Over the Fourth of July holiday in 1863, the Confederacy lost the two most critical battles of the Civil War. From that point, there was no realistic possibility the South would ever prevail.
Union forces of General George Meade turned back the army of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, thwarting the only serious attempt of the Confederates to seize and hold Union territory during the war.
After a 46-day siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, the Union Army of General Ulysses S. Grant accepted the surrender of starving Confederate forces. Since the outset of the war, Southern cannons on the bluffs above the Mississippi River at Vicksburg had blocked Northern military and commercial traffic below that point to the Gulf of Mexico.
Lincoln exulted, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” Both Lincoln and Grant knew that Union control of the Mississippi River for all practical purposes was more important than Gettysburg because it effectively severed the Confederate army’s supply line of Texas beef, without which it eventually could not survive.
General Lee knew this as well, but chose to continue the war, hoping in vain that Lincoln would be defeated in the 1864 election and the South could negotiate friendly terms with a war-weary new American administration. When Lincoln won handily, the South placed its delusional hopes on a foreign intervention. During the nearly two years from Gettysburg and Vicksburg to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, the South gained no different outcome and thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers died needlessly.
While southern historians have made a legend of the loyalty of Lee’s starving, ragged troops at Appomattox, the fact is that roughly two-thirds of non-slaveholding Confederate soldiers deserted during this period. Lincoln and Grant always believed the natural political affiliation of these men was with the Union. The novel and movie “Cold Mountain” tells the story of one such soldier.
Lincoln never acknowledged the claim of the Confederacy to be a separate country. Grant and many others viewed the rebellion as treason. Confederate generals and politicians are no more deserving of a public monument than Revolutionary War General Benedict Arnold. They made war upon the United States in defense of a brutal and perverse system and called it honor.
In his “Personal Memoirs” published in 1885, partly to counter the emerging revisionist southern “Lost Cause” myth, Grant wrote, “The Confederates proclaim themselves as aliens, and thereby debarred themselves of all right to claim protection under the Constitution of the United States. We did not admit the fact that they were aliens, but all the same, they debarred themselves of the right to expect better treatment than people of any other foreign state who makes war upon an independent nation.”
Strong Northern resistance to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act (the term “sanctuary city” originated then) and then the push by the South to expand slavery into the Western territories and finally the election of Lincoln set off secession and the Civil War. In the conclusion to his memoirs, Grant said, “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery.”
Marty Ansley
Cinebar
