Individual
trading card from the "GENERALS OF THE LATE CIVIL WAR" set, reproduced in 1991. "A Nostalgia Reprint".
Please note that these cards were re-printed (in 1991) from a Historic Set issued by H. Ellis & Co.,Tobacco (of Baltimore, Maryland) in 1890, for "Recruit" Cigarettes, only one generation after the Civil War.
The
American Civil War
was a civil war in the United States fought from 1861 to 1865. The
Union faced secessionists in eleven Southern states grouped togther
as the Confederate States of America. The Union won the war, which
remains the bloodiest in U.S. history.
Among the
34 U.S. states in January 1861, seven Southern slave states
individually declared their secession from the U.S. and formed the
Confederate States of America. War broke out in April 1861 when they
attacked a U.S. fortress, Fort Sumter. The Confederacy grew to
include eleven states; it claimed two more states and several western
territories. The Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by
any foreign country. The states that remained loyal including border
states where slavery was legal, were known as the Union or the North.
The war ended with the surrender of all the Confederate armies and
the collapse of Confederate government in spring 1865.
The
war had its origin in the factious issue of slavery, especially the
extension of slavery into the western territories. Four years of
intense combat left 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers dead, a higher number
than the American military deaths of World War I and World War II
combined, and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure. The
Confederacy collapsed and slavery was abolished in the entire
country. The Reconstruction Era (1863–1877) overlapped and followed
the war, with its fitful process of restoring national unity,
strengthening the national government, and guaranteeing civil rights
to the freed slaves.
HISTORY: In the 1860 presidential
election, Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, supported banning
slavery in all the U.S. territories, something the Southern states
viewed as a violation of their constitutional rights and as being
part of a plan to eventually abolish slavery. The Republican Party,
dominant in the North, secured a majority of the electoral votes, and
Lincoln was elected the first Republican president, but before his
inauguration, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed
the Confederacy. The first six to secede had the highest proportions
of slaves in their populations, a total of 48.8 percent. Eight
remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession.
Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming
Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln's March 4, 1861
inaugural address declared his administration would not initiate
civil war. Speaking directly to "the Southern States," he
reaffirmed, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to
interfere with the institution of slavery in the United States where
it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no
inclination to do so." Confederate forces seized numerous
federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. Efforts at
compromise failed, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates
assumed that European countries were so dependent on "King
Cotton" that they would intervene; none did, and none recognized
the new Confederate States of America.
Hostilities began
on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter.
While in the Western Theater the Union made significant permanent
gains, in the Eastern Theater, battle was inconclusive in 1861–62.
The autumn 1862 Confederate campaigns into Maryland and Kentucky
failed, dissuading British intervention. Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal. To
the west, by summer 1862 the Union destroyed the Confederate river
navy, then much of their western armies, and seized New Orleans. The
1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the
Mississippi River. In 1863, Robert E. Lee's Confederate incursion
north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to
Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. Inflicting an
ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports, the Union
marshaled the resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from
all directions, leading to the fall of Atlanta to William T. Sherman
and his march to the sea. The last significant battles raged around
the Siege of Petersburg. Lee's escape attempt ended with his
surrender at Appomattox Court House, on April 9, 1865. While the
military war was coming to an end, the political reintegration of the
nation was to take another 12 years of the Reconstruction Era.
The
American Civil War was one of the earliest true industrial wars.
Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, and mass-produced weapons were
employed extensively. The mobilization of civilian factories, mines,
shipyards, banks, transportation and food supplies all foreshadowed
the impact of industrialization in World War I. It remains the
deadliest war in American history. From 1861 to 1865, it has been
traditionally estimated that about 620,000 died but recent
scholarship argues that 750,000 soldiers died, along with an
undetermined number of civilians. By one estimate, the war claimed
the lives of 10 percent of all Northern males 20–45 years old, and
30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18–40.
CAUSES
OF SECESSION: The causes of the Civil War were complex and have been
controversial since the war began. James C. Bradford wrote that the
issue has been further complicated by historical revisionists, who
have tried to offer a variety of reasons for the war. Slavery was the
central source of escalating political tension in the 1850s. The
Republican Party was determined to prevent any spread of slavery, and
many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican
candidate, Lincoln, won the 1860 election. After Lincoln won without
carrying a single Southern state, many Southern whites felt that
disunion had become their only option, because they thought that they
were losing representation, which would hamper their ability to
promote pro-slavery acts and policies.
SLAVERY:
Contemporary actors, the Union and Confederate leadership and
fighting soldiers on both sides believed that slavery caused the
Civil War. Union men mainly believed the war was to emancipate the
slaves. Confederates fought to protect southern society, and slavery
as an integral part of it From the anti-slavery perspective, the
issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an
anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the
United States. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was
containment — to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path
to gradual extinction. The slave-holding interests in the South
denounced this strategy as infringing upon their Constitutional
rights. Southern whites believed that the emancipation of slaves
would destroy the South's economy because of the alleged laziness of
blacks under free labour
. Slavery was illegal in the
North, having been outlawed in the late 18th and early 19th century.
It was fading in the border states and in Southern cities, but was
expanding in the highly profitable cotton districts of the South and
Southwest. Subsequent writers on the American Civil War looked to
several factors explaining the geographic divide, including
sectionalism, protectionism, and state's rights.
SECTIONALISM:
Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social structure,
customs and political values of the North and South. It increased
steadily between 1800 and 1860 as the North, which phased slavery out
of existence, industrialized, urbanized, and built prosperous farms,
while the deep South concentrated on plantation agriculture based on
slave labour, together with subsistence farming for poor freedmen. In
the 1840s and 50s, the issue of accepting slavery (in the guise of
rejecting slave-owning bishops and missionaries) split the nation's
largest religious denominations (the Methodist, Baptist and
Presbyterian churches) into separate Northern and Southern
denominations.
Historians have debated whether economic
differences between the industrial Northeast and the agricultural
South helped cause the war. Most historians now disagree with the
economic determinism of historian Charles A. Beard in the 1920s and
emphasize that Northern and Southern economies were largely
complementary. While socially different, the sections economically
benefited each other.
PROTECTIONISM: Historically,
southern slave-holding states, because of their low cost manual
labour, had little perceived need for mechanization, and supported
having the right to sell cotton and purchase manufactured goods from
any nation. Northern states, which had heavily invested in their
still-nascent manufacturing, could not compete with the full-fledged
industries of Europe in offering high prices for cotton imported from
the South and low prices for manufactured exports in return. Thus,
northern manufacturing interests supported tariffs and protectionism
while southern planters demanded free trade.
The
Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote the tariff
laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates so that
the 1857 rates were the lowest since 1816. The Whigs and Republicans
complained because they favoured high tariffs to stimulate industrial
growth, and Republicans called for an increase in tariffs in the 1860
election. The increases were only enacted in 1861 after Southerners
resigned their seats in Congress. The tariff issue was and is
sometimes cited–long after the war–by Lost Cause historians and
neo-Confederate apologists. In 1860–61 none of the groups that
proposed compromises to head off secession raised the tariff issue.
Pamphleteers North and South rarely mentioned the tariff, and when
some did, for instance, Matthew Fontaine Maury and John Lothrop
Motley, they were generally writing for a foreign audience.
STATES’
RIGHTS: The South argued that each state had the right to
secede–leave the Union–at any time, that the Constitution was a
"compact" or agreement among the states. Northerners
(including President Buchanan) rejected that notion as opposed to the
will of the Founding Fathers who said they were setting up a
perpetual union. Historian James McPherson writes concerning states'
rights and other non-slavery explanations: While one or more of these
interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans
and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now
subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states'-rights
argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question,
states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was
always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain
goal more than a principle.
TERRITORIAL CRISIS: Between
1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of
territory through purchase, negotiation, and conquest. At first, the
new states carved out of these territories entering the union were
apportioned equally between slave and free states. It was over
territories west of the Mississippi that the proslavery and
antislavery forces collided.
