Download U.S. Civil War The U.S. Civil War, also called the War between the

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U.S. Civil War
The U.S. Civil War, also called the War between the States, was waged from
April 1861 until April 1865. The war was precipitated by the secession
of eleven Southern states during 1860 and 1861 and their formation of the
Confederate States of America under President Jefferson Davis. The
Southern states had feared that the new president, Abraham Lincoln, who
had been elected in 1860, and Northern politicians would block the
expansion of slavery and endanger the existing slaveholding system.
Though Lincoln did free Southern slaves during the war by issuing the
Emancipation Proclamation, he fought primarily to restore the Union.
The war began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery fired on Fort
Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. In the ten weeks between the fall
of Fort Sumter and the convening of Congress in July 1861, Lincoln began
drafting men for military service, approved a naval blockade of Southern
ports, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. The U.S. Supreme Court
upheld Lincoln's authority to take these actions in the Prize cases, 67
U.S. (2 Black) 635, 17 L. Ed. 459; 70 U.S. (3 Wall.) 451, 18 L. Ed. 197;
70 U.S. (3 Wall.) 514, 18 L. Ed. 200; 70 U.S. 559, 18 L. Ed. 220 (1863).
The Court concluded that the president had the authority to resist force
without the need for special legislative action.
On July 21, 30,000 Union troops marched on Richmond, Virginia, the capital
of the Confederacy. They were routed at the Battle of Bull Run and forced
to retreat to Washington, D.C. The defeat shocked Lincoln and Union
leaders, who called for 500,000 new troops for the Union Army of the
Potomac.
General Ulysses S. Grant brought the Union its first victory in February
1862, when his troops captured Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee.
Grant fought in the Battles of Shiloh and Corinth, Tennessee, before
forcing the surrender of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4, 1863.
The Army of the Potomac, however, did not have such success. A Union summer
offensive against Confederate forces led by General Robert E. Lee fared
badly. Union forces were defeated at the Seven Days Battle and later that
summer at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Lee then invaded Maryland but
was checked at Antietam on September 17, 1862.
Lincoln despaired at the poor leadership demonstrated by the commanders
of the Army of the Potomac. He replaced General George B. McClellan with
General A. E. (Ambrose Everett) Burnside, but when Burnside faltered,
Lincoln appointed General Joseph Hooker commander. Hooker proved no
better. His attempt to outmaneuver Lee's forces at Chancellorsville,
Virginia, in May 1863 led to defeat, retreat, and Hooker's dismissal as
commander. Lee then invaded Pennsylvania, where a chance encounter of
small units led to the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1. The new Union
commander, General George G. Meade, directed a successful defense at
Gettysburg, forcing Lee to return to Virginia.
In March 1864 Lincoln gave Grant command of the Union armies. Grant planned
a campaign of attrition that would rely on the Union's overwhelming
superiority in numbers and supplies. Though Union forces would suffer
enormous casualties as a result of this strategy, he concluded that the
devastation experienced by the Confederate troops would be even greater.
In the late summer of 1864, Grant sent General William T. Sherman and his
troops into Georgia. Sherman captured and burned the city of Atlanta in
September and then set out on his march through Georgia, destroying
everything in his path. He reached Savannah on December 10 and soon
captured the city.
In the spring of 1864, Grant commanded the Army of the Potomac against
Lee's forces in the Wilderness Campaign, a series of violent battles that
took place in Virginia. Battles at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor extracted
heavy Union casualties, but Lee's smaller army was, as Grant had hoped,
devastated. Grant laid siege to Petersburg for ten months, pinning down
Lee's troops and slowly destroying their morale.
By March 1865 Lee's army had suffered numerous casualties and desertions.
Grant began the final advance on April 1 and captured Richmond on April
3. On April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Lee surrendered his
Confederate forces, signaling an end to the Civil War.
The casualties had been enormous for both sides. More than 359,000 Union
soldiers had died, while the Confederate dead numbered 258,000.
The war ended slavery. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln had announced the
abolition of slavery in areas occupied by the Confederacy effective
January 1, 1863. The wording of the Emancipation Proclamation on that date
had made clear that slavery was still to be tolerated in the border states
and areas occupied by Union troops so as not to jeopardize the war effort.
Lincoln was uncertain that the Supreme Court would uphold the
constitutionality of his action, so he lobbied Congress to adopt the
Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery.
Lincoln's wartime suspension of the writ of habeas corpus meant that
military commanders could arrest persons suspected of being sympathetic
to the Confederacy and have them imprisoned indefinitely. After the war
the Supreme Court, in Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2, 18 L. Ed. 281 (1866),
condemned Lincoln's directive establishing military jurisdiction over
civilians outside the immediate war zone. The Court strongly affirmed the
fundamental right of a civilian to be tried in a regular court of law with
all the required procedural safeguards.
Encyclopedia
Civil War, in U.S. history, conflict (1861–65) between the Northern
states (the Union) and the Southern states that seceded from the Union
and formed the Confederacy. It is generally known in the South as the War
between the States and is also called the War of the Rebellion (the
official Union designation), the War of Secession, and the War for
Southern Independence. The name Civil War, although much criticized as
inexact, is most widely accepted.
Causes
The name Civil War is misleading because the war was not a class struggle,
but a sectional combat having its roots in political, economic, social,
and psychological elements so complex that historians still do not agree
on its basic causes. It has been characterized, in the words of William
H. Seward, as the “irrepressible conflict.” In another judgment the
Civil War was viewed as criminally stupid, an unnecessary bloodletting
brought on by arrogant extremists and blundering politicians. Both views
accept the fact that in 1861 there existed a situation that, rightly or
wrongly, had come to be regarded as insoluble by peaceful means.
In the days of the American Revolution and of the adoption of the
Constitution, differences between North and South were dwarfed by their
common interest in establishing a new nation. But sectionalism steadily
grew stronger. During the 19th cent. the South remained almost completely
agricultural, with an economy and a social order largely founded on
slavery and the plantation system. These mutually dependent institutions
produced the staples, especially cotton, from which the South derived its
wealth. The North had its own great agricultural resources, was always
more advanced commercially, and was also expanding industrially.
Hostility between the two sections grew perceptibly after 1820, the year
of the Missouri Compromise, which was intended as a permanent solution
to the issue in which that hostility was most clearly expressed—the
question of the extension or prohibition of slavery in the federal
territories of the West. Difficulties over the tariff (which led John C.
Calhoun and South Carolina to nullification and to an extreme states'
rights stand) and troubles over internal improvements were also involved,
but the territorial issue nearly always loomed largest. In the North moral
indignation increased with the rise of the abolitionists in the 1830s.
Since slavery was unadaptable to much of the territorial lands, which
eventually would be admitted as free states, the South became more anxious
about maintaining its position as an equal in the Union. Southerners thus
strongly supported the annexation of Texas (certain to be a slave state)
and the Mexican War and even agitated for the annexation of Cuba.
The Compromise of 1850 marked the end of the period that might be called
the era of compromise. The deaths in 1852 of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster
left no leader of national stature, but only sectional spokesmen, such
as W. H. Seward, Charles Sumner, and Salmon P. Chase in the North and
Jefferson Davis and Robert Toombs in the South. With the Kansas-Nebraska
Act (1854) and the consequent struggle over “bleeding” Kansas the
factions first resorted to shooting. The South was ever alert to protect
its “peculiar institution,” even though many Southerners recognized
slavery as an anachronism in a supposedly enlightened age. Passions
aroused by arguments over the fugitive slave laws (which culminated in
the Dred Scott Case) and over slavery in general were further excited by
the activities of the Northern abolitionist John Brown and by the vigorous
proslavery utterances of William L. Yancey, one of the leading Southern
fire-eaters.
The Election of 1860
The “wedges of separation” caused by slavery split large Protestant
sects into Northern and Southern branches and dissolved the Whig party.
Most Southern Whigs joined the Democratic party, one of the few remaining,
if shaky, nationwide institutions. The new Republican party, heir to the
Free-Soil party and to the Liberty party, was a strictly Northern
phenomenon. The crucial point was reached in the presidential election
of 1860, in which the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, defeated
three opponents—Stephen A. Douglas (Northern Democrat), John C.
Breckinridge (Southern Democrat), and John Bell of the Constitutional
Union party.
Lincoln's victory was the signal for the secession of South Carolina (Dec.
20, 1860), and that state was followed out of the Union by six other
states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.
Immediately the question of federal property in these states became
important, especially the forts in the harbor of Charleston, S.C. (see
Fort Sumter). The outgoing President, James Buchanan, a Northern Democrat
who was either truckling to the Southern, proslavery wing of his party
or sincerely attempting to avert war, pursued a vacillating course. At
any rate the question of the forts was still unsettled when Lincoln was
inaugurated, and meanwhile there had been several futile efforts to
reunite the sections, notably the Crittenden Compromise offered by Sen.
J. J. Crittenden. Lincoln resolved to hold Sumter. The new Confederate
government under President Jefferson Davis and South Carolina were
equally determined to oust the Federals.
Sumter to Gettysburg
When, on Apr. 12, 1861, the Confederate commander P. G. T. Beauregard,
acting on instructions, ordered the firing on Fort Sumter, hostilities
officially began. Lincoln immediately called for troops to be used against
the seven seceding states, which were soon joined by Arkansas, North
Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, completing the 11-state Confederacy.
In the first important military campaign of the war untrained Union troops
under Irvin McDowell, advancing on Richmond, now the Confederate capital,
were routed by equally inexperienced Confederate soldiers led by
Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston in the first battle of Bull Run (July
21, 1861). This fiasco led Lincoln to bring up George B. McClellan
(1826–85), fresh from his successes in W Virginia (admitted as the new
state of West Virginia in 1863).
After the retirement of Winfield Scott in Nov., 1861, McClellan was for
a few months the chief Northern commander. The able organizer of the Army
of the Potomac, he nevertheless failed in the Peninsular campaign
(Apr.–July, 1862), in which Robert E. Lee succeeded the wounded Johnston
as commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Lee planned
the diversion in the Shenandoah Valley, which, brilliantly executed by
Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, worked perfectly. Next to Lee himself
Jackson, with his famous “foot cavalry,” was the South's greatest
general.
