Diary of Orrin Brown, New Bern, North Carolina
Friday–Apr. 28th
I feel rather unwell after my trip to the City and I think that I have taken some cold. There was about 50 men left here for the front this morning. The day has been very warm and sultry. I read 4 Chapts. today.
On 28 April 1865, Lincoln’s funeral train stopped at Cleveland, Ohio. In North Carolina, Gen. Sherman prepared his armies to march out of the state. First, he planned to return to Savannah, Georgia, and wrote to Gen. Grant:
We should not drive a people into anarchy, and it is simply impossible for our military power to reach all the masses of their unhappy country.
I confess I did not desire to drive General Johnston’s army into bands of armed men, going about without purpose, and capable only of infinite mischief…. I envy not the task of ‘reconstruction,’ and am delighted that the Secretary of War has relieved me of it.
Would the many troubles of Reconstruction and failures afterward been avoided if Sherman’s Peace had been granted? Sherman the tactician saw the danger ahead. And the South did suffer the “bands of armed men” in the Ku Klux Klan and other conspiracies of hate lasting much longer than the Civil War itself. What might have been….
Read More:
- Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War by Michael Vorenberg (Knopf, 2025)
- Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction by Elaine Frantz Parsons (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2016)
- Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 by Eric Foner (Harper & Row, 1988)
- Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Edward Steers Jr (Univ Press of Kentucky, 2001)
- Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney (University of North Carolina Press, 2021)
- Sherman’s March Through the Carolinas by John Gilchrist Barrett (Univ North Carolina Press, 1956)
- Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman by Robert L. O’Connell (Random House, 2014)
- The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns by Joseph T. Glatthaar (New York University Press, 1985)
- The Memoirs Of General William T. Sherman by W.T. Sherman (Library of America, 1990)
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