In 1862, McClellan led the army down Chesapeake Bay to the James Peninsula, southeast of the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. During this campaign, he exhibited the timidity and sluggishness that later doomed him.
Historians who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement placed slavery and emancipation at the center of the Civil War. This trend is now reflected in textbooks and popular culture. The Civil War today is generally seen as a necessary and ennobling sacrifice, redeemed by the liberation of four million slaves.
The Civil War Trust's own Clayton Butler recently had the opportunity to sit down with one the most distinguished scholars in the field of Civil War history – Dr. Gary Gallagher of the University of Virginia.
Virtually no one paid much attention to the Gettysburg Address during the Civil War. Very few newspapers paid much attention to it, only the tiniest part of the loyal population paid much attention to it. Edward Everett seemed to like it!
Aftermath. The Peninsula Campaign had two primary outcomes. The first was that Lee replaced Johnston as Army of Northern Virginia commander. Confederate fortunes in the East changed dramatically, with Lee winning several battles and even in defeat keeping his army intact for almost three years.
The Battle of Richmond is classified by most Civil War scholars as the most complete Confederate victory of the entire war, and it is the only example during the war of the Federal force “ceasing to exist” and the end of the battle.
Richmond, Virginia served as the capital of the Confederate States of America for almost the whole of the American Civil War. It was a vital source of weapons and supplies for the war effort, and the terminus of five railroads.
Initiated by Union Major General George B. McClellan, the purpose of the Peninsula Campaign was to advance on and capture the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, via the Virginia Peninsula situated between the James and York rivers.
Richmond, Virginia, was the capital of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. While it is most notably known for being the South's political capital, Richmond transformed as a city throughout the course of the war from an agricultural town to an industrial powerhouse.
Confederates burned Richmond, Virginia, their capital, before it fell to Union forces in April 1865.
Beginning early on the morning of September 17, 1862, Confederate and Union troops in the Civil War clash near Maryland's Antietam Creek in the bloodiest single day in American military history. The Battle of Antietam marked the culmination of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the Northern states.
April 2, 1865On the morning of Sunday April 2, 1865 Confederate lines near Petersburg broke after a nine month seige. The retreat of the army left the Confederate capital of Richmond, 25 miles to the north, defenseless.
The Union victoryBy mid-afternoon, Confederate troops had begun to evacuate the town. The Union victory ensured the fall of Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, located just twenty-five miles north of Petersburg.
How did it change Union goals? Although the Peninsula campaign was a defeat for Lincoln, for anti-slaverites it was a win. By Lee effectively defending Richmond, he ensured that the war would continue until slavery was abolished. The Union now looked towards total war.
The Peninsula Campaign was the Union's grand plan for victory early on in the war. The basis of this plan was to capture Richmond so as to stop the war as early as possible. Robert E. Lee was the commander of the Confederate Army.
Peninsular Campaign, (April 4–July 1, 1862), in the American Civil War, large-scale but unsuccessful Union effort to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Va., by way of the peninsula formed by the York and the James rivers.
The Civil War Trust's own Clayton Butler recently had the opportunity to sit down with one the most distinguished scholars in the field of Civil War history – Dr. Gary Gallagher of the University of Virginia. He shared his thoughts on the state of current Civil War scholarship and the compelling nature of Civil War history for scholars and the general public alike. As Dr. Gallagher make clear, the field of Civil War history has only strengthened as it has expanded, and continues to be heir to an extraordinarily rich tradition of first-rate scholarship and research.
Another one that has proved very tenacious is that the Confederacy failed because of internal causes – because of tensions over class and race and gender ; that there was no real Confederate national sentiment. That has been part of the scholarly literature for a very, very long time.
Prior to the 1960s, just a handful of books dealt with women, black people, or poorer white people—the “plain folk” or yeomanry. Bell Wiley was a pioneer in that regard, taking both common white people and black people seriously when most academics didn’t.
If the United States hadn’t won the war, then historians would have looked at all the internal tensions north of the Potomac, and would have pulled to the fore all of the ways in which the loyal states were incredibly divided. There’s nothing equivalent to the New York City draft riots in the Confederacy.
That’s something we’d already sort of known, that someone born in the late 1830s was less likely to think well of people in the other section – whether you’re a Northerner or a Southerner--because you’d never known any time that wasn’t filled with sectional conflict.
Well, it’s the best way to understand the war if you don’t really want to understand the war, would be my response. There were millions of men under arms, and not very many of them were guerrillas.