Lee then went on to save Richmond in the Seven Days battles (June 26–July
2) and was victorious in the second battle of Bull Run (Aug. 29–30),
thoroughly trouncing John Pope. However, he also failed in his first
invasion of enemy territory. In September, McClellan, whom Lincoln had
restored to command of the defenses of Washington, checked Lee in Maryland
(see Antietam campaign). When McClellan failed to attack the Confederates
as they retreated, Lincoln removed him again, this time permanently.
Two subsequent Union advances on Richmond, the first led by Ambrose E.
Burnside (see Fredericksburg, battle of) and the second by Joseph Hooker
(see Chancellorsville, battle of), ended in resounding defeats (Dec. 13,
1862, and May 2–4, 1863). Although Lee lost Jackson at Chancellorsville,
the victory prompted him to try another invasion of the North. With his
lieutenants Richard S. Ewell, James Longstreet, A. P. Hill, and J. E. B.
(Jeb) Stuart, he moved via the Shenandoah Valley into S Pennsylvania.
There the Army of the Potomac, under still another new chief, George G.
Meade, rallied to stop him again in the greatest battle (July 1–3, 1863)
of the war (see Gettysburg campaign).
Naval Engagements
With the vastly superior sea power built up by Secretary of the Navy Gideon
Welles, the Union established a blockade of the Southern coast, which,
though by no means completely effective, nevertheless limited the South's
foreign trade to the uncertain prospects of blockade-running. In
cooperation with the army the Union navy also attacked along the coasts.
The forts guarding New Orleans, the largest Confederate port, fell (Apr.
28, 1862) to a fleet under David G. Farragut, and the city was occupied
by troops commanded by Benjamin F. Butler (1818–93). The introduction
of the ironclad warship (see Monitor and Merrimack) had revolutionized
naval warfare, to the ultimate advantage of the industrial North. On the
other hand, Confederate cruisers, built or bought in England (see Alabama
claims) and captained by men such as Raphael Semmes, destroyed or chased
from the seas much of the U.S. merchant marine.
The War in the West
That the “war was won in the West” has become axiomatic. There the rivers,
conveniently flowing either north (the Cumberland and the Tennessee) or
south (the Mississippi), invited Union penetration, as they did not in
Virginia. In Feb., 1862, the Union gunboats of Andrew H. Foote forced the
Confederates to retire from their post Fort Henry on the Tennessee to their
stronghold on the Cumberland, Fort Donelson. There, on Feb. 16, 1862,
Grant, commanding the Army of the Tennessee, won the first great Union
victory of the war, and Nashville promptly fell without a struggle.
Farther down the Tennessee, Grant was lucky to escape defeat in a bloody
contest (Apr. 6–7) with Albert S. Johnston and Beauregard (see Shiloh,
battle of). Minor Union successes at Iuka (Sept. 19) and Corinth (Oct.
3–4) followed, while the counterinvasion by the Confederate Army of
Tennessee under Braxton Bragg was stopped by Don Carlos Buell at
Perryville, Ky. (Oct. 8, 1862). William S. Rosecrans, Buell's successor,
then stalked Bragg through Tennessee, fought him to a standoff at
Murfreesboro (Dec. 21, 1862–Jan. 2, 1863), and finally, by
outmaneuvering him, forced the Confederate general to withdraw S of
Chattanooga.
Union gunboats had cleared the upper Mississippi (see Island No. 10; Fort
Pillow), leading to the fall of Memphis on June 6, 1862. Grant's Vicksburg
campaign, at first stalled by the raids of Confederate cavalrymen Nathan
B. Forrest and Earl Van Dorn, was pressed to a victorious end in a brilliant
movement in which the navy, represented by David D. Porter, also had a
hand. The Union now controlled the whole Mississippi, and the
trans-Mississippi West was severed from the rest of the Confederacy. The
fighting in that area (see Pea Ridge; Arkansas Post) had held Missouri
for the Union and led to the partial conquest of Arkansas, but after the
fall of Vicksburg, the war there, with the exception of the unsuccessful
Union Red River expedition of Nathaniel P. Banks and a last desperate
Confederate raid into Missouri by Sterling Price (both in 1864), was
largely confined to guerrilla activity.
The Emancipation Proclamation
Britain never formally recognized the Confederacy (neither did France)
and maintained peaceful relations with the Union despite the provocation
late in 1861 of the Trent Affair, which was adroitly handled by Secretary
of State Seward. Charles Francis Adams (1807–86) at London and John
Bigelow at Paris were able diplomats, but probably more important in
winning popular support for the Union in England and France was the
Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln issued after Antietam.
This act appeased for a time the anti-Lincoln radical Republicans in
Congress, among them Benjamin F. Wade, Zachariah Chandler, Thaddeus
Stevens, and Henry W. Davis, with whom Secretary of the Treasury Salmon
P. Chase and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton were allied. Not all
Unionists were abolitionists, however, and the Emancipation Proclamation
was not applied to the border slave states: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky,
and Missouri had all remained loyal. For Lincoln and kindred moderates,
such as Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, the restoration of the Union,
not the abolition of slavery, remained the principal objective of the war.
Turning Point
The Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July, 1863, marked a
definite turning point in the war. Both sides now had seasoned, equally
valiant soldiers, and in Lee and Ulysses S. Grant each had a superior
general. But the North, with its larger population and comparatively
enormous industry, enjoyed a tremendous material advantage. Both sides
also resorted to conscription, even though it met some resistance (see
draft riots).
Under Stanton, successor to Simon Cameron, the overall administration of
the Union army was more efficient. Problems of organization still remained,
however, and Henry W. Halleck continued in the difficult role of military
adviser, with the title of general in chief. The Joint Congressional
Committee on the Conduct of the War, organized in Dec., 1861, attempted
to influence the actions as well as the appointment of Union generals (its
efforts were particularly strong on behalf of Hooker). The chairman,
Benjamin F. Wade, was frequently at odds with Lincoln, and the committee's
investigations and high-handed actions lowered morale among the Union
forces.
Grant and Sherman
On the Georgia-Tennessee line in Sept., 1863, Bragg, having temporarily
halted his retreat, severely jolted the Federals, who were saved from a
complete rout by the magnificent stand of George H. Thomas, the Rock of
Chickamauga (see Chattanooga campaign). Grant, newly appointed supreme
commander in the West, hurried to the scene and, with William T. Sherman,
Hooker, and Thomas's fearless troops, drove Bragg back to Georgia (Nov.
25). After Knoxville, occupied in September, withstood Longstreet's siege
(Nov.–Dec.), all Tennessee, hotbed of Unionism, was now safely restored
to the Union.
In Mar., 1864, Lincoln, for many years an admirer of Grant, made him
commander in chief. Leaving the West in Sherman's capable hands, Grant
came east, took personal charge of Meade's Army of the Potomac, and engaged
Lee in the Wilderness campaign (May–June, 1864). Outnumbered but still
spirited, the Army of Northern Virginia was slowly and painfully forced
back toward Richmond, and in July the tenacious Grant began the long siege
of Petersburg.
Although Jubal A. Early won at Monocacy (July 9), threatening the city
of Washington, the Confederates were unable to repeat Jackson's
successful diversion of 1862, and Philip H. Sheridan, victorious in the
grand manner at Cedar Creek (Oct. 19), virtually ended Early's activities
in the Shenandoah Valley. For his part, Sherman, opposed first by the wily
Joe Johnston and then by John B. Hood, won the Atlanta campaign (May–Sept.,
1864).
The Election of 1864
On the political front, a movement within the Republican party to shelve
Lincoln had collapsed as the tide turned in the Union's favor. With Andrew
Johnson, Lincolm's own choice for Vice President over the incumbent
Hannibal Hamlin, the President was renominated in June, 1864. The
Democrats nominated McClellan, who still had a strong popular following,
on an ambiguous peace platform (largely dictated by Clement L.
Vallandigham, leader of the Copperheads), which the ex-general repudiated.
Even so, Lincoln was easily reelected.
Lee's Surrender
After the fall of Atlanta, which had contributed to Lincoln's victory,
Sherman's troops made their destructive march through Georgia. Hood had
failed to draw Sherman back by invading Union-held Tennessee, and after
the battle of Franklin (Nov. 30) Hood's army was almost completely
annihilated by Thomas at Nashville (Dec. 15–16, 1864). Sherman presented
Lincoln with the Christmas gift of Savannah, Ga., and then moved north
through the Carolinas. Farragut's victory at Mobile Bay (Aug. 5, 1864)
had effectively closed that port, and on Jan. 15, 1865, Wilmington, N.C.,
was also cut off (see Fort Fisher).
After Sheridan's victory at Five Forks (Apr. 1), the Petersburg lines were
breached and the Confederates evacuated Richmond (Apr. 3). With his
retreat blocked by Sheridan, Lee, wisely giving up the futile contest,
surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse (see under Appomattox) on
Apr. 9, 1865. The surviving Confederate armies also yielded when they
heard of Lee's capitulation, thus ending the conflict that resulted in
over 600,000 casualties.
Aftermath
The long war was over, but for the victors the peace was marred by the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest figure of the war. The
ex-Confederate states, after enduring the unsuccessful attempts of
Reconstruction to impose a new society on the South, were readmitted to
the Union, which had been saved and in which slavery was now abolished.
The Civil War brought death to more Americans than did any other war,
including World War II. Photographs by Mathew B. Brady and others reveal
some of the horror behind the statistics. The war cost untold billions
and nourished rather than canceled hatreds and intolerance, which
persisted for decades. It established many of the patterns, especially
a strong central government, that are now taken for granted in American
national life. Virtually every battlefield, with its graves, is either
a national or a state park. Monuments commemorating Civil War figures and
events are conspicuous in almost all sizable Northern towns and are even
more numerous in the upper South.
History
Civil War
The war fought in the United States between northern (Union) and southern
(Confederate) states from 1861 to 1865, in which the Confederacy sought
to establish itself as a separate nation. The Civil War is also known as
the War for Southern Independence and as the War between the States. The
war grew out of deep-seated differences between the social structure and
economy of North and South, most notably over slavery; generations of
political maneuvers had been unable to overcome these differences (see
Missouri Compromise and Compromise of 1850). The secession of the southern
states began in late 1860, after Abraham Lincoln was elected president.
The Confederacy was formed in early 1861. The fighting began with the
Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Most of the battles took place in the
South, but one extremely crucial episode, the Battle of Gettysburg, was
fought in the North. The war ended with the surrender of General Robert
E. Lee to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. (See Battle
of Bull Run, Battle of Chancellorsville, Emancipation Proclamation, and
Sherman's march to the sea; also see map, next page.)
