| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: American Civil War |
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American civil war (1861-5), the most important event in the history of the USA. It resulted from a fundamental disagreement between two sections, North and South, about the place of chattel slavery in the Union. Without the slavery question there would have been no war. The southern emphasis on ‘states rights’ was essentially a coded phrase for the defence of slavery. By the 1840s a pro-slavery ideology had grown up in the Deep South which argued that slavery was a positive good and by 1860 this had become popular throughout the entire South and imbued it with a strong feeling that the slave states enjoyed a unique culture. Increasing numbers of secessionists claimed that this culture could only be protected by gaining independence. The war itself was detonated by the refusal of the slave states to accept the decision of the 1860 presidential election, which had seen the first Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, sweep the northern states but did not gain a single electoral vote in the South. From December 1860-February 1861 seven states in the Deep South passed ordinances of secession, occupied federal installations, and called out their militias. These states set up their own Confederacy with a pro-slavery constitution headed by a Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, and this new government located its capital initially at Montgomery, Alabama. The rebel government was eager to remove the two remaining federal outposts on their territory, at Pensacola in Florida and at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour. After a stand-off lasting four months, the Confederacy bombarded the latter on 12-13 April 1861.
President Lincoln responded by issuing a proclamation calling for 75, 000 volunteers for three months to suppress a rebellion against federal authority. Virtually all participants believed that the conflict would be short. Perhaps it would have been if the seceded states had remained only seven in number; however, four important states of the Upper South, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas, seceded rather than co-operate in the ‘coercion’ of their sister slave states. They added not only to the Confederacy's population and territory but also to its sparse industrial resources. However, geography placed Virginia and Tennessee especially in the very front line should military operations escalate. So large was the Confederacy that a number of influential figures doubted whether it could be physically occupied and placed their hopes in the naval blockade which was announced on 19 April. Certainly, the South's geographical advantages added to a prevailing sense of overconfidence that independence could be achieved easily.
A widespread belief in a short war was buttressed in the North by an awareness of a great disparity in resources. The total population of the USA in 1860 was 31, 443, 321. Of these the population of the southern states was 8, 726, 644 (of whom 3, 953, 760 were slaves). The Border States (Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri) had a population of 3, 588, 729. Throughout 1861-2 ensuring the loyalty of the Border States remained a top priority for the Lincoln administration. Should secession be limited to eleven states then the northern states could mobilize 4 million fighting men to the Confederacy's 1, 100, 000. The industrial disparity was even greater. The states of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania alone produced more manufactured goods than the entire Confederacy. The South could produce sufficient food to feed itself but lacked the means to transport it. In 1860 only 9, 000 miles (14, 481 km) of the American total of 31, 000 miles (49, 879 km) of railway track could be found in the South, and southern engineers had completed only nine of the 470 locomotives built before 1860. Yet a material disparity in itself does not guarantee victory and Lincoln's main problem was in mobilizing and organizing the great resources available to him for waging war.
The secession crisis had generated the largest arms race yet seen in North America. In the North the 75, 000 volunteers were soon supplemented, and by 1 July 1861 300, 000 men had been raised, the majority for three years. Jefferson Davis had succeeded in raising 200, 000 Confederate volunteers by August 1861. These hosts on both sides were difficult to command. The men believed that they were civilians in uniform and enjoyed all their previous rights; they were not deferential to their officers, who were often elected. Many incompetents had to be weeded out by commissions boards over the next year. Important politicians, such as John C. Frémont, Benjamin F. Butler, and Nathaniel P. Banks, were awarded generals' commissions. Consequently, armies on both sides were subject to political influences, but especially those Union forces that were encamped near Washington, known by the summer as the Army of the Potomac, because the process of congressional and presidential elections continued unabated despite the war.
Political pressure helped shape the first campaign. The elderly general-in-chief, Winfield Scott preferred to launch a well-prepared campaign in the Mississippi basin relying on the economic strangulation of the South. This concept was strategically sensible but was unacceptable to public opinion because it would work slowly. The press dubbed it the ‘Anaconda Plan’. The power of the press and propaganda was potent throughout the conflict. In the spring of 1861 the Confederacy decided to move its capital to Richmond, Virginia, a mere 100 miles (161 km) from Washington. A clamour developed that the federal army should move ‘on to Richmond’. The result was an advance towards Centreville and a Confederate defensive victory at first Bull Run. However, Confederate forces were disorganized by their success and could not exploit it. McClellan was appointed to command the Army of the Potomac and began an energetic programme of consolidation, reorganization, and training. In November he replaced Scott as general-in-chief and became overburdened by his dual role. The first lull in the eastern theatre ensued, but this brought immense political dissatisfaction with the war's conduct and culminated in the creation of the Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War on 20 December 1861. This body was highly critical of McClellan's conciliatory policy, which stressed that the war aimed at the restoration of the Union and not the destruction of slavery.
Bibliography
— Brian Holden Reid
| US Military History Companion: Civil War |
| US Supreme Court: Civil War |
Constitutional history of the Civil War period underscores the principal characteristics of the Supreme Court as a coordinate branch of government in the context of nineteenth‐century political culture. As the war signaled the end of three decades of Democratic rule and the start of a long period of Republican dominance, so it marked the transition from the state sovereignty doctrines of the Taney Court to the constitutional nationalism of the Chase Court. The process of change that accelerated these political and jurisprudential trends was dramatically illustrated in the withdrawal from the federal government of southern members of Congress and the resignation from the Supreme Court of Justice John A. Campbell of Alabama.
Changes in the membership of the Supreme Court at the start of the Civil War permitted the effects of the political realignment that put Abraham Lincoln in the White House to be registered in constitutional law more rapidly than is usually the case following critical elections in American political history. Problems arising from the war encouraged the Court to refrain from judicial activist policy making at the expense of the political branches. Military exigencies caused most of the major constitutional questions that arose to be resolved by the executive and Congress and induced in the justices a more deferential attitude toward political officers than might otherwise have prevailed (see War).
Three vacancies existed on the Supreme Court at the start of President Abraham Lincoln's administration. Justice Peter V. Daniel died in 1860 and President James Buchanan's nomination of a Democratic successor was blocked by Republicans in the Senate in February 1861. Justice John McLean died on 4 April 1861, and on 25 April Justice Campbell resigned. Lincoln appointed Noah H. Swayne, an Ohio Republican, in January 1862, Republican Samuel F. Miller of Iowa in July, and Illinois Republican David Davis, a state judge, in October. When Congress created a tenth judicial circuit (thereby increasing the size of the Court to ten justices) in 1863, Lincoln named Stephen J. Field of California, a Democrat and ardent Unionist, to the high bench. These appointments produced a more politically balanced Court, consisting of six antebellum Democrats (Samuel Nelson, Nathan Clifford, James M. Wayne, Robert C. Grier, John Catron, and Roger B. Taney), and four wartime appointees sympathetic to the Republican administration. The composition of the Court remained stable until Chief Justice Taney died in October 1864 and was replaced by Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury under Lincoln.
The war raised constitutional questions that were inappropriate for judicial resolution because of their military and political nature. Confiscation, emancipation, taxation and fiscal policy, conscription, and treason were among these issues. Yet the judiciary's traditional concern for individual liberty and property rights provided the basis for limited Supreme Court involvement in matters relating to internal security policy and to the politically sensitive question of the legal nature of the war.
President Lincoln's suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in April 1861 presented an issue of government infringement of civil liberties that could reasonably be brought before the judiciary. The executive and Congress provided for the nation's internal security without benefit of any Supreme Court opinion on the constitutionality of the measures adopted. Before the government's policy was put in place, however, Chief Justice Taney attempted to control the actions of the executive branch by invalidating Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Taney questioned the president's action in Ex parte Merryman in May 1861.
John Merryman was a pro‐Confederate Maryland political leader who was arrested under authority of Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus in May 1861 for participating in the destruction of railroad bridges. He petitioned Chief Justice Taney, presiding judge of the circuit court at Baltimore, for a writ of habeas corpus. Taney issued the writ, but the military commander to whom it was addressed refused to produce Merryman. The chief justice then issued a writ of attachment ordering the military commander to be apprehended. He was again rebuffed. Holding a session at chambers as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (rather than presiding over a session of the circuit court), Taney on 28 May 1861 declared Merryman entitled to his freedom. In an unusual move, he filed an opinion condemning Merryman's arrest as an arbitrary and illegal denial of civil liberty (see Military Trials and Martial Law).
Taney stated that military detention of civilians like Merryman was unconstitutional because only Congress had authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. He based this conclusion on the fact that the provision authorizing suspension of the writ appears in Article I of the Constitution, dealing with the powers of the legislative branch. In a broader constitutional analysis, Taney described the president as a mere administrative officer charged with faithful enforcement of the laws. According to the chief justice, this amounted to a constitutional duty not to execute the laws on the president's own authority or initiative, but rather to act in support of the judicial authority by executing the laws “as they are expounded and adjudged by the co‐ordinate branch of the government, to which that duty is assigned by the Constitution.” Taney sent a copy of his opinion to Lincoln, who in his 4 July 1861 message to Congress justified his action suspending the writ of habeas corpus on the basis of his constitutional oath to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The president reasoned further that the Constitution did not expressly state who can order suspension of the writ and that the framers did not intend that in an emergency no action should be taken to protect the public safety by suspending habeas corpus until Congress could be assembled. Lincoln prevailed in the contest with Taney.
The Supreme Court at other times deferred to the government's internal security policy, even when executive action exceeded habeas corpus suspension, as in Ex parte Vallandigham in 1864. In April 1863, General Ambrose Burnside issued an order prohibiting in the area of his command any declarations of sympathy for the enemy. He also declared that persons who helped the enemy would be tried under military authority. Former Democratic representative Clement L. Vallandigham condemned the order and urged resistance to it. He was arrested, tried, and convicted by a military commission. Burnside imposed a prison sentence, which President Lincoln commuted into banishment beyond Confederate lines. Removing to Canada, Vallandigham petitioned a federal circuit court in Ohio for a writ of habeas corpus, but since he was no longer in custody, no basis existed for Supreme Court review of the lower court's denial of the petition. Vallandigham then applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari to review directly the decision of the military commission.
With Chief Justice Taney not participating in the case, the Court denied the petition for certiorari. Justice Wayne's opinion for a unanimous Court asserted that the Court lacked jurisdiction under the Judiciary Act of 1789 because a military commission was not a court whose decisions could be reviewed by the Supreme Court. He noted that the Constitution defined the original jurisdiction of the Court in a way that precluded review of the case. Although the disposition of the case was favorable to the government, the Court did not reach the issue of the constitutionality of military trial of civilians in circumstances like those surrounding the arrest of Vallandigham.
While generally refraining from decisions having an impact on military or war‐related policies, the Supreme Court handed down a major decision determining the legal nature of the conflict. This question was presented in the Prize Cases (1863), where the issue was the legality of the navy's capture of ships bound for Confederate ports under the blockade ordered by President Lincoln in April 1861. If a state of war recognized by international law existed, the blockade was legal and the captures legitimate. If a war did not exist when the executive imposed the blockade, the captures were illegal. In March 1863, the Supreme Court decided 5 to 4 that the blockade was legal. According to Justice Grier's majority opinion, a state of war existed in April 1861 that justified resort to a blockade. Grier wrote that although the conflict began as an insurrection against the federal government and without a formal declaration, it was nonetheless a war—a civil war. He observed that the Civil War was a fact of which the Supreme Court was bound to take notice. Turning to the Constitution, he pointed out that although neither Congress nor the executive could declare war on a state, the president was authorized by statutes of 1795 and 1807 to call out the militia and use military force to suppress insurrection against the United States. Grier stated that it was for the president as commander in chief to decide whether in suppressing an insurrection it was justifiable to treat the opponents as belligerents (see Presidential Emergency Powers). He furthermore contended that the Supreme Court must be governed by the president's decision. Grier concluded that the proclamation of the blockade was evidence that a state of war existed.
The Prize Cases recognized broad executive power to respond to military attack on the United States. Of more immediate practical import was the Court's holding that persons in the seceded states could be treated both as rebels and enemies, or as a belligerent party. The Court did not, however, acknowledge or confer executive authority unilaterally to declare and carry on a war indefinitely without legislative approval.
Justice Nelson wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Clifford, Catron, and Taney. Nelson argued that war did not exist when Lincoln ordered the blockade because Congress had not exercised its exclusive power to declare war. He said that whether war existed was a legal question unaffected by material facts and realities. When Congress on 13 July 1861 authorized the executive to declare the existence of a state of insurrection, war began and the blockade was legal. Before that date the conduct of hostilities by the United States was a “personal war” of President Lincoln.
During the Civil War the Supreme Court decided many nonmilitary questions. California land disputes arising out of Mexican rule were prominent on its docket, as were cases dealing with contracts, partnership, bankruptcy, usury, patent rights, and other commercial matters. A few cases illustrated continuity with earlier trends in constitutional law despite changes in the Court's membership.
In Gelpcke v. Dubuque (1864), the Court overruled an Iowa supreme court decision holding that a city's nonpayment of municipal bonds, issued for a railroad that was never built, was constitutional under the state constitution. Although not expressly stated, the effective basis of the Court's decision seemed to be the Contract Clause of the Constitution. The case also may have illustrated the Court's belief that it could shape a federal common law of commerce, as in Swift v. Tyson (1842).
The Supreme Court also ruled against state power in People ex rel. Bank of Commerce v. Commissioner of Taxes (1863). In this case the Court considered a New York tax on bank stock, including federal government securities that were otherwise exempt from state taxation. Although Congress in 1862 passed an act declaring stocks, bonds, and other U.S. securities exempt from state taxes, the Court struck down the state tax on constitutional grounds. Yet the Court declined to decide the constitutionality of the Legal Tender Act of 1862. In Roosevelt v. Meyer (1863), it inexplicably held that it lacked jurisdiction to review a New York state court ruling favorable to the Legal Tender Act. It is not clear whether this decision, which was overruled in 1872, reflected unwillingness to tackle the controversial issue of national currency policy or was instead a flawed legal analysis of the Judiciary Act of 1780. (See Legal Tender Cases.)
The December 1864 term of the Supreme Court marked the end of the Taney era. While Congress debated and rejected a proposal to place a marble bust of the late Chief Justice Taney in the Supreme Court room in the Capitol, the Court under Chief Justice Chase disposed of a series of cases involving the illegal slave trade. In February 1865, John S. Rock was sworn in as the first African‐American attorney to be admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court. This event signified the emergence of racial equality as a major constitutional issue in the judicial history of the Reconstruction period that would soon engage the Court's attention.
See also History of the Court: Establishment of the Union.
Bibliography
— Herman Belz
| US Military Dictionary: American Civil War |
(April 1861- April 1865) costing more than 600, 000 American lives, the Civil War consolidated the Revolutionary War of 1776 by ensuring that the United States would remain a single republic rather than a collection of potentially independent states. The Civil War brought enormous changes to the United States, most notably in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery and gave citizenship to African Americans. The war also made use of several military innovations. Longer-range and more destructive ammunition, primarily the minié rifle bullet, made casualty rates much higher than in previous wars. The Civil War also was the first to make use of the draft and ironclad warships, and extensive use of rail transport and military telegraph lines, and it was first to be widely documented by photographers. Prompted by sectional disputes between slaveholding southern states and northern states, the Civil War began following the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, whose party was committed to free labor ideology. Rather than accepting Lincoln's leadership, seven southern states, led by South Carolina and comprising Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas elected to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States of America (CSA) in February 1861. The Confederacy elected Mexican War (1846-48) hero and former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis as their president, and began organizing an independent government modeled on the U.S. Constitution, with caveats guaranteeing slavery. On April 12, the Confederacy began fighting to assert its independence when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor. Soon after, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia joined the Confederacy.
Union commander Gen. Winfield Scott's strategic response was to blockade and encircle the Confederacy in a strategy dubbed the Anaconda Plan. Nevertheless, the first two years of fighting favored Confederate armies. Despite the superiority in men and supplies held by the Union's Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia led by Robert E. Lee won or dramatically stopped U.S. armies in a series of battles fought in northern Virginia and Maryland. Notable among these were the 1861 First Battle of Bull Run, in which southern armies won the war's first major contest; a series of dramatic raids conducted in the Shenandoah Valley by troops under Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson; the Seven Days' Battle (1862), in which Lee, at high cost, drove Union general George B. McClellan back from the Confederate capital at Richmond; the 1862 Second Battle of Bull Run, in which Lee virtually crushed Union armies fighting under John Pope; Antietam, that same year, where McClellan failed to capitalize on a costly victory that stopped Lee's advance into the heart of Maryland; and Fredericksburg (also 1862), which witnessed well-defended Confederates cutting down 13, 000 Union troops with only 5, 000 losses of their own.
While Lee stymied Union armies in the East, federal forces under Ulysses S. Grant chipped away at the South's western defenses. In February 1862 Grant launched joint army-navy attacks that took Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Kentucky and Tennessee, piercing the center of the Confederacy's western defenses. As Union armies began moving into the Confederacy from the West, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston counterattacked near Shiloh (1862) on the Tennessee River. Grant's unprepared troops suffered heavy casualties, but managed to repel the attack. The Union then began a long push into the South. The year 1863 proved crucial in many ways. After Antietam, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation stating that the federal government considered all slaves still in Confederate territory to be free, which went into effect on January 1, 1863. The proclamation had two important consequences. For many in the North it transformed the war into a crusade against slavery. It also dissuaded Britain from officially recognizing and aiding the Confederacy. That year, the United States accepted African American enlistments to the army for the first time since 1820. By war's end, over 179, 000 African-American men served in the U.S. armed forces. the year 1863 also witnessed two of the most crucial Confederate military defeats. Lee attempted to bring the Union to negotiate a peace by making an offensive strike. Federal armies under Gen. George G. Meade stopped that advance in the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July—the war's largest and most consequential battle. In the west, on July 4, Grant took the city of Vicksburg, the Confederacy's last major stronghold on the Mississippi. In 1864, Lincoln promoted Grant to general-in-chief. As Grant pushed against Lee's armies toward the Confederate capital at Richmond, Gen. William T. Sherman assailed Atlanta and then conducted his infamous March to the Sea (1864-65). Aiming to undercut the Confederacy's ability to sustain warfare in terms of both material and morale, Sherman's forces cut a sixty-mile wide trail through Georgia from Atlanta to the Atlantic, earning him the longstanding enmity of many southerners, despite his own personal regard for the region and its people. These two offensives combined with a concerted Union press to shatter the Confederacy. The war effectively ended on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, Virginia. In something of an anticlimax, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston handed over the last Confederate army to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, on April 26. The Reconstruction that followed in its wake was fraught, a situation only made worse by Abraham Lincoln's death on April 15, 1865.
See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
| British History: civil wars |
Civil wars, 1642-51. In 1629 Charles I dismissed Parliament, resolving never to call another. He might have succeeded but for the problem of the multiple kingdoms. During the 1630s he decided to bring Scottish religious practice into conformity with English by abolishing presbyterian worship and substituting an Anglican service. The Scots revolted, and Charles's two attempts to subdue them—the Bishops' wars of 1639 and 1640—were abject failures. At the insistence of the nobility he summoned Parliament. Once convened, the Commons refused him the taxes he needed, and set about dismantling the apparatus of prerogative government, abolishing ship money, the courts of Star Chamber, High Commission, Wards, and others; passing a Triennial Act, depriving church courts of their punitive powers, and attainting Charles's chief minister Strafford. Charles ratified these changes, but with such ill grace that many doubted whether he would keep his word. Trust became a critical issue upon the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland in the autumn of 1641. Exaggerated reports of atrocities perpetrated against the protestant settlers in Ireland inflamed English opinion. It was accepted that an army should crush the rebellion, but there was no agreement about entrusting the king with command. Charles's attempt to arrest five of the parliamentary ringleaders contributed to the deepening distrust of him. Mistrust was compounded by fear that the king could not be counted on to defend England against the threat of international catholicism. Thus legal and constitutional arguments about taxation, the rights of Parliament, and the extent of royal power were inflamed by religious panic.
