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THE CIVIL WAR
· THE MOBILIZATION OF THE NORTH
· THE MOBILIZATION OF THE SOUTH
LOOKING AHEAD
1. How did the North’s mobilization for war differ from mobilization in the South? What accounts for these differences?
2. How did the war affect the North and the South differently?
3. What were the military strategies employed by the North and the South from the opening clashes in 1861 through the Union victory in 1865, and how did these strategies differ?
AMERICA FACED A TIME OF RECKONING by the end of 1860. As had been long predicted by black critics of American society like David Walker and Frederick Douglass, the country was being brought to knees by the institution of slavery. The shared political beliefs and institutions that had bound the Union for generations now lay tattered. The second party system had collapsed, no longer able to contain sectional differences and find compromises over the meaning and expansion of the peculiar institution. Politicians leapt at one another’s throats, each eager to protect his state’s particular economy, society, and views on the morality and legality of slavery. The federal government itself was no longer a remote, unthreatening presence to most citizens. Forced to resolve the status of territories and settle the question of whether they would be open to slavery or not, Washington now became a more direct presence in the lives of Americans. The presidential election of 1860 brought these political tensions to a head and forced Americans to confront the possibility that the nation would no longer exist. It precipitated the bloodiest war in nation’s history whose outcome—which was always in doubt until the very end—ultimately remade the meaning of American democracy.
THE SECESSION CRISIS
Almost as soon as news of Abraham Lincoln’s election reached the South, militant leaders began to demand an end to the Union.
The Withdrawal of the South
South Carolina, long the hotbed of Southern separatism, seceded first, on December 20, 1860. By the time Lincoln took office, six other Southern states—Mississippi (January 9, 1861), Florida (January 10), Alabama (January 11), Georgia (January 19), Louisiana (January 26), and Texas (February 1)—had withdrawn from the Union. In February 1861, representatives of the seven seceded states met at Montgomery, Alabama, and formed a new nation—the Confederate States of America . Two months earlier, President James Buchanan told Congress that no state had the right to secede from the Union but that the federal government had no authority to stop a state if it did.
The seceding states immediately confiscated the federal property within their boundaries. But they did not at first have sufficient military power to seize two fortified offshore military installations: Fort Sumter , in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, garrisoned by a small force under Major Robert Anderson; and Fort Pickens, in Pensacola, Florida. Buchanan refused to yield Fort Sumter when South Carolina demanded it. Instead, in January 1861, he ordered an unarmed merchant ship to proceed to Fort Sumter with additional troops and supplies. Confederate guns turned it back. Still, neither section was yet ready to concede that war had begun. And in Washington, efforts began once more to forge a compromise.
The Failure of Compromise
Gradually, the compromise efforts came together around a proposal from John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. Known as the Page 323Crittenden Compromise, it proposed reestablishing the Missouri Compromise line and extending it westward to the Pacific. Slavery would be prohibited north of the line and permitted south of it. Southerners in the Senate seemed willing to accept the plan. But the compromise would have required the Republicans to abandon their most fundamental position—that slavery not be allowed to expand—and they rejected it. Whether the failure to compromise and find common ground between Northern and Southern politicians triggered the Civil War has been a topic of debate among historians for generations. (See “ Debating the Past: The Causes of the Civil War .”)
DEBATING THE PAST
The Causes of the Civil War
Abraham Lincoln, in his 1865 inaugural address, looked back at the terrible war that was now nearing its end and said, “All knew [that slavery] was somehow the cause of the war.” Few historians dispute that. But disagreement has been sharp over whether slavery was the only, or even the principal, cause of the war.
The debate began even before the war itself. In 1858, Senator William H. Seward of New York took note of the two competing explanations of the sectional tensions that were then inflaming the nation. On one side, he said, stood those who believed the conflicts to be “accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators.” Opposing them stood those (among them Seward himself) who believed there to be “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces.”
The “irrepressible conflict” argument dominated historical discussion of the war from the 1860s to the 1920s. War was inevitable, some historians claimed, because there was no room for compromise on the central issue of slavery. Others deemphasized slavery and pointed to the economic differences between the agrarian South and the industrializing North. Charles and Mary Beard, for example, wrote in 1927 of the “inherent antagonisms” between the interests of planters and those of industrialists. Still others cited social and cultural differences as the source of an irrepressible conflict. Slavery, the historian Allan Nevins argued, was only one factor that was making residents of the North and South “separate peoples.” Fundamental differences in “assumptions, tastes, and cultural aim” made it virtually impossible for the two societies to live together in peace.
More recent proponents of irrepressible-conflict arguments similarly emphasize culture and ideology but define the concerns of the North and the South in different terms. Eric Foner, writing in 1970, argued that the moral concerns of abolitionists and the economic concerns of industrialists were less important in explaining Northern hostility to the South than was the broad-based “free-labor” ideology of the region. Northerners opposed slavery because they feared it might spread into their own region or into the West and threaten the position of free white laborers.
Other historians have argued that the war was not inevitable, beginning with a group of scholars in the 1920s known as the “revisionists.” James G. Randall and Avery Craven were the two leading proponents of the view that the differences between the North and the South were not so great as to require a war, that only a “blundering generation” of leaders caused the conflict. Michael Holt revived the revisionist argument in a 1978 book, in which he, too, emphasized the partisan ambitions of politicians. Holt was, along with Paul Kleppner, Joel Silbey, and William Gienapp, one of the creators of an “ethnocultural” interpretation of the war that emphasized the collapse of the party system and the role of temperance and nativism, which was central to the coming of the conflict.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. Some arguments regarding the Civil War as inevitable focus on economic differences between the North and the South. What were these differences and how might they have led—inevitably—to war?
2. Some revisionist scholars attribute the Civil War to a “blundering generation” of political leaders. Who were these leaders and what blunders did they make? Could better decisions have avoided war?
When Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington, talk of secession and possible war filled the air. In his inaugural address, Lincoln insisted that acts of force or violence to support secession were insurrectionary and that the government would “hold, occupy, and possess” federal property in the seceded states—a clear reference to Fort Sumter.
