A map in Case IV shows the battlefield at Spotsylvania Court House. No other battle illustrates Grant’s tenacity. Fighting lasted from May 8-21. On the 12th Union forces attacked the bulge in the Confederate line called the Mule Shoe Salient. The attack lasted almost 24 hours. Rain fell, the ground became slippery with water and blood. Fighting lasted through the night, men firing and stabbing over and through the log breastworks and grappling hand to hand, the fighting so intense that at a place called Bloody Angle, a 22 inch oak tree was cut down by bullets. 17,000 men from both sides were killed, wounded or captured on this one day. Grant did not succeed in destroying Lee’s army at Spotsylvania, but when it was clear further attacks would be useless, Grant continued his attempt to get around Lee’s right flank. Death awaited many more thousands over the next 11 months, but Grant did not loosen his deadly grasp until the exhausted remnants of Lee’s army surrendered at Appomattox.

Five days after Appomattox, on the 14th of April, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated. Not all in the North mourned. Jennie Sellers’ diary describes what she learned from the papers. She read that Booth’s body had been dumped in a river (it had actually been taken to Washington.) This treatment angered Sellers, who hated Lincoln. “Such was the fate of one, who whatever he done was not . . . deserving such a fate it will have to be decided by wiser heads than mine which was the greatest crimes Abraham Lincoln the wholesale butcherer or J. Wilkes Booth who shot the greatest tyrant the world has ever known. Ann Haines in another letter to her cousin Margaret V. W. Haines says she is glad to see Jefferson Davis captured, “As to Jeff Davis, I am revenged, but Haines’ strong Quaker faith allows her to see a way to Christian redemption, and she writes, “May he be converted and know a knew heart, then I should rejoice.”

Albert Barnes (APS 1855), pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, was one of the most important Presbyterian clergymen of the middle 19th century. In an enlarged version of a sermon delivered on the National Day of Mourning for Lincoln Barnes says that, “This war has demonstrated to the world that there can now be no permanent peace in this nation until slavery shall be wholly removed by law” which is possible only by amending the Constitution.

Charles Sumner (APS 1867) was arguably the most idealistic, ardent and articulate spokesman for the rights of African-Americans. In 1865 Congress passed a bill that would guarantee civil rights to all citizens regardless of color. In a pamphlet in Case IV, Sumner argues for the bill’s passage, recounting violence against unprotected freedmen in the South and concludes, “If you are not ready to be the Moses of an oppressed people, do not become its Pharaoh.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, but in April 1866 Congress overrode his veto.

The APS had continued to meet throughout the War. The minute book records many meetings that were routine. Gettysburg is not mentioned in the minutes, but the War was never far away. There were discussions about raising crops or their substitutes for commodities that used to come from the South: more flax to compensate for lost cotton, cotton itself, sorghum to replace cane sugar. On December 5, 1862, the members examined military ordnance: rifles, muskets, mortars, cannon, and gun powder. At the first meeting after Lincoln was assassinated, Benjamin Franklin’s chair—traditional chair of APS presidents— was draped in black. Including some elected before the War, eighteen APS members were Union generals or admirals. Their names and dates of election are:

No Confederate generals were elected to the APS.