[91.0] Postwar (2): Strike The Tent

v1.1.3 / chapter 91 of 93 / 01 sep 11 / greg goebel / public domain

* While the nation staggered uncertainly through Reconstruction, Ulysses S. Grant held court in the White House. Grant's two terms as president of the United States were at best undistinguished, at worst an embarrassment. The Grant years were a time when men were on the make instead of full of ideals, and under such circumstances the South was able to rebuild its society largely without interference. Segregation and white supremacy became the law, and so it would remain for almost a century.

In the meantime, the major players of the Civil War went through the remainder of their lives, some finding new successes, some suffering failure; some would become immortalized, while many more would be all but forgotten.

[91.1] PRESIDENT GRANT

* The men who had founded the Republic Party had been driven by antislavery ideals, but after the war passions had cooled, and increasingly the Republicans seemed infected by the "easy money" mindset of the times. The Presidential election of 1868 was a turning point of sorts, where the Republicans had to determine whether they were a party of ideals or of money.

The Republicans selected a candidate who seemed on the surface to represent the old ideals. At the Republican national convention, John "Black Jack" Logan, now a full-time politician again, stood up and nominated Ulysses S. Grant for the presidency. There was wild applause, and Grant won the nomination with no real competition.

Although Grant had done much to destroy slavery and preserve the Union, any analysis of him as a presidential candidate showed he left much to be desired. He was a hero, yes, but he had no background in politics, and in fact his indifference to politics was one of the things that had made him successful as a general. He hadn't sought the presidency, and in fact the only political aspiration he had ever mentioned was to be mayor of his hometown of Galena, Illinois. Grant was a generally honest man, to be sure, but many who backed him for the presidency saw him as a convenient figurehead whose popularity would get him elected, while they actually controlled things once he was in the White House.

The Democrats responded by nominating Horatio Seymour, previously governor of New York, as their candidate. The Democrats were in a difficult position. The Republicans were not only in positions of influence, but they were easily able to smear the Democrats as the "party of treason". The Democrats foolishly attacked the Reconstruction Acts, and in response the Republicans accused the Democrats of being sympathetic to rebellion, or that they were even rebels themselves. Grant won the election with 214 electoral votes to Seymour's 80, though the popular vote was very tight, with Grant beating Seymour by only a little more than 300,000 votes. Despite the posturing of the Republicans, public enthusiasm for their rhetoric was actually low.

The Grant Administration did nothing to produce any more enthusiasm. Grant felt that his role as president was to implement measures passed by Congress, which reduced the administrative branch of government to dancing on the strings of Congressional intrigues. Any opportunity for civil rights was lost for almost a century, and Republicanism acquired its reputation as a party of and for the privileged that it has never quite managed to shake.

This last was in particular due to the financial scandals of the Grant Administration, generally regarded as one of the most corrupt in American history. The biggest scandal occurred when two financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, came up with a scheme to corner the gold market, control the price of gold, and make a killing. They used Abel Corbin, a lawyer who was a brother-in-law of Grant's, to lobby the president to discourage any sale of Treasury gold, which would completely disrupt the scheme.

Grant gradually became suspicious, and on Friday, 24 September 1869, he ordered the sale of four million dollars worth of Treasury gold. Gould and Fisk did make a killing, though they had to move quickly to avoid being lynched by other speculators they had ruined. The day became known as "Black Friday". The scandal led up to the White House. Grant was not implicated himself in the Black Friday fiasco or the other scandals that followed, but many of his appointees were, and he often tried to protect them when they were accused of corruption.

Although the newspapers made much of the scandals, to the public and the Republican faithful they were just crooked business as usual, and when the presidential election of 1872 rolled around, Grant was automatically nominated for a second term. However, a group of Republicans was so disgusted with the status quo that they bolted and form their own "Liberal Republican Party". The Liberal Republicans were a motley group, including some respected figures such as Charles Francis Adams, along with many marginal figures of little credibility, most particularly Horace Greeley.

It was an indication of the condition of the Liberal Republicans that they actually made Greeley their candidate for the presidency. They had done so reluctantly, having approached Sherman first, who replied: "What do you think I am, a damned fool?! Look at Grant! Look at Grant! What wouldn't he give now if he had never meddled in politics!" Greeley was very well known, of course, but as much of his notoriety was for his highly public and eccentric views. People might be amused by Horace Greeley but few took him seriously, and many of those who took him seriously detested him.

