The American Civil War in RARE Photos — As It REALLY Looked 165 Years Ago

PART 2:

The news spread by telegraph. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers  the next day and Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, which had still been hesitating, decided to join the Confederacy  in direct response to the federal mobilization. The First Battle of Bull Run began on July 21st, 1861,  when about 35,000 Union and Confederate soldiers faced each other near Manassas, Virginia.

Civilians from  Washington even brought picnic baskets to watch the fight from a distance, expecting a quick and decisive spectacle. The Confederate army, reinforced  in time by train from the Shenandoah Valley, reversed an early Union advance near the Henry family house and  forced a disorganized retreat.

Soldiers and spectators returned together along the roads toward the capital. It was  there that General Thomas Jackson received the nickname “Stonewall” or “Stone Wall” for holding his lines firm under heavy pressure when a Confederate officer  is said to have shouted that he was standing like a stone wall.

The battle ended all expectations of a short conflict. The more than 800 military losses recorded that day showed both sides that they  were facing a much longer campaign than anyone had predicted in April. The so-called Trent Affair began on November 8th, 1861,  when Captain Charles Wilkes, commanding the Union warship United  States ship San Jacinto, intercepted the British civilian ship Royal Mail ship Trent on the high seas and  captured two Confederate diplomats, James Mason and John Slidell, who were

traveling to Europe in search of support. The action, carried out without prior approval  from Washington, was initially celebrated as heroism in the north. But in London, it was seen as a serious violation of British maritime neutrality. The United Kingdom government even sent additional troops to Canada and prepared a formal ultimatum.

Lincoln,  judging that the war could not afford to also face the British Empire, ordered the diplomats released in December  of that year. A move that eased tensions considerably. The diplomatic crisis, called the Trent Affair, cooled without direct confrontation, but it made clear how much the Confederacy depended on  convincing European powers such as Great Britain and France to recognize its independence  or intervene in the conflict.

In the waters of Hampton Roads, Virginia, the Confederate States ship Virginia, an armored Confederate ship rebuilt on the hull of the former United States ship  Merrimack, put the United States ship Cumberland and the United States ship Congress out of action on March 8th, 1862, causing major concern among the Union’s wooden ships  in the region.

The next day, March 9th, the newly arrived United States ship Monitor, designed by Swedish engineer John Ericsson and equipped  with an unprecedented rotating turret, faced the Virginia in the first battle in history between  fully iron armored ships. For almost 4 hours, the two vessels exchanged fire at close range without  either one being definitively disabled, ending in a tactical draw that prevented the Virginia from continuing its advance    against the rest of the federal fleet.

The clash made wooden warships in the world’s  navies obsolete almost overnight. Newspapers of the time described crowds along the shore watching the metal duel, aware that they were witnessing the beginning of a new naval era. On April  6th, 1862, Confederate forces surprised the Union Army camped near a church called Shiloh  in Tennessee.

 On the first day, the Federals were pushed back to the banks of  the Tennessee River and came close to a complete defeat. While General William Tecumseh Sherman suffered two minor wounds, but stayed on the field. Confederate Commander Albert Sidney  Johnston was badly hit that afternoon and died, leaving the offensive without its main leader at a critical moment.

 Reinforcements commanded by General Ulysses Grant arrived during the night and the Union retook the lost ground on  the second day, April 7th, forcing the Confederate retreat back to  Corinth, Mississippi. Shiloh recorded about 23,746  military losses between the two armies, a number higher than the total accumulated by the United  States in its earlier conflicts.

 The scale of the result permanently changed how the public viewed  that war. Between June 25th and July 1st,  1862, General Robert E. Lee, newly appointed to command the Army of Northern Virginia, launched a series of attacks known  as the Seven Days Battles against Union forces advancing on Richmond.

The campaign, commanded by General George McClellan,  had reached within a few miles of the Confederate capital, the closest any Union Army would come to Richmond until 1865. Lee, despite heavy losses in his own army, including the costly final battle  at Malvern Hill, where Confederates attacked well-defended positions, managed to push the Federals  back to the Virginia coast, ending the immediate threat.

