This entry is a subentry of Civil War (1861 – 65).
In the days following the capture of Fort Sumter, few Americans anticipated a lengthy conflict. President Abraham Lincoln responded to the crisis by calling for 75,000 90‐day volunteers, reflecting his confidence that the war would not last the summer. But, of course, such optimism proved ill‐founded. By any measure, the next four years would be the bloodiest in American history. How did the men and women on the home front respond to the war's enormous challenges?
In some fundamental ways, the North and the South faced very similar situations in April 1861. The outbreak of open hostilities, after months of uncertainty and division, prompted most citizens above and below the border states to “rally ‘round” their flag. Town dignitaries delivered bellicose speeches with puffed chests; editorials urged readers to new patriotic heights; bands blared. Military recruiters had no trouble obtaining volunteers in such an atmosphere; those who persisted in dissent generally maintained a judicious silence.
The Union and the Confederacy also faced comparable obstacles. Neither side was remotely prepared to fight a major war. The federal army only numbered about 16,000 men. The Confederacy had to start with nothing, although it did have the advantage of a more military‐oriented population, including compulsory military service and a disproportionate share of the nation's Mexican War veterans. And despite all the excitement, mid‐nineteenth‐century Americans had little familiarity with—and less enthusiasm for—the sort of activist central government a long war might require. These similarities notwithstanding, both sides went to war with dissimilar material and human resources. Moreover, the Confederate government was constructed in a society committed to states' rights and lacking a functioning two‐party system. Such differences helped mold distinctive patterns of wartime mobilization, and as the war dragged on, they created quite different home front experiences.
Manpower
At the outset, mobilization in both North and South took on an almost carnival air. Young men rushed to volunteer for hastily organized companies, anxious to get in on the glory while there was still time. Before long, both sides discovered that they could no longer rely on such unfettered passion, and thus they turned—in stages—to various strategies initially to coax young men into uniform in the Union army or the Confederate army. The North enjoyed a huge numerical advantage. The free Union states had a total population of 19 million; the slaves states that stayed with the Union—Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri—added another 3.2 million, although that number included many Southern sympathizers. The eleven Confederate states totaled just over 9 million people. These numbers understate the Union's numerical superiority by including the Confederacy's 3.5 million black slaves, who were central to the Southern economy and war effort but not deemed fit for military service. Furthermore, roughly 800,000 foreign immigrants arrived in the North during the war.
Both central governments initially relied on the states and localities to orchestrate recruiting. When Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis called for volunteers, each state received a quota to fill. By the time the three‐month recruits were returning home in late summer 1861, the North had issued calls for three‐year volunteers that yielded more than 700,000 men. The infant Confederacy had already requested 100,000 men before the capture of Fort Sumter in April and added another 400,000 the following month.
With winter approaching and the most willing recruits already in uniform, the Confederate Congress offered bounties and furloughs to convince volunteers to reenlist. In April 1862, the Confederacy passed the first national draft legislation, making white men between ages eighteen and thirty‐five eligible for conscription. The North was not too far behind. In June 1862, Lincoln called for 300,000 more three‐year volunteers. When the citizenry responded slowly, Congress passed the Militia Act giving state governors the power to draft men. That August, the Union implemented this new legislation by requisitioning 300,000 nine‐month militiamen, with the provision that states failing to meet their quota would be subject to a draft. In March 1863, the North replaced the controversial state militia drafts with federal conscription measures that were more on a par with the Confederacy's system.
The initial conscription legislation in both the Union and the Confederacy provided military‐aged men with ample opportunities for avoiding service. In addition to excluding men with certain disabilities, the Confederate legislation exempted a long list of professions, ranging from political and judicial officers to teachers and clergymen to workers in war‐related occupations. A later act exempted one white man from every plantation with twenty or more slaves. Each of these provisions could be defended in the name of military necessity or domestic stability, but together they triggered angry complaints of class legislation from nonslave owning Southern whites. The North's federal draft act had no occupational exemptions, but it did exclude men with numerous medical ailments or certain family obligations, as well as unnaturalized aliens. Most controversial were the provisions enabling wealthier conscripts simply to buy their way out of service. Following long‐standing European tradition, both sides allowed draft ees to send substitutes in their place, the North permitting conscripts to pay a commutation fee of $300 (an amount equal to a worker's annual wages) rather than serving.
