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The US Civil War in less than
80 powerpoint slides
An incomplete and basic survey of the causes
and conflicts that reshaped these United
States into The United States
Dissonance
1850-1862
The Divide
• Social division was complete by 1861
between the regions.
• Edmund Ruffin, Robert Rhett, Louis T.
Wigfall, and William Lowndes Yancey were
members of the deep southern contingent
agitating for secession and southern
independence.
• Davey Atchison (Senator, D-MO) actively
agitated in the border regions.
• Northerners had an exclusively regional
political party in the Republicans since
1856.
• Radical agitators in the north were far less
influential than their counterparts in the
south.
– John Brown – Pottawattamie Massacre
– William Lloyd Garrison – The Liberator
– “Radical” Republicans - Emancipationists
Conflicts short of wholesale war
•
•
•
•
Bleeding Kansas
Brooks-Sumner Affair
Dred Scott v. Sanford
Missouri “neutrality” and constitutional
convention
Delusion
• Whites believed slaves were happy and
born to serve. The image of the dependant
and eager slave was just that – an image.
– “Cuffee” was a figment of the imagination. The
white south believed deeply in the paternalism
of slavery.
• Slaves who challenged the white
conception were seen as being ill. Dr.
Samuel Cartwright explained these
diseases and proposed cures.
Dr. Cartwright’s “scientific”
diagnoses
• African-American brains were 9/10ths the size of
white brains, but had the same amount of
nerves. This made blacks more prone to
“sensuality at the expense of intellectuality”
• African-Americans had inferior lung capacity and
“molasses-like blood.” This caused maladies
such as
– Drapetomania – the unquenchable propensity toward
fleeing
– Dysaesthesia – insatiable appetite for sloth
• The cure was to get the blood moving and
oxygenated. This was best done with the lash.
More “science”
• Josiah Nott, Louis Agassiz, George
Gliddon were proponents of the theory of
polygenesis
– They based this conclusion on skull sizes
(capacity) and temperatures at various
latitudes.
If the US had constant
compromises and the
ability to mediate
differences, why did the
US suddenly split and go
to war with itself in 1861?
The Civil War
The Prewar Assessment
Motives for Secession
• Lincoln’s Election in 1860
– Within days, S. Carolina seceded. Buchanan
did VERY little to stop this.
– Before Lincoln was inaugurated, six more
states quit the union
• These states are considered “the Lower South”
– Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, S.
Carolina and Texas
• Joined by four more by the start of the war
– Virginia, Arkansas, N. Carolina, Tennessee
Motives for Secession
• Northern Domination
– The south felt overpowered by northern
political, industrial, banking and
manufacturing interests
• Economically, they were an internal COLONY.
Politically, they were “on the ropes”
– Lincoln represented the new Republican north. He won
without carrying a single southern state.
Race and Baiting
• To the South, Lincoln represented
emancipation.
– Culturally, this threatened the Herrenvolk
society. Fears of miscegenation were
widespread.
– Economically, they were weaker (as you will
see). They held only four strengths going into
the war.
Southern Advantages
•
•
•
•
Fear of Black Citizenship (and racial equality)
Cotton
The Threat of Secession
Possible home-field advantage if a war should
break out with the best military leadership and a
well-armed society (due to fear of slave rebellions!)
Northern Strengths
• 23 States
– Including California, Oregon and four slave-holding
“border” states (Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware,
Maryland), PLUS seven territories and the Western
part of Virginia.
– Population: 22 Million (4 million men combat age)
– Economy: 100,000 factories
• 1.1 million workers
• 20,000 miles of railroad (70% of US Total, 96% of all railroad
equipment
Northern Strengths
• 23 States
– Economy: 100,000 factories
• 1.1 million workers
• 20,000 miles of railroad (70% of US Total, 96% of
all railroad equipment
• $189 million in bank deposits (81% of all money in
banks)
• $56 million in gold reserves
Southern Comparisons
• 11 States
• Population: 9 million (3.5 million slaves, 1.2 million men
of combat age)
• Economy: 20,000 factories
–
–
–
–
101,000 workers
9,000 miles of railroad
$47 million in bank deposits
$27 million in gold reserves
• OUTPRODUCED IN EVERYTHING EXCEPT MULES
AND COTTON!
• Military Leadership and familiarity with battlefields would
prove essential
Why did they lose?
The Confederacy fought a defensive war, much
like the American Revolution. How did they
manage to lose?
A draw would be a win for the CSA (Survival is
Victory), but the Union would need to annihilate!
THIS IS THE SAME ISSUE FACED IN THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION, but the outcome will
be much different.
WHY?
Civil War
Part 1
Politically Fractured
• Two versions of Republicanism destroy
the two party system.
• There are no National parties after 1856.