With the conquest of
northern Mexico west to California in 1848, slaveholding interests
looked forward to expanding into these lands and perhaps Cuba and
Central America as well. Northern "free soil" interests
vigorously sought to curtail any further expansion of slave
territory. The Compromise of 1850 over California balanced a free
soil state with stronger fugitive slave laws for a political
settlement after four years of strife in the 1840s. But the states
admitted following California were all free: Minnesota (1858), Oregon
(1859) and Kansas (1861). In the southern states the question of the
territorial expansion of slavery westward again became explosive.
Both the South and the North drew the same conclusion: "The
power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the
power to determine the future of slavery itself."
By
1860, four doctrines had emerged to answer the question of federal
control in the territories, and they all claimed they were sanctioned
by the Constitution, implicitly or explicitly. The first of these
"conservative" theories, represented by the Constitutional
Union Party, argued that the Missouri Compromise apportionment of
territory north for free soil and south for slavery should become a
Constitutional mandate. The Crittenden Compromise of 1860 was an
expression of this view.
The second doctrine of
Congressional preeminence, championed by Abraham Lincoln and the
Republican Party, insisted that the Constitution did not bind
legislators to a policy of balance – that slavery could be excluded
in a territory as it was done in the Northwest Ordinance at the
discretion of Congress, thus Congress could restrict human bondage,
but never establish it. The Wilmot Proviso announced this position in
1846.
Senator Stephen A. Douglas proclaimed the doctrine
of territorial or "popular" sovereignty – which asserted
that the settlers in a territory had the same rights as states in the
Union to establish or disestablish slavery as a purely local matter.
The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine. In Kansas
Territory, years of pro and anti-slavery violence and political
conflict erupted; the congressional House of Representatives voted to
admit Kansas as a free state in early 1860, but its admission in the
Senate was delayed until January 1861, after the 1860 elections when
southern senators began to leave.
The fourth theory was
advocated by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, one of state
sovereignty ("states' rights"), also known as the "Calhoun
doctrine", named after the South Carolinian political theorist
and statesman John C. Calhoun. Rejecting the arguments for federal
authority or self-government, state sovereignty would empower states
to promote the expansion of slavery as part of the Federal Union
under the U.S. Constitution. "States' rights" was an
ideology formulated and applied as a means of advancing slave state
interests through federal authority. As historian Thomas L.
Krannawitter points out, the "Southern demand for federal slave
protection represented a demand for an unprecedented expansion of
federal power." These four doctrines comprised the major
ideologies presented to the American public on the matters of
slavery, the territories and the U.S. Constitution prior to the 1860
presidential election.
NATIONAL ELECTIONS: Beginning in
the American Revolution and accelerating after the War of 1812, the
people of the United States grew in their sense of country as an
important example to the world of a national republic of political
liberty and personal rights. Previous regional independence movements
such as the Greek revolt in the Ottoman Empire, division and
redivision in the Latin American political map, and the
British-French Crimean triumph leading to an interest in redrawing
Europe along cultural differences, all conspired to make for a time
of upheaval and uncertainty about the basis of the nation-state. In
the world of 19th century self-made Americans, growing in prosperity,
population and expanding westward, "freedom" could mean
personal liberty or property rights. The unresolved difference would
cause failure—first in their political institutions, then in their
civil life together.
NATIONALISM AND HONOUR: Nationalism
was a powerful force in the early 19th century, with famous spokesmen
such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster. While practically all
Northerners supported the Union, Southerners were split between those
loyal to the entire United States (called "unionists") and
those loyal primarily to the southern region and then the
Confederacy. C. Vann Woodward said of the latter group, A great slave
society ... had grown up and miraculously flourished in the heart of
a thoroughly bourgeois and partly puritanical republic. It had
renounced its bourgeois origins and elabourated and painfully
rationalized its institutional, legal, metaphysical, and religious
defenses ... When the crisis came it chose to fight. It proved to be
the death struggle of a society, which went down in ruins. Perceived
insults to Southern collective honour included the enormous
popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the actions of
abolitionist John Brown in trying to incite a slave rebellion in
1859.
While the South moved toward a Southern
nationalism, leaders in the North were also becoming more nationally
minded, and rejected any notion of splitting the Union. The
Republican national electoral platform of 1860 warned that
Republicans regarded disunion as treason and would not tolerate it:
"We denounce those threats of disunion ... as denying the vital
principles of a free government, and as an avowal of contemplated
treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant people
sternly to rebuke and forever silence." The South ignored the
warnings: Southerners did not realize how ardently the North would
fight to hold the Union together.
LINCOLN’S ELECTION:
The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 was the final
trigger for secession. Efforts at compromise, including the "Corwin
Amendment" and the "Crittenden Compromise", failed.
Southern leaders feared that Lincoln would stop the expansion of
slavery and put it on a course toward extinction. The slave states,
which had already become a minority in the House of Representatives,
were now facing a future as a perpetual minority in the Senate and
Electoral College against an increasingly powerful North. Before
Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven slave states had declared
their secession and joined to form the Confederacy.
Outbreak
of the war - SECESSION CRISIS: The election of Lincoln caused the
legislature of South Carolina to call a state convention to consider
secession. Prior to the war, South Carolina did more than any other
Southern state to advance the notion that a state had the right to
nullify federal laws and, even, secede from the United States. The
convention summoned unanimously voted to secede on December 20, 1860
and adopted the "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which
Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal
Union". It argued for states' rights for slave owners in the
South, but contained a complaint about states' rights in the North in
the form of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, claiming that
Northern states were not fulfilling their federal obligations under
the Constitution. The "cotton states" of Mississippi,
Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed suit,
seceding in January and February 1861.
Among the
ordinances of secession passed by the individual states, those of
three – Texas, Alabama, and Virginia – specifically mentioned the
plight of the 'slaveholding states' at the hands of northern
abolitionists. The rest make no mention of the slavery issue, and are
often brief announcements of the dissolution of ties by the
legislatures. However, at least four states – South Carolina,
Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas – also passed lengthy and detailed
explanations of their causes for secession, all of which laid the
blame squarely on the movement to abolish slavery and that movement's
influence over the politics of the northern states. The southern
states believed slaveholding was a constitutional right because of
the Fugitive slave clause of the Constitution.
These
states agreed to form a new federal government, the Confederate
States of America, on February 4, 1861. They took control of federal
forts and other properties within their boundaries with little
resistance from outgoing President James Buchanan, whose term ended
on March 4, 1861. Buchanan said that the Dred Scott decision was
proof that the South had no reason for secession, and that the Union
"... was intended to be perpetual," but that, "The
power by force of arms to compel a State to remain in the Union,"
was not among the "... enumerated powers granted to Congress."
One quarter of the U.S. Army – the entire garrison in Texas – was
surrendered in February 1861 to state forces by its commanding
general, David E. Twiggs, who then joined the Confederacy.
As
Southerners resigned their seats in the Senate and the House,
Republicans were able to pass bills for projects that had been
blocked by Southern Senators before the war, including the Morrill
Tariff, land grant colleges (the Morill Act), a Homestead Act, a
transcontinental railroad (the Pacific Railway Acts), the National
Banking Act and the authorization of United States Notes by the Legal
Tender Act of 1862. The Revenue Act of 1861 introduced the income tax
to help finance the war.
On December 18, 1860, the
Crittenden Compromise was proposed to re-establish the Missouri
Compromise line by constitutionally banning slavery in territories to
the north of the line while guaranteeing it to the south. The
adoption of this compromise likely would have prevented the secession
of every southern state apart from South Carolina, but Lincoln and
the Republicans rejected it. It was then proposed to hold a national
referendum on the compromise. The Republicans again rejected the
idea, although a majority of both Northerners and Southerners would
have voted in favour of it. A pre-war February Peace Conference of
1861 met in Washington, proposing a solution similar to that of the
Crittenden compromise, it was rejected by Congress. The Republicans
proposed an alternative compromise to not interfere with slavery
where it existed but the South regarded it as insufficient.
Nonetheless, the remaining eight slave states rejected pleas to join
the Confederacy following a two-to-one no-vote in Virginia's First
Secessionist Convention on April 4, 1861.