But Fort Sumter was running short of supplies. So Lincoln sent a relief expedition to the fort and informed the South Carolina authorities that he would send no troops or munitions unless the supply ships met with resistance. The new Confederate government ordered General P. G. T. Beauregard, commander of Confederate forces at Charleston, to take the fort. When Anderson refused to give up, the Confederates bombarded it for two days. On April 14, 1861, Anderson surrendered. The Civil War had begun.
Almost immediately, four more slave states seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy: Virginia (April 17), Arkansas (May 6), Tennessee (May 7), and North Carolina (May 20). The four remaining slave states, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri—under heavy political pressure from Washington—remained in the Union.
The Opposing Sides
All the important material advantages for waging war lay with the North, most notably an advanced industrial system able by 1862 to manufacture almost all the North’s own war materials. The South had almost no industry at all.
In addition, the North had a superior transportation system, with more and better railroads than did the South. During the war, the Confederate railroad system steadily deteriorated and by early 1864 had almost collapsed.
But the South also had advantages. The Southern armies were, for the most part, fighting a defensive war on familiar land with local support. The Northern armies, on the other hand, were fighting mostly within the South amid hostile local populations; they had to maintain long lines of communication. The commitment of the white population of the South to the war was, with limited exceptions, clear and firm throughout much of the early years of fighting. In the North, opinion was more divided, and support remained shaky until very near the end. A major Southern victory at any one of several crucial moments might have proved decisive in breaking the North’s will to continue the struggle. Finally, the dependence of the English and French textile industries on Southern cotton inclined many leaders in those countries to favor the Confederacy; and Southerners hoped, with some reason, that one or both might intervene on their behalf.
Billy Yank and Johnny Reb
The vast majority of Civil War soldiers were volunteers. Recruiters for the Union often pulled in groups of men from the same town or ethnic group. There were entire companies and even regiments of Irish Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans, or, Page 325later, African Americans. Initially, these soldiers and their officers were haphazardly trained and unprepared for battle. Many officers jokingly referred to their troops as armed mobs.
Because individual states outfitted their soldiers at the outset of the war, Union uniforms were at first far from uniform, ranging from the dark blue jackets and light blue pants of the regular army to dark blue and red “Zouave” uniforms based on the French colonial regiments in Algeria. “Federals” did not consistently wear blue uniforms until 1862, when the federal government provided them along with shoes, weapons, cartridge boxes, knapsacks, blankets, canteens, and other basic supplies.
Northerners generally saw themselves fighting to restore the Union and preserve the American democratic experiment. They questioned how the nation might endure if parts of it could secede at every undesirable election result. Most white Northerners understood that divisions over slavery had caused the Civil War, but they did not fight, at first, to abolish it. Later, when it became clear that abolishing slavery would help end the rebellion, emancipation joined reunion as a war aim. (In contrast, black Northerners immediately understood the war to be a struggle for emancipation.) Otherwise, beyond the timeless motivations of comradeship, honor, and adventure shared by soldiers in many wars, Union troops generally fought to sustain “the best government on earth.” 1
Like his Union counterpart, the average Confederate soldier rarely had proper military training and tended to serve with comrades from the same area. When on the march, fully provisioned Southern soldiers carried an ammunition cartridge box on their belts, a rolled-up blanket, a haversack, a tin cup, frying pan, and cloth-covered canteen. Many Confederate soldiers supplied their own shotguns, hunting rifles, or ancient flintlock muskets, and cavalrymen often provided their own horses. Regiments wore different uniforms, and even after the Confederacy adopted gray, the government was never able to clothe every soldier. Meals were meager, with soldiers on both sides subsisting on dried vegetables, salt pork and beef, coffee, and tough crackers known as hardtack.
THE COST OF BATTLE Seeking to capture the moment when Union Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow captures three Confederate officers on June 21, 1864, at Petersburg, Virginia, Winslow Homer offers a sharp portrait of defeat and victory. Beyond providing a picture of the soldiers’ different uniforms, he looks ahead to the state of America after the war. In the unapologetic glare of the Confederate most closely facing Barlow, Homer questions how quickly or coherently the nation can knit itself back together.
(Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Frank B. Porter, 1922)
Southerners saw themselves as the protectors of sacred American values. They defended the right of states to secede if they found the federal government oppressive, just as the colonies had claimed the right to declare independence from an oppressive Britain in the Revolutionary War. And they interpreted their defense of slavery as a defense of individual property rights in general. Indeed, slavery was at the heart of the rights Confederates sought to protect and of the life and economy they fought to preserve. Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens called slavery the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. Outraged at the thought of living under an antislavery president, secessionists relished independence. Page 326“Thank God!” wrote one Mississippian the summer after secession. “We have a country at last . . . to live for, to pray for, to fight for, and if necessary, to die for.” 2
Beyond these abstract motivations, however, many rebels fought to protect their homes and families from the invading Yankees.
THE MOBILIZATION OF THE NORTH
In the North, the war produced considerable discord, frustration, and suffering. But it also produced prosperity and economic growth. With the South now gone from Congress, the Republican Party enjoyed almost unchallenged supremacy. During the war, it enacted an aggressively nationalistic program to promote economic development.
Economic Nationalism
Two 1862 acts assisted the rapid development of the West. The Homestead Act permitted any citizen or prospective citizen to purchase 160 acres of public land for a small fee after living on it for five years. The Morrill Act transferred substantial public acreage to the state governments, which could now sell the land and use the proceeds to finance public education. This act led to the creation of many new state colleges and universities, the so-called land-grant institutions. Congress also passed a series of tariff bills that by the end of the Page 327war had raised duties to the highest level in the nation’s history—a great boon to domestic industries eager for protection from foreign competition, but a hardship for many farmers and other consumers. Without the seceding states to block their legislation, Congress bent to the political will of the Northern and western factions.
Congress also moved to spur completion of a transcontinental railroad. It created two new federally chartered corporations: the Union Pacific Railroad Company, which was to build westward from Omaha, and the Central Pacific, which was to build eastward from California. The two projects were to meet in the middle and complete the link, which they did in 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah.