Greeley was more given to theatrics than tact and pointlessly offended many people with his statements, for example proclaiming that while not all Democrats were horse thieves, all horse thieves were Democrats. He got at least as good as he gave, with the campaign becoming very loud and nasty. Greeley said, possibly remembering Sherman's comment the first time the general was approached to run for political office: "I was assailed so bitterly that I hardly knew whether I was running for the Presidency or the Penitentiary." He was soundly defeated, with 66 electoral votes to Grant's 286. Greeley, worn out, died a month later, aged 61.

* In an environment where deals meant much more than ideals, the goal of reforming Southern society and ensuring civil rights was gradually forgotten. Most of the Radicals were gone, survived in Congress by opportunists like Ben Butler, who found the gilded postwar environment perfectly satisfactory. Most Northerners, busy with a booming economy, only wanted to put the war behind them. Before the war, abolitionists had been able to influence a broader public, but now slavery was officially dead and as far as most folks were concerned, that was good enough.

While tens of thousands of Southern officials had been disenfranchised after the war, the North was tiring of vindictiveness. A General Amnesty Act was passed in 1872 that restored the full rights of all but a few hundred. In the meantime, the various armed and militant white supremacist groups in the South were busy undermining Republican rule through harassment and intimidation. Stories of murders and other atrocities filtered North, but the public had become indifferent.

In New Orleans, on 14 September 1874, 3,500 armed White League men attacked 3,600 police and black militia commanded by, of all people, James Longstreet. The White League men scattered the defenders, capturing Longstreet. 38 men were killed and 79 wounded in the fight. The White League men were enraged at Longstreet, and it was only with difficulty that their leaders prevented them from shooting him. The White League ran the state government for three days, until US Army troops arrived and chased them back out.

Northern papers bitterly criticized Grant for sending in the army, calling him a tyrant. The North no longer had any enthusiasm for the use of force to keep the South in line. Even at the beginning of the Civil War, only the most extreme Northerners had wanted to change the social order of the South, with the real push towards conflict driven by the prospect of extension of slavery to the West. During the war, most Northern troops fought not to destroy slavery, but to preserve the Union. That goal had been achieved, and had also buried the question of the extension of slavery to the West that had caused the trouble in the first place. The North's primary war goals having been achieved, Northern concern over how the Southern states did things, however disagreeable it might seem to outsiders, gradually faded out. Besides, there were many Northerners who were perfectly happy to see blacks kept in their place and were perfectly happy with the reassertion of white supremacy in the South.

Grant refused to send in the troops again. The White Leagues and similar groups were able to do as they pleased. The Republican state governments began to fall, and by 1876 the only states that were still under Republican control were South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Some carpetbaggers assimilated, working agreeably with the new order; those who didn't get with the program were chased out, in a few cases murdered. Black people were put on the bottom of the social order. In fact, in some ways slavery returned. States had set up programs to obtain revenue by farming out convict labor, and as the scheme began to become profitable, black people were often arrested on minor pretexts and put to work in chains.

In a last-ditch effort to halt the rollback of social reform in the South, the US Congress had passed a "Civil Rights Act" in 1875, originally proposed by Sumner and Butler five years earlier, to ban discrimination in schools, places of public accommodation, transportation, and juries. It would be generally ignored, and then overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1883 as unconstitutional. The courts would strike down another challenge to segregation in 1892 and that was the end of the matter for six decades. "Jim Crow" laws would rule the South.

Still, things were not as they had been before the war. There were systems of black education in place in the Southern states -- poor ones, to be sure, but before the war even teaching slaves to read was illegal. There was a greater degree of freedom of movement. Most importantly, the Constitution itself now specified that all citizens, regardless of race, were in theory if not in practice equal in the eyes of the law. A century after the beginning of the war, the 15th Amendment would be the basis for a new revolution that would finally establish racial equality in the law, an event would be called a "Second Reconstruction".

* The Presidential election of 1876 was the last major act in Reconstruction. There was some consideration for Grant running once more, but although he retained his stature as one of the great heroes of the war, few retained any confidence in his political leadership, such as it was.

Grant's second term had led to as many or more scandals as the first. In 1873, the lingering effects of government war dept helped bring on a great financial panic that triggered a severe economic depression. The economy went back on the boom within a few years, but in the meantime widespread hardship helped increase dissatisfaction with the Grant Administration. As election time approached again, a contemporary political cartoon depicted Grant standing in front of a bar in Uncle Sam's Saloon, with Uncle Sam holding a bottle of OLD THIRD TERM. Grant asks: "How 'bout another?" Uncle Sam replies: "I think you've had enough."

The Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, who had a good war record, had been governor of Ohio for three terms, and wanted civil service reform. The Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden, a reformist governor of New York, and hoped to win from popular disgust with the widespread corruption of the Grant Administration. The vote was very close, and the result was bitterly contested to the point where a new rebellion seemed possible. Grant publicly threatened to impose martial law if "warlike concentrations of men" arose.

The swing factor in the contest were the electoral votes of the three Southern states still in Republican hands. To break the impasse, prominent Republican and Democrat leaders went into extended negotiation sessions, and in the end Hayes became president. The Southern Democrats played a controlling role in the negotiations, and the Republicans offered them a better deal.

The agreement was known as the Compromise of 1877. Hayes quickly withdrew Federal troops from the South, though it appears that he had planned to do so anyway, and that the real concessions to the Southern Democrats were economic. However, the withdrawal of troops allowed the Southern Democrats to "declare victory" to their own people, a useful face-saving gesture after having backed a Republican nominee for the presidency. With the troops gone, the last Southern republican state governments finally fell. Reconstruction was over.

The South had lost the war, but had managed to win the peace, preserving much of their prewar social order, if in a substantially altered fashion. It was the sole consolation of defeat and a demotion of the South in national affairs relative to prewar days. Southern influence would not revive for a century.

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[91.2] THE DEATHS OF LEE, GRANT, & DAVIS

* As Reconstruction sailed through its unsteady course to its unsatisfactory end, veterans of the conflict lived out the rest of their lives.

Robert E. Lee remained in Virginia after Appomattox, taking a position as president of Washington College, a small establishment in the Shenandoah Valley. His health was poor, with the ailments that had increasingly afflicted his well-being in the last years of the war continuing to grow worse. He finally collapsed completely in late September 1870, and died on 12 October at age 63. In his last hours, he called deliriously on his generals, then went still and gave a final order: "Strike the tent."

Along with his towering reputation, Lee left behind another prominent memorial. His estate at Arlington was in Union hands through the war, and in 1864 Quartermaster General decided to make use of it as a military cemetery. The first person to be interred there was a Confederate prisoner of war who had died in a local hospital; he was buried on 13 May 1864. Although Lee had no say in the establishment of Arlington National Cemetery, it's hard not to think that he would have found it a fitting gesture.

* Jefferson Davis lived out a full life as a walking, unrepentant memorial of the Confederacy, observing with a stiff dignity the passing of the great figures of the war from North and South. Davis had been a politician most of his grown life, and found the adjustment to business life both difficult and unsatisfying. He finally settled on writing his memoirs of the war, supported by a large inheritance from a wealthy and childless widow who had been one of his admirers. Davis was too proud to accept charity, but there was no way to refuse the gift under such terms.

The two-volume book, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT, was published in 1881. It traced the events to which Davis had been such a well-placed witness, unsurprisingly making the case that the South had a perfect right to secede from the Union and that the Federal war against the Confederacy was a crime. Legally, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Chase had judged against secession in 1869 under TEXAS VS. WHITE, but that was after the fact, and Davis rejected it as a fraudulent judgement of the victors anyway -- though the judgement still stands.

For whatever satisfaction the book might have given him, it didn't make him much money, since the book was too expensive for most Southerners and was of no interest to the North. However, it did nothing to diminish his prestige. He had written his memoirs partly to counter Joe Johnston's memoirs of the war, published in 1874, in which Davis figured as a prominent demon. After the publication of THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT, Johnston wondered to a reporter what had happened to all the gold and silver the Confederate government had taken with them when they fled Richmond, saying that Davis had never given a clear account of it. The public response was a wave of outrage that forced Johnston to backtrack.

Although Davis was obstinate in his continued faith in the rightness -- if not the realism -- of the Confederate cause, and in his condemnation of the North's campaign against it, he was remarkably charitable to his enemies. Grant lost all of his money after leaving the White House, being caught up in a swindle, and then was diagnosed with throat cancer. With not long to live, he began work on his memoirs, which he hoped would support his wife after he died. Grant had been one of the most determined enemies of the Confederacy and his presidency was a disgrace, but Jefferson Davis saw fit to be kindly: "General Grant is dying. Instead of seeking to disturb the quiet of his closing hours, I would, if it were in my power, contribute to the peace of his mind and the comfort of his body."