On March 4,
1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President. 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 any secession "legally
void".[78] He had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did
he intend to end slavery where it existed, but said that he would use
force to maintain possession of Federal property. The government
would make no move to recover post offices, and if resisted, mail
delivery would end at state lines. Where popular conditions did not
allow peaceful enforcement of Federal law, U.S. Marshals and Judges
would be withdrawn. No mention was made of bullion lost from U.S.
mints in Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina. In Lincoln's
inaugural address, he stated that it would be U.S. policy to only
collect import duties at its ports; there could be no serious injury
to the South to justify armed revolution during his administration.
His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union,
famously calling on "the mystic chords of memory" binding
the two regions.
The South sent delegations to Washington
and offered to pay for the federal properties and enter into a peace
treaty with the United States. Lincoln rejected any negotiations with
Confederate agents because he claimed the Confederacy was not a
legitimate government, and that making any treaty with it would be
tantamount to recognition of it as a sovereign government. Secretary
of State William Seward who at that time saw himself as the real
governor or "prime minister" behind the throne of the
inexperienced Lincoln, engaged in unauthorized and indirect
negotiations that failed. President Lincoln was determined to hold
all remaining Union-occupied forts in the Confederacy, Fort Monroe in
Virginia, in Florida, Fort Pickens, Fort Jefferson, and Fort Taylor,
and in the cockpit of secession, Charleston, South Carolina's Fort
Sumter.
BATTLE OF FORT SUMTER: Fort Sumter was located in
the middle of the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina, where the
U.S. fort's garrison had withdrawn to avoid incidents with local
militias in the streets of the city. Unlike Buchanan, who allowed
commanders to relinquish possession to avoid bloodshed, Lincoln
required Maj. Anderson to hold on until fired upon. Jefferson Davis
ordered the surrender of the fort. Anderson gave a conditional reply
that the Confederate government rejected, and Davis ordered P. G. T.
Beauregard to attack the fort before a relief expedition could
arrive. Troops under Beauregard bombarded Fort Sumter on April 12–13,
forcing its capitulation.
The attack on Fort Sumter
rallied the North to the defense of American nationalism. Historian
Allan Nevins says: The thunderclap of Sumter produced a startling
crystallization of Northern sentiment. ... Anger swept the land. From
every side came news of mass meetings, speeches, resolutions, tenders
of business support, the muster of companies and regiments, the
determined action of governors and legislatures."
However,
much of the North's attitude was based on the false belief that only
a minority of Southerners were actually in favour of secession and
that there were large numbers of southern Unionists that could be
counted on. Had Northerners realized that most Southerners really did
favour secession, they might have hesitated at attempting the
enormous task of conquering a united South.
Lincoln
called on all the states to send forces to recapture the fort and
other federal properties. He cited presidential powers given by the
Militia Acts of 1792. With the scale of the rebellion apparently
small so far, Lincoln called for only 75,000 volunteers for 90 days.
The governor of Massachusetts had state regiments on trains headed
south the next day. In western Missouri, local secessionists seized
Liberty Arsenal. On May 3, 1861, Lincoln called for an additional
42,000 volunteers for a period of three years.
Four
states in the middle and upper South had repeatedly rejected
Confederate overtures, but now Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and
North Carolina refused to send forces against their neighbors,
declared their secession, and joined the Confederacy. To reward
Virginia, the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond.
Attitude
of the border states Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky were
slave states that were opposed to both secession and coercing the
South. They were later joined by West Virginia, which separated from
Virginia and became a new state.
Maryland had numerous
anti-Lincoln officials who tolerated anti-army rioting in Baltimore
and the burning of bridges, both aimed at hindering the passage of
troops to the South. Maryland's legislature voted to stay in the
Union, but also rejected hostilities with the South, voting to close
Maryland's rail lines to prevent them from being used for war.
Lincoln responded by establishing martial law, and unilaterally
suspending habeas corpus, in Maryland, along with sending in militia
units from the North. Lincoln rapidly took control of Maryland and
the District of Columbia, by seizing many prominent figures,
including arresting 1/3 of the members of the Maryland General
Assembly on the day it reconvened. All were held without trial,
ignoring a ruling by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Roger Taney, a Maryland native, that only Congress (and not the
president) could suspend habeas corpus (Ex parte Merryman). Indeed,
federal troops imprisoned a prominent Baltimore newspaper editor,
Frank Key Howard, Francis Scott Key's grandson, after he criticized
Lincoln in an editorial for ignoring the Supreme Court Chief
Justice's ruling.
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.
Kentucky
did not secede; for a time, it declared itself neutral. When
Confederate forces entered the state in September 1861, neutrality
ended and the state reaffirmed its Union status, while trying to
maintain slavery. During a brief invasion by Confederate forces,
Confederate sympathizers organized a secession convention,
inaugurated a governor, and gained recognition from the Confederacy.
The rebel government soon went into exile and never controlled
Kentucky.
After Virginia's secession, a Unionist
government in Wheeling asked 48 counties to vote on an ordinance to
create a new state on October 24, 1861. A voter turnout of 34 percent
approved the statehood bill (96 percent approving). The inclusion of
24 secessionist counties in the state and the ensuing guerrilla war
engaged about 40,000 Federal troops for much of the war. Congress
admitted West Virginia to the Union on June 20, 1863. West Virginia
provided about 20,000–22,000 soldiers to both the Confederacy and
the Union.
A Unionist secession attempt occurred in East
Tennessee, but was suppressed by the Confederacy, which arrested over
3,000 men suspected of being loyal to the Union. They were held
without trial.
WAR: The Civil War was a contest marked by
the ferocity and frequency of battle. Over four years, 237 named
battles were fought, as were many more minor actions and skirmishes,
which were often characterized by their bitter intensity and high
casualties. "The American Civil War was to prove one of the most
ferocious wars ever fought". Without geographic objectives, the
only target for each side was the enemy's soldier.
MOBILISATION:
As the first seven states began organizing a Confederacy in
Montgomery, the entire U.S. army numbered 16,000. However, Northern
governors had begun to mobilize their militias. The Confederate
Congress authorized the new nation up to 100,000 troops sent by
governors as early as February. By May, Jefferson Davis was pushing
for 100,000 men under arms for one year or the duration, and that was
answered in kind by the U.S. Congress.
In the first year
of the war, both sides had far more volunteers than they could
effectively train and equip. After the initial enthusiasm faded,
reliance on the cohort of young men who came of age every year and
wanted to join was not enough. Both sides used a draft
law—conscription—as a device to encourage or force volunteering;
relatively few were actually drafted and served. The Confederacy
passed a draft law in April 1862 for young men aged 18 to 35;
overseers of slaves, government officials, and clergymen were exempt.
The U.S. Congress followed in July, authorizing a militia draft
within a state when it could not meet its quota with volunteers.
European immigrants joined the Union Army in large numbers, including
177,000 born in Germany and 144,000 born in Ireland.
When
the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in January 1863,
ex-slaves were energetically recruited by the states, and used to
meet the state quotas. States and local communities offered higher
and higher cash bonuses for white volunteers. Congress tightened the
law in March 1863. Men selected in the draft could provide
substitutes or, until mid-1864, pay commutation money. Many eligibles
pooled their money to cover the cost of anyone drafted. Families used
the substitute provision to select which man should go into the army
and which should stay home. There was much evasion and overt
resistance to the draft, especially in Catholic areas. The great
draft riot in New York City in July 1863 involved Irish immigrants
who had been signed up as citizens to swell the vote of the city's
Democratic political machine, not realizing it made them liable for
the draft. Of the 168,649 men procured for the Union through the
draft, 117,986 were substitutes, leaving only 50,663 who had their
personal services conscripted.
In both the North and
South, the draft laws were highly unpopular. In the North, some
120,000 men evaded conscription, many of them fleeing to Canada, and
another 280,000 soldiers deserted during the war. At least 100,000
Southerners deserted, or about 10 percent. In the South, many men
deserted temporarily to take care of their distressed families, then
returned to their units. In the North, "bounty jumpers"
enlisted to get the generous bonus, deserted, then went back to a
second recruiting station under a different name to sign up again for
a second bonus; 141 were caught and executed.
