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FEATURE ESSAY
Illinois and the Background
Robert Sterling . . . and when I was carried into the building and looked about I could not help comparing the surgeons to fiends. It was dark and the building lighted partially with candles; all around on the ground lay the wounded men; some of them were shrieking, some cursing and swearing and some praying; in the middle of the room was some 10 or 12 tables just large enough to lay a man on; these were used as dissecting tables and they were covered with blood; near and around the tables stood the surgeons with blood all over them and by the side of the tables was a heap of feet, legs and arms, . . . wrote Colonel T. D. Kingsley to his wife. This scene was but a microscopic view of what was happening to the United States during the Civil War. The military and political officials, North and South, (sometimes viewed as "fiends") were the surgeons who struggled to repair, but often augmented, the nation's wounds. The military theaters were the operating tables where the more than fifty major battles and hundreds of lesser engagements took place. Blood was everywhere. The nation was on that dissecting table. The war had severed it into two, three, and multiple anatomical parts, as surely as the doctors severed the limbs of men. So, too, with whole families. Fragile Mary Lincoln lost three half-brothers and a brother-in-law—all fighting for the Confederacy. Her widowed half-sister briefly stayed in the White House amid the howling editorials and the impatient, unsympathetic populace. No middle ground in this war. A horrendous loss of life: nearly 700,000 and the indispensable Lincoln died. Between 1850 and 1860 a phenomenal growth in population and wealth had taken place in Illinois and the nation, as the knotty secession predicament erupted. The population had doubled; real and personal property had increased 457 percent, corn and wheat production was up 160 percent, and serviceable railroad mileage had exploded from 110 miles to a fantastic 2,867. In 1860 Lincoln was elected President in a confusing four-party race. He carried the more populated North and its decisive electoral vote. At the Springfield depot he made his last Illinois speech before the train's departure for Washington, saying, "... I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return." More than two hundred miles to the north, in Galena, a thirty-nine-year-old leather-goods store clerk, U. S. Grant, wrote to his slave-owning father-in-law, "In all this I can but see the doom of slavery." It was a mushrooming state that was called upon by Governor Yates and President Lincoln to assist. Two weeks after Fort Sumter the General Assembly passed the necessary legislation to organize six regiments of volunteers. The almost hysterical people immediately oversubscribed and continued to do so for the duration of the war. The patriotic fervor was so intense that many—more than 6,000—formed companies in nearby Missouri, after the federal government put a freeze on the state's enlistments. No major state had responded with greater numbers in proportion to its population. By war's end more than 174 units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery had been organized. More than 256,000 had served. What initially motivated the men and women in 1861 was the preservation of the Union. '' You ask me if I have thought seriously before entering the army," wrote a young officer to his fiance. "Not very seriously, but I have thought seriously since entering it." In subsequent letters he averred that the cause demanded his service, and he would see it through. And he and the other Illinois soldiers did see it through—only 5 percent abandoned the commitment and deserted. That uncomplex cause—preserving the Union— was made complex in the fall of 1862 when Lincoln proclaimed that "all persons held as slaves . . . shall be then, thenceforward, forever free." The political program was suddenly embellished with a mission that would, ultimately, produce the Thirteenth Amendment. The war was the architect of an edifice pre-war politicians would not, or could not, chisel. No event in the history of Illinois has generated more intense examination than that four-year crisis. A scenario-writer of the period could not have created the tableaux needed to cover a molecule of the mass of events to transpire so quickly. Myriad subjects beg to be studied. The literature emanating out of that epic event attests to the everlasting fascination to learn more about the conflict. Whether writing about Lincoln or some aspect of the war, no shortage of evidence exists. The participants left diaries and letters and wrote memoirs for later-generation students. The state produced the mammoth Adjutant-General's report listing the names of the men who served and the final disposition of the soldiers. The Christ-like Lincoln is second only to Christ in this ongoing scrutiny by writers. No aspect of his life has escaped the infinitesimal dissection—personal, political, or presumed—by a horde of writers— amateur or scholar, contemporary or modern. Special examinations include the role of women as nurses (a few with concealed gender, were soldiers); on the home front; or with the Sanitary Commission and a study of the Twenty-ninth U.S. Infantry that was organized to utilize the anxious African-American population wanting to serve in the ranks. Particular attention has focused on the government-citizen relationship, including the anti-war resistance and the notable Copperhead Clement Vallandigham's omnipotence in the 1864 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Some of the P.O.W. survivors wrote explicit accounts of their incarceration, especially at Andersonville, Georgia, where more than nine hundred Illinois soldiers are buried. An infinite list of topics may be examined— weapons, salted pork and its inseparable comrade, diarrhea (the principal soldier killer), navies, the assassination of Lincoln, the press, and, on the lighter side, music. Lincoln's late-war response to a serenade was, "I have always thought Dixie one of the best tunes I have ever heard.'' Another one of the Civil War's most famous songs would be identified with another time in history by another generation of Americans:
When Johnny comes marching home. And so, in the end, just as the Civil War doctor hopefully witnessed, the patient overcame the trauma and recovered. The Union was made perpetual and the malignant cancer—"that harlot slavery" as one politician characterized it—was severed from the body, leaving it to reconstruct a more benign entity. The mission of present and future generations to avoid another infirmity is as inevitable as that faced by the Civil-War generation long ago.
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