The North against the South.
Brother against Brother.
America's Civil War is the bloodiest in it's history.
Victory will take far more than brute firepower of the battlefield.
Technology
Communications...
Logistics.
It's what happens behind the front line
That will ultimately decide this battle for America's future.
1862, the American Civil War is at its height.
North and South locked in a bitter conflict over the future.
A new kind of bullet has brought this war to a terrible deadlock.
Bringing death on a scale never previously seen warfare.
Here at a metal works in the state of Illinois,
Molten lead is beginning its journey...
Becoming a lethal instrument of destruction.
The bullet known as the "Minie ball".
This crude piece of lead is the primary reason
For the unprecedented levels of slaughter in this war.
Invented in France, It's just 30 grams in weight.
Just over a centimeter across.
One person can cast 3000 Mini balls an hour.
Each one of these simple bullets
Can rip through a man's body in a fraction of a second.
The Minie ball is used by North and South alike.
Demand for this killer bullets runs so high
That entire industry springs up supplying Minie balls to the front line
In total, the North makes over half a billion of Minie balls
Ready to be fired from the 2 million muskets supplied to its men
In many ways, the Civil War was the first modern war
Because it was the first war took place
After the industrial Revolution had begun to transform our country
It will take over 33 hours for a bullet in this box
To travel the 1300 km to the battlefield, ready to find its target
The new musket is much faster to reload than traditional weapons.
Load the gunpowder...
Ram down the bullet...
And it's ready to fire.
Imagine a warfare where your ability to load a musket
Faster than the guy with the other musket would determine if you lived or die.
Groove on the inside of the barrel, rifling, spin the ball towards its target.
The improved accuracy and range are a deadly combination.
One second -- everything's great,
And the next second, your buddy's heads is gone, or his arm is flying off.
You don't wanna know what a soft metal musket ball does
When it enters the human body.
On impact...
The bullet flattens out.
Bone shuttered into splinters...
Causing further damage to muscle and tissue.
More often than not...
The result of a direct hit,
Death.
But for all the Minie balls technological edge
The army still uses traditional military tactics.
What made it specifically tragic was
Modern technology meeting much more ancient tactics
So the death rates were truly appalling.
The troops still faced one another openly in lines across the battlefield.
But the Minie ball is accurate over a range of 550 meters.
Easily spanning this distance.
And it can be reloaded eight times faster than a traditional weapon.
The effects are catastrophic.
The kill rate increases dramatically
Compared to previous wars.
Across the battlefield the results are carnage
Blood and death on a previously unseen scale.
They killed each other
in droves in line and in piles.
Soldier Alexander Hunter writes
"One lay on his faced with his body in two parts"
"Another was shot just as he was taking aim."
"One eye was still open while the other was closed,"
"One arm extended in the position of holding his rifle"
"Which laid beside on the ground."
The troops on both sides
Must live in the middle of this untold deafen suffering.
Horatio Chapman, records his experience in his diary.
"The dead in some places were piled upon each other"
"And groans and moans of the wounded were truly saddening to hear."
"Some were just alive and gasping, but unconscious."
"Others were mortally wounded and were unconscious of the fact"
"That they couldn't live long."
By the time of the North's final victory
Over 600,000 men on both sides are dead
Sum 2% of the entire US population...
In current terms, that's the equivalent of 6 million people.
Almost half of the dead remain unidentified.
The fear of dying forgot on the battlefield
These soldiers for the first time.
To begin painting their names and unions on their uniform.
These crude identity tags
Make it possible to identify their bodies after they are killed.
For the first time, America's growing postal service,
Means soldiers can write to their loved ones from the front.
With none of today's military censorship, it allows soldiers like Robert Stiles
To relay the terrifying realities of life on the front line.
"The sights and smells that assaulted us were simply indescribable."
"Corpus swollen to twice their original size."
"Some of them actually burst sunder"
"With the pressure of foul gases and vapors."
Fueling this carnage lays the deep political animosity
That has led to this war.
In a bitter conflict that has pitted as "Brother against brother"
The Southern states are determined.
To defend their independence and their system of slavery.