 The Civil War has been the most serious test yet of the ability of the
United States to remain one nation.
American History
Civil War
I. Causes and Results
"Of the American Civil War it may safely be asserted that there was a single
cause, slavery," wrote historian James Ford Rhodes in 1913. Although
historians today would not put it quite so starkly, Rhodes's basic point
remains valid.
In the decades since 1913 various schools of historiography have advanced
other interpretations of the war's causes. The progressive historians
emphasized the widening economic gulf between the North and South.
Cultural and social historians stressed the contrast between the
civilizations and values of the two regions. But revisionist historians
denied the existence of any fundamental economic or social conflicts. They
pointed instead to self-serving politicians who created and then
exploited the false issue of slavery's expansion into new territories to
whip up sectional passions and get themselves elected to office.
Few historians today subscribe to either the progressive or the
revisionist interpretation in unalloyed form. To be sure, conflicts of
interest occurred between the agricultural South and the industrializing
North. But issues like tariffs, banks, and land grants divided parties
and interest groups more than they did North and South. The South in the
1840s and 1850s had its advocates of industrialization and protective
tariffs, just as the North had its millions of farmers and its low-tariff,
antibank Democratic majority in many states. The Civil War was not fought
over the issue of tariff or of industrialization or of land grants. Nor
was it a consequence of false issues invented by demagogues. It was fought
over profound, intractable problems that Americans on both sides believed
went to the heart of their society and its future.
In this sense the "two civilizations" thesis comes closest to the mark.
As a lawyer in Savannah, Georgia, expressed it in 1860, "in this country
have arisen two races [i.e., Northerners and Southerners] which, although
claiming a common parentage, have been so entirely separated by climate,
by morals, by religion, and by estimates so totally opposite to all that
constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that they cannot longer exist
under the same government." What lay at the root of this separation?
Slavery. It was the sole institution not shared by North and South. The
peculiar institution defined the South. "On the subject of slavery,"
declared the Charleston Mercury in 1858, "the North and South ... are not
only two Peoples, but they are rival, hostile Peoples."
Two of the North's foremost political leaders echoed this point in the
same year. Slavery and freedom, said Senator William H. Seward of New York,
are "more than incongruous--they are incompatible." The collision between
them "is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces,
and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become
either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation."
Abraham Lincoln, in a famous speech, declared that "'a house divided
against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure,
permanently half slave and half free."
But why could it not so endure? After all, in 1858 it had done so for seventy
years. To be sure, slavery had been a source of contention at the
Constitutional Convention, at the time of Missouri's admission into the
Union in 1821, in the debates between abolitionists and slavery's
defenders especially in the 1830s, at the time of Texas's admission as
a state in 1845 and the subsequent war with Mexico, and on numerous other
occasions. But compromises palliated these conflicts; the Republic
endured. What made the rhetoric of 1858 different? What split the Republic
in 1861? The answer lies mainly in the schism generated by the expansion
of slavery.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had seemed to settle this matter by
dividing the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase between slavery
and freedom at the latitude of 36°30' (with Missouri as a slave-state
exception north of that line). But the conquest from Mexico of vast new
regions in the Southwest following the annexation of Texas as a slave state
reopened the question in 1846. With the support of nearly all Northern
congressmen, the House of Representatives passed over unanimous Southern
opposition the Wilmot Proviso stating that slavery should be excluded from
all territory acquired by the Mexican War. Southern strength in the Senate
was sufficient to defeat the proviso there. And that was the point. With
the Union comprising fifteen free states and fifteen slave states in 1848,
the South could block in the Senate any measures threatening slavery. But
if only free states were to be admitted in the future, the South would
eventually become a helpless minority in all branches of government.
Slavery would be doomed by Northern hostility.
What explained the growing Northern hostility to slavery? Since 1831 the
militant phase of the abolitionist movement had crusaded against bondage
as unchristian, immoral, and a violation of the republican principle of
equality on which the nation had been founded. The fact that this land
of liberty had become the world's largest slaveholding nation seemed a
shameful anomaly to an increasing number of Northerners. "The monstrous
injustice of slavery," said Lincoln in 1854, "deprives our republican
example of its just influence in the world--enables the enemies of free
institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites." Slavery
degraded not only the slaves, argued Northerners opposed to its expansion,
by demeaning the dignity of labor and dragging down the wages of all
workers; it also degraded free people who owned no slaves. If slavery goes
into the territories, declared abolitionists, "the free labor of all the
states will not.... If the free labor of the states goes there, the slave
labor of the southern states will not, and in a few years the country will
teem with an active and energetic population." The contest over expansion
of slavery into the territories thus became a contest over the future of
America, for these territories held the balance of power between slavery
and freedom.
The South accepted the gauntlet flung down by the Free-Soil movement.
Proslavery advocates countered that the bondage of blacks was the basis
of liberty for whites. Slavery elevated all whites to an equality of status
and dignity by confining menial labor and caste subordination to blacks.
"If slaves are freed," said Southerners, whites "will become menials. We
will lose every right and liberty which belongs to the name of freemen."
The fear that emancipation would degrade whites to the level of black
slaves explains why most of the Southern whites who owned no slaves (70
percent of all whites) supported the institution. They agreed with slave
owners that slavery must be allowed in the territories, for such expansion
might increase their own chances of acquiring slaves.
This question became the dominant political issue of the 1850s.
Southerners led several filibustering expeditions into Cuba, Mexico, and
Nicaragua to try to gain control of these regions in order to annex them
to the United States as slave states. Southern Democrats used their
domination of the party, which in turn controlled the federal government
during most of the decade, to make annexation of Cuba a party policy (but
Spain refused to sell its colony). Southern Democrats and their Northern
allies passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which repealed the Missouri
Compromise's restriction on slavery north of 36°30' in Louisiana
Purchase territories. The outraged Northern response led to the founding
of the Republican party as a coalition of Free-Soilers, Northern Whigs,
and those Northern Democrats who were fed up with Southern domination of
their party. Tensions were exacerbated in 1857 when the
Southern-dominated Supreme Court handed down its Dred Scott decision,
which declared slavery legal in all territories. During the remainder of
the decade, the territory of Kansas echoed with the gunfire of strife
between pro- and antislavery settlers. Out of the Kansas conflict came
John Brown with his vision of a holy war to free the slaves, which
culminated with his attack on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.
These events were flash points in the increasing polarization of North
and South over slavery. When Lincoln won the presidential election in 1860
without winning a single electoral vote and with scarcely any popular
votes in the slave states, Southerners knew they had lost control of the
government. A Northern antislavery party would dominate the future.
Slavery was doomed if the South remained in the Union. So seven slave
states seceded (followed by four more after the firing on Fort Sumter)
and formed the Confederate States of America.
Still, that did not inevitably mean war. If the new Lincoln administration
and the Northern people had been willing to accept secession, the two
halves of the former United States might have coexisted in an uneasy peace.
But most Northerners were not willing to tolerate the dismemberment of
the United States. This would create a fatal precedent whereby "any
minority [would] have the right to break up the Government at pleasure,"
declared Northern newspapers and political leaders. The government would
become "a rope of sand" and "our thirty-three States may resolve
themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics.... Our
example for more than eighty years would not only be lost, but it would
be quoted as a conclusive proof that man is unfit for self-government."
Lincoln intended to maintain the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in
Charleston Bay as a symbol of national sovereignty in the Confederate
states, in the hope that a reaction toward Unionism in those states would
eventually bring them back. To forestall this happening, the Confederate
army attacked Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. This was the spark that
ignited four years of war in which at least 620,000 American soldiers lost
their lives--nearly as many as in all the other wars this country has
fought combined. The destruction wrought in the South by the Civil War
was devastating. It killed one-quarter of the Confederacy's white men of
military age and destroyed two-fifths of Southern livestock, half of the
farm machinery and a similar proportion of factories and railroads, and
two-thirds of Southern wealth. The Civil War was the great trauma and
tragedy of American history.
But it was also a great triumph of nationalism and freedom. The war
resolved the two fundamental problems left unresolved by the Revolution
of 1776, problems that had preoccupied the country for four score and nine
years down to 1865. The first was the question whether this fragile
republic would survive in a world of monarchs and emperors and dictators
or would follow the example of most republics through history (including
many in the nineteenth century) and collapse into tyranny or fragment in
a dreary succession of revolutions and civil wars. Northern victory in
the Civil War settled that question: the United States would survive as
a single nation with a republican form of government. Since 1865 no state
or region has tried to secede. The second problem left unresolved by the
Revolution was slavery, which had divided the country from the beginning.
The Civil War abolished the institution and freed 4 million slaves. What
still remained unresolved in 1865 were the meaning and dimensions of that
freedom--issues that continue to concern Americans today.
II. Strategies and Tactics
In military terminology, tactics is the handling of troops on the
battlefield. The definition of strategy is usually divided into two parts:
national strategy, which is the shaping of a nation's political goals in
time of war, and military strategy, which is the use of armed forces to
achieve those goals.
The Confederacy's national strategy in the Civil War was to defend its
political independence and territorial borders. This goal remained
constant throughout four years of war, but the military strategies devised
to achieve the goal fluctuated. The initial Southern military strategy
consisted of what might be described as a "dispersed defensive." Numerous
small contingents of troops were dispersed around the circumference of
six thousand miles of land and water borders of the Confederacy in the
hope of blocking enemy invasions at any and all points. Some of these
troops were stationed in forts along the seacoast and on rivers; others
were organized in small mobile armies that defended key rail junctions,
mountain passes, or river crossings on or near the Confederate border.
This proved to be an unwise use of the South's limited military manpower
(which was only one-third of the Union potential), for by fragmenting its
forces the Confederacy risked a breakthrough at one or more crucial points
by larger enemy forces. This was precisely what happened in the winter
and spring of 1862, when Northern armies and river navies breached
Southern defenses dispersed along a four-hundred-mile line in Tennessee
and Kentucky with breakthroughs at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Island
No. Ten on the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers.