Grant's term in the White House had been a sad business, as sorry in its own way as the time he spent as a failure before the war, but in his last months his iron determination came back to the surface. As his son said, he wrote with one hand, held off death with the other, and finished his book only days before his death in July 1885 at age 63. The book was a great success, earning almost a half million dollars for his family, a real fortune at the time.

Jefferson Davis was charitable to others as well. Longstreet had been willing to criticize some of Robert E. Lee's military judgements; worse, had signed up with his old friend Grant and joined the Republicans. Many Southerners regarded him as a traitor and a scalawag. During the silver anniversary of Sumter in 1886, there was a huge reunion in Atlanta, with Davis as one of the star speakers. Longstreet showed up in full Confederate uniform, characteristically indifferent to anyone who might suggest he didn't have a right to it, and came up to the stage where Davis was seated.

The crowd was hushed, wondering what would happen, but the two men embraced. Longstreet's services to the Confederacy had been beyond dispute, and he had taken a bullet through the throat in the name of the cause. That he had contrary opinions was of lesser consequence; he was just being Longstreet, and, unlike a good list of other senior Confederate generals, he had never quarreled with Davis in the first place. In Davis's last public address, delivered in 1887, he encouraged others to be conciliatory:

BEGIN QUOTE:

The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes, and its aspirations. Before you lies the future, a future full of golden promise, a future of expanding national glory, before which all the world shall stand amazed. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation to be wished -- a reunited country.

END QUOTE

Jefferson Davis died in Louisiana on 6 December 1889, at the age of 81. He was buried in New Orleans, though reinterred in Richmond in 1893 at the direction of his wife. The last of the dominating figures of the rebellion -- Lincoln, Lee, Grant, Davis -- was gone. Davis might have been judged another Benedict Arnold, but even today he is remembered with a certain respect, and in fact like Lee he would be politically rehabilitated in the next century.

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[91.3] LAST ACTS

* The postwar careers of the major players in the conflict took a wide range of paths:

• Robert Anderson died in retirement in 1871 at age 66.

• Nathaniel Banks mustered out in 1865, returning to his career in politics. He served in Congress, in the Massachusetts state senate, and as a US marshal. He retired in 1890 and died in 1894 at age 78.

• Francis C. Barlow became the secretary of state for New York state in 1865. From 1868 to 1871 he was a US marshal, and then became state attorney general. As attorney general, he was one of the prime movers in the investigation of a group of corrupt officials known as the "Tweed ring". After that, he returned to his law practice.

  Barlow's first wife had died in 1864; he married Ellen Shaw, sister to the heroic Robert Gould Shaw, in 1867. Barlow was one of the founders of the American Bar Association. He died in New York City in 1896, aged 61.

• Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard went back to his hometown of New Orleans, working in the railroad and streetcar business as an engineer and official up to 1876. He then worked in the state government as a militia officer and as the director of the state lottery. His stint as lottery director was undistinguished; people were skimming the lottery, and though he wasn't involved in the dirty business, he failed to put a stop to it. He traded literary broadsides with Jefferson Davis over the conduct of the war. Beauregard died in New Orleans in 1897 at age 74.

• After fleeing to England, Judah P. Benjamin quickly established himself as a prosperous and successful lawyer, even writing books on English law and conducting cases in British courts wearing robes and wig. From the evidence, he found his new life fulfilling, leaving behind hardly a single written word on his role in the Confederacy. He moved to Paris late in life, dying and being laid to rest there in 1884 at age 72.

• Braxton Bragg went to Louisiana to serve as the superintendent of New Orleans' waterworks system, then worked as the chief engineer for the state of Alabama. Later he moved to Texas to work as a railroad inspector, dying abruptly at age 59 in Galveston in 1876 while he was walking down the street with a friend.

• John C. Breckinridge fled to Cuba after the war, moving on to Britain, Ireland, Canada, and back to Britain again. In 1869, after being granted amnesty, he came home to Lexington, Kentucky, to take up law practice again, and later took a position as an official with a railroad firm. He died in 1875 at age 54.

• Simon Bolivar Buckner went to New Orleans for a time, working as a newspaper editor, returning to Kentucky in 1868 to take up the same job there, until he was elected governor of Kentucky from 1887 to 1891. He died in Kentucky in 1914, age 90. His son, Simon Bolivar Buckner JR, became a US Army general and was killed in action on Okinawa in 1945.