Despite its control of the midlands, the east, and the south-east including London, there was nothing inevitable about Parliament's victory. Charles almost overthrew his foes at Edgehill October 1642), while in 1643 there were a number of royalist victories. For all the efforts of John Pym to hold together the parliamentary coalition, parliamentary fortunes reached their nadir in that year.
What turned the tide against Charles I was again the reality of multiple kingdoms. In return for a promise to uphold presbyterian church government and impose it in England, the Scots came to Parliament's aid with an army of 20, 000. This bargain was sealed in the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, and the Scots army entered England early in 1644. The joint armies dealt a crushing blow to the king's forces at Marston Moor, near York July 1644). However, this victory was almost frittered away by Essex when he allowed his army to become trapped by Charles at Lostwithiel in Cornwall September 1644). Completely disenchanted with the aristocratic leadership of Parliament's armies, the win-the-war faction under Sir Henry Vane and Oliver Cromwell purged the armies of their noble and parliamentary leadership, creating the New Model Army. Led by Sir Thomas Fairfax, and knit together by constant pay and religious indoctrination, this army quickly put the royalist forces to flight at Naseby June 1645), Langport July 1645), and Bristol September 1645). By May 1646 Charles had handed himself over to the Scots.
Refusing to accept the verdict of the battlefield, Charles dragged out peace negotiations with Parliament, attempting to exploit the rift between army and Parliament and redoubling his efforts to persuade the Scots to assist him. Early in 1648 royalist risings erupted in Kent, Essex, Wales, and the navy in anticipation of a Scottish intervention on behalf of the king. But the Scots were late, and the New Model Army had no difficulty crushing the revolts. When the duke of Hamilton crossed the border in July, he attracted little support, and Cromwell destroyed his forces between Preston and Uttoxeter August 1648). Everywhere triumphant in battle, the army found that Parliament was still intent on negotiating with the king. To prevent such an outcome it occupied London, purged the House of Commons of those who favoured negotiation, and engineered the trial and execution of the king. Once the Rump Parliament had abolished monarchy and the House of Lords, it launched invasions of Ireland (1649) and Scotland (1650). In spite of Cromwellian ruthlessness at Drogheda and Wexford, Ireland took three years to subjugate. The Scots were devastated at Dunbar September 1650), but continued to resist, to the point of invading England a year later under Charles II. His forces scattered at Worcester September 1651), the hapless king fled to the continent. Although the king, lords, and Church of England were brought back in 1660, prerogative government was not. The constitutional changes of 1641 were preserved, while the legacy of the civil wars in radical thought, religious liberty, and parliamentary domination of the state re-emerged in the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688-9.
| US History Encyclopedia: Civil War |
Historians have long debated the causes of the Civil War. They have argued that a split developed between the industrialized North and the agricultural South as both sections vied for control of the nation. Closely related is the belief that the two sections fought over the tariff, which, some have stated, protected Northern manufactures. Others have contended that the war erupted over states' rights. Northerners advocated a more expanded federal government than did Southerners, who held fast to a federal system in which the preponderant power lay with the states. Some have also suggested that politicians in the 1850s failed by their own in competency to broker a compromise to the sectional controversy during the secession crisis, so that the nation blundered into civil strife.
Each of these explanations has serious shortcomings. The Northern states accounted for two of every three farms in the United States, and Southern staple crop production, especially cotton, provided raw material for many Northern factories. The tariff was not a powerful political issue in the critical decade leading up to the war. Nor did Southerners complain about the import duty when it protected regional interests, such as those of sugar growers. Like their Southern countrymen, many Northerners—perhaps even a majority—believed instates' rights, and on the surface, the differences of opinion were not sufficient to warrant separation or war. The blundering generation argument assumes that politicians in Washington were unusually incompetent in the 1850s or that there was room to compromise on the vital moral issue of the day: slavery. There is little evidence to substantiate charges of massive political incompetence and the argument plays down the buildup of mistrust that controversies and compromises had generated since the Missouri Crisis four decades earlier. The willingness of so many millions of people to march off to war or endure hardships for their section proves just how deeply people in the North and South felt about the great issues of their day.
Slavery, Secession, and the War's Onset
Slavery lay at the root of the Civil War. The Republican Party dedicated itself to blocking the expansion of the "peculiar institution," and many of its leaders had publicly avowed their desire to see slavery abolished. Southern states had maintained that if a member of the Republican Party were elected president, they would secede. When the voters chose the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln in 1860, seven slave states voted to leave the union and began to form a Southern confederacy. In their ordinances of secession or justifications, they stated clearly that they dissolved their connection to the United States to protect slavery. As the state of Mississippi argued, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." Slavery had divided families, religions, institutions, political parties, and finally, the nation itself.
Although the U.S. Constitution did not specifically forbid secession, Lincoln and most Northerners believed that the concept would undercut the linchpin of any democratic republic, respect for the outcome of fair elections. By allowing secession, a group could nullify the expressed wishes of the people acting under constitutional law.
Northerners viewed the union and the Constitution as sacrosanct. It was the basis for the world's great experiment, a democratic republic, a kind of beacon of light for people everywhere. All freedoms derived from the Constitution and the union. For those who had gone before them and for future generations, they had an obligation to preserve that system.
Representatives from the seceding states met during the months of February and March in Montgomery, Alabama, to form a new government, the Confederate States of America. The convention chose Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as provisional president and Alexander Stephens of Georgia as provisional vice president. The constitution itself greatly resembled that of the United States. Major distinctions included a single, six-year term as president, a line-item veto for the president, and a provision stipulating that states could not secede from the country. The most fundamental difference, according to Stephens, rested with the underlying premise: the United States acknowledged the notion that all men were created equal, whereas the Confederate States of America insisted that "the negro is not the equal of the white man" and that "slavery …is his natural and normal condition."
The fighting began when the Lincoln administration determined to preserve the union and to protect federal property. Lincoln attempted to maintain Union control of several forts on Confederate soil, including Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. As food supplies for the garrison began to run low, the president let it be known that he would send a resupply ship that would carry no munitions of war. The plan forced the Rebels' hand. If the Confederacy allowed the ship to deposit supplies safely, it would be tolerating the existence of a United States fort not just on Confederate soil, but in the birthplace of secession. Such a presence was a slap at the viability of the new nation. The other alternative would be for the new Confederate government to employ force to prevent the re-supply, and thus commit the first act of violence. Rather than endure the insult of a Union post on secessionist soil, the Confederates began shelling Fort Sumter on 12 April. After a thirty-four-hour bombardment, the garrison surrendered. In response to the attack, Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand militiamen to suppress the insurrection. The war was on.
Rather than fight their fellow slave states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded and joined the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy then shifted its seat of government from Montgomery to Richmond, Virginia. While the new Confederate capital would be only 110 miles from Washington, D.C., and in a more exposed area than Montgomery, the choice of Richmond made good sense. Richmond was a larger city and could better accommodate the new government. It was the seat of vital manufacturing operations that would be essential to preserve during the war and it served as a key railroad nexus in a powerful agricultural state. Moving the capital to Richmond had the effect of bonding Virginia more strongly to the Confederacy. The site also reminded everyone of the legacy to the American Revolution and the work of the founding fathers. Secessionists insisted that they were the true inheritors of the Constitution, one that forged compromises to permit slave ownership. Like their forefathers, they would fight a war for independence to protect their rights.
Comparative Advantages
The Union possessed the preponderance of resources. It had a population of twenty-two million, well educated and with a sound work ethic. Ninety percent of U.S. manufacturing was produced in the loyal states and virtually all arms manufacturing took place there. One half of its adult males listed farming as their occupation, and the region's output of food crops was staggering. Almost three times as many draft animals, an extremely valuable wartime asset, were in Northern hands. The Union had a vast financial network, with four of every five bank accounts, huge gold reserves, and ready access to commercial credit, all of which were essential to finance a massive war. It had a sophisticated and modern railroad network, with two and one-half times as many miles as the South, and a large commercial fleet to carry trade and, in wartime, to haul supplies. Finally, the Union inherited a small U.S. Army, numbering around sixteen thousand, with experienced officers, and a U.S. Navy with only twenty-three active ships, but an industrial base that could transform it into the largest and probably the best in the world.
As history has demonstrated time after time, however, overwhelming resources do not guarantee victory. Furthermore, the Confederacy had some advantages of its own. It had a population of 9 million, 5.5 million of whom were white, scattered over an area of almost 750,000 square miles. Its white citizenry, on the whole, was educated and motivated to support the cause. The seceding states produced some superb military leaders, many from the regular army. One in eight regular army officers resigned their commissions to join the Confederacy. A number of them were among the most respected, including Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Joseph E. Johnston, to name a few. To join those, the South had hundreds of graduates from military schools such as the Virginia Military Institute and The Citadel, who could teach recruits the basics in drill, tactics, and soldierly comportment. Even more so than their revolutionary ancestors, they had a wealth of experienced politicians on the state, local, and national levels. And perhaps most importantly, the Confederacy had to be conquered to lose. A stalemate was tantamount to Rebel victory.
Over the course of the war, the Confederacy steadily lost a resource on which it had depended heavily: its slave population. Confederates expected their 3.5 million slaves would help produce foodstuffs, manufacture materials for the army and their people, and serve the Rebel cause in sundry other ways. Instead, hundreds of thousands of slaves ultimately escaped to Union lines, many of them taking up arms against their old masters. Other slaves disrupted life on the home front, generated fears of servile insurrections while most of the young adult white males were away in the service, slowed production of essential wartime commodities, or aided the Union armies in many different ways.
From a legal standpoint, the war began when Lincoln called out the militiamen and ordered the Union navy to blockade Confederate ports. Internationally, the Confederacy achieved recognition as a belligerent, but never received recognition as an independent state by any foreign power. No nation attempted to intervene, although the British government considered it and the French government offered to mediate, an overture the United States rebuffed.
Before Lincoln's first Congress met in July 1861, the president adopted measures that gave the Union war policy its controlling character. Besides proclaiming an insurrection, calling out militia, and blockading Rebel ports, he suspended the habeas corpus privilege, expanded the regular army, directed emergency expenditures, and in general assumed executive functions beyond existing law. That summer, Congress ratified his actions and in 1863, by a five to four vote, the U.S. Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of his executive decisions in the Prize Cases. In general, Lincoln's method of meeting the emergency and suppressing disloyal tendencies was to employ arbitrary executive power, such as his extensive program of arbitrary arrests, wherein thousands of citizens were thrust into prison on suspicion of disloyal or dangerous activity. These prisoners were held without trial, deprived of their usual civil rights, and subjected to no accusations under the law. Such policies, which Lincoln justified as necessary for the survival of the union, led to severe and widespread criticism of the Lincoln administration. Yet it cannot be said that Lincoln became a dictator. He allowed freedom of speech and of the press, contrary examples being exceptional, not typical. He tolerated newspaper criticism of himself and of the government, interposed no party uniformity, permitted free assembly, avoided partisan violence, recognized opponents in making appointments, and above all submitted his party and himself, even during war, to the test of popular election.
Confederate president Jefferson Davis also faced dissent, but Davis suffered from the additional burden of attempting to build a government and a nation during wartime. Many Confederates opposed the kind of concentration of power under the central government that was necessary to prosecute the war. With only one political party, vicious factions emerged, heaping sharp criticism on the overworked Davis and many of his appointees.
Enlistment and Conscription
Neither side was prepared for war, yet both sides rallied around their flag and cause. That regular army of only sixteen thousand men was transformed into two massive national armies. Before the war was over, the Union would maintain more than one million men in uniform at one time; the Confederacy's peak estimate was about one half that number. In order to draw people into military service, both sides relied primarily on volunteers. Locals organized companies, batteries, or regiments and offered them to the governor, who then tried to convince the secretary of war to accept them. Those early waves of recruits left home with a hero's good-bye. Over time, the celebrations ceased as more and more men failed to return home.
Early in the war, both sides had more volunteers than they could arm and clothe, and many frustrated volunteers were not accepted. By 1862, however, matters began to change. Most of the Confederates who enlisted in 1861 did so for a one-year term. As both sides geared up for spring offensives, the Davis administration and his generals feared their armies would dissolve. In April 1862, the Confederate Congress passed laws that established all white males between ages eighteen and thirty-five as eligible for military service. Everyone called into service would be subject to a three-year term, unless the war ended sooner, and those people already in service who were of draft age had their terms of service extended to three years. This was the first conscription act in American history. Draftees had the opportunity to hire substitutes, and in October 1862 the act was amended so that individuals who owned more than twenty slaves could acquire an exemption for an adult white male. Throughout the remainder of the war, the Confederacy continued to draft, expanding the age limits on both ends, and to recruit to fill its ranks. The Confederacy eventually forbade substitutes as well.
The Lincoln administration suffered similar problems. In The summer of 1862, dismal Union progress in the East convinced most people that the war would extend on for years. As enlistment slowed to a trickle, the Northern government also resorted to conscription through the Militia Act of 17 July 1862, which could keep individuals in uniform for only nine months. This proved so unsatisfactory that Congress replaced it with a stronger law in March 1863, establishing state quotas for three-year terms of service. Local communities raised bounty money to lure individuals to enlist, there by reducing or filling their draft quotas. For those slots that volunteers did not fill, locals would have to draft. Inmost cases, results were achieved by the threat of being drafted and the amount of money available as bounty for recruits.
Recruitment policies in the North and the South generated complaints against both governments, including charges that it was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, and even sparked draft riots. In The end, though, comparatively few soldiers were drafted. Conscription acted as a stick to encourage enlistments, while bounties and avoiding the shame of being drafted were the carrots.
Virtually all of those who entered the two armies did so with naive notions of military service, duty, and combat. Disease took greater tolls on their ranks than did enemy shot and shell. Perceptions of glory faded as hard-ships mounted. Approximately one in eight, unwilling to endure the sacrifices and suffering any longer, deserted. Yet for the bulk of those who donned the blue and the gray, their commitment to cause and comrades sustained them through the most trying moments. Over time, they learned to be skilled soldiers, men who knew how to execute on the battlefield and care for themselves in camp. They took pride in themselves, their units, and their service and vowed to stay the course until they achieved victory or all hope was lost.
The Early War
The first major engagement of the war took place in July 1861, near Manassas Junction, Virginia. Confederates under Major General P. G. T. Beauregard had assembled in northern Virginia to defend the area and guard the connection of the Manassas Gap Railroad from the Shenandoah Valley, running east-west, and the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, which sliced from southwest Virginia toward Washington, D.C. A Union army of a little more than thirty thousand men, the largest ever assembled for battle in American history, under Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, pushed southwest from Washington. After marching all night, McDowell's columns engaged the Confederates around a creek called Bull Run. McDowell feigned an attack on the Rebel right and swung wide on the opposite side, crossing Bull Run and rolling up on Beauregard's left. Just as it appeared that the Union would win the day, two events occurred. Soldiers under Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson held firm, like a "stone wall," and critical reinforcements from the Shenandoah
Valley under Major General Joseph E. Johnston arrived by rail to bolster the defenders. As the Union attackers grew exhausted, the Confederates launched a counterattack that swept the battlefield. President Davis, who arrived that afternoon, joined his generals in trying to mount a pursuit, but Confederate confusion in victory was almost as bad as Union panic in defeat. The Federals fled back to Washington, having endured a staggering three thousand casualties; in triumph, the Confederates suffered almost two thousand losses.
Lincoln promptly replaced McDowell with Major General George B. McClellan, a highly touted engineer who oversaw a minor Union victory in western Virginia. McClellan accumulated and trained a massive army, but tarried so long that winter fell before he moved out. Meanwhile, McClellan politicked to remove the aged commanding general of all Union armies, Winfield Scott, and got himself installed. "I can do it all," a cocky McClellan boasted.
The following spring, after much prodding from Lincoln, the Union army shifted its base by water to the Virginia coast east of Richmond and began an arduous advance up the peninsula between the York and James Rivers. As the Union forces neared Richmond, Confederates under Joseph E. Johnston attacked; Johnston was badly wounded, and the Federals held.
To replace Johnston, Davis chose his military adviser, General Robert E. Lee, a highly regarded West Point graduate who had not achieved much success theretofore. With his back up against Richmond, Lee drew Stonewall Jackson's men in from the Shenandoah Valley, where they had conducted a spectacular campaign against superior Union numbers, and launched a massive surprise attack on McClellan's right flank. In the Seven Days' Battles in June and July 1862, Lee's army failed to crush McClellan, but it drove the Federals back twenty miles to the protection of the Union navy. With the fight whipped out of McClellan, Lee began moving northward in August. At the Battle of Second Manassas, Lee crushed a Union army under Major General John Pope, and then turned on the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry and crossed over into Maryland in September. A lost copy of the Confederate invasion plan, which a Union soldier had discovered and passed on to headquarters, emboldened McClellan, who had replaced Pope. He fought Lee to a draw at Antietam in the single bloodiest day of fighting in the war, with combined casualties of nearly twenty-three thousand. After the fight, Lee fell back to Virginia while McClellan dawdled until an exasperated Lincoln replaced him with Major General Ambrose P. Burnside. In just three months, though, Lee had completely reversed Rebel fortunes in the East and had established himself as the great Confederate general.
Emancipation and Black Enlistment
Strangely enough, despite Lee's overall achievements, the Union repulse of Lee's raid offered Lincoln an opportunity to transform the war. With the failure of McClellan's Richmond campaign, Lincoln had decided on emancipation and black enlistment. The war was all about slavery, Lincoln had concluded, and if the nation reunited, the United States would have to settle the slavery issue and move beyond it. Federal recruitment, moreover, had slowed to a trickle. The largest untapped resource available was African Americans. They produced for the Confederacy; they could contribute in and out of uniform to the Union.
Despite the hopes of Lincoln and other politicians to keep blacks out of the war, they had forced their way to the heart of it from the beginning. In April 1861, several slaves who were being used for Confederate military construction projects fled to Union lines. The Union general, Benjamin Butler, declared them contraband of war and subject to confiscation, in accordance with international law, and then hired them to work for the Union army. Congress established Butler's ruling as the law of the land in the First Confiscation Act in August 1861. But soon, slaves who worked for the Rebel army began arriving with family members who had not labored on Rebel military projects and the original law broke down as many Union officers were loath to return anyone to slavery. In July 1862 Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, which allowed the president to authorize the seizure of any Rebel property, including slaves. It also passed legislation that enabled Lincoln to use blacks for any military duties he found them competent to perform.
Lincoln issued his most important executive pronouncement, the Emancipation Proclamation, in September 1862, just after the Battle of Antietam. In it, Lincoln announced that slaves in all areas beyond control of Union armies on 1 January 1863, would become free. Based on his powers as commander in chief, Lincoln rightly believed that slavery aided the Confederacy and that its destruction would strengthen the Union effort. Yet the program also fulfilled one of Lincoln's dreams: the destruction of an immoral institution. By eradicating it, Lincoln altered the Union goal from a war to restore the Union to one that would destroy slavery as well. The decision generated some opposition, but in the end, those who were principally responsible for enforcing the proclamation, the Union soldiery, embraced it as a vital step in winning the war.
Although Lincoln waited to issue his emancipation decree until the Union won its next victory—almost three months later—he had begun bringing blacks into Union uniform in the summer of 1862. He tried to control the experiment carefully, but after black troops fought heroically at the Battles of Port Hudson, Milliken's Bend, and Fort Wagner in 1863, he authorized a dramatic expansion of black enlistment. Blacks served in segregated units, largely under white officers, and in time they proved to be an invaluable force in the Union war effort.
Union Progress in the Western Theater
While the Yankees struggled to achieve positive results in the eastern theater, out west their armies made great progress. Ulysses S. Grant, a West Point graduate who resigned under a cloud in 1854, emerged as an unlikely hero. In February 1862, he launched an outstandingly effective campaign against Confederate forces at Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, respectively. In conjunction with the Union gun-boat fleet, he secured Fort Henry and then besieged the prize, Fort Donelson and its garrison of nearly twenty thousand men. Although some Confederates escaped, its fall resulted in the first great Union victory of the war and shattered the cordon of Rebel defenses in the Kentucky-Tennessee region. Several weeks later, Union troops occupied Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, and by the end of March, Grant's reinforced command had occupied a position around Shiloh Church near the Mississippi border.
