Civil War events of note on this date.

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Provisional Confederate Congress convenes

The Confederate State of America is open for business when the Provisional Congress convenes in Montgomery, Alabama.

The official record read: "Be it remembered that on the fourth day of February, in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one, and in the Capitol of the State of Alabama, in the city of Montgomery, at the hour of noon, there assembled certain deputies and delegates from the several independent South State of North America..."

The first order of business was drafting a constitution. They used the U.S. Constitution as a model, and most of it was taken verbatim. It took just four days to hammer out a tentative document to govern the new nation. The president was limited to one six-year term. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, the word "slave" was used and the institution protected in all states and any territories to be added later. Importation of slaves was prohibited, as this would alienate European nations and would detract from the profitable "internal slave trade" in the South.

Other components of the constitution were designed to enhance the power of the states--governmental money for internal improvements was banned and the president was given a line-item veto on appropriations bills.


The Congress then turned its attention to selecting a president. The delegates settled on Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate who was the U.S. Secretary of War in the 1850s and a senator from Mississippi.

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Battle of Dabney's Mill (Hatcher's Run)

Union and Confederate forces around Petersburg, Virginia, begin a three-day battle that produces 3,000 casualties but ends with no significant advantage for either side.

Dabney's Mill was another attempt by Union General Ulysses S. Grant to break the siege of Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia. In 1864, Grant and Confederate General Robert E. Lee pounded each other as they wheeled south around the cities. After a month of heavy battling that produced the highest casualty rates of the war, Grant and Lee settled into trenches around Petersburg. These lines eventually stretched 25 miles to Richmond, and the stalemate continued for 10 months. Periodically, Grant mounted offensives either to break through Lee's lines or envelope the ends. In June, August, and October, these moves failed to extricate the Confederates from their trenches.

Now, Grant sent cavalry under General David Gregg to capture a road that carried supplies from Hicksford, Virginia, into Petersburg. On February 5, Gregg moved and captured a few wagons along his objective, the Boydton Plank Road. He found little else, so he pulled back toward the rest of the Union army. Yankee infantry under General Gouverneur K. Warren also moved forward and probed the area at the end of the Confederate's Petersburg line. The Rebels responded by moving troops into the area. Skirmishes erupted that evening and the fighting continued for two more days as each side maneuvered for an advantage. The fighting surged back and forth around Dabney's Mill, but the Yankees were never able to penetrate the Confederate lines. The Union suffered 2,000 men killed, wounded, or captured, while the Confederates lost about 1,000. The battle did extend the Petersburg line a few miles to further stretch Lee's thin lines, but the stalemate continued for six more weeks before Grant's forces finally sent Lee racing west with the remnants of his army. The chase ended in April when Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House.

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General Ulysses S. Grant captures Fort Henry

General Ulysses S. Grant provides the first major Union victory of the war when he captures Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Ten days later, he captured Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, which gave the Yankees control of northern Tennessee and paved the way for the occupation of Nashville.

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Confederates order reinforcements to Fort Donelson

One day after the fall of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, commander of Rebel forces in the west, orders 15,000 reinforcements to Fort Donelson. This fort lay on the Cumberland River just a few miles from Fort Henry. Johnston's decision turned out to be a mistake, as many of the troops were captured when the Fort Donelson fell to the Yankees on February 16.

During the fall and winter of 1861 to 1862, the Union army and navy penetrated through Kentucky and into Tennessee. Led by General Ulysses S. Grant, the Yankees were gaining crucial advantages by controlling parts of the major rivers in the upper South. Johnston sought to stop the bleeding of lost Confederate territory by strengthening the garrison inside Fort Donelson. In retrospect, his mistake was in not providing enough support to Donelson. Johnston wanted to buy time so he could gather his forces from eastern Kentucky and Tennessee to Nashville, which lay south and east of Fort Donelson. If Johnston had concentrated his force at Donelson, he would have had a significant advantage over Grant. Instead, Grant surrounded the fort and sent a squadron to attack from the river. On February 16, the Yankees cut off the fort from the south and forced the surrender of 15,000 Confederates.

After the fall of Fort Donelson, Johnston gathered his remaining forces to northern Mississippi. On April 6 at Shiloh, the western armies clashed in one of the most destructive battles of the war. Johnston was killed in the Confederate defeat.

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General William T. Sherman Born



"You people of the South don't kow what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is folly, madness, a crime against civilization. You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing. You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it." - Ohio born William T. Sherman, superintendent of the Louisiana State Military Academy in 1860 after Southern states began efforts toward secession, warning one of his colleagues, a Virginian.