From a tiny
frontier force in 1860, the Union and Confederate armies had grown
into the "largest and most efficient armies in the world"
within a few years. European observers at the time dismissed them as
amateur and unprofessional, but British historian John Keegan's
assessment is that each outmatched the French, Prussian and Russian
armies of the time, and but for the Atlantic, would have threatened
any of them with defeat.
MOTIVATION: Perman and Taylor
(2010) say that historians are of two minds on why millions of men
seemed so eager to fight, suffer and die over four years: Some
historians emphasize that Civil War soldiers were driven by political
ideology, holding firm beliefs about the importance of liberty,
Union, or state rights, or about the need to protect or to destroy
slavery. Others point to less overtly political reasons to fight,
such as the defense of one's home and family, or the honour and
brotherhood to be preserved when fighting alongside other men. Most
historians agree that no matter what a soldier thought about when he
went into the war, the experience of combat affected him profoundly
and sometimes altered his reasons for continuing the fight.
PRISONERS: At the start of the civil war, a system of
paroles operated. Captives agreed not to fight until they were
officially exchanged. Meanwhile, they were held in camps run by their
own army where they were paid but not allowed to perform any military
duties. The system of exchanges collapsed in 1863 when the
Confederacy refused to exchange black prisoners. After that, about
56,000 of the 409,000 POWs died in prisons during the war, accounting
for nearly 10 percent of the conflict's fatalities.
NAVAL
WAR: The small U.S. Navy of 1861 was rapidly enlarged to 6,000
officers and 45,000 men in 1865, with 671 vessels, having a tonnage
of 510,396. Its mission was to blockade Confederate ports, take
control of the river system, defend against Confederate raiders on
the high seas, and be ready for a possible war with the British Royal
Navy. Meanwhile, the main riverine war was fought in the West, where
a series of major rivers gave access to the Confederate heartland, if
the U.S. Navy could take control. In the East, the Navy supplied and
moved army forces about, and occasionally shelled Confederate
installations.
By early 1861, General Winfield Scott had
devised the Anaconda Plan to win the war with as little bloodshed as
possible. Scott argued that a Union blockade of the main ports would
weaken the Confederate economy. Lincoln adopted parts of the plan,
but he overruled Scott's caution about 90-day volunteers. Public
opinion, however, demanded an immediate attack by the army to capture
Richmond.
In April 1861, Lincoln announced the Union
blockade of all Southern ports; regular traffic ended. The South
blundered in embargoing cotton exports in 1861 before the blockade
was effective; by the time they realized the mistake, it was too
late. "King Cotton" was dead, as the South could export
less than 10 percent of its cotton. The blockade shut down the ten
Confederate seaports with railheads that moved almost all the cotton,
especially New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston. By June 1861,
warships were stationed off the principal Southern ports, and a year
later nearly 300 ships were in service.
EVOLUTION OF
MODERN NAVY: The Civil War occurred during the early stages of the
industrial revolution and subsequently many naval innovations emerged
during this time, most notably the advent of the ironclad warship. It
began when the Confederacy, knowing they had to meet or match the
Union's naval superiority, responded to the Union blockade by
building or converting more than 130 vessels, including twenty-six
ironclads and floating batteries. Only half of these saw active
service. Many were equipped with ram bows, creating "ram fever"
among Union squadrons wherever they threatened. But in the face of
overwhelming Union superiority and the Union's own ironclad warships,
they were unsuccessful.
The Confederacy experimented with
a submarine, which did not work well, and with building an ironclad
ship, the CSS Virginia, which was based on rebuilding a sunken Union
ship, the Merrimack. On its first foray on March 8, 1862, the
Virginia decimated the Union's wooden fleet, but the next day the
first Union ironclad, the USS Monitor, arrived to challenge it. The
Battle of the Ironclads was a draw, but it marks the worldwide
transition to ironclad warships.
The Confederacy lost the
Virginia when the ship was scuttled to prevent capture, and the Union
built many copies of the Monitor. Lacking the technology to build
effective warships, the Confederacy attempted to obtain warships from
Britain.
BLOCKADE RUNNERS OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR:
British investors built small, fast, steam-driven blockade runners
that traded arms and luxuries brought in from Britain through
Bermuda, Cuba, and the Bahamas in return for high-priced cotton. The
ships were so small that only a small amount of cotton went out. When
the Union Navy seized a blockade runner, the ship and cargo were
condemned as a Prize of war and sold, with the proceeds given to the
Navy sailors; the captured crewmen were mostly British and they were
simply released. The Southern economy nearly collapsed during the
war. There were multiple reasons for this: the severe deterioration
of food supplies, especially in cities, the failure of Southern
railroads, the loss of control of the main rivers, foraging by
Northern armies, and the seizure of animals and crops by Confederate
armies. Most historians agree that the blockade was a major factor in
ruining the Confederate economy, however, Wise argues that the
blockade runners provided just enough of a lifeline to allow Lee to
continue fighting for additional months, thanks to fresh supplies of
400,000 rifles, lead, blankets, and boots that the homefront economy
could no longer supply.
ECONOMIC IMPACT: Surdam argues
that the blockade was a powerful weapon that eventually ruined the
Southern economy, at the cost of few lives in combat. Practically,
the entire Confederate cotton crop was useless (although it was sold
to Union traders), costing the Confederacy its main source of income.
Critical imports were scarce and the coastal trade was largely ended
as well. The measure of the blockade's success was not the few ships
that slipped through, but the thousands that never tried it. Merchant
ships owned in Europe were too slow to evade the blockade; they
simply stopped calling at Confederate ports.
To fight an
offensive war, the Confederacy purchased ships from Britain,
converted them to warships, and raided American merchant ships in the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Rates skyrocketed and the American flag
virtually disappeared from international waters. However, the same
ships were reflagged with European flags and continued unmolested.
After the war, the U.S. demanded that Britain pay for the damage
done, and Britain paid the U.S. $15 million in 1871.
RIVERS:
The 1862 Union strategy called for simultaneous advances along four
axis. McClellan would lead the main thrust in Virginia towards
Richmond. Ohio forces were to advance through Kentucky into
Tennessee, the Missouri Department would drive south along the
Mississippi River, and the westernmost attack would originate from
Kansas.
Ulysses Grant used river transport and Andrew
Foote's gunboats of the Western Flotilla to threaten the
Confederacy's "Gibraltar of the West" at Columbus,
Kentucky. Grant was rebuffed at Belmont, but cut off Columbus. The
Confederates, lacking their own gunboats, were forced to retreat and
the Union took control of western Kentucky in March 1862.
In
addition to ocean-going warships coming up the Mississippi, the Union
Navy used timberclads, tinclads, and armored gunboats. Shipyards at
Cairo, Illinois, and St. Louis built new boats or modified steamboats
for action. They took control of the Red, Tennessee, Cumberland,
Mississippi, and Ohio rivers after victories at Fort Henry and Fort
Donelson, and supplied Grant's forces as he moved into Tennessee. At
Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing), in Tennessee in April 1862, the
Confederates made a surprise attack that pushed Union forces against
the river as night fell. Overnight, the Navy landed additional
reinforcements, and Grant counter-attacked. Grant and the Union won a
decisive victory – the first battle with the high casualty rates
that would repeat over and over. Memphis fell to Union forces and
became a key base for further advances south along the Mississippi
River. In April 1862, U.S. Naval forces under Farragut ran past
Confederate defenses south of New Orleans. Confederates abandoned the
city, which gave the Union a critical anchor in the deep South.
Naval forces assisted Grant in his long, complex campaign
that resulted in the surrender of Vicksburg in July 1863, and full
Union control of the Mississippi soon after.
EASTERN
THEATRE: In one of the first highly visible battles, a march by Union
troops under the command of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell on the
Confederate forces near Washington was repulsed.
Maj.
