Episode 529: We Hold These Truths

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Hello and welcome to Western Civ, episode 529.

We hold these truths.

In the evening of July 3rd, 1863,

the field south of the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg

lay silent in a way that they hadn't now for three days.

The silence, of course, was not peaceful.

It was the silence of exhaustion, of shock,

of 50,000 dead men who would never speak again.

The rain began to fall on July 4th,

as if the sky itself was trying to wash away

the previous 72 hours.

General Robert E. Lee, the man who had gambled

everything on the invasion of North,

sat on his horse, traveler, and probably watched

the broken remnants of Pickett's division stumble back

across the open ground.

At least according to legend, he is reported to have said

to them, it is all my fault.

Whether those were his exact words

or the embellishment of a later memory,

the sentiment was honestly real.

The great Confederate offensive

in the Union territory heading out decisively

and fully failed.

But the war wasn't over, not even close.

From this moment, the rain soaked after math

of Gettysburg in July 1863 to the bullet

that will end Abraham Lincoln's life in April of 1865.

Nearly two full years of the most brutal grinding

and transformative warfare in American history

was still ahead of us.

Today, I'm gonna cover the story of those two years.

It's the story of the long road to peace

and one single act of violence that will shatter it,

the moment that it arrived.

To understand what happened immediately after Gettysburg,

you have to understand what was happening

at the same time as Gettysburg, 1,000 miles to the west.

On July 4, 1863, the very day that Lee began

his retreat from Pennsylvania,

the Confederate fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi,

surrendered to major general Ulysses S. Grant

after a siege that had lasted 47 days.

The fall of Vicksburg gave the Union complete control

over the Mississippi River,

effectively cutting the Confederacy in two.

President Lincoln, upon hearing the news,

reportedly said, quote,

the father of waters again goes unvexed to the sea.

And just think about that timing for a second.

Within 24 hours, the Confederacy suffered

over arguably its two most devastating defeats

of the entire war.

Gettysburg shattered the myth of these invincibility

in the east.

Vicksburg severed the Confederacy's lifeline in the west.

The Fourth of July, 1863 may well be

the single most consequential day of the war.

The wars are not won on single days.

They are won or lost in the months and years that follow.

And in the east, the months that followed Gettysburg

were frankly frustrating for the Union.

General George Mead, the victor of Gettysburg,

pursued Lee's retreating army cautiously.

Once again, too cautiously for Lincoln's taste.

The president was beside himself.

He wrote a letter to Mead expressing

his deep dissatisfaction,

arguing that Mead had lead trapped

against the flooded Potomac and he had let him escape.

Ultimately, Lee wrote the letter, but he never sent it.

He filed it away, but the frustration was genuine

and it was telling.

Lincoln understood maybe better than a lot of his generals

that the war would only end when Confederate armies

were destroyed.

And it just pushed back into Virginia.

The fall of 1863 shifted the focus to Tennessee.

In September, the two major armies in the Western theater,

the Union Army of the Cumberland under General William

Rosencrands and the Confederate Army of Tennessee

under General Braxton Bragg, collided along the banks

of the Chickamonga Creek in northwest Georgia.

The Battle of Chickamonga

bought on September the 19th and 20th

was one of the bloodiest engagements of the war

with combined casualties exceeding 34,000 men.

And it was a Confederate victory,

the last major one in the West.

Rosencrands battled army retreated

back to Chattanooga, Tennessee,

where it essentially found itself besieged.

Confederate forces occupied the high ground

on missionary rage and lookout mountain,

commanding the roads and the river.

And the Union Army began to starve.

Supplies dwindled, horses and mules died by the thousands.

Soldiers were put on half rations, then quarter rations.

Lincoln needed someone who could fix this.

And so he turned to the man who had taken Vicksburg.

In October of 1863, Ulysses S. Grant was given overall command

of the newly created Military Division of the Mississippi,

overseeing virtually all Union operations

between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River.

Grant arrived in Chattanooga and immediately sent to work.

He reopened supply lines,

what the soldiers called Cracker Line

and reinforcements poured in,

including troops from the Army of the Potomac

under General Joseph Hooker,

and elements of the Army of the Tennessee

under General William Tacumse Sherman.

