Notes

Notes

James M. McPherson is George Henry Davis '86 Professor of American History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1962. He received his PhD in 1963 from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with C. Vann Woodward. McPherson has written fourteen books, mostly focusing on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, including Battle Cry of Freedom, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989, and For Cause and Comrades, which won the Lincoln Prize in 1998. In addition to serving as president of the American Historical Association, he has been president of Protect Historic America and the Society of American Historians. He is currently working on a book about the navies in the Civil War.

Notes

1. Paul Glass and Louis C. Singer, Singing Soldiers: A History of the Civil War in Song (New York, 1975), 152–53, 267–69; Willard A. Heaps and Porter W. Heaps, The Singing Sixties: The Spirit of Civil War Days Drawn from the Music of the Times (Norman, Okla., 1960), 159–60, 224–26.

2. William L. Dayton to William H. Seward, April 17, 1862, in Papers Relating to the Foreign Affairs of the United States, 1862, part 1 (Washington, D.C., 1863), 333.

3. Charles Francis Adams to William H. Seward, March 13, 1862, in Papers Relating to the Foreign Affairs of the United States, 1862, part 1, 48; Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., March 15, 1862, in The Letters of Henry Adams, Vol. 1: 1858–1868, J. C. Levenson, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 284–85.

4. Constitutionnel, July 19, June 7, 1862.

5. The Times, July 17, 1862; Morning Post, quoted in New York Tribune, July 30, 1862.

6. The Times, October 9, 1862; Gladstone to Lord John Russell, August 30, 1862, Gladstone to William Stuart, September 8, 1862, in Gladstone Letterbooks, quoted in Howard Jones, Abraham Lincoln and the New Birth of Freedom (Lincoln, Neb., 1999), 93.

7. Palmerston to Russell, September 14, 1861, Russell to Palmerston, September 17, 1862, Lord Russell Papers, Public Record Office, London, quoted in James V. Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets: The Battle of Antietam and the Maryland Campaign of 1862 (Baton Rouge, La., 1965), 394, 396–97; Palmerston to Gladstone, September 24, 1862, in Gladstone and Palmerston, Being the Correspondence of Lord Palmerston with Mr. Gladstone, 1861–1865, Phillip Guedalla, ed. (Covent Garden, 1928), 232–33.

8. Palmerston to Russell, September 23, 1862, Russell Papers, quoted in Murfin, Gleam of Bayonets, 399–400.

9. Palmerston to Russell, October 2, 22, 1862, Russell Papers, quoted in Ephraim Douglass Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1925), 2: 43–44, 54–55.

10. Howard Jones, Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 210–23. See also Frank Merli and Theodore A. Wilson, "The British Cabinet and the Confederacy: Autumn 1862," Maryland Historical Magazine 65 (1970): 239–62.

11. New York Times, January 29, 1863. See also New York Tribune, January 9, 14, 22, 1863.

12. Seward quoted in The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3: The Civil War 1860–1865, Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds. (New York, 1952), 293, entry of February 1, 1863. This affair is analyzed at length in Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer, The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia, 1970), 384–97; and in Daniel B. Carroll, Henri Mercier and the American Civil War (Princeton, N.J., 1971), 251–69.

13. Roy C. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1952–55), 7: 53–56.

14. New York Times, May 9, 1864; New York Herald, May 14, 1864; New York Tribune, May 14, 1864.

15. New York Tribune, May 31, 1864.

16. New York World, July 12, 30, August 6, 1864.

17. Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 7: 448–49; New York World, July 19, 1864.

18. Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols., Howard K. Beale, ed. (New York, 1960), 2: 44, 73, entries of June 2 and July 11, 1864; Adam Gurowski, Diary, 3 vols. (Boston, 1862–66), 3: 254, entry of August 19, 1864.

19. Diary of George Templeton Strong, 474, entry of August 19, 1864; Sarah Butler to Benjamin Butler, June 19, 1864, in Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War, 5 vols., Jesse A. Marshall, ed. (Norwood, Mass., 1917), 4: 418.