As the war dragged on, the Confederacy was forced to widen its conscription net. The list of exemptions gradually shrank; the Southern Congress repealed the substitute clause and made all those who had furnished substitutes eligible for the draft; and the age parameters expanded to include white males between seventeen and fifty. The more populous North tinkered with its rules but made fewer substantial revisions other than restricting the controversial commutation clause to members of certain religious groups. (As many had feared, this resulted in a steady increase in the market price for substitutes.)
Despite the superficially similar rules, conscription played different roles in the two nations. Only about eight percent of Union soldiers were conscripts or substitutes. The four federal drafts were really designed to encourage enthusiastic local recruiting rather than to put conscripts into uniform. The Union army's provost marshal general announced draft days long in advance, giving communities every opportunity to fill their quotas and avoid a draft. Cities and towns responded by raising large bounty funds—which supplemented existing federal and state bounties—to encourage enlistment. The poorer South soon exhausted funds available for enlistment bounties, limiting the effectiveness of pre‐draft recruiting. Roughly one in five Confederate soldiers was either a draftee or a substitute.
In 1863, the North tapped a further manpower ad vantage when it decided to accept African Americans in the military. Blacks had served in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, but black enlistment was prohibited in 1820. Many Northern blacks offered their services to the Union, but for long months racist assumptions about the ability of African American troops and political qualms about the costs of arming black volunteers conspired to keep black men out of uniform (although thousands did serve in the navy). The 1862 Militia Act allowed Lincoln to accept black volunteers, but it was not until after the 1 January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that the North aggressively recruited black volunteers. By the end of the Civil War, 179,000 African American men had served in 166 black regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops. The North commissioned few black officers and persisted in giving black regiments inferior wages, equipment, and assignments. In the war's waning months the Confederate Congress voted to accept black soldiers, but this legislation was passed too late to be tested in practice.
By the end of the war, roughly half of the North's military‐aged white men had served in uniform, as compared with nearly four‐fifths of Southern white males of military age. Some critics at the time and some later historians charged that the war became “A Rich Man's War But a Poor Man's Fight,” yet comparisons of the occupational distribution of sampled soldiers with data from the 1860 census indicate that both armies were surprisingly representative of the white male populations. The Northern army was also not, as sometimes suggested, dominated by foreign mercenaries; immigrants were actually underrepresented in the Union ranks.
Economic Mobilization and Its Effects
The North enjoyed enormous economic advantages over its weaker adversary. In 1860, roughly 90 percent of the nation's manufacturing output was from the Northern states. The Union's economic superiority was particularly pronounced in key war‐related sectors, such as textiles, boots and shoes, iron, and firearms. Moreover, the North had a near monopoly in railroads and shipping. The agrarian South was even behind its Northern neighbor in some critical foodstuffs. In 1860, Northern agriculture was producing half the nation's corn and four‐fifths of its wheat.
With a few key exceptions, the Union was able to outfit its armies through private contracting rather than establishing federally owned factories. Unlike modern conflicts, this war did not call for the vast production of uniquely military goods. Most of the items needed to feed, outfit, and arm a soldier could be provided by existing farms and factories; a few government arsenals produced the rest. Lacking an established industrial base, the Confederacy found itself in far more challenging circumstances.
Here was one of the war's many ironies. Whereas the Union could rely on private enterprise, the states' rights–oriented Confederacy was forced to build nationally owned factories, subsidize private enterprises, regulate prices, and impress goods and services (including slave labor) to meet the war's economic needs. With the passage of time, the South's economic deficiencies became more glaring. The Union blockade limited Confederate access to foreign ports, and the North's military successes destabilized portions of the Southern economy. Above all, Southerners learned to reuse materials where they could and to manage with less wherever possible.