On November the 24th and the 25th,

Grant launched his assault.

The Battle of Chattanooga unfolded in dramatic fashion.

On the 24th, Hooker's men fought their way up the slopes

of Lookout Mountain in what became romantically known

as the battle above the clouds.

Fog and mist shrouded the mountain as fighting raged.

The next day in one of the war's most remarkable episodes,

Union troops from the Army of the Cumberland,

the same men who had just been humiliated

at Chikamaga, charged up the steep face

of missionary rage without orders,

driving the Confederates from what should have been

an impregnable position.

Grant himself watched in astonishment,

reportedly turning to his staff and asking

who had ordered that charge.

No one had.

The men burning with the desire to redeem themselves

had simply gone.

The Confederate Army broke and retreated back into Georgia.

Chattanooga was secure, and suddenly,

the gateway to the deep south stood wide open.

Ulysses S. Grant had proven himself, once again,

to be the Union's most effective general.

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In March of 1864, Abraham Lincoln did something

that would change the trajectory of the war.

He summoned Ulysses S. Grant to Washington

and appointed him Lieutenant General,

a rank that had been held by no one since George Washington,

and gave him command of all Union armies.

Grant was not a polished man.

He was short, rumpled in appearance, and spoke quietly.

He had struggled before the war, failed at farming,

built the business, worked in his father's leather,

good store, and galena, Illinois.

There were persistent rumors about his drinking,

but Lincoln didn't care about any of that.

When critics pressed him about Grant's habits,

Lincoln has said to have quipped

that he'd like to know Grant's brand of whiskey

so that he could send a barrel of it to his other generals.

The quote may be apocryphal,

but it captures something real about Lincoln's attitude.

He had cycled through general after general,

McDowell, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, Mead,

and none of them had been willing to use

the Union's overwhelming advantages

in manpower and resources to press the Confederacy

to the breaking point.

Grant was willing.

His strategy was elegant in its simplicity

and brutal in his execution,

rather than focusing on capturing Confederate territories

or cities, Grant would target Confederate armies.

He would apply simultaneous pressure

across multiple fronts so that the Confederacy

with its dwindling manpower could not shift reinforcements

from one theater to another.

In the East, Grant would personally accompany

the army of the Potomac still technically commanded by Mead

to go after Robert E. Lee.

And in the West, his most trusted subordinate,

William T. Cumseh Sherman, would advance from Chattanooga

into Georgia, targeting the Confederate army

of the Tennessee now commanded by General Joseph E. Johnston.

Smaller forces would operate in the Shenandoah Valley

and along the James River in Virginia.

It was a strategy of exhaustion.

Grant understood something that many Union commanders

before him had not.

The Confederacy could not replace its losses.

Every battle, even a costly one,

brought the Union closer to victory

as long as the pressure never led up.

On May the 4th, 1864, the army of the Potomac

roughly 120,000 strong crossed the Rapidan River in Virginia

and entered a dense, tangled stretch of scrubland

and second-growth forest known as we talked about before

as the wilderness.

Lee, with about 65,000 men attacked.

The battle of the wilderness fought between May the 5th

and 7th was a nightmare.

The terrain was so thick that units couldn't see each other

at 50 yards.

The brush caught fire from musket flashes and artillery

and wounded men burned to death between the lines.

Their screams carrying through the smoke.

Neither side could maneuver effectively.

The fighting was close, confused, and savage.

The Union suffered roughly 18,000 casualties.

The Confederates lost around 11,000,

a smaller number, but obviously,

a much larger percentage of their overall army.

But here's the moment that defined grants,

general ship.

Every previous commander of the army of the Potomac

after a battle like this had done the same things.

Retreat back across the nearest river to lick its wounds.

The soldiers expected Grant would do the exact same.

And so, on the night of May the 7th,

when the army started to march,

everyone simply assumed it was another retreat.

And when the columns reached the crossroads

where a left turn meant retreat

and a right turn meant advanced,

they turned right, south, toward the Confederates.

The reaction among the men was electric.

