Guts & Glory: The American Civil War

Introduction

WITH HIS TEETH CLENCHED AND HIS EYES resolutely fixed on the imposing walls of the Confederate fort looming in front of him, Color Sergeant Alexander Campbell of the Seventy-Ninth New York Volunteer Infantry gripped a heavy, nine-foot-tall wooden staff proudly bearing the flag of the United States of America and raced ahead as fast as his legs could carry him, charging through the humid, sun-drenched swamplands of Secessionville, South Carolina, toward the enemy. Somehow ignoring the hail of bullets ripping past his head, Campbell bravely led a sea of blue-coated Union soldiers hurtling through the ankle-deep marsh, their rifled muskets brandishing steel bayonets that glinted menacingly in the sunlight. Even as many of his comrades fell around him, Campbell forged ahead. When he reached the wooden walls of the Rebel fort, Campbell clambered his way up, slugged a defender with a crushing blow from his staff, and planted the bullet-riddled Stars and Stripes on the parapet, screaming for his men to follow him.

Atop the walls, the Confederate defenders of Secessionville rushed to counter the Union breach, battling the Federal onslaught with everything they had available. One fearsome warrior from the First South Carolina Infantry Battalion already had his weapon obliterated by an enemy bullet, but this wasn't about to stop him. He ran up to the parapet, saw a group of Federals charging toward him, and shoved a big log off the ledge, knocking the Yankees back into the swampland below. Suddenly attacked by another Union trooper at the top of the wall, the now unarmed Rebel dodged a bayonet thrust, grabbed his opponent's rifle, ripped it from his hands, and shot him with his own gun.

This Confederate soldier's name was James Campbell. He was Union flag bearer Alexander Campbell's big brother. Two men, related by blood, fighting a life-or-death struggle on opposite sides of the same battle.

How does something like this happen? In the United States, of all places?

Countless volumes and entire chapters of boring textbooks have been devoted to describing the causes of the "American Civil War of Northern Aggression Between the States" down to every single nauseating detail from a day-by-day re-creation of Bleeding Kansas to a description of the type of underwear Abraham Lincoln was wearing at his presidential inauguration ceremony. The short answer is that the war was fought over slavery, but that doesn't quite cover it. In actuality, the vast majority of Confederate troops fought for the South even though they never owned a single slave, and many Union soldiers were ultra-passionate about enlisting and fighting for their cause even though the institution of slavery wasn't formally abolished in the United States until after the war had already been going on for almost three years.

So what the heck was this all about, then?

To say that the events leading up to the presidential election of 1860 were pretty intense would be like saying that swan-diving into an active volcano is kind of a bad idea. Basically, the United States at this time was about as divided as you could get. In the South, wealthy plantation owners utilized millions of black slaves, many of whom were kept under incredibly harsh, unforgivably barbaric conditions, to harvest their tobacco and cotton crops, which were then shipped to the ultra-industrial North for massive profit. The Southern elite were constantly worried that some uppity Yankee politician was going to deprive them of their so-called "right" to exploit free labor for profit, so they made it their mission to expand slavery into the territory the United States gained after its war with Mexico as a means of protecting their plantations. The industrial Northern states, which had already outlawed slavery as cruel and unusual punishment, naturally tried to block this at all costs. The results were intense political tension, a handful of gunfights in border towns, and a whole lot of bad blood between North and South.

All this came to a head in the presidential election of 1860, when the ardently antislavery Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, defeated Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and a couple of other dudes and was elected the sixteenth president of the United States. Lincoln, who was so hated in the South that he didn't even appear on the ballot in ten states, swept the Northern electoral vote, ultimately receiving 39.8 percent of the national popular vote, and was elected to office.

This was the last straw for the South. Seven states seceded from the Union immediately, forming the Confederate States of America. They seized US forts and arsenals, created their own government, and elected Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis to serve as their president.

