Case II has a speech by Charles J. Biddle (son of Nicholas Biddle, APS 1813). He took up arms after Sumter, becoming the colonel of a regiment, but resigned to run for a vacant House seat. A Democrat with racist views, in a House speech, Biddle said that arming African-Americans would let loose a rapacious mob. “Of the slave you cannot make a soldier; you may make an assassin.”

Charles J. Stillé (APS 1867), a lawyer by training, wrote one of the best selling pamphlet of the war years, “How a Free People Conduct a Long War.” In it Stillé looks to Britain’s Napoleonic wars for historical example. The important thing is to embrace all who wish for success in the field: “In essentials Unity; in non-essentials Liberty; in all things Charity: this should be our motto. The only possible hope for the South is in our own divisions. Let us remember that with success all things are possible; without it, all hopes and theories vanish in thin air.”

Thomas Leiper Kane (APS 1856), son of John Kintzing Kane was a social reformer and an abolitionist. He worked for a time in the same Federal Court as his father, but passage of the Fugitive Slave Act prompted his resignation. His father jailed him for contempt, but the US Supreme Court freed him. He recruited a regiment from western Pennsylvania who became known as Kane’s Rifles or the Bucktails. Twice severely wounded, taken prisoner and exchanged, he was made a brigadier general. He left his sickbed to be with his brigade at Gettysburg. Kane’s 1862 letter to his mother in Case II says that the “generous” and “gallant” southerners are the aristocrats, not the “poor whites” who make up 7/8 of the population and are now courted for their votes. But they are “dirty, lazy, malicious, physically weakly and morally unclean.” “Such beasts will never make peace with us. If we should grant them peace and free institutions, they would vote war again. We have no friends but their negroes to vote them down. We might as well give up at once if we are not to free the negroes.”

The War most directly affected the APS as an organization when for the only time in its history it voted to expel two members. Matthew F. Maury and W. F. Lynch “committed public and notorious acts of Treason against the United States, [thus] it is hereby ordered that they be expelled from this Society.” 23 of 27 present voted for the resolution. Maury (APS 1852), a navy man internationally known as a pioneering oceanographer, spent much of his time in Europe acquiring supplies and advocating the Confederate cause. William Lynch (APS 1853), another navy man, commanded among other units the naval forces at Vicksburg.One early Union success is chronicled in the diary of Albert Dabadie Bache. Albert Bache served as clerk on board the USS Hartford, the flagship of David G. Farragut when he captured New Orleans in April 1862. Bache writes vividly of the assault: “The cries of the men at the guns running to and fro of powder boys & those passing ammunition together with the carrying down of the wounded and the crashing & whistling of the balls as they tore through the hull all conspired to make the most horrible description reminding me of the lake in Hell in Mythology.” As he more famously did at Mobile Bay, Farragut “the coolest and bravest man I ever saw” had “stood up in the rigging” during the battle. On November 7, 1861 Samuel F. Du Pont (APS 1862) captured Port Royal Sound, South Carolina. Du Pont sent a copy of Mill’s Atlas of South Carolina that was captured from the commanding general’s headquarters in Beaufort.

Modernization of the hide-bound medical service was desperately needed, and resources found and allocated. William A. Hammond (APS 1859) wrote a letter to John L. LeConte noting that “the Medical Bill” to reorganize the medical department “has passed the House and will pass the Senate immediately.” Hammond has written S. Weir Mitchell (APS 1862) and Edward Hartshorne (APS 1858) to sign the “memorial,” a document recommending Hammond for Surgeon General. “The old fellows will make every effort to defeat my nomination but Stanton says I will have it”; Hammond got the job. Hammond, with the support of the Sanitary Commission, had in July appointed Dorothea Dix as Superintendent of Army Nurses with sole responsibility for recruiting and assigning nurses to military hospitals. Dix issued a circular which listed qualifications: 35 to 50 years old, serious, neat, plainly dressed, with recommendations from two people, with pay 40 cents per day.