The Northern war effort cost an estimated $2.3 billion; the smaller Confederacy spent roughly $1 billion. As he developed strategies to fund the war, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase had a host of advantages over his Confederate counterpart, Christopher G. Memminger. In many senses, the fiscal history of the war runs parallel to the mobilization of the armies, with both sides employing similar strategies tailored in distinctive ways to meet their individual needs. The wealthier North funded most of its costs through the sale of interest‐bearing bonds. These bonds, sold largely under the enthusiastic direction of Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, enabled the Union, effectively, to “borrow” roughly two‐thirds of its military expenses from its own citizens or from foreign investors. The North covered an additional 20 percent of its expenses through a assortment of import duties and taxes, including a modest federal income tax. It paid for the war's remaining costs by issuing “greenbacks,” printed notes not backed by specie or any precious metal.
This new currency, which was authorized by the Legal Tender Act of 1862, proved crucial to the smooth functioning of the wartime economy while passing on part of the war's costs to consumers in the form of relatively high inflation. The South, with less disposable wealth and a poorly developed financial structure, could fund only about 40 percent of its costs through taxation and the sale of bonds. Instead, the Confederacy had to rely on massive issues of paper money, triggering a disastrously high inflation.
The war's economic strains fell unevenly on different groups across the home front. The booming Northern economy assured low unemployment, but soon wage earners chafed at the burden of rising prices. The more skilled urban artisans managed to organize and negotiate comfortable raises; the less skilled, including scores of women who worked for unscrupulous military subcontractors, for example, in the manufacture of uniforms, suffered through declining real wages. Federal forces only intervened in a handful of labor conflicts, and then only under the guise of claimed military necessity. Heavy wartime demands for food, poor European harvests, and disproportionately high enlistment rates among agricultural workers combined to produce a variety of results: unusually high profits for farm owners; increased wages for the agricultural workers who remained at home; and unprecedented investment in agricultural machinery. Women and men on the Confederate home front felt the war's economic pains even more acutely. By mid‐1863, the combination of high prices and food shortages had driven many Southerners into open dissent. In April, an angry mob composed largely of women destroyed much of Richmond's shopping district after their appeals for relief from inflated food prices had gone unanswered.
Richmond's “bread riots” underscored the war's effect on women and children on the home front. In the prosperous North, some benevolent institutions reported proportionally greater demands from women, perhaps reflecting the combined weight of more economic opportunities for male workers and soldiers and the loss of family income when men fell on the battlefield. Cities and towns across the North collected special funds for the “families of volunteers,” providing much needed relief while adding further incentives to reluctant enlistees. Southern women bore the brunt of the Confederacy's economic ills without much opportunity for relief. When private charities ran dry, Southerners turned to unprecedented public welfare measures, at the local, state, and national levels. But inflation, inefficiency, and overwhelming numbers conspired to limit the effectiveness of these initiatives.
For some women, the Civil War's economic challenges brought new opportunities. Although the Union's military demands did not produce an army of nineteenth‐century factory women, the war did accelerate the movement of Northern women into positions as clerks, teachers, and nurses. In both the North and the South, white women took on expanded agricultural roles when white men left for the front. This was particularly true in the Confederacy, where women often acted independently of any male influence. Wartime necessity also forced Southern women into new positions, but they continued to run up against cultural barriers. The North, for instance, proved more receptive to the use of female nurses.
For Southern blacks, there was no such ambiguity. Long before the war ended, hundreds of thousands of slaves had won their freedom. The story of wartime emancipation reflects the complexity of national, local, and individual forces. As official Northern policy slowly inched its way toward Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect 1 January 1863, individual slaves responded to their own circumstances, pursuing freedom when absent masters or approaching Union troops provided the best opportunities. Many of these freed slaves remained in the South, finding refuge behind Union lines, while others fled to the North. The process of piecemeal emancipation left much of the Southern agricultural economy in disarray while laying the groundwork for various wartime experiments with the ramifications of free labor.
Politics and Dissent
Four years of war produced serious strains on domestic politics in both the Union and the Confederacy. In most fundamental ways the Confederate leaders modeled their new constitution and government after the nation that they had abandoned. After all, the seceding states had insisted that they were the true heirs to the founders of the republic. Beneath the structural similarities, however, lay important political differences. Whereas Lincoln entered a political arena with a strong two‐party system, Davis presided over a nation that would be torn by factionalism but without any party mechanisms to register (and control) dissent. Moreover, many of the Confederacy's leaders had worked during the antebellum decades as political dissenters, resisting perceived challenges to states' rights.