Then, early on 6 April, Confederates under General Albert Sidney Johnston launched a vicious attack. Grant, caught unprepared, saw his men driven back. Valiant fighting and some timely reinforcements saved the day, however, and the following afternoon, Union troops swept the field. Johnston was wounded and bled to death on the first day of fighting. At Shiloh, Grant's army suffered thirteen thousand casualties, horrifying politicians and civilians alike, and he soon found his reputation damaged and his command responsibilities curtailed.
When his superior, Major General Henry W. Halleck, returned East to become the new general in chief that summer, however, Grant was given a second chance. On 1 May 1862, Union forces began entering New Orleans; opening the entire length of the Mississippi River became a high priority. Grant began the difficult task of securing Vicksburg, Mississippi, a Confederate bastion located high on bluffs that dominated the Mississippi River. After months of toil and failure, including a repulsed assault on the bluffs, Grant finally conceived a way to defeat the Rebels. With Navy help, he shifted his army below the city in April 1863 by marching men along the opposite bank and shuttling them across the river. He then pushed inland toward Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, and turned on Vicksburg. Over the course of several weeks, in perhaps the most brilliant campaign of the war, Grant's forces defeated two Confederate armies in five separate battles and then laid siege to the city. On 4 July 1863, the Vicksburg garrison of nearly thirty thousand men surrendered. Grant had captured his second army, and with news of the fall of Vicksburg, the Confederates at Port Hudson, Louisiana, surrendered, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River and isolating a large portion of the Confederacy.
After a Union disaster at Chickamauga, Georgia, in September, Grant was brought in to preserve the Federal hold on Chattanooga, Tennessee. With extensive reinforcements and an audacious assault up a steep incline called Missionary Ridge, Grant's command shattered the Rebel positions. The victory drove the Confederates back into Georgia and pushed Grant's star into the ascendancy. In March 1864, Grant was promoted to lieutenant general, commander of all U.S. forces, while his key subordinate, William Tecumseh Sherman, took over in the West.
The Road to Union Victory
To the east, the Union army under Burnside suffered a disastrous repulse at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862. Again in April and May 1863, the same reinforced army under Major General Joseph Hooker was crushed by a much smaller force under Lee. In the Battle of Chancellorsville, Jackson led a brilliant flanking march that surprised and routed the Union forces, but that night Jackson sustained an accidental mortal wound from his own troops.
With some momentum from the Chancellorsville victory, Lee decided to raid Pennsylvania and perhaps convince the Northern public that continuation of the war was pointless. His troops marched through Maryland and approached Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, before pulling back. At a vital crossroad village called Gettysburg, Lee and Hooker's new replacement, Major General George G. Meade, fought the most costly battle of the war. After three days and close to fifty thousand casualties, Lee withdrew back to Virginia, his third-day assault having been repulsed. For the second time, Lee had invaded the Union states and failed.
For the spring campaign of 1864, Grant determined to launch simultaneous offensives to squeeze the outnumbered Confederates. He elected to travel alongside Meade's army in Virginia, while Sherman commanded a group of armies in the West that advanced toward Atlanta. Against Grant, Lee put up a bold defense. His Army of Northern Virginia inflicted unprecedented losses, some sixty thousand, in seven weeks at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and elsewhere, yet the Yankees kept the initiative. Eventually, Grant was able to lock Lee's army up in a siege around Petersburg. Yet he could not crush Lee's men.
Meanwhile, to the westward, Sherman had more success against the Confederates, led by Joseph E. Johnston. Sherman largely avoided the enormous casualties of the eastern theater, holding and then turning his Rebel opponents. By mid-July, as the Confederates backed up near Atlanta, President Davis replaced Johnston with the aggressive John Bell Hood. Hood did what Davis expected of him: fight. But in each instance, the Confederates lost. In early September, Sherman forced the Rebel defenders out of Atlanta, a victory that ensured Lincoln's reelection two months later.
By mid-November, Sherman—with three-fifths of his army—began his famous March to the Sea, wrecking railroads, consuming foodstuffs, and proving to the Southern people that their armies could not check these massive Union raids. The other two-fifths of his army served as the core of a large force under Major General George Thomas that crushed the remainder of Hood's army around Nashville, a victory that elevated the importance of Sherman's march all the more.
On water, the Union navy contributed mightily to the ultimate victory. Those original twenty-three active vessels increased to more than 700 thanks to Northern shipbuilding. With this huge fleet, the Federal blockade closed ports or discouraged trading ships, while the wood and ironclad river boats supported land campaigns on the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi Rivers and also along the coast. In January 1865, the Union sealed the last significant port city, Wilmington, with the fall of Fort Fisher.
That same month, Sherman launched a destructive overland campaign through the Carolinas, once again wrecking railroads; eating foodstuffs; destroying anything of military value; terrifying civilians; and in the case of South Carolina, burning homes and towns. By late March, the end was in sight. Sherman's army had reached central North Carolina and could be in Virginia in a few weeks. Grant, meanwhile, slowly extended his superior numbers around Lee's flank, severing the railroads that supplied Richmond and Petersburg and penetrating the Confederate rear. His works outflanked, Lee abandoned the Petersburg-Richmond line and took flight westward, hoping to swing around Grant's army and unite with Johnston, who was back in command opposing Sherman. Before Lee could escape, a Union force under Philip Sheridan boxed him in and he surrendered at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865.Several weeks later, Johnston surrendered to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, and all Confederate resistance soon succumbed.
Sustaining the Soldier and Civilian Populations
Approximately 2.25 million served in the Union army, and from 800,000 to 900,000 donned Confederate gray. The Union had over 20,000 African American sailors and almost 180,000 African American soldiers, about 150,000 of whom came from the Confederate States. In the final stages of the war, the Confederacy attempted to create black regiments, with very limited success.
With a large industrial and agricultural base, the Union provided better for its soldiery. After some initial scandals over ostensibly shoddy clothing and shoes and accusations of profiteering on a grand scale, the Northern states churned out vast quantities of food, clothing, weapons, ammunition, and other equipment necessary for war, while providing for its domestic market as well. To offset the labor loss of the up to one million young males who were in service at a given time, women took to the fields and factories and owners adopted more labor-saving machinery. Through hard work, cooperation, technology, and innovation, the Union produced enough food and clothing to provide for those soldiers in the field, the people at home, and in some cases, a number of people in Europe.
To pay for the war, the Union Congress raised the tariff dramatically and passed into law a series of taxes, including the first income tax, under the Internal Revenue Act of 1862.Despite this heavy taxation by the Lincoln administration, much of the war was financed by bond sales and the printing of paper money called greenbacks. The banker Jay Cooke and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase convinced the Northern public to buy long-term war bonds.(Cooke's firm alone sold over $1.2 billion worth.) The paper money circulated as legal tender. Still, inflation drove prices up to twice their prewar level, causing considerable hardship for those on fixed wages and those who did not grow their own food. Families and communal organizations attempted to ease the burden on those with breadwinners in uniform.
Philanthropic organizations also contributed to the well-being of the soldiers. The United States Sanitary Commission was formed to combat the atrocious conditions in Union hospitals. The group promoted cleanliness, better medical care, proper nursing, and a host of other issues to improve care for the sick and injured. The U.S. Christian Commission championed religion through the publication of vast amounts of religious tracts. For those seeking spiritual comfort or for activity-starved soldiers in camp, these readings filled an important void.
The Davis administration lacked the established apparatus to collect taxes, and with the Union blockade, little in the way of import taxes entered the coffers. Congressional laws establishing an income tax, a levy on agricultural products at the source, and a duty on the buying and selling of most basic goods generated more frustration with the government than revenue. The government floated war bonds, which raised a little more than a third of the needed funds. The Confederates generated the remainder by printing money. Early on, the notes circulated reasonably well, but as the fortunes of war declined and the amount of paper money in circulation escalated, its value plummeted. Late in the war, these paper notes were more a keepsake than a circulating medium.
The Confederate States performed minor miracles in creating a munitions industry, but in other areas, scarcity plagued the armies and the civilian population. Refugees flooded cities, driving up prices and reducing the amount of food crops harvested. Despite an extraordinary agricultural base, southerners devoted too many acres to the production of tobacco and cotton and not enough to food. A congressional resolution and state laws tried to rectify this problem, but they did not succeed satisfactorily. Other basic items, like clothing and shoes, became so rare that only the well-off could afford them. People made do with makeshift footgear, homespun garments, whatever they could. Still, basic shortages damaged morale and resulted in protests and even riots. In one instance, Davis tossed all the money he had in his pockets into a crowd to quell a bread riot.
With limited financial means, huge government expenses, and shortages, inflation rates soared. By the last two years of the war, prices rose so rapidly that many Southern farmers refused to sell their crops and livestock to the Confederate government; the authorized price could not keep up with escalating market prices. In order to feed and supply soldiers, many commissary and quartermaster officials simply impressed the goods or foodstuffs and provided receipts to the owner. Even though Confederate law authorized these seizures, they alienated many people from the Confederate cause and did little to check inflation. Throughout the war, but especially in the last few months, soldiers and civilians alike suffered severe shortages.
Military Strategy and Administration
Both the Lincoln and the Davis administrations ran their respective war efforts well. For the most part they managed military affairs effectively, appointed fairly competent officers (although both sides suffered through a few dreadful politicians who were appointed as generals), and adopted sensible strategies. Davis was aware of both the demands for protection from all Confederate citizens and the limited resources available to provide it. He therefore attempted to employ what historians have called an "offensive-defensive" strategy. Davis oversaw the creation of large military departments. He had the officers in charge position their major army or armies along the logical invasion routes, and called on them to concentrate their forces to defeat major Union advances. Whenever they had opportunities, Davis encouraged offensives, even raids into Union territories. Those raids would take the war to the enemy, compelling the Northern public to taste the hazards of invasion. He also hoped to draw valuable supplies from the Northern populace. While there was some Confederate guerrilla fighting, the Davis administration never embraced it, largely because guerrilla warfare would have exposed their people and property, including slaves, to Federal harassment, destruction, or confiscation.
When both sides optimistically believed the war would be of relatively brief duration, Lincoln embraced Win-field Scott's Anaconda Plan, which called for a blockade, river gunboats to penetrate deep into the Confederacy, and Union armies to slice their way through the rebellious territory. As the war expanded, Lincoln urged his generals to target the Confederate armies as their objectives, not simply Confederate territory. With Rebel military forces crushed, resistance would collapse, Lincoln believed. He skillfully tapped diplomacy to keep European powers and their money out of the conflict, and he used a blockade to cut off supplies to the under-industrialized Confederacy. By proclaiming emancipation, Lincoln won over all advocates of human rights, co-opted those in the North who criticized him for his slowness to embrace the concept, and allowed him to use a weapon that worked doubly, depriving Southerners of a valuable laborers force and putting them to work for the Union cause as soldiers, sailors, teamsters, stevedores, cooks, and farmers. Where Lincoln failed as a strategist was in his belated grasp of the value of Grant and Sherman's raiding strategy. Both generals realized that by marching Union armies directly through the Confederacy, destroying military resources and terrifying Southern people, they could promote the destruction of Rebel armies without suffering the staggering losses of direct military campaigns. Lincoln acquiesced because of his faith in those commanders, a faith that events fully justified, not just in Georgia and the Carolinas but also in Virginia under Philip Sheridan. Those marches destroyed valuable supplies, severed rail connections, damaged Southern morale, and caused mass desertions as soldiers abandoned the army to look after their loved ones.
The greatest administrative failure was in the area of prisons. Neither side prepared adequately for the huge number of captives as both sections assumed that they would exchange or parole prisoners regularly. But two major factors resulted in the breakdown of exchange. The Confederates claimed that many of the prisoners Grant took at Vicksburg were paroled illegally and could therefore return to service without formal exchange. The second revolved around black soldiers. The Confederacy resisted notions of treating them like white soldiers, and refused to exchange them. In response, the trading cartel broke down and prison populations soared beyond anyone's expectations. Lacking adequate preparation, camps quickly became overcrowded. Food, clothing, and housing shortages developed, and sanitary problems escalated as a consequence of these conditions. Over fifty-six thousand men died from the spread of disease as a result of overcrowding and food and clothing shortages in these horrible prison camps.
Confederate and Union Politics
In the political arena, the Confederate Congress exhibited some foresight when it established conscription and passed innovative taxing legislation, but it generally got mired in the inconsequential and failed to address many important issues in a timely way. Congress never passed legislation to flesh out a Supreme Court and other important pieces of legislation died of inertia or petty squabbles. Quite a number of legislators used the halls of Congress as a forum in which to bash Davis, his appointees, and the policies they opposed. Davis's popular election to the presidency in 1861 was unopposed, but administration critics had already begun to complain publicly. The congressional elections of 1863 reflected the public's growing disillusionment. When the second Congress convened in May 1864, clear opponents of Davis fell just short of a majority in both houses. Without organized political parties, however, opposition to the Davis administration splintered. In just one instance did Congress override a presidential veto, and only on a minor postage bill.
Lincoln's relationship with Congress and his own party varied. Early in his administration, with Republicans in the clear majority after secession, Congress passed into law all of the party's important planks for promoting economic growth and opportunity: an increase in the tariff; a homestead bill that offered free western land to anyone agreeing to settle on it; land subsidies for the construction of a transcontinental railroad; and federal land grants to promote agricultural and mechanical colleges. In addition to war legislation, Congress established the first national currency in the Legal Tender Act. Yet the president's relations with Congress and his own party waxed and waned in accordance with progress in the war. The failure of eastern campaigns in 1862, perhaps compounded by an initial backlash to the Emancipation Proclamation, resulted in Republican losses at the polls that year.
Numerous individuals within the Republican Party came to believe that Lincoln was not up to the job of president. They began lobbying to dump him from the 1864 ticket, rallying around John C. Frémont or Salmon Chase. Like so many other people, both men and their supporters underestimated Lincoln's political savvy, and the president outmaneuvered them to secure renomination.
Much has been made about divisions between Lincoln and the more extreme wing in his own party, the Radical Republicans. In fact, Lincoln generally got along with the radical element. His differences with them were often minor policy distinctions, issues of timing or arguments over legislative versus executive power, not necessarily policy objectives.
Many administration critics outside the Republican Party, fueled by wartime failures, huge casualty lists, the draft, emancipation, and civil rights violations, organized into the Peace Democrats. These Copperheads, as supporters of the war called them, made some election gains in 1862, and their leading spokesman, Clement L. Vallandigham, almost won the governorship of Ohio in 1863.
During the difficult days in the summer of 1864, with the armies of both Grant and Sherman apparently bogged down, and Confederate Jubal Early threatening Washington, it appeared to Lincoln that he would not win reelection. The Democratic Party nominated for president the former general George B. McClellan, a pro-war administration critic, on a peace platform. Yet Lincoln stayed the course, and the war issue turned his way when Sheridan defeated Early and Sherman captured Atlanta. With the overwhelming support of Union soldiers, who detested the Copperheads, Lincoln and the Union Party (a coalition of Republicans and pro-war Democrats) swept the 1864 election.
Between his reelection and his assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth in April 1865, Lincoln endorsed several important initiatives to help those who had been held in bondage to succeed after the war. He pressed for passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery; encouraged and signed into law the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which created an organization to assist blacks in the transition from slavery to freedom; and began discussing with close political friends the idea of giving blacks the vote.
Davis and Lincoln As Leaders
Most modern scholars believe that Jefferson Davis did a competent job as Confederate president under extremely adverse circumstances. However, his inability to under-stand alternative viewpoints and his lack of personal charm served him badly. The distinction of Lincoln, on the other hand, was discernible not in the enactment of laws through his advocacy, nor in the adoption of his ideals as a continuing postwar policy, nor even in his persuasion of Republicans to follow his lead. Rather, the qualities that marked him as a leader were vision, personal tact, fairness toward opponents, popular appeal, dignity and effectiveness in state papers, absence of vindictiveness, and withal a personality that was remembered for its own uniqueness while it was almost canonized as a symbol of the Union cause. Military success, though long delayed, and the dramatic martyrdom of his assassination must also be reckoned as factors in Lincoln's fame. On the Southern side, the myth of the lost cause has diminished the true role of slavery in the war and has elevated the reputation of numerous talented Confederate individuals, most notably Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, to extraordinary heights.
The Consequences of the War
The cost of the war was staggering. Some 258,000 Confederates soldiers gave their lives for slavery and an independent nation; more than 360,000 Federals paid the ultimate price for the union. In addition, one-half million sustained wounds in the war and untold thousands permanently damaged their health by contracting wartime illnesses. From a monetary standpoint, the best guess places the cost of the war at $20 billion. The Confederate States alone suffered an estimated $7.4 billion worth of property damage. In fact, so devastated was the Southern economy that it was not until well into the twentieth century that its annual agricultural output reached the 1860 level.
Among the other consequences of the war, the union was established as inviolate. The central government would continue to increase its power at the expense of the states, and the Northern vision of rights, economic opportunity, and industrialization would prevail. For African Americans, in addition to the abolition of slavery forever, the Fourteenth Amendment granted them citizenship. Unfortunately, the court system refused to apply the due process and equal protection clause of that amendment to African Americans, and it was not long before whites regained control in the South and stripped blacks of many of their newfound rights. Southern whites even managed to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African Americans the right to vote. All the while, as Southern whites restored themselves to power and forced blacks into a subordinate position, a Northern public, tired of war and reform, acquiesced. It took another one hundred years for blacks to gain their civil liberties.
Bibliography
Boritt, Gabor S., ed. Why the Confederacy Lost. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Cooper, William C., Jr. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Davis, William C. Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.
———. Look Away!; A History of the Confederate States of America. New York: Free Press, 2002.
Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
———, ed. Why the North Won the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960.
Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Gienapp, William E. The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852– 1856. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Glatthaar, Joseph T. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. New York: Free Press, 1990.
Hattaway, Herman, and Archer Jones. How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Paludan, Phillip Shaw. "A People's Contest": The Union and the Civil War, 1861–1865. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
Roland, Charles P. An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.
Thomas, Emory M. The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.
—Joseph T. Glatthaar
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Civil War |
Causes
The name Civil War is misleading because the war was not a class struggle, but a sectional combat having its roots in political, economic, social, and psychological elements so complex that historians still do not agree on its basic causes. It has been characterized, in the words of William H. Seward, as the "irrepressible conflict." In another judgment the Civil War was viewed as criminally stupid, an unnecessary bloodletting brought on by arrogant extremists and blundering politicians. Both views accept the fact that in 1861 there existed a situation that, rightly or wrongly, had come to be regarded as insoluble by peaceful means.
In the days of the American Revolution and of the adoption of the Constitution, differences between North and South were dwarfed by their common interest in establishing a new nation. But sectionalism steadily grew stronger. During the 19th cent. the South remained almost completely agricultural, with an economy and a social order largely founded on slavery and the plantation system. These mutually dependent institutions produced the staples, especially cotton, from which the South derived its wealth. The North had its own great agricultural resources, was always more advanced commercially, and was also expanding industrially.
Hostility between the two sections grew perceptibly after 1820, the year of the Missouri Compromise, which was intended as a permanent solution to the issue in which that hostility was most clearly expressed-the question of the extension or prohibition of slavery in the federal territories of the West. Difficulties over the tariff (which led John C. Calhoun and South Carolina to nullification and to an extreme states' rights stand) and troubles over internal improvements were also involved, but the territorial issue nearly always loomed largest. In the North moral indignation increased with the rise of the abolitionists in the 1830s. Since slavery was unadaptable to much of the territorial lands, which eventually would be admitted as free states, the South became more anxious about maintaining its position as an equal in the Union. Southerners thus strongly supported the annexation of Texas (certain to be a slave state) and the Mexican War and even agitated for the annexation of Cuba.
