1 00:00:18,950 --> 00:00:20,350 "In this army, 2 00:00:20,400 --> 00:00:23,990 "one hole in the seat of the britches indicates a captain;" 3 00:00:24,200 --> 00:00:26,450 "two holes... a lieutenant," 4 00:00:27,260 --> 00:00:29,610 "and the seat of the pants all out" 5 00:00:29,860 --> 00:00:32,820 "indicates that the individual is a private." 6 00:00:36,860 --> 00:00:39,120 They both have a particular way of yelling: 7 00:00:39,170 --> 00:00:41,440 the northern troops made a sort of hurrah. 8 00:00:41,490 --> 00:00:44,130 It was called... one soldier... "the deep, generous" 9 00:00:44,180 --> 00:00:46,480 "manly shout" of the northern soldier. 10 00:00:46,530 --> 00:00:49,900 The Confederates, of course, had what was called "the rebel yell." 11 00:00:49,950 --> 00:00:52,840 We don't really know what that sounded like. 12 00:00:53,210 --> 00:00:56,160 One northerner described it, he said... 13 00:00:56,820 --> 00:01:01,100 he described it by describing the peculiar corkscrew sensation 14 00:01:01,150 --> 00:01:03,470 that goes up your backbone when you hear it, 15 00:01:03,880 --> 00:01:06,980 and he said, "and if you've claimed you've heard it" 16 00:01:07,030 --> 00:01:10,050 "and weren't scared, that means you never heard it." 17 00:01:10,480 --> 00:01:11,770 It was... 18 00:01:11,920 --> 00:01:15,930 it was basically, I think, a sort of fox hunt yip 19 00:01:16,200 --> 00:01:19,290 mixed up with a sort of banshee squall. 20 00:01:19,530 --> 00:01:22,040 And it was used on the attack. 21 00:01:22,260 --> 00:01:25,540 And an old Confederate veteran after the war 22 00:01:25,590 --> 00:01:29,040 was asked at a UDC meeting in Tennessee somewhere to give 23 00:01:29,090 --> 00:01:31,720 the rebel yell. The ladies had never heard it. 24 00:01:31,890 --> 00:01:34,940 And he said, "It can't be done", 25 00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:36,970 "except at a run," 26 00:01:37,050 --> 00:01:40,050 "and I couldn't do it anyhow with a mouth full of false teeth" 27 00:01:40,100 --> 00:01:41,810 "and a stomach full of food." 28 00:01:41,860 --> 00:01:44,960 So they never got to hear what it sounded like. 29 00:02:00,580 --> 00:02:04,260 The civil war was fought in 10,000 places: 30 00:02:04,730 --> 00:02:07,290 Murfreesboro, Chambersburg, 31 00:02:07,340 --> 00:02:09,990 Dranesville, and Opelousas; 32 00:02:10,610 --> 00:02:13,510 Apache Canyon, St. Augustine, 33 00:02:13,560 --> 00:02:15,890 Paducah, and Brandy Station; 34 00:02:16,210 --> 00:02:18,670 on the Red River, the Rappahannock, 35 00:02:18,720 --> 00:02:20,310 and the Rapidan; 36 00:02:20,930 --> 00:02:24,190 across the Susquehanna and the Monongahela; 37 00:02:24,510 --> 00:02:28,180 from Mount Ida and Mount Olive to Mount Zion; 38 00:02:28,990 --> 00:02:32,100 from Ninevah and Nickajack Gap 39 00:02:32,410 --> 00:02:36,690 to New Berne, New Carthage, New Iberia, New Lisbon, 40 00:02:36,740 --> 00:02:38,170 and New Hope; 41 00:02:38,420 --> 00:02:40,250 from the Yazoo Delta 42 00:02:40,300 --> 00:02:42,350 to the Chickasaw Bluffs. 43 00:02:47,860 --> 00:02:51,290 By 1863, the Taiping Rebellion in China 44 00:02:51,340 --> 00:02:53,590 had entered its thirteenth year. 45 00:02:54,100 --> 00:02:57,020 Civil war broke out in Afghanistan. 46 00:02:57,740 --> 00:03:00,980 In America, Eddie Cuthbert of the Philadelphia Keystones 47 00:03:01,030 --> 00:03:03,860 stole the first base in professional baseball. 48 00:03:04,280 --> 00:03:07,750 The National Academy of Science was founded in Washington. 49 00:03:07,800 --> 00:03:09,790 The roller skate was patented, 50 00:03:10,150 --> 00:03:13,980 and Henry Ford and William Randolph Hearst were born. 51 00:03:18,290 --> 00:03:22,000 In 1863, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson 52 00:03:22,050 --> 00:03:24,110 would become a terror to the Union army 53 00:03:24,160 --> 00:03:26,660 and a legend, north and south. 54 00:03:27,530 --> 00:03:29,290 Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 55 00:03:29,330 --> 00:03:31,120 a college professor from Maine, 56 00:03:31,170 --> 00:03:33,650 would lead his regiment to glory on hillsides 57 00:03:33,700 --> 00:03:35,850 in Virginia and Pennsylvania. 58 00:03:37,520 --> 00:03:40,050 In the Wilderness, west of Fredericksburg, 59 00:03:40,100 --> 00:03:42,690 Robert E. Lee would devise one of the most daring 60 00:03:42,740 --> 00:03:45,260 and brilliant battle plans of the war... 61 00:03:46,830 --> 00:03:49,060 while 1,000 miles to the west, 62 00:03:49,110 --> 00:03:51,640 Ulysses S. Grant continued to hammer away 63 00:03:51,690 --> 00:03:54,180 at the rebel stronghold at Vicksburg. 64 00:03:57,830 --> 00:04:02,180 Confederate private Sam Watkins would fight at Murfreesboro, Shelbyville, 65 00:04:02,230 --> 00:04:05,870 Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge, 66 00:04:06,130 --> 00:04:08,240 and somehow survive, 67 00:04:08,910 --> 00:04:10,750 while Elisha Hunt Rhodes 68 00:04:10,800 --> 00:04:13,560 would have the best Fourth of July of his life. 69 00:04:16,600 --> 00:04:20,210 In 1863, despite a Northern victory at Antietam, 70 00:04:20,260 --> 00:04:21,760 despite emancipation, 71 00:04:21,810 --> 00:04:25,250 despite a clear superiority in men and materiel, 72 00:04:25,570 --> 00:04:28,910 the Union seemed close to fumbling all it had. 73 00:04:30,460 --> 00:04:32,730 Meanwhile, from Vicksburg to Charleston, 74 00:04:32,780 --> 00:04:34,720 the fragile Confederate coalition 75 00:04:34,770 --> 00:04:36,350 was coming apart. 76 00:04:37,280 --> 00:04:40,460 And yet somehow the Confederacy stayed alive 77 00:04:40,510 --> 00:04:42,090 by the daring and luck 78 00:04:42,140 --> 00:04:44,520 and genius of its high command. 79 00:04:47,630 --> 00:04:50,560 But the biggest tests were coming that summer 80 00:04:50,660 --> 00:04:53,990 where the Mississippi took a sharp turn at Vicksburg 81 00:04:54,090 --> 00:04:57,120 and at a sleepy corner of Pennsylvania. 82 00:05:14,330 --> 00:05:19,120 "Murfreesboro, Tennessee, January 1st, 1863. 83 00:05:19,630 --> 00:05:23,930 "Martha, I can inform you that I have seen the monkey show at last" 84 00:05:23,980 --> 00:05:26,570 "and I don't want to see it no more." 85 00:05:26,890 --> 00:05:30,090 "I never want to go on another fight anymore, sister." 86 00:05:30,240 --> 00:05:33,510 "I want to come home worse than I ever did before." 87 00:05:33,830 --> 00:05:35,590 Thomas Warwick. 88 00:05:39,820 --> 00:05:42,570 Charles Coffin, Boston Journal. 89 00:05:42,720 --> 00:05:45,820 "All the surrounding forests had disappeared, 90 00:05:45,870 --> 00:05:48,700 "built into huts with chimneys of sticks and mud 91 00:05:48,750 --> 00:05:51,680 "or cut for burning in the stone fireplaces. 92 00:05:51,950 --> 00:05:54,270 "The soldiers were discouraged." 93 00:05:54,580 --> 00:05:56,840 "They knew that they had fought bravely" 94 00:05:56,890 --> 00:05:59,090 "but that there had been mismanagement" 95 00:05:59,140 --> 00:06:01,450 "and inefficient generalship." 96 00:06:03,210 --> 00:06:05,020 "Falmouth, Virginia. 97 00:06:05,120 --> 00:06:09,460 "This morning, we found ourselves covered with snow that had fallen during the night." 98 00:06:09,560 --> 00:06:11,430 "It is too cold to write." 99 00:06:11,580 --> 00:06:13,489 "How I would like to have some of those." 100 00:06:13,490 --> 00:06:16,190 "'On to Richmond' fellows out here with us." 101 00:06:16,410 --> 00:06:18,320 Elisha Hunt Rhodes. 102 00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:24,100 The men of the Army of the Potomac had not been paid for six months, 103 00:06:24,150 --> 00:06:27,720 and while army warehouses at Washington bulged with food, 104 00:06:27,770 --> 00:06:30,130 little of it got to the winter camp. 105 00:06:30,440 --> 00:06:33,060 "I do not believe I have ever seen" 106 00:06:33,110 --> 00:06:35,070 "greater misery from sickness" 107 00:06:35,120 --> 00:06:38,390 "than now exists in our Army of the Potomac." 108 00:06:38,760 --> 00:06:41,860 Thomas F. Perley, Inspector General. 109 00:06:43,810 --> 00:06:47,840 One Wisconsin officer called the winter camp at Falmouth, Virginia, 110 00:06:47,890 --> 00:06:50,350 the Union's "Valley Forge." 111 00:06:51,110 --> 00:06:54,090 Hundreds died from scurvy, dysentery, 112 00:06:54,140 --> 00:06:56,900 typhoid, diphtheria, pneumonia. 113 00:06:57,510 --> 00:07:01,610 There were epidemics of measles, mumps, and other childhood diseases, 114 00:07:01,660 --> 00:07:05,360 and farm boys, crowded with other men for the first time in their lives, 115 00:07:05,410 --> 00:07:07,610 were especially susceptible. 116 00:07:08,650 --> 00:07:11,190 Disease was the chief killer of the war, 117 00:07:11,240 --> 00:07:14,650 taking two for every one who died of battle wounds. 118 00:07:16,310 --> 00:07:19,990 "One of the wonders of these times was the army cough, 119 00:07:20,090 --> 00:07:23,850 "and it is almost a literal fact that when 100,000 men" 120 00:07:23,950 --> 00:07:25,870 "began to stir at reveille" 121 00:07:25,920 --> 00:07:28,210 "the sound of their coughing would drown out" 122 00:07:28,260 --> 00:07:30,310 "that of the beating drums." 