The offensive  saved Richmond from an early fall and strengthened Lee’s reputation as an aggressive  commander. McClellan, too cautious by Lincoln’s standards, would be replaced months later after disappointing Union expectations  in that campaign. On the same field as the first battle, near Manassas, Virginia, Confederates under  Robert E.

 Lee and Stonewall Jackson faced the Union again between August 28th and  August 30th, 1862. Jackson positioned his men  along an unfinished railroad cut and resisted waves of Union attacks. And at  one point, with ammunition nearly exhausted, his soldiers even threw stones at enemy lines to hold  the position.

Meanwhile, General James Longstreet organized a surprise flank  attack with about 25,000 men, the largest simultaneous coordinated attack of the war  up to that point, which crashed into the Union army with almost no warning. The Union, under General John Pope, retreated in disorder  back toward Washington, repeating the humiliating scene of 1861.

The victory gave Lee the confidence  to try something the Confederacy had not yet done, directly invade northern territory. The first major Confederate invasion of the north culminated  on September 17th, 1862, when Lee’s army and General George McClellan’s army met near Antietam Creek  in Maryland.

The fighting centered on places that would gain sadly famous names, the cornfield, the sunken road, and Burnside  Bridge. In just over 12 hours, about 23,000 men were recorded as losses, wounded, or missing, making it the military day with the  largest number of Americans affected in the country’s history, surpassing even D-Day and Pearl Harbor combined.

  Photographer Alexander Gardner arrived on the field days later and documented the aftermath before  crews finished recovering the victims. Shown in New York, the photographs deeply affected  the public and revealed the reality of the conflict in a way never seen before. Although tactically indecisive, Antietam  forced Lee to return to Virginia, giving Lincoln the political victory he needed to announce a measure that would change the declared purpose of the war.

Outside Fredericksburg, Virginia,  Union General Ambrose Burnside ordered, on December 13th, 1862, repeated waves of advances against  heavily protected Confederate positions behind a stone wall at Marye’s  Heights. More than 14 attempts were made against the same point throughout the afternoon, but none managed to break the line commanded by Lee and Longstreet from high ground that dominated the entire open field below.

The Union recorded about 12,600  compared with just over 5,000 on the Confederate side,  making the episode one of the most uneven defeats suffered by the North during the entire war. Many Union members remained between the lines  through the freezing night, unable to reach shelter. The result caused  a serious crisis of confidence in Washington.

Lincoln would later comment that he was going through one of  the hardest moments of his presidency, and growing pressure would lead to Burnside’s replacement a few weeks later. On January 1st, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Lincoln, went into  effect, declaring free now and forever all enslaved people in territories still in rebellion against the Union  after a preliminary version had already been announced the previous September just after Antietam.

The measure did not reach slave-holding states loyal to the north such as Kentucky and Missouri. But it irreversibly changed the political meaning of the conflict. From that moment on, the war was no longer only about preserving the Union and began to explicitly include the end of slavery as a declared goal, something Lincoln had avoided announcing publicly  since the beginning of the conflict for fear of losing support from the border states.

   The proclamation also opened a legal path for black men to enlist in the Union Army and Navy. Over the next 2  years, more than 180,000 black soldiers would join the federal ranks, many of them formerly enslaved people who fled to Union  lines during the war. During the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia on May 2nd, 1863, Lee divided his army,  already outnumbered nearly two to one, against General Joseph Hooker in one of the  boldest gambles of his military career.

Stonewall Jackson led a flank maneuver at dusk that completely surprised the Union Army, causing  a disorganized retreat and securing what would be considered Lee’s greatest tactical triumph  during the war. While returning from nighttime reconnaissance in front of his own lines,    Jackson was mistakenly wounded by Confederate sentries who did not recognize him in the darkness.

  The severity of the injury required emergency surgery that resulted in  the loss of his left arm. During recovery, Jackson developed pneumonia and died on May  10th, 1863. When Lee received the news,  he declared that he had lost the right arm of his army, an absence that would prove decisive  in the following months.