• Democrats are Subdivided between FREE SOIL
and FIREATERS.
• Whigs split as Cotton and Union Whigs (the latter
becomes the Republican Party)
• 4 separate sectional parties vie for election
in 1860.
John Brown
• Represented the
personification of white
southerners’ worst
nightmare.
• Attempted to take a
federal armory to arm
slaves and abolitionists
• Gave ammunition to fireeaters and put
Republicans on the
defensive
Stakes in the War
“Upon the course of our arms, all else depends” –
A. Lincoln
• In 1861, the CSA has the heavy advantage
– A defensive war means you just have to stretch out
the invaders and attack weaknesses. A draw is good
enough
– At the time of the split, CSA had the most
experienced military officers. Most field grade
officers above the rank of major joined the CSA.
– COTTON DIPLOMACY – If CSA could get foreign
help, they were sure they would win (American Rev).
– COTTON DIPLOMACY – If CSA could get
foreign help, they were sure they would win
(American Rev). South believed their cotton
employed hundreds of thousands of British
and French textile workers. This could be
used as leverage.
– Seamless Society – United in a common war
effort, desire to maintain slavery/white
supremacy, a way of life, a vision of
republicanism. USA is disunited and this is a
partisan war Democrats do not support
– LEADERSHIP –
Jefferson Davis
• By far, the most
qualified war-time
president ever to serve.
War hero, West Point
graduate. Colonel in
Mexican American War
(with citations), senator
and secretary of war.
The best possible
leader (on paper).
DAVIS v. LINCOLN
• Davis was a militaristic politician, centered on
building an army to defend a “new nation”.
• Lincoln served for a month in a minor Indian war
in the 1830s. In 1861, he was concerned with
patronage and politics, not the military.
THIS IS WHY THE SOUTH FELT THEY COULD
WIN. THEY HAD FIVE SOLID ADVANTAGES.
They had the North beaten in almost every
aspect.
Civil War outbreak
Phase 1 of 4
April 1861-Dec 1862
SUMMARY: Confederacy has its
best chance to win on the
battlefield. US is unprepared, but
all apparent southern
advantages turn into liabilities.
The war is essentially a stalemate
at the end of 1862
Jefferson Davis
Not a strong wartime leader
and a poor politician.
• He has some serious
leadership flaws.
–
–
–
–
Cannot accept criticism
Stubborn
Alienates “united people”
INDECISIVE!
• He has a political paradox
in his lap, never solves this
issue
The Confederate Paradox
This government is built on State Supremacy in a
loose confederacy. HOWEVER, they are
fighting a much stronger enemy with a strong
central organization.
• To defeat the US, the CSA needs to have a
strong, decisive federal command in
Richmond, yet not assail the “States’ Rights”
• Davis attempts to walk this line at his own peril
Southern Military Split
Gen. Joseph E. Johnston
– Virginian in command of
the Western Theater
– Believes the war will be
won or lost in the Ohio
Valley
– His troops invade
Kentucky, causing
Kentucky to remain in the
Union.
Gen. Robert E. Lee
– Virginian in command of
the Eastern Theater
– Believes war will be won or
lost in 90 mile corridor
between Richmond and DC
– Lee tries to force CSA
wins, but battles are
indecisive. Antietam was
his attempt for a Saratoga.
Davis’s attempts
• As military commander, he MUST mediate and
decide to back Lee OR Johnston. He never
does.
– Confederates have NO UNITED STRATEGY to win
the war militarily. As long as the union is invading,
they win.
• When he is decisive, he creates more problems.
– Set quotas for farm and factory production
• If/When quotas were not met, the government took over the
factory or farm
– Established wage controls and suspended free
market economy. Necessary but INCREDIBLY
unpopular.
Cotton Diplomacy Fails
• CSA NEEDS Britain. They never get their
“Saratoga” and Britain will not risk
supporting them. (Antietam was the failed
attempt at great costs)
• England does not need southern cotton
because they stockpiled it before the war.
• England is making lots of $$ supplying
both sides with weapons and other goods
(English rifles are the best in the world)
MONEY
• CSA was too weak to run a wartime
nation.
– Passed Sales Taxes but that did not raise
enough.
– Could not effectively sell bonds – no
investment capital and people are reluctant to
buy them (fear if CSA loses, they lose their
money!)
– Hyperinflation results. By 1865, a confederate
dollar is worth $0.03. Money is worthless.
Class Conflict
• The latency of class conflict becomes
manifest and very real during the war.
– Farmers resent fixed prices and crop quotas
– Poor resent entire program of taxation and
hyperinflation.
– BIGGEST RESENTMENT was to the Draft of
March, 1862.
• 20 slave exemption ignites class conflict
Institution of Slavery
• Originally thought of as an asset, quickly
becomes a liability.