123 00:07:32,350 --> 00:07:36,250 "The newspapers say the army is eager for another fight." 124 00:07:36,300 --> 00:07:37,890 "It is false." 125 00:07:37,990 --> 00:07:41,530 "They are heartily sick of battles that produce no results." 126 00:07:43,130 --> 00:07:46,640 "I don't think I have received half of my letters. 127 00:07:46,740 --> 00:07:48,360 "It cannot be possible" 128 00:07:48,410 --> 00:07:52,410 "that one is my quota in over three weeks from home." 129 00:07:52,460 --> 00:07:55,970 "I've written constantly from every place where we have stopped" 130 00:07:56,020 --> 00:07:58,730 "long enough to write and could mail a letter." 131 00:07:59,030 --> 00:08:01,200 Edward Hastings Ripley. 132 00:08:02,070 --> 00:08:04,760 Two hundred men deserted every day. 133 00:08:05,280 --> 00:08:09,640 By late January, ¼ of the Union army was absent without leave. 134 00:08:11,110 --> 00:08:14,460 Added to the men's misery were memories of the battle they had fought 135 00:08:14,510 --> 00:08:18,150 across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg in December. 136 00:08:23,320 --> 00:08:25,350 At Fredericksburg, there was a... 137 00:08:25,550 --> 00:08:28,100 an exchange across the Rappahannock. 138 00:08:29,000 --> 00:08:32,860 One of them hollered, "Hey, reb," and they said, "Yeah?" 139 00:08:34,330 --> 00:08:36,350 "When are you fellas going to come over?" 140 00:08:36,610 --> 00:08:39,390 They said, "When we get good and ready. What do you want?" 141 00:08:39,440 --> 00:08:41,220 They said, "Want Fredericksburg." 142 00:08:41,270 --> 00:08:43,070 "Don't you wish, you may get it!" 143 00:08:43,120 --> 00:08:46,150 And things like that. There were a lot of those exchanges. 144 00:08:48,000 --> 00:08:51,050 A line of hills overlooked Fredericksburg, Virginia, 145 00:08:51,100 --> 00:08:53,300 a key Confederate transportation link 146 00:08:53,350 --> 00:08:55,920 midway between Richmond and Washington. 147 00:08:56,730 --> 00:08:59,730 Union General Ambrose E. Burnside's plan 148 00:08:59,780 --> 00:09:02,510 had been to cross the Rappahannock by pontoon, 149 00:09:02,560 --> 00:09:06,370 occupy the town, then take the thinly defended heights. 150 00:09:07,930 --> 00:09:11,930 Bold action did not come naturally to Ambrose Burnside, 151 00:09:11,980 --> 00:09:14,190 though he had led his men to Fredericksburg 152 00:09:14,240 --> 00:09:18,250 determined to display the fighting spirit his predecessor, George McClellan, 153 00:09:18,300 --> 00:09:20,650 had so conspicuously lacked. 154 00:09:22,530 --> 00:09:24,730 But now the War Department failed him, 155 00:09:24,780 --> 00:09:29,040 and seventeen days passed waiting for pontoon bridges to arrive. 156 00:09:30,050 --> 00:09:32,190 By the time the bridge was in place, 157 00:09:32,340 --> 00:09:36,140 Lee had 75,000 men waiting in the hills. 158 00:09:37,110 --> 00:09:39,620 Stonewall Jackson was on the right; 159 00:09:40,380 --> 00:09:44,740 James Longstreet on the left along a bluff called "Marye's Heights." 160 00:09:47,350 --> 00:09:50,780 From the top of the Heights, Lee could just see Chatham Mansion 161 00:09:50,830 --> 00:09:53,030 across the river on the Union side, 162 00:09:53,080 --> 00:09:57,170 where thirty years before, he had courted his wife, Mary Custis. 163 00:09:57,370 --> 00:10:00,210 It was now Burnsides' headquarters. 164 00:10:02,390 --> 00:10:06,380 On December 11th, Union guns began shelling Fredericksburg, 165 00:10:06,430 --> 00:10:08,650 setting much of the town on fire; 166 00:10:09,910 --> 00:10:12,470 then the troops started across the river. 167 00:10:14,670 --> 00:10:19,080 Some wondered why the Confederates did not make it harder for them to cross. 168 00:10:19,250 --> 00:10:21,450 "They want to get us in," one private said; 169 00:10:21,500 --> 00:10:24,550 "getting out won't be quite so smart and easy." 170 00:10:27,720 --> 00:10:29,670 While waiting to attack the Heights, 171 00:10:29,720 --> 00:10:32,620 Union men looted what was left of the town. 172 00:10:37,940 --> 00:10:42,040 The great assault came two days later on December 13th. 173 00:10:42,260 --> 00:10:45,510 Federal forces advanced toward Marye's Heights. 174 00:10:45,770 --> 00:10:48,670 Lee could not believe the enemy would be so foolish. 175 00:10:48,720 --> 00:10:51,260 His artillery covered all the approaches. 176 00:10:51,830 --> 00:10:54,900 Four lines of riflemen waited behind a stone wall 177 00:10:54,950 --> 00:10:56,780 that ran along the base of the hill. 178 00:10:57,040 --> 00:10:59,930 "General," an officer assured James Longstreet, 179 00:10:59,980 --> 00:11:03,420 "a chicken could not live in that field when we open on it." 180 00:11:05,220 --> 00:11:07,360 "How beautifully they came on; 181 00:11:07,580 --> 00:11:11,260 "their bright bayonets glistening in the sunlight made the line look like a huge 182 00:11:11,310 --> 00:11:13,510 "serpent of blue and steel. 183 00:11:13,660 --> 00:11:16,710 "We could see our shells bursting in their ranks, making great gaps, 184 00:11:16,760 --> 00:11:19,980 "but on they came, as though they would go straight through us and over us." 185 00:11:21,190 --> 00:11:23,720 "Now we gave them canister, and that staggered them." 186 00:11:23,940 --> 00:11:27,760 "A few more paces onward, and the Georgians in the road below us rose up and" 187 00:11:27,810 --> 00:11:31,610 "let loose a storm of lead into the faces of the advancing brigade." 188 00:11:32,580 --> 00:11:36,890 "The brilliant assault of their Irish brigade was beyond description;" 189 00:11:36,960 --> 00:11:39,160 "we forgot they were fighting us, and" 190 00:11:39,210 --> 00:11:43,580 "cheer after cheer at their fearlessness went up along our lines." 191 00:11:43,800 --> 00:11:45,880 General George Pickett. 192 00:11:48,370 --> 00:11:50,270 It was suicide. 193 00:11:51,340 --> 00:11:53,300 "They came forward," one man said, 194 00:11:53,350 --> 00:11:56,610 "as though they were breasting a storm of rain and sleet." 195 00:11:56,910 --> 00:12:01,020 "Faces and bodies half turned to the storm, shoulders shrugged." 196 00:12:01,980 --> 00:12:05,630 The Irish brigade got within twenty-five paces of the wall. 197 00:12:05,950 --> 00:12:08,790 The men of the 24th Georgia who shot them down 198 00:12:08,840 --> 00:12:10,430 were Irish, too. 199 00:12:12,110 --> 00:12:14,850 A Union officer watching from a church steeple 200 00:12:14,900 --> 00:12:18,440 saw brigade after brigade charge the stone wall. 201 00:12:18,960 --> 00:12:20,870 "They seemed to melt," he said, 202 00:12:20,920 --> 00:12:24,000 "like snow coming down on warm ground." 203 00:12:27,910 --> 00:12:32,170 They still believed that to take a position, you massed your men 204 00:12:32,220 --> 00:12:34,880 and moved up and gave them the bayonet. 205 00:12:35,140 --> 00:12:37,999 There were practically no bayonet wounds in the Civil War, 206 00:12:38,000 --> 00:12:40,700 much more than there were in the First World War or the Second. 207 00:12:40,900 --> 00:12:42,950 They never came in that kind of contact, 208 00:12:43,000 --> 00:12:45,890 or at least very seldom came in that kind of contact, 209 00:12:45,940 --> 00:12:49,500 but they still thought that to mass their fire they had to mass their men. 210 00:12:49,550 --> 00:12:53,800 So they lined up and marched up toward an entrenched line and got blown away. 211 00:13:01,100 --> 00:13:04,500 Fourteen assaults were beaten back from Marye's Heights 212 00:13:04,550 --> 00:13:07,680 before Burnside decided it could not be taken. 213 00:13:08,750 --> 00:13:12,290 Nine thousand men fell before the Confederate guns. 214 00:13:14,490 --> 00:13:18,160 More credit for valor is given to Confederate soldiers. 215 00:13:18,210 --> 00:13:21,060 They're supposed to have had more élan and dash. 216 00:13:21,430 --> 00:13:24,470 Actually, I know of no braver men in either army 217 00:13:24,520 --> 00:13:26,520 than the Union troops at Fredericksburg, 218 00:13:26,570 --> 00:13:28,160 which is a serious defeat. 219 00:13:28,380 --> 00:13:31,870 But to keep charging that wall at the foot of Marye's Heights, 220 00:13:31,920 --> 00:13:34,970 after all the failures there had been... and they were all failures... 221 00:13:35,970 --> 00:13:39,270 is a singular instance of valor. 222 00:13:39,940 --> 00:13:43,350 Watching from above, even Robert E. Lee was moved. 223 00:13:43,620 --> 00:13:46,600 "It is well," he said, "that war is so terrible; 224 00:13:46,870 --> 00:13:48,910 "we should grow too fond of it." 225 00:13:52,340 --> 00:13:55,890 Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine 226 00:13:55,940 --> 00:13:59,770 were among the thousands of Union men pinned down at the foot of the Heights. 227 00:14:00,840 --> 00:14:04,940 That night, the temperature fell below freezing, and a stiff wind blew. 228 00:14:06,600 --> 00:14:09,570 Men now froze as well as bled to death. 