They cheered somewhat openly,

understanding that this was a different kind of war now.

There would be no more retreating.

Grant later wrote in his memoirs, quote,

I proposed to fight it out on this line,

if it takes all summer, end quote.

Of course, it would take longer than that.

What followed were a series of engagements

of almost inimaginable intensity.

From the wilderness, Grant moved southeast

to Spotsylvania courthouse,

where 12 days of fighting included the most infamous struggle

at the bloody angle on May the 12th.

24 hours of continuous hand-to-hand combat

in pouring rain, men fighting with bayonets,

musket butts, and bare hands,

over a set of earthen fortifications.

An oak tree, nearly two feet in diameter,

was cut down by rifle fire.

You can go see the stump today.

I've seen it.

It's at the Smithsonian.

From Spotsylvania, Grant continued to slide south and east,

fighting at the North Anna River,

and top harmony creek until, on June 3rd,

he ordered a frontal assault at Cold Harbor,

a decision that he would regret for the rest of his life.

In less than an hour, approximately 7,000 union soldiers

were killed or wounded,

attacking heavily entrenched Confederate positions.

The night before the assault, union soldiers

had been seen quietly pinning their names and addresses

on the back of their coats,

so their bodies could be identified.

They seemed to know it was coming.

Grant didn't.

In roughly one month of fighting

from the wilderness to Cold Harbor,

the army of the Potomac had suffered over 50,000 casualties.

Norther newspapers began calling Grant a butcher,

but Grant had also inflicted irreplaceable losses

on Lee's army, somewhere around 33,000 men.

And he had driven the army of Northern Virginia

from the open country of central Virginia

to the very outskirts of Richmond.

And then Grant did something that Lee did not expect.

Rather than continuing to hammer away

at Lee's entrenched lines north of the Confederate capital,

Grant disengaged, marched his army south,

crossed the James River

and one of the longest pontoon bridges

in military history, over 2,000 feet,

and targeted the city of Petersburg,

a critical railroad junction south of Richmond.

If Petersburg fell,

Richmond's supply lines would be severed

and Lee would be forced to abandon the capital.

Lee caught off guard, rushed reinforcements

to Petersburg just in time.

And so began the siege of Petersburg,

a grueling, grinding affair

that would last from June 1864 to April 1865.

Trench warfare, in many ways,

foreshadowing the Western Front of World War I,

became the new reality.

Miles of fortification, zigzag trenches,

sharp shooters, mortar fire,

and the constant slow erosion

of the Confederate army's strength.

While Grant pinned Lee down at Petersburg,

William to come to Sherman

was conducting one of the most consequential campaigns

in military history.

Sherman had departed Chattanooga in May of 1864

with roughly a hundred thousand men,

aiming for Atlanta, Georgia,

a major Confederate industrial center,

railroad hub, and a symbol of southern resolve.

Opposing him was Joseph E. Johnston,

a cautious and skilled defensive general,

who fought a masterful retreating campaign

using Georgia's rugged terrain

to slow Sherman's advance without risking a decisive battle.

For weeks, the campaign was a chess match.

Sherman would flank.

Johnston would fall back to the next prepared position.

Sherman flanked again.

Johnston retreated again.

It was effective defense,

but Confederate President Jefferson Davis grew impatient.

In July 1864, with Sherman at the gates of Atlanta,

Davis replaced Johnston

with the aggressive general John Bell Hood.

Hood attacked and attacked again.

Hit the battles of Peach Tree Creek on July the 20th,

Atlanta on July the 22nd,

and Ezra Church on July the 28th.

Hood hurled his army at Sherman's forces

and was repulsed each time with heavy losses.

Sherman then swung south of the city,

cutting its last railroad connections,

and on September the 2nd, 1864,

the city of Atlanta fell.

The timing could not have been more significant,

and I wanna take a moment here and explain why.

By the summer of 1864, the north was exhausted.

The casualty lists from grants for Virginia campaign

had been staggering.

The war seemed endless.

A powerful peace movement had now taken root

in the Democratic Party,

and it's candidate for the 1864 presidential election,

General George McClellan, Lincoln's former army commander,

was running on a platform that called the war failure

and advocated for a negotiated peace with the Confederacy.