Yet though militarily unsound, the dispersed defensive was politically
necessary. Confederate regiments were recruited and organized by the
states, whose governors retained some control over them even after they
were incorporated into the Confederate army. The governors of, say, South
Carolina and Arkansas were unwilling to send most of their regiments to
crucial points in Virginia or Tennessee if this would leave their own
states unprotected. The political allegiance of states was almost as
important to Confederate national survival as the military defense of the
Southern heartland. Thus Jefferson Davis and his military leaders could
never wholly abandon the dispersed defensive. Substantial numbers of
troops remained scattered in several quiet sectors instead of
concentrated in the most active and threatened theaters (mainly Virginia
and Tennessee) until 1864, when Union conquests had shrunk Confederate
territory to the point where most Southern troops were perforce
concentrated into the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee.
But even earlier, Southern strategists had used interior lines of
communication to combine scattered forces into a larger army that could
meet an invading Union army on even or nearly even terms. Joseph Johnston
brought most of his small army from Winchester to Manassas Junction to
combine with P. G. T. Beauregard's force in July 1861 to win the Battle
of Manassas. Robert E. Lee likewise brought Thomas J. (Stonewall)
Jackson's army from the Shenandoah Valley in June 1862 to join with the
Army of Northern Virginia to drive George B. McClellan's besieging force
away from Richmond. After the losses of Forts Henry and Donelson in
Tennessee, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ordered Confederate detachments
from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama as well as those driven from
Kentucky and Tennessee to concentrate at Corinth, Mississippi, where they
launched the counteroffensive that almost won the bloody Battle of Shiloh.
These modifications of the dispersed defensive became known in the
Confederate lexicon as an "offensive-defensive" strategy. What this meant
was that although the Confederate national strategy remained defensive,
it could sometimes best be achieved by an offensive military strategy--by
attacking the enemy in Confederate territory, as Lee did in the Seven Days
Battles and as Johnston did at Shiloh, or by invading enemy territory,
as Braxton Bragg and Lee did in September 1862 and Lee did again in June
1863.
Large risks inhered in this offensive-defensive strategy. One was the
danger that Union forces would move into the vacuum created by the
departure of troops from one place to concentrate in another. The transfer
of first-line Confederate regiments from Louisiana to Corinth in March
1862, for example, left New Orleans defended by only two forts, a makeshift
navy, and raw militia. These were no match for the Union army-navy task
force that fought its way up the Mississippi to Vicksburg during April
and May, capturing New Orleans and gaining control of most of the vital
Mississippi Valley. Another risk of the offensive-defensive strategy was
the possibility of defeat and destruction of an army far from its home
base. This danger was especially acute for Confederate armies, which did
not have the logistical capacity to operate in enemy territory for an
extended period. Thus Lee risked the loss or crippling of his army after
the Battles of Antietam and Gettysburg.
The timidity and caution of opposing commanders enabled Lee to bring his
battered army back to Virginia on these occasions. But thereafter,
Confederate armies were too weak for effective employment of an
offensive-defensive strategy, though John B. Hood tried it once more with
the Army of Tennessee in November 1864--with disastrous results. The
virtual destruction of Hood's army in the Battles of Franklin and
Nashville seemed to confirm the necessity for a less aggressive strategy
that would minimize one's own casualties and maximize the enemy's. This
was a strategy of attrition, which became the principal Confederate
strategy in 1864. In Virginia and Georgia, Lee and Joseph Johnston stood
on the entrenched defensive, forcing enemy armies to attack or carry out
difficult flanking maneuvers, trading space for time in the hope that high
Union casualties and prolonged stalemate would convince the Northern
people to give up the attempt to conquer the South because the human and
material cost was too high. It almost worked, owing to tactical changes
introduced by rifled weapons and trenches.
The Confederate strategy of attrition was a matter of tactics as well.
In the military campaigns of 1864 the opposing armies seldom lost contact
with each other. Fighting or maneuvering in the presence of the enemy was
almost continuous, merging battlefield operations (tactics) with
campaign maneuvers (strategy). The Napoleonic tactics taught in American
military schools and employed in the Mexican War were becoming obsolete
in the age of rifled muskets and artillery. These tactics involved
close-order assaults by troops bunched in lines of two or three ranks or
in dense columns in order to mass firepower and impact. This worked
reasonably well in the era of the muzzle-loading, smoothbore musket and
bayonet. The effective (i.e., accurate) range of the smoothbore musket
was at most a hundred yards, and a good soldier could get off two shots
a minute. Heavy close-order assaults often succeeded because of the short
range of defensive fire before attackers reached the defenders' line. But
the development of rifled muskets in the 1850s increased the effective
firing range of an infantryman to four or five hundred yards, and the range
of an expert sharpshooter to nearly twice as far. This vastly strengthened
the defense against close-order assaults. Civil War soldiers by 1863 also
learned to entrench whenever they came into contact with the enemy because
of the added protection this provided against long-range rifled muskets
and rifled artillery. Old-fashioned cavalry charges became suicidal
because enemy fire could cut down men and horses long before the shock
of their charge could break a defensive line. The Civil War thus produced
the evolution of dismounted cavalry tactics, as well as looser infantry
assault tactics, which amounted to large-scale skirmishing, flank attacks,
and the like. Although commanders on both sides continued to order
close-order assaults until virtually the end of the war, thus providing
an example of how tactics lagged behind technology, these assaults became
increasingly suicidal, especially for Union attackers running up against
Confederate trenches, which by 1864 were almost as elaborate as those on
the western front in World WarI.
What kind of Union strategy could overcome the vastly increased strength
of defensive warfare? The Northern national strategy was to preserve the
territorial and governmental integrity of the United States. At first this
meant restoring the Union as it had existed before 1861 by suppressing
the insurrection that had gained control of eleven states. This seemed
to require a military strategy of limited war: defeat the armies of the
insurrectionists and arrest their leaders, in order to enable the
Unionists (whom Northerners in 1861 assumed to be the silent majority in
most Southern states) to regain control and bring the states back into
the Union. This strategy worked well in the border states of Maryland,
Missouri, and Kentucky, which were kept in the Union with the aid of
military force despite the Confederate allegiance of a substantial
minority of their citizens. It worked also in Virginia west of the
Alleghenies, where Northern troops helped the Unionist majority form the
new state of West Virginia.
But elsewhere the silent majority of Unionists remained largely a myth.
By 1862, therefore, Union strategy evolved to a second stage: conquest
of Confederate territory. This too seemed to result in great success. In
Tennessee and the lower Mississippi Valley, Union arms conquered and
occupied fifty thousand square miles of territory in the spring of 1862
while McClellan's Army of the Potomac swept up the Virginia peninsula and
stood poised to capture Richmond. But then the Confederate
offensive-defensive onslaught recaptured some of this territory and
knocked Union armies back on their heels.
It became clear that so long as Southern armies retained striking power,
the Confederacy would remain a viable state. Thus in 1863 Northern
military strategy evolved to a third phase: destruction of Confederate
armies. Ulysses S. Grant captured one whole army at Vicksburg and badly
crippled another at Chattanooga; Lee's army limped home to Virginia badly
hurt after Gettysburg.
But the Confederacy still lived, its armies sustained by the will of the
population to resist and to continue producing the sinews of war. By 1864
Union strategists recognized that it was not enough to conquer territory
and cripple enemy armies; they must destroy the resources and capacity
of the Southern people to wage war. Gen. William T. Sherman saw this most
clearly. "We are not only fighting hostile armies," he wrote, "but a
hostile people." In Sherman's march through Georgia and South Carolina
in 1864-1865 and in the campaigns of other Union armies elsewhere,
Northern forces burned and destroyed railroads, factories,
farms--anything that could feed and supply Confederate armies as well as
the civilian population, to break their will and ability to continue the
war.
This worked. It had been foreshadowed in 1861 by the Union naval blockade
to restrict Confederate imports of war matériel and by the Lincoln
administration's adoption of an emancipation policy in 1862 to uproot the
South's labor force and convert it to a Union labor and fighting force.
By 1863 several hundred thousand former slaves had become free people
within Union lines, and the Union army had begun the process that
ultimately recruited 180,000 of them to fight for the Union--and freedom.
This crippled a crucial Southern resource for waging war and added a
powerful resource to the Northern strategic effort. Sherman's destruction
of all Southern resources was a logical extension of these policies. It
was a strategy of total war that by 1865 overcame the South's defensive
tactics and strategy of attrition by totally destroying the Confederacy's
capacity to continue fighting. In several respects, therefore, the
tactics and strategy of the American Civil War foreshadowed those of the
two world wars in the twentieth century.
III. Foreign Relations
The Confederacy's principal goals in foreign policy were to obtain
diplomatic recognition and material assistance from European countries.
The Union's main diplomatic objective was to prevent this. In the end the
South failed to achieve diplomatic recognition or British aid in breaking
the Union blockade. But foreign assistance and sympathy did contribute
in a minor way to the Confederate war effort. Both the Union and the
Confederacy focused their diplomatic activities primarily on Britain, the
world's foremost industrial and naval power whose lead other nations would
follow.
On April 19, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of
Confederate ports. By 1863 the Union navy had built up its force
sufficiently to make this blockade effective, seriously curtailing the
export of cotton and the imports of war matériel the agricultural South
needed to supply its armies. But when, in 1861, the blockade was still
little more than nominal, Southerners pursued one of their objectives by
placing an embargo on cotton exports, reasoning from what has been termed
"the King Cotton illusion." Aware that textiles were the most important
industry in Britain (and almost as important to the economy of France)
and that 80 percent of Britain's raw cotton came from their fields,
Southerners believed that by withholding the 1861 crop from export they
would compel British intervention to break the blockade in order to obtain
cotton. They miscalculated. The 1859 and 1860 cotton crops had been so
large that British mills had enough on hand to carry them into 1862, and
the war boom in arms trade and shipping to both the Union and the
Confederacy took up part of the slack in the British economy caused by
a slowdown in textiles. In any case, the world's richest and most powerful
nation was not likely to submit to economic blackmail. Moreover, many
working-class leaders and their middle-class allies in Britain
sympathized with the Union, thinking it was fighting for democracy and
the dignity of labor against a society dominated by slaveholders. After
the Emancipation Proclamation, it became even less likely that Britain
would side with the South.
Confederate diplomats tried to convince British leaders that the Union
blockade in 1861-1862 was so leaky that under international law it should
be considered a "paper blockade" and therefore illegitimate. Such
arguments fell on deaf ears. As a naval power, Britain relied on blockades
in time of war and did not want to create an antiblockade precedent that
might boomerang on the Royal Navy in a future conflict. Hence the British
government recognized the Northern blockade as legal, and British
blockade-runners seized and confiscated by the Union navy could expect
no help from their government.