229 00:14:10,590 --> 00:14:12,770 Night brought quiet. 230 00:14:13,830 --> 00:14:17,830 "But out of that silence rose new sounds, more appalling still... 231 00:14:17,880 --> 00:14:22,210 "a strange ventriloquism, of which you could not locate the source; 232 00:14:22,950 --> 00:14:24,900 "a smothered moan, 233 00:14:25,520 --> 00:14:30,170 "as if a thousand discords were flowing together into a keynote... 234 00:14:30,220 --> 00:14:33,540 "weird, unearthly, terrible to hear and bear, 235 00:14:33,740 --> 00:14:36,210 "yet startling with its nearness; 236 00:14:37,280 --> 00:14:40,710 "the writhing concord broken by cries for help; 237 00:14:40,760 --> 00:14:43,030 "some begging for a drop of water, 238 00:14:43,080 --> 00:14:45,470 "some calling on God for pity, 239 00:14:45,640 --> 00:14:48,249 "and some on friendly hands to finish 240 00:14:48,250 --> 00:14:51,250 "what the enemy had so horribly begun;" 241 00:14:52,410 --> 00:14:55,210 "some with delirious, dreamy voices" 242 00:14:55,280 --> 00:14:59,370 "murmuring loved names as if the dearest were bending over them," 243 00:15:01,450 --> 00:15:05,150 "and underneath, all the time, 244 00:15:05,220 --> 00:15:09,000 "the deep bass note from closed lips 245 00:15:09,050 --> 00:15:10,450 “too hopeless 246 00:15:10,510 --> 00:15:14,210 "or too heroic to articulate their agony." 247 00:15:17,100 --> 00:15:20,180 "At last, out-wearied and depressed, 248 00:15:20,550 --> 00:15:23,880 "I moved two dead men a little and lay down between them, 249 00:15:23,930 --> 00:15:26,620 "making a pillow of the breast of a third," 250 00:15:27,190 --> 00:15:30,120 "drew the flap of his overcoat over my face" 251 00:15:30,380 --> 00:15:32,110 "and tried to sleep." 252 00:15:32,780 --> 00:15:34,880 Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. 253 00:15:37,640 --> 00:15:40,820 They were stuck there all night and all the next day, 254 00:15:40,870 --> 00:15:43,470 crouching behind a wall of their own dead, 255 00:15:43,740 --> 00:15:45,920 trying not to hear the Confederate bullets 256 00:15:45,970 --> 00:15:48,500 thudding into the corpses of their friends. 257 00:15:51,680 --> 00:15:54,780 Burnside, openly weeping, declared that he himself 258 00:15:54,830 --> 00:15:56,740 would lead the new attack. 259 00:15:57,110 --> 00:15:59,360 Subordinates talked him out of it. 260 00:16:01,950 --> 00:16:04,130 That night, Chamberlain and his men 261 00:16:04,180 --> 00:16:07,200 scraped out shallow graves for the dead. 262 00:16:07,510 --> 00:16:12,210 As they worked, the northern lights began to dance in the winter sky. 263 00:16:13,970 --> 00:16:16,520 "Who would not pass on as they did," 264 00:16:16,640 --> 00:16:18,670 "dead for their country's life" 265 00:16:19,140 --> 00:16:23,440 "and lighted to burial by the meteor splendors of their native sky?" 266 00:16:27,520 --> 00:16:31,190 It was very unusual to see the northern lights that far south, 267 00:16:31,400 --> 00:16:34,630 but the whole heavens were lit up with streamers of 268 00:16:34,680 --> 00:16:37,190 fire and whatever the northern lights are. 269 00:16:37,460 --> 00:16:40,900 And the Confederates took it as a sign that. 270 00:16:40,950 --> 00:16:44,660 God almighty himself was celebrating a Confederate victory. 271 00:16:46,630 --> 00:16:50,440 "The slaughter is terrible, the result, disastrous." 272 00:16:51,210 --> 00:16:54,990 "Until we have good generals, it is useless to fight battles." 273 00:16:59,720 --> 00:17:03,570 The Union had lost 12,600 men. 274 00:17:04,160 --> 00:17:07,700 The South had lost 5,300 men, 275 00:17:08,260 --> 00:17:12,350 but many of them were only missing... gone home for Christmas. 276 00:17:14,830 --> 00:17:18,090 The battered Union army limped back across the river. 277 00:17:18,760 --> 00:17:21,190 Icy rain began to fall. 278 00:17:22,050 --> 00:17:23,960 From the ruins of Fredericksburg, 279 00:17:24,010 --> 00:17:27,790 Confederate soldiers openly taunted the Union troops huddled miserably 280 00:17:27,840 --> 00:17:30,040 on the far side of the Rappahannock. 281 00:17:35,530 --> 00:17:39,570 After the battle of Fredericksburg, the Confederates went back into the town 282 00:17:39,620 --> 00:17:43,310 and they saw all the damage that had been done during the Union occupation of the town... 283 00:17:43,360 --> 00:17:46,090 it was a great deal of damage, real vandalism... 284 00:17:46,660 --> 00:17:50,010 and they were shocked, and someone on Jackson's staff said, 285 00:17:50,320 --> 00:17:53,220 "How are we going to put an end to all this kind of thing?" 286 00:17:53,690 --> 00:17:55,580 And Jackson said, "Kill them." 287 00:17:55,780 --> 00:17:57,430 "Kill them all." 288 00:18:03,110 --> 00:18:04,700 Clarksville. 289 00:18:04,960 --> 00:18:07,490 "Those hateful gunboats. 290 00:18:07,760 --> 00:18:10,990 "They looked like they were from the lower regions. 291 00:18:11,030 --> 00:18:13,530 "Now this is the second night that four of them" 292 00:18:13,580 --> 00:18:16,780 "have been anchored in the river opposite our house." 293 00:18:17,190 --> 00:18:19,890 "I see the men crawling about on the boats" 294 00:18:19,940 --> 00:18:23,080 "like so many black snakes." 295 00:18:23,300 --> 00:18:25,190 Nannie Haskins. 296 00:18:26,300 --> 00:18:30,700 Fifteen-hundred Union men were now stationed at Clarksville, Tennessee. 297 00:18:30,760 --> 00:18:34,660 No one could enter or leave the town without a military pass. 298 00:18:35,550 --> 00:18:39,210 "Every day," Mrs. D. N. Kennedy wrote her husband in Georgia, 299 00:18:39,260 --> 00:18:41,380 "the reins are tightened." 300 00:18:46,170 --> 00:18:50,060 On Deer Isle, Maine, the parents of Private Harlton Powers 301 00:18:50,110 --> 00:18:53,000 learned that he was among the missing at Fredericksburg. 302 00:18:53,050 --> 00:18:56,490 In fact, his fellow soldiers were certain he was dead, 303 00:18:56,810 --> 00:19:00,020 but had been unable to recognize his body among the swollen, 304 00:19:00,070 --> 00:19:02,190 blackened Union corpses. 305 00:19:03,250 --> 00:19:06,250 His father placed a stone to his memory anyway 306 00:19:06,300 --> 00:19:09,200 in the little cemetery at Southwest Harbor. 307 00:19:10,280 --> 00:19:12,700 Private Alfred Robbins, age twenty, 308 00:19:12,750 --> 00:19:15,080 collapsed and died while on his way to mail a letter 309 00:19:15,130 --> 00:19:17,700 in camp near Port Hudson, Louisiana. 310 00:19:17,750 --> 00:19:20,020 The cause was never discovered. 311 00:19:20,790 --> 00:19:25,240 In March, Corporal Farnum Haskell's coffin came home from Louisiana 312 00:19:25,340 --> 00:19:27,860 and was buried at Mount Adams Cemetery, 313 00:19:28,030 --> 00:19:32,280 despite the great difficulty of digging a grave in the frozen ground. 314 00:19:39,510 --> 00:19:43,140 During the long, cold, rainy winter of 1863, 315 00:19:43,190 --> 00:19:45,920 Confederate forces huddled in defensive positions 316 00:19:45,970 --> 00:19:49,360 south of the Duck River near Tullahoma, Tennessee. 317 00:19:50,030 --> 00:19:53,000 Confederate officers liked to explain that "Tullahoma" 318 00:19:53,100 --> 00:19:56,190 came from the Greek word "tulla," meaning "mud," 319 00:19:56,290 --> 00:19:59,070 and "homa," meaning "more mud." 320 00:20:01,250 --> 00:20:03,720 The Confederacy was on the move: 321 00:20:04,040 --> 00:20:07,940 Confederate General John C. Pemberton beat back Union forces 322 00:20:07,990 --> 00:20:10,050 trying to take the Chickasaw Bluffs 323 00:20:10,100 --> 00:20:11,810 north of Vicksburg; 324 00:20:12,520 --> 00:20:15,770 John Morgan's Confederate cavalry raided Kentucky, 325 00:20:15,820 --> 00:20:18,390 burning bridges, twisting train tracks, and 326 00:20:18,440 --> 00:20:21,180 taking 2,000 Union prisoners; 327 00:20:22,300 --> 00:20:25,680 and Nathan Bedford Forrest was driving the Union army mad 328 00:20:25,730 --> 00:20:27,230 everywhere he went... 329 00:20:27,800 --> 00:20:30,780 stealing horses, harrying supply lines, 330 00:20:30,880 --> 00:20:33,790 attacking armies four times the strength of his, 331 00:20:33,840 --> 00:20:36,130 then disappearing without a trace. 332 00:20:37,200 --> 00:20:40,180 In two weeks, Forrest stole 10,000 rifles, 333 00:20:40,230 --> 00:20:42,510 wrecked $3 million worth of equipment, 334 00:20:42,560 --> 00:20:46,270 and cut U. S. Grant's life lines, and forced him to retreat. 335 00:20:51,690 --> 00:20:54,220 In Texas, General John B. Magruder 336 00:20:54,270 --> 00:20:56,980 captured a Union flotilla at Galveston. 337 00:20:57,140 --> 00:21:00,990 After the bombardment was over, Confederate Major A. M. Lea 338 00:21:01,040 --> 00:21:04,610 went aboard the badly hit U.S.S. Harriet Lane. 339 00:21:05,000 --> 00:21:07,030 There he found his son, 340 00:21:07,080 --> 00:21:10,180 a federal lieutenant, dying on the deck. 341 00:21:16,950 --> 00:21:19,810 January 24, near Falmouth. 