Lincoln himself believed that he would lose the election.

In August, he wrote a private memo to his cabinet,

sealed it, and asked them to sign the outside

without reading it.

It read in part, quote,

it seems exceedingly probable

that this administration will not be elected.

But the fall of Atlanta changed everything.

It was tangible, undeniable proof that the war could be won.

Northern morale surged.

In November, Lincoln was reelected in a landslide,

carrying every state but three,

New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky,

and winning 55% of the popular vote.

Perhaps most tellingly,

Union soldiers in the field voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln.

The men doing the fighting,

they wanted to see it through.

After Atlanta, Sherman made a radical proposal,

rather than chasing Hood's army,

which had swung north to threaten Sherman supply lines

in Tennessee,

Sherman wanted to abandon those supply lines entirely,

march his army across Georgia to the sea

and live off the land,

destroying everything of military value along the way.

It was total war,

and not just at Confederate armies,

but at the Confederate economy

and the southern populations will to fight.

Grant was initially skeptical,

but ultimately he gave his approval.

To deal with Hood,

Sherman detached General George Thomas

and roughly 30,000 men to defend Tennessee.

A decision that proved wise,

when Thomas utterly destroyed Hood's army

at the Battle of Nashville on December 15th and 16th, 1864,

and what was actually one of the most complete victories

of the war.

Meanwhile, Sherman marched.

On November 15th, 1864,

his army of 62,000 men left Atlanta

after burning much of the city

and set out on what became known as the march to the sea.

For the next five weeks,

Sherman's forces cut a swath of destruction,

roughly 60 miles wide across Georgia.

Railroads were torn up,

the rails heated over bonfires

and twisted around trees.

The soldiers called them Sherman's neckties.

Barnes, mills, cotton jins and warehouses were burned.

Livestock was slaughtered or confiscated.

The army foraged liberally

and the line between foraging and looting

lured frequently.

The march to the sea was not a battle.

There was almost no organized Confederate resistance.

It was a demonstration,

a message written in fire and ruin.

The Confederacy could no longer protect its own people,

its own territory, its own heartland.

Thousands of enslaved people left plantations

and followed Sherman's columns to freedom.

A powerful and complicated exodus

that Sherman himself handled with ambivalence.

A reminder that even among those fighting to end slavery,

racial attitudes were deeply flawed.

On December the 21st, 1864,

Sherman's army captured Savannah, Georgia.

Sherman sent a telegram to Lincoln.

I begged to present you as a Christmas gift,

the city of Savannah.

In February 1865, Sherman turned north,

marching through South Carolina at the state

that started at all first to secede

with a particular vengeance.

Columbia the state capital earned on February the 17th.

The cause of fire remains debated.

Retreating Confederates had set cotton bales,

a light, high winds spread the flames,

and union soldiers, many of them drunk,

may have contributed to the destruction.

But the result was devastating.

Much of the city had been reduced to ash.

Sherman continued into North Carolina,

fighting a sharp engagement at Bettenville

in March before linking up with other union forces.

By this time, the Confederacy itself was in full collapse.

Now meanwhile, back up North at Petersburg,

the siege ground through the winter of 1864 to 1865,

and these army was dying,

not just from union shells and sharp shooters,

but from hunger, cold disease, and despair,

desertion, sword,

men who had fought for four years simply walked away,

sometimes toward home, sometimes toward union lines.

By March of 1865,

Lee's effective force had dwindled

to fewer than 50,000 men

facing Grant's army of roughly 125,000.

In a desperate attempt to break the siege,

Lee launched an attack on Fort Stedman on March 25th, 1865.

It initially succeeded in capturing the fort,

but a swift union counterattack

drove the Confederates back with heavy losses.

It was proved to be Lee's final offensive action.

On April 1st, union forces under General Phillips Sheridan,

the fiery cavalry commander,

who had laid waste the Shenandoah Valley the previous fall,

denying the Confederacy one of its last

and most important bread baskets,

won a decisive victory at five forks west of Petersburg,

effectively turning Lee's right flank

and cutting the south side railroad,

one of the last supply lines into Petersburg.

