Download Chapter 11: The Peculiar Institution

Chapter 14: A New Birth of Freedom: The Civil War, 1861–1865
1. How did a war to preserve the Union become a war to end slavery? (Discuss
Lincoln and the Union government’s initial policy toward slavery. Why was their
largely a “hands-off” policy in regards to slavery? How and why did the “handsoff” policy evolve towards emancipation?) See pgs.491-495 (3rd Ed.)
2. It took four years for the Union to defeat the Confederacy. Given the
tremendous advantages the North had over the South, why is this surprising? Or,
can an argument be made that the Union victory was far from a sure thing? (Be
sure to use evidence to support whichever view you take.)
3. How did the Civil War contribute to a stronger American nation-state? (What
role did Lincoln play in bringing about a transformation of American government
and society during the Civil War?)
See pgs.498-501, 504-505, also Lincoln’s
Address at Sanitary Fair, April 18, 1864 on p.503 (3rd Ed.)
The American Civil War has been called the first modern war. This was the first time
mass armies fought with weapons forged by the Industrial Revolution, and the scale
of casualties was unprecedented in American history. The war became a conflict
between societies, as the distinction between military and civilian targets
diminished. Wars like this depend on the effectiveness of political leaders, the
capacity to mobilize economic resources, and a society’s determination to continue
the war, despite failures.
The Union seemed favored over the Confederacy. The North, including loyal border
states, had a population of 22 million, while the South had only 9 million, 3.5 million
of whom were slaves. The Union had far more manufacturing, railroad track, and
financial resources. Yet, to end the rebellion, the Union had to invade and conquer a
huge area and defeat spirited Confederate soldiers defending homes and families.
Even if the South lost most battles, it could win by exhausting the enemy.
The outbreak of war stimulated powerful feelings of patriotism, and recruits
hastened to enlist, thinking the war would be short and glorious. Both sides later
resorted to a draft, the Confederacy in 1862, the Union the next year. By 1865, more
than 2 million men had served in the Union army, and 900,000 in the Confederate.
Few soldiers had any military experience, and their notions of war were romantic.
Soldiers and officers did not anticipate how technological advances changed
warfare. The Civil War was the first major conflict in which the railroad moved
troops and supplies. The war saw the famous battle between the Union vessel
Monitor and Confederate Merrimac in 1862, which showed the advantage of
ironclads over wooden ships and transformed naval warfare. The telegraph,
observation balloons, and even hand grenades and submarines were used for the
first time. Most important was the revolution in arms manufacturing, which
1
replaced the musket, accurate only at a short range, with the rifle, deadly at 600 or
more yards because of its grooved barrel. This changed the nature of combat,
making far more important heavy fortifications and trenches and giving defensive
forces (usually Confederates) a significant advantage. This development produced
the awful casualties of the war’s battles.
Medical care was primitive, and large numbers of Americans for the first time were
captured and held as prisoners of war in camps, leading to high death rates. At least
620,000 died in the war, the equivalent of more than 6 million in today’s population,
and more than the entire number of Americans killed in all other wars in U.S.
history, from the Revolution to the Iraq war.
The Civil War was also modern in the use of propaganda by both sides to mobilize
public opinion. In the North, patriotic organizations and the War Department
reaffirmed northern values, portrayed the Democratic Party as treasonous, and
accused the South of crimes against Union soldiers and loyal civilians. The South
engaged in similar campaigns. Modern media, with newspapers, telegraphs, and
especially photographs, for the first time captured the often shocking reality of war
and communicated it to the public.
Both sides were unprepared for war. There was no national banking system, no tax
system to raise revenue for the war, and few accurate maps of the South. After Fort
Sumter, Lincoln enacted a blockade of the South, intended to destroy its commerce,
but the navy at first had too few ships to enforce it.
The problems of purchasing and distributing food, weapons, and other supplies for
the armies were huge. While the Union Army eventually became the best-fed and
best-supplied force in history, southern soldiers lacked food, uniforms, and shoes.
Lacking sufficient industrial capacity, the Confederate government imported many
items for the military from abroad and established its own arsenals.
