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A Brief Overview of the American
Civil War
A DEFINING TIME IN OUR NATION'S HISTORY
BY DR. JAMES MCPHERSON
Abraham Lincoln (National Archives)
The Civil War is the central event in America's historical consciousness. While the
Revolution of 1776-1783 created the United States, the Civil War of 1861-1865
determined what kind of nation it would be. The war resolved two fundamental
questions left unresolved by the revolution: whether the United States was to be a
dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign
national government; and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men were
created with an equal right to liberty, would continue to exist as the largest
slaveholding country in the world.
Northern victory in the war preserved the United States as one nation and ended the institution of
slavery that had divided the country from its beginning. But these achievements came at the cost of
625,000 lives--nearly as many American soldiers as died in all the other wars in which this country
has fought combined. The American Civil War was the largest and most destructive conflict in the
Western world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the onset of World War I in
1914.
The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over
the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become
states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform
pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and
formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and
most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it
would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer
United States into several small, squabbling countries.
The event that triggered war came at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay on April 12, 1861. Claiming this
United States fort as their own, the Confederate army on that day opened fire on the federal garrison
and forced it to lower the American flag in surrender. Lincoln called out the militia to suppress this
"insurrection." Four more slave states seceded and joined the Confederacy. By the end of 1861 nearly
a million armed men confronted each other along a line stretching 1200 miles from Virginia to
Missouri. Several battles had already taken place--near Manassas Junction in Virginia, in the
mountains of western Virginia where Union victories paved the way for creation of the new state of
West Virginia, at Wilson's Creek in Missouri, at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and at Port Royal in
South Carolina where the Union navy established a base for a blockade to shut off the Confederacy's
access to the outside world.
But the real fighting began in 1862. Huge battles like Shiloh in Tennessee,Gaines' Mill, Second
Manassas, and Fredericksburg in Virginia, andAntietam in Maryland foreshadowed even bigger
campaigns and battles in subsequent years, from Gettysburg in Pennsylvania to Vicksburg on the
Mississippi to Chickamauga and Atlanta in Georgia. By 1864 the original Northern goal of a limited
war to restore the Union had given way to a new strategy of "total war" to destroy the Old South and
its basic institution of slavery and to give the restored Union a "new birth of freedom," as President
Lincoln put it in his address at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for Union soldiers killed in the battle
there.
Bodies in front of the Dunker Church - Antietam Battlefield (Library of Congress)
For three long years, from 1862 to 1865, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia staved off
invasions and attacks by the Union Army of the Potomac commanded by a series of ineffective
generals until Ulysses S. Grant came to Virginia from the Western theater to become general in chief
of all Union armies in 1864. After bloody battles at places with names like The
Wilderness, Spotsylvania,Cold Harbor, and Petersburg, Grant finally brought Lee to bay at Appomattox in
April 1865. In the meantime Union armies and river fleets in the theater of war comprising the slave
states west of the Appalachian Mountain chain won a long series of victories over Confederate armies
commanded by hapless or unlucky Confederate generals. In 1864-1865 General William Tecumseh
Sherman led his army deep into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and South Carolina,
destroying their economic infrastructure while General George Thomas virtually destroyed the
Confederacy's Army of Tennessee at the battle of Nashville.
By the spring of 1865 all the principal Confederate armies surrendered, and when Union cavalry
captured the fleeing Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Georgia on May 10, 1865, resistance
collapsed and the war ended. The long, painful process of rebuilding a united nation free of slavery
began.
Battle of Port Hudson
New Orleans fell to Federal troops in late April 1862, Confederate control of the Mississippi was
in jeopardy. The Confederate army had already fortified the river bluffs at Vicksburg, Mississippi,
but it needed another series of river batteries below the mouth of the Red River. The Red River
was the primary route for the shipment of supplies from Texas to the heartland of the
Confederacy.
The bluffs near the small town of Port Hudson represented a perfect site for the river batteries.
These bluffs were the first high ground upstream from Baton Rouge and overlooked a severe
bend in the river. This bend presented an additional obstacle for Union warships.
The siege of Port Hudson began on May 23, 1863. Roughly 30,000 Union troops, under the
command of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, were pitted against 6,800 Confederates, under
the command of Major General Franklin Gardner. The ensuing battles constituted some of the
bloodiest and most severe fighting in the entire Civil War.