One crisis associated with the blockade, however, almost ruptured
relations between the United States and Britain: the Trent affair. On
November 8, 1861, the USS San Jacinto stopped the British packet Trent
on the high seas near Cuba and captured James Mason and John Slidell,
Confederate diplomats on their way to London and Paris, respectively, to
seek diplomatic recognition. The British government considered this a
violation of international law and demanded an apology and the release
of Mason and Slidell. Public opinion in the North and in England rose to
fever pitch while Southerners watched with high hopes that a war would
break out between Britain and the United States. But President Lincoln
and Secretary of State William H. Seward cooled the crisis by releasing
Mason and Slidell, and Britain dropped the demand for an apology.
Confederate hopes for diplomatic recognition rose again in the summer of
1862. Southern armies were on the offensive, having won several small
battles in Tennessee and two big ones in Virginia. This convinced some
European leaders that the North could never conquer the South. And, too,
the cotton shortage was beginning to hurt. The British and French
governments discussed the possibility of jointly offering to mediate a
peace on the basis of Confederate independence, planning to recognize the
Confederacy if the Lincoln administration rejected the offer.
As Southern armies invaded Maryland and Kentucky in September 1862,
European governments awaited the outcome. When Union forces turned back
the invasions at Antietam and Perryville, Britain dropped the idea of
mediation. As things turned out, this was the closest the South came to
gaining diplomatic recognition.
One other issue exacerbated Anglo-American relations. Confederate agents
contracted with private British shipyards to build fast, sleek warships
to prey on American merchant vessels. This was a violation of British
neutrality laws, but forged papers and lax British enforcement allowed
some of these ships to put to sea. Two of them, the CSS Alabama and CSS
Florida, sank or captured nearly one hundred American merchant ships.
Union protests did not stop these and other commerce raiders from putting
to sea but did prevent the culmination of an even more egregious and
dangerous violation of British neutrality. In 1863 the Laird shipbuilding
firm in Liverpool built for the Confederate navy two armor-plated warships
fitted with seven-foot iron spikes at their prow for ramming enemy vessels.
Designed for use against the blockade, these powerful ships would surely
have occasioned a diplomatic breach between Britain and the United States
if they had gone to sea. At the last minute, however, the British
government seized and detained them.
In this as well as other diplomatic crises, the painstaking, skillful
efforts of the American minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, did
much to ensure the success of Union foreign policy, which in turn played
an important role in Northern victory.
American Civil War
American Civil War
(clockwise from upper right) Confederate prisoners
at Gettysburg; Battle of Fort Hindman, Arkansas;
Rosecrans at Stones River, Tennessee
Date:
1861–1865
Principally in the Southern United
Location:
States
Union victory; Southern states
Result:
reconstructed; slavery abolished
Combatants
United States
Confederate States
of America
of America
Commanders
Abraham Lincoln†
Ulysses S. Grant
Jefferson Davis
Robert E. Lee
Strength
2,213,363
1,064,200
Casualties
KIA: 110,100
Total dead: 359,500
Wounded: 275,200
KIA: 94,000
Total dead: 258,000
Wounded: 137,000+
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was a civil war between the United
States of America, called the Union, and the Confederate States of America,
formed by eleven Southern states that had declared their secession from
the Union. The Union won a decisive victory, followed by a period of
Reconstruction. The war produced more than 970,000 casualties (3 percent
of the population), including approximately 560,000 deaths. The causes
of the war, the reasons for the outcome, and even the name of the war itself,
are subjects of much controversy, even today.
Multiple explanations of why the War began
The origins of the American Civil War lay in the complex issues of slavery,
politics, disagreements over the scope of States' rights versus federal
power, expansionism, sectionalism, economics, modernization, and
competing nationalism of the Antebellum period. Although there is little
disagreement among historians on the details of the events that led to
war, there is disagreement on exactly what caused what and the relative
importance. There is no consensus on whether the war could have been
avoided, or if it should have been avoided.
Failure to compromise
In 1854, the old Second Party System broke down after passage of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Whig Party disappeared, and the new Republican
Party arose in its place. It was the nation's first major political party
with only sectional appeal; though it had much of the old Whig economic
platform, its popularity rested on its commitment to stop the expansion
of slavery into new territories. Open warfare in the Kansas Territory,
the panic of 1857, and John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry further
heightened sectional tensions and helped Republicans sweep elections in
1860. The election of Abraham Lincoln, who met staunch opposition from
Southern slave-owning interests, triggered Southern secession from the
union.
During the secession crisis, many politicians argued for a new sectional
accommodation to preserve the Union, focusing in particular on the
proposed "Crittenden Compromise." But historians in the 1930s such as
James G. Randall argued that the rise of mass democracy, the breakdown
of the Second Party System, and increasingly virulent and hostile
sectional rhetoric made it highly unlikely, if not impossible, to bring
about the compromises of the past (such as the Missouri Compromise and
the Compromise of 1850). Indeed, the Crittenden Compromise was rejected
by Republicans. One possible "compromise" was peaceful secession agreed
to by the United States, which was seriously discussed in late 1860—and
supported by many abolitionists—but was rejected by James Buchanan's
conservative Democrats as well as the Republican leadership.
Slavery as a cause of the War
Example of slave treatment: Back deeply scarred from whipping
Several slave rebellions took place during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Focus on the slavery issue has been cyclical. It was considered the main
cause in the 1860–1890 era. From 1900 to 1960, historians considered
anti-slavery agitation to be less important than constitutional, economic,
and cultural issues. Since the 1960s historians have returned to an
emphasis on slavery as a major cause of the war. Specifically, they note
that the South insisted on protecting it and the North insisted on
weakening it.
For Southern leaders, the preservation of slavery emerged as a political
imperative. As the basis of the Southern labor system and a major store
of Southern wealth (see "Economics," below), it was the core of the
region's political interests within the Union. The section's politicians
identified as Southern "rights" the equal opportunity to introduce its
labor system and property (i.e. slaves) into newly opened territories,
and to retrieve escaped slaves from the free states with federal
assistance.
Northern resistance to slavery fell into the categories of self interest
and moral (largely religious) opposition. In the small-producer economy
of the North, a free-labor ideology (see "Ideologies," below) grew up that
celebrated the dignity of labor and the opportunities available to working
men. Slavery was seen as unfair competition for men attempting to better
themselves in life. Slavery was also seen as a threat to democracy;
Northerners believed that a corrupt oligarchy of rich planters, the Slave
Power, dominated Southern politics, and national politics as well.
Northerners also objected on moral grounds to being legally required to
enforce fugitive slave laws.
Abolitionism as a cause of the war
By the 1830s, a small but outspoken abolitionist movement arose, led by
New Englanders and free blacks, including William Lloyd Garrison,
Frederick Douglass, and Lucretia Mott. Many people North and South
considered slavery an undesirable institution, but by the 1840s the
militant abolitionists went much further and declared that owning a slave
was a terrible sin, and that the institution should be immediately
abolished. Southerners bitterly resented this moralistic attack, and also
the stereotypical presentation of slave owners as heartless Simon Legrees
in the overwhelmingly popular (in the North) book and play by Harriet
Beecher Stowe, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852). Historians continue to debate
whether slave owners actually felt either guilt or shame (Berringer
359-60[1]). But there is no doubt the southerners were angered by the
abolitionist attacks. Starting in the 1830s there was a widespread and
growing ideological defense of the "peculiar institution" everywhere in
the South. By the 1850s Northern teachers suspected of any tinge of
abolitionism were expelled from the region, and abolitionist literature
was banned there as well. The secessionists rejected the denials of
Republicans that they were abolitionists, and pointed to John Brown's
attempt in 1859 to start a slave uprising as proof that multiple northern
conspiracies were afoot to ignite bloody slave rebellions. (No evidence
of any Brown-like conspiracy has been discovered by historians.)
Economics
The free-labor and slavery-based labor systems of North and South both
reflected and heightened an economic differentiation between the sections.
The states of the Middle Atlantic and New England regions developed a
commercial market economy in the first half of the nineteenth century,
and gave birth to the nation's first factories. The Midwest, the free
states west of the Appalachians, had an agricultural economy that exported
its surplus production to the other U.S. regions and to Europe. The South
depended upon large-scale production of export crops, primarily cotton
and (to a lesser extent) tobacco, raised by slaves. (Slaves were a key
component in Southern wealth, comprising the second most valuable form
of property in the region, after real estate.) Some of its cotton was sold
to New England textile mills, though much more of it was shipped to Britain.
The dominance of this crop led to the expression "King Cotton." But
shipping, brokerage, insurance, and other financial mediation for the
trade was centered in the North, particularly in New York City.
These contrasting economic interests led to sectional agendas that, at
times, competed in Congress. Pennsylvania politicians, for example,
pushed for a protective tariff to foster the iron industry. Southerners,
tied to an export economy, sought free-trade policies. There was some
demand in the West for federally funded improvements in roads and
waterways, but less support in the agricultural South. However, there was
no unanimity of support for such programs even within each region.
Northern farmers also depended upon exports; early railroad managers
desired reduced tariffs on imported iron; many Northern Democrats opposed
any federal role in the nation's infrastructure, while Southern Whigs
favored it. As a result, the significance of economic conflict has been
exaggerated: North and South did not compete but were complementary. Each
depended on the other for prosperity. King Cotton's greatest importance
may have been in fostering the secessionist belief that it would prove
a sufficient support for an independent Southern nation. Many believed
that British prosperity depended on cotton, and that surely Britain (and
possibly France) would help protect cotton supplies by helping the
Confederacy gain independence. This analysis proved a delusion during the
war, but it seems to have been influential in 1860-61 during the debates.
Ideologies
The economic and social differentiation of North and South found
expression in ideologies that were highly refined by 1860. Historian Eric
Foner (1970) has argued that a free-labor ideology dominated thinking in
the North. The economy of the free states consisted largely of small
producers, ranging from farms to workshops to retail and mercantile
establishments. Large corporations were few; wage labor was seen as an
honorable (but temporary) condition. Northern society celebrated the
dignity of free labor, and emphasized the capacity of a working man to
lift himself up by his own efforts.