Each side tried to exploit its advantages—the South, by adopting a defensive
strategy to wear down the North, led by the brilliant Robert E. Lee, and the North, by
using its superiority in manpower and technology. But the northern army was at
first small, its officers and leadership were poor, and it was focused on capturing
Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital, a difficult task. Lincoln soon realized that
capturing and occupying territory would not win the war; defeating the South’s
armies would. Lincoln’s eventual embrace of emancipation acknowledged that
slavery was the basis of the Confederacy, and that to win the conflict, the Union had
to make this institution, the economic and social foundation of the South, a military
target.
Most of the war in the East occurred in a narrow corridor between Washington and
Richmond, as a series of Union generals led the North’s Army of the Potomac toward
the Confederate capital, only to be repeatedly repulsed by the main Confederate
army. The first significant clash at Bull Run ended in the defeat and chaotic retreat
of Union forces. This battle ended the widespread belief that the war would end
2
quickly. George B. McClellan soon took command of the Union’s main army, but after
thoroughly training this army’s tens of thousands of volunteer soldiers, he proved
reluctant to commit them to battle. McClellan was a Democrat, and he hoped that
compromise might end the conflict without many casualties or weakening slavery.
Pressured by public opinion, President Lincoln, and Congress, McClellan, in the
spring of 1862, led his army of more than 100,000 men into Virginia. Approaching
the Confederate capital on the peninsula southwest of Richmond, McClellan’s
advance was ably deflected by Lee in a series of battles, forcing McClellan back to
Washington, D.C. After Lee won the second Battle of Bull Run in August, 1862, he
invaded the North, hoping to bring border slave states into the Confederacy, gain
French and British recognition of southern independence, influence the North’s
elections in the fall, and perhaps capture Washington, D.C. At the Battle of Antietam,
McClellan and the Army of the Potomac repelled Lee’s invasion. In one day at
Antietam, nearly 4,000 men were killed and 18,000 wounded. More Americans died
in this battle on September 17, 1862, than on any other day in American history,
including Pearl Harbor and D-Day in World War II and the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001. Northern triumph was short-lived. General Ambrose E.
Burnside, who replaced McClellan, was repulsed by Lee’s army at Fredricksburg,
Virginia, in December 1862, with heavy losses.
The North had better luck in the West. There Ulysses S. Grant, a West Point graduate
whose army career had been ruined by his excessive drinking, captured several
important forts in Tennessee in early 1862. In April 1862, naval forces under
Admiral David G. Farragut steamed into New Orleans and captured that city for the
Union, which now controlled the South’s largest city and its lucrative nearby sugar
plantations. After Grant repelled a surprise Confederate attack at Shiloh, Tennessee,
Union success in the West stalled.
The Civil War had revolutionary effects on American society, the most important of
which was the destruction of slavery, the fundamental institution of southern
society. The emancipation of America’s 4 million slaves, in numbers, scale, and
economic value, was far greater than any other emancipation of slaves or serfs (in
Russia) in the world. At the war’s beginning, Lincoln identified the North’s cause
with the cause of free labor. But Lincoln also initially stated that the conflict was not
being fought to end or limit slavery, but to preserve the Union. He wanted to keep
the border slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri in the Union
and build the broadest possible base of support for the war in the North.
As Confederates used slave labor for military purposes and blacks began to escape
to Union lines, this initial policy of ignoring slavery became untenable. By the end of
1861, Union commanders had begun treating escaped slaves as “contraband” of
war—property of military value subject to confiscation. Southern blacks themselves
took actions that propelled the Union toward ending slavery. Well before Lincoln’s
Emancipation Act, slaves saw the war as an opportunity to gain their freedom.
3
Thousands escaped to the safety of Union lines, crippling many plantations. In areas
occupied by northern soldiers, slaves refused to work unless paid.
Anti-slavery northerners pressed the federal government to realize that slavery was
the basis of the southern economy and its military capacities, and they insisted
emancipation was required in order to weaken the South. Abolitionists and Radical
Republicans demanded, none more adamantly than Fredrick Douglas, that abolition
become a war aim. Congress, frustrated by military failures, prohibited the army
from returning fugitive slaves, abolished slavery in Washington, D.C., and the
territories, and passed the Second Confiscation Act, which freed slaves of disloyal
owners in Union-occupied territory and slaves who escaped to Union lines. But
Lincoln reversed the policies of Union generals who declared emancipation in their
districts, and he still endorsed colonization as a solution to slavery.