The small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, became the scene of an almost accidental meeting between Lee’s army and General George Meade’s army between  July 1st and July 3rd, 1863, during the second and final Confederate invasion of the  north. On the second day, intense fighting at Little Round Top, defended by Colonel Joshua  Chamberlain, prevented the Confederates from turning the Union line.

On the third day,  Lee ordered a frontal advance against the center of the enemy position, commanded by General George Pickett,  with about 12,500 men crossing nearly 6/10 of a mile of open field under heavy resistance. The action, known as Pickett’s Charge, was repelled with extremely high military losses shortly after briefly reaching the Union lines at a point that came to be called the Confederacy’s high-water mark.

It was the largest battle fought on the American continent,  bringing more than 50,000 losses on both sides in 3 days. Lee withdrew his army to Virginia    and would never invade the north again. One day after the end of the Battle of Gettysburg  on July 4th, 1863, the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi,  surrendered to General Ulysses Grant after a 47-day siege,    ending a campaign that involved an unconventional river crossing south of the city and an advance through enemy

territory using  the resources available in the region. Residents and Confederate soldiers  even sheltered in caves dug into hillsides to protect themselves from constant Union artillery operations during the weeks of siege. The food shortage became so severe inside the the that accounts  from the period mentioned the use of unusual resources before the surrender of about 29,000  Confederates who were later released under oath not to return to the ranks.

With the fall  of Vicksburg, the Union took full control of the Mississippi River separating Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana from the rest  of the Confederacy. Grant would be promoted months later to command all Union armies. Days after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, New York was overtaken  between July 13th and July 16th, 1863 by serious unrest against  the Union’s new draft law, which allowed wealthy men to pay $300  to avoid enlistment.

The mobilization, made up mostly of working-class Irish immigrants, began at the office responsible  for the draft lottery and quickly spread across the city targeting black residents and black  community institutions including the Colored Orphan Asylum. Federal troops, many of them rushed from Gettysburg,  were sent to restore order in the streets of Manhattan and used military force to disperse groups in different parts of the city.

The New York draft riots remain one of the most  tense civil episodes in American history revealing a nation divided not only between north and  south, but also inside northern cities themselves over the true cost of the war. On July 18th, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment,  made up mostly of free black soldiers, led an advance against Fort Wagner, a Confederate fortification  in South Carolina that protected access to Charleston.

The action, carried out across a narrow strip of sand under intense resistance,  caused significant losses for the regiment including its young white colonel,  Robert Gould Shaw, who led the men on the front line and died during the operation. Sergeant William Carney, even while weakened,  managed to recover and protect the regimental flag during the retreat, an act that decades later earned him the Medal of Honor, making him the first black  soldier to receive the highest American military decoration.

Although the fort was not taken,  the courage shown by the 54th Massachusetts was widely reported by the northern press    and helped change public opinion about the role of black soldiers, speeding up the recruitment of dozens of new African-American regiments  by the Union. Four months after the Battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln gave a speech on November 19th, 1863, at the dedication ceremony for the National Cemetery created for the soldiers who had lost their lives in the battle. 

The main speech of the day, lasting more than two hours, was delivered by the famous speaker,  Edward Everett. Lincoln spoke for less than three minutes in about 270 words. He connected the war  to the founding principles of equality in the Declaration of Independence and defined the conflict as a test of whether a government of the people, by the people, for the people could survive.

 There is no confirmed photograph of Lincoln speaking  that day since the photographers present only managed to capture the crowd before and after because the speech was too quick for the equipment of the time. The Gettysburg  Address, now one of the most quoted texts in American history, was received quietly by the press  at the time and Lincoln himself is said to have commented that the world would little note  his words, a prediction that history would prove completely wrong.

Surrounded by  mountain ranges and essential to the railroad routes of both sides, Chattanooga, Tennessee, had its Confederate  siege broken by Union forces commanded by Grant between November 23rd and November 25th, 1863. On the second day, Union  troops took Lookout Mountain amid fog so dense that part of the fighting was hidden  from observers in the valley, an episode that gave the action the nickname Battle Above the Clouds.