Gen. 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 favour 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 attacked 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, Johnston halted his advance at the Battle of
Seven Pines, then General Robert E. Lee and top subordinates James
Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson defeated McClellan in the Seven Days
Battles and forced his retreat. The Northern Virginia Campaign, which
included the Second Battle of Bull Run, ended in yet another victory
for the South. McClellan resisted General-in-Chief Halleck's orders
to send reinforcements to John Pope's Union Army of Virginia, which
made it easier for Lee's Confederates to defeat twice the number of
combined enemy troops.
Emboldened by Second Bull Run, the
Confederacy made its first invasion of the North. General Lee led
45,000 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 United States military 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 an opportunity 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 was soon defeated at the Battle of Fredericksburg
on December 13, 1862, when more than 12,000 Union soldiers were
killed or wounded during repeated futile frontal assaults against
Marye's Heights. After the battle, Burnside was replaced by Maj. Gen.
Joseph 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. Gen.
Stonewall Jackson was shot in the arm by accidental friendly fire
during the battle and subsequently died of complications. Gen. Hooker
was replaced by Maj. Gen. George Meade during Lee's second invasion
of the North, in June. Meade defeated Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg
(July 1 to 3, 1863). This was the bloodiest battle of the war, and
has been called the war's turning point. Pickett's Charge on July 3
is often considered the high-water mark of the Confederacy because it
signaled the collapse of serious Confederate threats of victory.
Lee's army suffered 28,000 casualties (versus Meade's 23,000).
However, Lincoln was angry that Meade failed to intercept Lee's
retreat, and after Meade's inconclusive fall campaign, Lincoln turned
to the Western Theater for new leadership. At the same time, the
Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg surrendered, giving the Union
control of the Mississippi River, permanently isolating the western
Confederacy, and producing the new leader Lincoln needed, Ulysses S.
Grant.
WESTERN THEATRE: While the Confederate forces had
numerous successes in the Eastern Theater, they were defeated many
times in the West. They were driven from Missouri early in the war as
a result of the Battle of Pea Ridge. Leonidas Polk's invasion of
Columbus, Kentucky ended Kentucky's policy of neutrality and turned
that state against the Confederacy. Nashville and central Tennessee
fell to the Union early in 1862, leading to attrition of local food
supplies and livestock and a breakdown in social organization.
The
Mississippi was opened to Union traffic to the southern border of
Tennessee with the taking of Island No. 10 and New Madrid, Missouri,
and then Memphis, Tennessee. In April 1862, the Union Navy captured
New Orleans, which allowed Union forces to begin moving up the
Mississippi. Only the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi,
prevented Union control of the entire river.
General
Braxton Bragg's second Confederate invasion of Kentucky ended with a
meaningless victory over Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell at the Battle of
Perryville, although Bragg was forced to end his attempt at invading
Kentucky and retreat due to lack of support for the Confederacy in
that state. Bragg was narrowly defeated by Maj. Gen. William
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 Lt. Gen. James Longstreet's corps
(from Lee's army in the east), defeated Rosecrans, despite the heroic
defensive stand of Maj. Gen. George Henry Thomas. Rosecrans retreated
to Chattanooga, which Bragg then besieged.
The Union's
key strategist and tactician in the West was Ulysses S. Grant, who
won victories at Forts Henry and Donelson (by which the Union seized
control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers); the Battle of
Shiloh; and the Battle of Vicksburg, which cemented Union control of
the Mississippi River and is considered one of the turning points of
the war. Grant marched to the relief of Rosecrans and defeated Bragg
at the Third Battle of Chattanooga, driving Confederate forces out of
Tennessee and opening a route to Atlanta and the heart of the
Confederacy.
TRANS-MISSISSIPPI: Extensive guerrilla
warfare characterized the trans-Mississippi region, as the
Confederacy lacked the troops and the logistics to support regular
armies that could challenge Union control. Roving Confederate bands
such as Quantrill's Raiders terrorized the countryside, striking both
military installations and civilian settlements. The "Sons of
Liberty" and "Order of the American Knights" attacked
pro-Union people, elected officeholders, and unarmed uniformed
soldiers. These partisans could not be entirely driven out of the
state of Missouri until an entire regular Union infantry division was
engaged.
By 1864, these violent activities harmed the
nationwide anti-war movement organizing against the re-election of
Lincoln. Missouri not only stayed in the Union, Lincoln took 70
percent of the vote for re-election.
Numerous small-scale
military actions south and west of Missouri sought to control Indian
Territory and New Mexico Territory for the Union. The Union repulsed
Confederate incursions into New Mexico in 1862, and the exiled
Arizona government withdrew into Texas. In the Indian Territory,
civil war broke out within tribes. About 12,000 Indian warriors
fought for the Confederacy, and smaller numbers for the Union. The
most prominent Cherokee was Brigadier General Stand Watie, the last
Confederate general to surrender.
After the fall of
Vicksburg in July 1863, General Kirby Smith in Texas was informed by
Jefferson Davis that he could expect no further help from east of the
Mississippi River. Although he lacked resources to beat Union armies,
he built up a formidable arsenal at Tyler, along with his own Kirby
Smithdom economy, a virtual "independent fiefdom" in Texas,
including railroad construction and international smuggling. The
Union in turn did not directly engage him. Its 1864 Red River
Campaign to take Shreveport, Louisiana was a failure and Texas
remained in Confederate hands throughout the war.
THE END
OF THE WAR: Conquest of Virginia - 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 end the war. This was total war not in killing
civilians but rather in taking provisions and forage and destroying
homes, farms, and railroads, that Grant said "would otherwise
have gone to the support of secession and rebellion. This policy I
believe exercised a material influence in hastening the end."
Grant devised a coordinated strategy that would strike at the entire
Confederacy from multiple directions. Generals George Meade and
Benjamin Butler were ordered to move against Lee near Richmond,
General Franz Sigel (and later Philip Sheridan) were to attack the
Shenandoah Valley, General Sherman was to capture Atlanta and march
to the sea (the Atlantic Ocean), Generals George Crook and William W.
Averell were to operate against railroad supply lines in West
Virginia, and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks was to capture Mobile,
Alabama.
Grant's army set out on the Overland Campaign
with the goal of drawing Lee into a defense of Richmond, where they
would attempt to pin down and destroy the Confederate army. The Union
army first attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles,
notably at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbour. These
battles resulted in heavy losses on both sides, and forced Lee's
Confederates to fall back repeatedly. An attempt to outflank Lee from
the south failed under Butler, who was trapped inside the Bermuda
Hundred river bend. Each battle resulted in setbacks for the Union
that mirrored what they had suffered under prior generals, though
unlike those prior generals, Grant fought on rather than retreat.
Grant was tenacious and kept pressing Lee's Army of Northern Virginia
back to Richmond. While Lee was preparing for an attack on Richmond,
Grant unexpectedly turned south to cross the James River and began
the protracted 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 was initially repelled at the
Battle of New Market by former U.S. Vice President and Confederate
Gen. John C. Breckinridge. The Battle of New Market was the
Confederacy's last major victory of the war. After redoubling his
efforts, Sheridan defeated Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early in a series of
battles, including a final decisive defeat at the Battle of Cedar
Creek. Sheridan then proceeded to destroy the agricultural base of
the Shenandoah Valley, a strategy similar to the tactics Sherman
later employed in Georgia.
Meanwhile, Sherman maneuvered
from Chattanooga to Atlanta, defeating Confederate Generals Joseph E.
Johnston and John Bell Hood along the way. The fall of Atlanta on
September 2, 1864, guaranteed the reelection of Lincoln as president.
Hood left the Atlanta area to swing around and menace Sherman's
supply lines and invade Tennessee in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign.
Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield defeated Hood at the Battle of
Franklin, and George H. Thomas dealt Hood a massive defeat at the
Battle of Nashville, effectively destroying Hood's army.