In summer 1862, Lincoln decided that emancipation had become a military and
political necessity. He delayed his intention to free the slaves until after a Union
victory, and after the battle of Antietam, he issued a preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation. Democrats in the North used the declaration to gain votes, arguing
that Republicans threatened to inundate the North with cheap black labor and allow
blacks to marry white women. The Democrats gained considerable political
victories in some northern states, and Lincoln, now on the defensive, revived plans
for gradual emancipation and colonization and downplayed racial equality.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The
document did not free all the slaves and at first applied to very few. Based on
Lincoln’s authority as military commander-in-chief, the proclamation exempted
areas under Union control. Thus, it did not apply to loyal border slave states that
had not seceded or to parts of the Confederacy occupied by Union forces, such as
Tennessee and parts of Virginia and Louisiana. But it declared free the vast majority
of the South’s slaves, more than 3 million men, women, and children. Still behind
Confederate lines, these slaves would be free only when Union military success
made them so.
The Emancipation Proclamation made the Union Army an agent of freedom and
promised the death of slavery by combining the goals of abolition and the Union. It
altered the nature of the Civil War and the course of American history. It also
represented a change in Lincoln’s thinking. Lincoln did not mention compensating
slaveholders for the loss of their slaves, nor did he mention colonization. The order
committed the North to enlisting blacks soldiers in the Union Army.
Emancipation in the United States, unlike elsewhere, was immediate and offered no
compensation. It anticipated the demise of slavery in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil
(the last nation to abolish slavery in the Western Hemisphere, in 1888). Now the
Civil War, begun to preserve the nation, now promised a revolutionary
transformation of southern life and a redefinition of American freedom. Without
4
colonization, emancipation meant incorporating freed slaves into American life. A
new system of labor, politics, and race relations would have to replace slavery.
The proclamation’s provision allowing blacks to enlist in the army had far-reaching
effects. Although the navy allowed blacks to serve as sailors, they had been excluded
from the army. Lincoln’s administration first refused to allow blacks to enlist,
fearing that it would alienate white soldiers and border slave states that stayed in
the Union. But a few union commanders enlisted soldiers who were contraband, as
happened in South Carolina. Only with the Emancipation Proclamation did
significant black enlistment begin. By the end of the war, 180,000 black men had
served in the Union Army, and 24,000 in the Union Navy. One-third died in battle,
from wounds, or disease. Black soldiers and units received considerable notoriety
after showing great heroism in battle, such as the 54th Massachusetts and its assault
on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1863 (popularized in the film Glory). Most black
soldiers were emancipated slaves who joined the army in the South. Many were
slaves from loyal border states excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation,
where enlistment was, for most of the war, the only road to freedom.
Military service was liberating for many black soldiers, who earned a new sense of
dignity and rights. As veterans, many of these troops became community and
political leaders, including many of the Reconstruction era. Within the army,
however, black troops received discriminatory treatment, including being led only
by white officers, being more often assigned to work rather than combat duty, and
at first receiving unequal pay. They were targeted by Confederates, who executed
some black prisoners. But black soldiers’ service ensured that they could make
claims on the government for equal rights and citizenship in the war’s aftermath.
Because it radically transformed American government and society, some historians
call the American Civil War the Second American Revolution. Notions of freedom
were contested and transformed by the war. Union victory secured the North’s
understanding of freedom as self-ownership and owning one’s own labor, as
opposed to the South’s vision of freedom as mastership over others. The war
advanced abolitionists’ definitions of freedom, and Lincoln’s emancipation of the
slaves reinforced Americans’ sense that their nation was a progressive force in
world history.
Lincoln did the most to link the war with northern values. The American Civil War
was part of a worldwide phenomenon of nation building. Throughout the world,
powerful, centralized nation-states developed in old countries and new nations
emerged where none had ever existed. Modern states consolidated their power and
reduced local autonomy. Japan and Argentina are two examples where this
occurred, and where rapid economic development quickly followed national
unification. Lincoln has even been called the American Mazzini or Bismarck, figures
who respectively created nation-states in Italy and Germany. But Lincoln’s America,
unlike these nations, was based on universal ideas of political democracy, human
liberty, and self-government; other nations were based on particular identities of
ethnicity, culture, and language. In his November 1863 Gettysburg Address
5
commemorating that battle’s dead, Lincoln reaffirmed that “all men are created
equal” and stated the war heralded a “new birth of freedom.” Union soldiers’
sacrifices would ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The Union war effort created a new American nation-state with greatly expanded
powers and responsibilities. The United States remained a federal republic, with
sovereignty divided between state and national governments. Yet the war
inaugurated a new national self-consciousness, as indicated by a greater use of the
word “nation,” a unified political entity, rather than the older “Union” of individual
states. More and more, Americans thought freedom required a nation and coherent
national identity.
