The Union Restored: The Life History of the United States - 1861-1876 Volume 6

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At the Gettysburg battlefield Abraham Lincoln said that the Civil War would test whether the American democracy "or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure." During the long years of fighting there were moments when many supporters of the Union doubted that the nation could endure the terrible bloodletting.

Yet Lincoln never despaired of the outcome, writes T. Harry Williams, author of this volume of The LIFE History of the United States. Although the President was saddened by the slaughter of America's young men, he was convinced that the Union would survive.

At the outset, both North and South thought that the war would be short. The Battle of Bull Run taught them otherwise. Lincoln realized that he needed better generals; the Confederates ruefully admitted that the boys in blue could fight better than Rebel fire-eaters had predicted.

T. Harry Williams,, Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University, makes use of a lifetime of study of this 'strange sad war," as poet Walt Whitman called it, to bring to his work an understanding of the grand strategy and varied tactics that were used. He tells of the blunders on both sides that prolonged the war, of the brilliant strokes that kept the South a fighting force despite an inferiority in men and material, and of the gradual emergence of Union generals who knew how to win battles. The author also makes it clear that two wars were being fought. The conflict was the last of the old wars in which straight lines of infantry marched shoulder to shoulder across open fields, under the personal supervision of their generals, against equally beautifully aligned enemy ranks. It was also the first of the new wars: now, mass armies used breech-loading and repeating rifles and powerful accurate artillery to mow down advancing infantry from the protection of earthen trenches; telegraphs hastened communications; balloons improved observation; ironclad ships revolutionized war at sea; railroads speeded men and supplies to the fighting.

It was an old-fashioned American war because volunteers were initially expected to do the fighting as they always had in the past; it became modern within a year, for the South had to conscript men to maintain troop strength (the North followed suit one year later). More men still died of sickness and disease than of wounds, but Clara Burton moved the care of casualties somewhat closer to modernity with her reorganization of nursing services. The war was pre-eminently modern in its ghastly death toll: 360,000 Northerners, 258,000 from the South.

In time Lincoln found his great general, Ulysses S. Grant. The North's three-pronged plan - seize the Mississippi, blockade the coast, destroy General Robert E, Lee's army - did work. On April 12, 1865, the haggard Confederate Army of northern Virginia surrendered. Two days later, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

From the horror of war, the author moves through the agony of Reconstruction, the bewildering period when hope was destroyed, and freedom for black Americans was followed by swift disillusionment as Southern whites used terror and force to regain dominance that would last for another century. The aftermath of Lincoln's death also brought the unprecedented Presidential impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. Saved from conviction by just one vote in the Senate, Johnson remained a "prisoner" of the Radical Republican Congress for the remainder of his term. His successor, U.S. Grant, a magnificent soldier but inept politician, easily won office, only to preside over two of the most scandalous administrations in United States History.