The National Bank Acts of 1863–1864 created a new national banking system. Existing or newly formed banks could join the system if they had enough capital and were willing to invest one-third of it in government securities. In return, they could issue U.S. Treasury notes as currency. This eliminated much (although not all) of the chaos and uncertainty surrounding the nation’s currency.
More difficult was financing the war itself. The government tried to do so in three ways: levying taxes, issuing paper currency, and borrowing. Congress levied new taxes on almost all goods and services and in 1861 levied an income tax for the first time. But taxation raised only a small proportion needed to fight the war, and strong popular resistance prevented the government from raising the rates.
At least equally controversial was the printing of paper currency, or “ greenbacks .” The new currency was backed not by gold or silver but (as today) simply by the good faith and credit of the government. The value of the greenbacks fluctuated according to the fortunes of the Northern armies. Early in 1864, with the war effort bogged down, a greenback dollar was worth only 39 percent of a gold dollar. But at the close of the war, with confidence high, it was worth 67 percent of a gold dollar.
By far the largest source of financing for the war was loans. The Treasury persuaded ordinary citizens to buy over $400 million worth of bonds. Yet public bond purchases constituted only a small part of the government’s borrowing, which in the end totaled $2.6 billion, most of it from banks and large financial interests.
Raising the Union Armies
At the beginning of 1861, the regular army of the United States consisted of only 16,000 troops, many of them stationed in the West. So the Union, like the Confederacy, had to raise its army mostly from scratch. After the surrender of Fort Sumter, on April 15, 1863, Lincoln directed individual state militias to help him create a new federal force of 75,000 soldiers by providing men for an initial term of three months. But it would be far from enough. When Congress convened in July 1861, it authorized enlisting 500,000 volunteers for three-year terms.
This voluntary system of recruitment produced adequate forces only briefly, during the first flush of enthusiasm for the war. By March 1863, Congress was forced to pass a national draft law. Virtually all young adult males were eligible to be drafted, although a man could escape service by hiring someone to go in his place or by paying the government a fee of $300.
To many who were accustomed to a remote and inactive national government, conscription was strange and threatening. Opposition to the draft law was widespread, particularly among laborers, immigrants, and Democrats opposed to the war (known as “Peace Democrats” or “Copperheads” by their opponents). Occasionally opposition to the draft erupted into violence such as when demonstrators rioted in New York City for four days in July 1863, Page 328after the first names were selected for conscription. More than 100 people died. Irish workers were at the center of violence. They were angry because black strikebreakers had been used against them in a recent longshoremen’s strike. They blamed African Americans generally for the war, which they thought was being fought for the benefit of slaves. The rioters lynched several African Americans and burned down black homes, businesses, and even an orphanage, leaving more than 100 dead. Only the arrival of federal troops direct from the Battle of Gettysburg halted the violence.
Wartime Politics
When Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington, many Republicans considered him a minor prairie politician who would be easily controlled by the real leaders of his party. But Lincoln was not cowed by the distinguished figures around him. The new president understood his own (and his party’s) weaknesses, and he assembled a cabinet representing every faction of the Republican Party and every segment of Northern opinion. He moved boldly to use the war powers of the presidency, blithely ignoring inconvenient parts of the Constitution because, he said, it would be foolish to lose the whole by being afraid to disregard a part. And so he sent troops into battle without asking Congress for a declaration of war, arguing that the conflict was a domestic insurrection, and he unilaterally proclaimed a naval blockade of the South.
Lincoln’s greatest political problem was the widespread popular opposition to the war in the North. Lincoln ordered military arrests of civilian dissenters and suspended the right of habeas corpus (the right of an arrested person to receive a speedy trial). At first, Lincoln used these methods only in sensitive areas such as the border states; but by 1862, he proclaimed that all persons who discouraged enlistments or engaged in disloyal practices were subject to martial law.
Repression was not the only tool the North used to strengthen support for the war. In addition to arresting “disloyal” Northerners, Lincoln’s administration used new tools of persuasion to build popular opinion in favor of the war. In addition to pro-war pamphlets, posters, speeches, and songs, the war mobilized a significant corps of photographers—organized by the renowned Mathew Brady, one of the first important photographers in American history—to take pictures of the war. The photographs that resulted from this effort—new to warfare—were among the grimmest ever made to that point, many of them displaying the vast numbers of dead on the Civil War battlefields. For some Northerners, the images of death contributed to a revulsion for the war. But for most they gave evidence of the level of sacrifice that had been made for the preservation of the Union and thus spurred the nation on to victory. (Southerners used similar propaganda in the Confederacy, although less effectively.)
By the time of the 1864 election, the North was in political turmoil. The Republicans had suffered heavy losses in the midterm elections of 1862, and in response party leaders tried to create a broad coalition of all the groups that supported the war. They called the new organization the Union Party, but it was, in reality, little more than the Republican Party and a small faction of War Democrats. They nominated Lincoln for a second term and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a War Democrat who had opposed his state’s decision to secede, for the vice presidency.
The Democrats nominated George B. McClellan , a celebrated former Union general. The party adopted a platform denouncing the war and calling for a truce. McClellan repudiated that demand, but the Democrats were clearly the peace party in the campaign, Page 329trying to profit from growing war weariness. For a time, Lincoln’s prospects for reelection seemed doubtful.
At this crucial moment, however, several Northern military victories, particularly the capture of Atlanta, Georgia, early in September 1864, rejuvenated Northern morale and boosted Republican prospects. With the overwhelming support of Union troops, Lincoln won reelection comfortably, with 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21.
The Politics of Emancipation
Despite their surface unity in supporting the war and their general agreement on most economic matters, the Republicans disagreed sharply with one another on the issue of slavery. “Radical Republicans”—led in Congress by such men as Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senators Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Benjamin Wade of Ohio—wanted to use the war to abolish slavery immediately and completely. “Conservative Republicans” favored a more cautious policy—in part to placate the slave states that remained, precariously, within the Union.