• Don Carlos Buell went to Indianapolis after being relieved from command in 1862; failing to receive any other assignment, he finally resigned from the Army in 1864. He settled in Kentucky, working in management in a coal mining company, becoming president of an iron company, and finally acting as a government pension agent. He died in 1898 at age 80.

• James Bulloch was never offered amnesty, so he remained in Britain, working in the cotton trade and publishing his memoirs in 1883. He died in Liverpool in 1901 at age 77 and was buried there.

• After Ambrose Burnside resigned from the army, he went back into business, prospered, become governor of Rhode Island for three years, and would be into his second term as US senator from that state when he died in 1881 at age 57.

• Benjamin Franklin Butler was a member of the House of Representatives from 1867 to 1879, except for an intermission in 1875 through 1879. He was governor of the state of Massachusetts in 1883 and 1884, and ran unsuccessfully for US president on a third-party ticket in 1884. He returned to the practice of law and died while arguing a case in court in 1893, age 74.

• Edward Canby remained in the Army to the end of his days. He served in a number of roles, including command of occupation Military Districts, and went to fight the Modoc Indians in California in 1873. He was murdered by the Modoc chieftain, Captain Jack, during negotiations; Canby was 55 years old at his death. Captain Jack was captured and hanged for the murder.

• Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain went back to Bowdoin College in Maine. His prominence as a war hero led to his election as governor of Maine in 1866. He left the governor's office in 1870 and became president of Bowdoin College in 1871. His administration of the college had its high points, but it also featured an attempt to impose military drill as part of the curriculum -- resulting in protests by students and the board of directors that forced him to backtrack. The ugly wound that he took at Petersburg never healed very well, and Chamberlain was forced to retire from the presidency of the college in 1883, engaging in various business ventures from that time on. In 1893, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor; he finally died of his wound in 1914, at age 86.

• Salmon P. Chase remained the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court up to his death in 1873 at age 65. The modern Chase Manhattan Bank derives its name from him, though Judge Chase never had any affiliation with the bank.

• John "Johnny Shiloh" Clem fought out the rest of the war, being wounded twice. After the end of the conflict, he tried to sign up for West Point, but he lacked schooling and his request was denied. Clem had never been much one to take NO for an answer, so he wrote President Grant, who gave him a second lieutenant's commission in 1871. Clem retired from the US Army as a major general in 1916, dying in San Antonio, Texas, in 1937 at age 85.

• After the war, Darius Couch moved to Connecticut to serve with the state militia, retiring in 1884 and dying in 1897 at age 74.

• Sam Curtis mustered out of the Army in the spring of 1866 and died late in that same year, at age 61.

• George Armstrong Custer was one of the few Civil War generals to actually be better known for his postwar career as an "Indian fighter", finally famously meeting his end at age 36 at the Little Big Horn in 1876, in the last major victory of the tribes over the US Army. He was actually a lieutenant colonel at the time, his general's commission having been only by brevet; Canby was the only general to be killed in the Indian Wars.

• Charles Dana became a newspaper editor and owner after the war, acquiring a considerable fortune and becoming widely known. He died in 1897 at the age of 78.

• Jefferson C. Davis, the general who got away with murder, stayed in the Army, fighting the Modoc Indians in California and then serving as the first commander of the Department of Alaska. He died in Chicago in 1879 at age 51.

• Jubal Early fled the country to Canada by way of Texas, Mexico, and Cuba. He settled in Toronto and wrote his memoirs. After being pardoned in 1868, he returned to Virginia to practice law. He remained one of the most diehard Confederates, loudly proclaiming the dignity of the "Lost Cause" and firing broadsides at Longstreet. Early died in 1894 at the age of 77, after a fall down a flight of stairs.

• Dick Ewell retired to a farm in Tennessee after the war, dying there in 1872 at age 54.

• David Glascow Farragut became America's first full admiral in 1866, commanded a naval squadron in 1867 to show the flag around foreign ports, and finally died in New Hampshire in 1870 at age 69.

• Nathan Bedford Forrest went back to Memphis and worked as an official in a railroad company. His murky involvement with the Klan has already been mentioned; he died of diabetes in 1877, at age 56.

• William B. Franklin resigned from the army and returned to his home state of Connecticut, where he became the general manager of the Colt Firearms Company, then taking on a number of other roles until his death in 1903 at age 80.