– US invasions create abilities for slaves to flee
• Half a million slaves run away in 1862
• Another 186,000 joined the Union Armies
• THE CONFEDERACY WAS SUPPLYING UNION
TROOPS IN THE FORM OF RUNAWAYS!
• By 1865, Black US soldiers alone will outnumber
remaining CSA soldiers.
• Destroys the illusion of the happy, servile slave
Phase 2
Dec 1862- Aug 1864
Summary – Phase 2
The Union realizes potential strengths. US
coordinates civilian and military command
structure. Lincoln assumes a VERY
powerful role at the top of the hierarchy.
Phase 2 (continued)
• Us neutralizes southern advantages of military
manpower and leadership by finding leaders
from within to wage TOTAL WAR.
• US is able to pay for the war through an effective
income tax and the sale of war bonds.
• Northern Agriculture has REALLY good years
• African Americans are recruited to fight, bringing
a new morality to the war
– Two reasons – Preserving the Union and Liberation!
The Emancipation Proclamation
Jan 1, 1863.
This TECHNICALLY would not have freed any
slave. It was a political move to agitate the south
and appease the growing abolitionist sentiment.
• This freed only slaves in states of open rebellion.
These are Confederate states that saw Lincoln
as a foreign president.
• This did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to free slaves
in border states.
The Emancipation Proclamation was not
intended to be an anti-slavery revision to
the constitution. It was a war powers
declaration to take property!
Phase 3
August 1864 – Middle of September 1864
Phase 3 Summary
This is the LAST opportunity for a Confederate
win, because the US may not have the WILL TO
CONQUER and wage TOTAL WAR.
• Grant invades Virginia, May 1864. Not one
battle, but 8 months of constant warfare.
– Trench Warfare is utilized. This is a preview for WWI.
– The Battle of Cold Harbor is one of the bloodiest and
costliest, as well as most decisive
Phase 3 Summary
• Grant’s regiments are approximately 1000 men
each. Each one suffers between 20-60%
casualties.
– There are 60,000 casualties under Grant alone.
• Public opinion in both the Union and
Confederacy turns pacifistic.
• Sherman captures Atlanta. First DECISIVE
victory.
Phase 4
Sept 1864 – Apr 1865
Phase 4
The war turns anti-slavery. There is a
propagandized view that the Union had
always held slavery was immoral.
• March 1865. Lincoln’s second inaugural
address said that the Civil War was God’s
punishment for slavery. References that
containment was not enough. Slavery
must be destroyed.
• The Confederates were starving, failing to unite,
and lost their best military leaders.
• Political heads such as Judah Benjamin were
unable to keep the confederated states together
with the staggering losses and poor supplies.
• Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon
(and his USA counterpart Edwin Stanton)
operated POW camps of absolute starvation and
desolation. Military morale was low for both
sections, but lower in the South.
Civil War
The Southern Experience
Social Upheaval
The entire plantation system is fractured.
• Slavery rested on order, discipline, control,
authority. This broke down over war-time
necessity
• War causes a switch from cotton to food
as people in an AGRICULTURAL society
were starving.
This war economically devastated the south.
Almost all Confederate capital was
destroyed. This costs the confederacy $12
billion in our money ($9 billion in lost
slaves)
• Britain’s cotton embargo made growing cotton
temporarily obsolete for the moment
– (although there was still SOME market for the good,
demand and prices fell)
• Slaves were forced to work independently and at
their own pace in growing diversified crops
– Mutual obligations are unfulfilled. Slave-owners send
food and clothing to the Army, slaves go uncared for.
Slaves work less.
• White men are pressed into joining the
army.
– Surrogate “Masters” are less competent.
Women, elderly men, even children. They do
not have strong-handed tactics and slaves
flee. Many stay on and ignore their authority.
– This is why the 20 slave exemption was seen
as necessary
Life Outside of Plantations
• Many skilled industrial jobs were only open
to slaves, so many slaves were the most
skilled factory workers.
• BLACK CONFEDERATES = skilled slaves
producing war goods. Industrial workers.
Often worked without white management.
They gained a sense of freedom, were
promised freedom after the war.
• Impressment – The CSA army seizes slaves to
become soldiers. They are not armed, but do
manual work (dig ditches, move logs, nurses,
spies). They are promised freedom after the war.
• The idea of black soldiers negates the core
identity of the Confederacy, and of the honor of
the Confederate military. Many CSA supporters
become further disillusioned.
Desperation
• By 1865, the CSA was doomed. Once Sherman
took Atlanta, a union win was assured.
• Nov 1864. J.Davis asks congress to enlist black
soldiers who will be paid in their own freedom.