Nevertheless, momentum began to gather behind emancipation early in the war. In 1861, Congress passed the Confiscation Acts , which declared that all slaves used for “insurrectionary” purposes (that is, in support of the Confederate military effort) would be considered freed. Subsequent laws in the spring of 1862 abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and the western territories and provided for the compensation of owners. In July 1862, Radicals pushed through Congress the second Confiscation Act, which declared free the slaves of persons supporting the insurrection and authorized the president to employ African Americans as soldiers.
As the war progressed, many in the North slowly accepted emancipation as a central war aim; nothing less, they believed, would justify the enormous sacrifices the struggle had required. As a result, the Radicals gained increasing influence within the Republican Party—a development that did not go unnoticed by the president, who decided to seize the leadership of the rising antislavery sentiment himself.
On September 22, 1862, after the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam, the president announced his intention to use his war powers to issue an executive order freeing all slaves in the Confederacy. And on January 1, 1863, he formally signed the Emancipation Proclamation , which declared forever free the slaves inside the Confederacy. The proclamation did not apply to the Union slave states; nor did it affect those parts of the Confederacy already under Union control (Tennessee, western Virginia, and southern Louisiana). It applied, in short, only to slaves over whom the Union had no control. Still, the document was of great importance. It clearly and irrevocably established that the war was being fought not only to preserve the Union but also to eliminate slavery. Eventually, as federal armies occupied much of the South, the proclamation became a practical reality and led directly to the freeing of thousands of slaves.
Even in areas not directly affected by the proclamation, the antislavery impulse gained strength. The U.S. government’s tentative measures against slavery were not, at first, a major factor in the liberation of slaves. Instead, the war helped African Americans liberate themselves, and they did so in increasing numbers as the war progressed. Many slaves were taken from their plantations and put to work as workers building defenses and other chores. Once transported to the front, many of them found ways to escape across Northern lines, where they were treated as “contraband”—goods seized from people who had no right to them. They could not be returned to their masters. By 1862, the Union army often Page 330penetrated deep into the Confederacy. Almost everywhere they went, escaped slaves flocked to join them by the thousands, often whole families. Some of them joined the Union army, others simply stayed with the troops until they could find their way to free states. When the Union captured New Orleans and much of southern Louisiana, slaves refused to work for their former masters, even though the Union occupiers had not made any provisions for liberating African Americans.
By the end of the war, two Union slave states (Maryland and Missouri) and three Confederate states occupied by Union forces (Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana) had abolished slavery. In 1865, Congress finally approved and the states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment , which abolished slavery in all parts of the United States. After more than two centuries, legalized slavery finally ceased to exist in the United States.
African Americans and the Union Cause
About 186,000 emancipated blacks served as soldiers, sailors, and laborers for the Union forces. Yet in the first months of the war, African Americans were largely excluded from the military. A few black regiments eventually took shape in some of the Union-occupied areas of the Confederacy. But once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, black enlistment increased rapidly and the Union military began actively to recruit African American soldiers and sailors in both the North and, where possible, the South.
Some of these men were organized into fighting units, of which the best known was probably the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, which (like most black regiments) had a white commander: Robert Gould Shaw, a member of an aristocratic Boston family.
Most black soldiers, however, were assigned menial tasks behind the lines, such as digging trenches and transporting water. Even though many fewer blacks than whites died in combat, the African American mortality rate was actually higher than the rate for white soldiers because so many black soldiers died of diseases contracted while working long, Page 331arduous hours in unsanitary conditions. Conditions for blacks and whites were unequal in other ways as well. Until 1869, black soldiers were paid a third less than were white soldiers. But however dangerous, onerous, or menial the tasks that black soldiers were given, most of them felt enormous pride in their service—pride they retained throughout their lives, and often through the lives of their descendants. Many moved from the army into politics and other forms of leadership (in both the North and, after the war, the Reconstruction South). Black fighting men captured by the Confederates were sent back to their masters (if they were escaped slaves) or executed. In 1864, Confederate soldiers killed over 260 black Union soldiers after capturing them in Tennessee.
AFRICAN AMERICAN TROOPS Although most of the black soldiers who enlisted in the Union army performed noncombat jobs behind the lines, some black combat regiments—members of one of which are pictured here—fought with great success and valor in critical battles.
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-B8184-841])
Women, Nursing, and the War
Thrust into new and often unfamiliar roles by the war, women took over positions vacated by men as teachers, salesclerks, office workers, mill and factory hands, and above all nursing. The United States Sanitary Commission , an organization of civilian volunteers, mobilized large numbers of female nurses to serve in field hospitals. By the end of the war, women were the dominant force in nursing.
Female nurses encountered considerable resistance from male doctors, many of whom thought it inappropriate for women to take care of male strangers. The Sanitary Commission countered such arguments by presenting nursing in domestic terms: as a profession that made use of the same maternal, nurturing roles women played as wives and mothers.
Some women came to see the war as an opportunity to win support for their own goals. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony together founded the Women’s National Loyal League in 1863 and worked simultaneously for the abolition of slavery and the awarding of suffrage to women.
THE MOBILIZATION OF THE SOUTH
Early in February 1861, representatives of the seven seceding states met at Montgomery, Alabama, to create a new Southern nation. When Virginia seceded several months later, the leaders of the Confederacy moved to Richmond.
There were, of course, important differences between the new Confederate nation and the nation it had left. But there were also significant similarities.
The Confederate Government
The Confederate constitution was almost identical to the Constitution of the United States, with several significant exceptions. It explicitly acknowledged the sovereignty of the individual states (although not the right of secession). And it specifically sanctioned slavery and made its abolition (even by one of the states) practically impossible.
The constitutional convention at Montgomery named a provisional president and vice president: Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, who were later elected by the general public, without opposition, for six-year terms. Davis had been a moderate secessionist before the war. Stephens had argued against secession. The Confederate government, like the Union government, was dominated throughout the war by men of the political center.Page 332
Davis was a reasonably able administrator and encountered little interference from the generally tame members of his unstable cabinet. But he rarely provided genuinely national leadership, spending too much time on routine items. Unlike Lincoln, he displayed a strict—even obsessive—regard for legal and constitutional requirements.