The war changed religion, as well. Northern Protestant clergy tried to give the war a
religious justification and sanctify the sacrifices of Northern soldiers. In their
sermons, they joined Christianity and patriotism into a civic religion, marking the
war as God’s means of eradicating slavery and truly making America a land of
liberty. Religion also enabled Americans to cope with the horrors of the battlefield
and the enormous loss of life caused by the conflict.
Intensified northern nationalism made criticism of the war or Lincoln’s
administration seem treasonous to Republicans. Thousands of opposition
newspaper editors, Democratic politicians, opponents of enlistment and the draft,
and ordinary civilians were arrested, often arbitrarily. As the Constitution did not
clarify who had the authority to suspend habeas corpus, Lincoln claimed this right
under his presidential war powers, and he suspended it twice for those charged
with “disloyal activities.” Courts generally gave the administration a free hand, and
Lincoln even ignored Supreme Court decisions in individual cases. Only in 1866 did
the Supreme Court declare it unconstitutional to bring accused persons before
military tribunals where civil courts were in operation. While Lincoln was no
dictator, the conflict showed that civil liberties were fragile in wartime.
The northern war effort empowered both the federal government and a rising class
of capitalist businessmen. Unlike the South, which was economically devastated, the
northern economy flourished. Industrial profits soared from wartime inflation and
government contracts to produce supplies, coal, and iron. Mechanization was
spurred onward by war demands in boot and shoe production and meatpacking.
Agricultural production also expanded during the war.
The northern government was committed to rapid economic growth and
development, and Congress adopted policies that promoted this and transformed
America’s financial system. With no South represented in Congress to block changes,
lawmakers adopted policies advocated by many in the North. The Homestead Act
spurred agricultural development by offering 160 acres of free public land to
settlers in the West. The Land Grant College Act helped states establish agricultural
and mechanical schools, many of which became the state universities of today.
6
Congress also made huge grants of money and land for internal improvements,
including up to 100 million acres to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific to build the
transcontinental railroad. This monumental project required 20,000 men to lay
track, an enterprise that involved many Chinese contract laborers, called “coolies”
by Americans. The transcontinental railroad, finished in 1869, expanded the
national market, facilitated western settlement and investment, and sealed the fate
of Indians in the West.
Because Lincoln removed soldiers from the West to fight in the East, soldiers could
not keep white settlers from intruding on Indian territories. Conflict between whites
and federal troops and the Indians increased. Sioux attacks on white farmers in
Minnesota led to the sentencing and mass hanging of 38 Indians, the largest official
execution in American history. In 1864, Colorado soldiers killed around 400
Arapaho and Cheyenne men, women, and children at Sand Creek. The Union Army
also launched a campaign against the Navajo in the Southwest, and forced them onto
a reservation. The Confederacy ironically treated Indians more fairly than the Union,
allowing tribes to elect representatives to its Congress, and allowing Indian tribes
on reservations complete self-government.
For many northern women, the war created economic opportunity. Women took
manufacturing jobs and jobs in male professions, like nursing. Women found jobs as
clerks in the expanding federal government. Women maintained a presence after
the war in white-collar government jobs, retail sales, and nursing. Women worked
as nurses in the armies, and hundreds of thousands of women indirectly supported
the armies by raising money and supplies for soldiers and freed slaves. The U.S.
Sanitary Commission became a centralized national relief agency to coordinate
efforts on the home front. These activities brought women into the public sphere in
new ways. The suffrage movement suspended its work during the conflict, but
women’s contribution to the war effort heightened the sense of many women that
they deserved the vote in its aftermath.
The need to generate revenue to pay for the war transformed America’s financial
system. To raise funds, the government increased the tariff to record levels, imposed
new taxes on production and consumption, and passed the first income tax in
American history. The Union government also borrowed more than $2 billion by
selling interest-bearing bonds, creating a huge national debt. It also printed more
than $400 million of paper money, called “greenbacks,” as legal tender. Congress
rationalized banking by creating a system of nationally chartered banks required to
buy government bonds, and allowed to issue bank notes as currency. A heavy tax
drove money issued by state banks out of circulation. The United States, with a
money supply before the war an anarchic mix of paper notes issue by state and local
banks, during the war had two kinds of national paper money – greenbacks printed
by the federal government—and notes issued by new national banks.