• March 1865. Davis makes a secret pact with
Great Britain to abolish slavery in exchange for
recognition. WHAT WAS UNTHINKABLE IN
1861 IS A NECESSITY IN 1865!
• SLAVERY is a casualty of the war.
Civil War
The Union Experience
Antebellum
• The North differs from the South in that it
has a two party system (corrupt as it may
be) and free labor (including the freedom
to pay starvation wages).
• John Brown was demonized in the North
(and South); William Lloyd Garrison was a
crackpot to most Northerners.
After the War
• The Republicans dominate political institutions
for the next 40 years+. Democrats are the party
of treason (Copperheads). Corruption persists
and even increases.
– Clement Laird Vallandigham (D-OH), Suspension of
Habeas Corpus in the Border States
• John Brown becomes a hero second to Lincoln
and Garrison is widely accepted. The North
transforms by 1864 into a culture of abolitionism.
The Slavery Question
At the Onset, this was not about SLAVERY, but
about the expansion of slave society.
THE US COULD HAVE:
1. Incited slave revolts
2. Encouraged runaways
3. Immediately accepted Black Volunteer troops
All of these would send CSA soldiers home to
battle slave insurrections.
The war was 18 months old before Lincoln
attacked slavery. He did so to hasten the end of
the war. Had he done it earlier, the war effort
would likely collapse due to economic support
for slavery.
• Attacking slavery also ensured England’s
support and prevented a CSA alliance.
• Morally, it proves Lincoln’s version of
Republicanism and Free Soil.
At any rate, it serves to remove the
hypocrisy of a slave society believing in
equality and freedom.
“Equality” will have other challenges in the
industrial north for several generations.
13th Amendment
Slavery actually ends with a constitutional
change to remove the protections of the
“peculiar institution” of “involuntary
servitude”.
• Passed by Congress in 1865. States
HAVE TO ratify it to regain admission to
the USA
• Part of Reconstruction
• Slavery ends due to consequences of war
SUMMARY
This bloody and tragic conflict can be oversimply
summarized as follows:
The Civil War guaranteed “one nation, indivisible.”
It ended the conflict of the
centralizers/decentralizers. Sovereignty rests in
the Federal Government. This left a wartime
bitterness that still has not healed.
Summary
This war also set a precedent that Presidents have
UNLIMITED powers in times of national
emergency.
-- there is an irony that the south feared the
strength of the “abolitionist Lincoln” to such a
degree that they caused Lincoln to be the
strongest president in US History, and also
made him into an abolitionist!
What This Cruel War Was Over
“The real war will never get in the books”
-Walt Whitman
“War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it.
The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
-William Tecumseh Sherman
Changes
• American’s relationship to the government is
fundamentally changed
– Before the war, most Americans ONLY contact with
the Federal Government was their local post office.
– Serving in the war gave many veterans more
exposure to different regions
– The central government became more of an authority
(and more authoritarian) during the war. This will
continue after the war.
– In the antebellum period, it was THESE UNITED
STATES (plural). Afterwards, it is The United States
(singular).
• Death
– Death was a personal, intimate family affair in
the antebellum period
– Hundreds of thousands dying far from home
in anonymous graves creates several death
industries
– Photography shifts death remembrances from
the personal to the collective
• Political landscape
– Democrats were painted as Copperheads
– Republicans dominated the south in the postwar
period
– Southern states were divided into military districts and
run accordingly
– Southern women acted out “political ventriloquism”
through commemoration
– “Radical Republicans” controlled congress and a
Southern Republican controlled the executive branch.
• Redeemer Democrats were active in the south, but not
openly.
– Key people on the political landscape
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Benjamin Butler
Benjamin Wade
Thaddeus Stevens
Charles Sumner
Andrew Johnson
Edwin M. Stanton
Abraham Lincoln
• Industrialization and Agrarianism
– The Northern victory was largely due to
industrial output. Industrialization will speed
up as a result of the war.
– Many of the wealthiest Americans in the postwar 19th century earned their fortune directly
or indirectly from the war.
– The agrarian democracy of the CSA would be
dormant until 1896.
– Key people on the industrial landscape
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
John Pierpont Morgan
John Davidson Rockefeller
Andrew Carnegie
Jay Gould
Philip Armour
George Mortimer Pullman
Marshall Field
• Abolition?
– The war did not start about slavery, but ended
as a war for emancipation.
– The 13th amendment ended slavery, but not
the conditions of slavery.
• General O. O. Howard’s efforts were stymied by
Andrew Johnson
• Redemption and Reconstruction concerns
sidelined the status of Freedmen.
Post-war Conflict
• Reconstruction is highly charged, both in
contemporary politics of the 19th century
and in the historiography. (see handout)
• Dealing with the status of the southern
states, Confederate soldiers, Confederate
officers and other “treasonous” people
would be a dominant theme in American
politics for the following 13 years.