Although there were no formal political parties in the Confederacy, its politics were fiercely divided nevertheless. Some white Southerners opposed secession and war altogether. Most white Southerners supported the war, but as in the North, many were openly critical of the government and the military, particularly as the tide of battle turned against the South.
States’ rights had become such a cult among many white Southerners that they resisted virtually all efforts to exert national authority, even those necessary to win the war. States’ rights enthusiasts obstructed conscription and restricted Davis’s ability to impose martial law and suspend habeas corpus. Governors such as Joseph Brown of Georgia and Zebulon M. Vance of North Carolina tried at times to keep their own troops apart from the Confederate forces.
But the national government was not impotent. It experimented, successfully for a time, with a “food draft,” which permitted soldiers to feed themselves by seizing crops from farms in their path. The Confederacy also seized control of the railroads and shipping; it impressed slaves to work as laborers on military projects and imposed regulations on industry; it limited corporate profits. States’ rights sentiment was a significant handicap, but the South nevertheless took important steps in the direction of centralization.
Money and Manpower
Financing the Confederate war effort was a monumental task. The Confederate congress tried at first to requisition funds from the individual states; but the states were as reluctant to tax their citizens as the congress was. In 1863, therefore, the congress enacted an income tax. But taxation produced only about 1 percent of the government’s total income. Borrowing was not much more successful. The Confederate government issued bonds in such vast amounts that the public lost faith in them, and efforts to borrow money in Europe, using cotton as collateral, fared no better.
As a result, the Confederacy had to pay for the war through the least stable, most destructive form of financing: paper currency, which it began issuing in 1861. By 1864, the Confederacy had issued the staggering total of $1.5 billion in paper money. The result was a disastrous inflation—a 9,000 percent increase in prices in the course of the war (in contrast to 80 percent in the North).
Like the United States, the Confederacy first raised armies by calling for volunteers. And as in the North, by the end of 1861 voluntary enlistments were declining. In April 1862, therefore, the congress enacted the Conscription Act, which subjected all white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to military service for three years. As in the North, a draftee could avoid service if he furnished a substitute. But since the price of substitutes was high, the provision aroused such opposition from poorer whites that it was repealed in 1863.
Even so, conscription worked for a time, in part because enthusiasm for the war was intense and widespread among white men in most of the South. At the end of 1862, about 500,000 soldiers were in the Confederate army, not including the many slave men and women recruited by the military to perform such services as cooking, laundry, and manual labor. Small numbers of slaves and free blacks enlisted in the Confederate army, and a few participated in combat.Page 333
After 1862, however, conscription began producing fewer men, and by 1864 the Confederate government faced a critical manpower shortage. The South was suffering from intense war weariness, and many Southerners had concluded that defeat was inevitable. Nothing could attract or retain an adequate army any longer. In a frantic final attempt to raise men, the congress authorized the conscription of 300,000 slaves, but the war ended before the government could attempt this incongruous experiment.
Economic and Social Effects of the War
The war cut off Southern planters and producers from Northern markets, and a Union blockade of Confederate ports eventually reduced the sale of cotton outside of the region and overseas by nearly 95 percent. As a result, the South redoubled effort to diversify and expand its crops, bolster its textile industry, and make armaments and wartime provisions. Nothing came close to replacing cotton, however. Indeed, in the South, production of all goods during the war declined by more than a third; in the North, production grew. Above all, the fighting itself wreaked havoc on the Southern landscape, destroying farmland, towns, cities, and railroads. As the war continued, the shortages, the inflation, and the carnage slowly destabilized Southern society. Resistance to conscription, food impressment, and taxation rose throughout the Confederacy, as did hoarding and black-market commerce. Even before emancipation, the war had far-reaching effects on the lives of slaves. Confederate leaders enforced slave codes with particular severity, but many slaves—especially those near the front—still escaped their masters and crossed Union lines.
Some recreational pursuits found new popularity. Baseball emerged as a favorite pastime for Confederate and Union troops alike, who set up makeshift games within their ranks to relieve the pressures of the war. At the same time, civilians in Northern cities flocked to cheer on local teams in the newly founded National Association of Base Ball Players. (See “ Patterns of Popular Culture: Baseball and the Civil War .”)Page 334
PATTERNS OF POPULAR CULTURE
Baseball and the Civil War
Long before the great urban stadiums, the lights, the cameras, and the multimillion-dollar salaries, baseball was the most popular game in America. During the Civil War, it was a treasured pastime for soldiers and for thousands of men (and some women) behind the lines, in both the North and the South.
The legend that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday—who probably never even saw the game—was created by Albert G. Spalding, a patriotic sporting-goods manufacturer eager to prove that the game had purely American origins. In fact, baseball was derived from a variety of earlier games, especially the English pastimes of cricket and rounders. American baseball took its own distinctive form beginning in the 1840s, when Alexander Cartwright, a shipping clerk, formed the New York Knickerbockers, laid out a diamond-shaped field with four bases, and declared that batters with three strikes were out and that teams with three outs were retired.
Cartwright moved West in search of gold in 1849, settling finally in Hawaii, where he introduced the game to Americans in the Pacific. But the game did not languish in his absence. Henry Chadwick, an English-born journalist, spent much of the 1850s popularizing the game and regularizing its rules. By 1860, baseball was being played by college students and Irish workers, by urban elites and provincial farmers, by people of all classes and ethnic groups from New England to Louisiana. Students at Vassar College formed “ladies” teams in the 1860s, and in Philadelphia, free black men formed the Pythians, the first of what was to become a great network of African American baseball teams. From the beginning, they were barred from playing against most white teams.