• John C. Fremont lost much of his fortune after the war. He worked as a railroad executive for a time, and then was appointed governor of Arizona Territory from 1878 to 1881. He died in New York City in 1890 at age 77.

• John Gibbon reverted to the rank of colonel and became an "Indian fighter" out West, warring with the Nez Perce, and also suppressing anti-Chinese riots in Seattle in 1886. He mustered out as a brigadier general, dying in 1896 at age 68.

• John B. Gordon had a stellar postwar career, being elected senator from Georgia in 1873 and becoming, in 1879, the first ex-Confederate to preside over the Senate. He worked in the railroad industry from 1880 to 1886. He was then elected governor of Georgia, followed by another stint in the US Senate from 1891 to 1897. Gordon was the first commander of the United Confederate Veterans after the organization was established in 1890. He was a sought-after public speaker; when he died in Miami, Florida, in 1904 at age 71, his funeral was attended by tens of thousands.

• Benjamin Grierson remained in the US Army after the war, fighting in the Indian Wars out West. He commanded a unit of black cavalry or "buffalo soldiers" for a time, and was also inclined to treat the tribes fairly -- neither of which endeared him to all his fellow officers. He retired as a brigadier general in 1890 and died in 1911 at age 85.

• Henry Halleck became commander of the Army's Division of the Pacific, and was then reassigned to the Department of the South. He was serving in this position when he died in 1872 at age 56.

• Daniel Harvey Hill became a newspaper editor for a time after the war, then went on to become the president of colleges in Arkansas and Georgia. He died in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1889 at age 68.

• Wade Hampton became governor of South Carolina in 1876 on an anti-Reconstruction platform, in an election that was marked by considerable racial violence. He then served two terms as a US senator, and in the 1890s worked as a railroad commissioner. He died in 1902 at age 83.

• Winfield Scott Hancock ran for president in 1880, being defeated by James Garfield, and died in 1886 at age 61.

• William Hardee retired to an Alabama plantation after the war, writing a bit and dying at home in 1873 at age 56.

• Herman Haupt of course went back to the railroad business, working as an engineer and official, making and losing a fortune. He wrote his memoirs and a number of engineering texts; he died in 1905 at age 88, appropriately while riding on a train.

• Thomas Hindman went to Shelby's settlement in Carlota, Mexico, for a time, then went back to Arkansas. Although he was one of the few Confederate officers to be refused a pardon, he did try to reenter politics. This effort was cut short when he was murdered in his home in 1868 at age 40. The assassins were never caught, and to this day nobody is sure of the motive for his murder.

• John Bell Hood settled in Louisiana, first becoming a cotton broker and then running an insurance business. He married and fathered eleven children, but he, his wife, and eldest child died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1879, with the other ten children adopted by other families. He was 58 years old at his death.

• Though Joe Hooker never held another combat command following his resignation from Sherman's army during the battle for Atlanta, he retained his rank as major general, and finally mustered out into retirement in 1868. He died in 1879 at age 64.

• Oliver Otis Howard's work in the Freedman's Bureau has been mentioned; he was also instrumental in setting up in 1867 what would become Howard University in Washington DC, the most elite of the black universities. He was transferred to the Pacific Northwest in 1874 and fought Indian tribes, most prominently the Nez Perce. He was superintendent of West Point in 1881:1882, and retired from the Army in 1894 with the rank of major general. He died in 1909 at age 78.

• After leaving the presidency, Andrew Johnson tried to run for Congress, finally being elected senator from Tennessee in 1874. He only served a short time, since he died in mid-1875 at age 66. He is said to be the only president who served in the Senate following his presidency.

• Joe Johnston went to Savannah, Georgia, to run a railroad company, then went into the insurance business. He moved back to Richmond, Virginia, in 1877, running an express delivery company there, and also serving as Congressman from Virginia in the US House of Representatives from 1879 to 1881. Johnston was one of the pallbearers at William T. Sherman's funeral in 1891; in a famous story, out of respect for Sherman he refused to put on a hat though it was nasty and raining, caught pneumonia, and died soon after at age 84.

• John "Black Jack" Logan resumed his career in politics, serving as a Congressman from Illinois in the House of Representatives from 1867 to 1871, then as senator from 1871 to 1877 and 1879 to 1886, the year he died at age 60. He ran for vice-president on the failed James Blaine presidential bid in 1884.