But the North will not allow them to leave the Union States.
We fought and lost hundreds of thousands of men on both sides
Fighting for what they believed is right
The unholy alliance of new weapons and outdated battle tactics,
Means body count on an industrial scale.
The war is locked in a bloody stalemate.
Neither side can land a decisive blow.
In this bitter war of attrition.
Victory will come to the last man standing.
August 1862, over a year into the war.
General Robert E. Lee's confederate army
is preparing a wide ranging assault.
Against the Union forces in Virginia.
Highly motivated, these men are fighting on their home turf
And are ready to die for Southern independence
Its traditions and its rural way of life.
Its prosperity is built around a simple crop,
Cotton.
Known as "White Gold", the South accounts for 2/3 of the world's supply of cotton.
It brings extraordinary wealth to the Southern states.
But it is wealth built upon the backs of slaves.
Now the victory of president Lincoln at the ballot box,
Threatens this traditional way of life,
And the slavery it is built on.
Rather than submit Northern rule, the South decides to fight.
They want a separate nation.
General Robert E. Lee takes command
At the head of the newly formed confederate army of Northern Virginia.
Lee, a brilliant graduate to the elite West Point Academy
Is already a veteran of the Mexican War.
And highly regarded for his effectiveness on the battlefield.
Lee could intuit the battlefield
In a way that almost resembles Rommel in the World War II, or Patton
And as a result, he could sort of almost sense
Where the place would be to take the gamble and where to hit
Manassas, Virginia, 1862.
Confederate troops gather ahead of the second battle of Bull Run.
Lee's forces are heavily outnumbered.
But this Virginia woodland is home territory for these volunteer troops
Known like the back of their hand
Rigid training and strict discipline
Have turned them into a formidable fighting force.
If you've been a betting man back then, you would have bet the South would have won
The South only had to hold its territory.
The North had to come and take it away, the North had to be occupying force
Which is for harder to do.
Fire
At Bull Run, Lee easily demonstrates his forces superiority.
In one engagement lasting 10 minutes
The Northern 5th New York regiment loses more men
Than any other regiment during the entire Civil War.
All told, Lee's men killed over 1,700 Union soldiers.
Determination and local knowledge
Give the South their greatest victory in the war to date.
But Lee and his commanders
Have underestimated the nature of this conflict...
And of their opponent, President Abraham Lincoln.
Because Lincoln is fighting a totally new kind of war
And the Southern adversaries just don't get it
A packed train speeds on its way South
Ready to replenish the Union army with fresh troops and supplies.
Lieutenant George Benedict writes home:
"We were stowed away in freight cars and started out of the city."
"The train took 600 other troops beside our regiment"
"And numbered 34 heavily loaded cars. "
The railways, one of Lincoln's hidden weapons in this war.
In one key operation ordered directly by the President...
25,000 fresh troops were sent on 2000 km journey to the South.
By road, it would take over two months.
By rail, it will take these men just seven days.
Following its introduction in the 1830's, America's rail infrastructure,
gradually spread its tentacles across the country.
Lincoln realizes it can revolutionize
The speed of troop deployments.
He strikes a deal with the rail owners
To put the North rail network under government control
With it the railways become a weapon of war.
Instead of armies being limited to the speed at which they can march,
All of a sudden you had armies being able to move to up to the front by rail,
And more importantly supplies.
Supplies and troops pour out of the North towards the battle front
Some busy lines carry over 700 tons of supplies a day
The equivalent of 80 wagons.
In Lincoln's hands, the North's 38,000 km rail network
Becomes an arm of his war machines.
Against this the South's network is Just 14,500 km at the start of the war
And it remains under private controls
In the four years the war lasts
The North adds 6,500 km of new track to its network
Against just 650 km in the South.
This inability to coordinate rail supplies
Will prove disastrous for the South.
Even though they're just 50 km from their capitol in Richmond,
In the winter of 1863,
Poor rail links mean Southern troops starve
For all their brilliance and determination in battle,
The Southerns simply lacked the logistics to deliver a decisive blow.