From his first days in office, Lincoln had to navigate between the radical Republicans in his own party, such as Thaddeus Stevens, and an increasingly vocal array of dissenting Peace Democrats. The relative unanimity that followed the outbreak of hostilities quickly dissolved as Northerners debated a series of controversial war measures including the Habeas Corpus Act, conscription, greenbacks, and, above all, emancipation. Even Unionist War Democrats in Washington and across the North criticized policies that they claimed enacted an unconstitutional Republican agenda.
The administration countered with aggressive measures to silence the most dangerous dissent, the Peace Democrats. Soon after the capture of Fort Sumter, Lincoln ordered the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in the border states. This set in motion a critical series of events in Maryland: military authorities threw several prominent local figures, including wealthy secessionist John Merryman, in jail; in Ex Parte Merryman (1861), U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland responded by ordering Merryman's release; and Lincoln refused to yield, leaving it to history to judge his actions. The following year, with the state militia drafts underway, federal officials arrested several hundred vocal draft resisters and five dissenting newspaper editors while suspending publication of several opposition newspapers. By 1863, the Northern “Copperheads”—the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party—had won important strongholds across the Midwest and in some areas of the East. In May, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside ordered the arrest of dissenting Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham, triggering another round of angry outbursts.
As the election of 1864 approached, Lincoln had every reason to fear that he would lose to the Democratic challenger, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. McClellan, long a thorn in the president's side, had repeatedly criticized emancipation, the loss of civil liberties, and Lincoln's overall handling of the war. When the votes were counted, Lincoln had managed to garner 55 percent, aided by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's recent successes in the South and the overwhelming support of absentee ballots from the Union Army.
Historians have often compared Lincoln with Jefferson Davis, generally finding the Confederate president lacking. The South's material disadvantages forced Davis into a series of measures that dramatically expanded the central government while placing him in the center of controversy. This process of central government growth, which Emory Thomas (1979) has termed a “political revolution,” included the continent's first draft legislation, impressment of goods and labor, the suspension of civil liberties, and a wide range of ventures into economic control. Davis faced heated opposition from strong‐minded state governors as well as attacks from much closer to home, often led by his vice president, the surly Georgian Alexander Stephens. Davis, like Lincoln, used his authority to declare martial law in sensitive areas, but civil liberties for whites may have in fact fared better in the Confederacy (for instance, freedom of the press survived unscathed in the South).
Much of the most rigorous wartime dissent was voiced beyond the boundaries of normal political discourse. Northerners fretted over secret societies, such as the notorious Knights of the Golden Circle, which reputedly conspired against the Union. Portions of the nonslave hill country and mountain region in the South remained bastions of pro‐Union sympathy throughout the conflict. The North's worst internal violence followed tension‐filled conscription days, but often reflected broader tensions. In July 1863, disgruntled conscripts attacked a draft office, triggering four days of New York City antidraft riots, which led to much carnage. Many of the rioters were Irish immigrants who took out their hostilities on African Americans.
In addition to periodic food riots, portions of the Confederacy experienced violence at the hands of roving companies of guerrillas. Some of these groups had at least passing connections to formal military bodies, but others were little more than desperate bands of hungry deserters. Even where the South did not divide into open warfare, declining troop morale eventually took a tremendous toll, inciting soldiers to flee the army and accelerating the demise of the Confederacy.
Supporting the War Effort
For most people on the home front, the “citizens' war” provided a wealth of opportunities to assist the war effort. In the North, women and men labored in a wide variety of voluntary societies designed to fill the gaps in the official governmental machinery. Local women's groups sewed clothing, rolled bandages, visited hospitals, fed traveling soldiers, and provided refuge for escaped slaves. Fund‐raising concerts and fairs, modeled on antebellum practices, enabled the volunteers to mail packages off to distant soldiers. Two national bodies—the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the U.S. Christian Commission—emerged to organize and direct some of these benevolent efforts. Confederate women threw themselves into war work with equal vigor. White women of all classes gathered at sewing circles to produce all manner of goods for the men in gray. As the Confederacy faced financial ruin, Southern women demonstrated their patriotism by staging fund‐raisers or sacrificing heirlooms. Even in its heyday, Southern voluntarism did not spawn bodies comparable to the North's national commissions, and long before the war had ended the South had exhausted whatever funds the volunteers could raise.