The Compromise of 1850 marked the end of the period that might be called the era of compromise. The deaths in 1852 of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster left no leader of national stature, but only sectional spokesmen, such as W. H. Seward, Charles Sumner, and Salmon P. Chase in the North and Jefferson Davis and Robert Toombs in the South. With the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and the consequent struggle over "bleeding" Kansas the factions first resorted to shooting. The South was ever alert to protect its "peculiar institution," even though many Southerners recognized slavery as an anachronism in a supposedly enlightened age. Passions aroused by arguments over the fugitive slave laws (which culminated in the Dred Scott Case) and over slavery in general were further excited by the activities of the Northern abolitionist John Brown and by the vigorous proslavery utterances of William L. Yancey, one of the leading Southern fire-eaters.
The Election of 1860
The "wedges of separation" caused by slavery split large Protestant sects into Northern and Southern branches and dissolved the Whig party. Most Southern Whigs joined the Democratic party, one of the few remaining, if shaky, nationwide institutions. The new Republican party, heir to the Free-Soil party and to the Liberty party, was a strictly Northern phenomenon. The crucial point was reached in the presidential election of 1860, in which the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, defeated three opponents-Stephen A. Douglas (Northern Democrat), John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat), and John Bell of the Constitutional Union party.
Lincoln's victory was the signal for the secession of South Carolina (Dec. 20, 1860), and that state was followed out of the Union by six other states-Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Immediately the question of federal property in these states became important, especially the forts in the harbor of Charleston, S.C. (see Fort Sumter). The outgoing President, James Buchanan, a Northern Democrat who was either truckling to the Southern, proslavery wing of his party or sincerely attempting to avert war, pursued a vacillating course. At any rate the question of the forts was still unsettled when Lincoln was inaugurated, and meanwhile there had been several futile efforts to reunite the sections, notably the Crittenden Compromise offered by Sen. J. J. Crittenden. Lincoln resolved to hold Sumter. The new Confederate government under President Jefferson Davis and South Carolina were equally determined to oust the Federals.
Sumter to Gettysburg
When, on Apr. 12, 1861, the Confederate commander P. G. T. Beauregard, acting on instructions, ordered the firing on Fort Sumter, hostilities officially began. Lincoln immediately called for troops to be used against the seven seceding states, which were soon joined by Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, completing the 11-state Confederacy. In the first important military campaign of the war untrained Union troops under Irvin McDowell, advancing on Richmond, now the Confederate capital, were routed by equally inexperienced Confederate soldiers led by Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston in the first battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861). This fiasco led Lincoln to bring up George B. McClellan (1826-85), fresh from his successes in W Virginia (admitted as the new state of West Virginia in 1863).
After the retirement of Winfield Scott in Nov., 1861, McClellan was for a few months the chief Northern commander. The able organizer of the Army of the Potomac, he nevertheless failed in the Peninsular campaign (Apr.-July, 1862), in which Robert E. Lee succeeded the wounded Johnston as commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Lee planned the diversion in the Shenandoah Valley, which, brilliantly executed by Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, worked perfectly. Next to Lee himself Jackson, with his famous "foot cavalry," was the South's greatest general.
Lee then went on to save Richmond in the Seven Days battles (June 26-July 2) and was victorious in the second battle of Bull Run (Aug. 29-30), thoroughly trouncing John Pope. However, he also failed in his first invasion of enemy territory. In September, McClellan, whom Lincoln had restored to command of the defenses of Washington, checked Lee in Maryland (see Antietam campaign). When McClellan failed to attack the Confederates as they retreated, Lincoln removed him again, this time permanently.
Two subsequent Union advances on Richmond, the first led by Ambrose E. Burnside (see Fredericksburg, battle of) and the second by Joseph Hooker (see Chancellorsville, battle of), ended in resounding defeats (Dec. 13, 1862, and May 2-4, 1863). Although Lee lost Jackson at Chancellorsville, the victory prompted him to try another invasion of the North. With his lieutenants Richard S. Ewell, James Longstreet, A. P. Hill, and J. E. B. (Jeb) Stuart, he moved via the Shenandoah Valley into S Pennsylvania. There the Army of the Potomac, under still another new chief, George G. Meade, rallied to stop him again in the greatest battle (July 1-3, 1863) of the war (see Gettysburg campaign).
Naval Engagements
With the vastly superior sea power built up by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, the Union established a blockade of the Southern coast, which, though by no means completely effective, nevertheless limited the South's foreign trade to the uncertain prospects of blockade-running. In cooperation with the army the Union navy also attacked along the coasts. The forts guarding New Orleans, the largest Confederate port, fell (Apr. 28, 1862) to a fleet under David G. Farragut, and the city was occupied by troops commanded by Benjamin F. Butler (1818-93). The introduction of the ironclad warship (see Monitor and Merrimack) had revolutionized naval warfare, to the ultimate advantage of the industrial North. On the other hand, Confederate cruisers, built or bought in England (see Alabama claims) and captained by men such as Raphael Semmes, destroyed or chased from the seas much of the U.S. merchant marine.
The War in the West
That the "war was won in the West" has become axiomatic. There the rivers, conveniently flowing either north (the Cumberland and the Tennessee) or south (the Mississippi), invited Union penetration, as they did not in Virginia. In Feb., 1862, the Union gunboats of Andrew H. Foote forced the Confederates to retire from their post Fort Henry on the Tennessee to their stronghold on the Cumberland, Fort Donelson. There, on Feb. 16, 1862, Grant, commanding the Army of the Tennessee, won the first great Union victory of the war, and Nashville promptly fell without a struggle.
Farther down the Tennessee, Grant was lucky to escape defeat in a bloody contest (Apr. 6-7) with Albert S. Johnston and Beauregard (see Shiloh, battle of). Minor Union successes at Iuka (Sept. 19) and Corinth (Oct. 3-4) followed, while the counterinvasion by the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg was stopped by Don Carlos Buell at Perryville, Ky. (Oct. 8, 1862). William S. Rosecrans, Buell's successor, then stalked Bragg through Tennessee, fought him to a standoff at Murfreesboro (Dec. 21, 1862-Jan. 2, 1863), and finally, by outmaneuvering him, forced the Confederate general to withdraw S of Chattanooga.
Union gunboats had cleared the upper Mississippi (see Island No. 10; Fort Pillow), leading to the fall of Memphis on June 6, 1862. Grant's Vicksburg campaign, at first stalled by the raids of Confederate cavalrymen Nathan B. Forrest and Earl Van Dorn, was pressed to a victorious end in a brilliant movement in which the navy, represented by David D. Porter, also had a hand. The Union now controlled the whole Mississippi, and the trans-Mississippi West was severed from the rest of the Confederacy. The fighting in that area (see Pea Ridge; Arkansas Post) had held Missouri for the Union and led to the partial conquest of Arkansas, but after the fall of Vicksburg, the war there, with the exception of the unsuccessful Union Red River expedition of Nathaniel P. Banks and a last desperate Confederate raid into Missouri by Sterling Price (both in 1864), was largely confined to guerrilla activity.
The Emancipation Proclamation
Britain never formally recognized the Confederacy (neither did France) and maintained peaceful relations with the Union despite the provocation late in 1861 of the Trent Affair, which was adroitly handled by Secretary of State Seward. Charles Francis Adams (1807-86) at London and John Bigelow at Paris were able diplomats, but probably more important in winning popular support for the Union in England and France was the Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln issued after Antietam.
This act appeased for a time the anti-Lincoln radical Republicans in Congress, among them Benjamin F. Wade, Zachariah Chandler, Thaddeus Stevens, and Henry W. Davis, with whom Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton were allied. Not all Unionists were abolitionists, however, and the Emancipation Proclamation was not applied to the border slave states: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri had all remained loyal. For Lincoln and kindred moderates, such as Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, the restoration of the Union, not the abolition of slavery, remained the principal objective of the war.
Turning Point
The Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July, 1863, marked a definite turning point in the war. Both sides now had seasoned, equally valiant soldiers, and in Lee and Ulysses S. Grant each had a superior general. But the North, with its larger population and comparatively enormous industry, enjoyed a tremendous material advantage. Both sides also resorted to conscription, even though it met some resistance (see draft riots).
Under Stanton, successor to Simon Cameron, the overall administration of the Union army was more efficient. Problems of organization still remained, however, and Henry W. Halleck continued in the difficult role of military adviser, with the title of general in chief. The Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, organized in Dec., 1861, attempted to influence the actions as well as the appointment of Union generals (its efforts were particularly strong on behalf of Hooker). The chairman, Benjamin F. Wade, was frequently at odds with Lincoln, and the committee's investigations and high-handed actions lowered morale among the Union forces.
Grant and Sherman
On the Georgia-Tennessee line in Sept., 1863, Bragg, having temporarily halted his retreat, severely jolted the Federals, who were saved from a complete rout by the magnificent stand of George H. Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga (see Chattanooga campaign). Grant, newly appointed supreme commander in the West, hurried to the scene and, with William T. Sherman, Hooker, and Thomas's fearless troops, drove Bragg back to Georgia (Nov. 25). After Knoxville, occupied in September, withstood Longstreet's siege (Nov.-Dec.), all Tennessee, hotbed of Unionism, was now safely restored to the Union.
In Mar., 1864, Lincoln, for many years an admirer of Grant, made him commander in chief. Leaving the West in Sherman's capable hands, Grant came east, took personal charge of Meade's Army of the Potomac, and engaged Lee in the Wilderness campaign (May-June, 1864). Outnumbered but still spirited, the Army of Northern Virginia was slowly and painfully forced back toward Richmond, and in July the tenacious Grant began the long siege of Petersburg.
Although Jubal A. Early won at Monocacy (July 9), threatening the city of Washington, the Confederates were unable to repeat Jackson's successful diversion of 1862, and Philip H. Sheridan, victorious in the grand manner at Cedar Creek (Oct. 19), virtually ended Early's activities in the Shenandoah Valley. For his part, Sherman, opposed first by the wily Joe Johnston and then by John B. Hood, won the Atlanta campaign (May-Sept., 1864).
The Election of 1864
On the political front, a movement within the Republican party to shelve Lincoln had collapsed as the tide turned in the Union's favor. With Andrew Johnson, Lincolm's own choice for Vice President over the incumbent Hannibal Hamlin, the President was renominated in June, 1864. The Democrats nominated McClellan, who still had a strong popular following, on an ambiguous peace platform (largely dictated by Clement L. Vallandigham, leader of the Copperheads), which the ex-general repudiated. Even so, Lincoln was easily reelected.
Lee's Surrender
After the fall of Atlanta, which had contributed to Lincoln's victory, Sherman's troops made their destructive march through Georgia. Hood had failed to draw Sherman back by invading Union-held Tennessee, and after the battle of Franklin (Nov. 30) Hood's army was almost completely annihilated by Thomas at Nashville (Dec. 15-16, 1864). Sherman presented Lincoln with the Christmas gift of Savannah, Ga., and then moved north through the Carolinas. Farragut's victory at Mobile Bay (Aug. 5, 1864) had effectively closed that port, and on Jan. 15, 1865, Wilmington, N.C., was also cut off (see Fort Fisher).
After Sheridan's victory at Five Forks (Apr. 1), the Petersburg lines were breached and the Confederates evacuated Richmond (Apr. 3). With his retreat blocked by Sheridan, Lee, wisely giving up the futile contest, surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse (see under Appomattox) on Apr. 9, 1865. The surviving Confederate armies also yielded when they heard of Lee's capitulation, thus ending the conflict that resulted in over 600,000 casualties.
Aftermath
The long war was over, but for the victors the peace was marred by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest figure of the war. The ex-Confederate states, after enduring the unsuccessful attempts of Reconstruction to impose a new society on the South, were readmitted to the Union, which had been saved and in which slavery was now abolished. The Civil War brought death to more Americans than did any other war, including World War II. Photographs by Mathew B. Brady and others reveal some of the horror behind the statistics. The war cost untold billions and nourished rather than canceled hatreds and intolerance, which persisted for decades. It established many of the patterns, especially a strong central government, that are now taken for granted in American national life. Virtually every battlefield, with its graves, is either a national or a state park. Monuments commemorating Civil War figures and events are conspicuous in almost all sizable Northern towns and are even more numerous in the upper South.
Bibliography
Notable fictional treatments of the war are Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1896) and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), and there is one outstanding work in verse-Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body (1928). The quantity of historical literature on the Civil War is enormous, and there is no single, adequate bibliographical guide. For bibliographies, see Allan Nevins et al., ed., Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography (2 vol., 1967-69).
On the causes of, and events leading up to, the war, see A. C. Cole, The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850-1865 ("History of American Life" series, Vol. VII, 1934; rev. ed. 1938, repr. 1971); G. F. Milton, The Eve of Conflict (1934); A. O. Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (1942, new ed. 1957) and Civil War in the Making (1959, repr. 1968); C. B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (2001).
Standard, older works on the military phase are C. C. Buel and R. U. Johnson, ed., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (4 vol., 1877; new ed. 1956); J. C. Ropes, The Story of the Civil War (2 vol., 1898-99; completed by W. R. Livermore, 1913); and F. Maurice, Statesmen and Soldiers of the Civil War (1926). R. E. Lee: A Biography (4 vol., 1934-35) and Lee's Lieutenants (3 vol., 1942-44), both by D. S. Freeman, and Lincoln Finds a General (5 vol., 1949-59), by K. P. Williams, are definitive in their respective fields.
See also T. L. Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861-1865 (1901; new ed. 1957, repr. 1969); J. F. Rhodes, History of the Civil War, 1861-1865 (1917, new ed. 1961); J. B. McMaster, A History of the People of the United States during Lincoln's Administration (1927); E. C. Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War (1927, repr. 1970); R. S. Henry, The Story of the Confederacy (1931, rev. ed. 1957); C. R. Fish, The American Civil War: An Interpretation (1937); M. Leech, Reveille in Washington (1941); A. Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (8 vol., 1947-71); B. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (1953) and other studies; B. Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (1953, repr. 1968); L. M. Starr, Bohemian Brigade (1954); J. B. Mitchell, Decisive Battles of the Civil War (1955); R. S. West, Jr., Mr. Lincoln's Navy (1957); S. Foote, The Civil War (3 vol., 1958-74); M. M. Boatner, The Civil War Dictionary (1959); American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (ed. by R. M. Ketchum et al., 1960); R. F. Nichols, The Stakes of Power (1961); V. Jones, The Civil War at Sea (3 vol., 1960-62); J. M. McPherson, The Negro's Civil War (1965); J. G. Randall, The Civil War and Reconstruction (2d ed., with D. Donald, 1969); E. Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (1980); E. B. and Barbara Long, The Civil War Day by Day (1971, repr. 1985); J. McPherson, Battlecry of Freedom (1988) and For Cause and Comrades (1997); E. Forbes, Thirty Years After (1994); H. Holzer and M. E. Neely, Jr., Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (1994); G. W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (1997); J. M. Perry, A Bohemian Brigade: The Civil War Correspondents-Mostly Rough, Sometimes Ready (2000); A. Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South (2001); D. W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001); D. J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War (2001); W. A. McDougall, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877 (2008); C. B. Flood, 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History (2009). See also the bibliographies in separate articles on the major events of the war.
| US Foreign Policy Encyclopedia: Civil War Diplomacy |
The importance of diplomacy during the American Civil War has long been underestimated. Both Northerners, who were committed to the preservation of the Union, and Southerners, determined to create a new nation, understood that without support from Europe, the secession movement in the United States was doomed. Thus, the foreign policy of the Union, in the able hands of Secretary of State William Henry Seward, was directed toward preventing the Confederacy from securing diplomatic recognition, military supplies, and any kind of encouragement from abroad. Toward that end, Seward conducted a vigorous foreign policy composed of bluff, bluster, and ultimately cautious moderation. The Confederates, on the other hand, were confident that the reliance of Britain and other industrialized nations of Europe on Southern cotton for their economic health and well-being and their desire for free trade guaranteed full support. Confederate foreign policy, therefore, was largely passive and dependent on King Cotton. Britain and France were indeed dependent on Southern cotton, and their leaders were convinced that the United States was irrevocably divided. All that was needed, they thought, was for the Union to recognize that fact. That conviction, a broad hostility toward slavery, an ample supply of cotton already in British warehouses, and a highly profitable wartime trade with the Union led to a uniform European policy of neutrality. That policy, however, which helped the North but hurt the South, was never carved in stone. Union blunders, British impatience, the actual and feared depletion of cotton stocks, and European horror at the bloodshed and destruction in America all threatened to move Europe from neutrality to intervention and Confederate success. Diplomacy, as much as military leadership, strategy and tactics, and Northern economic dominance, provided an essential key to the ultimate triumph of the Union and preservation of the United States as a single nation.
Because of the phenomenal development of the American economy and the expansion of the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, Europe and Latin America closely watched the American crisis unfold. The health of the economies of Britain and France depended greatly upon the import of American raw materials, primarily cotton, and access to the prosperous American market. Early on it was recognized that peace in North America best served European interests and therefore European leaders hoped that Americans would not engage in hostilities. They were convinced that restoration of the Union was impossible. When hostilities began, they decided that neutrality best served their interests.
The Confederate States of America also hoped for a peaceful separation. Shortly after his appointment as provisional president, Jefferson Davis and his secretary of state, Robert Toombs of Georgia, dispatched a mission to Washington to secure recognition and the transfer of all federal property to Confederate authorities. Davis and Toombs also dispatched three commissioners to Europe to explain the reasons for the creation of the Confederacy and to secure recognition and treaties of amity and commerce. Support from Europe, Southerners understood, was critical, for without a navy or industry of its own, the Confederacy had to have foreign backing. They placed primary reliance on European, and particularly British, dependence on their cotton, believing this ensured a favorable response.
Northern leaders, particularly Abraham Lincoln and Seward, were absolutely committed to the preservation of the Union and also understood that the European reaction to the American crisis was critical. Seward, especially, believed that secession lacked majority support in the South and that Southern Unionists would rise and end the secession movement by the spring of 1861. It was essential that the Southern extremists receive no encouragement from abroad, without which expectation, Seward believed, the Confederacy would be short-lived.
Seward and Early Union Policy
Seward was the driving force behind American Civil War diplomacy, and much of his diplomacy was shaped by his imperial vision. For more than thirty-five years, Seward had extolled the promise, potential, and perpetuity of the American empire, and much of his Civil War diplomacy aimed at preserving, expanding, and ensuring the successful completion of that empire. Well before "manifest destiny" became the slogan of expansionists, Seward envisioned the expansion of the United States to include all of North America and quite likely South America and the islands of the Caribbean as well. He also spoke eloquently about the certain growth of the American economy and American overseas commerce and predicted that U.S. merchants, commercial agents, and diplomats would spread the principles and ideology of the American System around the world.
Seward's program required the centralization of American political power and the containment and eventual abolition of slavery in the United States. He promoted legislation to attract, Americanize, and assimilate immigrants, liberalize land policies, centralize banking and monetary programs, and fund internal improvements and federal money. He also believed that the gradual end of slavery and its replacement by free labor were essential for peaceful American expansion and the full growth of the American economy. Without the stain of slavery, he thought, Canada and Mexico would eagerly seek admission to the American commonwealth.
Slavery also gave excessive power to reactionary agrarian interests in the South. Containment of slavery to the states where it presently existed, gradual emancipation, and the reduction of Southern power in Congress, Seward believed, were made possible by the Republican victory of 1860, as was the restructuring of the American political economy and the expansion of the American territorial, commercial, and ideological empire. During the war years these programs were subordinated to the preservation of the Union, an end that Seward never questioned and a goal from which he never wavered.
Throughout the secession winter of 1860–1861 that followed Lincoln's election, Seward worked tirelessly to find a compromise or modus vivendi with those Southern leaders whose states had not left the Union. While Lincoln remained in Springfield, Illinois, preparing for his inauguration, Seward made a number of public speeches emphasizing the dangers, impracticality, and fruitlessness of secession. He opposed all actions that would close the door to the return of the disaffected states and tried to ensure that the Confederates received no encouragement, prospect of support, or tangible aid from overseas.