Grant ordered a general assault

along the line for the morning of April the 2nd.

The Confederate defenses stretched thin for miles,

broke in multiple places.

Among the dead that day was General AP Hill,

one of Lee's most trusted corps commanders

killed by union soldiers as he rode toward the sound of the guns.

Lee then sent a message to Jefferson Davis in Richmond.

The city had to be evacuated.

Davis received the message

while sitting in church on a Sunday morning.

He rose quietly and left.

That night, the Confederate government fled Richmond by train.

The city's tobacco warehouses were set ablaze

to deny them to the enemy and the fire spread,

consuming much of the business district.

On the morning of April the 3rd,

union troops entered Richmond.

Among the first were soldiers

of the United States colored troops,

black men in blue uniforms,

marching into the capital of the slaveholding Confederacy.

The symbolism was obvious and staggering.

The next day, April the 4th,

Abraham Lincoln himself walked the streets of Richmond.

He had been visiting Grant's headquarters

at City Point, Virginia when he heard of the city's fall

and he wanted to see it for himself.

The president of the United States

walked through the ruined capital of the rebellion

with only a small escort, formerly enslaved people

crowded around him, some kneeling at his feet.

Lincoln reportedly told them, don't kneel to me.

That is not right.

You must kneel to God only

and thank him for the liberty you will enjoy here after.

Meanwhile, Lee's army was running west

and south from Petersburg,

the army of Northern Virginia,

or I guess what was left of it,

stumbled along muddy roads,

hoping to reach supplies that had been sent by rail

to Amelia Courthouse.

But when Lee arrived there on April the 4th,

the rations were not.

A bureaucratic error, miscommunication,

the supplies had gone to Richmond instead.

Lee's starving army lost a full day waiting and foraging

and that lost day proved fatal.

Grant's forces pursuing relentlessly

finally got ahead of Lee.

On April the 6th, at the Battle of Sailor's Creek,

roughly a quarter of Lee's remaining army,

some 8,000 men were just cut off and captured.

Lee, watching the disaster from a ridge,

reportedly exclaimed, my God, as the army had dissolved.

It nearly had.

By April the 8th, Union cavalry undershared

and had raced ahead and blocked Lee's path

at Appomattox Courthouse.

When Lee attempted a breakout on the morning of April 9th,

his advance guard pushed through the cavalry screen

only to find rank upon rank of Union infantry

behind it deployed and waiting.

There was no way forward.

There was no way back.

Lee then said to his staff,

there is nothing left for me to do

but to go and see General Grant

and I would rather die a thousand deaths.

The meeting took place on the afternoon of April the 9th,

1865, Palm Sunday.

In the parlor of a modest brick home

owned by a man named Wilmer McLean,

there's a crazy footnote to this that I always point out.

McLean had previously lived near Manassas, Virginia.

There a cannonball had crashed through his kitchen

during the first battle of Bull Run in 1861

and he had moved his family to the remote village

of Appomattox Courthouse,

specifically to escape the war.

But the war it seemed followed him.

Coming full circle in a way that conflicts just never do

other than in the story books.

Where the war began was now going to end,

the same person's kitchen.

Lee arrived first.

He was immaculate,

dressed in a new great uniform,

a red silk sash at his waist,

the jeweled sword at his side.

Grant arrived shortly after,

still wearing the mud-splattered private's coat

with Lieutenant General Starr's tacked on the soldiers

that he had been wearing in the field.

He hadn't had time to change.

He later wrote that he felt embarrassed by the contrast.

The two men had met once before

during the Mexican-American War

and they spoke briefly about that shared memory

before turning to the matter at hand.

The terms Grant offered remarkably generous,

Confederate officers and men would be paroled.

They would sign a pledge not to take up arms

and then they could go home.

Officers could keep their side arms,

horses and personal property.

When Lee mentioned that Confederate cavalry men

and artilleryists owned their own horses,

Grant allowed them to keep those as well,

saying the men would need them for the spring planting.