Lincoln not only uses rail,
He realizes that victory depends on mobilizing
The entire industrial might of the North behind the war effort
Production of clothing in the North doubles during the conflict
Pitchfork manufacturers start making sword.
While the number of patents doubles in the course of the war.
Manufacturing, Technology, Infrastructure
It will change the face of America.
For the first time in history
Industry is put behind the war effort...
An approach to conflict
That America will exploit in the First and Second World Wars.
It is the beginning of a new integrated economy
That will become the hallmark of the modern United States.
In a building across the road from the White House is a small room.
Which will become Lincoln's nerve center in this war.
And it's heart, a simple device that will transform how this war is fought
And won.
The telegraph.
The invention of Morse code in 1844
Turns the telegraph into America's first tool of mass communication
Quickly encoded, the basic system of dots and dashes
Is ideal for brief messages.
Like Twitter today, it need just seconds to send them and transcribe them.
Where messengers previously took days on horseback
over hundreds of miles and across every kind of terrain.
Now the country's 80,000 km telegraph network
Means communications is almost instantaneous.
As telegraph poles snake out alongside the railways.
This vast country begins to shrink.
It will transform the nature of this war, as information and decisions
Can flow backwards and forwards, at lightning speed.
It became kind of the early version of e-mail.
Suddenly it was possible to get a message to somebody from St. Louis
You know, to get a message to New York in a shockingly short amount time.
Lincoln immediately realizes the telegraph's potential as a weapon of war
He insists on the installation of telegraph lines
Directly into the War Department.
And he quickly asks to place all telegraph facilities in the Union
Under military control.
The telegraph offices become
The central hub of Lincoln's war operation,
His commands and control center.
He even takes to sleeping here at busy times.
The Telegraph Office Manager, David Homer Bates
describes how Lincoln obsesses over every scrap of news from the front:
sometimes reading dispatches word by word as they are deciphered.
"Lincoln's habit was to go immediately to the drawer"
"Each time he came into our room"
"And read over telegraphs beginning at the top"
"Until he came to the one he had seen on his previous visit"
The North's telegraph network spreads its tentacle far and wide
Sucking information back to Lincoln and his commanders in Washington.
It gives him a vast strategic overview
Providing him an unrivaled insight into his commanders' tactical thinking
Lincoln himself was able to stay on top of,
Literally, hour-by-hour developments in the course of individual battles.
That never happened before.
To the irritation of his generals,
It even allows him to issue his own direct orders, telling them how to fight.
In one campaign, with confederate General Lee's forces threatening Washington,
Lincoln response by telegraphing direct orders to his generals
"The exposed position of General Banks"
"Makes his immediate relief a point of paramount importance."
"You are therefore directed by the President"
"To move against Jackson at Harrisonburg."
"This movement must be made immediately"
In the course of the war,
Lincoln sends almost 1,000 telegrams from the small office
But the South never grasps the potential of the telegraph
In creating a centralized command and control system
It means southern generals like Lee
Must plan their battles without that kind of strategic overview
As the war continues
Lincoln brings down the hammer of his war machine.
Industry,
Lines of communications and supplies,
Manpower and firepower, are all marshaled
To deliver a blow after blow to the Confederate army
But the South, bolstered by the belief in the rightness of its cause
doggedly refuses to give in.
As a result, the death toll just keeps rising
At Antietam in 1862,
6,000 are killed...
17,000 wounded...
Over 3 times than number of U.S. casualties from World War II's D-day landings
The carnage will trigger a revolution in battlefield medicine
3/4 of all operations conducted by army surgeons during civil war
Are amputations
Letters from surgeon William Watson record
What these battlefield hospitals were like
"Day before yesterday I performed 14 amputations without leaving the table."
"I do not exaggerate when I say I have performed"
"At the least calculation, 50 amputations."
"There's so many severely wounded to the joints"
"There are so many operations yet to be performed"
Sergeant Theodore Dimon describes the hideous wounds
Left by the weapons like the Minie ball
"The shuddering, splintering, and splitting of a long bone"
"By the impact of Minie ball is both remarkable and frightening"
An experienced surgeon can hack off a limb in just 10 minutes.
Ether and chloroform are used as anesthetics.