In the South, Quaker and other religious voices for the abolition of
slavery, heard soon after the American Revolution, were increasingly
replaced by defenders of the "peculiar institution." As the early
nineteenth century proceeded, white Southern writers attacked the
sharp-dealing, commercially-minded society of the North. Only in a
slave-owning society, some argued, could a white man truly be free, to
pursue education, cultural refinement, or political participation. They
depicted slavery as a positive good for the slaves themselves, especially
the Christianizing that had rescued them from the "paganism" of Africa.
These emerging ideologies polarized the nation. Republicans argued that
a clique of wealthy planters, the Slave Power, dominated the South, and
the nation as a whole. (Indeed Southerners played a predominant role in
the federal government, supplying most of the nation's Presidents,
Speakers of the House of Representatives, and Chief Justices of the
Supreme Court.) Though historians have recently emphasized that the South
was much more democratic than Northerners believed, the Slave Power image
gripped the Northern imagination. White Southerners, by contrast, seeing
a threat to their society by fanatical and conspiratorial abolitionists,
the underground railroad, and, most ominously, the violent activities of
John Brown, felt a sense that they were under siege.
Both North and South believed strongly in republican values of democracy
and civic virtue. But their conceptualizations were diverging. Each side
thought the other was aggressive toward it, and was violating both the
Constitution and the core values of American republicanism.
States' Rights
The States' rights debate cut across the issues. Southern politicians
argued that the federal government had no power to prevent slaves from
being carried into new territories, but they also demanded federal
jurisdiction over slaves who escaped into the North; Northern politicians
took reversed, though equally contradictory, stances on these issues.
Slavery in the Territories
The specific political crisis that culminated in secession and civil war
stemmed from a dispute over the expansion of slavery into new territories.
Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Congress had agreed to admit
Missouri as a slave state, but bar slavery in the territory west and north
of Missouri. The acquisition of vast new lands during the Mexican War
(1846–1848), however, reopened the debate. Free-state politicians such
as David Wilmot, who personally had no sympathy for abolitionism, feared
that unpaid slaves would provide too much competition for free labor, and
thus effectively keep free-state migrants out of newly opened territories.
Slaveholders felt that any ban on slaves in the territories was a
discrimination against their peculiar form of property, and would
undercut the financial value of slaves, the institution itself, and their
national political dominance. In Congress, the end of the Mexican War was
overshadowed by a fight over the Wilmot Proviso, a provision that Wilmot
tried (and failed) to enact to bar slavery from all lands acquired in the
conflict.
The dispute led to open warfare in the Kansas Territory after it was
organized in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This act repealed the
prohibition on slavery there under the Missouri Compromise, and put the
fate of slavery in the hands of the territory's settlers, a process known
as "popular sovereignty." Proslavery Missourians expected that Kansas,
due west of their state, would naturally become a slave state, and were
alarmed by an organized migration of antislavery New Englanders. Soon
heavily armed "border ruffians" from Missouri battled antislavery forces
under John Brown, among other leaders. Hundreds were killed or wounded.
Southern congressmen, perceiving a Northern conspiracy to keep slavery
out of Kansas, insisted that it be admitted as a slave state. Northerners,
pointing to the large and growing majority of antislavery voters there,
denounced this effort. By 1860, sectional divisions had grown deep and
bitter.
Southern fears of Modernity
Abraham Lincoln
16th President (1861–1865)
Southern secession was triggered by the election of Republican Abraham
Lincoln because regional leaders feared that he would make good on his
promise to stop the expansion of slavery and put it on a course toward
extinction. If not Lincoln, then sooner or later another Yankee would do
so, many Southerners said; it was time to quit the Union. The slave states
had lost the balance of power in the Electoral College and the Senate,
and were facing a future as a perpetual minority. In a broader sense, the
North was rapidly modernizing in a manner deeply threatening to the South.
Historian James McPherson (1983 p 283) explains:
“When secessionists protested in 1861 that they were acting to preserve
traditional rights and values, they were correct. They fought to preserve
their constitutional liberties against the perceived Northern threat to
overthrow them. The South's concept of republicanism had not changed in
three-quarters of a century; the North's had.... The ascension to power
of the Republican Party, with its ideology of competitive, egalitarian
free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the Northern
majority had turned irrevocably towards this frightening, revolutionary
future.”
Secession
Before Lincoln took office, seven states seceded from the Union, and
established an independent Southern government, the Confederate States
of America on February 9, 1861. They took control of federal forts and
other properties within their boundaries, with little resistance from
President Buchanan. One fourth of the U.S. Army--the entire garrison in
Texas-- was surrendered to state forces by its commanding general David
E. Twiggs, who then joined the Confederacy. By seceding, the rebel states
gave up any claim to the Western territories that were in dispute, canceled
any obligation for the North to return fugitive slaves to the Confederacy,
and assured easy passage in Congress of many bills and amendments they
had long opposed.
The Civil War began when, under orders from Confederate President
Jefferson Davis, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire upon
Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. There were
no casualties from enemy fire in this battle.
A House Divided Against Itself
The Union States
There were 23 states which remained loyal to the Union during the war:
California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas,
Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri,
New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode
Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. The Union counted Virginia as well, and
added Nevada and West Virginia. It added Tennessee, Louisiana, and other
rebel states as soon as they were reconquered.
Map of the division of the states during the Civil War. Dark blue
represents Union states; light blue represents Union states that
permitted slavery; red represents Confederate states; Unshaded
represents areas that had not yet become states.
The territories of Colorado, Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah,
and Washington also fought on the Union side. There was a civil war inside
the Oklahoma territory.
The Confederacy
Seven states seceded by March 1861:
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South Carolina (December 21 1860),
Mississippi (January 9 1861),
Florida (January 10 1861),
Alabama (January 11 1861),
Georgia (January 19 1861),
Louisiana (January 26 1861),
Texas (February 1 1861).
These states of the Deep South, where slavery and cotton were most dominant,
formed the Confederate States of America (February 4 1861), with Jefferson
Davis as president, and a governmental structure closely modeled on the
U.S. Constitution (see also: Confederate States Constitution).
After the surrender of Fort Sumter, April 13, 1861, Lincoln called for
troops from all states to put down the insurrection, resulting in the
secession of four more states:
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Virginia (April 17 1861),
Arkansas (May 6 1861),
North Carolina (May 20 1861), and
Tennessee (June 8 1861).
Border states
Along with the northwestern portion of Virginia (whose residents did not
wish to secede and eventually entered the Union in 1863 as West Virginia),
four of the five northernmost "slave states" (Maryland, Delaware,
Missouri, and Kentucky) did not secede, and became known as the Border
States. There was considerable anti-war or "Copperhead" sentiment in the
southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and some men volunteered
for Confederate service; however much larger numbers, led by John A. Logan,
joined the Union army.
Maryland had numerous pro-Confederate officials, but after rioting in
Baltimore and other events had prompted a Federal declaration of martial
law, Union troops moved in, and arrested the pro-Confederates. Both
Missouri and Kentucky remained in the Union, but factions within each
state organized governments in exile that were recognized by the CSA.
In Missouri, an elected convention on secession voted decisively to remain
within the Union. When pro-Confederate Governor Claiborne F. Jackson
called out the state militia, it was attacked by federal forces under
General Nathaniel Lyon, who chased the governor and the rest of the State
Guard to the southwestern corner of the state. (See also: Missouri
secession). In the resulting vacuum the convention on secession
reconvened and took power as the Unionist provisional government of
Missouri.
Although Kentucky did not secede, for a time it declared itself neutral.
During a brief invasion by Confederate forces, Southern sympathizers
organized a secession convention, inaugurated a Confederate Governor, and
gained recognition from the Confederacy. However, the military occupation
of Columbus by Confederate General Leonidas Polk in September 1861 turned
general popular opinion in Kentucky against the Confederacy, and the state
reaffirmed its loyal status and expelled the Confederate government.
Residents of the northwestern counties of Virginia organized a secession
from Virginia and entered the Union in 1863 as West Virginia. Similar
secessions were supported in some other areas of the Confederacy (such
as eastern Tennessee), but were suppressed by declarations of martial law
by the Confederacy.
The War Begins
Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of 1860 triggered South
Carolina's secession from the Union. By February 1861, six more Southern
states had seceded. On February 7, the seven states adopted a provisional
constitution for the Confederate States of America and established their
capital at Montgomery, Alabama. The pre-war February peace conference of
1861 met in Washington, as one last attempt to avoid war; it failed. The
remaining southern states as yet remained in the Union. Confederate forces
seized all but three federal forts within their boundaries (they did not
take Fort Sumter); President Buchanan made no military response, but
governors in Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania began secretly
buying weapons and training militia units to ready them for immediate
action.
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in. In his inaugural address,
he argued that the Constitution was a more perfect union than the earlier
Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, that it was a binding
contract, and called the secession "legally void". He stated he had no
intent to invade southern states, but would use force to maintain
possession of federal property. His speech closed with a plea for
restoration of the bonds of union. The South did send delegations to
Washington and offered to pay for the federal properties, but they were
turned down. Lincoln refused to negotiate with any Confederate agents
because he insisted the Confederacy was not a legitimate government.
On April 12, Confederate soldiers fired upon the Federal troops stationed
at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, until the troops surrendered.
Lincoln called for all of the states in the Union to send troops to
recapture the forts and preserve the Union. Most Northerners hoped that
a quick victory for the Union would crush the nascent rebellion, and so
Lincoln only called for volunteers for 90 days. Four states, Tennessee,
Arkansas, North Carolina, and—most importantly, Virginia—which had
repeatedly rejected Confederate overtures now decided that they could not
send forces against the seceding states. They seceded and to reward
Virginia the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond, Virginia, a highly
vulnerable location at the end of the supply line.
Even though the Southern states had seceded, there was considerable
anti-secessionist sentiment in certain scattered localities in the
seceding states. Eastern Tennessee, in particular, was a hotbed for
pro-Unionism. Winston County, Alabama issued a resolution of secession
from the state of Alabama. The Red Strings were a prominent Southern
anti-secession group.
Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the U.S. Army, devised the
Anaconda Plan to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible. His
idea was that a Union blockade of the seacoast would strangle the rebel
economy, then capture of the Mississippi would split the South. Lincoln
adopted the plan but overruled Scott's warnings against an immediate
attack on Richmond.