As the siege continued, the Confederates nearly exhausted their ammunition and were reduced
to eating mules, horses and rats. When word reached Gardner that Vicksburg had surrendered,
he realized that his situation was hopeless and nothing could be gained by continuing the
defense of Port Hudson. Surrender terms were negotiated, and on July 9, 1863, after 48 days
and thousands of casualties, the Union army entered Port Hudson. The siege became the
longest in American military history.
Prior to one of the most intense attacks by the Union soldiers, on May 27, a bold experiment
was decided upon. Two African-American regiments were chosen to participate in the fight. The
First and Third Louisiana Native Guards proved their worth by pressing an attack against a wellfortified Confederate position. After the siege, the garrison at Port Hudson became a recruiting
center for African-American troops.
In 1974, the Port Hudson battlefield was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S.
Department of the Interior. It joined a select group of properties which have been recognized for
their importance in American History. Port Hudson State Historic Site hosts several living history
events, including the Battle of Port Hudson re-enactment held annually during the last full
weekend of March. Visitors can watch authentically costumed interpreters demonstrate Civil
War weapons and equipment.
Reconstructed Plantations
In the late 1800s, Mark Twain noted on his adventures down the mighty Mississippi that there were
so many plantations and dwellings along the river that it looked like a spacious street. Towering
homes lay nestled in large patches of moss-draped oak trees. Slaves worked the sugarcane fields,
while planters from as far away as Europe brought materials and furnishings in by steamboat.
Still today you can catch a glimpse of what Twain once saw on the riverfront by embarking on a tour
of Louisiana's plantation homes and museums.
Just 20 miles outside of New Orleans, Destrehan Plantation dates to 1787 and is the oldest
documented plantation in the lower Mississippi Valley. Once stretching over 6,000 acres to the
shores of Lake Pontchartrain, Destrehan was actually a small community that supported several
households.
It's still easy to imagine Destrehan as it was more than 200 years ago. Members of the Destrehan
family tended to administrative affairs and held lavish dinners in the main house. Steamboats
arrived from New Orleans with furnishings and visitors, while caretakers tended to the manicured
gardens. Destrehan offers daily historic demonstrations by costumed guides who offer visitors a
glimpse into what life was like during the 1800s.
Just upriver is San Francisco Plantation, the most distinctive and only authentically restored plantation
on River Road. Noted for its lavish and intricate interior painting, the home was built in 1865 and
inspired novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes to write a novel about it, Steamboat Gothic.
Cross the bridge near Gramercy and head north to Oak Alley Plantation, named for the quarter-mile
entrance canopy of 300-year-old oak trees. A 40-minute tour given by costumed guides chronicles
the history of the elaborate mansion that was built in 1837. Next door to Oak Alley is St. Joseph
Plantation, one of the most complete plantation homes on River Road. Tour the blacksmith shop and
peek into the on-site schoolhouse, and be sure to stop by the visitor's center to pick up handmade
gifts, many of them made by descendants of those who once lived at St. Joseph.
Upriver from Oak Alley you'll find Houmas House Plantation. This is a stately Greek Revival home
which, at its peak in the 1860s, was the largest sugar producer in the United States. Today Houmas
House is best known for its gardens, impeccably decorated interior, tours given by costumed guides
and a world-class restaurant.
Downriver from Oak Alley, Laura Plantation once spanned 12,000 acres of sugarcane, the lifeblood of
plantations in the 19th century. Visitors to Laura, whose can still find kettles, tools and other
remnants of the sugar cane industry—as well as the crop itself, which is still grown throughout
Plantation Country. Select from one of three tours — Plantation Slaves, Artisans & Folklore; Women
on the Creole Plantation; and Laura's Taste of Wine.
In 1792, Pierre Clidamone Becnel, a grandson of some of the first German immigrants in the area,
built a small cottage near Edgard that would one day be known as Evergreen Plantation. It is one of only
eight major Greek Revival plantation homes on River Road, and contains one of the most complete intact collections
of slave cabins in the nation.
Next door to Evergreen Plantation is The Whitney Plantation. Opened in December 2014, The Whitney
offers visitors a unique view of plantation life as it was lived by those who worked there — enslaved
Africans. Take a guided tour to see three memorials dedicated to telling the story of slavery in
Louisiana, as well as an original slave cabin and church. The Whitney is one of the oldest and bestpreserved plantations on River Road.
A shift from sugar cane, cotton is the focus at the Frogmore Plantation and Gins in east-central
Louisiana. The plantation began in the early 1800s and still today produces cotton for the garment
industry. Frogmore has more than a fair share of stories, having been the site of a Union
encampment during the Civil War, and is one of the best-preserved cotton plantations in the
Mississippi River Delta.