The war began over slavery, and the states that left the Union wrote that down at the time. What followed reached everywhere: an iron raft with a turret, a hand-cranked submarine, a state constitution sent by telegraph, a cemetery laid out on a general's lawn. These stories take the war at eye level, and correct a few things everyone knows.
Every tile in a U.S. Civil War game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
People
nine stories
1The pilot who sailed a Confederate steamer to freedom
On the tile: Robert SmallsMay 1862
Robert Smalls was the enslaved wheelman of the Confederate transport Planter at Charleston, a pilot in all but title. One night in May 1862, with the three white officers ashore, he put on the captain's broad-brimmed straw hat, picked up his wife, their children and other families at a wharf, and steamed out past the harbor forts sounding the proper whistle signals for an outbound ship. Past the last gun he raised a white bedsheet and handed the vessel over to the Union blockade. He piloted for the Navy afterward and later served in Congress.
Harriet Tubman had already guided people out of slavery when she went to South Carolina, first as a nurse and cook and then as a scout for the Union army. On June 2, 1863, she helped plan and guide a raid up the Combahee River with Colonel James Montgomery and Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, steering the boats clear of Confederate mines whose locations had come from enslaved people living along the river. Nearly 800 enslaved men, women and children reached the boats. The Park Service calls her the first American woman to lead a military action in wartime.
Through the war Frederick Douglass kept pressing Lincoln on two points: make emancipation an open war aim, and let Black men enlist. When both were granted he went recruiting for the Union army himself. He was not asking other families for something his own would not give: two of his sons joined the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first Black regiments of the war. When Black troops found they were paid and treated worse than white ones, Douglass went to the president to argue their case.
Elizabeth Van Lew lived in Richmond, the Confederate capital, and worked steadily against it. Recruited by General Benjamin Butler in December 1863, she ran a network of about a dozen people, Black and white, moving information out of the city and helping Union prisoners in Libby Prison with food, messages and escapes. After the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid in 1864 she recovered Colonel Ulric Dahlgren's body and quietly reburied it so his family could claim it. President Grant later made her postmaster of Richmond.
5The rhetoric professor who held the end of the line
On the tile: ChamberlainJuly 2, 1863
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain taught languages and rhetoric at Bowdoin College before the war. On July 2, 1863, he commanded the 20th Maine at the far left of the Union line on Little Round Top at Gettysburg. His men held off repeated attacks until the ammunition ran low, then went down the slope with bayonets. Congress gave him the Medal of Honor for it. In April 1865 he received the surrender of Confederate arms at Appomattox and had his men salute the soldiers filing past.
Clara Barton was a former schoolteacher working as a Patent Office clerk, with little training as a nurse, when the war started. She collected donations, spent her own money, and took supplies out to the fighting in army wagons. At Antietam she found surgeons dressing wounds with corn husks, and put the men still on their feet to hauling water and cooking for the wounded. In 1865, with Lincoln's authorization, she opened an office to trace missing soldiers. After the war she founded the American Red Cross, in 1881.
Susie King Taylor joined the First South Carolina Volunteers, later the 33rd United States Colored Troops, as the regimental laundress, and cooked and nursed as well. She could read and write, so she spent her spare hours teaching the soldiers. Their colonel, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, wrote that their love of the spelling-book was perfectly inexhaustible. She later published her memoir, the only one by an African American woman about her own wartime service.
He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Ohio. In 1839 the congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote him down as Ulysses S. Grant, taking Simpson, his mother's maiden name, for a middle name. At the academy Grant was told to accept that name or go home and seek a new appointment the next year, and he accepted it. Classmates read the initials U.S. as Uncle Sam, soon shortened to Sam. The name followed him through Vicksburg, command of all the Union armies, and the April afternoon at Appomattox when Lee surrendered to him.
Mary Edwards Walker earned a medical degree in 1855, when hardly any American woman had one. She volunteered as soon as the war began, was refused a commission, worked on battlefields anyway, and was eventually appointed assistant surgeon of the 52nd Ohio Infantry. Confederate forces captured her in 1864 and held her four months in a Richmond prison. She became the first woman to receive the Medal of Honor. The army later revoked it, and in 1977 a review board restored it.
Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, and fired for about thirty-six hours. Buildings inside the fort caught fire, the garrison surrendered, and not one soldier on either side was killed in the shooting. Major Robert Anderson was allowed to salute his flag before leaving. On April 14 a gun went off early during that salute and killed Private Daniel Hough of the 1st United States Artillery. The war's first death came out of a ceremony.
2The battle civilians rode out from Washington to watch
On the tile: Bull RunJuly 21, 1861
Both sides expected a short war in the summer of 1861, and civilian spectators came down from Washington to watch the armies meet near Manassas. On July 21 the Union attack came apart, and the retreat jammed the narrow bridges together with the spectators' carriages. Nearly 4,900 men on both sides were killed, wounded, captured or missing. It was a shocking figure that week and a modest one by the standards of the four years that followed.