Naval war and blockade
In May 1861 Lincoln proclaimed the Union blockade of all southern ports,
which shut down nearly all international traffic and most local
port-to-port traffic. Although few naval battles were fought and few men
were killed, the blockade shut down King Cotton and ruined the southern
economy. British investors built small, very fast "blockade runners" that
brought in military supplies (and civilian luxuries) from Cuba and the
Bahamas and took out some cotton and tobacco. When the blockade captured
one the ship and cargo were sold and the proceeds given to the Union sailors.
The crews were British, so when they were captured they were released and
not held as prisoners of war. The most famous naval battle was the Battle
of Hampton Roads (often called "the Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac")
in March 1862, in which Confederate efforts to break the blockade were
frustrated. Other naval battles included Island No. 10, Memphis, Drewry's
Bluff, Arkansas Post, and Mobile Bay.
Eastern Theater 1861–1863
Because of the fierce resistance of a few initial Confederate forces at
Manassas, Virginia, in July 1861, a march by Union troops under the command
of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell on the Confederate forces there was halted
in the First Battle of Bull Run, or First Manassas, whereupon they were
forced back to Washington, D.C., by Confederate troops under the command
of Generals Joseph E. Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard. It was in this battle
that Confederate General Thomas Jackson received the name of "Stonewall"
because he stood like a stone wall against Union troops. Alarmed at the
loss, and in an attempt to prevent more slave states from leaving the Union,
the U.S. Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution on July 25 of
that year, which stated that the war was being fought to preserve the Union
and not to end slavery.
Major General George B. McClellan took command of the Union Army of the
Potomac on July 26 (he was briefly general-in-chief of all the Union armies,
but was subsequently relieved of that post in favor of Maj. Gen. Henry
W. Halleck), and the war began in earnest in 1862.
Upon the strong urging of President Lincoln to begin offensive operations,
McClellan invaded Virginia in the spring of 1862 by way of the peninsula
between the York River and James River, southeast of Richmond. Although
McClellan's army reached the gates of Richmond in the Peninsula Campaign,
Joseph E. Johnston halted his advance at the Battle of Seven Pines, then
Robert E. Lee defeated him in the Seven Days Battles and forced his retreat.
McClellan was stripped of many of his troops to reinforce John Pope's Union
Army of Virginia. Pope was beaten spectacularly by Lee in the Northern
Virginia Campaign and the Second Battle of Bull Run in August.
Confederate dead behind the stone wall of Marye's Heights, Fredericksburg,
Virginia, killed during the Battle of Chancellorsville, May 1863.
Emboldened by Second Bull Run, the Confederacy made its first invasion
of the North, when General Lee led 55,000 men of the Army of Northern
Virginia across the Potomac River into Maryland on September 5. Lincoln
then restored Pope's troops to McClellan. McClellan and Lee fought at the
Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17 1862, the
bloodiest single day in American history. Lee's army, checked at last,
returned to Virginia before McClellan could destroy it. Antietam is
considered a Union victory because it halted Lee's invasion of the North
and provided justification for Lincoln to announce his Emancipation
Proclamation.
When the cautious McClellan failed to follow up on Antietam, he was
replaced by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside. Burnside suffered near-immediate
defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13 1862, when over ten
thousand Union soldiers were killed or wounded. After the battle, Burnside
was replaced by Maj. Gen. Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker. Hooker, too,
proved unable to defeat Lee's army; despite outnumbering the Confederates
by more than two to one, he was humiliated in the Battle of
Chancellorsville in May 1863. He was replaced by Maj. Gen. George G. Meade
during Lee's second invasion of the North, in June. Meade defeated Lee
at the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–July 3, 1863), the largest battle
in North American history, which is sometimes considered the war's turning
point. Lee's army suffered 28,000 casualties (versus Meade's 23,000). Lee
was almost trapped but managed to escape. Lincoln was angry that Meade
failed to intercept Lee's retreat, and decided to turn to the Western
Theater for new leadership.
On the use of balloons, see Aerial warfare section on the American Civil
War.
Western Theater 1861–1863
While the Confederate forces had numerous successes in the Eastern theater,
they crucially failed in the West. They were driven from Missouri early
in the war as result of the Battle of Pea Ridge. Leonidas Polk's invasion
of Kentucky enraged the citizens there who previously had declared
neutrality in the war, turning that state against the Confederacy.
Nashville, Tennessee, fell to the Union early in 1862. Most of the
Mississippi was opened with the taking of Island No. 10 and New Madrid,
Missouri, and then Memphis, Tennessee. The Union Navy captured New Orleans,
Louisiana without a major fight in May 1862, allowing the Union forces
to begin moving up the Mississippi as well. Only the fortress city of
Vicksburg, Mississippi, prevented unchallenged Union control of the
entire river.
Braxton Bragg's second Confederate invasion of Kentucky was repulsed by
Don Carlos Buell at the confused and bloody Battle of Perryville and he
was narrowly defeated by William S. Rosecrans at the Battle of Stones River
in Tennessee.
The one clear Confederate victory in the West was the Battle of Chickamauga.
Bragg, reinforced by the corps of James Longstreet (from Lee's army in
the east), defeated Rosecrans, despite the heroic defensive stand of
George Henry Thomas. Rosecrans retreated to Chattanooga, which Bragg then
besieged.
The Union's key strategist and tactician in the west was Maj. Gen. Ulysses
S. Grant, who won victories at: Forts Henry and Donelson, by which the
Union seized control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers; Shiloh; the
Battle of Vicksburg, cementing Union control of the Mississippi River and
considered one of the turning points of the war. Grant marched to the
relief of Rosecrans and defeated Bragg at the Battle of Chattanooga,
Tennessee, driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee and opening an
invasion route to Atlanta and the heart of the Confederacy.
Trans-Mississippi Theater 1861–1865
Though geographically isolated from the battles to the east, a few
small-scale military actions took place west of the Mississippi River.
Confederate incursions into Arizona and New Mexico were repulsed in 1862.
Guerilla activity turned much of Missouri and Indian Territory (Oklahoma)
into a battleground. Late in the war the Federal Red River Campaign was
a failure. Texas remained in Confederate hands throughout the war, but
was cut off after the capture of Vicksburg in 1863 gave the Union control
of the Mississippi River.
End of the War 1864–1865
Jefferson Davis, first and only President of the Confederate States of
America
At the beginning of 1864, Lincoln made Grant commander of all Union armies.
Grant made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, and put Maj.
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in command of most of the western armies.
Grant understood the concept of total war and believed, along with Lincoln
and Sherman, that only the utter defeat of Confederate forces and their
economic base would bring an end to the war.[394] He devised a coordinated
strategy that would strike at the heart of Confederacy from multiple
directions: Generals Grant, Meade, and Benjamin Butler would move against
Lee near Richmond; General Franz Sigel (and later Philip Sheridan) would
invade the Shenandoah Valley; General Sherman would capture Atlanta and
march to the sea; Generals George Crook and William W. Averell would
operate against railroad supply lines in West Virginia; and General
Nathaniel Banks would capture Mobile, Alabama.
Union forces in the East attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several
battles during that phase ("Grant's Overland Campaign") of the Eastern
campaign. An attempt to outflank Lee from the south failed under Butler,
who was trapped inside the Bermuda Hundred river bend. Grant was tenacious
and, despite astonishing losses (over 66,000 casualties in six weeks),
kept pressing Lee's Army of Northern Virginia back to Richmond. He pinned
down the Confederate army in the Siege of Petersburg, where the two armies
engaged in trench warfare for over nine months.
Grant finally found a commander, General Philip Sheridan, aggressive
enough to prevail in the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Sheridan proved to be
more than a match for Jubal Early, and defeated him in a series of battles,
including a final decisive defeat at Cedar Creek, Sheridan then proceeded
to destroy the agricultural base of the Valley, a strategy similar to the
tactics Sherman would later employ in Georgia.
Meanwhile, Sherman marched from Chattanooga to Atlanta, defeating
Confederate Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John B. Hood. The fall of
Atlanta, on September 2, 1864, was a significant factor in the re-election
of Abraham Lincoln, as President of the Union. Leaving Atlanta, and his
base of supplies, Sherman's army marched with an unclear destination,
laying waste to about 20% of the farms in Georgia in his celebrated "March
to the Sea", and reaching the Atlantic Ocean at Savannah in December 1864.
Burning plantations as they went, Sherman's army was followed by thousands
of freed slaves. There were no major battles along the March. When Sherman
turned north through South Carolina and North Carolina to approach the
Virginia lines from the south, it was the end for Lee and his men.
Lee attempted to escape from the besieged Petersburg and link up with
Johnston in North Carolina, but he was overtaken by Grant's better rested
and equipped army. Consequently, Lee surrendered his Army of Northern
Virginia on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House. In an untraditional
gesture and as a sign of Lincoln's respect and anticipation of folding
the Confederacy back into the Union with dignity and peace, Lee was
permitted to keep his officer's sabre and his near-legendary horse,
Traveler. Johnston surrendered his troops to Sherman shortly thereafter
in Durham, North Carolina at a family farmhouse known as Bennett Place.
The Battle of Palmito Ranch, fought on May 13, 1865, in the far south of
Texas, was the last Civil War land battle and ended, ironically, with a
Confederate victory. All Confederate land forces surrendered by June
1865.
Analysis of the outcome
Why the Union prevailed (or why the Confederacy was defeated) in the Civil
War has been a subject of extensive analysis and debate.
Could the South have won? A significant number of scholars believe that
the Union held an insurmountable advantage over the Confederacy in terms
of industrial strength, population, and the determination to win.
Confederate actions, they argue, could only delay defeat. Southern
historian Shelby Foote expressed this view succinctly in Ken Burns's
television series on the Civil War: "I think that the North fought that
war with one hand behind its back.... If there had been more Southern
victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other
hand out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance
to win that War." [Ward 1990 p 272]
Other historians, however, suggest that the South had a chance to win its
independence. As James McPherson has observed, the Confederacy remained
on the defensive, which required fewer military resources. The Union,
committed to the strategic offensive, faced enormous manpower demands
that it often had difficulty meeting. War weariness among Union civilians
mounted along with casualties, in the long years before Union advantages
proved decisive. Thus, the inevitability of Union victory remains hotly
contested among scholars.
The goals were not symmetric. To win independence the South had to convince
the North it could not win, but it did not have to invade the North. To
restore the Union the North had to conquer vast stretches of territory.
In the short run (a matter of months) the two sides were evenly matched.