Sherman's memoirs -

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4361

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George Custer married

Union General George Armstrong Custer marries Elizabeth Bacon in Monroe, Michigan, while the young cavalry officer is on leave. "Libbie," as she was known to her family, was a tireless defender of her husband's reputation after his death at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, and her work helped establish him as an American hero.

The two met in November 1862 at a party in Monroe. They courted while George was on winter furlough. After he retuned to service in 1863, Custer became, at 23 years old, the youngest general in the Union army. George and Libbie continued their correspondence, and when he returned to Monroe that winter, their relationship intensified. George recognized that Libbie's good judgment balanced the young general's brash and impulsive behavior. They were engaged by Christmas.

The bride wore a white satin dress for the nuptials, which were held in Monroe's packed First Presbyterian Church. They honeymooned in New York, where they visited West Point, Custer's alma mater. After spending time in New York City, they settled in Washington and the attractive couple soon became darlings of the social scene. While her husband was in the field, Libbie worked to advance his career by hobnobbing with prominent Republican politicians. Her influence with some prominent members of Congress was helpful, and possible crucial, for Custer's promotion to major general on April 15, 1865.

After the war, Custer became a lieutenant colonel in the downsized postwar frontier army. On June 25, 1876, he and the 210 men under his command were wiped out by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne Indians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana. Libbie spent the remainder of her life building Custer's reputation and defending his actions during his last battle. Not until after her death in 1933 did the first iconoclastic biography of her husband appear. The enduring legend of George Custer was due in large part to the tireless efforts of his widow.

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Davis learns he is president

Jefferson Davis receives word that he has been selected president of the new Confederate States of America.

Davis was at his plantation, Brierfield, pruning rose bushes with his wife Varina when a messenger arrived from nearby Vicksburg. It was not a job he wanted, but he accepted it out of a sense of duty to his new country. Varina later wrote that she saw her husband's face grow pale and she recalled, "Reading that telegram he looked so grieved that I feared some evil had befallen our family. After a few minutes he told me like a man might speak of a sentence of death."

Davis said of the job: "I have no confidence in my ability to meet its requirement. I think I could perform the function of a general." He could see the difficulties involved in launching the new nation. "Upon my weary heart was showered smiles, plaudits, and flowers, but beyond them I saw troubles innumerable. We are without machinery, without means, and threatened by powerful opposition but I do not despond and will not shrink from the task before me."

Davis was prescient in his concerns. He drew sharp criticism during the war--Alexander Stephens, the vice president, said Davis was "weak and vacillating, timid, petulant, peevish, obstinate," and Stephens declared that he held "no more feeling of resentment toward him" than he did toward his "poor old blind and deaf dog."

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Lincoln leaves Springfield

President-elect Abraham Lincoln leaves home in Springfield, Illinois, as he embarks on his journey to Washington.

On a cold, rainy morning, Lincoln boarded a two-car private train loaded with his family's belongings, which he himself had packed and bound. Mary Lincoln was in St. Louis on a shopping trip, and she joined him later in Indiana. It was a somber occasion. Lincoln was leaving his home and heading into the maw of national crisis. Since he had been elected, seven states of the lower South had seceded from the Union. Lincoln knew that his actions upon entering office would likely lead to civil war. He spoke to the crowd before departing: "Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young man to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being...I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail...To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."

A bystander reported that the president-elect's "breast heaved with emotion and he could scarcely command his feelings." Indeed, Lincoln's words were prophetic--a funeral train carried him back to Springfield just over four years later.

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Abraham Lincoln is born

On this day in 1809, Abraham Lincoln is born in Hodgenville, Kentucky.


Lincoln, one of America’s most admired presidents, grew up a member of a poor family in Kentucky and Indiana. He attended school for only one year, but thereafter read on his own in a continual effort to improve his mind. As an adult, he lived in Illinois and performed a variety of jobs including stints as a postmaster, surveyor and shopkeeper, before entering politics. He served in the Illinois legislature from 1834 to 1836, and then became an attorney. In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd; together, the pair raised four sons.

Lincoln returned to politics during the 1850s, a time when the nation’s long-standing division over slavery was flaring up, particularly in new territories being added to the Union. As leader of the new Republican Party, Lincoln was considered politically moderate, even on the issue of slavery. He advocated the restriction of slavery to the states in which it already existed and described the practice in a letter as a “minor issue” as late as 1854. In an 1858 senatorial race, as secessionist sentiment brewed among the southern states, he warned, “a house divided against itself cannot stand”. He did not win the Senate seat but earned national recognition as a strong political force. Lincoln’s inspiring oratory soothed a populace anxious about southern states’ secessionist threats and boosted his popularity.