When young men marched off to war in 1861, some took their bats and balls with them. Almost from the start of the fighting, soldiers in both armies took advantage of idle moments to lay out baseball diamonds and organize games. Games on battlefields were sometimes interrupted by gunfire and cannon fire. “It is astonishing how indifferent a person can become to danger,” a soldier wrote home to Ohio in 1862. “The report of musketry is heard but a very little distance from us, . . . yet over there on the other side of the road is most of our company, playing Bat Ball.” After a skirmish in Texas, another Union soldier lamented that, in addition to casualties, his company had lost “the only baseball in Alexandria, Texas.” Far from discouraging baseball, military commanders—and the United States Sanitary Commission, the Union army’s medical arm—actively encouraged the game during the war. It would, they believed, help keep up the soldiers’ morale.
Away from the battlefield, baseball continued to flourish. In New York City, games between local teams drew crowds of ten thousand to twenty thousand. The National Association of Base Ball Players, founded in 1859, had recruited ninety-one clubs in ten Northern states by 1865; a North Western Association of Baseball Players, organized in Chicago in 1865, indicated that the game was becoming well established in the West as well. In Brooklyn, William Cammeyer drained a skating pond on his property, built a board fence around it, and created the first enclosed baseball field in America—the Union Grounds. He charged ten cents for admission. The professionalization of the game had begun.
Despite all the commercialization and spectacle that came to be associated with baseball in the years after the Civil War, the game remained for many Americans what it was to millions of young men fighting in the most savage war in the nation’s history—an American passion that at times, even if briefly, erased the barriers dividing groups from one another. “Officers and men forget, for a time, the differences in rank,” a Massachusetts private wrote in 1863, “and indulge in the invigorating sport with a schoolboy’s ardor.”
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. How could a competitive game of baseball erase “the barriers dividing groups from one another”?
2. Baseball during the Civil War crossed the lines of cultural differences between the North and the South. Does baseball today—professional or amateur—continue to cross lines of cultural differences?
The war turned the meaning of work upside down for women. Because their fathers, brothers, and husbands had all gone to war, and some would never return, many white women assumed greater responsibility for raising crops, caring for animals, hunting, and fishing; others turned to mills and manufacturing jobs to earn money for food. To support the Confederate cause more directly, they joined relief associations and wrote letters, sent food, sewed uniforms and blankets, and worked in hospitals. Slave women also saw their labors expand. They too were forced to take on duties vacated by masters gone to fight and by male slaves who accompanied their masters, were impressed, or ran away. Now they cooked, cleared land, and farmed even more and took up new livery and hunting duties.
STRATEGY AND DIPLOMACY
The military initiative in the Civil War lay mainly with the North, since it needed to destroy the Confederacy as quickly as possible. Southerners needed only to survive; however, survival required diplomatic recognition from other nations, especially Great Britain, and the financial and military aid that would accompany it. Lincoln and his diplomatic corps worked tirelessly to keep foreign powers and their resources out of the Confederacy while the Union navy blockaded Southern ports.Page 335
The Commanders
The most important Union military leader was Abraham Lincoln. He ultimately succeeded as commander in chief because he recognized the North’s material advantages, and he realized that the proper objective of his armies was to destroy the Confederate armies’ ability to fight. Despite his missteps and inexperience, the North was fortunate to have Lincoln, but the president struggled to find a general as well suited for his task as Lincoln was for his.
From 1861 to 1864, Lincoln tried repeatedly to find a chief of staff capable of orchestrating the Union war effort. He turned first to General Winfield Scott, the ailing seventy-four-year-old hero of the Mexican War who had already contributed strategic advice to the president, but Scott was no longer physically capable of leading an army. Lincoln then appointed the young George B. McClellan, the commander of the Union forces in the East, the Army of the Potomac. Unfortunately, the proud and overly cautious McClellan seemed too slow to act for Lincoln’s tastes. Lincoln returned McClellan to his previous command in March 1862. For most of the rest of the year, Lincoln had no chief of staff at all. When he eventually appointed General Henry W. Halleck to the post, he found him ineffectual as well. Not until March 1864 did Lincoln finally find a general he trusted to command the war effort: Ulysses S. Grant , who shared Lincoln’s belief in unremitting combat and in making enemy armies and resources the target of military efforts.
Lincoln’s handling of the war effort faced constant scrutiny from the Committee on the Conduct of the War, a joint investigative committee of the two houses of Congress. Established in December 1861 and chaired by Senator Benjamin E. Wade of Ohio, the committee complained constantly of the inadequate ruthlessness of Northern generals, which Radicals on the committee attributed (largely inaccurately) to a secret sympathy among the officers for slavery. The committee’s efforts often seriously interfered with the conduct of the war.
Southern military leadership centered on President Davis, a trained soldier who nonetheless failed to create an effective central command system. Early in 1862, Davis named General Robert E. Lee as his principal military adviser. But in fact, Davis had no intention of sharing control of strategy with anyone. After a few months, Lee left Richmond to command forces in the field, and for the next two years, Davis planned strategy alone. In February 1864, he named General Braxton Bragg as a military adviser, but Bragg never provided much more than technical advice.Page 336
GRANT (LEFT) AND LEE Of the Union general, an observer said: “He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.” It was an apt metaphor for Grant’s military philosophy, which relied on constant, unrelenting assault. The Confederate general, in contrast, was known for his dignified and disciplined demeanor. He became a symbol to white Southerners of the “Lost Cause.”
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ61-903]; Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-cwpb-04406])
At lower levels of command, men of markedly similar backgrounds controlled the war in both the North and the South. Many of the professional officers on both sides were graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. Amateur officers played an important role in both armies as commanders of volunteer regiments. In both the North and the South, such men were usually economic or social leaders in their communities who rounded up troops to lead. Sometimes this system produced officers of real ability; more often it did not.
The Role of Sea Power
The Union had an overwhelming advantage in naval power. It played two important roles in the war: enforcing a blockade of the Southern coast and assisting the Union armies in field operations.Page 337
The blockade, which began in the first weeks of the war, kept most oceangoing ships out of Confederate ports, but for a time small blockade runners continued to slip through. Gradually, however, federal forces tightened the blockade by seizing the Confederate ports themselves. The last important port in Confederate hands—Wilmington, North Carolina—fell to the Union early in 1865.