342 00:21:20,070 --> 00:21:22,530 "Daylight showed a strange scene: 343 00:21:22,940 --> 00:21:27,670 "men, horses, artillery, pontoons, and wagons were stuck in the mud. 344 00:21:28,390 --> 00:21:30,300 "Rebels put up a sign marked," 345 00:21:30,350 --> 00:21:32,650 "'Burnside stuck in the mud.'" 346 00:21:33,320 --> 00:21:36,460 "We can fight rebels, but not in the mud." 347 00:21:36,850 --> 00:21:38,820 Elisha Hunt Rhodes. 348 00:21:52,390 --> 00:21:55,300 "I wish you could hear Joshua give off a command 349 00:21:55,350 --> 00:21:59,180 "and see him ride along the battalion on his white horse." 350 00:21:59,280 --> 00:22:01,090 "He looked so splendidly." 351 00:22:01,140 --> 00:22:04,790 "He told me last night that he never felt so well in his life." 352 00:22:04,900 --> 00:22:06,500 Tom Chamberlain. 353 00:22:08,440 --> 00:22:11,600 "What makes it strange is that I should have gained twelve pounds 354 00:22:11,650 --> 00:22:13,300 “living on worms." 355 00:22:30,810 --> 00:22:33,670 "We live so mean here that hard bread is all worm, 356 00:22:33,720 --> 00:22:35,480 "and the meat stinks like hell. 357 00:22:35,580 --> 00:22:39,210 "And rice two or three times a week, and worms as long as your finger. 358 00:22:40,030 --> 00:22:43,320 “I liked rice once, but goddamn the stuff now." 359 00:22:44,880 --> 00:22:46,930 "It was no uncommon occurrence 360 00:22:46,980 --> 00:22:50,080 "for a man to find the surface of his pot of coffee 361 00:22:50,130 --> 00:22:53,990 "swimming with weevils after breaking up hardtack in it, 362 00:22:54,400 --> 00:22:56,570 "but they were easily skimmed off 363 00:22:56,620 --> 00:22:59,670 “and left no distinctive flavor behind." 364 00:23:00,950 --> 00:23:04,940 "Tell ma that I think of her beans and collards often and wish for some;" 365 00:23:05,190 --> 00:23:07,160 "but wishing does no good." 366 00:23:07,210 --> 00:23:09,170 Benjamin Franklin Jackson. 367 00:23:10,280 --> 00:23:13,040 Union troops were issued beans, bacon, 368 00:23:13,090 --> 00:23:15,820 pickled beef... called salt horse by the men... 369 00:23:15,840 --> 00:23:18,630 desiccated, compressed mixed vegetables, 370 00:23:18,900 --> 00:23:20,460 and hardtack... 371 00:23:20,510 --> 00:23:23,830 square, flour-and-water biscuits hard enough, some said, 372 00:23:23,930 --> 00:23:25,560 they could stop bullets. 373 00:23:26,580 --> 00:23:29,440 In the southern army, you ate something called "sloosh." 374 00:23:29,700 --> 00:23:32,110 You got issued cornmeal and bacon, 375 00:23:32,160 --> 00:23:36,380 and you fried the bacon... which left a great deal of grease in the pan... 376 00:23:36,430 --> 00:23:39,960 then you took the cornmeal and swirled it around in the grease 377 00:23:40,010 --> 00:23:41,430 to make the dough; 378 00:23:41,480 --> 00:23:44,000 then you might take the dough and make a snake of it 379 00:23:44,050 --> 00:23:47,260 and put it around your ramrod and cook it over the campfire. 380 00:23:47,430 --> 00:23:49,070 That was called "sloosh." 381 00:23:49,130 --> 00:23:50,790 They ate a lot of that. 382 00:23:52,890 --> 00:23:56,110 Coffee was the preferred drink of both armies. 383 00:23:56,620 --> 00:23:59,850 Union troops crushed the beans with their rifle butts; 384 00:23:59,900 --> 00:24:02,000 drank four pints of it a day... 385 00:24:02,070 --> 00:24:05,990 strong enough, one man said, to float an iron wedge... 386 00:24:06,660 --> 00:24:08,550 and when they could not build a fire, 387 00:24:08,600 --> 00:24:10,690 were content to chew the grounds. 388 00:24:15,250 --> 00:24:17,050 Potatoes, and chicory. 389 00:24:19,420 --> 00:24:23,420 "We have been living on the contents of those boxes you sent to us. 390 00:24:23,470 --> 00:24:26,220 "Nothing was spoiled except that card of biscuits. 391 00:24:26,270 --> 00:24:30,000 "Those were molded some, but we used over half of them in a soup. 392 00:24:30,210 --> 00:24:32,920 "Thank Mr. Berdicts a thousand times for me, 393 00:24:32,970 --> 00:24:35,640 "also Mrs. Maxson for those pies." 394 00:24:35,690 --> 00:24:38,370 "And those fried cakes and gingersnaps are first-rate." 395 00:24:38,440 --> 00:24:41,989 "And the dried berries, they're nice, and the dried beef and applesauce..." 396 00:24:41,990 --> 00:24:43,790 "That was first-rate." 397 00:24:47,060 --> 00:24:50,740 "No one agent so much obstructs this army" 398 00:24:50,910 --> 00:24:53,650 "as the degrading vice of drunkenness." 399 00:24:53,810 --> 00:24:56,720 "Total abstinence would be worth 50,000 men" 400 00:24:56,770 --> 00:24:58,690 "to the armies of the United States." 401 00:24:59,260 --> 00:25:01,070 General George McClellan. 402 00:25:03,340 --> 00:25:06,050 If a soldier couldn't buy it, he made it. 403 00:25:06,620 --> 00:25:09,580 One Union recipe called for bark juice, tar water, 404 00:25:09,630 --> 00:25:12,840 turpentine, brown sugar, lamp oil, and alcohol. 405 00:25:14,710 --> 00:25:17,120 Southerners sometimes dropped in raw meat 406 00:25:17,170 --> 00:25:19,520 and let the mixture ferment for a month or so 407 00:25:19,570 --> 00:25:21,530 to add what one veteran remembered as 408 00:25:21,580 --> 00:25:23,580 "an old and mellow taste." 409 00:25:25,750 --> 00:25:29,360 The men called their home brew "nockum stiff," "pop skull," 410 00:25:29,410 --> 00:25:31,180 and "oh, be joyful." 411 00:25:34,350 --> 00:25:37,330 "I invited my comrades to assist me in emptying 412 00:25:37,380 --> 00:25:39,730 "three canteens of "oh, be joyful," 413 00:25:40,000 --> 00:25:42,700 "then spent the balance of the evening singing." 414 00:25:43,170 --> 00:25:45,730 "Then we parted in good spirits." 415 00:25:49,580 --> 00:25:53,600 In March 1863, John Mosby's Confederate rangers 416 00:25:53,650 --> 00:25:56,000 raided Fairfax Court House, Virginia, 417 00:25:56,050 --> 00:26:00,100 capturing two captains, thirty privates, fifty-eight horses, 418 00:26:00,150 --> 00:26:02,960 and Brigadier General Edwin Stoughton. 419 00:26:03,970 --> 00:26:07,620 "For that, I am sorry," Lincoln said when told of the capture, 420 00:26:07,670 --> 00:26:09,670 "for I can make brigadier generals," 421 00:26:09,720 --> 00:26:11,570 "but I can't make horses." 422 00:26:13,580 --> 00:26:16,920 General Mosby had made life miserable for northern commanders 423 00:26:16,970 --> 00:26:18,440 throughout the war. 424 00:26:18,490 --> 00:26:21,430 No other Confederate officer was mentioned favorably 425 00:26:21,480 --> 00:26:24,200 as many times in Robert E. Lee's dispatches 426 00:26:24,250 --> 00:26:26,490 as John Singleton Mosby. 427 00:26:28,200 --> 00:26:32,820 There were no medals in the Confederate army, not one in the whole course of the war. 428 00:26:33,390 --> 00:26:35,850 The Confederate reason for that given was 429 00:26:35,900 --> 00:26:39,370 that they were all heroes and it would not do to single anyone out, but 430 00:26:39,490 --> 00:26:41,300 they were not all heroes. 431 00:26:42,010 --> 00:26:43,910 But there was a suggestion 432 00:26:45,460 --> 00:26:49,870 made to Lee that there be a roll of honor for the Army of Northern Virginia, 433 00:26:50,240 --> 00:26:51,940 and Lee disallowed it. 434 00:26:52,060 --> 00:26:54,830 The highest honor you could get in the Confederate army 435 00:26:54,880 --> 00:26:57,230 was to be mentioned in dispatches, 436 00:26:57,290 --> 00:27:00,080 and that was considered absolutely enough. 437 00:27:04,440 --> 00:27:06,970 "March 5th, 1863. 438 00:27:07,690 --> 00:27:09,820 "The arm of the slaves 439 00:27:09,880 --> 00:27:13,530 "is the best defense against the arm of the slave holder. 440 00:27:14,040 --> 00:27:15,710 "Who would be free themselves 441 00:27:15,810 --> 00:27:17,860 "must strike the blow. 442 00:27:18,450 --> 00:27:20,020 "I urge you 443 00:27:20,220 --> 00:27:23,340 "to fly to arms and smite with death" 444 00:27:23,390 --> 00:27:26,220 "the power that would bury government and your liberty" 445 00:27:26,270 --> 00:27:28,420 "in the same hopeless grave." 446 00:27:29,470 --> 00:27:33,090 "This is our golden opportunity." 447 00:27:34,260 --> 00:27:35,960 Frederick Douglass. 448 00:27:38,550 --> 00:27:41,650 "The colored population is the great available, 449 00:27:41,700 --> 00:27:45,480 "and yet un-availed-of, force for restoring the Union. 450 00:27:45,750 --> 00:27:48,930 "The bare sight of 50,000 armed and drilled 451 00:27:48,980 --> 00:27:51,330 "black soldiers upon the banks of the Mississippi" 452 00:27:51,380 --> 00:27:53,730 "would end the rebellion at once." 453 00:27:54,300 --> 00:27:56,850 "And who doubts that we can present that sight" 454 00:27:56,900 --> 00:27:59,250 "if we but take hold in earnest?" 455 00:28:00,020 --> 00:28:01,480 Abraham Lincoln. 