As important as Philadelphia was to the Union cause, many there thought was no adequate organization to promote it. A short narrative in Case II by Judge John I. C. Hare (APS 1842) the need to make support for the War “felt and heard” in the city and says that people who believe in continuing the War were “really in the majority.” A meeting was held at the house of John F. Meigs (APS 1852) and thus the Union League club was born, the only requirement for admission being “a resolve to support the war at whatever cost.”

Just about every item useful to the war effort was provided by the state: guns, men, money, food, coal, iron, clothing, ships. Philadelphia was also a hub of military activity: men moving through the city, the wounded returning to the hospitals, Confederate prisoners going to their prisons, Pennsylvania supplied more black troops—over 8,600—than any other state, despite persistent racism by many whites.

Philadelphia was directly threatened by Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863. Rumors were everywhere. Ann Haines’ letter to Margaret Wistar Haines (11) says she was told “the Rebbles or rather the Copper Heads [anti-War Democrats] have placed upon the Bullatine Boards . . . that there are no Rebbles near Harrisburg—which we know is not the case.” In another letter written onJuly 10 also to Margaret, Ann notes she feared “the nefarious devices proposed by our enemies if they should have the opportunity to execute them—even fireing of mines . . . and totally destroying our fair city” but “God in his mercy has gotten us the victory.” Emergency troops were called up from the city, but few saw fighting. An exception was the Independent Battery Militia Light Artillery. As a member of the unit, Horace Binney Hare, son of John I. C. Hare (APS 1842) helped to halt the Confederate advance toward Harrisburg in the most northerly battle of the Civil War. His letter in Case III discusses the jealousies among units and their lack of supplies. Hare gripes that one unit is “flourishing around new revolvers presented to them by the Union League while our cannoneers are entirely without them.”

Old antagonisms however did not die. The reforms William Hammond (APS 1859) instituted, which stressed efficiency and professionalism, had transformed the Medical Department, but Hammond was arrogant, abrasive, autocratic, self-promoting, and widely disliked. A circular in 1863 that banned the use of calomel (a compound of mercury) and tartar emetic, used extensively by physicians of the time, angered many in the army. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton decided to investigate the Medical Department. Hammond demanded a court-martial to clear himself. After months of investigation, a committee of Stanton’s choosing found Hammond guilty of minor purchasing irregularities and conduct unbecoming an officer, and he was dishonorably discharged. Physician Joseph Brown wrote John L. LeConte that Hammond “plays the lyre with a thousand strings. His head is a falsehood and his legs a pair of lies.” “His heart is hollow and he has no bowels. He is a public calamity & a cuss, and so let him lie.”

Dorothea Dix also ran into trouble. Her untiring insistence on rigid standards for nurses and her authority to assign them angered army surgeons, and she was gradually deprived of her authority. Dix continued to work, however, gradually turning her attention away from the wounded and toward prisoners of war. Even though Dix treated wounded Confederates and Yankees alike, her attitude toward Rebel treatment of prisoners hardened her toward the South even as she underplayed prison conditions in the North. In one letter to Mrs. Clark Hare in Case III. Dix says she has been engaged in “suitcase occupations,” travelling around the theater of war, including seeing prisoners at Belle Plaine. She “just escaped being made prisoner by Guerillas—to think of having no arms—I would surely surely have used them.” In another she notes that the soldiers are “very enthusiastic about Grant” and that she just missed the train on which General William Franklin was captured.

Hatred of the enemy is a characteristic of war. The Anti-Jefferson Davis fold out leaves no ambiguity about what should happen to Davis. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Civil War was that in its midst, a free election was held for President. In his speech accepting the party nomination, George McClellan states he is for continuing the War so the Union may be restored and the sacrifice justified. Reconciliation should be sought. He does not mention slavery. Democratic propaganda did discuss slavery, saying that Lincoln “makes abolition the yoke-fellow of Union, and does urge the continuance of fighting for other purposes that the only one which is lawful or attainable [restoration of Union].