Although Seward did not assume office until Lincoln's inauguration on 4 March, he engaged European diplomats in Washington in private conversations that aimed, first, at assuring them that the secession effort would shortly collapse, and, second, warning Europe that the United States would not tolerate any foreign intervention in American or hemispheric affairs. Seward had predicted that if the United States became divided, European nations would sweep down upon the Americas to reestablish or expand their authority and influence. During the last weeks of March, these concerns appeared justified. Rumors were rife that Britain, France, and Spain were planning to intervene in Mexico, that Spain was about to recolonize the Dominican Republic, and that France was about to move back into Haiti. The first two had a basis in fact. The three European powers were discussing an intervention limited to collecting debts for their nationals who had invested in Mexican bonds, and the Dominican Republic, engaged in civil war, had asked Spain to return. Spain had agreed and dispatched a force from Cuba to reestablish a colonial government in Santo Domingo. The information that France was contemplating recolonizing Haiti was groundless. Seward chose to use this information both to reassert his waning authority in the cabinet and perhaps to take effective control of the Lincoln administration and generate an issue calculated to reunite the fractured nation.
On 1 April 1861, Seward sent Lincoln an extraordinary memo entitled "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration." In the memo, Seward complained that the government lacked both a domestic and a foreign policy and was adrift. He recommended that Lincoln change the thrust of the American dispute from the question of slavery to that of union, and proposed that the United States seek "explanations" from France, Spain, Britain, and Russia for their plans and actions. (The Russian minister, Edouard de Stoeckl, had met with one of Davis's Confederate commissioners, and Northern newspapers reported that Russia was about to recognize the Confederacy.) If, Seward continued, France and Spain could not satisfactorily explain their intentions and their recent actions, Lincoln should convene Congress and ask for a declaration of war. In addition, Seward recommended sending agents to Canada and Latin America to promote independence and opposition to European interference in the New World. Finally, he suggested that this policy required energetic and constant attention and implied that if Lincoln was unwilling to provide leadership, Seward was willing to assume it himself.
Lincoln responded to Seward immediately, pointing out that he had already made it clear that his administration would not interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed and that the fundamental issue in the crisis was indeed the question of union. He also noted that recent dispatches which Seward had sent to American agents abroad clearly stated his administration's foreign policy. Finally, Lincoln said that he would continue to determine policy with the help of his entire cabinet.
Seward's chief purpose, aside from taking control of the administration, had been to create a crisis that was calculated to restore unity. It is most unlikely that he either expected or wanted war with Europe—a foreign crisis only, not war, would have served his purpose. It was a dangerous strategy, however, and it is just as well that Lincoln rejected it. Although the memo remained confidential, Seward's foreign war panacea was well known among diplomats and merely confirmed their view that Seward would be a difficult person with whom to deal.
Seward's memo stemmed partly from his disagreement with his fellow cabinet members over the question of maintaining federal control of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The fort, well within the range of shore batteries, could not be defended, and when President James Buchanan had attempted to send provisions to the fort early in January, Confederate gunners opened fire on the supply ship Star of the West, forcing it to retreat. Buchanan left the question of reprovisioning the fort or evacuating it to his successor, and shortly after Seward took office, he recommended the evacuation of Fort Sumter. Initially, Seward had majority support in the cabinet. He argued that attempting to resupply the fort would be regarded as a hostile act against the Confederate States of America and would not only strengthen the separatists' hands but also cause critical border states, such as Virginia, to secede from the Union. Lincoln, however, did not agree. He had pledged that he would yield no federal property to the Confederate government and decided to let events help him decide on a course of action. Over the following few weeks, public sentiment for holding the fort strengthened, and by the end of March, a majority of the cabinet came to the same position. This isolated Seward, who still counseled delaying any confrontation and who now feared that attempting to reprovision the fort would lead to war. His memo was his last effort to dissuade Lincoln from sending fresh supplies to the fort.
On 6 April, Lincoln notified South Carolina authorities that he had dispatched a supply force to Fort Sumter. Four days later, South Carolina demanded that the commandant of the fort, Major Robert J. Anderson, immediately surrender. When Anderson offered to surrender only after a few days when his supplies ran out, the Confederates, aware that fresh supplies were in transit, rejected Anderson's offer. On 12 April, Confederate General Pierre G. T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter. As Seward had feared, the decision to hold on to the fort had provoked the Confederates. The Civil War had begun.
Following the outbreak of hostilities and Jefferson Davis's announcement on 17 April that the Confederacy would issue letters of marque and reprisal, creating privateers for action against Union shipping, Union policy changed. Lincoln responded to Davis on 19 April by announcing that the Union would treat privateers as pirates and proclaiming a blockade of Southern ports. Seward attempted to open negotiations with the British foreign minister, Lord John Russell, for American adherence to the Declaration of Paris of 1856, an international agreement that, among other things, outlawed privateering. The United States had declined to participate earlier because, as a small-navy nation, it wanted to hold on to the privateering option. Seward hoped that the negotiation would cause Britain to postpone recognition of the Confederate belligerency and that an Anglo-American convention committing the United States to the Declaration of Paris would require Britain and other nations to treat Confederate privateers as pirates. Negotiations, however, began on 18 May, four days after Britain had recognized Confederate belligerency and collapsed in July, when Russell announced that if negotiations with the Union were successful, Britain would neither hold the Confederacy to the agreement nor treat Confederate privateers as pirates.
Lincoln's blockade proclamation had an important effect on British policy. A blockade was universally regarded as an act of war and therefore an implicit recognition that a state of belligerency existed. Therefore, Lincoln's proclamation opened the door to a British proclamation of neutrality and recognition of Confederate belligerency, which (except when in violation of neutrality laws) gave the Confederate States the right to, among other things, solicit loans, buy arms, engage in recruiting, and put cruisers on the high seas with the rights of search and seizure. Because British commerce with the United States and reliance on Southern cotton was so heavy, Russell had to respond to Lincoln's proclamation. The British proclamation became public on 14 May 1861, and as Seward had feared, the other nations of Europe immediately followed with their own proclamations of neutrality. The way was now clear for Confederate agents to scour Europe for money and material to conduct their war.
The Union blockade was a double-edged sword. If effective, or even moderately effective, it would reduce the ability of the Confederates to import war material. But it would also interfere with foreign commerce and deprive Britain, France, and other industrialized nations of vital supplies of cotton. Reducing the export of cotton to Europe could increase pressure in Europe for involvement in American affairs in support of the Confederacy, which the Confederates hoped and expected would be the case.
Confederate Agents in Washington and Europe
While Seward was meeting regularly with diplomats in Washington and, after Lincoln's inauguration on 4 March 1861, sending elaborate instructions to American ministers abroad, Confederate leaders—confident that foreign support would be forthcoming with little or no effort on their part—had a casual attitude toward foreign affairs. Thus, Jefferson Davis chose Robert Toombs of Georgia as his first secretary of state, despite the fact that Toombs had no experience and little interest in foreign affairs. After six months Toombs resigned to become a general in the Confederate army. Davis then replaced Toombs with Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, who also lacked experience and had previously declined appointment as secretary of state when it was offered by Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. Hunter remained in office only seven months. Finally, on 17 March 1862, Davis appointed his close personal friend, former attorney general, and current secretary of war Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana to the post. Benjamin, who had had limited experience dealing with international legal disputes regarding slavery, served ably until the end of the Confederacy. Neither Davis nor any of these secretaries of state, however, ever attempted to develop a cohesive or imaginative foreign policy program.
Confederate officials did not develop a foreign policy program chiefly because they were confident they did not need one. Committed to the notion that "cotton is king," they were certain that Britain, France, and the other industrial nations of Europe could not tolerate a destructive civil war in the United States that would weaken or destroy the cotton culture. Neither, Confederates believed, would Europeans tolerate interference in their North American commerce. Furthermore, for decades Southerners had demanded free trade and had resisted the high, protective tariffs favored by Northern manufacturing interests. Confederates reasoned that the prospect of free trade with the Confederacy would also win British approval and ensure support. And surrounding these economic considerations, Confederate leaders were certain that the European elite felt a special affinity to the planter class. All that was needed, therefore, was to explain why the Southern states had seceded, to convince European governments that the Confederacy had an effective government, and to assure European governments that the Confederates were determined to preserve their independence.
On 25 February 1861, Davis and Toombs dispatched A.B. Roman, Martin J. Crawford, and John Forsyth to Washington to negotiate a peaceful separation and the evacuation of all federal property in the Confederacy. Two days later, Toombs sent William Lowndes Yancey, Pierre A. Rost, and Ambrose Dudley Mann to Europe to secure de jure recognition of the Confederate States of America and treaties of amity and commerce. No thought was given to establishing permanent missions in Washington or any European capital.
Not surprisingly, Roman, Forsyth, and Crawford—who arrived in Washington in early March—had no success there. Seward refused to meet with the commissioners or to arrange a meeting with Lincoln, which they had requested. Unwilling, however, to antagonize the agents, Seward maintained contact through a third party. He assured the Confederates that the Union would not attempt to coerce the seceded states into returning to the Union and still hoped that a peaceful reunion was possible. On 8 April, after a month of waiting impatiently and distrusting Seward's assurance of Lincoln's commitment to the maintenance of peace, Crawford informed Davis of rumors that Lincoln was committed to war. A few days later the three Confederates returned home.
The Confederate mission to Europe began with considerably more promise than the mission to Washington. Russell and French foreign minister Edouard Thouvenel both received Yancey, Rost, and Mann unofficially, as was common practice in dealing with nonaccredited agents. Toombs had instructed the Confederate agents to visit Britain first, and then continue on to France, Russia, and Belgium. They were to explain that the secession of Southern states was provided for by the U.S. Constitution, and was necessary to prevent Northern social, political, and economic domination of the Southern states. Toombs had instructed the commissioners to avoid mention of slavery and emphasize the economic benefits to Europe of an independent Confederacy.
Meeting with the British and French foreign ministers was all that the commissioners accomplished. Russell expressed sympathy for the Confederacy but refused either to discuss treaty negotiations or to grant de jure recognition without a treaty. The British neutrality proclamation was already forthcoming when he spoke with the Confederate commissioners on May 3 and May 9. Russell had also reached an agreement with France that the two nations would act jointly on American affairs and instructed his minister in Washington, Lord Lyons, to coordinate policy and work closely with his French counterpart, Henri Mercier. In France, Thouvenel also expressed sympathy for the Confederacy but would go no further than Britain.
Britain's proclamation of neutrality did not address the question of whether the Union blockade was effective and therefore legal. Confederate agents understood that access to Southern ports was essential for the import of war material legitimized by belligerent status, and that the ability of the small Union navy to blockade all Southern ports and the extensive Southern coast was implausible at the least. Britain was divided on the issue. Commercial interests, legal purists, Southern sympathizers, and Confederate propagandists insisted the blockade was ineffective and demanded that Britain, with its powerful navy, confront the United States; the Admiralty and several in the government, however, understood that a loose interpretation of effectiveness could be most useful to the British navy sometime in the future.
The consequence of this division was that Russell never challenged the legality of the Union blockade, which became more effective as the war continued. Initially, the appearance of effectiveness was inadvertently enhanced by the decision of Southerners to impose a voluntary cotton embargo of their own. The Confederates reasoned that the sooner Britain and France felt the effects of the loss of fresh supplies of cotton, the more rapidly the former would demand the end of the Union blockade and come to the aid of the South. Southerners stated that no cotton would leave the Confederacy until the Northern blockade ended and Europe provided recognition and support. Their policy created the illusion that the blockade was more effective than it was, which Union agents and propagandists abroad used to their advantage; it also opened the Confederacy to charges of blackmail and hypocrisy.
Yancey, Rost, and Mann, having failed to secure de jure recognition from either Britain or France, saw no reason to continue their mission on to Russia and Belgium. They returned to Britain and began an intensive propaganda campaign in association with a number of other Southerners whose goal was to strengthen and expand support for the Confederacy among sympathetic members of Parliament and the upper classes, journalists, and conservatives generally. Yancey was confident that the upper classes and those in power in both Britain and France supported the Confederacy, but he understood that positive sentiment was not enough. Only a decisive Confederate military victory and a deprivation of fresh cotton would move both nations to act.
Latin American Developments
After Lincoln squelched Seward's call for an aggressive program to meet European interference on 1 April, the secretary's policy changed. The secretary of state followed a surprisingly mild policy toward Spain, toward British, French, and Spanish intervention in Mexico, and toward the subsequent French occupation of Mexico City and establishment of Archduke Maximilian of Austria as emperor of Mexico. For example, he officially protested the Spanish occupation of Santo Domingo to the Spanish minister to the United States, Gabriel García y Tassara, and to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid through the American chargé in Madrid. Tassara dismissed Seward's note as being meant primarily for the American public and not to be taken seriously. When Spanish officials explained that Spain had returned to Santo Domingo by invitation and asked Seward to explain his note further, Seward retreated, noting to Tassara that Congress would consider sometime later on whether war was justified.
With regard to the impending tripartite intervention in Mexico, Britain had been firm in insisting that the three powers invite the United States to participate. Seward declined the offer, and since foreign intervention for the purpose of collecting debts was allowed under international law, he had no justification to oppose the three nations. Seward did propose lending Mexico funds to pay off its creditors with Baja California and other Mexican territory as collateral if the European nations would agree not to intervene. The plan failed when Britain, France, and Spain responded unenthusiastically and the U.S. Senate rejected the proposal. In October 1861 the three European nations signed the Tripartite Treaty of London and in December they jointly landed troops in Vera Cruz.
It soon became apparent that the French emperor, Louis Napoléon, had more ambitious schemes in mind, and Britain and Spain withdrew their forces. Seward warned France that the United States would not "view with indifference" the establishment of a European monarchy in the New World, especially so close to the United States, but Napoléon was undeterred. In June 1863, French troops seized Mexico City. Napoléon, with the support of Mexican conservatives in the capital, offered Maximilian an imperial throne. Maximilian accepted and set up his government in the following year. Benito Juárez fled to the countryside and initiated a guerrilla war against Maximilian and the French army that protected him. Seward was unhappy with this turn of events, but did nothing to oppose either Napoléon or Maximilian. War with France or even a threat of war, he decided, would not serve Union interests. Mexican affairs, like Caribbean matters, could wait until after peace had returned to the United States.
Confederate involvement in Mexico began in May 1861, when Toombs sent John T. Pickett to Mexico City to open a permanent embassy, secure recognition, and negotiate a treaty of amity and commerce. Astonishingly, Toombs also instructed Pickett to point out to the reformist Juárez the similarity of the Confederate and Mexican economies and the resemblance between slavery and peonage. Pickett's career as a filibusterer in Cuba and his record as consul in Vera Cruz did not inspire confidence among Mexicans, and Juárez was not impressed.
Pickett's mission was a disaster. He was unable to overcome Mexican fears of Southern expansionism or hostility toward slavery, both emphasized by the Union minister, Thomas Corwin. When Pickett suggested that the Confederacy might return some of the territory taken in the Mexican War in exchange for recognition, Mexican officials were skeptical. By the fall of 1861 Pickett had alienated all of those with whom he had dealt, chiefly by exposing his contempt for Mexico and his racism. When he became involved in a public brawl with a Union sympathizer in November, the Mexican authorities arrested him as a common criminal. When Davis and his cabinet learned of Pickett's behavior and arrest, they did not defend him but, rather, recalled their diplomat in disgrace and repudiated his actions. The damage, however, had been done. Juárez had no interest in supporting the Confederacy and maintained a strict neutrality throughout the Civil War.
In Mexico, the Confederates had greater success in negotiations with Santiago Vidaurri, the governor of Nuevo León and Coahuilla, who had long had separatist inclinations and conducted his affairs autonomously. The Confederate agent, Juan A. Quintero, had solid relations with Vidaurri. Quintero secured an important commercial agreement and a promise from Vidaurri that he would block any requests for the transit of Union troops across territory under his authority. The Confederate government instructed Quintero to discourage Vidaurri from separating from Mexico and asking for annexation to the Confederacy. President Davis doubted the Confederate Congress would welcome the addition of a Mexican province to their nation and he wished to avoid the embarrassment of a rejection. For all their efforts, Mexico was a low priority for the Confederates. They understood that the key to a successful foreign policy remained in Europe.
Pressure and Counterpressure on Britain and France
Seward understood that British policy would be decisive in Europe, and he was pleased that in the patronage battles, he had succeeded in having Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of former American ministers to the Court of St. James, appointed to Britain. Lincoln's choice, William Dayton of New Jersey—John C. Frémont's running mate on the Republican ticket in 1856—went to France instead. Adams had his first interview with Russell on 18 May. Seward had been outraged by the British neutrality proclamation and the granting of belligerent rights to the Confederacy, and Adams complained to Russell. Russell only assured Adams that Britain had no intention at that time to move to the next step of recognizing Confederate independence.
Seward also reacted harshly to the willingness of Russell to meet, even informally, with the Confederate agents. He sent Adams his notorious Dispatch No. 10, dated 21 May 1861, instructing Adams to break off all relations with the British government if Russell continued to meet with the Confederate commissioners. Seward had wanted Adams to read the message to Russell, but Lincoln wisely insisted that Seward change the instructions so that Adams had discretion in his discussion with Russell and was to use the document only for his own guidance. Adams had the good sense to soften the dispatch by presenting only noninflammatory parts to Russell. Russell, as it happened, had already decided to have no further discussions with the Confederate commissioners.
By late summer Yancey, Rost, Mann, and their colleagues had had enough success in arousing British and French support to alarm both Adams and Dayton. Hunter, who had replaced Toombs as Confederate secretary of state, saw great potential in the use of propaganda and decided to formalize the propaganda effort by appointing journalists Henry Hotze and Edwin De Leon to promote the Confederate cause in London and Paris, respectively. Hotze established a weekly journal, the Index, that was highly successful. After De Leon ran into difficulties, Hotze took over the French propaganda operation as well.
Whatever success these agents had in shaping opinion, however, Britain and France refused to move from their neutral policies. Yancey remained confident that a military victory and lack of cotton would bring about British support, and he was relieved when Lincoln emphasized that the Union had no intention to abolish slavery. All of the elements he believed necessary for tangible British support were in place by midsummer 1861. The Confederates scored a stunning military success on 21 July at Bull Run, Virginia, and distress was already apparent in the cotton manufacturing areas. When, however, the Confederate agents requested an unofficial meeting with Russell, he put them off and informed them that Britain would remain neutral. Both British public opinion and the cabinet remained divided, and whatever Lincoln's position on slavery, British abolitionists and Union sympathizers emphasized that the Confederacy was based on slavery and its expansion. Neither Prime Minister Lord Palmerston nor Foreign Minister Russell were willing to appear as champions of a slave nation or to contribute to its perpetuation and expansion.
Shortly after Russell's response, Davis and Hunter decided to take a more aggressive approach and establish formal diplomatic missions in Britain, France, Spain, and Belgium. The previous passive policy was clearly not working; Yancey submitted his resignation to Davis and prepared to return to Alabama. Davis ordered Mann to open a diplomatic mission in Belgium, and he sent Rost to Spain. More significantly, Davis selected James Murray Mason of Virginia to establish a mission in London and John Slidell of Louisiana, a highly experienced and able diplomat, to go to Paris.
Following Adams's assumption of his duties in London, Anglo-American relations proceeded smoothly until the end of the year. Adams deftly handled Seward's Dispatch No. 10, and Russell's decision to have no further meetings with the Confederates resolved the matter raised by the dispatch. For the most part, Adams attempted to counter the increasingly effective Confederate propaganda campaign and to gather information on the activities of Confederate agents. The only major diplomatic issue was the unsuccessful negotiation on the Declaration of Paris.
