McClellan, Lee, Grant, Sherman Documents

These documents offer a deeper understanding of the will of each side to endure the hardships of war and see the conflict through to its finality. The first document written by George McClellan to President Lincoln addressed how the Union should approach the impending war. McClellan told Lincoln things the President was surely already aware of. Lincoln probably didn't need reminding about the principles that the Union stood for and the he held constitutional powers to preserve law and order in all the states. Still, McClellan reminded Lincoln that he should lay out "a system of policy thus constitutional and conservative and pervaded by the influences of Christianity and freedom." Conversely, Robert E. Lee wrote to President Stephens about Confederate victories in somewhat of a confident and boastful tone. After writing to Stephens about their recent victories, Lee wrote again to Stephens to convince him that the Confederate army should attack Maryland and go on the offensive in order to keep the pressure on the Union. He also petitioned to Stephens for ammunition and shoes in order to continue the effective assault of the Union.
The next document, written by Ulysses S. Grant was his recollection of the eve of the Overland Campaign. He admitted in this document his realization that the capture of the Confederate capital was not to happen without great losses. Grant wrote that since there had been such fierce fighting on both sides for so long, there had to be a final end - no matter the cost.
Finally, General Sherman warned that the people living in Atlanta had better prepare to vacate because war was imminent. Sherman wrote, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out." He chided those in the south for continuing the fight and said that, "the war was done in error and is perpetuated in pride." He ended by telling those in the south that the Union was not interested in confiscating their possessions or gaining anything at their expense, they simply wanted them to obey the law and if it took the destruction of their land, homes and bodies, then it must be so in order to preserve reconciliation. After this stern and frightening warning, Sherman assured Southerners that after the conflict, he'd be their friend, but not until they were willing to give up the fight.

Stephens and Lincoln documents

No one could make it more clear than Alexander Stephens did that the Southern states withdrew from the United States on the issue of slavery alone. Unless Stephens spoke to the crowd gathered at Savannah, Ga on March 21, 1861 on his own accord and without the sanction of any other Confederate authority, any post war explanation of the motives of disunion that relied on states rights as its bedrock is nothing but a weak and untruthful argument. I also find it incredibly interesting that Confederates used the constitution extensively as their body of evidence that they were acting in the true spirit the country's founding principles. In his speech in 1861, Stephens actually asserts that the crafters of the constitution were ideologically wrong in their assumption that all men were created equally. Observing flaw in one aspect of the constitution severely diminishes any other argument that uses the constitution as its legitimizing document.
I also found it interesting in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation that, although he based this act on the purpose of its justice, it only applied to a portion of the enslaved population. Regarding states like Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware and Maryland, which were not in rebellion to the Union but at the same time sanctioned slavery, Lincoln said, "are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued." It seems that if the emancipation of the slaves was an act based solely on justice, then the entirety of the slave population would have been emancipated. It seems more appropriate that Lincoln used the emancipation of the slaves in rebelling states more as a bargaining chip than a civil rights act.

Response to Apostles of Disunion

I find it interesting that southern cotton states proactively lobbied for other southern states to join the confederacy on the basis of slavery but insist in hindsight that the war was fought over states rights and interpretations of the constitution. Charles Dew did a great job emphasizing the major role that race and slavery played in the decision making for southern states as they decided to secede one by one. Dew explains, "Alabamians described the same nightmare world that Commissioner Harris had painted for the Georgia legislature: a South humbled, abolitionized degraded, and threatened with destruction by a brutal Republican majority. Emancipation, race war, miscegenation - one apocalyptic vision after another. The death throes of white supremacy would be so horrific that no self-respecting Southerner could fail to rally to the ccessionist cause, they argued. Only through disunion could the South preserve the purity and ensure the survival of the white race."