Civil War voluntarism raises important questions of gender for historians. Women in both the North and South earned widespread notice and praise for their “noble” wartime sacrifices. Sacrifice for larger benevolent causes was nothing new for American women, but the scale of wartime activities and the paucity of civilian men (at least white men in the South) enabled some women to go beyond established practices. Southern historians—weighing the economic, political, and voluntaristic experiences of Confederate women—remain divided over how much, and for how long, the war opened the door to changing gender roles.
A few Northern women such as Clara Barton rose to positions of national prominence, but the Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission remained largely under male direction. Nevertheless, women in some communities (Chicago, for instance) took on unfamiliar authority, and the organizational skills and theories that scores of volunteers developed at the grassroots level proved crucial in molding the postwar activities of a key cohort of female activists. Overall, the conflict helped expand the range of experiences for many women while probably doing little to alter commonly held assumptions about gender and war.
In addition to providing material and emotional assistance to the soldiers, home front volunteers sought to affect public opinion and otherwise contribute to wartime discourse. Most of the organized Civil War “propaganda” emerged from a handful of Northern publication societies. The first few years of the war saw the occasional printing of partisan pamphlets by interested individuals, a practice that had a long American tradition. In 1863, the Democrats raised the stakes with the establishment of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Political Knowledge. Soon Philadelphia's Union League had countered with its own Board of Publications while the equally partisan Loyal Publication Society began operations in New York City. These, and a few other smaller bodies, flooded the North with millions of copies of several hundred political publications, many of which aimed to sway the electorate in 1864. Some authors wrote extremely sophisticated pamphlets, examining esoteric constitutional issues; others aimed their rhetoric at a broader, less educated, audience. Taken together, these Northern pamphlets provided members of the Union League and their antagonists with a crucial vehicle for reaching a broad audience outside formal party politics. So did patriotic songs such as “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Conclusions
The Civil War home front offers a host of perspectives. The military historian can find seeds of success and failure in the goings‐on behind the lines. For instance, although the South was outmanned and outgunned, a strong case can be made that the Confederacy's fall owed much to the loss of civilian morale. Scholars of race, gender, and class have mined the war years for evidence of both changing relationships and stubborn continuities. Emancipation forever reshaped American race relations, but racial inequalities persisted in both the North and South. Although wartime women earned approval for their highly public patriotic efforts, suffragists had to wait three more generations for the vote. Economic historians have dismissed the notion that the war launched a “takeoff” into postwar industrial growth, while stressing the importance of emancipation in reducing Southern agriculture.
The political and institutional history of the home front is full of interesting ironies. Focusing on the North, it is tempting to tell a tale of Lincoln and the Republican Party using the pressures of war to promote sweeping national reform. After all, the legislative litany includes taxation, greenbacks, banking reform, conscription, and emancipation. But if we widen our lens to include the Confederacy—the bastion of militant individualism and states' rights—we find far more evidence of an expanded national state, including more aggressive conscription and a much greater federal role in economic affairs. In truth, both regions remained devoted to tradition and localism throughout the war. Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy went further than the Union in using the machinery of a central government to support the war effort, but only because conditions required it.
[See also Agriculture and War; Civil Liberties and War; Congress, War, and the Military; Economy and War; Industry and War; Labor and War; Race Relations and War; Society and War.]
Bibliography
- Emory Thomas, The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865, 1979.
- Phillip Shaw Paludan, “A People's Contest”: The Union and the Civil War, 1861–1865, 1988.
- George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism, 1989.
- Roger Ransom, Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation and the American Civil War, 1989.
- Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877, 1990.
- Maris A. Vinovskis, ed., Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays, 1990.
- James W. Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War, 1991.
- Mark E. Neely, The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, 1991.
- Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, 1992.
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2nd ed. 1992. - J. Matthew Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, 1994.
- Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention, 1996
