Tarnished Victory

Most multivolume histories of the Civil War tend to focus on the most attractive elements of the story: the abundant heroism, the ultimate restoration of the Union and the eradication of slavery. According to historian William Marvel, those works frequently overlook that much of the heroism was wasted by military ineptitude and political perfidy. Additionally, they ignore the fact that the restored Union was no longer a voluntary community and that the war did not fully eradicate human bondage.

The intensity of the exhilaration, dejection and uncertainty felt by those who witnessed the worst of all American conflicts is often diminished by stage-by-stage analyses of the war that trace the path of Union dominance. A chronological perspective affords a better view of the degree of pessimism and optimism that infected the Northern population, as well as a better understanding of why it existed, contends Marvel. In Tarnished Victory, he presents an accurate, more realistic account of the last year of the war.

The conclusion to the author’s sweeping four-part series examining the war, this volume opens with the Virginia and Atlanta campaigns in May 1864 and closes with the final surrender of Confederate forces in June 1865. Marvel, whom Stephen Sears has called "the Civil War’s master historical detective," succeeds in capturing the anxiety, anger, fear and uncertainty that swept through a broken nation. Despite significant Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga in 1863, Confederate confidence still leaned heavily on the expectation of defeating Union armies in the field. The stubborn survival of the Confederacy seriously undermined support for Lincoln’s war.

In the course of the last year, the conflict grew even more deadly. The home front was stripped to fill the armies and the economy was crippled by both debt and inflation. “North and South, the campaign to unseat Abraham Lincoln was viewed with equal exaggeration as an expression of the Northern people’s readiness to give up the fight,” explains Marvel. “On that assumption, ardent Confederates hoped he would be cast from office, and with a war for the national destiny in the balance, President Lincoln came much closer to that fate than his ten-point margin of the popular vote seemed to suggest.”

In the end, Lincoln’s early critics were proven correct: victory did require massive bloodshed and complete conquest of the South. It also required decades of occupation to cement the achievements of 1865. As Marvel shows, the ultimate failure of Lincoln’s political heirs to carry through with that occupation squandered the most commendable of those achievements, making it a tarnished victory.