But in the long run (a matter of years) the North had advantages that
increasingly came into play, while it prevented the South from gaining
diplomatic recognition in Europe.
Both sides had long-term advantages but the Union had more of them. The
Union had to control the entire coastline, defeat all the main Confederate
armies, seize Richmond, and control most of the population centers. As
the occupying force they had to station hundreds of thousands of soldiers
to control railroads, supply lines, and major towns and cites. The
long-term advantages widely credited by historians to have contributed
to the Union's success include:
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The more industrialized economy of the North, which aided in the
production of arms, munitions and supplies, as well as finances,
and transportation. The graph shows the relative advantage of the
USA over the CSA.
A party system that enabled the Republicans to mobilize soldiers
and support at the grass roots, even when the war became unpopular.
The Confederacy deliberately did not use parties.
The Union population was 22 million and the South 9 million in 1861;
the disparity grew as the Union controlled more and more southern
territory with garrisons, and cut off the trans-Mississippi part
of the Confederacy.
Excellent railroad links between Union cities, which allowed for
the quick and cheap movement of troops and supplies. Transportation
was much slower and more difficult in the South which was unable
to augment its much smaller system or repair damage, or even perform
routine maintenance.
The Union devoted much more of its resources to medical needs,
thereby overcoming the unhealthy disease environment that sickened
(and killed) more soldiers than combat did.
The Union at the start controlled over 80% of the shipyards,
steamships, river boats, and the Navy. It augmented these by a
massive shipbuilding program. This enabled the Union to control the
river systems and to blockade the entire southern coastline.
The Union's more established government, particularly a mature
executive branch which accumulated even greater power during
wartime, may have resulted in less regional infighting and a more
streamlined conduct of the war. Failure of Davis to maintain
positive and productive relationships with state governors damaged
the Confederate president's ability to draw on regional resources.
The Confederacy's tactic of engaging in major battles at the cost
of heavy manpower losses, when it could not easily replace its
losses.
The Confederacy's failure to fully use its advantages in guerrilla
warfare against Union communication and transportation
infrastructure. However, as Lee warned, such warfare would prove
devastating to the South, and (with the exception of Confederate
partisans in Missouri) Confederate leaders shrank from it.
Despite the Union's many tactical blunders like the Seven Days
Battle, those committed by Confederate generals, such as Lee's
miscalculations at the Battle of Gettysburg and Battle of Antietam,
were far more serious—if for no other reason than that the
Confederates could so little afford the losses.
Lincoln proved more adept than Davis in replacing unsuccessful
generals with better ones.
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Strategically the location of the capital Richmond tied Lee to a
highly exposed position at the end of supply lines. (Loss of
Richmond, everyone realized, meant loss of the war.)
Lincoln grew as a grand strategist, in contrast to Davis. The
Confederacy never developed an overall strategy. It never had a plan
to deal with the blockade. Davis failed to respond in a coordinated
fashion to serious threats, such as Grant's campaign against
Vicksburg in 1863 (in the face of which, he allowed Lee to invade
Pennsylvania).
The Confederacy's failure to win diplomatic or military support
from any foreign powers. Its King Cotton misperception of the world
economy led to bad diplomacy, such as the refusal to ship cotton
before the blockade started.
Most important, the Union had the will to win, and leaders like
Lincoln, Seward, Stanton, Grant, and Sherman would do whatever it
took to achieve victory. The Confederacy, as Beringer et al (1986)
argue, may have lacked the total commitment needed to win. It took
time, however, for leaders such as Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan to
emerge; in the meantime, Union public opinion wavered, and Lincoln
worried about losing the election of 1864, until victories in the
Shenandoah Valley and Atlanta made victory seem likely.
Civil War leaders and soldiers
One of the reasons that the U.S. Civil War wore on as long as it did and
the battles were so fierce was that most important generals on both sides
had formerly served in the United States Army—some, including Ulysses
S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, during the Mexican-American War between 1846
and 1848. Most were graduates of the United States Military Academy at
West Point. Southern military commanders and strategists included
Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson, James Longstreet, P.G.T. Beauregard, John Mosby, Braxton Bragg,
John Bell Hood, James Ewell Brown (JEB) Stuart, William Mahone, Judah P.
Benjamin, Jubal Early, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Northern military commanders and strategists included Abraham Lincoln,
Edwin M. Stanton, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, George H.
Thomas, George B. McClellan, Henry W. Halleck, Joseph Hooker, Ambrose
Burnside, Irvin McDowell, Winfield Scott, Philip Sheridan, George Crook,
George Armstrong Custer, George G. Meade, and Winfield Hancock
After 1980, scholarly attention turned to ordinary soldiers, and to women
and African Americans involved with the War. As James McPherson observed
"The profound irony of the Civil War was that Confederate and Union
soldiers ... interpreted the heritage of 1776 in opposite ways.
Confederates fought for liberty and independence from what they regarded
as a tyrannical government; Unionists fought to preserve the nation
created by the founders from dismemberment and destruction."(McPherson
1994 p 24)
The Question of Slavery During the War
Lincoln initially declared his purpose to be the preservation of the Union,
not emancipation. He had no wish to alienate the thousands of slaveholders
in the Union border states. The long war, however, had a radicalizing
effect on federal policies. With the Emancipation Proclamation, announced
in September 1862 and put into effect four months later, Lincoln adopted
the abolition of the Slave Power as a second mission—that is slaves owned
by rebels had to be taken away from them and freed.
The Emancipation Proclamation declared all slaves held in territory then
under Confederate control to be "then, thenceforth, and forever free,"
but did not affect slaves in areas under Union control. It did, however,
show the Union that slavery's days were numbered, increasing abolitionist
support in the North. The border states (except Kentucky) abolished
slavery on their own. One goal was to destroy the economic basis of the
Confederate leadership class, and another goal was to actually liberate
the 4 million slaves, which was accomplished by late 1865.
Foreign diplomacy
Because of the Confederacy's attempt to create a new state, recognition
and support from the European powers were critical to its prospects. The
Union, under Secretary of State William Henry Seward attempted to block
the Confederacy's efforts in this sphere. The Confederates hoped that the
importance of the cotton trade to Europe (the idea of cotton diplomacy)
and shortages caused by the war, along with early military victories,
would enable them to gather increasing European support and force a turn
away from neutrality.
President Lincoln's decision to announce a blockade of the Confederacy,
a clear act of war, enabled Britain, followed by other European powers,
to announce their neutrality in the dispute. This enabled the Confederacy
to begin to attempt to gain support and funds in Europe. President
Jefferson Davis had picked Robert Toombs of Georgia as his first Secretary
of State. Toombs, having little knowledge in foreign affairs, was replaced
several months later by Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, another choice
with little suitability. IN early 1862 Davis selected Judah P. Benjamin
as Secretary of State, who although having more international knowledge
and legal experience failed to create a dynamic foreign policy for the
Confederacy.
The first attempts to achieve European recognition of the Confederacy were
dispatched on February 25, 1861 and led by William Lowndes Yancey, Pierre
A. Rost, and Ambrose Dudley Mann. The British foreign minister Lord John
Russell met with them, and the French foreign minister Edouard Thouvenel
received the group unofficially. However, at this point, the two countries
had agreed to coordinate and cooperate and would not make any rash moves.
Charles Francis Adams proved particularly adept as ambassador to Britain
for the Union, and Britain was reluctant to boldly challenge the Union's
blockade. The Confederacy also attempted to initiate propaganda in Europe
through journalists Henry Hotze and Edwin De Leon in Paris and London.
However, public opinion against slavery created a political liability for
European politicians, especially in Britain. A significant challenge in
Anglo-Union relations was also created by the Trent Affair, involving the
Union boarding of a British mail steamer to seize James M. Mason and John
Slidell, Confederate diplomats sent to Europe. However, the Union was able
to smooth over the problem to some degree.
In 1862 the British considered mediation; the Union victory in the Battle
of Antietam caused them to delay this decision. The Emancipation
Proclamation further reinforced the political liability of supporting the
Confederacy. As the war continued, the Confederacy's chances with Britain
grew more hopeless, and they focused increasingly on France. Napoléon III
proposed to offer mediation in January 1863, but this was dismissed by
Seward. Despite some sympathy for the Confederacy, France's own seizure
of Mexico ultimately deterred them from war with the Union. In late 1864
Davis sent Duncan F. Kenner to Europe to test whether a promised
Confederate emancipation of its slaves could lead to possible recognition.
The proposal was strictly rejected by both Britain and France.
Aftermath
Main article: Reconstruction
The Peace Monument at Lookout Mountain, Tennessee depicts a Union and
Confederate soldier shaking hands.
Northern leaders agreed that the war would be over when Confederate
nationalism was dead, and slavery was dead. They disagreed sharply on how
to identify these goals. They also disagreed on the degree of federal
control that should be imposed on the South. The fighting ended with the
surrender of all the Confederate forces. There was no significant
guerrilla warfare. Many senior Confederate leaders escaped to Europe, but
Davis was captured and imprisoned, but never brought to trial. The
question became how much the Union could trust the ex-Confederates to be
truly loyal to the United States. The second main question in
Reconstruction dealt with the destruction of slavery. The XIII Amendment
(1865) officially abolished it legally, but the issue was whether black
codes indicated a sort of semi-slavery, and whether Freedmen should have
the vote to protect those rights.
In 1867, Radicals in Congress pushed aside President Johnson and imposed
new rules. Freedmen gained the right to vote and formed Republican
political coalitions that took control of each state for varying periods.
One by one the white conservatives or "Redeemers" gained back control of
their states, often through lethal force. The final three were redeemed
by the Compromise of 1877. After that, the hatreds between North and South
rapidly diminished until, by 1900, the nation was no longer divided by
the war, though it did remain divided by race.
Ghosts of the conflict still persist in America. For decades after the
war, Northern Republicans "waved the bloody shirt," bringing up memories
of the Civil War as an electoral tactic, while the "Solid South" voted
as a Democratic block in national politics. The Civil Rights Movement of
the 1960s had its neoabolitionist roots in the failure of Reconstruction.
A few debates surrounding the legacy of the war continue, especially
regarding memorials and celebrations of Confederate heroes and battle
flags. The question is a deep and troubling one: Americans with
Confederate ancestors cherish the memory of their bravery and
determination, yet their cause is also tied to the history of African
American slavery.
http://www.answers.com/American%20civil%20war