• James Longstreet, as mentioned, got a reputation for being a scalawag due to his closeness to his old friend Grant and for his Republican affiliations. He was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire under the Hayes Administration, and served as railroad commissioner under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Longstreet died in 1904 at age 82, having outlasted many of his critics -- though he wasn't fully rehabilitated as a Confederate hero until decades later.

• Lord Richard Lyons gave up his post in Washington DC in 1865, having become much too weary of contending with the Americans, not to mention the city's notoriously sticky-hot summers. He later became Britain's ambassador to France, seen as the most important diplomatic post, retiring in 1887 and promptly dying of a stroke at age 70.

• John Magruder went to Mexico after the war, actually enlisting as an officer under Emperor Maximilian. This proving another lost cause, he went back to Houston, Texas, to die there in 1871 at age 63.

• After being held in prison by the Federals for ten months after the war, Stephen Mallory was released and went back to his home state of Florida to work at his law practice, spending a fair amount of effort fighting Republican reconstruction efforts. He died in 1873 at age 61, with many Southerners blaming him as one of the politicians who lost the war for the Confederacy, though later generations would see him as one of the biggest assets to the cause.

• After George McClellan's failed presidential bid in 1864, he ran for public office again, successfully as it turned out, being elected governor of New Jersey in 1878 for a three-year term. He died in New Jersey in 1885 at the age of 68.

• Although Irvin McDowell had been effectively shelved after Second Bull Run, he held on to his military career. He was sent to command US Army forces on the West Coast late in the war, and after the war, in 1872, he was given a permanent commission as a major general. He retired at that rank in 1882, and died in 1885 at age 66.

• John McClernand resigned his commission late in 1864, going back to Illinois to take up his former profession as a lawyer and serving as a district court judge for a time. He died in 1900 at age 88.

• George Gordon Meade stayed in the army until 1866, then resigned to become a parks commissioner in Philadelphia. He died there in 1872 at age 56.

• Montgomery Meigs remained in his post as Quartermaster General up to his retirement from the Army in 1882, his contributions in that role including directing the construction of new War Department buildings, and the National Museum. After retirement, he was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and one of the earliest members of the US National Academy of Sciences. He died in 1892 at age 75, and was buried with honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

• As mentioned, John Singleton Mosby returned to his law practice in Virginia after the war. He was so agreeable with the new order and friendly with Grant that other Southerners called Mosby a scalawag. In 1878, Mosby became US consul to Hong Kong, remaining there until 1885. On his return, he got a job with the railroads in San Francisco. He lost that job in 1901 and took a series of government positions until his retirement in 1910. He died in 1916 at age 80.

• John Pemberton retired to a farm in Virginia, but finally went back to his native Pennsylvania, where he died in 1881, aged 57.

• George Pickett worked as an insurance salesman in Richmond, up to his death at age 50 in 1875.

• John Pope remained in the US Army, finally retiring in 1886. He died in 1892 at age 70.

• David Dixon Porter became superintendent of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1866, it appears mostly because Gideon Welles wanted to sideline him. He remained in that position until 1870, when he was promoted to full admiral and regained much of his influence. He wrote a number of books in his retirement, including novels, and died in 1891 at age 77, to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

• Fitz-John Porter's vindication by a court of inquiry was mentioned. He worked in mining, construction, and commerce, as well as the New York City commissioner of public works, then police, and finally the fire department. He died in New Jersey at age 77 in 1901.

• Sterling Price joined Shelby's settlement at Carlota in Mexico for a time. When that exercise folded, he went back to Missouri, where he died in 1867 at age 58.

• Despite the fact that William Rosecrans' Army career had been steadily downhill after leaving Chattanooga, he stayed with the service until 1867. After resigning he had a lively variety of jobs, working in railroads and mining, performing a stint as ambassador to Mexico and as a Treasury official, finally retiring to a ranch near Los Angeles, where he died in 1898 at age 78.

• John Schofield stayed in the Army, with an intermission to take the job of Secretary of War from 1868 to 1869. He was superintendent of West Point from 1876 to 1881, and Commanding General of the US Army from 1888 to his retirement in 1895. He died at age 74 in 1906. Incidentally, the well-known Schofield revolver of the era had nothing to do with John Schofield, being the work of an Army captain named George Schofield.

• Winfield Scott ultimately took up residence at West Point, fortunately seeing out the end of the conflict with satisfaction and dying in 1866 at age 79.

• Raphael Semmes spent time as a college professor and newspaper editor before finally settling down to practice law in Mobile, where he died in 1877 at age 67.

