FATEFUL LIGHTNING: A History of the American Civil War
Text by William Hillenbrand

copyright © 1995, 1998 Troubadour Interactive. All rights reserved.

I. A FIREBELL IN THE NIGHT
      1) The Coming of the Crisis
      2) Propaganda War
      3) To the Drum-Taps Prompt

II. ALL GREEN ALIKE
      Introduction--The Ground War Opens
      1) In Bitter Earnest: First Bull Run
      2) Mountain Victory: McClellan's West Virginia Campaign
      3) Thirteen Stars and Eleven States: The Struggle for Kentucky and Missouri
      4) A Crack in the Western Wall: Fort Donelson
      5) The Devil's Own Day: Shiloh

III. THE CRUCIBLE OF COMMAND
      Introduction--In Search of a Strategy
      1) Slow Going on the York: The Peninsular Campaign
      2) Richmond Shall Not Be Given Up: The Seven Days
      3) Headquarters and Hindquarters: Second Bull Run
      4) Three Cigars and a Battle Order: Antietam
              a) Across South Mountain
              b) A Frenzy Seized Them

IV. WEARINESS AND RESOLVE
      Introduction--The Federal Offensives of 1862
      1) High Valor and Bad Judgment: Fredericksburg
      2) Standoff at Stones River
      3) The Key in Mr. Lincoln's Pocket: Vicksburg
              a) The Long Way 'Round
              b) Closing the Ring

V. FATEFUL LIGHTNING
      Introduction--Battle Summer of 1863
      1) Over the River and Under the Trees: Chancellorsville
      2) The Fiery Trial Through Which We Pass: Gettysburg
              a) To Find and Fight
              b) The Enemy is There
              c) Race for High Ground
              d) A Gambler's Chance
              e) The Hand is Played
              f) A Vast Mournful Roar
              g) All That Men Can Do
      3) In Letters of Blood: Chickamauga
      4) Eclipse of the South: Chattanooga

VI. EVERY DAY AND EVERY HOUR
      Introduction--The Advent of Total War
      1) No Turning Back: The Wilderness
      2) By the Left Flank: Spotsylvania
      3) At All Hazards: Cold Harbor
      4) Sherman at the Gates: Atlanta
              a) Assail and Not Defend
              b) Hell Has Broke Loose
              c) A Grand Left Wheel   
              d) Atlanta is Ours

VII. LET THE THING BE PRESSED
      1) The King of the North Shall Come: The Siege of Petersburg
      2) "Sheridan! Sheridan!
      3) Without Home or Habitation: Sherman's March to the Sea
      4) The Madness of Despair
              a) We Will Make This Fight: Franklin
              b) Darkest of All Decembers: Nashville
      5) Uncle Billy's Whirlwind
      6) We Who Are Left: Five Forks to Appomattox
      7) The Last Ditch
      8) An Awed Stillness

                     "This momentous question [of slavery], like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the Union."
                                                                                                                    --Thomas Jefferson

                                                                                   1) The Coming of the Crisis

          In the early hours of the twelfth of April, 1861, Mary Boykin Chesnut lay in the bedroom of her Charleston, South Carolina, home, sleeplessly waiting and wondering. Until very recently her husband, James Chesnut, Jr., had been a United States Senator. Now he was a member of the Provisional Congress of the new Confederacy. With Mrs. Chesnut this April morning the nation, north and south, waited and wondered. Thunderheads of war were roiling over Fort Sumter out in the harbor. At 4:30 a.m. Mrs. Chesnut heard the "heavy booming" of a signal gun. "I sprang out of bed," she remembered, "and on my knees, prostrate, I prayed as I had never prayed before." The American Civil War had begun. "Woe to those who began this war," she warned, "if they were not in bitter earnest."
           But the men who struck the first blow of the conflict were nothing if not in bitter earnest as they fired the first of more than three thousand shells at Sumter. The object of all this violence, a lightly-armed pile of masonry off in the darkness of Charleston Harbor, was of no particular military value either to the United States or the newly-proclaimed Confederate States of America. But it had suddenly become the focus and the symbol of the political and social antagonisms that had divided North and South for the previous half-century. The long, complex, acrimonious national debate about free labor and slavery, about the primacy of the Union and the sovereignty of the states, about the meaning of liberty itself, had at last found decisively violent expression in this time and place. A Southerner at the scene thought that "All the pent-up hatred of the past months and years is voiced in the thunder of these cannon."
           Some of the dramatis personae on the South Carolina shore suggested the long foreground of the conflict. When General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard gave the order to fire on Sumter, his batteries were commanded by a general with the evocative name of States Rights Gist. Gist offered the honor of firing the first shot to Roger Pryor, a Virginia Congressman and long-time advocate of secession. A few days earlier Pryor had urged a Charleston crowd to "Strike a blow!" Still, when the moment came, the thought of the awful consequences of that blow weighed too heavily on Pryor. Who actually fired the first shot on that dark April morning is not clear from this distance, but a fire-eating secessionist named Edmund Ruffin could justly claim to have fired one of the first in that thunderous opening volley. And there is a certain poetic justice to his claim, for Ruffin's development of new fertilizers and innovations in land-use patterns a quarter of a century earlier had revitalized Southern soil nearly exhausted by the cultivation of cotton. As a volunteer with the Palmetto Guards on Morris Island, Ruffin was offered the honor of striking the first blow and embraced no reservations when it came to shooting at the "vile Yankee race." Ruffin was, as he said, "highly gratified by the compliment and delighted to perform the service." For the next thirty-six hours Confederate batteries hammered away at the helpless fort. A little after noon on the fourteenth of April the Union commander, Major Robert Anderson, hauled down his flag and surrendered his fort to General Beauregard, his former student of artillery at West Point. Incredibly, despite the four thousand or so shells fired by both sides, hostile fire killed no one. America's deadliest war had commenced without a combat death. A good deal of popular talk held that Southern independence was all but accomplished. A lady's thimble, it was said, would hold all the blood necessary to achieve it. Perhaps the American people had been better served if more of them had thought long and hard about the implications of civil war, thoughts that occurred to Congressman Pryor apparently only in the last moments of peace. Sam Houston of Texas warned the South that independence was no more than "a bare possibility." Achieving it--if it could be achieved at all--would mean the "sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives." But in the heady enthusiasm evoked by the easy conquest of Sumter few heeded that prophetic voice. Fewer still seemed to recognize that despite increasingly angry rhetoric from both sides about an "irrepressible conflict, "there was nothing inevitable about the coming of this storm....