As a presidential candidate in the election of 1860, Lincoln tried to reassure slaveholding interests that although he favored abolition, he had no intention of ending the practice in states where it already existed and prioritized saving the Union over freeing slaves. When he won the presidency by approximately 400,000 popular votes and carried the Electoral College, he was in effect handed a ticking time bomb. His concessions to slaveholders failed to prevent South Carolina from leading other states in an exodus from the Union that began shortly after his election. By February 1, 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas had also seceded. Soon after, the Civil War began. As the war progressed, Lincoln moved closer to committing himself and the nation to the abolitionist movement and, in 1863, finally signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The document freed slaves in the Confederate states, but did not address the legality of slavery in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska or Arkansas.

Lincoln was the tallest president at 6’ 4.” As a young man, he impressed others with his sheer physical strength--he was a legendary wrestler in Illinois--and entertained friends and strangers alike with his dry, folksy wit, which was still in evidence years later. Exasperated by one Civil War military defeat after another, Lincoln wrote to a lethargic general “if you are not using the army I should like to borrow it for awhile.” An animal lover, Lincoln once declared, "I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it." Fittingly, a variety of pets took up residence at the Lincoln White House, including a pet turkey named Jack and a goat called Nanko. Lincoln’s son Tad frequently hitched Nanko to a small wagon and drove around the White House grounds.

Lincoln’s sense of humor may have helped him to hide recurring bouts of depression. He admitted to friends and colleagues that he suffered from “intense melancholia” and hypochondria most of his adult life. Perhaps in order to cope with it, Lincoln engaged in self-effacing humor, even chiding himself about his famously homely looks. When an opponent in an 1858 Senate race debate called him “two-faced,” he replied, “If I had another face do you think I would wear this one?”
Lincoln is remembered as “The Great Emancipator.” Although he waffled on the subject of slavery in the early years of his presidency, his greatest legacy was his work to preserve the Union and his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. To Confederate sympathizers, however, Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation reinforced his image as a hated despot and ultimately led John Wilkes Booth to assassinate him on April 14, 1865. His favorite horse, Old Bob, pulled his funeral hearse.

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Sherman enters *******n, (M.e.r.i.d.i.a.n) Mississippi

Union General William T. Sherman enters *******n, Mississippi, during a winter campaign that served as a precursor to Sherman's "March to the Sea." This often-overlooked campaign was the first attempt by the Union at total warfare, a strike aimed not just at military objectives but also at the will of the southern people.

Sherman launched the campaign from Vicksburg, Mississippi, with the goal of destroying the rail center at *******n and clearing central Mississippi of Confederate resistance. Sherman believed this would free additional Federal troops that he hoped to use on his planned campaign against Atlanta, Georgia, in the following months.
Sherman led 25,000 troops east from Vicksburg and ordered another 7,000 under General William Sooy Smith to march southeast from Memphis, Tennessee. They planned to meet at *******n in eastern Mississippi. The Confederates had few troops with which to stop Sherman. General Leonidas Polk had less than 10,000 men to defend the state. Polk retreated from the capital at Jackson as Sherman approached, and some scattered cavalry units could not impede the Yankees' progress. Polk tried to block the roads to *******n so the Confederates could move as many supplies as possible from the city's warehouses, but Sherman pushed into the city on February 14 in the middle of a torrential rain.

After capturing *******n, Sherman began to destroy the railroad and storage facilities while he waited for the arrival of Smith. Sherman later wrote: "For five days, 10,000 men worked hard and with a will in that work of destruction...*******n, with its depots, storehouses, arsenals, hospitals, offices, hotels, and cantonments no longer exists." Sherman waited until February 20 for Smith to arrive, but Smith never reached *******n. On February 21, Confederate troops under General Nathan Bedford Forrest waylaid Smith at West Point, Mississippi, and dealt the Federals a resounding defeat. Smith returned to Memphis, and Sherman turned back towards Vicksburg.

Ultimately, Sherman failed to clear Mississippi of Rebels, and the Confederates repaired the rail lines within a month. Sherman did learn how to live off the land, however, and took notes on how to strike a blow against the civilian population of the South. He used that knowledge with devastating results in Georgia later that year.