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Civil War Begins
1860
• Lincoln elected
• 7 states secede before
inauguration
1861
• April: Fort Sumter; 4 more
states secede
• June: Bull Run
• November: SC ports &
forts
1862
• February: Union captures
New Orleans
• April: Shiloh
• April-July: Peninsular
Campaign
• September: Antietam
1863
• July: Vicksburg, Gettysburg
• NY draft riots
1860 Election:
cause of
secession
Are the Republicans
prepared to defy:
• The Constitution?
(which recognizes
slavery)
• Congress? (which,
through 1850
Compromise and
KA/NE Act, allows
expansion of slavery)
• Supreme Court?
(Which, through Dred
Scott decision,
allowed unlimited
expansion of slavery)
Lincoln
states his
case in
inaugural
address
• “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the
States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to
do so…
• I take the official oath to-day with no mental reservations and with no purpose to construe
the Constitution or laws by any hypercritical rules; and while I do not choose now to specify
particular acts of Congress as proper to be enforced, I do suggest that it will be much safer
for all, both in official and private stations, to conform to and abide by all those acts which
stand unrepealed than to violate any of them trusting to find impunity in having them held to
be unconstitutional.
• …no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union…
‘In your
hands…and
not in mine
is…the issue
of war’
•
•
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not
in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government
will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being
yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in
heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the
most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We
must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it
must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of
memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave
to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad
land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again
touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our
nature.”
After
delivering
these words,
Lincoln plans
to resupply
forts Sumter
and Pickens…
Five weeks later,
Charleston shore
batteries bombard Ft.
Sumter. “You can have
no conflict without
being yourselves the
aggressors,” Lincoln had
warned. Now it is war.
“The better angels of our nature” had to wait:
Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers
Four more Southern states secede: AR, TN, NC,
VA
Southern strategy for victory
• Wait for, then resist and wear down invasion
• Seek alliances with Europe
• Take the war to the North when possible, to
shock the public out of their enthusiasm for war’s
human, social, and financial costs
July 1861: Bull
Run shows that
this will be a
fight to the
death, requiring
huge armies,
and not a mere
police action
Southern currency:
a sign that this is a
new country. After
the war, it will be
abolished: the
wealth of the South
evaporates.
Inflation in South
will be over 9000%;
in North, 80%
Trent Affair
risked war
with Britain
November 1861: US navy
captured two Confederate envoys
to Britain and France James
Mason & John Slidell.
This could have meant war;
Prince Albert negotiated facesaving release of the two. Later
US threatens war when Brits
offer to build Confederate ships.
The British are
generally
perplexed by the
Civil War; they
see both sides
as losers…
The Anaconda
strangles its
prey
New Orleans
captured April
1862; cotton
exports drop 98%
At the end of 1862 the
blockade was well on
the way to strangling
Southern commerce.
New Orleans is
captured in late
1862 – after that,
the South is
doomed
• 1860, $191 million of
cotton was exported
• 1862 cotton exports
only $4 million.
• South had difficulty
importing goods such as
ammunition, shoes, and
salt.
Peninsular Campaign
April-July 1862
McClellan moves 100,000 men
to Virginia; after 3 months he
withdraws, failing to take
Richmond
Lincoln begins his search for
a general who will fight
Lincoln replaces McClellan;
• with Halleck till 2nd Bull Run
in August,
• then McClellan again till
after Antietam,
• then Burnside till
Fredericksburg slaughter,
• then Hooker resigns after
June disaster at
Chancellorsville
• then Meade till Gettysburg
Second Bull Run: Union
fails to move on Richmond
Union army again invades
Virginia. On August 29,
1862 Halleck orders Pope
(Union) with 62,000 men to
attack Jackson. Pope
believed that he had
defeated Jackson. The next
day, Longstreet and Lee
moved up to reinforce
Jackson. Longstreet’s
artillery and infantry
shattered Pope’s force,
which fled. Lee pursued to
cut off Pope’s retreat the
next day at Chantilly.