This move set the United States spiraling into a firestorm that would rip the country in half and lead to the bloodiest war in American history. Lincoln, determined to keep the Union together, put out a call for volunteers to fight and defend America from these dangerous Rebels who would dare to break it apart. Union newspapers declared death to the traitors, and all across the North, patriots rallied to the Stars and Stripes, eager to preserve the United States as one country, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Well, this call to arms wasn't heeded as well in some of the Southern states, many of which weren't down with fighting a war against their fellow Southerners. As the North prepared for war, four more states refused to raise arms for the Union and seceded, their governments putting out a similar request for men to come to the aid of the South. Southerners—many of them poor farmers who never owned slaves themselves but whose loyalty lay with their home state and not the Federal government—flocked to the Confederate banner and prepared to do battle with an army they perceived as an invading force seeking to unconstitutionally impose its will on the South.

The battle lines had been drawn—twenty-one heavily populated Northern industrial states against eleven rural Southern states. The Union had the manpower, industry, railroads, and infrastructure to outnumber and outproduce the agrarian South, but they would be fighting on enemy soil against a determined foe. The Confederacy had the advantage of fighting on their home turf against an invading army, and had much more experienced generals. They also still held out hope that the great European powers—England and France, both of which depended very heavily on Southern cotton exports to keep their economies running—might come to their aid and help them defeat the US forces and preserve their newfound independence.

The first shots of the Civil War were fired on April 12, 1861, when South Carolina coastal artillery batteries shelled the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, off the coast of Charleston. The Confederates bombed the fort for about a day and a half before it surrendered, the only fatalities being two Union dudes who accidentally blew themselves up after the battle was already over, but everyone got the point and they were pretty much just pumped up that it was finally time to stop talking and start fighting.

The stage was now set for a war that would pit brother against brother and tear the entire country apart.

What happened next would claim more lives than every previous American war combined and redefine the United States of America forever.

The Union included the states of Maine, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, California, and Oregon. Abraham Lincoln was their president. West Virginia and Nevada became states during the course of the Civil War (West Virginia was specifically formed from a portion of Virginia that opted not to secede) and entered on the side of the Union.

Author's Note

THE CIVIL WAR IS IN MY BLOOD. I HAVE EIGHT ancestors on my father's side alone who served with Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia, all of them rural, non-slaveholding Virginia farm boys. Of these eight, all of whom enlisted in time to serve in the Battle of First Manassas, three didn't return after setting out on Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg; three more were taken prisoner at Sayler's Creek, and, of those three, one died in prison two months after the war was already over. One was pardoned at Appomattox (his discharge paperwork hangs in my living room); the other was wounded in the head and hand at Gettysburg and didn't make it back into action until the end of the war. My mother's side claims some tangential descent from Joseph E. Johnston that I've never been able to document, but the war is embedded in my genetic code on that side too—my mother's family farm is a landmark on maps of the Battle of Sayler's Creek and is visible in photographs of the battlefield from 1865.

I have studied the Civil War intensely all my life, and in my fifteen years off and on as a Civil War reenactor wearing both Confederate gray and Union blue, I've fought as part of Wheat's Tigers, Forrest's Cavalry, Sheridan's Raiders, and the Army of Northern Virginia, been killed in Pickett's Charge twice, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Sherman's troops at Resaca, been blown up charging Confederate artillery alongside the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts at the Battle of Olustee, and—I kid you not—had a full-blooded Seminole Indian run up out of nowhere and whack me in the head with a rubber tomahawk in front of hundreds of spectators.

This stuff is what I live for.

As a man who has the South in his veins but also loves the United States of America with all his heart, I can understand exactly why men of both sides would fight and die for their respective causes in this war. As such, in writing this book I have attempted to present courageous heroes and cowardly villains from both sides equally, showing each in their full glory without trying to pull any punches whatsoever. In each chapter I have attempted to pick a point of view and run with it full-throttle, concerning myself primarily with highlighting why these men and women fought and what exactly they accomplished, rather than attempting to inject some annoying political statement or any of that garbage. These are the stories. I encourage you to dig deeper, read the primary sources, and draw your own conclusions.

These stories are presented in chronological order, from the war's first battle to its last. Rather than settling on just the "greatest hits," I've tried to find a good mix of different people, battles, and events, each with their own feel and flavor, to show exactly how diverse this war could be, and tie them all together into a narrative that brings the reader along for the ups and downs of the darkest, bloodiest, and most defining moment in American history.