Grant invited the Lincolns to Union headquarters at City Point, Virginia, just ten miles northeast of Petersburg.

Captain Robert Lincoln—until recently a student at Harvard, and now, upon his father’s special request, a member of Grant’s staff—escorted General and Mrs. Grant to greet the Lincolns when the River Queen docked at City Point on the evening of March 24. While the women chatted, Grant reassured his president that the war was indeed winding down.

The next morning, however, brought surprising news. Nearly half of Lee’s army, under General John Gordon, had broken away from the Petersburg lines and attacked Fort Stedman, just eight miles away.

Lincoln remarked “upon the sad and unhappy condition” of long lines of Confederate prisoners, most of whom appeared undernourished and resigned to defeat. Later he said that “he had seen enough of the horrors of war, and that he hoped this would be the beginning of the end, and that there would be no more bloodshed or ruin of homes.” [More...]

June 1864: the Civil War is now into its fourth year of bloody conflict with no end in sight.

The armies of the North are stalled in fetid trenches outside of Richmond and Atlanta, and the reelection of Abraham Lincoln to a second term seems doomed to defeat—a defeat that will set off the call for an end to the conflict, dismembering the Union and continuing slavery.

Only one group of volunteers for the Union cause is still eager for battle. Nearly two hundred thousand men of color have swarmed the recruiting stations and are being mobilized into regiments known as the USCTs, the United States Colored Troops.

General Ambrose Burnside, a hard luck commander out of favor with his superiors, is one of the few generals eager to bring a division of these new troops into his ranks. He has an ingenious plan to break Fort Pegram, the closest point on the Confederate line, defending Petersburg—the last defense of Richmond—by tunneling forward from the Union position beneath the fort to explode its defenses.

Burnside needs the USCTs for one desperate rush that just might bring victory.

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December 22, 1864, two days after Savannah fell, General Sherman sent a telegram to President Lincoln (see copy of original):

I beg to present to you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition. Also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.

Viewed through the lens of 9/11, Harpers Ferry seems an al-Qaeda prequel: a long-bearded fundamentalist, consumed by hatred of the U.S. government, launches nineteen men in a suicidal strike on a symbol of American power. A shocked nation plunges into war. We are still grappling with the consequences.

But John Brown wasn’t a charismatic foreigner crusading from half a world away. He descended from Puritans and Revolutionary soldiers and believed he was fulfilling their struggle for freedom.

Nor was he an alienated loner in the mold of recent homegrown terrorists such as Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh. Brown plotted while raising an enormous family; he also drew support from leading thinkers and activists of his day, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Henry David Thoreau.

Those who followed Brown into battle represented a cross section of mid-nineteenth-century America. These foot soldiers often bristled at his leadership and rejected his orthodox Calvinism. Most who went with him to Harpers Ferry regarded themselves as nonbelieving “infidels.”

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Whereas there now exist in the United States an insurrection and rebellion against the authority thereof, and it is, under the Constitution of the United States, the duty of the government to suppress insurrection and rebellion, to guarantee to each State a republican form of government, and to preserve the public tranquility; and whereas, for these high purposes, a military force is indispensable, to raise and support which all persons ought willingly to contribute; and whereas no service can be more praiseworthy and honorable than that which is rendered for the maintenance of the Constitution and Union, and the consequent preservation of free government: Therefore—