Lee accepted, he signed the document in the war

or at least the major part of it was over.

As Lee wrote away on his famous horse traveler,

Grant's men began firing artillery salutes in celebration.

Grant ordered them to stop saying,

the war is over.

The rebels are our countrymen again.

Over the next several weeks,

the remaining Confederate armies surrendered.

Johnston surrendered to Sherman

in North Carolina on April 26th.

Richard Taylor surrendered the last major Confederate force

east of the Mississippi,

on May the 4th.

The last Confederate general,

the surrender, the stand weighty, a Cherokee leader

who laid down his arms on June the 23rd, 1865.

But by that time,

the nation had already suffered a blow from which

any hope of a merciful peace,

but never recover.

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On the evening of April 14th, 1865,

Good Friday, Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln

attended a performance of the comedy,

Our American Cousin,

at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC.

It had been five days since Lee's surrender.

The city was still celebrating.

Flags were flying.

Illuminations lit the public buildings.

Lincoln himself was in unusually good spirits.

That afternoon,

he had told his wife during a carriage ride

that he wanted to visit the Holy Land and see Jerusalem.

He spoke of the future and of peace.

The Lincoln's arrived late to the theater,

around 8.30 p.m.,

and the play paused as the audience rose

and the orchestra played, hailed to the chief.

They took their seats in the presidential box,

a raised balcony on the right side of the stage.

With them were major Henry Rathbone and his fiance,

Clay Harris.

Lincoln's regular bodyguard,

William Cook,

had been replaced for the evening by John Parker,

a metropolitan police officer with a spotty record.

At some point during the play,

Parker left his post outside the door to the presidential box,

perhaps to watch the play from a different vantage point,

perhaps to get a drink from the saloon next door.

The exact reason has never been established.

The door to the box was left unguarded.

John Wilkes Booth was 26 years old,

strikingly handsome and a famous actor,

a genuine celebrity.

He was also a Confederate sympathizer,

a white supremacist,

and by the spring of 1865,

a man consumed by rage at the collapse of the Confederate cause.

He had originally planned to kidnap Lincoln

and deliver him to the Confederacy

in exchange for prisoners of war.

That plan had fallen apart.

Now with the Confederacy in ruins,

Booth's schemes had evolved into something far darker.

Booth knew for its theater intimately,

he knew the layout, the schedule, the passengers backstage.

He knew that on this particular evening,

the president would be in attendance

to have been announced in the newspapers.

He had spent the day drinking and making final preparations.

He had assembled a small group of conspirators

for simultaneous attacks.

Lewis Powell was to assassinate Secretary of State

William Seaworth at his home.

George Azeroth was to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson

at the hotel.

The goal was to decapitate the Union government

in a single night.

At approximately 10, 15 PM during the Third Act,

Booth made his way through the theater's back passage

and entered the narrow hall

by leading to the presidential box.

He peered through a small hole,

he had bored in the hole earlier that day,

confirming Lincoln's position.

Then he opened the door, stepped into the box,

raised a 44 caliber single shot,

derailing pistol, and fired a single bullet

into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head,

just behind the left ear.

Major Rathbone launched at Booth,

who slashed him across the arm with a large knife.

Booth then vaulted over the railing of the box,

dropping roughly 12 feet out of the stage below.

His spur caught on the treasury guard flag

that draped the box and he landed awkwardly,

breaking or fracturing his left leg, accounts differ.

He rose allegedly shouting,

six separate tyrannas, thus always to tyrants,

the motto of Virginia,

and fled across the stage and out the back door

where a horse was waiting.

The theater erupted into chaos.

Mary Lincoln screamed,

the audience initially confused,

thought it was some part of the play,

but then they quickly realized what had happened.

A young army surgeon named Charles Lill,

who was in the audience,

rushed to the presidential box

and found Lincoln slumped in his chair unconscious

and barely breathing.

Lill located the wound and removed a blood clot,

which briefly improved Lincoln's breathing,

but he quickly determined that the wound was mortal.

Lincoln was carried across the street

to a boarding house owned by William Peterson.

The tall president was laid diagonally on a bed

in a small first floor room.