Shiloh was fought in Tennessee on April 6 and 7, 1862, and it ended the idea that the war would be short. A Union line held a thicket of oaks through attack after attack, and the men who lived through it named the place the Hornets' Nest afterward. About 23,700 soldiers on both sides were killed, wounded, captured or missing, making it the bloodiest American battle up to that date. The Confederate commander, Albert Sidney Johnston, was among the dead.
September 17, 1862, along Antietam Creek in Maryland, is still the deadliest one-day battle in American military history. About 22,700 men were killed, wounded, captured or missing between dawn and dusk, a great many of them in a single cornfield that changed hands over and over. Neither army was destroyed, and Lee withdrew into Virginia. That was enough of a result for Lincoln, who had been waiting for a victory before announcing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Thomas Jackson got the name Stonewall at Bull Run in 1861, when a fellow general rallied his brigade by pointing out Jackson standing like a stone wall. At Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863, he marched nearly 30,000 men clear across the front of the Union army and hit its exposed flank late in the afternoon. Riding out ahead in the dark to scout a night attack, he was fired on by his own Confederate troops. His arm was amputated, and he died of pneumonia on May 10.
Gettysburg was fought from July 1 to 3, 1863, and as many as 51,000 soldiers on both sides were killed, wounded, captured or missing. On the third afternoon about 12,500 Confederates crossed open ground toward the center of the Union position on Cemetery Ridge. One brigade briefly reached the crest, and losses in the attack approached sixty percent. When Pickett was told to reform his division afterward, he is said to have answered that he had no division.
Grant's army reached Vicksburg on May 18, 1863, and when two assaults failed, he settled in to besiege the city. For forty-seven days shells came down on the bluffs above the Mississippi, and townspeople cut rooms into the yellow clay hillsides to shelter in. Grant wrote afterward that some of these were carpeted and furnished with considerable elaboration. The garrison of about 29,000 surrendered on July 4. With Gettysburg ending the day before, the Confederacy lost the river and was cut in two.
Fort Wagner was an earthwork on Morris Island guarding the southern approach to Charleston Harbor. At sunset on July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts led the assault with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at its head, and he was killed on the parapet. Union troops got onto the wall and could not stay there, suffering about 1,515 casualties to the defenders' 174. The attack failed, but the regiment's courage that evening helped convince a skeptical Northern public and army that Black soldiers could and would fight.
On July 17, 1863, a Union force of about 3,000 met a larger Confederate one at Honey Springs in what is now Oklahoma, the largest of more than 107 recorded engagements in Indian Territory. Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw regiments fought for the Confederacy, and three regiments of Indian Home Guard for the Union. When a Home Guard regiment strayed across the front of the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry and was ordered back, the Confederates took it for a retreat and surged forward. The 1st Kansas stood its ground, fired at close range, and the attack collapsed.
John Ericsson's Monitor was a strange-looking answer to an urgent problem: an iron hull riding only about a foot above the water, topped by a revolving gun turret. It went up at Greenpoint in Brooklyn in roughly a hundred days and launched on January 30, 1862. The turret became a standard feature of later warships, but that low deck was awash even in a light sea. On December 31, 1862, the Monitor sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, and sixteen of the sixty-two men aboard were lost. Scientists located the wreck in 1973.
The H. L. Hunley was a hand-cranked iron submarine: seven men turning a propeller shaft and an eighth steering. It sank twice in trials, drowning thirteen men altogether, among them Horace Hunley, the financial backer it was named for. On February 17, 1864, it drove a spar torpedo into the Union sloop Housatonic off Charleston, and the sloop went down in about five minutes. The Hunley did not come back either. The wreck was found in 1995 and raised in 2000.
In June 1861, Thaddeus Lowe rose on a tether five hundred feet above Washington with telegraph equipment aboard and sent President Lincoln a description of the view, calling it the first dispatch ever telegraphed from an aerial station. Lincoln backed him. The Union Balloon Corps that followed eventually had seven balloons, and a converted coal barge, the George Washington Parke Custis, carried one on the Potomac, remembered since as an early aircraft carrier. The corps was abandoned in 1863.
Exposures in the 1860s took several seconds, so photographers could not capture a battle in motion. What they could photograph was the aftermath. Alexander Gardner and James Gibson reached Antietam two days after the fighting, before the dead were buried, and Gardner made about ninety images there in all. Mathew Brady showed them in his New York gallery under a placard reading The Dead of Antietam. The New York Times wrote that he had brought "home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war." Crowds came to look.
The smoothbore musket of earlier wars was generally unreliable at any range past about seventy-five yards. The rifle musket, with its grooved barrel and conical bullet, changed that arithmetic: an ordinary soldier could expect to hit a target at roughly 250 yards, and a trained marksman as far as 800. Yet both armies still fought in the linear formations of the Napoleonic era, and historians have argued ever since about how much difference the longer reach actually made.
A soldier with a muzzleloader fired, then bit a cartridge, poured, rammed and capped before he could fire again. The Spencer carried seven rounds in a tube in the stock and fed them with a lever. The difference was audible. At Chickamauga in 1863, Union officer Gates Thurston wrote, regiments armed with Spencers did splendid work, and after the war Confederate General Longstreet told their brigade commander, John Wilder, that the steady and continued racket of those guns had made him think an army corps was attacking his left flank.