 The most dramatic  moment came the next day at Missionary Ridge, when Union soldiers, advancing without an explicit order  to continue beyond the base of the hill, took the initiative on their own and climbed the  steep slope under Confederate fire, surprising even their own commanders. The victory at Chattanooga opened the way for the invasion of Georgia the following year.

Grant, who had already been building a record of success  in the West, had his reputation strengthened enough to be called to Washington to take supreme command of the Union armies. On March 9th,  1864, Lincoln gave Ulysses Grant the rank of lieutenant general, a rank  until then held only by George Washington, and command of all Union armies,    unifying federal strategy across all areas of operation for the first time.

Unlike earlier commanders, Grant adopted an approach of constant pressure,  advancing simultaneously in multiple regions to prevent the Confederacy, with increasingly scarce resources, from reinforcing one army at the expense of another. Grant chose to  personally accompany the Army of the Potomac against Lee in Virginia, meeting him in intense and successive campaigns such as the Wilderness and Spotsylvania,  keeping up the pressure even in the face of heavy human results.

Meanwhile, he delegated to General William Tecumseh Sherman the mission of advancing through Georgia. The partnership between the two commanders,  coordinated by telegraph across distant fronts, would define the final outcome of  the war in the following months. Grant’s first field meeting with Lee took place between May 5 and May 7, 1864,  weeks after Grant took command of all Union armies in a dense Virginia thicket known as the Wilderness.

The thick vegetation made it impossible to see enemy formations only a few yards away. And the confusion of operations caused  forest fires that made withdrawal and care for men scattered between the lines even harder. Unlike earlier Union generals who turned back after unfavorable  results against Lee, Grant ordered the army to keep moving south instead of returning to Washington,  surprising his own exhausted troops.

The Battle of the Wilderness opened the  so-called Overland Campaign, a continuous sequence of clashes at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor that would produce tens of  thousands of military losses in the following weeks, but would finally wear down Lee’s army    in an irreversible way. The occupation of Atlanta, Georgia, happened on  September 2, 1864, when Union troops under General Sherman entered the city  after months of campaigning and a siege that caused the partial evacuation of the population

   and the disabling of military and railroad facilities by the retreating Confederates themselves.  Sherman ordered nearly all remaining civilians to leave, leading to a harsh  exchange of letters with the local mayor in which the general justified the measure by saying  that the conflict imposed severe decisions and that there was no way to make it less difficult.

 The conquest came at a critical moment. Lincoln faced strong  political pressure with part of northern public opinion worn down by years of campaigning and open to negotiating peace    before the November presidential election. The fall of Atlanta reversed  that situation almost overnight, strengthening Lincoln’s re-election campaign and  signaling to the Confederacy that its chances of reaching a favorable political settlement were rapidly  shrinking.

The march from Atlanta to the port of Savannah began on November 15th, 1864,  when Sherman led about 60,000 Union soldiers, deliberately cutting his own supply lines to live  off the territory he crossed until December 21st. Foraging groups nicknamed bummers spread  across farms along the way, gathering food, livestock, and resources in an improvised logistics system that sustained the advance without depending on convoys vulnerable to attack.

The campaign destroyed railroads, warehouses, plantations,  and economic infrastructure along a strip more than 62 miles wide in an explicit strategy to reduce the Confederacy’s ability    to sustain the war, not just to win isolated battles. Sherman offered Savannah as a Christmas gift to Lincoln  in a telegram sent on December 22nd, 1864.

The march showed the Confederate population  far beyond the front lines that the war had reached their homes. On November 30th, 1864, Confederate General John Bell Hood ordered a frontal advance against  fortified Union positions in Franklin, Tennessee in an attempt to stop federal forces before they reached  Nashville.

 About 20,000 Confederate soldiers crossed nearly 1 and  a quarter miles of open field in the late afternoon in an operation so costly    that historians compare it by the proportion of losses to Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. In a few hours, the Confederate Army of Tennessee  lost proportionally more general officers than in any other battle of the war.

Six of them died as a result of the action, including the experienced General Patrick Cleburne. Two weeks later,  on December 15th and December 16th, the rest of Hood’s forces suffered a decisive defeat at the Battle of Nashville. The Confederate Army of Tennessee, one of the South’s main military forces, stopped functioning as an effective unit for the rest of the war.