Leaving
Atlanta, and his base of supplies, Sherman's army marched with an
unknown destination, laying waste to about 20 percent of the farms in
Georgia in his "March to the Sea". He reached the Atlantic
Ocean at Savannah, Georgia in December 1864. Sherman's army was
followed by thousands of freed slaves; there were no major battles
along the March. Sherman turned north through South Carolina and
North Carolina to approach the Confederate Virginia lines from the
south, increasing the pressure on Lee's army.
Lee's army,
thinned by desertion and casualties, was now much smaller than
Grant's. One last Confederate attempt to break the Union hold on
Petersburg failed at the decisive Battle of Five Forks (sometimes
called "the Waterloo of the Confederacy") on April 1. This
meant that the Union now controlled the entire perimeter surrounding
Richmond-Petersburg, completely cutting it off from the Confederacy.
Realizing that the capital was now lost, Lee decided to evacuate his
army. The Confederate capital fell to the Union XXV Corps, composed
of black troops. The remaining Confederate units fled west after a
defeat at Sayler's Creek.
CONFEDERACY SURRENDERS:
Initially, Lee did not intend to surrender, but planned to regroup at
the village of Appomattox Court House, where supplies were to be
waiting, and then continue the war. Grant chased Lee and got in front
of him, so that when Lee's army reached Appomattox Court House, they
were surrounded. After an initial battle, Lee decided that the fight
was now hopeless, and surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on
April 9, 1865, at the McLean House. In an untraditional gesture and
as a sign of Grant's respect and anticipation of peacefully restoring
Confederate states to the Union, Lee was permitted to keep his sword
and his horse, Traveller. On April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was
shot by John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer. Lincoln died early
the next morning, and Andrew Johnson became the president. Meanwhile,
Confederate forces across the South surrendered as news of Lee's
surrender reached them. On April 26, 1865, General Joseph E. Johnston
surrendered nearly 90,000 men of the Army of Tennessee to Major
General William T. Sherman at the Bennett Place near present-day
Durham, North Carolina. It proved to be the largest surrender of
Confederate forces, effectively bringing the war to an end. President
Johnson officially declared a virtual end to the insurrection on May
9, 1865; President Jefferson Davis was captured the following day. On
June 2, Kirby Smith officially surrendered his troops in the
Trans-Mississippi Department. On June 23, Cherokee leader Stand Watie
became the last Confederate General to surrender his forces.
DIPLOMACY DURING THE AMERICAN WAR: Though the Confederacy
hoped that Britain and France would join them against the Union, this
was never likely, and so they instead tried to bring Britain and
France in as mediators. The Union, under Lincoln and Secretary of
State William H. Seward worked to block this, and threatened war if
any country officially recognized the existence of the Confederate
States of America. In 1861, Southerners voluntarily embargoed cotton
shipments, hoping to start an economic depression in Europe that
would force Britain to enter the war to get cotton, but this did not
work. Worse, Europe developed other cotton suppliers, which they
found superior, hindering the South's recovery after the war.
Cotton diplomacy proved a failure as Europe had a surplus
of cotton, while the 1860–62 crop failures in Europe made the
North's grain exports of critical importance. It also helped to turn
European opinion further away from the Confederacy. It was said that
"King Corn was more powerful than King Cotton", as U.S.
grain went from a quarter of the British import trade to almost half.
When Britain did face a cotton shortage, it was temporary, being
replaced by increased cultivation in Egypt and India. Meanwhile, the
war created employment for arms makers, ironworkers, and British
ships to transport weapons.
Lincoln's foreign policy was
deficient in 1861 in terms of appealing to European public opinion.
Diplomats had to explain that United States was not committed to the
ending of slavery, but instead they repeated legalistic arguments
about the unconstitutionality of secession. Confederate spokesman, on
the other hand, were much more successful by ignoring slavery and
instead focusing on their struggle for liberty, their commitment to
free trade, and the essential role of cotton in the European economy.
In addition, the European aristocracy (the dominant factor in every
major country) was "absolutely gleeful in pronouncing the
American debacle as proof that the entire experiment in popular
government had failed. European government leaders welcomed the
fragmentation of the ascendant American Republic."
U.S.
minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams proved particularly adept
and convinced Britain not to boldly challenge the blockade. The
Confederacy purchased several warships from commercial shipbuilders
in Britain (CSS Alabama, CSS Shenandoah, CSS Tennessee, CSS
Tallahassee, CSS Florida, and some others). The most famous, the CSS
Alabama, did considerable damage and led to serious postwar disputes.
However, public opinion against slavery created a political liability
for European politicians, especially in Britain (which, through the
Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, had begun to abolish slavery in most
of her colonies in 1834).
War loomed in late 1861 between
the U.S. and Britain over the Trent affair, involving the U.S. Navy's
boarding of the British mail steamer Trent to seize two Confederate
diplomats. However, London and Washington were able to smooth over
the problem after Lincoln released the two. In 1862, the British
considered mediation – though even such an offer would have risked
war with the U.S. British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston reportedly
read Uncle Tom's Cabin three times when deciding on this.
The
Union victory in the Battle of Antietam caused them to delay this
decision. The Emancipation Proclamation over time would reinforce the
political liability of supporting the Confederacy. Despite sympathy
for the Confederacy, France's own seizure of Mexico ultimately
deterred them from war with the Union. Confederate offers late in the
war to end slavery in return for diplomatic recognition were not
seriously considered by London or Paris. After 1863, the Polish
revolt against Russia further distracted the European powers, and
ensured that they would remain neutral.
UNION VICTORY &
AFTERMATH OF THE WAR: The causes of the war, the reasons for its
outcome, and even the name of the war itself are subjects of
lingering contention today. The North and West grew rich while the
once-rich South became poor for a century. The national political
power of the slaveowners and rich southerners ended. Historians are
less sure about the results of the postwar Reconstruction, especially
regarding the second class citizenship of the Freedmen and their
poverty.
Historians have debated whether the Confederacy
could have won the war. Most scholars, such as James McPherson, argue
that Confederate victory was at least possible. McPherson argues that
the North's advantage in population and resources made Northern
victory likely but not guaranteed. He also argues that if the
Confederacy had fought using unconventional tactics, they would have
more easily been able to hold out long enough to exhaust the Union.
Confederates did not need to invade and hold enemy
territory to win, but only needed to fight a defensive war to
convince the North that the cost of winning was too high. The North
needed to conquer and hold vast stretches of enemy territory and
defeat Confederate armies to win. Lincoln was not a military
dictator, and could only continue to fight the war as long as the
American public supported a continuation of the war. The Confederacy
sought to win independence by out-lasting Lincoln; however, after
Atlanta fell and Lincoln defeated McClellan in the election of 1864,
all hope for a political victory for the South ended. At that point,
Lincoln had secured the support of the Republicans, War Democrats,
the border states, emancipated slaves, and the neutrality of Britain
and France. By defeating the Democrats and McClellan, he also
defeated the Copperheads and their peace platform.
Many
scholars argue that the Union held an insurmountable long-term
advantage over the Confederacy in industrial strength and population.
Confederate actions, they argue, only delayed defeat. Civil War
historian Shelby Foote expressed this view succinctly: "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."
A
minority view among historians is that the Confederacy lost because,
as E. Merton Coulter put it, "people did not will hard enough
and long enough to win." Marxist historian Armstead Robinson
agrees, pointing to a class conflict in the Confederates army between
the slave owners and the larger number of non-owners. He argues that
the non-owner soldiers grew embittered about fighting to preserve
slavery, and fought less enthusiastically. He attributes the major
Confederate defeats in 1863 at Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge to this
class conflict. However, most historians reject the argument. James
M. McPherson, after reading thousands of letters written by
Confederate soldiers, found strong patriotism that continued to the
end; they truly believed they were fighting for freedom and liberty.
Even as the Confederacy was visibly collapsing in 1864–65, he says
most Confederate soldiers were fighting hard. Historian Gary
Gallagher cites General Sherman who in early 1864 commented, "The
devils seem to have a determination that cannot but be admired."
Despite their loss of slaves and wealth, with starvation looming,
Sherman continued, "yet I see no sign of let up – some few
deserters – plenty tired of war, but the masses determined to fight
it out."