The Trent Affair and Its Aftermath
A much more serious dispute in Anglo-American relations arose over the Union capture of Mason and Slidell in November. The two Confederate diplomats ran the blockade on 12 October 1861, sailing from Charleston to Nassau and thence to Cuba. On 7 November they boarded the Trent, a British mail packet, for the remaining leg of their voyage to England. On the next day the USS San Jacinto, under the command of Captain Charles Wilkes, stopped the Trent on the high seas, boarded the vessel, and after a minor skirmish removed Mason and Slidell and their secretaries. Wilkes carried his prisoners to Boston where they were imprisoned in Fort Warren in Boston harbor. Wilkes had acted without instructions and the seizure raised a number of questions of international law that resembled the issue of impressment that had so aroused Americans before 1812. While feigning outrage, the Confederates were delighted with Wilkes's action. They were certain that the Union would never give up the prisoners and that the resulting Anglo-American hostility could only help the Confederate cause overseas. Wilkes was widely applauded in the North, and the seizure of Confederate "traitors" from a British ship struck many as just and a proper response to Britain's assumed partiality toward the Confederacy. The crisis intensified during November and December as Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, the House of Representatives, and the Northern press extolled Wilkes's heroism. Meanwhile, the British developed an extensive case for the illegality of his action and made it clear that they regarded the seizure as an affront to Britain's national honor. Prime Minister Palmerston was furious. Britain prepared for war, and sent more than eleven thousand troops to Canada. Russell charged that Wilkes had violated international law and instructed Lyons to demand the immediate release of Mason and Slidell and an apology. At Queen Victoria's request, Prince Albert, although mortally ill, softened Russell's dispatch and provided an out for the Americans by allowing Seward to deny that Wilkes had acted under instruction.
Seward may have initially been pleased by Wilkes's action, but he very quickly adopted a moderate tone in a dispatch to Adams that the latter presented to Russell. Seward's note did much to defuse the crisis at the highest level. Lyons also presented Russell's demands in such a way to make a favorable American response more likely. Finally, on 25 December Seward responded by informing the British that Wilkes had indeed acted on his own and, while not violating international law, had made certain technical errors. The two diplomats would be "cheerfully liberated" and turned over to Lord Lyons. Seward had convinced Lincoln, others in the cabinet, and a number of prominent senators that retaining the Confederates was decidedly not in the Union's interest.
The furor generated by the Trent affair dissipated quickly. Support for Wilkes disappeared as American attention turned to the war at home and journals published calculations of the costs of a war with Britain. Seward had demonstrated genuine statesmanship that Russell and others recognized. For the first time, British officials began to reconsider their early estimation of the secretary of state. Seward perhaps understood better than before that threatening war was, indeed, a dangerous policy. Seward's reputation among influential associates, however, did not improve. A number of prominent Radical Republicans, never supportive, renewed efforts to remove him from office. By this time Lincoln had come to regard Seward as an effective secretary and as a valuable ally in his opposition to the Radical Republicans and was determined to keep him in the cabinet.
Seward meanwhile sought to capitalize on the relief felt in Britain and the Union over the peaceful resolution of the issue. Although the details remain vague, there is evidence that he facilitated the deployment of British troops in Canada—they had arrived after the St. Lawrence River froze over. Whatever the case, Seward skillfully used the story that he had granted permission to Her Majesty's troops to cross American territory to emphasize that he held no animosity nor aggressive intent toward Britain. Seward also resisted suggestions that the United States abrogate or let expire the Marcy-Elgin Reciprocity Treaty of 1854. The treaty, set to expire in 1864, eliminated duties in trade between the United States and Canada, opened the St. Lawrence to the United States, and regulated fishing off the Canadian coast. Seward saw Canadian-American free trade as a means of integrating the Canadian economy into America's as a prelude to annexation.
Seward also concluded negotiations with Lyons in April 1862 for the suppression of the African slave trade. The agreement extended the reciprocal right to search and detain merchant ships off the coasts of Africa and Cuba and established prize courts in Sierra Leone, the Cape of Good Hope, and New York. In February 1863, Seward and Lyons expanded the agreement to include the coasts of Madagascar, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo. These treaties completed efforts to end the Atlantic slave trade that had begun a half century earlier. (In the absence of Southern senators, Seward also recognized Liberia and Haiti in 1862 and treaties of amity and commerce with Liberia on 21 October 1862 and Haiti on 3 November 1864.) These agreements with Britain after the Trent crisis contributed to the restoration of friend-lier relations. This was especially important at a time when pressure for mediation was increasing in Britain and France because of a developing crisis in cotton textile manufacturing centers.
Cotton Diplomacy
Confederates were disheartened by the peaceful settlement of the Trent affair, and by 1862 had realized that their best hope for British and European support would come from a cotton famine in England. Distress in the cotton manufacturing districts increased greatly during the spring and summer of 1862. The jobs of an estimated 900,000 workers in the textile industry, centered in Lancashire, were in jeopardy. The British welfare system was severely strained, and Southern sympathizers increased their demands for intervention to relieve the cotton shortage. Although Seward made available cotton that came into Union hands, and imports of non-American cotton increased, the distress in Lancashire did not diminish, and Confederate reliance on cotton diplomacy seemed to be working.
In fact, although less American cotton was reaching Britain, British manufacturers, unlike their workers, were not in dire straits. In 1859 and 1860 the South had produced bumper crops that had glutted the market and driven down world prices. British warehouses were thus filled with huge stocks of cheap cotton fiber, and manufacturers were producing cloth at unprecedented levels, which also depressed textile prices. The Union blockade and Southern embargo were a blessing for these manufacturers as well as financiers dealing in cotton securities and futures. The prospect of a shortage of fiber and cloth immediately caused the value of both raw and finished cotton to rise dramatically. Merchants and manufacturers hoarded their goods, reduced their output, and made fortunes in the process. Those who had been promoting the development of alternate sources in Egypt and India appeared vindicated as planters in those regions also reaped huge profits. Only the workers suffered.
Outside of the cotton districts, other British industries prospered from the war. Both the Union and the Confederacy purchased war materials in increasing quantities, and producers of woolen cloth benefited from the reduced production of cotton cloth and inflated textile prices. Finally, Confederate raiders had enormous success in attacking Northern commercial vessels. American merchantmen were driven from the seas or forced to pay enormous premiums for maritime insurance. British merchants replaced American merchants in direct trade and strengthened their domination of other markets.
Despite the new wealth generated by the American war and continued national prosperity, by the fall of 1862 the distress in Lancashire was real and the news of bloodshed and destruction from America was shocking. It also seemed that the Union would never be able to subdue the South and that continuing the war was pointless. With the approval of Palmerston and Chancellor of the Exchequer William E. Gladstone and the prior agreement of Napoléon, Russell therefore brought the question of mediation to the cabinet. The discussion was extensive, and the cabinet was divided. Russell and Gladstone urged their colleagues to support an offer of mediation to both sides. However, after an impassioned argument against offering mediation by Minister of War George Cornewall Lewis—who pointed out that neither Lincoln nor Seward would accept the offer and that Britain could be forced into supporting the slaveholding Confederacy—news arrived that the Battle of Antietam had ended without a clear victory by either side. Palmerston decided to continue waiting until the war took "a more decided turn." Napoléon then proposed offering the Americans a six-month armistice if both Britain and Russia agreed to act jointly with him. Russia declined first, and on 13 November the British also declined. Confederate confidence in King Cotton was shaken, and the Confederate government sought support from Europe along other avenues.
Declining Confederate Prospects
In May 1861 Confederate secretary of the navy Stephen Mallory sent James Dunwoody Bulloch, a retired naval officer, to Britain to build or purchase six steamships to serve as commerce raiders and James H. North to purchase two ironclads for use against the Union blockade. By August, Bulloch had begun the construction of two ships, later christened the Florida and the Alabama, and in 1862 the North contracted for the construction of an ironclad ram.
Union agents learned of Bulloch's plans and Adams attempted to prevent the sailing of the Alabama. Russell refused to seize the ship for lack of evidence that its construction violated British neutrality laws. When Adams amassed evidence and a legal opinion to the contrary, Russell sought legal opinion himself and ultimately became convinced that the ship should be detained, but his order to that effect arrived too late to prevent the launching of the Alabama in early August 1862. Captained by Raphael Semmes, the ship wreaked havoc on Union shipping, which after the war became the basis of demands by the United States for massive compensation. After the departure of the Alabama from Britain, Adams and Russell engaged in a rancorous exchange of notes. Adams was determined to prevent future Confederate cruisers from leaving British ports.
Russell ultimately decided that it would better serve British interests if other ships being constructed for the Confederacy did not put to sea. In April 1863 he ordered seizure of the Alexandria, then under construction. Later in the year, following strong protests from Adams and the threat of privateering by the Union, Russell decided to detain rams that Bulloch was having constructed. By 1863 the Confederates had given up hope for recognition and substantial support from Britain. British consuls, whom the Confederate government had allowed to remain at their posts and who initially had written home about Confederate invincibility, had antagonized Confederate officials by their protests on behalf of British subjects being conscripted into the Confederate army. (Seward had gone out of his way to appease British consuls in the North over the same problem.) In October 1863, President Davis expelled all British consuls still at their posts. Two months earlier, on 4 August 1863, Judah Benjamin ordered Mason to close his London mission and to join Slidell in Paris.
Confederate officials had come to the conclusion that their best hope for support lay in Napoléon and France rather than in Palmerston and Britain. Napoléon had taken the initiative, following the failure of the Anglo-French mediation discussions in 1862, in proposing an armistice. In January 1863 he unilaterally proposed mediation, which Seward summarily rejected. During the previous September and October, Slidell successfully concluded a loan of $14.5 million with the French firm Emile Erlanger and Company that allowed Confederate agents used to purchase war materials.
Also, Mallory honored Bulloch's request that he shift operations to Paris, and in April and June 1863 the latter contracted for four commerce raiders and two ironclad rams. Unfortunately for the Confederates, France proved little more hospitable than Britain. Napoléon clearly sympathized with the Confederates, but pressure from Seward and Dayton forced him to prevent the ships from sailing. Napoléon, about to embark on his imperial program in Mexico, had no wish to become embroiled with the Union.
The construction of Confederate naval vessels in Britain and France was not the only issue that created difficulties on the high seas. As the demand for goods rose in both Britain and the Confederacy, success in running the Union blockade became ever more profitable. Similarly, the owners of Union vessels that captured blockade runners could take the ships to prize courts and receive a substantial proportion of the value of condemned prizes. The system led to a number of questionable seizures of not only British ships but also of vessels flying French and Spanish colors. Charles Wilkes continued to create problems after the Trent affair by using neutral ports as bases of operation against ships suspected of intentions to run the blockade. These possibly illegal seizures and violations of international law led to continual protests, legal battles, and ill will. Palmerston, however, saw value in the continual stretching of international law by Americans. They were setting precedents that could be useful to Britain in subsequent conflicts. None of these issues rose above the level of annoyances.
The Slavery Issue and the End of Confederate Diplomacy
Until 1863 the slavery issue lingered in the background of the American crisis. For domestic reasons, Lincoln and Seward had attempted to make it clear that the conflict in the United States had little to do with slavery and everything to do with preserving the Union. The North, they argued, had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states, and even after hostilities began they suggested that no assault would be made on the institution. Confederate agents abroad did their best to avoid discussion of slavery altogether, and when pressed argued that the war was not about slavery but rather over the right of states to preserve their social and economic institutions. British supporters of the Confederacy took Lincoln at his word, and Palmerston, firmly hostile to slavery, was relieved that it was not an issue, since otherwise Britain would have had less flexibility in developing policies toward the American war. Nevertheless, the Confederates could not disguise the fact that their nation was committed to the preservation of the slave system, and the British could never forget that to aid the Confederacy was to aid a slave nation. Furthermore, whatever the wishes of Lincoln and Seward, Radical Republicans at home and abroad, abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic, and Union propagandists called for a change in Union policy toward slavery and kept the issue alive in public discourse. The question of the future of American slavery never disappeared from view.
Following the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln decided to confront slavery directly. On 22 September he issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves in areas that were still in rebellion in January 1863. Lincoln had presented the plan to his cabinet on 22 July, but Seward and others persuaded him to wait until the Union had a military success lest the policy be regarded as an act of desperation. Seward strenuously objected to the proclamation because he feared it would antagonize slaveholders who had remained loyal; strengthen Confederate morale and determination; and, worst of all, encourage blacks in the South to rise in "servile insurrection." He also doubted that emancipation was constitutional and feared that the sudden end of slavery would permanently weaken the American economy and either delay or destroy altogether the rise and completion of the American empire. Seward remained committed to the containment of slavery and its gradual abolition and replacement by free labor.
European diplomats in Washington were uniformly critical of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. They regarded it, indeed, as an act of desperation following the Union failure to score a major victory at Antietam; some saw it as signifying the triumph of the Radical Republicans and abolitionists in the North. All worried that its enunciation would trigger a slave insurrection, extend race war, and then lead to the thorough destruction of the cotton culture in the United States. The European home offices were also critical of this turn in Union policy, especially since Seward had continually warned Britain and France that it was their policies of neutrality and support for the Confederacy that had extended the war and increased the danger of a slave uprising.
Nevertheless, by 1 January 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Europeans had reconciled themselves to the impending end of slavery in the United States should the Union win the war. (It was expected that slavery could not long survive in areas not in rebellion.) This understanding made it appear that the outcome of the war would determine the future of slavery, which changed the character of European-American relations for the remainder of the conflict by making it even more difficult for Europe to adopt policies in support of the Confederacy. When the Union armies scored major victories in July at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, European ministries began to regard a full Union military victory as more likely, and the continued successes of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman convinced them that victory was certain. As the British and French discarded their working assumption that the division of the United States was irreversible, their foreign policies changed accordingly. Confederate appeals for support were now largely ignored.
Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin understood that survival depended on European support and that this support would not be forthcoming without altering the Confederate position on slavery. In November 1864, Davis presented to the Confederate Congress a plan to employ forty thousand slaves in noncombatant military service to be followed by their emancipation. While this proposal was being considered, he dispatched Duncan F. Kenner of Louisiana to Europe on a secret mission with instructions to offer European governments a promise of emancipation of the slaves in exchange for recognition. Napoléon, then deeply involved in his Mexican policy, declined the offer and replied that France could not act without British concurrence. When Kenner made the same proposal to the British government, Palmerston rejected it out of hand, informing Kenner that Britain would never recognize the Confederate States of America. Confederate diplomacy in Europe had come to a dead end.
The final episode in the diplomacy of the American Civil War occurred in February 1865, when Lincoln and Seward agreed to meet with a delegation of Confederate leaders at Hampton Roads, Virginia. Francis P. Blair, Sr., had arranged the meeting at Davis's request, and Davis had selected Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, former Confederate secretary of state Robert M. T. Hunter, and former U.S. Supreme Court justice and Confederate assistant secretary of war John A. Campbell to conduct the negotiations. Both Lincoln and Davis hoped to arrange a return of peace, but their terms were incompatible. Lincoln demanded reunion, acceptance of emancipation, and the disbanding of all Confederate military forces. He was prepared to offer the South generous terms on a number of issues, including compensation to slaveholders. Davis had wanted an armistice, to be followed by discussion of all these and other issues. When Lincoln would not yield in his demands for reunion and the breakup of Confederate military force first, the meeting collapsed.
Military action resumed fully after the Hampton Roads conference, and within four months the last of the Confederate armies had surrendered to Union forces. Jefferson Davis, who refused to admit defeat and promoted guerrilla war to the end, was captured by Union troops in Irwinsville, Georgia, on 10 May. He was imprisoned and indicted for treason, but was paroled two years later.
Conclusion
It is doubtful that the Confederacy could ever have achieved the support that it expected during the Civil War. It never was in the interest of the nations of Europe to become entangled in the American conflict. Rather, they profited by a neutral policy. Confederates relied on sympathy and the pressure from cotton textile manufacturers to force Britain, and then other nations in Europe, to their support and defense. They believed that time was on their side. As a consequence, the Confederate government delayed in adopting a bold diplomatic strategy until it was far too late. At the same time, William Henry Seward, with the significant aid of Charles Francis Adams in London and a number of other superb diplomats, developed an aggressive and consistent program that did not always win friends but was effective. Seward began his term of office with a reputation for recklessness and hostility toward the British, and his initial maneuvers seemed to confirm, as Lyons wrote home, that he would be a "dangerous foreign minister." Seward's erratic behavior had the positive effect of making European foreign ministers more cautious. During the critical first year of the war, Palmerston and Russell worried that Seward had little understanding of the limits to which he could go in his threats and bluster against British policy, and so as not to arouse him and precipitate a crisis, the British leaders adopted a largely passive policy, ended official contacts with Confederate officials, and resisted attempts by pro-Confederate members of Parliament to support the Southern cause. After Seward's first year in office, his reputation improved, and by the end of the war, he and Adams were highly regarded overseas.
It is clear that international relations during the war years were largely determined by the interests of all the nations involved directly and indirectly in the struggle. It is difficult to see how the Confederacy could have acquired the support it needed or how the Union could have done better. It is also clear that the Confederacy's weak policy did not help its cause and that the strong and clearsighted Union policy, conducted by able hands, made a profound difference and was essential to a Union victory in 1865.
Bibliography
Adams, Ephraim D. Great Britain and the American Civil War. 2 vols. New York, 1925. The classic study.
Bernath, Stuart L. Squall Across the Atlantic: American Civil War Prize Cases and Diplomacy. Berkeley, Calif., 1970. A superb analysis.
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Blumenthal, Henry. "Confederate Diplomacy: Popular Notions and International Realities." Journal of Southern History 32 (1966): 151–171. An important essay.
Brauer, Kinley. "Gabriel Garcia y Tassara and the American Civil War: A Spanish Perspective." Civil War History 21 (1975): 5–27.
——. "The Slavery Problem in the Diplomacy of the American Civil War." Pacific Historical Review 46 (1977): 439–469.
Carroll, Daniel B. Henry Mercier and the American Civil War. Princeton, N.J., 1971. An excellent examination of the diplomacy of the French minister to the United States.
Case, Lynn Marshall, and Warren F. Spencer. The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy. Philadelphia, 1970. A thorough and judicious examination.
Clapp, Margaret. Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow. Boston, 1947. A biography of the American consul in Paris.
Cortada, James W. "Spain and the American Civil War Relations at Mid-Century, 1855–1868." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 70, no. 4 (1980).
Crook, D. P. The North, The South, and the Powers, 1861–1865. New York, 1974. An able synthesis that emphasizes British and Canadian relations with the Union and Confederacy.
Cullop, Charles P. Confederate Propaganda in Europe, 1861–1865. Coral Gables, Fla., 1969.
Duberman, Martin B. Charles Francis Adams, 1807–1866. New York, 1961. Excellent biography of the U.S. Minister to Great Britain.
Ellison, Mary. Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War. Chicago, 1972. Excellent study of the effects of the cotton famine on British opinion in the Lancashire cotton district.
Evans, Eli N. Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate. New York, 1988. Especially strong on Benjamin's relations with Jefferson Davis.
Ferris, Norman B. "Diplomacy." In Allan Nevins et al., eds. Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography. Vol. 1. Baton Rouge, La., 1967. An excellent starting point for books published before 1967.
——. Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward's Foreign Policy, 1861. Knoxville, Tenn., 1976. A study of the difficult first year of the war.
——. The Trent Affair: A Diplomatic Crisis. Knoxville, Tenn., 1977. Best detailed study of the crisis.
Hanna, Alfred J., and Kathryn Abbey Hanna. Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumph over Monarchy. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1971.
Hyman, Harold, ed. Heard Round the World: The Impact Abroad of the Civil War. New York, 1968. Looks at the influence of the Civil War primarily on Europe.
Jenkins, Brian A. Britain and the War for the Union. 2 vols. Montreal, 1974, 1980. More recent and useful treatment than the Adams work.
Jones, Howard. Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992. Excellent study of the mediation crisis of 1862.
——. Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War. Lincoln, Nebr., 1999.
Mahoney, Harry T., and Marjorie Locke Mahoney. Mexico and the Confederacy, 1860–1867. San Francisco, 1998. Good narrative survey.
May, Robert E., ed. The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim. West Lafayette, Ind., 1995. Information on the impact of the Civil War on Europe, European colonies, and Latin America and examines the role of African Americans in influencing British opinion.