After months of congressional resistance,  the House of Representatives approved, on January 31st, 1865,  the 13th Amendment to the American Constitution, which would abolish slavery throughout the national territory, with 119 votes in favor and 56 against, barely reaching the required 2/3 majority.

The Senate had already approved the amendment months earlier, in April 1864, but the House vote faced strong resistance from Democratic lawmakers  before finally passing amid intense personal pressure from Lincoln on  undecided members of Congress. When the result was announced, representatives and visitors in the galleries burst into celebration  inside the chamber, one of the rare moments of spontaneous celebration    ever recorded in the American capital.

The amendment still needed to be ratified by 3/4 of the states  to officially take effect, which would only happen in December of that year, months after the end of the war and Lincoln’s  death, meaning he would not live to see the full ratification of his greatest legislative achievement. On April 2nd, 1865, after months of siege at Petersburg, Lee informed the Confederate government that his lines had been broken and that  Richmond could no longer be defended.

President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet left  the city by train that same night, taking what remained of the Confederate archives and treasury. Retreating Confederate  troops tried to disable warehouses and bridges to prevent the Union from using them, including  facilities connected to Tredegar Iron Works, the Confederacy’s main center of military production.

The actions, however,  caused a major fire that spread through the city’s commercial district. Federal troops entered on April 3rd and spent part of the day helping control  the flames, which had already damaged much of downtown Richmond. Two days later, Lincoln walked through the streets with almost no escort,  surrounded by newly freed people who recognized the president and gathered to see him.

The capital that had resisted for 4 years    was finally under federal control. Unable to continue fighting,  Robert E. Lee met Ulysses Grant on April 9th, 1865, in the parlor  of Wilmer McLean’s house at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, to negotiate the surrender  of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Grant, who according to his own memoirs had suffered from a severe headache all morning, reported that the discomfort disappeared the moment he received Lee’s note proposing the meeting to discuss surrender terms.  Grant offered notably generous terms. Confederate soldiers could return home freely, keeping horses and mules for planting,    as long as they surrendered their weapons and did not take up arms against the United States again.

Lee’s surrender, although  it did not formally end all fighting scattered across the country, became the symbolic moment recognized as the effective end of the war.  Grant banned excessive celebrations by his soldiers, reminding them that the Confederates were again fellow citizens. Only 5 days after Lee’s surrender, on the night of April 14th, 1865,  Lincoln was watching a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, when the actor and Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth, entered the presidential box and

carried out an attack against  the president. Lincoln was taken to a house across from the theater, where doctors stayed by his side through the night, recognizing that his condition was extremely serious.  He died the next morning, April 15th, 1865, becoming the first American president to lose his life in an  assassination.

Vice President Andrew Johnson took office hours later, amid the shock caused by the news spreading across the country. Booth fled on horseback and was found 12 days later on a rural property in Virginia, where he died during the attempt by federal troops to arrest  him. Lincoln, who had guided the country through 4 years of war, did  not live to witness the reconstruction of the nation he had worked so hard to reunify.

Even after Appomattox, Lee’s surrender did not end the war immediately, because several Confederate armies still remained in the field. On April 26th, 1865, General Joseph Johnston surrendered to  General Sherman in North Carolina, handing over the second largest Confederate force    still active.

 During the same period, about 81 miles away in Georgia,    Union cavalry finally caught and detained Jefferson Davis, who had been traveling since  the fall of Richmond while trying to reorganize the Confederate government through the interior of the country. The last organized forces in the  Trans-Mississippi, commanded by General Kirby Smith would only formally surrender on May 26th,  1865, more than a month after Appomattox, ending any coordinated military opposition from the Confederacy.

  4 years after the first events at Fort Sumter, the conflict that began after Lincoln’s election ended with human  losses estimated at about 620,000 soldiers, slavery abolished by constitutional amendment, and an entire  nation facing the task of rebuilding itself. If you enjoyed this video and  want to support the channel, please use the Super Thanks tool below.

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