A sitting U. S. president was once shot at during the Civil War, and the incident was kept secret from his wife. In August 1863, President Abraham Lincoln was riding alone to the Soldiers’ Home in Washington when a gunshot rang out.
His horse bolted, and when soldiers retrieved Lincoln’s hat, they found a bullet hole through the brim. Lincoln ordered the guards not to tell Mary Todd Lincoln, who was already struggling with the stresses of the war. The Civil War produced many such surprising developments, from the diversity of the Union Army to the unexpected fate of Robert E. Lee’s Virginia estate.
One-third of Union soldiers were immigrants, with Germans making up about 10 percent of the army and the Irish about 7. 5 percent. Roughly one quarter of Union regiments were largely composed of foreign-born soldiers. African American soldiers, who began enlisting in 1863, served in the United States Colored Troops and became crucial to the Union’s effort despite facing significant racial prejudice.
History often casts General Ulysses S. Grant as a ruthless commander, but it was actually Robert E. Lee who suffered proportionally greater losses throughout the war. Mary Todd Lincoln called Grant a “butcher” after the Overland Campaign of 1864, when Union forces suffered twice the casualties of Lee’s Confederate army.
However, when measured against the size of their forces, Lee’s aggressive tactics and preference for offensive combat led to severe attrition. Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg exemplified this costly approach, and Lee’s relentless attacks gradually eroded the Army of Northern Virginia. Harriet Tubman, already famous for her work on the Underground Railroad, became the first woman to lead a military raid during the Civil War. In June 1863, she joined Colonel James Montgomery in leading 300 Black Union soldiers through South Carolina’s plantations.
The operation liberated more than 720 enslaved men, women, and children. Tubman said the scene reminded her of the biblical story of the Israelites fleeing Egypt. In a single operation, she freed ten times the number of people she had helped escape during a decade of Underground Railroad work. Before William Tecumseh Sherman became one of the Union’s greatest generals, he nearly fell apart.
In October 1861, while in charge of defending Kentucky, Sherman requested 60,000 men for defense and an additional 200,000 for an offensive. Secretary of War Simon Cameron dismissed the request as extreme and removed Sherman from command. Devastated, Sherman wrote to his brother that he might have considered suicide if not for his children. A few months later, Ulysses Grant reassigned Sherman to Paducah, Kentucky, seeing past his earlier struggles.
Sherman’s loyalty to Grant became legendary. When a civilian criticized Grant, Sherman replied, “General Grant is a great general. He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk. And now, sir, we stand by each other always.
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Abraham Lincoln, before and during the Civil War, supported the idea of colonization, which meant sending freed Black people to other countries. Influential figures like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Clay had backed the concept. In August 1862, Lincoln brought five Black ministers to the White House and proposed relocating freed Black people to Central America. He even called for a constitutional amendment to fund the effort.
The plan drew strong opposition from leading abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, who saw it as morally unacceptable. After Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he stopped advocating for colonization and the plan was quietly abandoned. Civil War generals faced extraordinary risks because they led directly from the front, a practice rarely seen in modern warfare. Generals were 50 percent more likely to be killed in action than privates.
The Battle of Antietam in 1862 saw three generals killed and six wounded. At the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, Confederate General James Longstreet was severely wounded when a bullet struck his shoulder and throat. He survived, returned to command, and lived until 1904, outliving many of his peers. Black Union soldiers protested unequal pay by refusing to accept their salaries for 18 months.
When they began enlisting in 1863, they were paid $10 per month compared to at least $13 for white soldiers. Black soldiers were also uniquely charged a $3 monthly clothing fee, reducing their effective pay to $7. Entire Black regiments refused the lower wages in solidarity. Their protest, combined with battlefield bravery in engagements like the Battle of Fort Wagner, led Congress to pass a law in September 1864 granting equal pay retroactively to the date of enlistment.
Robert E. Lee’s Virginia estate, Arlington, was confiscated by the U. S. government in 1863 over an unpaid tax bill of $92.
07. President Lincoln authorized a military cemetery on the grounds, including a burial vault in what had been the estate’s rose garden. The idea, according to Lee’s biographer, was that if Lee ever returned, he would be confronted by the sight of graves. After the war, Lee’s eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, sued to reclaim the property.
The U. S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor in 1882, but by then Arlington was a cemetery. George Lee sold the estate back to the government for $150,000.
Arlington National Cemetery eventually became the final resting place for more than 250,000 soldiers. The Civil War remains the deadliest conflict in American history, claiming approximately 625,000 soldier lives, more than the combined American casualties of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The death toll represented about 2 percent of the U. S.
population at the time. Disease killed more soldiers than enemy fire. Close quarters, poor sanitation, and contaminated water spread illnesses like measles, chickenpox, and malaria through the camps. Malaria alone affected over a million Union soldiers.
The invisible enemy of disease took more lives than any weapon on the battlefield.