Wartime economic policies handsomely benefited northern manufacturers, railroad
businessmen, and financiers. Many “captains of industry” of the Gilded Age made
7
their fortunes in the war, including iron and steel man Andrew Carnegie, oil
magnate John D. Rockefeller, financiers Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan, and Philip D.
Armour, beef slaughterer. As a whole, Union economic policies vastly expanded the
power and size of the federal government. The federal budget in 1865 was more
than $1 billion, twenty times larger than 1860, and the federal government became
the nation’s largest employer.
The war and Lincoln’s policies divided the North. Republicans called those opposing
the war Copperheads, after a poisonous snake that strikes without warning.
Increasing casualties and rapid social change caused internal conflict. States with a
large southern-born population, like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and cities with large
working-class Catholic immigrant populations, were at the center of disquiet. The
growing power of the federal government challenged local autonomy, most notably
in the draft law, which allowed individuals to provide a substitute or pay a fee to
escape service. Wage-earners resented the huge profits of manufacturers and
financiers while inflation eroded their pay. The war saw the rebirth of the northern
labor movement, which called many strikes.
Prospective changes in the status of blacks sparked a racist backlash in much of the
North. Although divided between anti-war and pro-war wings, the Democratic Party
criticized Lincoln’s policies and the draft. Occasionally dissent became violence,
most notably the July 1863 riots against the draft in New York City, in which a
mostly Irish immigrant mob attacked draft offices, the mansions of wealthy
Republicans, industrial establishments, and city blacks. More than 100 people were
killed before federal troops ended the tumult.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis proved unable to rally the southern public
behind the war. Although eloquent, Davis, a West Point graduate, senator, and
Mississippi plantation owner, lacked charisma and an ability to connect with
ordinary citizens. The Confederacy’s lack of a party system also was a liability, as
southern leaders saw parties as a danger to national unity. Davis thus lacked a
counterpart to the well-organized Republican Party, which organized support for
Lincoln’s administration.
Under Davis, the South’s government became very centralized, raising armies,
taking control of railroads, and building factories. But the Confederate government
never effectively utilized the South’s main economic resource, cotton. A strategy to
focus on food production as a means to compel Great Britain, whose mills used
southern cotton, to side with the Confederacy, failed. Other nations increased their
cotton production, such as Egypt and India, which helped produce a crisis of
overproduction after the war when southern cotton production resumed.
Social change and internal strife consumed the South as the war dragged on.
Initially, white southerners widely supported the Confederate cause and war effort,
claiming the war was being fought to protect liberty against northern tyranny. Yet
public disaffection grew, especially over the draft, which allowed substitutes and
exempted one white male for every twenty slaves on a plantation, thus releasing
8
from service many overseers and planters’ sons and greatly increasing opposition to
the war among poor whites.
Economic crisis also caused inner turmoil in the South. As the blockade became
more effective, more of the South became occupied by Union forces and slave
productivity declined, shortages of essential goods became widespread. Confederate
policies that seemed to favor the wealthy and large slaveowners exacerbated the
effects of economic troubles, as poor whites felt they faced unequal burdens.
While the Confederacy like the North borrowed heavily to finance the war, the
planter-dominated Congress would not levy heavy taxes that planters would have to
pay. Instead, it printed an enormous amount of paper money. Congress authorized
military officers to seize goods and pay citizens with this money, which became
increasingly worthless. Many southerners resented this practice. In some cities, food
riots broke out. By the end of the war, nearly 100,000 men, mostly poor nonslaveholders, had deserted from the Confederate Army.
By 1864, organized movements calling for peace surfaced in several southern states,
and secret societies were actively promoting disloyalty. Confederate military
tribunals imprisoned Unionists, drove them from their homes, and executed a few.
By the end of the war, about 50,000 white southerners fought for the Union.
More than in the North, the war imposed many costs on women in the South. Often
left alone on farms and plantations, women had to take over men’s responsibilities
to conduct business and discipline slaves. Southern women organized to support
soldiers and engaged in previously male occupations. “Government girls” worked as
clerks in the Confederate government. While southern women’s contribution to the
war was legendary, more women came to believe that the war was not worth the
sacrifices they were making. Women’s disaffection helped decrease civilian morale
and fostered desertion from the army.