The Confederates made a bold attempt to break the blockade with an ironclad warship, constructed by plating with iron a former U.S. frigate, the Merrimac. On March 8, 1862, the refitted Merrimac, renamed the Virginia, left Norfolk to attack a blockading squadron of wooden ships at nearby Hampton Roads. It destroyed two of the ships and scattered the rest. But the Union government had already built ironclads of its own, including the Monitor, which arrived only a few hours after the Virginia’s dramatic foray. The next day, it met the Virginia in battle. Neither vessel was able to sink the other, but the Monitor put an end to the Virginia’s raids and preserved the blockade.
The Union navy was particularly important in the western theater of the war, where the major rivers were navigable by large vessels. The navy transported supplies and troops and joined in attacking Confederate strong points. The South had no significant navy of its own and could defend against the Union gunboats only with ineffective fixed land fortifications.
Europe and the Disunited States
Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of state for most of the war, was an intelligent but undynamic man who attended mostly to routine administrative tasks. William Seward, his counterpart in Washington, gradually became one of the outstanding American secretaries of state. He had invaluable assistance from Charles Francis Adams, the American minister to London. This gap between the diplomatic skills of the Union and the Confederacy was a decisive factor in the war.
At the beginning of the conflict, the sympathies of the ruling classes of England and France lay largely with the Confederacy, partly because the two nations imported much Southern cotton; but it was also because they were eager to weaken the United States, an increasingly powerful rival to them in world commerce. France was unwilling to take sides in the conflict unless England did so first. And in England, the government was reluctant to act because there was powerful popular support for the Union—particularly from the large and influential English antislavery movement. After Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, antislavery groups worked particularly avidly for the Union. Southern leaders hoped to counter the strength of the British antislavery forces by arguing that access to Southern cotton was vital to the English and French textile industries. But English manufacturers had a surplus of both raw cotton and finished goods on hand in 1861 and could withstand a temporary loss of access to American cotton. Later, as the supply began to diminish, both England and France managed to keep at least some of their mills open by importing cotton from Egypt, India, and elsewhere. Equally important, even the 500,000 English textile workers thrown out of jobs as a result of mill closings continued to support the North. In the end, therefore, no European nation offered diplomatic recognition, financial support, or military aid to the Confederacy. No nation wanted to antagonize the United States unless the Confederacy seemed likely to win, and the South never came close enough to victory to convince its potential allies to support it. In the end, the Confederacy was on its own.
Even so, tension, and on occasion near hostilities, continued between the United States and Britain. The Union government was angry when Great Britain, France, and other Page 338nations declared themselves neutral early in the war, thus implying that the two sides to the conflict had equal stature. Leaders in Washington insisted that the conflict was simply a domestic insurrection, not a war between two legitimate governments.
A more serious crisis, the so-called Trent affair, began in late 1861. Two Confederate diplomats, James M. Mason and John Slidell, had slipped through the then-ineffective Union blockade to Havana, Cuba, where they boarded an English steamer, the Trent, for England. Waiting in Cuban waters was the American frigate San Jacinto, commanded by the impetuous Charles Wilkes. Acting without authorization, Wilkes stopped the British vessel, arrested the diplomats, and carried them in triumph to Boston. The British government demanded the release of the prisoners, reparations, and an apology. Lincoln and Seward were aware that Wilkes had violated maritime law. They were unwilling to risk war with England, and they eventually released the diplomats with an indirect apology.
CAMPAIGNS AND BATTLES
In the absence of direct intervention by the European powers, the two contestants in North America were left to resolve the conflict between themselves. They did so in four long years of bloody combat. More than 618,000 Americans died in the course of the Civil War, far more than the 112,000 who perished in World War I or the 405,000 who died in World War II. There were nearly 2,000 deaths for every 100,000 of population during the Civil War. In World War I, the comparable figure was only 109, and in World War II the comparable figure was 241. In some respects, the Civil War was the bloodiest war in modern times.
The Technology of War
Much of what happened on the battlefield in the Civil War was a result of new technologies that transformed the nature of combat.
The most obvious change was the nature of the armaments. Among the most important was the introduction of repeating weapons. Samuel Colt had patented a repeating pistol (the revolver) in 1835, but more important for military purposes was the repeating rifle, introduced in 1860 by Oliver Winchester. Also significant were greatly improved cannons and artillery, a result of earlier advances in iron and steel technology.
These new armaments made it impossibly deadly to fight battles as they had been fought for centuries, with lines of infantry soldiers standing erect in the field firing volleys at their opponents until one side withdrew. Soldiers quickly learned that the proper position for combat was staying low to the ground and behind cover. For the first time in the history of organized warfare, therefore, infantry did not fight in formation, and the battlefields became more chaotic places. Gradually, the deadliness of the new weapons encouraged armies on both sides to spend a great deal of time building elaborate fortifications and trenches to protect themselves from enemy fire. The sieges of Vicksburg and Petersburg, the defense of Richmond, and many other military events all produced the construction of vast fortifications around both cities and attacking armies. (They were the predecessors to the vast network of trenches of World War I.)
Other weapons technologies were less central to the fighting of the war, but important nevertheless. The relatively new technology of hot-air balloons was employed intermittently to provide a view of enemy formations in the field. The ironclad ships—and even torpedoes Page 339and submarine technology, which made fleeting appearances in the 1860s—suggested the dramatic changes that would soon overtake naval warfare.
Critical to the conduct of the war, however, were two other relatively new technologies: the railroad and the telegraph. The railroad was particularly important in mobilizing millions of soldiers and transferring them to the front. Transporting such enormous numbers of soldiers, and the supplies necessary to sustain them, by foot or by horse and wagon would have been almost impossible. But, ironically, railroads also limited the mobility of the armies. Commanders were forced to organize their campaigns at least in part around the location of the railroads rather than on the basis of the best topography or most direct land route to a destination. The dependence on the rails—and the resulting necessity of concentrating huge numbers of men in a few places—also encouraged commanders to prefer great battles with large armies rather than smaller engagements with fewer troops.
