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Civil War
In the 1860 presidential election Abraham Lincoln (Illinois) ran as the Republican
candidate. The Democratic party split over the issue of slavery. Northern Democrats
nominated Stephen Douglas (Illinois) as their candidate, while Southern Democrats chose
John C. Breckinridge (Kentucky) to run for president. A fourth political party, the
Constitutional Unionists, nominated John Bell (Tennessee). Because of the split in the
Democratic party, Abraham Lincoln easily won a majority of electoral votes and became
the sixteenth president of the United States.
Several Southern states refused to accept Lincoln’s election as president, because they
feared he would try to abolish or at least further restrict slavery. In late 1860 and early
1861 these southern states seceded or withdrew from the Union and formed a new nation
called the Confederate States of America. They elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as
president of the Confederacy. The secession of southern states triggered a long and
costly war that concluded with Northern victory, a restoration of the Union, and
emancipation (the freeing) of the slaves.
The Civil War put constitutional government to its most important test as the debate
over the power of the federal government versus states’ rights reached a climax. The
survival of the United States as one nation was at risk, and the nation’s ability to bring to
reality the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice depended on the outcome of the war.
In April 1861, President Lincoln refused to evacuate (remove) federal troops from
Fort Sumter, an American fort located in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. When
Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War (1861-1865) began. A civil war
is a war between people of the same country, and approximately 620,000 Americans died
during the four years of fighting in the American Civil War. Three hundred sixty
thousand men died fighting for the Union, while 260,000 Confederates perished.
The Civil War produced several key leaders. Abraham Lincoln served as President of
the United States during the Civil War. Lincoln opposed secession and insisted that the
Union be held together, by force if necessary. Ulysses S. Grant was a Union military
commander, who won victories over the South after several other Union commanders had
failed. Robert E. Lee was a Confederate general and commander of the Army of
Northern Virginia. Although Lee opposed secession, he did not believe the Union should
be held together by force. At the end of the war, Robert E. Lee urged Southerners to
accept defeat and unite as Americans again, even though some Southerners wanted to
continue the fight. A fourth leader of the Civil War era was Frederick Douglass.
Douglass was a former slave who became a prominent or important black abolitionist.
During the Civil War, Douglass urged President Lincoln to recruit former slaves to fight
in the Union army.
Three important battles of the Civil War were Antietam, Gettysburg, and
Appomattox. A major Union victory over the Confederates at the Battle of Antietam in
Maryland in 1862 led President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The
Union victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in July 1863 proved to be the military turning
point of the Civil War. After Gettysburg, it was only a matter of time before the Union
crushed the Confederacy. In April 1865 the surrender of Confederate General Robert E.
Lee to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia ended the Civil War.
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The Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862 marked a new stage
in President Lincoln’s conduct of the war. On New Year’s Day, 1863 Abraham Lincoln
issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This document freed all slaves in the “rebelling”
states (seceded Southern states) as of January 1, 1863. This call for emancipation of
African-American slaves changed the character of the war. Previously, preservation of
the Union had served as the North’s primary goal. By issuing the Emancipation
Proclamation, Lincoln made the destruction of slavery a Northern war aim. This
proclamation also discouraged any interference of foreign governments in the war, since
neither Great Britain nor France wanted to give the appearance of supporting slavery.
In November 1863, four months after the North’s great victory at the Battle of
Gettysburg, President Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to dedicate a military
cemetery. In the Gettysburg Address Lincoln eloquently set forth the North’s now dual
war aims of preserving the Union and abolishing slavery. In this speech he said the
United States was one nation, rather than a federation of sovereign, independent states.
In contrast, Southerners believed that states had freely joined the Union and could freely
leave (secede). In Lincoln’s view the North was fighting the war to preserve the Union
as a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people. He also believed the Civil
War was fought to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence and was a
“Second American Revolution.” The president described a different vision for the United
States from the one that had prevailed from the beginning of the Republic up to the Civil
War. Lincoln described the Civil War as a struggle to preserve a nation that was
dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” and that was ruled by a
government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” According to this vision,
the institution of African-American slavery must not exist in the United States.
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