If a bullet doesn't kill you, then infection can
Gangrene is the greatest killer.
Deprived of oxygen, wounds become
an ideal breeding ground for clostridium.
A bacteria that releases a poisonous toxin destroying tissue.
Death can follow quickly.
Approximately 60,000 amputations are performed during the Civil War,
More than in any other war American has fought in.
Twice as many soldiers died from infected wounds and disease as on the battlefield.
This unprecedented carnage
Forces a complete rethink of traditional battlefield medicine.
Looking after the well-being of soldiers
Becomes as central to the war effort
As the supply of guns and ammunition.
Large numbers of women sign up as battlefields nurses.
One of them is Clara Barton.
Help me, please.
A saw?
Clara Barton is untrained and in unpaid
When she starts, most nurses are men
It's a menial occupation.
The remedies she proposes for the care of the wounded are simple
But revolutionary in their effect.
"They want food, clothing, shelter, medicines"
"And a few claim, practical person to administer them ."
She insists the injured have already supply of clean bandages
First aid,
The sorting of the wounded with the most serious cases first.
The Civil War brings in a series of innovations
That form the basis of battlefield medicine to this day
20,000 women sign on as nurses during the war.
Clara Barton herself goes on to found the American Red Cross.
Standard of hygiene begin to dramatically improve
with the discovery of bromine.
This caustic chemical is effective against the bacteria that cause gangrene.
As a result, nearly 3/4 of amputees survive surgery
Gangrene becomes rare by the war's end.
With the civil war dragging on without a clear end in sight
Lincoln is increasingly forced to fight on a very different front - .
The war for public opinion
The spread of portable cameras means for the first time
Gory images of the battlefield can now reach every home
While these simple cameras ruled out dramatic action scenes
They're ideal for capturing the gruesome after math of battle
As many as 1,500 photographers flood the battlefield
Their images are sold chiefly to members of the public for as little as 25 cents
It was war photography coming back from the Civil War
That captured it in a way that made it real and made people recognize
The really extraordinary unprecedented violence.
America's growing newspaper mass media,
reproduces simple woodcuts of the images,
More than 200 correspondents cover the war.
Filing over 100 million words of copy.
This deluge of information about the war
ensures the grim reality of the conflict is seared into the public consciousness.
Never again will politicians be able to fight wars without public support.
The war means a soldier
Is five times more likely to die than a civilian.
Where American families were used to grieving for the dead at home
Now men die on the battlefield.
it forces of fundamental shift in the ritual surrounding death.
Matt Botage dies on the battlefield in Virginia.
Yet his family in Boston can still say goodbye.
To their son killed 800 km away.
Even though it has taken a week for his body to travel from the battlefield
His father describes how it is free of any signs of decomposition.
"So the marks of closely contested battle was still upon the face"
"The features were placid as if he were sleeping."
That's because of the new technique known as embalming.
chemicals like arsenic and zinc chloride are injected into the corpse.
To hold the natural process of decay
The business of death, the preservation of bodies
turns undertakers into overnight millionaires.
One undertaker boasts:
"I would be grad to prepare private soldiers".
"They are worth a 5 dollar bill a piece"
"But Lord bless you, Colonel pays 100"
"And a Brigadier General, 200."
If you got the money, all sorts of new techniques are available.
Airtight coffins and embalming are most popular
And for the wealthiest, even elaborated refrigerated coffins packed with ice.
The war drags on
Lincoln is determined to end it, and abolish slavery.
In September, 1862,
He gives the South an ultimatum.
Rejoins the Union.
He threatens to forcibly liberate their slaves if they refuse.
But having tasted independence,
The South does not want to rejoin a Union where slavery would be at risk
They reject the ultimatum.
Lincoln is in no mood to negotiate.
If the South won't free their slaves, he will do it himself
For white Southerners, it was a confirmation
That their thoughts about Lincoln all along.
that he was, in fact, somebody who was bent on destroying
What they thought was the Southern way of life.
In the North, in a sense, it gave people
A different understanding of what the war was about
On January 1st, 1863, Lincoln issues a proclamation abolishing slavery
In the rebellious Southern states,
Thanks to the telegraph, the news quickly spreads
"On the 4th day of January, in the year of our Lord, 1863."