The picture of a soldier biting a bullet while the surgeon works is one of the war's most durable inventions. Anesthesia was available and it was used. The Medical and Surgical History of the war estimates that no fewer than 80,000 Union surgical cases were given an anesthetic, usually chloroform on a sponge in a cone held over the nose and mouth, against only 254 reported cases with none. A light dose left men moaning and moving but unable to feel pain, which may be where the story started.
Nevada's statehood papers had gone east by mail, but with the 1864 election two weeks away, Washington still had not received the state constitution. So on October 26 the territorial governor put the entire document on the wire. It ran 16,543 words. Operators relayed it from Carson City to Salt Lake City, then Chicago, then Philadelphia, and it reached the War Department two days later at a cost of more than four thousand dollars. Lincoln proclaimed Nevada a state on October 31, eight days before the vote.
The City-class gunboats were ironclads built for rivers, flat and heavily armed. On December 12, 1862, the Cairo was clearing mines from the Yazoo River in Mississippi when Confederates hidden on the bank set one off by wire underneath her. She went down in about twelve minutes, and every one of her 159 officers and men got off alive. The wreck was located in 1956 and raised in sections, and it stands today at Vicksburg, the only surviving City-class ironclad.
Later generations argued about what the war was about. The states that left the Union did not leave the question open. Four of them, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas, issued formal declarations of the causes of their secession, and all four defend slavery. Mississippi's opens by stating that its position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, which it calls the greatest material interest of the world. South Carolina adopted hers on December 24, 1860, Georgia on January 29, 1861, and Texas on February 2.
2Three men crossed to a fort and changed Union policy
On the tile: ContrabandMay 1861
In May 1861 three enslaved men escaped to Fort Monroe in Virginia, which was still held by the Union. The law said they should be handed back. General Benjamin Butler, a lawyer in uniform, answered that property put to enemy use was contraband of war, and declined to send them back. Within weeks five hundred more had made the trip, and the place became known as Freedom's Fortress.
On the tile: EmancipationJanuary 1, 1863Myth busted
The proclamation of January 1, 1863, is often remembered as the end of American slavery, and that is not what it was. By its own terms it reached only the states and parts of states then in rebellion. It left slavery untouched in the loyal border states and expressly exempted parts of the South already under Union control. Its promise depended on Union victory. It also announced that Black men would be accepted into the Union Army and Navy, and almost 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought for the Union by the war's end.
Slavery did not stop everywhere on January 1, 1863. In Texas, far from the armies, it went on. On June 19, 1865, at Galveston, General Gordon Granger announced that the war was over and issued an order informing the people of Texas that all slaves were free. Black Texans held the first annual celebration of the day in 1866, and as they moved away they took Juneteenth with them across the country. Other communities kept other Emancipation Days, for the different dates on which freedom actually reached them.
5A national holiday declared in the middle of a war
On the tile: ThanksgivingOctober 3, 1863
Thanksgiving was an old custom, but it came only when a governor or a president chose to proclaim one, and its date, even its month, varied from state to state and year to year. On October 3, 1863, three months after Gettysburg, Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November a day of thanksgiving for the whole country. He asked Americans to commend to God's care all those who had become "widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife." The country has kept the holiday every year since.
By the spring of 1863 Confederate money bought less every week, and impressment and hoarding made it worse. On April 2 a crowd of women, many of them married to workers at the Tredegar Iron Works, gathered in Richmond and went through the shops taking food and then other goods. Accounts put the crowd anywhere from hundreds to thousands. It ran about two hours and broke up when officials threatened to open fire, and more than sixty people were later tried.
7One hundred sixty acres, five years and eighteen dollars
On the tile: Homestead ActMay 20, 1862
Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862, answering a question about public land that Americans had argued over since before the Constitution. Anyone twenty-one or older, or the head of a family, who was a citizen or had declared the intention to become one could claim 160 acres of surveyed public land. The claimant paid ten dollars to file, then had to live on and farm the land for five years to take title; the fees came to eighteen dollars in all. Anyone who had borne arms against the United States was barred.
Arlington was the estate of George Washington Parke Custis, whose daughter Mary married a young army officer named Robert E. Lee in 1831. The Lees left when the war began, and the Army seized the hill across the river from Washington on May 24, 1861. By 1864 the capital's military cemeteries were running out of space, and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ordered Arlington used for burials. Private William Christman was the first military burial there, on May 13, 1864, and Arlington officially became a national cemetery that June 15.
The United States Sanitary Commission, set up in June 1861, inspected army camps, published health advice for surgeons, and shipped medicine and food to the hospitals. Much of its money came from enormous public fairs full of exhibitions, art and parades. Chicago's fair in the fall of 1863 cleared over $80,000, and New York's Metropolitan Fair raised more than a million dollars. By the end of the war the Commission had taken in nearly five million dollars in cash and about fifteen million more in donated supplies.