of will among our public leaders to provide real security on the streets of many inner-city neighborhoods through effective and well-resourced local community policing.
As proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence, the United States is founded on the presumption that all people are endowed equally by nature with basic human rights, and the Constitution, as finally perfected by the Civil War Amendments, dedicates our Nation to achieving equality among all Americans in the recognition and protection of those rights. Under these Constitutional principles, all race-based favoritism, as well as favoritism based on color, religion, and nationality, is rejected. Our public institutions at all levels of government, Federal, State, and local, are charged with ensuring that all our citizens have the same legal rights and that all persons receive the equal protection of the laws.
Our Constitution and laws, as interpreted and applied, must be colorblind (and blind to race, religion, and ethnicity), and, as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. preached, our goal must be that all of America’s children will be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
However far we have to go to achieve that goal, we must maintain an unwavering commitment as a Nation to abolishing all intentional racism in the civil life of our Republic.
Our national commitment to equal rights under law should also translate into policies and programs that support the economic independence and self-secure autonomy of all Americans, including African Americans. We should avoid or end policies and programs that encourage over-dependence on government support or that weaken families and community structures or constrain the free economic choice of individuals through paternalistic conditions.
Any policy of so-called “racial equity” that promotes or is based on the idea that governing bodies should distribute benefits or privileges by reference to racial or ethnic groups or by reference to the demographic breakdown of the larger community should not be tolerated. Such a policy is anathema to the principle of equality under law.
And because they necessarily imply a racist assumption—that some people are unable to compete equally (in other words, are unequal) by virtue of their membership in one or another racial or ethnic group—such policies of “racial equity” carry the very real danger of deepening racial and ethnic animosities within our society and (what is even more unforgivable) of instilling such animosity in new generations of Americans. They will only set back the prospects of social justice and harmony and will fuel the fires of racial resentment and hatred that destroy so much human potential, deny the blessings of liberty, and betray the promise of republican citizenship for which our Nation was established and to which it was rededicated in the Civil War Amendments.