Meade, Robert D. Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate Statesman. New York, 1943. A good treatment of Benjamin's diplomacy.
Merli, Frank. Great Britain and the Confederate Navy, 1861–1965. Bloomington, Ind., 1970. Best study of the subject.
Monaghan, Jay. Diplomat in Carpet Slippers: Abraham Lincoln Deals with Foreign Affairs. New York, 1945. A popular study that overemphasizes Lincoln's role and is oversimplified.
Owsley, Frank L. King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America. 2d ed. Chicago, 1959. A full examination of Confederate diplomacy but somewhat dated.
Richardson, H. Edward. Cassius Marcellus Clay: Firebrand of Freedom. Lexington, Ky., 1976. Covers Union diplomacy with Russia.
Saul, Norman E. Distant Friends: The United States and Russia, 1763–1867. Lawrence, Kans., 1991. Based on research in both Russian and American materials.
Schoonover, Thomas D. Dollars over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican–United States Relations, 1861–1867. Baton Rouge, 1978.
Smiley, David L. Lion of Whitehall: The Life of Cassius M. Clay. Madison, Wis., 1962. On Union diplomacy with Russia.
Spencer, Warren F. The Confederate Navy in Europe. University, Ala., 1983. Deals with Bulloch and Confederate naval warfare.
Stern, Philip Van Doren. When the Guns Roared: World Aspects of the American Civil War. Garden City, N.Y., 1965. A popular study.
Taylor, John M. William Henry Seward: Lincoln's Right Hand. New York, 1991. A readable popular account.
Tyler, Ronnie C. Santiago Vidaurri and the Southern Confederacy. Austin, Tex., 1973. On Mexican-American relations.
Van Deusen, Glyndon G. William Henry Seward. New York, 1967. A scholarly biography.
Warren, Gordon H. Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas. Boston, 1981. A study of the first year of the war.
Willson, Beckles. John Slidell and the Confederates in Paris, 1862–1865. New York, 1932.
Winks, Robin. Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years. Baltimore, 1960. An able treatment of Canadian-American relations.
Woldman, Albert A. Lincoln and the Russians. Cleveland, Ohio, 1952. A narrative based on diplomatic correspondence from the United States.
— Kinley Brauer
| Law Encyclopedia: U.S. Civil War |
The U.S. Civil War, also called the War between the States, was waged from April 1861 until April 1865. The war was precipitated by the secession of eleven Southern states during 1860 and 1861 and their formation of the Confederate States of America under President Jefferson Davis. The Southern states had feared that the new president, Abraham Lincoln, who had been elected in 1860, and Northern politicians would block the expansion of slavery and endanger the existing slaveholding system. Though Lincoln did free Southern slaves during the war by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he fought primarily to restore the Union.
The war began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. In the ten weeks between the fall of Fort Sumter and the convening of Congress in July 1861, Lincoln began drafting men for military service, approved a naval blockade of Southern ports, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Lincoln's authority to take these actions in the Prize cases, 67 U.S. (2 Black) 635, 17 L. Ed. 459; 70 U.S. (3 Wall.) 451, 18 L. Ed. 197; 70 U.S. (3 Wall.) 514, 18 L. Ed. 200; 70 U.S. 559, 18 L. Ed. 220 (1863). The Court concluded that the president had the authority to resist force without the need for special legislative action.
On July 21, 30,000 Union troops marched on Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy. They were routed at the Battle of Bull Run and forced to retreat to Washington, D.C. The defeat shocked Lincoln and Union leaders, who called for 500,000 new troops for the Union Army of the Potomac.
General Ulysses S. Grant brought the Union its first victory in February 1862, when his troops captured Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. Grant fought in the Battles of Shiloh and Corinth, Tennessee, before forcing the surrender of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4, 1862.
The Army of the Potomac, however, did not have such success. A Union summer offensive against Confederate forces led by General Robert E. Lee fared badly. Union forces were defeated at the Seven Days Battle and later that summer at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Lee then invaded Maryland but was checked at Antietam on September 17, 1862.
Lincoln despaired at the poor leadership demonstrated by the commanders of the Army of the Potomac. He replaced General George B. McClellan with General A. E. (Ambrose Everett) Burnside, but when Burnside faltered, Lincoln appointed General Joseph Hooker commander. Hooker proved no better. His attempt to outmaneuver Lee's forces at Chancellorsville, Virginia, in May 1863 led to defeat, retreat, and Hooker's dismissal as commander. Lee then invaded Pennsylvania, where a chance encounter of small units led to the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1. The new Union commander, General George G. Meade, directed a successful defense at Gettysburg, forcing Lee to return to Virginia.
In March 1864 Lincoln gave Grant command of the Union armies. Grant planned a campaign of attrition that would rely on the Union's overwhelming superiority in numbers and supplies. Though Union forces would suffer enormous casualties as a result of this strategy, he concluded that the devastation experienced by the Confederate troops would be even greater.
In the late summer of 1864, Grant sent General William T. Sherman and his troops into Georgia. Sherman captured and burned the city of Atlanta in September and then set out on his march through Georgia, destroying everything in his path. He reached Savannah on December 10 and soon captured the city.
In the spring of 1864, Grant commanded the Army of the Potomac against Lee's forces in the Wilderness Campaign, a series of violent battles that took place in Virginia. Battles at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor extracted heavy Union casualties, but Lee's smaller army was, as Grant had hoped, devastated. Grant laid siege to Petersburg for ten months, pinning down Lee's troops and slowly destroying their morale.
By March 1865 Lee's army had suffered numerous casualties and desertions. Grant began the final advance on April 1 and captured Richmond on April 3. On April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Lee surrendered his Confederate forces, signaling an end to the Civil War.
The casualties had been enormous for both sides. More than 359,000 Union soldiers had died, while the Confederate dead numbered 258,000.
The war ended slavery. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln had announced the abolition of slavery in areas occupied by the Confederacy effective January 1, 1863. The wording of the Emancipation Proclamation on that date had made clear that slavery was still to be tolerated in the border states and areas occupied by Union troops so as not to jeopardize the war effort. Lincoln was uncertain that the Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of his action, so he lobbied Congress to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery.
Lincoln's wartime suspension of the writ of habeas corpus meant that military commanders could arrest persons suspected of being sympathetic to the Confederacy and have them imprisoned indefinitely. After the war the Supreme Court, in Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2, 18 L. Ed. 281 (1866), condemned Lincoln's directive establishing military jurisdiction over civilians outside the immediate war zone. The Court strongly affirmed the fundamental right of a civilian to be tried in a regular court of law with all the required procedural safeguards.
See: Military Government; Milligan, Ex parte; Texas v. White.
| History Dictionary: Civil War |
The war fought in the United States between northern (Union) and southern (Confederate) states from 1861 to 1865, in which the Confederacy sought to establish itself as a separate nation. The Civil War is also known as the War for Southern Independence and as the War between the States. The war grew out of deep-seated differences between the social structure and economy of North and South, most notably over slavery; generations of political maneuvers had been unable to overcome these differences (see Missouri Compromise and Compromise of 1850). The secession of the southern states began in late 1860, after Abraham Lincoln was elected president. The Confederacy was formed in early 1861. The fighting began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Most of the battles took place in the South, but one extremely crucial episode, the Battle of Gettysburg, was fought in the North. The war ended with the surrender of General Robert E. Lee to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. (See Battle of Bull Run, Battle of Chancellorsville, Emancipation Proclamation, and Sherman's march to the sea; also see map, next page.)
| Wikipedia: American Civil War |
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The American Civil War (1861–1865), also known as the War Between the States and several other names, was a civil war in the United States of America. Eleven Southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America (the Confederacy). Led by Jefferson Davis, they fought against the United States (the Union), which was supported by all the free states and the five border slave states. Union states were loosely referred to as "the North".
In the presidential election of 1860, the Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, had campaigned against the expansion of slavery beyond the states in which it already existed. The Republican victory in that election resulted in seven Southern states declaring their secession from the Union even before Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861. Both the outgoing and incoming US administrations rejected the legality of secession, considering it rebellion.
Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a US military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln responded by calling for a volunteer army from each state, leading to declarations of secession by four more Southern slave states. Both sides raised armies as the Union assumed control of the border states early in the war and established a naval blockade. In September 1862, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made ending slavery in the South a war goal[1], and dissuaded the British from intervening.[2] Confederate commander Robert E. Lee won battles in the east, but in 1863 his northward advance was turned back after the Battle of Gettysburg and, in the west, the Union gained control of the Mississippi River at the Battle of Vicksburg, thereby splitting the Confederacy. Long-term Union advantages in men and material were realized in 1864 when Ulysses S. Grant fought battles of attrition against Lee, while Union general William Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia, and marched to the sea. Confederate resistance collapsed after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
The American Civil War was the deadliest war in American history, resulting in the deaths of 620,000 soldiers and an undetermined number of civilian casualties. It legally abolished slavery in the United States, restored the Union and strengthened the role of the federal government. The social, political, economic and racial issues of the war decisively shaped the reconstruction era that lasted to 1877, and brought changes that helped make the country a united superpower.
Contents |
The coexistence of a slave-owning South with an increasingly anti-slavery North made conflict likely, if not inevitable. Abraham Lincoln did not propose federal laws against slavery where it already existed, but he had, in his 1858 House Divided Speech, expressed a desire to "arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction."[3] Much of the political battle in the 1850s focused on the expansion of slavery into the newly created territories.[4][5][6] All of the organized territories were likely to become free-soil states, which increased the Southern movement toward secession. Both North and South assumed that if slavery could not expand it would wither and die.[7][8][9]
Southern fears of losing control of the federal government to antislavery forces, and Northern resentment of the influence that the Slave Power already wielded in government, brought the crisis to a head in the late 1850s. Sectional disagreements over the morality of slavery, the scope of democracy and the economic merits of free labor versus slave plantations caused the Whig and "Know-Nothing" parties to collapse, and new ones to arise (the Free Soil Party in 1848, the Republicans in 1854, the Constitutional Union in 1860). In 1860, the last remaining national political party, the Democratic Party, split along sectional lines.
Both North and South were influenced by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson. Southerners used the states' rights[10][11][12] ideas mentioned in Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions to defend slavery. Northerners ranging from the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to the moderate Republican leader Lincoln[13] emphasized Jefferson's declaration that all men are created equal. Lincoln mentioned this proposition in his Gettysburg Address.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said[14] that slavery was the chief cause of secession[15] in his Cornerstone Speech shortly before the war. After Confederate defeat, Stephens became one of the most ardent defenders of the Lost Cause.[16] There was a striking contrast[15][17] between Stephens' post-war states' rights assertion that slavery did not cause secession[16] and his pre-war Cornerstone Speech. Confederate President Jefferson Davis also switched from saying the war was caused by slavery to saying that states' rights was the cause. While Southerners often used states' rights arguments to defend slavery, sometimes roles were reversed, as when Southerners demanded national laws to defend their interests with the Gag Rule and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. On these issues, it was Northerners who wanted to defend the rights of their states.[18]
Almost all the inter-regional crises involved slavery, starting with debates on the three-fifths clause and a twenty year extension of the African slave trade in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The 1793 invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney increased by fiftyfold the quantity of cotton that could be processed in a day and greatly increased the demand for slave labor in the South.[19] There was controversy over adding the slave state of Missouri to the Union that led to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Nullification Crisis over the Tariff of 1828 (although the tariff was low after 1846,[20] and even the tariff issue was related to slavery),[21][22][23] the gag rule that prevented discussion in Congress of petitions for ending slavery from 1835–1844, the acquisition of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and Manifest Destiny as an argument for gaining new territories where slavery would become an issue after the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), which resulted in the Compromise of 1850.[24] The Wilmot Proviso was an attempt by Northern politicians to exclude slavery from the territories conquered from Mexico. The extremely popular antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe greatly increased Northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.[25][26]
The 1854 Ostend Manifesto was an unsuccessful Southern attempt to annex Cuba as a slave state. The Second Party System broke down after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which replaced the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery with popular sovereignty, allowing the people of a territory to vote for or against slavery. The Bleeding Kansas controversy over the status of slavery in the Kansas Territory included massive vote fraud perpetrated by Missouri pro-slavery Border Ruffians. Vote fraud led pro-South Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan to make attempts (including support for the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution) to admit Kansas as a slave state.[27] Violence over the status of slavery in Kansas erupted with the Wakarusa War,[28] the Sacking of Lawrence,[29] the caning of Republican Charles Sumner by the Southerner Preston Brooks,[30][31] the Pottawatomie Massacre,[32] the Battle of Black Jack, the Battle of Osawatomie and the Marais des Cygnes massacre. The 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision allowed slavery in the territories even where the majority opposed slavery, including Kansas. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 included Northern Democratic leader Stephen A. Douglas' Freeport Doctrine. This doctrine was an argument for thwarting the Dred Scott decision which, along with Douglas' defeat of the Lecompton Constitution, divided the Democratic Party between North and South. Northern abolitionist John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry Armory was an attempt to incite slave insurrections in 1859.[33] The North-South split in the Democratic Party in 1860 due to the Southern demand for a slave code for the territories completed polarization of the nation between North and South.
Other factors include sectionalism, which was caused by the prosperity and growth of slavery in the cotton South while slavery was phased out of Northern states and steadily declined in the Border states that lacked cotton. 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 Beard and argue that Northern and Southern economies were largely complementary.[34] There was the polarizing effect of slavery that split the largest religious denominations (the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches)[35] and controversy caused by the worst cruelties of slavery (whippings, mutilations and families split apart). The fact that seven immigrants out of eight settled in the North, plus movement of twice as many whites leaving the South for the North as vice versa, contributed to the South's defensive-aggressive political behavior.[36]
The election of Lincoln in 1860 was the final trigger for secession.[37] 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.
Support for secession was strongly correlated to the number of plantations in the region; states of the deep South which had the greatest concentration of plantations were the first to secede. The upper South slave states of Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee had fewer plantations and rejected secession until the Fort Sumter crisis forced them to choose sides. Border states had fewer plantations still and never seceded.[38][39][40] As of 1850 the percentage of Southern whites living in families that owned slaves was 43 percent in the lower South, 36 percent in the upper South and 22 percent in the border states that fought mostly for the Union.[40] 85 percent of slaveowners who owned 100 or more slaves lived in the lower South, as opposed to one percent in the border states.[40] Ninety-five percent of African-Americans lived in the South, comprising one third of the population there as opposed to one percent of the population of the North. Consequently, fears of eventual emancipation were much greater in the South than in the North.[41]
The US Supreme Court decision of 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sandford added to the controversy. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's decision said that slaves were "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect".[42] Taney then overturned the Missouri Compromise, which banned slavery in territory north of the 36°30' parallel. He stated that "the Act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning [enslaved persons] in the territory of the United States north of the line therein is not warranted by the Constitution and is therefore void."[43] The Dred Scott decision was praised by Democrats, but Republicans branded it a "willful perversion" of the Constitution. They argued that if Scott could not legally file suit, the Supreme Court had no right to consider the Missouri Compromise's constitutionality. Lincoln warned that "the next Dred Scott decision"[44] could threaten Northern states with slavery.
Abraham Lincoln said, "this question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present."[45] The slavery issue was related to sectional competition for control of the territories,[46] and the Southern demand for a slave code for the territories was the issue used by Southern politicians to split the Democratic Party in two, which all but guaranteed the election of Lincoln and secession. When secession was an issue, South Carolina planter and state Senator John Townsend said that "our enemies are about to take possession of the Government, that they intend to rule us according to the caprices of their fanatical theories, and according to the declared purposes of abolishing slavery."[47] Similar opinions were expressed throughout the South in editorials, political speeches and declarations of reasons for secession. Even though Lincoln had no plans to outlaw slavery where it existed, whites throughout the South expressed fears for the future of slavery.
Southern concerns included not only economic loss but also fears of racial equality.[48][49][50][51] The Texas Declaration of Causes for Secession[52][53] said that the non-slave-holding states were "proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color", and that the African race "were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race". Alabama secessionist E. S. Dargan warned that whites and free blacks could not live together; if slaves were emancipated and remained in the South, "we ourselves would become the executioners of our own slaves. To this extent would the policy of our Northern enemies drive us; and thus would we not only be reduced to poverty, but what is still worse, we should be driven to crime, to the commission of sin."[54]
Beginning in the 1830s, the US Postmaster General refused to allow mail which carried abolition pamphlets to the South.[55] Northern teachers suspected of any tinge of abolitionism were expelled from the South, and abolitionist literature was banned. Southerners rejected the denials of Republicans that they were abolitionists.[56] The North felt threatened as well, for as Eric Foner concludes, "Northerners came to view slavery as the very antithesis of the good society, as well as a threat to their own fundamental values and interests."[57]
During the 1850s, slaves left the border states through sale, manumission and escape, and border states also had more free African-Americans and European immigrants than the lower South, which increased Southern fears that slavery was threatened with rapid extinction in this area. Such fears greatly increased Southern efforts to make Kansas a slave state. By 1860 the number of white border state families owning slaves plunged to only 16 percent of the total. Slaves sold to lower South states were owned by a smaller number of wealthy slave owners as the price of slaves increased.[58]
Even though Lincoln agreed to the Corwin Amendment, which would have protected slavery in existing states, secessionists claimed that such guarantees were meaningless. Besides the loss of Kansas to free soil Northerners, secessionists feared that the loss of slaves in the border states would lead to emancipation, and that upper South slave states might be the next dominoes to fall. They feared that Republicans would use patronage to incite slaves and antislavery Southern whites such as Hinton Rowan Helper. Then slavery in the lower South, like a "scorpion encircled by fire, would sting itself to death."[59] A few secessionists mentioned the tariff issue along with slavery, but these were rare. Among other reasons, slavery represented much more money than the tariff.[59] However, a few libertarian economists place more importance on the tariff issue.[60] There were non-slavery related causes of secession, but they had little to do with tariffs or states' rights.
South Carolina did more to advance nullification and secession than any other Southern state. South Carolina adopted the "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union" on December 24, 1860. 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. All the alleged violations of the rights of Southern states were related to slavery.
Before Lincoln took office, seven states had declared their secession from the Union. They established a Southern government, the Confederate States of America on February 4, 1861.[61] 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".[62] One quarter of the U.S. Army—the entire garrison in Texas—was surrendered 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, secession later enabled Republicans 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 trans-continental 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.
Seven Deep South cotton states seceded by February 1861, starting with South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. These seven states formed the Confederate States of America (February 4, 1861), with Jefferson Davis as president, and a governmental structure closely modeled on the U.S. Constitution. Following the attack on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for a volunteer army from each state. Within two months, four more Southern slave states declared their secession and joined the Confederacy: Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee. The northwestern portion of Virginia subsequently seceded from Virginia, joining the Union as the new state of West Virginia on June 20, 1863. By the end of 1861, Missouri and Kentucky were divided — each of them having a pro-Southern and pro-Northern government.
Twenty-three states remained loyal to the Union: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. During the war, Nevada and West Virginia joined as new states of the Union. Tennessee and Louisiana were returned to Union military control early in the war.
The territories of Colorado, Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington fought on the Union side. Several slave-holding Native American tribes supported the Confederacy, giving the Indian territory (now Oklahoma) a small bloody civil war.
The border states in the Union were West Virginia (which was separated from Virginia and became a new state), and four of the five northernmost slave states (Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky).
Maryland had numerous pro-Confederate officials who tolerated anti-Union rioting in Baltimore and the burning of bridges. Lincoln responded with martial law and called for troops. Militia units that had been drilling in the North rushed toward Washington, DC and Baltimore.[63] Before the Confederate government realized what was happening, Lincoln had seized firm control of Maryland and the District of Columbia, by arresting all the Maryland government members and holding them without trial.