Increasing shortages of white manpower led the Confederate government to
authorize the arming of slaves to fight on the South’s behalf, an event no one
anticipated in 1861. Many slaveholders resisted it, and the Confederate Senate
rejected it. The Confederate Congress approved it only in March 1865, when Robert
E. Lee endorsed it. The war ended before enlistment began, but Confederate forces
did employ blacks, mostly slaves, as laborers. The decision to recruit blacks for
combat had undermined slavery and the pro-slavery ideology on which it rested.
Despite the apparent disintegration of slavery and eroding southern morale, the
war’s outcome was uncertain in 1863 and 1864. In April 1863, “Fighting Joe”
Hooker, a new union commander in the East, invaded central Virginia. Outnumbered
two to one, Lee repulsed Hooker at Chancellorsville, though his most talented
commander, Stonewall Jackson, was mortally wounded in the fight. Lee soon
decided on another invasion of the North, although the rationale for it today
remains unknown. His army met and fought Union forces under General George G.
Meade at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the first three days of July. 165,000 troops
9
fought there, in the largest battle ever in North America. A desperate frontal assault
led by Major General George E. Pickett failed to break Union lines on July 3, and Lee,
having regretted ordering Pickett’s charge and lost the battle, retreated. The “high
tide of the Confederacy” had been reached, and Lee’s soldiers never again traded on
northern ground. Simultaneously, Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant had laid siege
to the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, Mississippi.
On July 4, Confederate forces surrendered, and the entire Mississippi River fell to
Union forces. Gettysburg and Vicksburg greatly diminished southern hopes for
victory.
Given the command of Union forces in the East, Grant in 1864 initiated a war of
attrition against Lee’s army in Virginia. Grant was willing to incur high numbers of
casualties with the knowledge that the North could replenish its armies, while the
South could not. In May 1864, Grant’s Army of the Potomac began a month of fierce
fighting and campaigning. In the Battle of the Wilderness, both sides suffered great
casualties, but instead of retreating, as had previous Union commanders, Grant
pushed on, fighting Lee again at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor. After six weeks Grant
lost 60,000 men, an enormous number, but he inflicted 30,000 casualties on Lee’s
army. This sustained fighting was a turning point in modern warfare and more
resembled the modern trench warfare of World War I than the methods of 1861.
Although Grant maintained the initiative, his strategy led to criticisms that he was a
butcher. Victory was elusive. When Grant failed to capture Petersburg, a city that
controlled the railways into Richmond, he laid siege to the city. At the same time,
General William T. Sherman marched through Georgia, and took Atlanta in
September 1864.
With casualties skyrocketing in the spring and summer of 1864, northern morale
sank to its lowest point in the war. Lincoln believed he would lose the presidential
election in the fall. Radical Republicans nominated an alternative candidate on a
radical plank, and General George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate, called for
a peace conference with the Confederacy. Ultimately Lincoln secured the Republican
nomination, and with Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, won a sweeping victory.
Lincoln’s re-election guaranteed the war would continue until the Confederacy had
been crushed.
Federal authorities came to supervise the transition from freedom to slavery as the
war came to an end and more southern territory came under Union control. Conflict
over access to land, control over labor, and new structures of political power took
place in South Carolina, Louisiana, and other parts of the South.
The most well-known of these “rehearsals for Reconstruction” was the experiment
on the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast. In late 1861, the Union Navy
occupied the islands and whites fled, leaving 10,000 slaves. Northern army officers,
cotton plantation investors, and black and white reformers came to reconstruct the
island and lift up the islands’ blacks. Northern-born teachers believed education
would make the former slaves self-dependent and productive citizens, and started
10
schools. Although the slaves’ most basic demand was for land to farm themselves,
some northerners believed free labor for slaves should take the form of wage work
which was more humane than slave labor. When the land was sold by the federal
government, it went to northern investors who wanted to show the advantages of
free labor and make a profit. By 1865, Sea Island black families were working for
wages, gaining an education, and enjoying a better material life than under slavery.
A very different experiment took place in Louisiana and the Mississippi River Valley.