Lincoln had totally grown
To where he said not only should blacks not be slaves,
They should be treated as equal citizens
with full enfranchisement, right to vote and right to participate.
"All persons held as slaves shall be then, henceforth"
"And forever free."
In the wake of President Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves
Black American soldiers rushed to enlist for the Union
Almost 200,000 signed up by the end of the war.
General James Blunt describes their skills as fighters.
"I never saw such fighting as was done by the Negro regiment."
"They make better soldiers in every respect"
"Than any other troops I have ever had under my command."
The Proclamation ending slavery changes the dynamics of the war.
The Union army becomes a force for liberation
Now fighting to end slavery
They understood that saving the Union
Would give them some sense of freedom, some sense of dignity
It was the dignity that I am a soldier; I am not a servant; I am a soldier,
"I have a uniform. I have stripes. I am somebody."
Lincoln follows the Proclamation with his master stroke
His 1863 address at Gettysburg,
Dedicating America's first National Cemetery for Soldiers
Is one of the most famous political speeches in history.
"Four score and seven years ago,"
"Our fathers brought forth upon this nation"
"Conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition"
"That all men are created equal"
"That we here highly resolve"
"That these deaths shall not have died in vain"
"That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom"
"And that government of the people, by the people,"
"And for the people, shall not perish from this earth."
It's an emotional thing to think about people sacrificing,
Giving their lives for an ideal.
And it's Lincoln at his absolute best
The genius, the simplicity that conveys a great amount.
It's spiritual in a way
It's a hymn to America
And it's the hymn to the possibilities of the great sacrifices of this country.
But in 1864, the war remains deadlocked,
With an election looming
And a Challenge coming from those who want to negotiate a peace with the South
Lincoln knows he needs to land a decisive blow.
At some point somebody gets tired
Somebody blinks.
Someone makes a mistake.
And when you're talking about war,
That mistake ... it's everything.
Lincoln puts the North's entire industrial might behind one final push.
The man who will lead the charge from Chattanooga to Atlanta:
General William Sherman.
His Orders: To stop for nothing.
"I would make this war as severe as possible"
"And show no symptoms of tiring until the South begs for mercy."
Advancing under the cover of night
General Sherman's march is sustained by
One of the greatest logistical operations yet seen in this conflict
Sherman knows he needs to throw everything he's got
At the Confederate army.
While he uses his own supply lines to maximum effect
He destroys those of the South
Ripping up their railway lines and bending them beyond use
In one day, the North's Supply lines replace 200,000 bullets.
While the South is left scavenging on the battlefield.
for spent rounds, food, or even old boots.
Sherman calls it total war.
A scorched earth approach
That becomes the trademark of modern warfare.
Finally, with Atlanta under siege,
Confederate forces set fire to their own munitions' stores.
Before abandoning their city to the Union soldiers.
Sherman's tactics of total war have won out.
His victory helps secure Lincoln's election in the Autumn.
With Atlanta in ruins, he just keeps going
Now launching his final assault:
The famous " March to the Sea."
In a 19th century equivalent of "shock and awe"
62,000 Union soldiers wreak 100 km
Wide path of destruction across Georgia,
From Atlanta to the coast of Savannah.
Supply lines are cut.
Villages are sacked and crops torched.
Anything of military value is destroyed.
Within 6 months
General Lee has tendered the Confederate Army's surrender.
The rebellion is over
The South will have to submit to the Union, and bring in an end to slavery.
By the act of winning,
The north both validated freedom and validated the industrial model
And so you have American confidence
An American sense of achievement
An American willingness to go out around the world
For all the Confederacy's commitment
Its inferior logistical infrastructure has been no match
For the North's unstoppable war machine.
It's industrial heartland, its growing rail infrastructure.
Its telegraph network
All bring victory to the North.
Within a week, Lincoln would lie dead.
Killed by an assassin's bullet
But America had pulled back from the brink
The American nation is once again united
And out of that unity, now grows a modern, industrialized economy.
That will spread right across the United States.