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. After the Camp Jackson Affair Lyon 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.[64]
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.[65]
After Virginia's secession, a Unionist government in Wheeling asked a total of 48 counties to vote on an ordinance to create a new state on October 24, 1861. Returns were received from 41 of the 48 counties,[66] and a minority turnout voted heavily in favor of the new state,[67] at first called Kanawha but later renamed West Virginia, which was admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863. Jefferson and Berkeley counties were annexed to the new state in late 1863.[68] The western counties of Virginia had voted nearly 2 to 1[69] against secession, though 24 of the 50 counties had voted for secession.[70] Soldier numbers from West Virginia were about evenly divided between the Confederacy and the Union.[71]
A similar Unionist secession attempt occurred in East Tennessee, but was suppressed by the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis arrested over 3000 men suspected of being loyal to the Union and held them without trial.[72]
Over 10,000 military engagements took place during the war, 40% of them in Virginia and Tennessee.[73] Since separate articles deal with every major battle and many minor ones, this article only gives the broadest outline. For more information see List of American Civil War battles and Military leadership in the American Civil War.
Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of 1860 triggered South Carolina's declaration of secession from the Union. By February 1861, six more Southern states made similar declarations. On February 7, the seven states adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America and established their temporary capital at Montgomery, Alabama. A pre-war February Peace Conference of 1861 met in Washington in a failed attempt at resolving the crisis. The remaining eight slave states rejected pleas to join the Confederacy. Confederate forces seized most of the federal forts within their boundaries. President Buchanan protested but made no military response apart from a failed attempt to resupply Fort Sumter using the ship Star of the West, which was fired upon by South Carolina forces and turned back before it reached the fort.[74] However, governors in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania quietly began buying weapons and training militia units.
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".[75] He stated he had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did he intend to end slavery where it existed, but that he would use force to maintain possession of federal property. His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union.[76]
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 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.[77] However, Secretary of State William Seward engaged in unauthorized and indirect negotiations that failed.[77]
Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, Fort Pickens and Fort Taylor were the remaining Union-held forts in the Confederacy, and Lincoln was determined to hold Fort Sumter. Under orders from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, troops controlled by the Confederate government under P. G. T. Beauregard bombarded the fort with artillery on April 12, forcing the fort's capitulation. Northerners rallied behind Lincoln's call for all the states to send troops to recapture the forts and to preserve the Union. With the scale of the rebellion apparently small so far, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers for 90 days.[78] For months before that, several Northern governors had discreetly readied their state militias; they began to move forces the next day.[79] Liberty Arsenal in Liberty, Missouri was seized eight days after Fort Sumter.
Four states in the upper South (Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia), which had repeatedly rejected Confederate overtures, now refused to send forces against their neighbors, declared their secession, and joined the Confederacy. To reward Virginia, the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond.[80] The city was the symbol of the Confederacy. Richmond was in a highly vulnerable location at the end of a tortuous Confederate supply line. Although Richmond was heavily fortified, supplies for the city would be reduced by Sherman's capture of Atlanta and cut off almost entirely when Grant besieged Petersburg and its railroads that supplied the Southern capital.
Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the U.S. Army, devised the Anaconda Plan[81] to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible. His idea was that a Union blockade of the main ports would weaken the Confederate economy; then the capture of the Mississippi River would split the South. Lincoln adopted the plan, but overruled Scott's warnings against an immediate attack on Richmond.
In May 1861, Lincoln enacted the Union blockade of all Southern ports, ending regular international shipments to the Confederacy. When violators' ships and cargoes were seized, they were sold and the proceeds given to Union sailors, but the British crews were released. By late 1861, the blockade stopped most local port-to-port traffic. The blockade shut down King Cotton, ruining the Southern economy. British investors built small, fast "blockade runners" that traded arms and luxuries brought in from Bermuda, Cuba and the Bahamas in return for high-priced cotton and tobacco.[82] Shortages of food and other goods triggered by the blockade, foraging by Northern armies, and the impressment of crops by Confederate armies combined to cause hyperinflation and bread riots in the South.[83]
On March 8, 1862, the Confederate Navy waged a fight against the Union Navy when the ironclad CSS Virginia attacked the blockade; against wooden ships she seemed unstoppable but the next day she had to fight the new Union warship USS Monitor in the Battle of the Ironclads.[84] The battle ended in a draw, which was a strategic victory for the Union in that the blockade was sustained. The Confederacy lost the Virginia when the ship was scuttled to prevent capture, and the Union built many copies of Monitor. Lacking the technology to build effective warships, the Confederacy attempted to obtain warships from Britain. The Union victory at the Second Battle of Fort Fisher in January 1865 closed the last useful Southern port and virtually ended blockade running.
Because of the fierce resistance of a few initial Confederate forces at Manassas, Virginia, in July 1861, a march by Union troops under the command of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell on the Confederate forces there was halted in the First Battle of Bull Run, or First Manassas,[85] whereupon they were forced back to Washington, D.C., by Confederate troops under the command of Generals Joseph E. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard. It was in this battle that Confederate General Thomas Jackson received the nickname of "Stonewall" because he stood like a stone wall against Union troops.[86] Alarmed at the loss, and in an attempt to prevent more slave states from leaving the Union, the U.S. Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution on July 25 of that year, which stated that the war was being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.
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 favor 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,[87][88][89] Johnston halted his advance at the Battle of Seven Pines, then General Robert E. Lee and top subordinates James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson[90] 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.[91] 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, when 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[90] near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day in United States military history.[92] 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.[93]
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[94] on December 13, 1862, when over twelve thousand 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[95] in May 1863. He 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[96] (July 1 to July 3, 1863), the bloodiest battle of the war, which is sometimes considered the war's turning point. Pickett's Charge on July 3 is often recalled as the high-water mark of the Confederacy, not just because it signaled the end of Lee's plan to pressure Washington from the north, but also because Vicksburg, Mississippi, the key stronghold to control of the Mississippi, fell the following day. Lee's army suffered 28,000 casualties (versus Meade's 23,000).[97] However, Lincoln was angry that Meade failed to intercept Lee's retreat, and after Meade's inconclusive fall campaign, Lincoln decided to turn to the Western Theater for new leadership.
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.[98] 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.
Most of the Mississippi was opened to Union traffic with the taking of Island No. 10 and New Madrid, Missouri, and then Memphis, Tennessee. In May 1862 the Union Navy captured New Orleans[99] without a major fight, 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,[100] 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[101] 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;[102] and the Battle of Vicksburg,[103] 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,[104] driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee and opening a route to Atlanta and the heart of the Confederacy.
Guerrilla activity turned much of Missouri into a battleground. Missouri had, in total, the third-most battles of any state during the war.[105] The other states of the west, though geographically isolated from the battles to the east, saw numerous small-scale military actions. Battles in the region served to secure Missouri, Indian Territory, and New Mexico Territory for the Union. Confederate incursions into New Mexico territory were repulsed in 1862 and a Union campaign to secure Indian Territory succeeded in 1863. Late in the war, the Union's Red River Campaign was a failure. Texas remained in Confederate hands throughout the war, but was cut off from the rest of the Confederacy after the capture of Vicksburg in 1863 gave the Union control of the Mississippi River.
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 bring an end to the war.[106] This was total war not in terms of killing civilians but rather in terms of destroying homes, farms, and railroads. 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.
Union forces in the East attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles during that phase ("Grant's Overland Campaign") of the Eastern campaign. Grant's battles of attrition at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor[107] resulted in heavy Union losses, but 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. Grant was tenacious and, despite astonishing losses (over 65,000 casualties in seven weeks),[108] kept pressing Lee's Army of Northern Virginia back to Richmond. He pinned down the Confederate army in the 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 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,[109] a strategy similar to the tactics Sherman later employed in Georgia.
Meanwhile, Sherman marched from Chattanooga to Atlanta, defeating Confederate Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood along the way. The fall of Atlanta,[110] on September 2, 1864, was a significant factor in the reelection of Lincoln as president.[111] Hood left the Atlanta area to menace Sherman's supply lines and invade Tennessee in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign.[112] Union Maj. Gen. John M. 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% 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,[113] increasing the pressure on Lee's army.
Lee's army, thinned by desertion and casualties, was now much smaller than Grant's. Union forces won a decisive victory at the Battle of Five Forks on April 1, forcing Lee to evacuate Petersburg and Richmond. The Confederate capital fell[114] to the Union XXV Corps, composed of black troops. The remaining Confederate units fled west and after a defeat at Sayler's Creek, it became clear to Robert E. Lee that continued fighting against the United States was both tactically and logistically impossible.
Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at the McLean House in the village of Appomattox Court House.[115] In an untraditional gesture and as a sign of Grant's respect and anticipation of peacefully folding the Confederacy back into the Union, Lee was permitted to keep his officer's saber and his horse, Traveller. On April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was shot. Lincoln died early the next morning, and Andrew Johnson became President.
Events leading to Lee's surrender began with the capture of key Confederate officers Richard S. Ewell and Richard H. Anderson on April 6, following Confederate defeat at the battle of Sayler's Creek. On April 8 Union cavalry under Major General George Armstrong Custer destroyed three trains of Confederate supplies at Appomattox Station, leading to the surrender of General Lee the next day.[116] General St. John Richardson Liddell's army surrendered after the loss of the Confederate fortifications at the Battle of Spanish Fort in Alabama, also on April 9.
On April 21 John S. Mosby’s raiders of the 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry disbanded and on April 26 General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his troops to Sherman at Bennett Place in Durham, North Carolina. Surrendering on May 4 and 5 were the Confederate departments of Alabama, Mississippi and East Louisiana regiments and the District of the Gulf. The Confederate President was captured on May 10 and the surrender of the Department of Florida and South Georgia happened the same day. Confederate Brigadier General "Jeff" Meriwether Thompson surrendered his brigade the next day and the day following saw the surrender of the Confederate forces of North Georgia.
On June 23, 1865, at Fort Towson in the Choctaw Nations' area of the Oklahoma Territory, Stand Watie signed a cease-fire agreement with Union representatives, becoming the last Confederate general in the field to stand down. The last Confederate ship to surrender was the CSS Shenandoah, on November 6, 1865, in Liverpool, England. These surrenders marked the conclusion of the American Civil War.
At the beginning of the war some Union commanders thought they were supposed to return escaped slaves to their masters. By 1862, when it became clear that this would be a long war, the question of what to do about slavery became more general. The Southern economy and military effort depended on slave labor. It began to seem unreasonable to protect slavery while blockading Southern commerce and destroying Southern production. As one Congressman put it, the slaves "...cannot be neutral. As laborers, if not as soldiers, they will be allies of the rebels, or of the Union."[117] The same Congressman—and his fellow Radical Republicans—put pressure on Lincoln to rapidly emancipate the slaves, whereas moderate Republicans came to accept gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization.[118] Copperheads, the border states and War Democrats opposed emancipation, although the border states and War Democrats eventually accepted it as part of total war needed to save the Union.
In 1861, Lincoln expressed the fear 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."[119] 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.[120] Only the District of Columbia accepted Lincoln's gradual plan, and Lincoln mentioned his Emancipation Proclamation to members of his cabinet on July 21, 1862. Secretary of State William H. Seward told Lincoln to wait for a victory before issuing the proclamation, as to do otherwise would seem like "our last shriek on the retreat".[121] In September 1862 the Battle of Antietam provided this opportunity, and the subsequent War Governors' Conference added support for the proclamation.[122] Lincoln had already published a letter[123] encouraging the border states especially to accept emancipation as necessary to save the Union. Lincoln later said that slavery was "somehow the cause of the war".[124] Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, and his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In his letter to 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."[125]
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.[126] Lincoln also played a leading role in getting Congress to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment,[127] which made emancipation universal and permanent.
Enslaved African Americans did not wait for Lincoln's action before escaping and seeking freedom behind Union lines. From early years of the war, hundreds of thousands of African Americans escaped to Union lines, especially in occupied areas like Nashville, Norfolk and the Hampton Roads region in 1862, Tennessee from 1862 on, the line of Sherman's march, etc. So many African Americans fled to Union lines that commanders created camps and schools for them, where both adults and children learned to read and write. The American Missionary Association entered the war effort by sending teachers south to such contraband camps, for instance establishing schools in Norfolk and on nearby plantations. In addition, nearly 200,000 African-American men served as soldiers and sailors with Union troops. Most of those were escaped slaves.
Confederates enslaved captured black Union soldiers, and black soldiers especially were shot when trying to surrender at the Fort Pillow Massacre.[128] This led to a breakdown of the prisoner exchange program[129] and the growth of prison camps such as Andersonville prison in Georgia, where almost 13,000 Union prisoners of war died of starvation and disease.[130]
In spite of the South's shortage of manpower, until 1865, most Southern leaders opposed arming slaves as soldiers. They used them as laborers to support the war effort. As Howell Cobb said, "If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Confederate generals Patrick Cleburne and Robert E. Lee argued in favor of arming blacks late in the war, and Jefferson Davis was eventually persuaded to support plans for arming slaves to avoid military defeat. The Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox before this plan could be implemented.[131]
The Emancipation Proclamation[132] greatly reduced the Confederacy's hope of getting aid from Britain or France. Lincoln's moderate approach succeeded in getting border states, War Democrats and emancipated slaves fighting on the same side for the Union. The Union-controlled border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia) were not covered by the Emancipation Proclamation. All abolished slavery on their own, except Kentucky and Delaware.[133] The great majority of the 4 million slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, as Union armies moved South. The 13th amendment,[134] ratified December 6, 1865, finally freed the remaining slaves in Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey, that numbered 225,000 for Kentucky, 1,800 in Delaware, and 18 in New Jersey as of 1860.[135]
Historian Stephen Oates said that many myths surround Lincoln: "man of the people", "true Christian", "arch villain" and racist. The belief that Lincoln was racist was caused by an incomplete picture of Lincoln, such as focusing on only selective quoting of statements Lincoln made to gain the support of the border states and Northern Democrats, and ignoring the many things he said against slavery, and the military and political context within which such statements were made. Oates said that Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley has been "persistently misunderstood and misrepresented" for such reasons.[136]
Entry into the war by Britain and France on behalf of the Confederacy would have greatly increased the South's chances of winning independence from the Union.[137] 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 (none ever did). In 1861, Southerners voluntarily embargoed cotton shipments, hoping to start an economic depression in Europe that would force Britain to enter the war in order to get cotton. 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 was said that "King Corn was more powerful than King Cotton", as US grain went from a quarter of the British import trade to almost half.[138]
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, iron workers, and British ships to transport weapons.[139]
Charles Francis Adams proved particularly adept as minister to Britain for the U.S. and Britain was reluctant to boldly challenge the blockade. The Confederacy purchased several warships from commercial ship builders in Britain. 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. War loomed in late 1861 between the U.S. and Britain over the Trent Affair, involving the U.S. Navy's boarding of a British mail steamer 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. Lord Palmerston reportedly read Uncle Tom’s Cabin three times[140] when deciding on this. The Union victory in the Battle of Antietam caused them to delay this decision. The Emancipation Proclamation further reinforced 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.
Historians have debated whether the Confederacy could have won the war. Most scholars emphasize that the Union held an insurmountable long-term advantage over the Confederacy in terms of industrial strength and population. Confederate actions, they argue, only delayed defeat. Southern 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."[141] 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 succeeded in getting the support of the border states, War Democrats, emancipated slaves and Britain and France. By defeating the Democrats and McClellan, he also defeated the Copperheads and their peace platform.[142] Lincoln had also found military leaders like Grant and Sherman who would press the Union's numerical advantage in battle over the Confederate Armies. Generals who did not shy from bloodshed won the war, and from the end of 1864 onward there was no hope for the South.
On the other hand, James McPherson has argued that the North’s advantage in population and resources made Northern victory likely, but not inevitable. 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.[143]
Also important were Lincoln's eloquence in rationalizing the national purpose and his skill in keeping the border states committed to the Union cause. Although Lincoln's approach to emancipation was slow, the Emancipation Proclamation was an effective use of the President's war powers.[144]
The Confederate government failed in its attempt to get Europe involved in the war militarily, particularly England 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% effective at stopping trade goods, as a result, imports and exports to the South declined significantly. The abundance of European cotton and England's hostility to the institution of slavery, along with Lincoln's Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico naval blockades, severely decreased any chance that either England or France would enter the war.[145]
| Union | CSA | |
|---|---|---|
| Total population | 22,100,000 (71%) | 9,100,000 (29%) |
| Free population | 21,700,000 | 5,600,000 |
| 1860 Border state slaves | 400,000 | NA |
| 1860 Southern slaves | NA | 3,500,000 |
| Soldiers | 2,100,000 (67%) | 1,064,000 (33%) |
| Railroad miles | 21,788 (71%) | 8,838 (29%) |
| Manufactured items | 90% | 10% |
| Firearm production | 97% | 3% |
| Bales of cotton in 1860 | Negligible | 4,500,000 |
| Bales of cotton in 1864 | Negligible | 300,000 |
| Pre-war U.S. exports | 30% | 70% |
The more industrialized economy of the North aided in the production of arms, munitions and supplies, as well as finances, and transportation. The table shows the relative advantage of the Union over the Confederate States of America (CSA) at the start of the war. The advantages widened rapidly during the war, as the Northern economy grew, and Confederate territory shrank and its economy weakened. The Union population was 22 million and the South 9 million in 1861; the Southern population included more than 3.5 million slaves and about 5.5 million whites, thus leaving the South's white population outnumbered by a ratio of more than four to one compared with that of the North.[147] The disparity grew as the Union controlled an increasing amount of southern territory with garrisons, and cut off the trans-Mississippi part of the Confederacy. The Union at the start controlled over 80% of the shipyards, steamships, river boats, and the Navy. It augmented these by a massive shipbuilding program. This enabled the Union to control the river systems and to blockade the entire southern coastline.[148] Excellent railroad links between Union cities allowed for the quick and cheap movement of troops and supplies. Transportation was much slower and more difficult in the South which was unable to augment its much smaller rail system, repair damage, or even perform routine maintenance.[149] The failure of Davis to maintain positive and productive relationships with state governors (especially governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia and governor Zebulon Baird Vance of North Carolina) damaged his ability to draw on regional resources.[150] The Confederacy's "King Cotton" misperception of the world economy led to bad diplomacy, such as the refusal to ship cotton before the blockade started.[151] The Emancipation Proclamation enabled African-Americans, both free blacks and escaped slaves, to join the Union Army. About 190,000 volunteered,[152] 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. Emancipated slaves mostly handled garrison duties, and fought numerous battles in 1864-65.[153] European immigrants joined the Union Army in large numbers, including 177,000 born in Germany and 144,000 born in Ireland.[154]
Northern leaders agreed that victory would require more than the end of fighting. It had to encompass the two war goals: secession had to be totally repudiated and all forms of slavery had to be eliminated. They disagreed sharply on the criteria for these goals. They also disagreed on the degree of federal control that should be imposed on the South, and the process by which Southern states should be reintegrated into the Union.
Reconstruction, which began early in the war and ended in 1877, involved a complex and rapidly changing series of federal and state policies. The long-term result came in the three Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution: the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended federal legal protections equally to citizens regardless of race; and the Fifteenth Amendment, which abolished racial restrictions on voting. Reconstruction ended in the different states at different times, the last three by the Compromise of 1877.
For further details on how the protections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were subverted, see:
Slavery effectively ended in the U.S. in the spring of 1865 when the Confederate armies surrendered. All slaves in the Confederacy were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, which stipulated that slaves in Confederate-held areas were free. Slaves in the border states and Union-controlled parts of the South were freed by state action or (on December 6, 1865) by the Thirteenth Amendment. The full restoration of the Union was the work of a highly contentious postwar era known as Reconstruction. The war produced about 1,030,000 casualties (3% of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease.[156] The war accounted for roughly as many American deaths as all American deaths in other U.S. wars combined.[157] The causes of the war, the reasons for its outcome, and even the name of the war itself are subjects of lingering contention today. About 4 million black slaves were freed in 1861-65. Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6% in the North and an extraordinary 18% in the South.[158] One reason for the high number of battle deaths during the war was the use of Napoleonic tactics such as charges. 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 a few experimental Gatling guns, soldiers were devastated when standing in lines in the open. This gave birth to trench warfare, a tactic heavily used during World War I.
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