After Vicksburg, Union authorities tried to resurrect the cotton plantations with
wage labor, but they forced the former slaves to sign labor contracts. At Davis Bend,
however, freed blacks were given the plantation lands of Jefferson Davis and
allowed to divide it among themselves and farm it as they saw fit.
The future political status of African-Americans became a central point of debate as
the war continued, and events in Union-occupied Louisiana focused the nation on
the question. Lincoln, hoping to establish a civilian government in that state,
announced a Ten-Percent Plan of Reconstruction. This offered an amnesty and full
restoration of rights, including property except for slaves, to almost all white
southerners who swore loyalty to the Union and support for emancipation. When 10
percent of the voters of 1860 took the oath, they could elect a new state
government, which would have to abolish slavery. Lincoln’s plan offered no role for
freed blacks, but he hoped that his plan would appeal to white southerners and
hasten the war’s end.
Free blacks in New Orleans, however, used the Union occupation to push for civil,
legal, and political equality, and they found sympathy among Radical Republicans in
Congress, who in 1864 passed the Wade-Davis Bill. This bill required a majority, not
just one-tenth, of white male southerners to pledge loyalty to the Union before
Reconstruction could begin in any state, and it gave blacks legal equality, although
not the suffrage. Lincoln vetoed the bill, and as the war came to a close, no plan for
Reconstruction existed to follow its end.
In November 1864, Sherman started a “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to the
Georgia coast. His forces destroyed railroads, buildings, and food and supplies to
deny their use by Confederate troops. Sherman’s vision of destroying civilian
property and resources as a way to win the war was controversial but very modern.
Sherman continued his path of destruction into South Carolina, freeing slaves and
ruining plantations.
On January 31, 1865, Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment, which
abolished slavery throughout the entire Union. In his March 1865 inaugural address,
Lincoln called for national reconciliation. On April 2, Grant finally pierced Lee’s lines
at Petersburg, causing Lee to retreat and abandon Richmond, which was occupied
by northern troops the next day. On April 4, Lincoln, ignoring his own safety, walked
Richmond’s streets, accompanied by only a dozen troops. Slaves celebrated and
praised him everywhere he went. Lee and his army headed west but were soon
surrounded by Grant’s army. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia,
on April 9, bringing the Civil War to an end. Only five days later, before Lincoln could
11
announce plans to reconstruct the south, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth,
a celebrated actor, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.
The war reverberated in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe. When Grant
toured Europe in 1877 after retiring from the presidency, he was greeted as a hero.
In England, nobles hailed him as a military genius. Workers there welcomed him as
a the general who saved the world’s leading experiment in democracy on behalf of a
president, Abraham Lincoln, who had vindicated free labor by emancipating the
slaves. Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s powerful chancellor, welcomed Grant as a
nation builder.
The Civil War truly did build the modern American nation, preserving the Union,
destroying slavery, and shifting power in the nation from the South to the North and
from slaveowning planters to northern capitalists. It greatly expanded the power of
the federal government and quickened the northern economy’s modernization. The
war also made central the task of defining and protecting freedom for AfricanAmericans.
But both sides had lost something they had fought the war to protect. The South had
fought to protect slavery, which had been destroyed. And the North, which had
fought for the world of free labor, the small shop, and the independent farmer, had
been transformed into an industrialized nation. A vision of freedom founded in free
labor would soon become impossible to realize amid the changes wrought by this
great conflict.
The war reverberated in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe. When Grant
toured Europe in 1877 after retiring from the presidency, he was greeted as a hero.
In England, nobles hailed him as a military genius. Workers there welcomed him as
a the general who saved the world’s leading experiment in democracy on behalf of a
president, Abraham Lincoln, who had vindicated free labor by emancipating the
slaves. Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s powerful chancellor, welcomed Grant as a
nation builder.
The Civil War truly did build the modern American nation, preserving the Union,
destroying slavery, and shifting power in the nation from the South to the North and
from slaveowning planters to northern capitalists. It greatly expanded the power of
the federal government and quickened the northern economy’s modernization. The
war also made central the task of defining and protecting freedom for AfricanAmericans.
But both sides had lost something they had fought the war to protect. The South had
fought to protect slavery, which had been destroyed. And the North, which had
fought for the world of free labor, the small shop, and the independent farmer, had
been transformed into an industrialized nation. A vision of freedom founded in free
labor would soon become impossible to realize amid the changes wrought by this
great conflict.
12
13