456 00:28:03,470 --> 00:28:05,150 The people most 457 00:28:05,730 --> 00:28:09,830 affected by the emancipation proclamation obviously 458 00:28:09,880 --> 00:28:11,830 did not receive it as news 459 00:28:11,880 --> 00:28:13,940 because they knew before Lincoln knew 460 00:28:13,990 --> 00:28:16,090 that the war was about emancipation, 461 00:28:16,140 --> 00:28:18,120 and moreover they knew, 462 00:28:18,280 --> 00:28:21,650 as perhaps Lincoln did without fully realizing it, 463 00:28:21,700 --> 00:28:24,820 and certainly as many people today do not realize, 464 00:28:24,870 --> 00:28:29,250 that the emancipation proclamation did nothing to get them their freedom. 465 00:28:29,420 --> 00:28:31,830 It said that they had a right to go 466 00:28:31,880 --> 00:28:34,360 and put their bodies on the line 467 00:28:34,410 --> 00:28:37,120 if they had the nerve to believe in it, 468 00:28:37,490 --> 00:28:40,970 and many of them had the nerve to believe in it, 469 00:28:41,140 --> 00:28:43,040 and many suffered for that. 470 00:28:46,750 --> 00:28:49,820 To Lincoln, it was now clear that harsher measures were needed 471 00:28:49,870 --> 00:28:51,920 to destroy the Confederacy. 472 00:28:52,220 --> 00:28:55,230 He called for more troops, and in February, 473 00:28:55,280 --> 00:28:57,970 pushed a conscription act through congress. 474 00:28:58,530 --> 00:29:02,040 The emancipation proclamation had already authorized the arming 475 00:29:02,090 --> 00:29:03,750 of freed slaves. 476 00:29:04,660 --> 00:29:06,580 "As to the politics of Washington, 477 00:29:06,630 --> 00:29:10,430 "the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the president:" 478 00:29:10,630 --> 00:29:13,170 "it does not exist. He has no admirers," 479 00:29:13,220 --> 00:29:14,870 "no enthusiastic supporters," 480 00:29:14,920 --> 00:29:17,000 "no one to bet on his head." 481 00:29:18,420 --> 00:29:20,880 The fall elections had not gone well; 482 00:29:20,930 --> 00:29:23,120 Fredericksburg only made matters worse, 483 00:29:23,170 --> 00:29:26,440 and in Washington, talk of the disaster was everywhere. 484 00:29:26,960 --> 00:29:30,170 "If there is a worse place than hell," Lincoln told a visitor, 485 00:29:30,270 --> 00:29:31,730 "I am in it." 486 00:29:32,650 --> 00:29:35,620 The single most unpopular act of Lincoln's administration 487 00:29:35,670 --> 00:29:37,520 was the emancipation proclamation. 488 00:29:37,570 --> 00:29:40,540 It not only was horribly unpopular in the Confederacy, 489 00:29:40,590 --> 00:29:43,780 where Jefferson Davis called it "the most wicked thing that the" 490 00:29:43,830 --> 00:29:46,150 "dark side of humankind had ever come up with," 491 00:29:46,200 --> 00:29:48,920 but millions of northerners responded to it as well. 492 00:29:48,980 --> 00:29:50,870 They did not really want the... 493 00:29:50,920 --> 00:29:53,020 a great many northerners did not want 494 00:29:53,070 --> 00:29:55,610 the war to be changed to a war over slave liberation. 495 00:29:57,760 --> 00:29:59,910 Opposition to the war was spreading, 496 00:29:59,960 --> 00:30:02,530 especially among democrats in the heartland... 497 00:30:02,600 --> 00:30:05,200 Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, 498 00:30:05,320 --> 00:30:08,170 and the southern half of Lincoln's own Illinois. 499 00:30:08,950 --> 00:30:12,870 The proclamation ignited an antiwar movement in the north. 500 00:30:13,480 --> 00:30:17,140 All but thirty-five men of the 138th Illinois 501 00:30:17,190 --> 00:30:19,250 deserted over emancipation, 502 00:30:19,320 --> 00:30:22,950 declaring they would lie in the woods until moss grew on their backs 503 00:30:23,000 --> 00:30:25,490 rather than help free the slaves. 504 00:30:27,240 --> 00:30:30,240 Groups with names like the Knights of the Golden Circle 505 00:30:30,290 --> 00:30:34,860 and Sons of Liberty met in secret and muttered of forcing an end to the war. 506 00:30:35,030 --> 00:30:37,010 Their enemies called them "copperheads," 507 00:30:37,060 --> 00:30:39,540 and they wore on their lapels the head of Liberty, 508 00:30:39,590 --> 00:30:41,620 snipped from a copper penny. 509 00:30:41,670 --> 00:30:45,240 Their leader was Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. 510 00:30:45,510 --> 00:30:47,370 Lincoln had him thrown in jail 511 00:30:47,420 --> 00:30:50,180 and later banished to the Confederacy. 512 00:30:50,790 --> 00:30:54,790 "You have not conquered the South; You never will. 513 00:30:55,530 --> 00:30:58,100 "War for the Union was abandoned; 514 00:30:58,320 --> 00:31:00,970 "war for the negro openly begun," 515 00:31:01,240 --> 00:31:04,100 "and with stronger battalions than before," 516 00:31:04,370 --> 00:31:06,390 "with what success?" 517 00:31:06,760 --> 00:31:09,740 "Let the dead at Fredericksburg answer." 518 00:31:13,350 --> 00:31:15,650 All of these things bore in on him, 519 00:31:15,700 --> 00:31:19,280 plus the fact that the South had a strong army and a good leadership and was... 520 00:31:19,550 --> 00:31:22,150 but then he would pick up a Richmond newspaper, 521 00:31:22,200 --> 00:31:25,550 and he'd say, "Here's what they're saying about Jeff Davis down here." 522 00:31:25,600 --> 00:31:27,380 "You know, I don't look so bad." 523 00:31:27,430 --> 00:31:29,360 Because the South had a free press, 524 00:31:29,680 --> 00:31:31,830 too, and he realized, you know, that 525 00:31:31,880 --> 00:31:35,310 Jeff was not doing any better than he was as far as they were concerned. 526 00:31:36,120 --> 00:31:38,630 Davis was walking down the street in Richmond one day, 527 00:31:38,680 --> 00:31:42,890 and a Confederate soldier, who was in Richmond on furlough, passed him 528 00:31:43,160 --> 00:31:45,220 and stopped him and said, 529 00:31:45,270 --> 00:31:48,890 "Sir, mister, be'nt you Jefferson Davis?" 530 00:31:49,450 --> 00:31:51,230 And Davis said that he was. 531 00:31:51,350 --> 00:31:56,070 Then the soldier said, "Well, I thought so. You look so much like a Confederate postage stamp." 532 00:32:08,190 --> 00:32:11,910 Jefferson Davis was trying to win a war while forging a nation 533 00:32:11,960 --> 00:32:15,430 out of eleven states suspicious of even the most trivial move 534 00:32:15,480 --> 00:32:17,420 toward centralized government. 535 00:32:18,480 --> 00:32:21,220 When Davis called for a day of national fasting, 536 00:32:21,270 --> 00:32:23,090 the governor of Georgia ignored it, 537 00:32:23,140 --> 00:32:25,750 then named a different fast day of his own. 538 00:32:26,620 --> 00:32:29,790 "I entered into this revolution to contribute my might" 539 00:32:29,840 --> 00:32:31,700 "to sustain the rights of states" 540 00:32:31,750 --> 00:32:34,360 "and to prevent the consolidation of the government," 541 00:32:34,410 --> 00:32:38,070 "and I am still a rebel, no matter who may be in power." 542 00:32:38,240 --> 00:32:40,510 Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia. 543 00:32:43,550 --> 00:32:47,700 "The Confederacy has been done to death by politicians." 544 00:32:48,160 --> 00:32:49,760 Mary Chesnut. 545 00:32:50,430 --> 00:32:53,430 "Pardon me," a South Carolinian wrote his congressman, 546 00:32:53,530 --> 00:32:55,740 "is the majority always drunk?" 547 00:32:57,000 --> 00:33:01,570 Vice President Alexander Stephens believed Davis weak and vacillating, 548 00:33:01,620 --> 00:33:04,410 timid, petulant, peevish, obstinate. 549 00:33:04,680 --> 00:33:08,810 Stephens left Richmond in 1862, rarely to return. 550 00:33:11,870 --> 00:33:14,550 "I make no terms," Davis once said. 551 00:33:14,600 --> 00:33:16,520 "I accept no compromise." 552 00:33:16,840 --> 00:33:21,030 He refused to unbend in public or to curry favor with the press. 553 00:33:21,750 --> 00:33:24,410 Privately, he commuted nearly every death sentence 554 00:33:24,460 --> 00:33:26,680 for desertion that reached his desk, 555 00:33:26,730 --> 00:33:29,860 explaining that the poorest use of a soldier 556 00:33:29,910 --> 00:33:31,390 was to shoot him. 557 00:33:32,930 --> 00:33:36,470 He's often described as a bloodless pedant, 558 00:33:37,190 --> 00:33:39,970 a man who filled all his time with 559 00:33:40,020 --> 00:33:43,380 small-time paperwork and never anything else, 560 00:33:43,430 --> 00:33:47,170 an icy-cold man who had no friendliness in him. 561 00:33:47,390 --> 00:33:50,800 I found the opposite to be true in all those respects. 562 00:33:50,850 --> 00:33:53,600 Davis is an outgoing, friendly man, 563 00:33:54,150 --> 00:33:57,410 a great family man... loved his wife and children... 564 00:33:58,080 --> 00:34:00,590 infinite store of compassion. 565 00:34:01,010 --> 00:34:03,340 Lee said it best... he said, 566 00:34:03,390 --> 00:34:07,550 "I don't think anyone could name anyone who could have done a better job than Davis did," 567 00:34:07,600 --> 00:34:11,080 "and I personally don't know of anyone who could have done as good a job." 568 00:34:11,200 --> 00:34:14,570 That's from Robert E. Lee, which is pretty good authority. 569 00:34:16,720 --> 00:34:19,570 Davis may well have been the only southerner 570 00:34:19,620 --> 00:34:21,930 who understood southern nationality, 571 00:34:21,980 --> 00:34:24,890 who understood what sacrifices had to be made 572 00:34:24,940 --> 00:34:27,990 if the Confederacy was ever going to jell as a nation. 