Also important were Lincoln's eloquence in
rationalizing the national purpose and his skill in keeping the
border states committed to the Union cause. The Emancipation
Proclamation was an effective use of the President's war powers. The
Confederate government failed in its attempt to get Europe involved
in the war militarily, particularly Britain and France. Southern
leaders needed to get European powers to help break up the blockade
the Union had created around the Southern ports and cities. Lincoln's
naval blockade was 95 percent effective at stopping trade goods; as a
result, imports and exports to the South declined significantly. The
abundance of European cotton and Britain's hostility to the
institution of slavery, along with Lincoln's Atlantic and Gulf of
Mexico naval blockades, severely decreased any chance that either
Britain or France would enter the war.
Historian Don
Doyle has argued that the Union victory had a major impact on the
course of world history. The Union victory energized popular
democratic forces. A Confederate victory, on the other hand, would
have meant a new birth of slavery, not freedom. Historian Fergus
Bordewich, following Doyle, argues that: The North's victory
decisively proved the durability of democratic government.
Confederate independence, on the other hand, would have established
an American model for reactionary politics and race-based repression
that would likely have cast an international shadow into the
twentieth century and perhaps beyond."
COSTS OF THE
WAR: The war produced at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of the
population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by
disease, and 50,000 civilians. Binghamton University historian J.
David Hacker believes the number of soldier deaths was approximately
750,000, 20 percent higher than traditionally estimated, and possibly
as high as 850,000. The war accounted for more American deaths than
in all other U.S. wars combined.
Based on 1860 census
figures, 8 percent of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war,
including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South. About
56,000 soldiers died in prison camps during the War. An estimated
60,000 men lost limbs in the war.
Union army dead,
amounting to 15 percent of the over two million who served, was
broken down as follows: 110,070 killed in action (67,000) or died of
wounds (43,000). 199,790 died of disease (75 percent was due to the
war, the remainder would have occurred in civilian life anyway)
24,866 died in Confederate prison camps 9,058 killed by accidents or
drowning 15,741 other/unknown deaths 359,528 total dead In addition
there were 4,523 deaths in the Navy (2,112 in battle) and 460 in the
Marines (148 in battle).
Black troops made up 10 percent
of the Union death toll, they amounted to 15 percent of disease
deaths but less than 3 percent of those killed in battle. Losses
among African Americans were high, in the last year and a half and
from all reported casualties, approximately 20 percent of all African
Americans enrolled in the military lost their lives during the Civil
War.:16 Notably, their mortality rate was significantly higher than
white soldiers: [We] find, according to the revised official data,
that of the slightly over two millions troops in the United States
Volunteers, over 316,000 died (from all causes), or 15.2 percent. Of
the 67,000 Regular Army (white) troops, 8.6 percent, or not quite
6,000, died. Of the approximately 180,000 United States Coloured
Troops, however, over 36,000 died, or 20.5 percent. In other words,
the mortality "rate" amongst the United States coloured
Troops in the Civil War was thirty-five percent greater than that
among other troops, notwithstanding the fact that the former were not
enrolled until some eighteen months after the fighting began.
Confederate records compiled by historian William F. Fox
list 74,524 killed and died of wounds and 59,292 died of disease.
Including Confederate estimates of battle losses where no records
exist would bring the Confederate death toll to 94,000 killed and
died of wounds. Fox complained, however, that records were
incomplete, especially during the last year of the war, and that
battlefield reports likely under-counted deaths (many men counted as
wounded in battlefield reports subsequently died of their wounds).
Thomas L. Livermore, using Fox's data, put the number of Confederate
non-combat deaths at 166,000, using the official estimate of Union
deaths from disease and accidents and a comparison of Union and
Confederate enlistment records, for a total of 260,000 deaths.
However, this excludes the 30,000 deaths of Confederate troops in
prisons, which would raise the minimum number of deaths to 290,000.
While the figures of 360,000 army deaths for the Union
and 260,000 for the Confederacy remained commonly cited, they are
incomplete. In addition to many Confederate records being missing,
partly as a result of Confederate widows not reporting deaths due to
being ineligible for benefits, both armies only counted troops who
died during their service, and not the tens of thousands who died of
wounds or diseases after being discharged. This often happened only a
few days or weeks later. Francis Amasa Walker, Superintendent of the
1870 Census, used census and Surgeon General data to estimate a
minimum of 500,000 Union military deaths and 350,000 Confederate
military deaths, for a total death toll of 850,000 soldiers. While
Walker's estimates were originally dismissed because of the 1870
Census's undercounting, it was later found that the census was only
off by 6.5%, and that the data Walker used would be roughly accurate.
Analyzing the number of dead by using census data to
calculate the deviation of the death rate of men of fighting age from
the norm suggests that at least 627,000 and at most 888,000, but most
likely 761,000 soldiers, died in the war. This would break down to
approximately 350,000 Confederate and 411,000 Union military deaths,
going by the proportion of Union to Confederate battle losses.
Losses can be viewed as high considering that the defeat
of Mexico in 1846–48 resulted in fewer than 2,000 soldiers killed
in battle, and roughly 13,000 killed overall. One reason for the high
number of battle deaths during the war was the use of Napoleonic
tactics, such as charging. With the advent of more accurate rifled
barrels, Minié balls and (near the end of the war for the Union
army) repeating firearms such as the Spencer Repeating Rifle and the
Henry Repeating Rifle, soldiers were mowed down when standing in
lines in the open. This led to the adoption of trench warfare, a
style of fighting that defined much of World War I.
The
wealth amassed in slaves and slavery for the Confederacy's 3.5
million blacks effectively ended when Union armies arrived; they were
nearly all freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves in the
border states and those located in some former Confederate territory
occupied before the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state
action or (on December 6, 1865) by the Thirteenth Amendment.
The
war destroyed much of the wealth that had existed in the South. All
accumulated investment Confederate bonds was forfeit; most banks and
railroads were bankrupt. Income per person in the South dropped to
less than 40 percent of that of the North, a condition that lasted
until well into the 20th century. Southern influence in the U.S.
federal government, previously considerable, was greatly diminished
until the latter half of the 20th century. The full restoration of
the Union was the work of a highly contentious postwar era known as
Reconstruction.
EMANCIPATION: Slavery as a war issue: -
While not all Southerners saw themselves as fighting to preserve
slavery, most of the officers and over a third of the rank and file
in Lee's army had close family ties to slavery. To Northerners, in
contrast, the motivation was primarily to preserve the Union, not to
abolish slavery. Abraham Lincoln consistently made preserving the
Union the central goal of the war, though he increasingly saw slavery
as a crucial issue and made ending it an additional goal. Lincoln's
decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation angered both Peace
Democrats ("Copperheads") and War Democrats, but energized
most Republicans. By warning that free blacks would flood the North,
Democrats made gains in the 1862 elections, but they did not gain
control of Congress. The Republicans' counterargument that slavery
was the mainstay of the enemy steadily gained support, with the
Democrats losing decisively in the 1863 elections in the northern
state of Ohio when they tried to resurrect anti-black sentiment.
EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION: The Emancipation Proclamation
enabled African-Americans, both free blacks and escaped slaves, to
join the Union Army. About 190,000 volunteered, further enhancing the
numerical advantage the Union armies enjoyed over the Confederates,
who did not dare emulate the equivalent manpower source for fear of
fundamentally undermining the legitimacy of slavery.
During
the Civil War, sentiment concerning slaves, enslavement and
emancipation in the United States was divided. In 1861, Lincoln
worried that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss
of the border states, and that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the
same as to lose the whole game." Copperheads and some War
Democrats opposed emancipation, although the latter eventually
accepted it as part of total war needed to save the Union.
At
first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by Secretary of War
Simon Cameron and Generals John C. Frémont (in Missouri) and David
Hunter (in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida) to keep the loyalty
of the border states and the War Democrats. Lincoln warned the border
states that a more radical type of emancipation would happen if his
gradual plan based on compensated emancipation and voluntary
colonization was rejected. But only the District of Columbia accepted
Lincoln's gradual plan, which was enacted by Congress. When Lincoln
told his cabinet about his proposed emancipation proclamation, Seward
advised Lincoln to wait for a victory before issuing it, as to do
otherwise would seem like "our last shriek on the retreat".