Throughout the night,

government officials, military officers,

and family members filed in and out.

Secretary of war Edwin Stanton

took effective command of the government from the back parlor.

Mary Lincoln, hysterical with grief,

was periodically brought in and let away.

Robert Todd Lincoln, the president's eldest son,

stood weeping by the bedside.

Abraham Lincoln never regained consciousness.

At 722 on the morning of April the 15th, 1865,

he died, who was 56 years old.

Stanton standing in the room as reported to have said,

now he belongs to the ages.

Some historians argue the quote was actually,

now he belongs to the angels.

Either way, the meaning was the same.

The man who had held the union together

through four years of war,

who had issued the emancipation proclamation,

who had spoken of malice toward done and charity for all.

In his second inaugural address, just six weeks earlier,

he was gone.

The other attacks that night partially failed.

Louis Powell forces way into Secretary Seward's home

and stabbed him repeatedly, but Seward survived,

saved in part by a metal jaw splint

he was wearing from a recent carriage accident.

George Azeroth, assigned to kill Vice President Johnson,

lost his nerve and spent the evening drinking.

He never attempted the assassination.

Booth fled south through Maryland with an accomplice,

David Herald.

For 12 days, he evaded one of the largest man hunts

in American history.

On April the 26th,

federal soldiers cornered Booth and Herald

in a tobacco barn on the farm of Richard Garrett

near Port Royal, Virginia.

Herald surrendered, but Booth refused.

And so the soldiers set the barn on fire.

As Booth moved inside the burning structure,

Sergeant Boston Corbett,

filed a single shot through a gap in the barn wall,

striking Booth in the neck.

He was dragged out, paralyzed.

He died on the porch of the farmhouse

as Don was breaking.

Reportedly whispering,

tell my mother, I died from my country.

Then he looked at his hands and said, useless, useless.

He was 26 years old.

Abraham Lincoln's body was carried back to the White House

where it lay and stayed in the East Room.

On April the 21st, a funeral train began,

a 1,700 mile journey from Washington

to Springfield, Illinois,

Lincoln's hometown,

retracing a reverse.

The route Lincoln had taken to the capital four years earlier.

In city after city, Baltimore, Harrisburg,

Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis,

the train stopped in hundreds of thousands of Americans

lined up to view the body and mourn.

It was the largest outpouring of grief

the nation had ever seen.

Lincoln was buried in Springfield

on May the 4th, 1865.

The war he had led the nation through

had lasted four years.

It had claimed the lives of approximately 750,000 Americans

the number that recently has been revised upward

from the long accepted previous figure of 620,000.

And it destroyed the institution of slavery,

which had existed on the North American continent

for two and a half centuries.

It preserved the union and it transformed the meaning

of that union from a voluntary compact

of sovereign states to a single indivisible nation

found by the principle,

however imperfectly realized that all men are created equal.

That period after Gettysburg,

from July 1863 to April 1865,

was the crucible in which the transformation was forged.

It was forged by grants relentless pressure in Virginia

by Sherman's march to the heart of the South

but the service of nearly 200,000 black soldiers

and sailors who fought for their own freedom

in union blue and a blood shed at the wilderness

and Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Nashville

and a hundred other places whose names have faded from memory

but whose toll never will.

And of course, it was forged by Lincoln himself

by his refusal to accept a peace that preserved slavery

by his insistence that the war had to end

in union victory and nothing less.

And by his vision articulated so powerfully

in a second inaugural address

that the nation must move forward, quote,

with malice toward none, with charity for all,

with firmness in right as God gives us to see.

That vision that died in a small bedroom across the street

from a theater from spring morning in Washington,

what followed the era of reconstruction

would test whether the nation could fulfill Lincoln's vision

without him.

But that's a story for another time.

Next week, we're actually gonna swing back to Europe.

We need to catch Russia back up

because the unfolding crisis in Crimea

is going to test that concert of Vienna,

that concert of Europe, the idea of that balance of power

that was supposed to keep everyone in line.

And two nations ready to unite and rise, Italy and Germany

was shattered that myth forever.

...

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.

Victory Lane?

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