573 00:34:28,210 --> 00:34:31,310 He kept saying, "I need the kind of powers that Lincoln got." 574 00:34:31,360 --> 00:34:34,510 "I need the kind of resources that he got in the draft laws." 575 00:34:34,560 --> 00:34:37,510 "I need to be able to suspend the writ of ha be as corpus like he did." 576 00:34:38,010 --> 00:34:41,830 He would have said, "We can't live by the dogmas of the quiet past any longer." 577 00:34:41,880 --> 00:34:43,790 He didn't say that, but he acted that out. 578 00:34:43,840 --> 00:34:46,940 He said, "I have to be given the kinds... this Confederate government..." 579 00:34:46,990 --> 00:34:49,670 "Needs the kind of national authority... national power" 580 00:34:49,720 --> 00:34:52,190 "that the Union had in order to win." 581 00:34:52,290 --> 00:34:55,710 And they didn't get it because the states' rights helped kill the Confederacy. 582 00:34:57,460 --> 00:35:01,340 A single cake of soap now cost $1.10... 583 00:35:01,390 --> 00:35:03,960 a tenth of a soldier's monthly pay. 584 00:35:04,770 --> 00:35:07,950 At the beginning of 1863, a barrel of flour 585 00:35:08,000 --> 00:35:10,250 cost $70 in the south; 586 00:35:10,470 --> 00:35:13,630 by year's end, it cost $250. 587 00:35:15,080 --> 00:35:17,960 The Confederate Treasury cranked out millions of dollars 588 00:35:18,010 --> 00:35:20,230 in notes un-backed by gold. 589 00:35:20,800 --> 00:35:22,980 Southern printing was so primitive 590 00:35:23,030 --> 00:35:27,230 that counterfeiters were sometimes caught because their work was too good. 591 00:35:29,090 --> 00:35:32,360 By 1862 and '63, the South suffered from terrible 592 00:35:32,410 --> 00:35:33,950 inflationary currency. 593 00:35:34,220 --> 00:35:37,410 What was really at a premium was a Union gold dollar. 594 00:35:37,510 --> 00:35:41,510 So that the Confederate people could never get away from the Union, not even economically. 595 00:35:43,280 --> 00:35:45,370 "If the Confederacy is defeated," 596 00:35:45,420 --> 00:35:47,830 "it will be by the people at home." 597 00:35:47,950 --> 00:35:50,140 Atlanta Southern Confederacy. 598 00:35:51,950 --> 00:35:55,310 Thousands of women, infuriated by soaring prices, 599 00:35:55,360 --> 00:35:57,670 stormed through downtown Richmond shops, 600 00:35:57,720 --> 00:36:01,850 smashing windows and gathering up armfuls of food and clothing. 601 00:36:02,710 --> 00:36:04,410 Troops tried to stop them, 602 00:36:04,460 --> 00:36:06,740 and Jefferson Davis himself came out, 603 00:36:06,790 --> 00:36:10,000 throwing what money he had in his pockets to the crowd 604 00:36:10,340 --> 00:36:13,480 and begging them to blame the Yankees, not the government. 605 00:36:15,010 --> 00:36:18,870 Then he warned the troops would open fire if they did not disperse. 606 00:36:19,140 --> 00:36:21,270 The women straggled home. 607 00:36:23,200 --> 00:36:27,560 "Patriotic planters would willingly put their own flesh and blood into the army," 608 00:36:27,730 --> 00:36:29,750 "but when they were asked for a negro," 609 00:36:29,800 --> 00:36:31,950 "it was like drawing an eyetooth." 610 00:36:32,100 --> 00:36:35,020 Senator Louis T. Wigfall, Texas. 611 00:36:35,870 --> 00:36:39,970 Farmers were called upon to contribute one-tenth of their produce, 612 00:36:40,120 --> 00:36:44,690 and the Confederate army was empowered to impress male slaves as laborers, 613 00:36:44,790 --> 00:36:47,920 provided a monthly fee was paid to their masters. 614 00:36:48,490 --> 00:36:52,530 Planters moved their slaves inland, away from the government and the fighting. 615 00:36:53,050 --> 00:36:57,340 One-hundred-fifty-thousand slaves were marched all the way to Texas. 616 00:36:57,490 --> 00:36:59,390 Hundreds, perhaps thousands, 617 00:36:59,440 --> 00:37:01,390 died along the way. 618 00:37:05,020 --> 00:37:07,010 "Wartrace, Tennessee, 619 00:37:07,160 --> 00:37:09,660 "June 10th, 1863. 620 00:37:10,020 --> 00:37:12,260 "I have just heard from Hilliard's Legion: 621 00:37:12,530 --> 00:37:14,220 "they're deserting every day." 622 00:37:14,270 --> 00:37:16,160 "They say they don't get enough to eat." 623 00:37:16,430 --> 00:37:18,280 "I just bought me a testament." 624 00:37:18,350 --> 00:37:21,780 "I gave $2.00 for it. Everything's high here." 625 00:37:21,980 --> 00:37:23,900 Benjamin Franklin Jackson. 626 00:37:26,700 --> 00:37:29,780 "I saw a sight today that made me feel mighty bad. 627 00:37:29,830 --> 00:37:32,160 "I saw a man shot for deserting. 628 00:37:32,880 --> 00:37:36,580 "There was twenty-four guns at him, and they shot him all to pieces." 629 00:37:37,000 --> 00:37:39,870 "He went home, and they brought him back, and then he went home again," 630 00:37:39,920 --> 00:37:41,820 "so they shot him for that." 631 00:37:42,740 --> 00:37:45,870 "Martha, it was one sight that I did hate to see." 632 00:37:49,790 --> 00:37:53,480 By the end of the year, two-fifths of the Southern Army would be absent, 633 00:37:53,530 --> 00:37:55,430 with or without leave. 634 00:37:56,480 --> 00:37:58,700 Deserters sometimes banded together, 635 00:37:58,750 --> 00:38:02,030 often fed and clothed by Union sympathizers. 636 00:38:02,650 --> 00:38:06,400 In North Carolina, the pro-Union Heroes of America 637 00:38:06,450 --> 00:38:08,820 had over 10,000 members. 638 00:38:09,690 --> 00:38:13,120 By the end of the war, Unionists from every Confederate state 639 00:38:13,170 --> 00:38:14,690 except South Carolina 640 00:38:14,740 --> 00:38:16,910 had sent regiments to the north. 641 00:38:18,830 --> 00:38:21,640 In Jones County, Mississippi, a guerrilla band 642 00:38:21,690 --> 00:38:24,340 ran off tax collectors, burned bridges, 643 00:38:24,390 --> 00:38:27,710 and ambushed Confederate columns for three years. 644 00:38:28,880 --> 00:38:30,760 Reporters called the region. 645 00:38:30,810 --> 00:38:32,920 "The Kingdom of Jones." 646 00:38:37,480 --> 00:38:41,020 "How I wish you could hear the music of this encampment tonight. 647 00:38:41,120 --> 00:38:44,230 "Just stand out in the open air a little while and listen. 648 00:38:44,550 --> 00:38:46,400 "All seems happy, 649 00:38:46,450 --> 00:38:48,700 "and all seems gay, but still, 650 00:38:48,750 --> 00:38:52,090 "could you look into their hearts you would see thoughts of the loved ones 651 00:38:52,140 --> 00:38:56,090 "that they have left at home rise above their mirth and gaiety. 652 00:38:56,820 --> 00:39:00,530 "Yet, they are contented, though not happy," 653 00:39:00,700 --> 00:39:02,890 "contented to do their duty," 654 00:39:03,200 --> 00:39:06,060 "contented to bear their part in this war," 655 00:39:06,230 --> 00:39:08,840 "and sing sad thoughts away." 656 00:39:12,000 --> 00:39:13,480 "Dear Fanny, 657 00:39:13,650 --> 00:39:16,320 "I don't know what we should have done without our band. 658 00:39:16,370 --> 00:39:20,050 "It's acknowledged by everyone to be the best in the division." 659 00:39:20,220 --> 00:39:23,920 "Every night about sundown, Gilmore gives us a splendid concert," 660 00:39:23,970 --> 00:39:26,560 "playing selections from the operas and" 661 00:39:26,610 --> 00:39:30,970 "some very pretty marches, quicksteps, waltzes, and the like." 662 00:39:49,070 --> 00:39:52,290 Troops sang in camp and on the way to battle. 663 00:39:52,600 --> 00:39:54,420 Confederates favored "Dixie" 664 00:39:54,470 --> 00:39:56,650 and "The Bonnie Blue Flag." 665 00:40:01,400 --> 00:40:05,160 Union soldiers still preferred an old Methodist tune. 666 00:40:07,810 --> 00:40:10,520 Mostly, they liked sentimental songs: 667 00:40:11,040 --> 00:40:13,070 "Just Before the Battle, Mother." 668 00:40:13,240 --> 00:40:14,940 "The Vacant Chair." 669 00:40:15,090 --> 00:40:17,610 "All Quiet Along the Potomac," 670 00:40:17,830 --> 00:40:19,620 and "Home Sweet Home." 671 00:40:21,720 --> 00:40:24,920 In many camps, the men were forbidden to play a song called, 672 00:40:24,970 --> 00:40:26,870 "Weeping, Sad and Lonely," 673 00:40:26,920 --> 00:40:30,250 officers considering it destructive of morale. 674 00:40:35,000 --> 00:40:37,660 Both sides loved "Lorena." 675 00:41:46,600 --> 00:41:49,340 "April 14th, 1863, 676 00:41:49,390 --> 00:41:52,760 "Rappahannock River, Virginia, near Franklin's Crossing. 677 00:41:53,180 --> 00:41:56,530 "General Thomas J. Jackson came down to the riverbank today 678 00:41:56,580 --> 00:41:58,790 "with a party of ladies and officers. 679 00:41:59,000 --> 00:42:02,000 "We raised our hats to the party, and strange to say, 680 00:42:02,050 --> 00:42:05,000 "The ladies waved their handkerchiefs in reply. 681 00:42:05,720 --> 00:42:09,920 "General Jackson took his field glasses and coolly surveyed our party. 682 00:42:10,200 --> 00:42:12,430 "We could have shot him with a revolver," 683 00:42:12,900 --> 00:42:15,960 "but we have an agreement that neither side will fire," 684 00:42:16,060 --> 00:42:17,770 "as it does no good" 685 00:42:18,110 --> 00:42:20,760 "and, in fact, is simply murder." 