You can’t understand the Civil War – you can only pretend to - without really understanding military affairs. Harpers Weekly devoted eighty percent of its covers to military affairs during the war. It’s just interesting how many people teach the war without the war in it – but it’s very common.
On September 17, 1862, McClellan and Lee battled to a standstill along Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland. Lee retreated back to Virginia and McClellan ignored Lincoln’ surging to pursue him. For six weeks, Lincoln and McClellan exchanged angry messages, but McClellan stubbornly refused to march after Lee.
In late October, McClellan finally began moving across the Potomac in feeble pursuit of Lee, but he took nine days to complete the crossing. Lincoln had seen enough. Convinced that McClellan could never defeat Lee, Lincoln notified the general on November 5 of his removal.
A tortured relationship ends when President Abraham Lincoln removes General George B. McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan ably built the army in the early stages of the war but was a sluggish and paranoid field commander who seemed unable to muster the courage to aggressively engage Confederate General Robert E. Lee ’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Lincoln removes General McClellan from Army of the Potomac. A tortured relationship ends when President Abraham Lincoln removes General George B. McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac.
McClellan was a promising commander who served as a railroad president before the war. In the early stages of the conflict, troops under McClellan’ s command scored several important victories in the struggle for western Virginia.
Lincoln summoned “Young Napoleon,” as some called the general, to Washington, D.C., to take control of the Army of the Potomac a few days after its humiliating defeat at the Battle of First Bull Run, Virginia in July 1861.
Winning one of the closest elections in U.S. history, Republican challenger Richard Nixon defeats Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Because of the strong showing of third-party candidate George Wallace, neither Nixon nor Humphrey received more than 50 percent of the popular vote; ...read more
Providing a sense of relief to white Southerners who feared being dishonored by defeat, the Lost Cause was largely accepted in the years following the war by white Americans who found it to be a useful tool in reconciling North and South.
The 1964 edition of Virginia: History, Government, Geography by Francis Butler Simkins, Spotswood Hunnicutt Jones, and Sidman P. Poole was not much different. “A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes,” the authors wrote.
The Lost Cause is an interpretation of the American Civil War (1861–1865) that seeks to present the war, from the perspective of Confederates, in the best possible terms. Developed by white Southerners, many of them former Confederate generals, in a postwar climate of economic, racial, and social uncertainty, the Lost Cause created ...
In 1870 two pivotal events shaped the way the Lost Cause would evolve in the coming decades. First, after five years of military occupation, on January 26, 1870, the commonwealth of Virginia was readmitted to the United States of America and American troops were withdrawn from the state.
The Southern Historical Society begins publication of the Southern Historical Society Papers in which the SHS defends nearly every aspect of Confederate action during the Civil War, addressing topics such as secession, battlefield performance, and the treatment of prisoners of war. April 1883.
In 1866 Pollard published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, a justification of the Confederate war effort, prompting the popular use of the term.
Two competing men’s organizations formed to eulogize Lee: the Lee Memorial Association of Lexington and the Lee Monument Association, initiated by Jubal Early and based in Richmond. Early likewise started an organization for veterans, the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia (AANVA).
Goldfield states on the first page that the war was "America's greatest failure.". He goes on to impeach politicians, extremists, and the influence of evangelical Christianity for polarizing the nation to the point where compromise or reasoned debate became impossible.
Gary Gallagher, a leading Civil War historian at the University of Virginia, argues that the long-reigning emphasis on slavery and liberation distorts our understanding of the war and of how Americans thought in the 1860s.
Historians who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement placed slavery and emancipation at the center of the Civil War. This trend is now reflected in textbooks and popular culture. The Civil War today is generally seen as a necessary and ennobling sacrifice, redeemed by the liberation of four million slaves.
The Civil War today is generally seen as a necessary and ennobling sacrifice, redeemed by the liberation of four million slaves. Similar reservations were voiced by an earlier generation of historians known as revisionists.
invoked Lincoln's words and the legacy of the Civil War in calling on the nation to pay its "promissory note" to black Americans, which it finally did, in part, by passing Civil Rights legislation that affirmed and enforced the amendments of the 1860s.
Economists have calculated that the cost of the Civil War, estimated at over $10 billion in 1860 dollars, would have been more than enough to buy the freedom of every slave, purchase them land, and even pay reparations.
As late as the summer of 1864, staggering casualties and the stalling of Union armies brought a collapse in Northern morale, cries for a negotiated peace, and the expectation that anti-war (and anti-black) Democrats would take the White House.