The election of Abraham Lincoln was met with a firestorm of protest in many parts of the Deep South. Nowhere was this opposition stronger than in South Carolina, where the state almost immediately seceded from the United States in December of 1860. By February, six more states followed, while Lincoln was not yet even in office (at the time Presidents were not inaugurated until March.) In the meantime, President Buchanan did little to threaten war to stop the seceding states, and other politicians lamely tried to revive the same or similar compromise measures from the 1850s. Increasingly Republicans such as Lincoln came to the realization that the Union must defend its interests, and let the chips fall where they may. When he came into office, events soon focused on one of the few remaining manned federal arsenals in Confederate territory, Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Determined to defend Fort Sumter as a symbol of his intentions to keep the Union together, Lincoln followed through on his threat to restock the fort, and then the South Carolinians shelled it in April of 1861. Able to claim that federal interests were now under attack, Lincoln responded to the shelling of Fort Sumter by calling up the Union militias. The Civil War had begun.
In most economic and demographic respects, the Confederacy possessed considerable disadvantages when compared to the Union: fewer people, fewer factories, fewer banks, fewer railroads, even lower crops yields for things such as wheat, corn, and cows, since so much of Southern agriculture focused on cotton. In addition, the Civil War came to be known as the first modern war, where industrial might coupled with new technologies such as railroads, telegraph lines, more deadly artillery, and ironclad submarines all played deciding roles in the eventual Union victory, since the Union overwhelmed the Confederacy in terms of industrial or manufacturing power. But the Confederacy did possess two advantages: a strong military culture, and the fact that they were fighting on home ground. The fact that the Union Army would have to march south and make its foe surrender meant that the Confederacy was theoretically fighting a guerilla war similar to the American Revolution. If the Confederacy could hold out long enough, wear down Northern resolve, or win enough battles, they could force a truce with the Union.
There were primarily two theaters battle in the Civil War: one in the east focusing on Virginia and the Confederate capital of Richmond, the other in the west focusing on the fight for control of the Mississippi River and therefore the easiest way to take the Deep South and Atlanta, arguably the Confederacy’s most important city after Richmond. In the East, the Union armies floundered for lack of effective leadership. But in the West, led by men like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union developed a pulverizing war machine which would eventually break the back of the Confederacy, while also emancipating slaves and using many of them as soldiers. Increasingly, Union generals would embrace the idea of “Total War,” but this was not at first the case. In Virginia, for example, Union General George McClellan repeatedly refused to pursue his main opponent, Confederate Robert E. Lee, or to adequately fight him during the so-called “Peninsular Campaign” during June and July of 1862. McClellan then found himself forced to retreat from taking territory south of Richmond by sea. By his actions, McClellan revealed his fundamental conservatism regarding the war in which he was engaged: he was a Democrat, he did not believe in emancipation, and he hoped to somehow bring the Confederacy back into the Union without angering them by fighting too hard. By the fall of 1862, Robert E. Lee was striking boldly to the north, within shouting distance of Washington, D.C., largely due to the bumbling and slow maneuvering of McClellan. Only when he accidentally received Lee’s plans for battle around Antietam, Maryland did McClellan begin to attack Lee with any determination, but then the Union general failed to pursue and destroy Lee’s Army when given the chance. For this, Lincoln both removed McClellan and, more importantly, signaled that the gloves were coming off, as it were, when it came to dealing with the South: now the Union would use slaves against their masters in an all-out attempt to crush the Confederacy as 1863 dawned.