686 00:42:21,280 --> 00:42:23,190 Elisha Hunt Rhodes. 687 00:42:36,000 --> 00:42:40,260 "General, I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. 688 00:42:40,480 --> 00:42:42,990 "I have heard in such away as to believe it 689 00:42:43,040 --> 00:42:46,380 "of your recently saying that both the army and the government 690 00:42:46,430 --> 00:42:48,250 "needed a dictator. 691 00:42:48,670 --> 00:42:52,060 "Of course, it was not for this but in spite of this 692 00:42:52,110 --> 00:42:54,170 "that I have given you the command. 693 00:42:54,580 --> 00:42:57,340 "Only those generals who gain successes" 694 00:42:57,390 --> 00:42:59,390 "can set up as dictators." 695 00:42:59,910 --> 00:43:03,550 "What I now ask of you is military success," 696 00:43:03,920 --> 00:43:06,350 "and I will risk the dictatorship." 697 00:43:06,760 --> 00:43:08,440 Abraham Lincoln. 698 00:43:09,380 --> 00:43:12,090 Again Lincoln turned to a new general. 699 00:43:13,050 --> 00:43:15,770 He replaced Burnside with Joseph Hooker, 700 00:43:15,890 --> 00:43:18,890 a tenacious West Pointer called fighting Joe, 701 00:43:18,940 --> 00:43:21,940 who drank and talked too much for his own good. 702 00:43:22,350 --> 00:43:25,150 It was absolutely necessary, Lincoln told him, 703 00:43:25,200 --> 00:43:27,330 to destroy Lee's army. 704 00:43:27,740 --> 00:43:29,740 "My plans are perfect." 705 00:43:29,800 --> 00:43:32,380 "May God have mercy on General Lee," 706 00:43:32,430 --> 00:43:34,090 "for I will have none." 707 00:43:38,410 --> 00:43:41,650 Hooker's plans called for one part of his enormous army 708 00:43:41,700 --> 00:43:44,030 to feign an assault on Lee's front, 709 00:43:44,080 --> 00:43:45,770 still at Fredericksburg, 710 00:43:46,340 --> 00:43:49,740 while the rest marched up the Rappahannock, crossed the river, 711 00:43:49,790 --> 00:43:51,710 and attacked Lee from the rear. 712 00:43:53,810 --> 00:43:56,320 On April 30th, Hooker's main force 713 00:43:56,370 --> 00:43:59,450 70,000 strong... reached Chancellorsville... 714 00:43:59,500 --> 00:44:02,790 a lone house in a clearing surrounded by a thick forest 715 00:44:02,840 --> 00:44:04,490 called "The Wilderness." 716 00:44:07,740 --> 00:44:10,570 Hooker and his officers moved in downstairs 717 00:44:10,670 --> 00:44:14,790 and continued to map out the assault they were sure would trap Lee. 718 00:44:16,270 --> 00:44:19,360 "The enemy must either ingloriously fly" 719 00:44:19,410 --> 00:44:21,240 "or come out from behind his defenses" 720 00:44:21,290 --> 00:44:23,990 "and give us battle upon our own ground," 721 00:44:24,040 --> 00:44:26,420 "where certain destruction awaits him." 722 00:44:28,080 --> 00:44:31,880 "The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation" 723 00:44:32,180 --> 00:44:34,090 "because she never cackles" 724 00:44:34,140 --> 00:44:36,580 "until after the egg is laid." 725 00:44:39,620 --> 00:44:42,660 But Robert E. Lee, outnumbered nearly two to one, 726 00:44:42,710 --> 00:44:45,000 was not fooled by Hooker's plan. 727 00:44:46,480 --> 00:44:50,880 Defying all military convention, he divided his own much smaller force, 728 00:44:50,930 --> 00:44:53,450 leaving only ¼ of his men at Fredericksburg, 729 00:44:53,500 --> 00:44:56,290 before rushing west to shore up his flank. 730 00:44:57,880 --> 00:45:00,750 When Lee's Confederates reached the edge of the Wilderness, 731 00:45:00,850 --> 00:45:03,300 Union troops moved out to engage them. 732 00:45:12,840 --> 00:45:14,170 Fire! 733 00:45:22,110 --> 00:45:24,120 But the fighting had hardly begun 734 00:45:24,170 --> 00:45:26,370 when fighting Joe Hooker inexplicably 735 00:45:26,420 --> 00:45:28,770 ordered his forces back to defensive positions 736 00:45:28,820 --> 00:45:30,720 around the Chancellor house. 737 00:45:31,330 --> 00:45:33,990 "To tell the truth," he later tried to explain, 738 00:45:34,110 --> 00:45:36,960 "I just lost confidence in Joe Hooker." 739 00:45:38,910 --> 00:45:41,100 Lee sensed Hooker's confusion 740 00:45:41,320 --> 00:45:43,900 and the next day divided his army a second time, 741 00:45:44,110 --> 00:45:47,410 sending 28,000 men under Stonewall Jackson 742 00:45:47,460 --> 00:45:50,260 on an extraordinary fourteen-mile march 743 00:45:50,310 --> 00:45:51,950 through the dense wilderness 744 00:45:52,000 --> 00:45:54,270 and around the Union's right flank. 745 00:46:01,200 --> 00:46:05,830 Hooker somehow persuaded himself that Jackson was actually retreating 746 00:46:05,880 --> 00:46:09,270 and despite the skeletal rebel force remaining in front of him, 747 00:46:09,320 --> 00:46:11,460 chose to stay in camp. 748 00:46:12,580 --> 00:46:17,420 All day long came reports from terrified Union pickets of a huge rebel force 749 00:46:17,520 --> 00:46:20,700 moving just beyond the screen of trees to the west. 750 00:46:21,100 --> 00:46:22,610 They were ignored. 751 00:46:24,690 --> 00:46:26,220 Late that afternoon, 752 00:46:26,280 --> 00:46:29,300 Union troops were boiling coffee and playing cards 753 00:46:29,350 --> 00:46:32,950 when deer came bounding out of the forest and through their camp. 754 00:46:34,870 --> 00:46:37,510 Jackson's army was right behind them. 755 00:46:48,270 --> 00:46:51,930 "It was a perfect whirlwind of men," a survivor said. 756 00:46:52,100 --> 00:46:54,620 "The enemy seemed to come from every direction." 757 00:47:09,720 --> 00:47:12,320 The federals fell back nearly two miles 758 00:47:12,420 --> 00:47:15,590 before darkness stopped the Confederate sweep. 759 00:47:17,200 --> 00:47:21,120 Chancellorsville, in many ways, is Lee's masterpiece: 760 00:47:21,630 --> 00:47:23,740 it's where the odds were longest; 761 00:47:23,900 --> 00:47:26,270 it's where he took the greatest risk 762 00:47:26,320 --> 00:47:29,710 in dividing his army in the presence of a superior enemy, 763 00:47:29,980 --> 00:47:33,230 and kept the pressure on. 764 00:47:34,470 --> 00:47:37,170 The real fault at Chancellorsville was 765 00:47:37,220 --> 00:47:41,380 the attack was staged so late in the day that they were not able to push it 766 00:47:41,530 --> 00:47:44,140 to the extent that Jackson had intended to. 767 00:47:44,310 --> 00:47:46,830 And he was even attempting to make a night attack... 768 00:47:46,880 --> 00:47:49,090 a very rare thing in the Civil War... 769 00:47:49,140 --> 00:47:52,860 because he knew that he hadn't finished up what he had started to begin. 770 00:47:54,970 --> 00:47:58,750 Eager to fight on, Jackson rode out between the lines that evening 771 00:47:58,800 --> 00:48:00,640 to scout for a night attack. 772 00:48:00,860 --> 00:48:02,660 When he turned back toward his men, 773 00:48:02,760 --> 00:48:05,550 nervous Confederate pickets opened fire. 774 00:48:07,740 --> 00:48:09,620 Two of his aides fell dead. 775 00:48:09,720 --> 00:48:12,310 Jackson was hit twice in the left arm. 776 00:48:15,620 --> 00:48:18,710 His shattered arm was amputated the next morning. 777 00:48:19,030 --> 00:48:20,650 Lee was horrified. 778 00:48:20,920 --> 00:48:23,300 "He has lost his left arm," he said, 779 00:48:23,360 --> 00:48:25,320 "but I have lost my right." 780 00:48:28,570 --> 00:48:30,580 Hooker continued to bumble. 781 00:48:31,450 --> 00:48:35,240 As he nervously watched the fighting from the porch of the Chancellor house, 782 00:48:35,260 --> 00:48:37,810 a shell split the pillar he was leaning against 783 00:48:37,860 --> 00:48:39,620 and knocked him senseless. 784 00:48:40,810 --> 00:48:44,500 Groggy all day, he refused to relinquish command. 785 00:48:45,920 --> 00:48:48,380 Finally, he ordered retreat. 786 00:48:50,810 --> 00:48:53,060 The defeat was total. 787 00:49:01,340 --> 00:49:05,030 Again the Union army withdrew across the Rappahannock. 788 00:49:07,660 --> 00:49:10,480 Hooker had lost 17,000 men, 789 00:49:10,530 --> 00:49:12,730 even more than at Fredericksburg. 790 00:49:14,750 --> 00:49:18,410 "My God, my God," said Lincoln when he got the news, 791 00:49:18,580 --> 00:49:20,760 "what will the country say?" 792 00:49:25,710 --> 00:49:29,170 Chancellorsville was Lee's most brilliant victory 793 00:49:29,340 --> 00:49:31,250 and one of the costliest. 794 00:49:31,410 --> 00:49:34,770 Thirteen-thousand of his men were dead or out of action, 795 00:49:35,430 --> 00:49:38,900 but it was the loss of one man that concerned him most. 796 00:49:40,000 --> 00:49:43,000 Stonewall Jackson seemed to be recuperating. 797 00:49:43,110 --> 00:49:45,490 Then on Sunday, May 10th, 798 00:49:45,540 --> 00:49:47,500 he took a turn for the worse. 799 00:49:49,710 --> 00:49:52,240 The scene is in a bedroom in which 800 00:49:52,390 --> 00:49:54,900 he's coming in and out of consciousness. 