Pope, humiliatingly beaten,
limped back to Washington.
He had lost about 14,500
men to Lee’s 9200.
Antietam: the
South invades
the North
Lee invaded Maryland in
September 1862:
• make the war costly and
repugnant by bringing it to
the North
• public pressure to end the
war - and possible recognition
of the Confederacy by
England and/or France - would
force Lincoln’s hand.
Lee and his army
escaped; Lincoln
used this as an
excuse to issue
the Emancipation
Proclamation,
which freed
slaves in rebel
states.
The deadly
geometry
of the
battlefield
is changed
by a little
hollow in
the base
of the
bullet: the
‘Minie ball’
This changes everything. With a deadly accurate range
of up to 400 yards, the Sharps rifle & minie-ball
makes frontal infantry assault instantly obsolete … but
the generals won’t fully realize this until after WWI.
Both sides pay a grisly toll in dead
and wounded
With this
new bullet,
battlefields
become
scenes of
carnage
Shiloh: 24,000 dead in 2 days (more than all
previous US wars combined)
Sharpsburg/Antietam: 22,000 fall in 1 day
Gettysburg: 50,000 of 160,000 fall in three
days - 6000 dead in minutes in Pickett’s
Charge alone
A new technology
of warfare
emerges
• Railroads & telegraph change logistics of
war
• Better guns change the geometry and
calculus of the battlefield: old tactics
become obsolete
Union Battery: Yorktown, Virginia
McClellan occupied Yorktown, Virginia, in May
1862, building batteries and earthworks.
McClellan prepares a march on Richmond, the
Confederate capital…but is afraid to send
troops into battle. Lincoln fires him.
(Left) Railway mortar: firing hand-lit bombs
weighing up to 300 lbs., soldiers hated it.
‘Ironclad’ warships
presage the
dreadnoughts of
WWI
Clash between Monitor and
Merrimac is the most famous
July 1863 turning
points: Gettysburg and
Vicksburg doom
Confederacy
July 1-3: Gettysburg, last
attempt by the South to
invade the North, cost Lee
1/3 of his entire 70,000man army … and ends the
same day.
July 4, 1863: Union
concluded its conquest of
Vicksburg, a key rail and
river town
At Gettysburg, Lee loses 1/3 of
his army in three days. The
rest of the war will only
postpone the inevitable…
Brief words at Gettysburg
redefine the nation
The brave men, living and dead, who
“Fourscore and seven years ago our
fathers brought forth on this continent,
a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war,
testing whether that nation or any nation
so conceived and so dedicated, can long
endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to
dedicate a portion of that field as a final
resting place for those who here gave
their lives that that nation might live. It
is altogether fitting and proper that we
should do this.
“But, in a larger sense, we cannot
dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we
cannot hallow—this ground.
struggled here, have consecrated it, far
above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long
remember what we say here, but it can
never forget what they did here. It is
for us the living, rather, to be dedicated
here to the unfinished work which they
who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced. It is rather for us to be here
dedicated to the great task remaining
before us—that from these honored
dead we take increased devotion to that
cause for which they gave the last full
measure of devotion—that we here
highly resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain—that this nation, under
God, shall have a new birth of freedom—
and that government of the people, by
the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.”
Confederacy
hacked in two with
the conquest of
Vicksburg on the
Mississippi in July
1863
Grant then takes
Chattanooga in late
November 1863;
Lincoln names him
Union commander in
March 1864
Sherman will
continue east (more
on that later)
Still, there are astonishing accounts of the
politeness of soldiers toward the locals…and
of officers being invited to tea along
Sherman’s path.
“This is a new
kind of war”
Sherman’s March to the
Sea lays waste to a 60mile swath of Georgia
Then he turns north:
pictured here is Columbia,
South Carolina - the capital
city - burned perhaps by
fleeing Confederate soldiers
(like Moscow before
Napoleon’s soldiers), perhaps
by Union invaders.
The grim and brutal
progress of conquest
In the next lecture
we will trace this
process of
dismembering and
breaking the will of
the South…