20. Columbus Crisis, August 24, 1864, quoted in Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1942), 174; Boston Pilot, quoted in Thomas H. O'Connor, Civil War Boston: Home Front and Battlefield (Boston, 1997), 202.

21. Clement C. Clay to Judah P. Benjamin, August 11, 1864, in War of the Rebellion ... Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901), Series IV, vol. 3, p. 585 (hereafter, OR). For the activities of Confederate agents in Canada, see Oscar A. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada and the North (North Quincy, Mass., 1970), esp. 35–103.

22. Richmond Dispatch, July 23, 1864; Diary of George Templeton Strong, 470, entry of August 6, 1864; Weed to Seward, August 22, 1864, in Abraham Lincoln Papers (Robert Todd Lincoln Collection), Library of Congress.

23. Greeley to Lincoln, July 7, 1864, Lincoln Papers.

24. Lincoln to Greeley, July 9, 1864, in Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 7: 435.

25. Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 7: 440–42, 451; Inside Lincoln's White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds. (Carbondale, Ill., 1997), 224–29, two memoranda written by Hay circa July 21 and after July 22, 1864; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), 9: 184–92.

26. Clement C. Clay and James Holcombe to Greeley, July 21, 1864, in New York Times, July 22. This letter was published in many Northern newspapers on July 22 or 23 and appeared in Southern newspapers soon after, with extensive editorial commentary. In a letter to Jefferson Davis on July 25, Clay and Holcombe explained that their purpose in this affair had been to "throw upon the Federal Government the odium of putting an end to all negotiations." Clement C. Clay Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C., quoted in Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of 1864 (University, Ala., 1980), 67.

27. New York Times, July 23, 1864; Clay to Benjamin, August 11, 1864, in OR, Series IV, vol. 3, pp. 585–86.

28. Independent, July 26, 1864; New York Tribune, August 5, 1864.

29. Greeley to Lincoln, August 9, 1864, Lincoln Papers; New York Times, July 25, 1864.

30. No official record of this meeting was kept. This account and the quotation are taken from Gilmore's article in the Atlantic Monthly 8 (September 1864): 372–83. Gilmore wrote a briefer version describing the meeting for the Boston Transcript of July 22, 1864, and a longer one in his memoirs many years later. These versions vary slightly in detail but agree in substance, as does Judah Benjamin's account in a circular sent to Confederate envoys abroad after Gilmore's article was published in the Atlantic. Benjamin to James M. Mason, August 25, 1864, in Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1894–1922), Series II, vol. 3, pp. 1190–94.

31. James R. Gilmore, "A Suppressed Chapter of History," Atlantic Monthly 59 (April 1887): 435–36; Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (Boston, 1898), 289.

32. New York Times, August 20, 1864.

33. Semi-Weekly Richmond Enquirer, August 26, 30, 1864.

34. New York World, August 15, 1864.

35. Columbus Crisis, August 3, 1864; New York News, quoted in Washington Daily Intelligencer, July 25, 1864.

36. New York World, July 25, 1864; New York Herald, August 7, 1864.

37. Newark Daily Advertiser and Ann Arbor Journal, quoted in Washington Daily Intelligencer, August 8, 1864.

38. New York Tribune, July 28, 1864; Diary of George Templeton Strong, 474, entry of August 19, 1864.

39. New York Times, August 18, 24, 1864.

40. Lincoln to Charles D. Robinson, dated August 17, 1864, in Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 7: 499–501.

41. Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 7: 500, 506–07.

42. William Frank Zornow, Lincoln and the Party Divided (Norman, Okla., 1954), 112; Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 7: 514.

43. Raymond to Lincoln, August 22, 1864, Lincoln Papers.

44. Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 7: 517; Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, 9: 220.

45. Nicolay to Hay, August 25, 1864, Nicolay to Theresa Bates, August 28, 1864, in With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865, Michael Burlingame, ed. (Carbondale, Ill., 2000), 152–53.