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                                                                               1) In Bitter Earnest:
                                                                                     First Bull Run

           The initial collision of the two armies facing each other across Bull Run came on July 18, when lead elements of McDowell's army under Brigadier General Daniel Tyler reached Centreville and found abandoned Confederate trenches. Bull Run was just two miles ahead to the southwest, and Tyler sent a brigade forward to see if it were held in force. Near Blackburn's Ford, Tyler encountered a line of Confederate infantry supported by artillery, and a sharp little skirmish ensued. The brigade lost eighty men in the fighting, and, as an evil omen of things to come for the Federals, Tyler saw one of his militia regiments break in panic and go streaming back to Centreville. McDowell called a halt and spent the next two days getting the rest of his army to the field and examining the Confederate line. McDowell's plan was perfectly sensible, and if he could have got it in motion a little sooner, it had every chance to succeed--and very nearly did. McDowell would feint at the Rebel right by making a demonstration at the Stone Bridge. The real effort would be on their left. His main body, 10,000 strong in two divisions, would march two miles upstream, cross Bull Run at Sudley Springs Ford, and come smashing down the Sudley Road toward the Warrenton Turnpike. As it happened, however, Beauregard hadn't planned to wait to be struck. He had a flank attack in mind himself, striking at McDowell's left. Had the attacks actually got off together, the two armies might have swung around like a gate eight miles wide.
           But McDowell, despite delay and confusion, got off first. At two a.m. on July 21 the Union commander roused his sleeping army. The attacking column made a six-mile march through the dark underbrush, and by 9:30 most of David Hunter's Second and Samuel P. Heintzleman's Third Division were across Bull Run at Sudley Springs--where there were virtually no Confederates to receive them. About seven a.m. Tyler's division went forward to make its demonstration at the Stone Bridge and one brigade of Colonel D. S. Mile's division feinted toward Blackburn's Ford. The demonstration, however, was mainly a slow, steady cannonade that made a good deal of noise but failed to convince anyone that McDowell intended to strike at the bridge. The bridge was defended by a South Carolina West Pointer, Colonel Nathan G. Evans, nicknamed "Shanks" for his spindly legs. In the old army Evans had earned a reputation as a hard-drinking, hard-driving dragoon. Today he commanded two regiments of infantry, some calvary, and a few guns in front of the Stone Bridge--where, he believed, nothing important was going to happen. Upstream to his left, the important things were going to happen. One of the few Confederates in the area was a captain of engineers, Edward Porter Alexander, who had been abruptly awakened that morning when one of the first shells of Tyler's barrage tore through his tent. When Alexander saw the Federal columnadvancing, he immediately understood the danger to the Confederate left and just as immediately communicated the danger to Evans at the Stone Bridge. Leaving four companies to guard the bridge, Evans hurried to the left with the rest of his command and two cannon, about a thousand men in all. When the lead elements of McDowell's attacking column (four regiments under the magnificently whiskered Ambrose E. Burnside) finally got moving down the Sudley Road about mid-morning, they found Evans drawn up a little north of the Warrenton Pike, and prepared to contest its passage. Burnside's regiments outnumbered the Confederates, but of course it was the first time virtually all of his men had heard a shot fired in anger. They made two uncoordinated and not-very-determined attacks and fell back in disorder, done for the day.
         But as Burnside's men withdrew, fresh troops of Colonel Heintzelman' s division came up and continued to press Evans, whose command was now in danger of falling apart. To Beauregard on Lookout Hill near Mitchell's Ford he called for help, but before Beauregard could respond, help reached Evans in the form of Brigadier General Barnard Bee who had come on the run on his own initiative. Bee's brigade had been in the Valley with Joe Johnstson, but had got off the cars at Manassas Junction in time to double-quick up the Sudley Road and confront the Federal advance. McDowell, however, was handling his green army skillfully thus far. From the ford at Sudley Springs he fed more of his attacking column into the fight against Bee and Evans, maintaining a punishing pressure on the Confederate left. To Tyler at the Stone Bridge he sent word to try to force a crossing. One of Tyler's brigades, led by a man who would make a name for himself as a remorseless fighter, Colonel William T. Sherman, got across the river about a half-mile above the bridge and fell in on McDowell's left. Joined by other regiments of Tyler's command, Sherman's troops hammered the Confederates on their front. A little before noon it was the Confederates turn to do some running. They ran southward across the Warrenton Pike, in some disorder but not broken, and formed a new line on the crest of a hill named for a family farm, Henry House Hill. There they were joined by Wade Hampton's South Carolina command and two regiments under Colonel Francis S. Bartow. On them depended the Confederate left and in all probability the Confederate army....

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