801 00:49:56,870 --> 00:50:00,290 Pneumonia's what he died of, not the loss of his arm. 802 00:50:02,610 --> 00:50:05,490 And his wife got there to be with him, 803 00:50:05,860 --> 00:50:08,430 and the surgeon, Dr. McGuire, 804 00:50:08,550 --> 00:50:12,600 told Mrs. Jackson that her husband would die that day, 805 00:50:13,260 --> 00:50:15,830 and she told him, said, 806 00:50:16,100 --> 00:50:19,050 "The doctor says that you won't last the day out," 807 00:50:19,120 --> 00:50:22,960 and he said, "Oh, no, my child. It's not that serious." 808 00:50:23,520 --> 00:50:25,470 And then finally she said, 809 00:50:25,690 --> 00:50:28,400 "You'll be with the lord this day." 810 00:50:29,070 --> 00:50:32,310 And he went off into some sort of sleepy delirium. 811 00:50:32,580 --> 00:50:35,100 Pneumonia affects people in strange ways. 812 00:50:35,670 --> 00:50:37,710 And he called the doctor over and he says, 813 00:50:37,760 --> 00:50:42,170 "Dr. McGuire, my wife tells me I'm gonna die today. Is that true?" And the doctor said, 814 00:50:42,220 --> 00:50:43,530 "Yes, it is." 815 00:50:43,790 --> 00:50:47,570 And he said, "Good. Very good." 816 00:50:47,840 --> 00:50:50,520 "I always wanted to die on a Sunday." 817 00:50:50,990 --> 00:50:54,380 And when they offered him brandy or morphine, 818 00:50:54,430 --> 00:50:56,900 He said, "No. I want to keep my mind clear." 819 00:50:57,520 --> 00:51:01,300 And the last thing he said... is sort of... he wandered in his mind. 820 00:51:01,350 --> 00:51:04,470 He was calling on A. P. Hill, and "Prepare for action." 821 00:51:04,830 --> 00:51:07,230 And then all of a sudden, he was quiet, 822 00:51:07,380 --> 00:51:09,570 and very quiet for a spell, 823 00:51:09,740 --> 00:51:12,330 and he said in a clear, distinct voice, 824 00:51:12,380 --> 00:51:14,310 "Let us cross over the river" 825 00:51:14,460 --> 00:51:16,840 "and rest under the shade of the trees," 826 00:51:16,890 --> 00:51:18,130 and then died. 827 00:51:25,480 --> 00:51:27,740 "The death of our pious, brave," 828 00:51:27,790 --> 00:51:30,520 "and noble General Stonewall Jackson" 829 00:51:30,930 --> 00:51:33,660 "is a great blow to our cause." 830 00:51:47,420 --> 00:51:49,470 Winfield Scott. 831 00:51:50,140 --> 00:51:51,940 Henry Halleck. 832 00:51:52,660 --> 00:51:54,560 Irvin McDowell. 833 00:51:55,270 --> 00:51:57,150 George McClellan. 834 00:51:58,020 --> 00:51:59,670 John Pope. 835 00:52:00,480 --> 00:52:02,690 George McClellan, again. 836 00:52:03,360 --> 00:52:05,610 Ambrose Burnside. 837 00:52:06,330 --> 00:52:08,150 Joseph Hooker. 838 00:52:08,360 --> 00:52:11,250 Lincoln could not find the general he needed. 839 00:52:12,270 --> 00:52:16,700 He now knew that to win the war, the southern armies had to be crushed. 840 00:52:17,360 --> 00:52:18,900 He had the men, 841 00:52:18,950 --> 00:52:22,040 but he needed a general with the will to use them. 842 00:52:23,260 --> 00:52:26,870 "No general yet found can face the arithmetic," 843 00:52:26,970 --> 00:52:29,700 "but the end of the war will be at hand" 844 00:52:29,750 --> 00:52:31,640 "when he shall be discovered." 845 00:52:33,550 --> 00:52:35,450 "Vicksburg is the key." 846 00:52:36,030 --> 00:52:40,490 "The war can never be brought to a close until the key is in our pocket." 847 00:52:42,220 --> 00:52:45,540 "A long line of high, rugged, irregular bluffs 848 00:52:45,590 --> 00:52:47,740 "clearly cut against the sky, 849 00:52:47,790 --> 00:52:50,610 "crowned with cannon, which peered ominously" 850 00:52:50,660 --> 00:52:52,920 "from embrasures to the right and left" 851 00:52:52,970 --> 00:52:55,110 "as far as the eye could see..." 852 00:52:55,210 --> 00:52:57,080 "That is Vicksburg." 853 00:52:59,030 --> 00:53:03,230 For two and-a-half months, Ulysses S. Grant doggedly attempted to dig 854 00:53:03,280 --> 00:53:06,300 or hack or float his army through the tangled bayous 855 00:53:06,350 --> 00:53:08,660 and seize the town of Vicksburg. 856 00:53:08,770 --> 00:53:10,310 Nothing worked. 857 00:53:10,920 --> 00:53:13,770 The press accused him of sloth and stupidity; 858 00:53:13,820 --> 00:53:15,890 hinted he was drinking again. 859 00:53:18,390 --> 00:53:21,550 Finally, Grant decided on a daring plan: 860 00:53:21,700 --> 00:53:25,760 he would march downriver through the swamps on the western side, 861 00:53:25,970 --> 00:53:27,700 cross below Vicksburg, 862 00:53:27,750 --> 00:53:30,750 and without hope of resupply or reinforcement, 863 00:53:30,800 --> 00:53:33,350 come up from behind and attack the city. 864 00:53:52,530 --> 00:53:55,480 By early May, Grant had crossed the river. 865 00:53:57,860 --> 00:53:59,620 "When this was effected, 866 00:53:59,670 --> 00:54:03,770 "I felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equaled since. 867 00:54:04,090 --> 00:54:06,490 "I was now in the enemy's country 868 00:54:06,610 --> 00:54:09,190 "with a river and the stronghold of Vicksburg" 869 00:54:09,240 --> 00:54:11,740 "between me and my base of supply,." 870 00:54:12,310 --> 00:54:14,280 "But I was on dry ground" 871 00:54:14,380 --> 00:54:17,200 "on the same side of the river with the enemy." 872 00:54:19,050 --> 00:54:22,650 The men knew they were cut loose from their base, 873 00:54:22,700 --> 00:54:27,180 knew they were going to be dependent for supplies on a very tenuous supply line, 874 00:54:27,280 --> 00:54:29,810 but Grant himself gave them confidence. 875 00:54:29,860 --> 00:54:32,250 They believed Grant knew what he was doing, 876 00:54:32,350 --> 00:54:35,050 and one great encouragement for their believing that was, 877 00:54:35,100 --> 00:54:37,950 quite often on the march, whether at night or in the daytime, 878 00:54:38,050 --> 00:54:40,470 they'd be moving along a road or over a bridge 879 00:54:40,520 --> 00:54:42,930 and right beside the road would be Grant on his horse... 880 00:54:42,980 --> 00:54:47,070 a dust-covered man on a dust-covered horse, saying "Move on, close up." 881 00:54:47,120 --> 00:54:50,870 So, they felt very much that he personally was in charge of their movement 882 00:54:50,920 --> 00:54:53,290 and it... it gave them an added confidence. 883 00:55:03,780 --> 00:55:07,330 In three weeks, Grant's army, cut off from all communication 884 00:55:07,380 --> 00:55:10,860 with the outside world, marched 180 miles, 885 00:55:10,910 --> 00:55:14,560 fought and won five battles at Port Gibson... 886 00:55:15,470 --> 00:55:16,910 Raymond... 887 00:55:17,480 --> 00:55:19,000 Jackson... 888 00:55:19,610 --> 00:55:21,350 Champions Hill... 889 00:55:21,860 --> 00:55:23,900 and Big Black River... 890 00:55:24,870 --> 00:55:27,500 and finally surrounded Vicksburg itself, 891 00:55:27,550 --> 00:55:30,200 trapping 31,000 Confederates. 892 00:55:33,000 --> 00:55:37,420 On May 19th, Grant tried to take the town by direct assault 893 00:55:37,640 --> 00:55:39,460 but was beaten back. 894 00:55:47,300 --> 00:55:48,920 "May 19th. 895 00:55:49,180 --> 00:55:53,750 "Thanks be to the great ruler of the universe Vicksburg is still safe." 896 00:55:54,210 --> 00:55:58,180 "The first great assault has been most successfully repelled." 897 00:55:58,330 --> 00:56:01,830 "All my fears in reference to taking the place by storm:" 898 00:56:01,880 --> 00:56:03,260 "now vanished." 899 00:56:03,530 --> 00:56:05,970 Reverend William Lovelace Foster, 900 00:56:06,070 --> 00:56:09,620 Chaplain, 35th Mississippi Volunteers. 901 00:56:11,750 --> 00:56:13,830 Grant settled in for a siege, 902 00:56:14,000 --> 00:56:17,550 resolved, he said, to "out-camp the enemy." 903 00:56:19,540 --> 00:56:23,370 "It is such folly for them to waste their ammunition like that. 904 00:56:23,420 --> 00:56:26,270 "How can they ever take a town that has such advantages" 905 00:56:26,320 --> 00:56:28,870 "for defense and protection as this?" 906 00:56:29,140 --> 00:56:31,940 "We'll just burrow into these hills and let them" 907 00:56:31,990 --> 00:56:34,740 "batter away as hard as they please." 908 00:56:41,790 --> 00:56:46,270 On May 15th, Jefferson Davis summoned General Lee to Richmond. 909 00:56:46,380 --> 00:56:49,040 Something had to be done about Grant. 910 00:56:49,460 --> 00:56:51,830 Davis wanted to send part of Lee's army 911 00:56:51,880 --> 00:56:53,520 to relieve Vicksburg. 912 00:56:54,140 --> 00:56:55,710 Lee was against it. 913 00:56:55,870 --> 00:56:57,610 He had a bolder plan. 914 00:56:59,950 --> 00:57:03,350 The Army of Northern Virginia should invade the north again, 915 00:57:03,400 --> 00:57:05,740 striking this time into Pennsylvania. 916 00:57:06,300 --> 00:57:08,980 Lee would attack Harrisburg and Philadelphia 917 00:57:09,050 --> 00:57:12,180 and force Grant north to defend Washington. 918 00:57:12,800 --> 00:57:15,560 With luck, Washington itself might fall. 919 00:57:16,330 --> 00:57:19,280 It might even force Lincoln to sue for peace 920 00:57:19,330 --> 00:57:21,570 and recognize the Confederacy. 921 00:57:22,480 --> 00:57:24,310 Davis agreed. 922 00:57:25,640 --> 00:57:28,560 Everything now hung on Vicksburg in the west 923 00:57:28,610 --> 00:57:30,580 and Pennsylvania in the east. 924 00:57:30,850 --> 00:57:33,390 As Grant pressed his siege at Vicksburg, 925 00:57:33,550 --> 00:57:35,400 Lee moved north.