Lincoln laid the groundwork for public support in an open letter
published letter to abolitionist Horace Greeley's newspaper.
In
September 1862, the Battle of Antietam provided this opportunity, and
the subsequent War Governors' Conference added support for the
proclamation. Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation on September 22, 1862, and his final Emancipation
Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In his letter to Albert G. Hodges,
Lincoln explained his belief that "If slavery is not wrong,
nothing is wrong ... And yet I have never understood that the
Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially
upon this judgment and feeling ... I claim not to have controlled
events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
Lincoln's moderate approach succeeded in inducing border
states, War Democrats and emancipated slaves to fight for the Union.
The Union-controlled border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland,
Delaware and West Virginia) and Union-controlled regions around New
Orleans, Norfolk and elsewhere, were not covered by the Emancipation
Proclamation. All abolished slavery on their own, except Kentucky and
Delaware.
Since the Emancipation Proclamation was based
on the President's war powers, it only included territory held by
Confederates at the time. However, the Proclamation became a symbol
of the Union's growing commitment to add emancipation to the Union's
definition of liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation greatly reduced
the Confederacy's hope of getting aid from Britain or France. By late
1864, Lincoln was playing a leading role in getting Congress to vote
for the Thirteenth Amendment, which made emancipation universal and
permanent.
TEXAS v. WHITE: In Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700
(1869) the United States Supreme Court ruled that Texas had remained
a state ever since it first joined the Union, despite claims that it
joined the Confederate States; the court further held that the
Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the
United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts
of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to
such ordinances, were "absolutely null", under the
constitution.
RECONSTRUCTION: Reconstruction began during
the war, with the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 and
continued until 1877. It comprised multiple complex methods to
resolve the outstanding issues of the war's aftermath, the most
important of which were the three "Reconstruction Amendments"
to the Constitution, which remain in effect to the present time: the
13th (1865), the 14th (1868) and the 15th (1870). From the Union
perspective, the goals of Reconstruction were to consolidate the
Union victory on the battlefield by reuniting the Union; to guarantee
a "republican form of government for the ex-Confederate states;
and to permanently end slavery—and prevent semi-slavery status.
President Johnson took a lenient approach and saw the
achievement of the main war goals as realized in 1865, when each
ex-rebel state repudiated secession and ratified the Thirteenth
Amendment. Radical Republicans demanded proof that Confederate
nationalism was dead and that the slaves were truly free. They came
to the fore after the 1866 elections and undid much of Johnson's
work. In 1872 the "Liberal Republicans" argued that the war
goals had been achieved and that Reconstruction should end. They ran
a presidential ticket in 1872 but were decisively defeated. In 1874,
Democrats, primarily Southern, took control of Congress and opposed
any more reconstruction. The Compromise of 1877 closed with a
national consensus that the Civil War had finally ended. With the
withdrawal of federal troops, however, whites retook control of every
Southern legislature; the Jim Crow period of disenfranchisement and
legal segregation was about to begin.
MEMORY AND
HISTORIOGRAPHY: The Civil War is one of the central events in
American collective memory. There are innumerable statues,
commemorations, books and archival collections. The memory includes
the home front, military affairs, the treatment of soldiers, both
living and dead, in the war's aftermath, depictions of the war in
literature and art, evaluations of heroes and villains, and
considerations of the moral and political lessons of the war. The
last theme includes moral evaluations of racism and slavery, heroism
in combat and behind the lines, and the issues of democracy and
minority rights, as well as the notion of an "Empire of Liberty"
influencing the world.
Professional historians have paid
much more attention to the causes of the war, than to the war itself.
Military history has largely developed outside academe, leading to a
proliferation of solid studies by non-scholars who are thoroughly
familiar with the primary sources, pay close attention to battles and
campaigns, and write for the large public readership, rather than the
small scholarly community. Bruce Canton and Shelby Foote are among
the best-known writers. Practically every major figure in the war,
both North and South, has had a serious biographical study. Deeply
religious Southerners saw the hand of God in history, which
demonstrated His wrath at their sinfulness, or His rewards for their
suffering. Historian Wilson Fallin has examined the sermons of white
and black Baptist preachers after the War. Southern white preachers
said: God had chastised them and given them a special mission – to
maintain orthodoxy, strict biblicism, personal piety, and traditional
race relations. Slavery, they insisted, had not been sinful. Rather,
emancipation was a historical tragedy and the end of Reconstruction
was a clear sign of God's favour.
In sharp contrast,
Black preachers interpreted the Civil War as: God's gift of freedom.
They appreciated opportunities to exercise their independence, to
worship in their own way, to affirm their worth and dignity, and to
proclaim the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Most of
all, they could form their own churches, associations, and
conventions. These institutions offered self-help and racial uplift,
and provided places where the gospel of liberation could be
proclaimed. As a result, black preachers continued to insist that God
would protect and help him; God would be their rock in a stormy land.
LOST CAUSE: Memory of the war in the white South
crystallized in the myth of the "Lost Cause", shaping
regional identity and race relations for generations. Alan T. Nolan
notes that the Lost Cause was expressly "a rationalization, a
cover-up to vindicate the name and fame" of those in rebellion.
Some claims revolve around the insignificance of slavery; some
appeals highlight cultural differences between North and South; the
military conflict by Confederate actors is idealized; in any case,
secession was said to be lawful. The two important political legacies
that flowed from the adoption of the Lost Cause analysis were that it
facilitated the reunification of the North and the South, and it
excused the "virulent racism" of the 19th century,
sacrificing African-American progress to a white man's reunification.
But the Lost Cause legacy to history is "a caricature of the
truth. This caricature wholly misrepresents and distorts the facts of
the matter" in every instance.
The interpretation of
the Civil War presented by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard in The
Rise of American Civilization (1927) was highly influential among
historians and the general public until the Civil Rights Movement of
the 1950s and 1960s. The Beards downplayed slavery, abolitionism, and
issues of morality. They ignored constitutional issues of states'
rights and even ignored American nationalism as the force that
finally led to victory in the war. Indeed, the ferocious combat
itself was passed over as merely an ephemeral event. Much more
important was the calculus of class conflict. The Beards announced
that the Civil War was really: [A] social cataclysm in which the
capitalists, labourers, and farmers of the North and West drove from
power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the
South.
The Beards themselves abandoned their
interpretation by the 1940s and it became defunct among historians in
the 1950s, when scholars shifted to an emphasis on slavery. However,
Beardian themes still echo among Lost Cause writers.
CIVIL
WAR COMMEMORATION: The American Civil War has been commemorated in
many capacities ranging from the reenactment of battles, to statues
and memorial halls erected, to films being produced, to stamps and
coins with Civil War themes being issued, all of which helped to
shape public memory. This varied advent occurred in greater
proportions on the 100th and 150th anniversary. Hollywood's take on
the war has been especially influential in shaping public memory, as
seen in such film classics as Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the
Wind (1939), and more recently Lincoln (2012). Ken Burns produced a
notable PBS series on television titled The Civil War (1990). It was
digitally remastered and re-released in 2015.
Books:
Gone with the Wind (by Margaret Mitchell); An Occurrence
at Owl Creek Bridge (by Ambrose Bierce); Texar's Revenge, or, North
Against South (by Jules Verne)
Films:
The
Birth of a Nation (1915, USA); The General (1926, USA); Gone with the
Wind (1939, USA); The Red Badge of Courage (1951, USA); The Horse
Soldiers (1959, USA); Shenandoah (1965, USA); The Good, the Bad and
the Ugly (1966, Italy-Spain-FRG); Glory (1989, USA); Gettysburg
(1993, USA); The Last Outlaw (1993, USA); Cold Mountain (2003, USA);
Gods and Generals (2003, USA); North and South (miniseries); Abraham
Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012, USA); Lincoln (2012, USA); 12 Years a
Slave (2012, USA)