The decision by Lincoln to emancipate slaves in areas still in rebellion did not end the war, but it laid the foundations for victory. Lincoln’s decision to support abolition also transformed the Civil War into what has aptly been termed “the Second American Revolution.” This is because by offering freedom to slaves, as well as by offering military service to African-Americans, Lincoln and the Republicans both destroyed the “private property” held in other human beings, while also implying that African-Americans did indeed have rights. However, even after the use of their former slaves against them, the Confederates continued to fight. By the summer of 1863, Lee decided to take the bold and daring step of invading free state territory, in Pennsylvania, in an attempt to demoralize Northerners and make them think that it would be impossible to conquer the South if they could not properly defend their own free territory. The showdown came at Gettysburg, in July of 1863, and Lee quite simply sacrificed his men. Lee’s suicidal gamble at Picket’s Charge, where 15,000 troops marched up a hill in open sight of Union fire from an elevated position, has been called the “high water mark of the Confederacy.” After this disaster, Lee offered his resignation to the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, but Davis refused. Also, in 1863, the New York Draft Riots indicated that Northern war-weariness might also cause the North to negotiate peace with the Confederacy.
During the war, there are several reasons that Abraham Lincoln was seen as a radical on the part of his opponents in the North—let alone among Confederates. Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus for people he suspected of being Confederate sympathizers, and his party not only liberated slaves, but also used its power in Congress (since the Democrats lost many seats to seceding southern states) to advance many aspects of a large-government agenda. Such long term projects as spending for more public colleges, giving away western land (the so-called Homestead Act), in addition to more spending on railroads, a national banking system, and the creation of a new, centralized currency, the “Greenback” were all accomplishments of these activist Republican politicians. These pro-business, pro-industrial, pro-federal government policies deeply disturbed many Northern conservatives, in addition to their distaste for the costs of war. By 1864, the so-called “Peace Democrats” threatened to take control of the Union government, and it was possible (though we will never know) that the Democrats would have ended the war before the Confederacy had been defeated. (Though even by this point, one wonders how slavery would have been sustained given all of the emancipations which had taken place.)
Given the growing opposition to Lincoln, the Union war effort needed to be seen as decisively gaining ground against the Confederates if Lincoln and the Republicans were to maintain power. Throughout 1864, Union armies stalled around Richmond, even though Grant proved much more willing to throw men at the problem than McClellan, the lack of results did not help the situation on the Northern home front. Things also went slowly with the effort to move through the Deep South and take Atlanta. Particularly with the aid of John Bell Hood, the Confederates resisted Sherman as best they could from Tennessee down into Georgia through the late summer of 1864. Sherman had to settle down for a siege of Atlanta, just as the Presidential election of 1864 was going into the final stretch. In that election, Lincoln faced a formidable challenge from his onetime general, George McClellan. As a centerpiece of his campaign against Lincoln, McClellan threatened a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy if he won. Luckily for Lincoln and the Republicans, word arrived in September regarding Sherman’s breakthrough outside Atlanta- he had finally worn down Hood, forcing him to flee Atlanta so as to save his army. Through the fall, Sherman then commenced his infamous “march to the sea” where he made it clear that railroads, farms, and other non-military targets would be sought out and destroyed by his military. Although they continued to fight on until April 1865 in Virginia, the Confederacy was dying and the Civil War in many ways ended with the re-election of Abraham Lincoln.
Although they lost the war, the Confederates could be said to have taken their revenge on the North when, on April 14, 1865, Confederate John Wilkes Booth mortally wounded the President. The vengeful attitude of Confederates was understandable when one realizes that the American Civil War took a tremendous toll on the white South. Yet for black slaves, by gaining their freedom they achieved more than many would have hoped. For the free states, although many families lost several relatives, the war itself would lay the foundations for the triumph of an industrial order, and northerners could go back to the more typically American endeavors of moving west, building farms, speculating in businesses, or experimenting with new technologies. Historians have also noted the involvement of women in various humanitarian organizations during the war, and how the trend toward increasing economic opportunities for women begun before the war continued after it ended (of course woman’s suffrage was still fifty years away.) For many in the Free states, within several decades the pain of war would at least seem to be a distant memory, which is amazing considering how many people were killed by the fighting. All told, over 600,000 people lost their lives as a direct result of the war, and hundreds of thousands of others were crippled, or otherwise lost their health and well-being as a result of the conflict. In present day terms, the number of people killed or wounded would equal well over seven million people. There has never been a war in U.S. history with such a high human cost.