46. On this matter, see Burlingame, ed., Inside Lincoln's White House, 238, Hay's diary entry of October 11, 1864; and Charles A. Dana to Henry J. Raymond, date not specified, in Francis Brown, Raymond of the Times (New York, 1951), 260n.

47. For the platform, see Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States during the Great Rebellion, 2d edn. (Washington, D.C., 1865), 406–07.

48. E. McPherson, Political History of the United States, 419–20.

49. Harper's Weekly 8 (August 30, 1864): 530; New York Times, August 17, 1864; New York Tribune, September 2, 1864.

50. McClellan struggled to strike a balance between the platform and his own commitment to reunion as a prerequisite for negotiations. For an analysis of the successive drafts of McClellan's acceptance letter, see Charles R. Wilson, "McClellan's Changing View on the Peace Plank of 1864,"AHR 38 (1933): 498–505. Drafts of McClellan's letter are in the McClellan Papers, Library of Congress, and in the Samuel L. M. Barlow Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

51. Sherman to Henry W. Halleck, September 3, 1864, in OR, Series I, vol. 38, part 5, p. 777; Diary of George Templeton Strong, 480–81, entry of September 3, 1864.

52. Richmond Examiner, September 5, 1864; New York Times, September 19, 1864, published the sermon.

53. Delos Lake to his mother, July 12, November 1, 1864, Lake Papers, Huntington Library; John Berry to Samuel L. M. Barlow, August 24, 1864, Barlow Papers.

54. Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 8: 149, 151.

55. The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 1857–1878, Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, ed. (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1995), 147–49, entries of January 6, 18, 1865.

56. Richmond Enquirer, January 19, 1865; Richmond Sentinel, rpt. in New York Herald, January 24, 1865; New York Herald, January 25, 1865; New York World, January 23, 1865; John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary, Earl Schenck Miers, ed. (New York, 1958), 489–90, entry of January 30, 1865.

57. Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 8: 275.

58. Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 8: 275–76. Italics added.

59. William J. Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis, American (New York, 2000), 510–11.

60. Grant to Edwin M. Stanton, February 2, 1865, in Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 8: 282.

61. "Memorandum of the Conversation at the Conference in Hampton Roads," in John A. Campbell, Reminiscences and Documents Relating to the Civil War during the Year 1865 (Baltimore, 1877), 11–17; Seward to Charles Francis Adams, February 7, 1865, in OR, Series I, vol. 46, part 2, pp. 471–73; Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1870), 2: 598–619. The best study of the Hampton Roads Conference is William C. Harris, "The Hampton Roads Peace Conference: A Final Test of Lincoln's Presidential Leadership," Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 21 (2000): 31–61.

62. Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 8: 279.

63. Stephens, Constitutional View, 2: 613.

64. In his account, Stephens maintained that Lincoln had urged him to go home to Georgia and persuade the legislature to take the state out of the war and to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment prospectively, to take effect in five years. This claim cannot be accepted; Lincoln was too good a lawyer to suggest any such absurdity as a "prospective" ratification of a constitutional amendment. The president had just played a leading part in getting Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, and he was using his influence to get every Republican state legislature as well as those of Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee to ratify it. Stephens, Constitutional View, 2: 611–12. See also Harris, "Hampton Roads Peace Conference," 51.

65. Richmond Examiner, February 6, 1865; Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, 10 vols., Dunbar Rowland, ed. (Jackson, Miss., 1923), 6: 465–67.

66. Jones, War Clerk's Diary, 493, entry of February 6, 1865; Richmond Dispatch, February 7, 1865; Richmond Whig, February 6, 1865.

67. New York Tribune, February 7, 1865; New York Times, January 18, February 13, 1865. See also Harper's Weekly 9 (February 4, 1865): 66: "The government does insist on an unconditional surrender. That was the exact issue before the people in the late election. There was to be no compromising, no compounding, no convention, no waving of olive boughs."

68. Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 8: 332–33.

69. Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 167, entry of May 4, 1865.