Download The American Civil War

The American Civil War
Resolution of Unanswered Questions

The Civil War is the central event in America's historical consciousness.
While the Revolution of 1776-1783 created the United States, the Civil War
of 1861-1865 determined what kind of nation it would be.

The war resolved two fundamental questions left unresolved by the
revolution:

whether the United States was to be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign
states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government; and

whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men were created with an
equal right to liberty, would continue to exist as the largest slaveholding country
in the world.
A Nation Divided
Effect & Cost

Northern victory in the war preserved the United States as one nation and
ended the institution of slavery that had divided the country from its
beginning.

But these achievements came at the cost of 625,000 lives--nearly as many
American soldiers as died in all the other wars in which the US has fought
combined.

The American Civil War was the largest and most destructive conflict in
the Western world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and
the onset of World War I in 1914.
Uncompromising Differences

The Civil War started because of uncompromising
differences between the free and slave states over the
power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the
territories that had not yet become states.

When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first
Republican president on a platform pledging to keep
slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep
South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate
States of America.

The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the
Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of
secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy
and create a fatal precedent that would eventually
fragment the no-longer United States into several small,
squabbling countries.
Fort Sumter

The event that triggered war came at Fort
Sumter in Charleston Bay on April 12, 1861.
Claiming this United States fort as their own, the
Confederate army on that day opened fire on
the federal garrison and forced it to lower the
American flag in surrender.

Lincoln called out the militia to suppress this
"insurrection."

Four more slave states seceded and joined the
Confederacy. By the end of 1861 nearly a million
armed men confronted each other along a line
stretching 1200 miles from Virginia to Missouri.
All Out War

Widespread fighting began in 1862

Battles included: Shiloh in Tennessee, Gaines' Mill,
Second Manassas, and Fredericksburg in Virginia,
and Antietam in Maryland foreshadowed even
bigger campaigns and battles in subsequent
years, from Gettysburg in Pennsylvania to
Vicksburg on the Mississippi to Chickamauga and
Atlanta in Georgia.

By 1864 the original Northern goal of a limited war
to restore the Union had given way to a new
strategy of "total war" to destroy the Old South
and its basic institution of slavery and to give the
restored Union a "new birth of freedom.”
The First War to Be Photographed
The First War to Be Photographed
The First War to Be Photographed
Desertion
•
Desertion was common on both sides, and became more
frequent later in the war (when more of the soldiers were
draftees rather than volunteers, and when the brutal realities of
Civil War combat had become more clear), and was more
common among Confederate soldiers, especially as they
received desperate letters from wives and families urging them
to return home as Union armies penetrated further south.
•
1 of 5 Union and 1 of 3 Confederate soldiers deserted by the
end of the war.
•
Officially, desertion constituted a capital offense and was
punishable by death. But because of the numbers of soldiers
involved, it proved practically as well as politically impossible to
execute every deserter who was captured. Dozens were killed
as examples, many others were branded with a “D”
American Civil War Prison Camps

American Civil War Prison Camps were operated by both the
Union and the Confederacy to handle the 409,000 soldiers
captured during the war

After the parole exchange system broke down in 1863, about
195,000 went to prison camps

Over 30,000 Union and nearly 26,000 Confederate prisoners
died in captivity. Just over 12% of the captives in Northern
prisons died, compared to 15.5% for Southern prisons

Many CSA prison camps were plagued by significant shortages
of food and disease. Union camps often retaliated for
perceived maltreatment of Union soldiers by the CSA
The Emancipation Proclamation

issued on September 22, 1862, and put into effect on January 1, 1863, declared free the slaves in 10 states not then under
Union control

as Union armies advanced south, more slaves were liberated until all three million of them in Confederate territory were
freed

Lincoln continued earlier plans to set up colonies for the newly freed slaves

Enlisting former slaves in the military was official government policy after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.
By the end of 1863, at Lincoln's direction, General Lorenzo Thomas had recruited 20 regiments of blacks from the
Mississippi Valley
Habeas Corpus Suspension Act 1863

authorized the president of the United States to suspend the privilege of
the writ of habeas corpus in response to the United States Civil War and
provided for the release of political prisoners

Abraham Lincoln signed the bill into law on March 3, 1863, and
suspended habeas corpus under the authority it granted him six months
later

The suspension was lifted with the issuance of Proclamation 148 by
Andrew Johnson, and the Act became inoperative with the end of the
Civil War
Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation,
conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that
war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who
here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we
should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far
above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what
we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that
from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the
last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead 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, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
Assassination and Funeral

John Wilkes Booth was a well-known actor and a
Confederate spy from Maryland; After attending an April
11, 1865, a speech in which Lincoln promoted voting rights
for blacks, an incensed Booth became determined to
assassinate the president. On April 14, 1865, Lincoln
attended the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre.
Booth crept up from behind and shot the president at
point-blank range, mortally wounding the President. The
dying President was taken across the street to Petersen
House. After remaining in a coma for nine hours, Lincoln
died at 7:22 am on April 15.