• William H. Seward remained as Secretary of State in the Johnson Administration. in 1869, he spent the next few years traveling and writing, dying in 1872 at age 71.

• Jo Shelby, as mentioned, went to Carlota, returning to Missouri in 1867 to become a US marshal, retaining that position up to his death in 1897 at age 66.

• After Phil Sheridan was removed from his command of the Fifth Military District, in 1867 he was sent West to deal with the Indian tribes then on the warpath. He conducted a scorched-earth campaign to force them to submit, but he always denied that he had ever said that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." He became the Commanding General of the US Army in 1883, replacing Sherman, and remained there until shortly before his death in 1888 at age 57.

• William Tecumseh Sherman became a lieutenant general in 1866, and moved up to the position of commander of the Army after Grant went into the White House in 1869. Sherman, as was his way, waged hard war against the Indian tribes in the West, but he also insisted that the US government honor agreements made with the tribes. He retired in 1883 and died in New York City in 1889 at age 71.

• Dan Sickles stayed in the Army until 1869, then becoming the US ambassador to Spain up to 1873, working in various New York state positions until 1893, and then acting as a Congressman in the US House of Representatives from 1895. His postwar career was as touched by scandals and scandalous rumors as his prewar career. He died in New York City in 1914 at the age of 94, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

• Franz Sigel resigned his commission, working as a journalist in Baltimore for a time, and then going to New York City to work as a newspaper editor. He went on to hold a number of government positions in the city, finally dying there in 1902 at age 78.

• Edmund Kirby Smith was president of a telegraph company from 1866 to 1868; president of a military academy in Tennessee for a short time; chancellor of the University of Nashville from 1870 to 1875; and finally a professor of mathematics at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, up to his death in 1893 at age 68. He was the last full Confederate general to be laid to rest.

• William F. "Baldy" Smith resigned from the Army in 1867, working as president of a telegraph company until 1873. From 1875 to 1881 he was on the police commissioner's board in New York City, and then went on to do civil engineering work in Pennsylvania. He died in Philadelphia in 1903 at age 79 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

• Edwin M. Stanton went back to his law practice after being booted from the Johnson Administration. Incoming President Grant appointed him to the US Supreme Court, but he died in 1869 at age 55 a few days before being sworn in. Later on, conspiracy theories would be cooked up to implicate him in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but few ever took the notion very seriously.

• Although Alexander Stephens never seemed to be in very good health, he long survived the war, serving in the US House of Representatives from 1873 to 1882. He became governor of Georgia in 1882, dying in office in 1883 at age 71.

• Charles P. Stone worked as an engineer for a mining company for a time after the war, and then in 1870 served as a senior officer for the Egyptian army, as part of a dubious and somewhat comical exercise that caught up a number of other ex-Union and ex-Confederate officers. He came back home in 1883, to direct the construction of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. He died in 1887 at age 62, and was buried at West Point.

• Richard Taylor worked as a Democratic politician to restore the political fortunes of the Southern states. He died in New York City in 1879 at age 53, and was buried in New Orleans.

• George Henry "Pap" Thomas remained in the Army, serving in Kentucky and Tennessee, then transferring to San Francisco in 1869. He died there of a stroke in 1872 at age 53.

• Following the war, Clement Laird Vallandigham returned to the practice of law in Ohio. He died in 1871 in a black-humor accident. He was trying to show other lawyers how his defendant's victim might have accidentally shot himself, and his demonstration proved a bit too authentic: he shot himself as well, and died the next day, at age 50. Incidentally, thanks at least in part to the demonstration, the defendant was acquitted. It was a demonstration of dedication to a client almost certainly unmatched in the history of law.

• Lew Wallace worked through a number of government jobs -- governor of New Mexico Territory, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and so on -- but he would also turn his hand to writing, turning out the well-known historical novel BEN-HUR in 1880. It was said to be one of the most popular American novels of the 19th century; it has not been out of print since, and it has been made into movies four times. He died in Indiana in 1905 at age 76.

• Gideon Welles remained in his post as Navy Secretary up to 1869. He wrote a series of books in his retirement up to his death in 1878 at age 75.

• James H. Wilson remained in the US Army, serving as a cavalry commander in the West until he resigned his commission in 1870. He came back to the Army in 1898 to fight in the Spanish-American War and in the Boxer Rebellion. After returning to civilian life, he became an official of an insurance company. He died in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1925, at age 87.

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