James McPherson - Struggle for a vast future: The American Civil War

Struggle for a Vast Future

Aaron Sheehan-Dean

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Osprey Publishing,

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The authors, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, James M. McPherson, William A. Blair, Richard Carwardine, Robert K. Krick, Gerald J. Prokopowicz, Mark Grimsley, Craig L. Symonds, Jeffery S. Prushankin, Michael Vorenberg, William B. Feis, Victoria E. Bynum, and Hugh Dubrulle, have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

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Acknowledgments

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the contributors. Their willingness to dive in quickly, their skill at producing fine essays, and their attention to deadlines made this a remarkably easy project to manage. Gary Gallagher, Steve Engle, Susanna Lee, and Megan Sheehan-Dean provided assistance at various stages and their help is sincerely appreciated. James McPherson generously agreed to write the foreword. Having his experienced eye on the manuscript strengthened it considerably. Last, and most important, I would like to thank Jo de Vries for inviting me to participate in this project. She has been a model editor throughout and done more than her share of the heavy lifting. It has been a pleasure to work with her.

From the first taking of our national census to the last
are seventy years; and we find our population at the end
of the period eight times as great as it was at the beginning.
The increase of those other things which men deem desirable
has been even greater. We thus have at one view, what the popular principle
applied to government, through the machinery
of the States and the Union, has produced in a given time;
and also what, if firmly maintained, it promises for the future.
There are already among us those, who, if the Union be preserved, will live to see it contain two hundred and fifty millions.
The struggle of today, is not altogether for today it is
for a vast future also. With a reliance on Providence,
all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great
task which events have devolved upon us.

Abraham Lincoln, First Annual Message

December 3, 1861, Washington, DC

Contents

Extremists at the gate

Dr William A. Blair

I would not be master

Professor Richard Carwardine

The power of the land

Robert K. Krick

Our hearts were touched with fire

Dr Gerald J. Prokopowicz

Remorseless, revolutionary struggle

Professor Mark Grimsley

Uncle Sams web-feet

Dr Craig L. Symonds

They came to butcher our people

Dr Jeffery S. Prushankin

That great essential of success

Dr William B. Feis

We never yielded in the struggle

Professor Victoria E. Bynum

The world will forever applaud

Dr Michael Vorenberg

One great society

Dr Hugh Dubrulle

A fearful lesson

Dr Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Contributors

Dr Aaron Sheehan-Dean is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida. He completed his PhD at the University of Virginia. He has devoted most of his academic career to the study of the American Civil War and has published essays on various themes surrounding the conflict. He is completing a book project titled Creating Confederates: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (forthcoming). He lives and works in Florida.

Professor James M. McPherson is the George Henry Davis 86 Professor of History at Princeton University and 2003 president of the American Historical Association. Widely acclaimed as the leading historian of the Civil War, he is the author of Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (2002) (a New York Times bestseller), For Cause and Comrades (1997) (winner of the Lincoln Prize), and many other books on Lincoln and the Civil War era. McPherson, is widely known for his ability to take American history out of the confines of the academy and make it accessible to the general reading public. His best-selling book Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1989. He also has written and edited many other books about abolition, the War and Lincoln, and he has written essays and reviews for several national publications.

Dr William A. Blair is Director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University and editor of Civil War History, the journal of the field. His dissertation won the Allan Nevis Prize for Best Dissertation in American History from the Society of American Historians. In addition to articles and chapters in books, Blair has published Virginias Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 18611865 (1998) and Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 18651914 (2004).

Professor Richard Carwardine is Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University and Fellow of St Catherines College. He has written widely on American politics and religion in the era of the Civil War. His publications include Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (1993). He recently completed an analytical political biography of Abraham Lincoln (2003; rev. edn 2006) which in 2004 won the Lincoln Prize, awarded annually by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College for the finest scholarly work in English on the American Civil War era.

Robert K. Krick was Chief Historian of the Civil War battlefields in central Virginia for more than 30 years, during which he was responsible for the sites of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Court House. He is the author of 15 books, including Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain (1990), which won the Douglas Southall Freeman Award for Best Book in Southern History, and The Smoothbore Volley that Doomed the Confederacy (2004).

Dr Gerald J. Prokopowicz is Assistant Professor of History at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. He earned a PhD from Harvard University, and holds a JD from the University of Michigan. He is the author of