Booth escaped. After being on the run for 12 days, Booth
was tracked down and found on a farm in Virginia, some
70 miles south of Washington. After refusing to surrender to
Union troops, Booth was killed.

Lincoln was the first US president to be assassinated, and
the country was distraught.
Lee & Grant

From 1862 to 1865, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia staved off
invasions and attacks by the Union Army of the Potomac commanded by
a series of ineffective generals until Ulysses S. Grant came to Virginia from
the Western theater to become general in chief of all Union armies in
1864.

After bloody battles at places with names like The Wilderness,
Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg, Grant finally brought Lee to
bay at Appomattox in April 1865.
Sherman’s March
In 1864-1865 General William
Tecumseh Sherman led his army
deep into the Confederate
heartland of Georgia and South
Carolina, destroying their economic
infrastructure while General George
Thomas virtually destroyed the
Confederacy's Army of Tennessee at
the battle of Nashville.
The War’s End
By the spring of 1865 all the
principal Confederate armies
surrendered, and when Union
cavalry captured the fleeing
Confederate President Jefferson
Davis in Georgia on May 10,
1865, resistance collapsed and
the war ended.
Ku Klux Klan

The first Ku Klux Klan flourished in the Southern United States in the late
1860s, then died out by the early 1870s.

It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the South
during the Reconstruction Era, especially by using violence against African
American leaders.

With numerous chapters across the South, it was suppressed around 1871,
through federal enforcement.

Members made their own, often colorful, costumes: robes, masks, and
conical hats, designed to be terrifying, and to hide their identities.
Reconstruction

The transformation of the Southern United States from 1863 to 1877, as directed by Congress,
with the reconstruction of state and society

From 1863 to 1865, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson both took moderate
positions designed to bring the South back to normal as quickly as possible, while Radical
Republicans used Congress to block any moderate approaches, impose harsh terms, and
upgrade the rights of the freedmen.

Johnson's interpretations of Lincoln's policies prevailed until the Congressional elections of 1866
in the North, which enabled the Radicals to take control of policy, remove former Confederates
from power, and enfranchise the freedmen.

A Republican coalition came to power in nearly all the southern states and set out to transform
the society by setting up a free labor economy, using the U.S. Army and the Freedmen's
Bureau. The Bureau protected the legal rights of freedmen, negotiated labor contracts, and set
up schools and even churches for them.

Thousands of Northerners came South, as missionaries, teachers, businessmen and politicians;
hostile elements called them "Carpetbaggers".

Rebuilding the rundown railroad system was a major strategy, but it collapsed when a
nationwide depression (called the Panic of 1873) struck the economy. The Radicals, frustrated
by Johnson's opposition to Congressional Reconstruction, filed impeachment charges but the
action failed by one vote in the Senate.
Reconstruction

President Ulysses S. Grant supported Radical Reconstruction and enforced
the protection of African Americans in the South through the use of the
Enforcement Acts passed by Congress. Grant suppressed the Ku Klux Klan,
but was unable to resolve the escalating tensions inside the Republican
party between the Carpetbaggers and the Scalawags (native whites in
the South).

Public support for Reconstruction policies faded in the North, as voters
decided the Civil War was over and slavery was dead.
Effects of the Civil War

The nation was reunited and the southern states were not allowed to secede.

The South was placed under military rule and divided into military districts.
Southern states then had to apply for readmission to the Union.

The Federal government proved its supremacy over the states. Essentially this
was a war over states rights and federalism and the victor was the power of
the national government.

Slavery was effectively ended. While slavery was not officially outlawed until
the passage of the 13th amendment, the slaves were set free upon the end of
the war.

Reconstruction, the plan to rebuild America after the war, began.

Industrialism began as a result of the increase in wartime production and the
development of new technologies.
Mathew Brady

Mathew B. Brady (May 18, 1822 – January 15, 1896) was one of the
first American photographers, best known for his scenes of the Civil
War.

When the Civil War started, his use of a mobile studio and
darkroom enabled vivid battlefield photographs that brought
home the reality of war to the public. Thousands of war scenes
were captured, as well as portraits of generals and politicians on
both sides of the conflict.

After the war, these pictures went out of fashion, and the
government did not purchase the master-copies, as he had
anticipated. Brady’s fortunes declined sharply, and he died in
debt.

His glass plate negatives were often sold to gardeners, not for their
images, but for the glass itself to be used in greenhouses and cold
frames. In the years that followed the end of the war, the sun
slowly burned away their filmy images and they were lost.