The impact of the telegraph on the war was limited both by the scarcity of qualified telegraph operators and by the difficulty of bringing telegraph wires into the fields where battles were being fought. Things improved somewhat after the new U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, headed by Thomas Scott and Andrew Carnegie, trained and employed over 1,200 operators. Gradually, too, both the Union and Confederate armies learned to string telegraph wires along the routes of their troops, so that field commanders were able to stay in close touch with one another during battles.
The Opening Clashes, 1861
The Union and the Confederacy fought their first major battle of the war in northern Virginia. A Union army of over 30,000 men under General Irvin McDowell was stationed just outside Washington. About thirty miles away, at Manassas, sat a slightly smaller Confederate army commanded by General P. G. T. Beauregard. If the Northern army could destroy the Southern one, Union leaders believed, the war might end at once. In mid-July, McDowell marched his inexperienced troops toward Manassas. Beauregard moved his troops behind Bull Run, a small stream north of Manassas, and called for reinforcements, which reached him the day before the battle.
On July 21, in the First Battle of Bull Run , or First Battle of Manassas, McDowell almost succeeded in dispersing the Confederate forces. But the Southerners managed to fight off a last strong Union assault and then counterattacked savagely. Surprised, the Union troops panicked, broke ranks, and ran helter skelter. Caught off guard himself, and unable to readily identify his soldiers because of mismatched and irregular uniforms (some regiments actually gray uniforms), McDowell failed to reorganize the troops. Instead he ordered a retreat to Washington—which quickly became a wild, chaotic withdrawal complicated by the presence along the route of many civilians, who had ridden down from the capital, picnic baskets in hand, to watch the battle from nearby hills. The Confederates, disorganized by the turn of events, did not pursue. But they hailed the outcome of the battle as a smashing success and a sure sign of future victories. By contrast, the battle was a severe blow to Union morale and to the president’s confidence in his officers.
Elsewhere, Union forces achieved some small but significant victories in 1861. A Union force under General George B. McClellan moved east from Ohio into western Virginia. By the end of 1861, it had “liberated” the antisecession mountain people of the region, who created their own state government loyal to the Union; the state was admitted to the Union as West Virginia in 1863.Page 340
The Western Theater
After the battle at Bull Run, military operations in the East settled into a long and frustrating stalemate. The first decisive operations occurred in the western theater in 1862. Here Union forces were trying to seize control of the southern part of the Mississippi River from both the north and south, moving down the river from Kentucky and up from the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans.
In April, a Union squadron commanded by Flag Officer David G. Farragut smashed past weak Confederate forts near the mouth of the Mississippi and from there sailed up to New Orleans. The city was virtually defenseless because the Confederate high command had expected the attack to come from the north. The surrender of New Orleans on April 25, 1862, was an important turning point in the war. From then on, the mouth of the Mississippi was closed to Confederate trade, and the South’s largest city and most important banking center was in Union hands.
Farther north in the western theater, Confederate troops under General Albert Sidney Johnston were stretched out in a long defensive line around two forts in Tennessee, Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. Early in 1862, Ulysses S. Grant attacked Fort Henry, whose defenders, awed by the ironclad riverboats accompanying the Union army, surrendered with almost no resistance. Grant then moved both his naval and ground forces to Fort Donelson, where the Confederates put up a stronger fight but finally, on February 16, had to surrender. Grant thus gained control of river communications and forced Confederate troops out of Kentucky and half of Tennessee.
With about 40,000 men, Grant now advanced south along the Tennessee River. At Shiloh, Tennessee, he met a force almost equal to his own, commanded by Albert Sidney Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard. The result was the Battle of Shiloh , April 6–7, 1862. In the first day’s fighting (during which Johnston was killed), the Southerners drove Grant back to the river. But the next day, reinforced by 25,000 fresh troops, Grant recovered the lost ground and forced Beauregard to withdraw. After the narrow Union victory at Shiloh, Northern forces occupied Corinth, Mississippi, and took control of the Mississippi River as far south as Memphis.
General Braxton Bragg, now in command of the Confederate army in the West, gathered his forces at Chattanooga, in eastern Tennessee, where he faced a Union army trying to capture the city. The two armies maneuvered for advantage inconclusively in northern Tennessee and southern Kentucky for several months until December 31–January 2, when they finally clashed in the Battle of Murfreesboro, or Stone’s River. Bragg was forced to withdraw to the South in defeat.
By the end of 1862, Union forces had made considerable progress in the West. But the heart of the war remained in the East.
THE WAR IN THE WEST, 1861–1863 While the Union armies in Virginia were meeting with repeated frustrations, the Union armies in the West were scoring notable successes in the first two years of the war. This map shows a series of Union drives in the western Confederacy. Flag Officer David Farragut’s ironclads led to the capture of New Orleans—a critical Confederate port—in April 1862, while forces farther north under the command of Ulysses S. Grant drove the Confederate army out of Kentucky and western Tennessee. These battles culminated in the Union victory at Shiloh, which led to Union control of the upper Mississippi River.
Why was control of the Mississippi so important to both sides?
The Virginia Front, 1862
During the winter of 1861–1862, George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, concentrated on training his army of 150,000 men near Washington. Finally, he designed a spring campaign to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond. But instead of heading overland directly, McClellan chose a complicated route that he thought would circumvent the Confederate defenses. The navy would carry his troops down the Potomac to a peninsula east of Richmond, between the York and James Rivers; the army would approach the city from there in what became known as the Peninsular campaign.Page 341
McClellan set off with 100,000 men, reluctantly leaving 30,000 members of his army behind, under General Irvin McDowell, to protect Washington. McClellan eventually persuaded Lincoln to send him the additional men. But before the president could do so, a Confederate army under General Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson staged a rapid march north through the Shenandoah Valley, as if preparing to cross the Potomac and attack Washington. Lincoln postponed sending reinforcements to McClellan, retaining McDowell’s corps to head off Jackson. In the Valley campaign of May 4–June 9, 1862, Jackson defeated two separate Union forces and slipped away before McDowell could catch him.
Meanwhile, McClellan was fighting Confederate troops under General Joseph E. Johnston outside Richmond in the two-day Battle of Fair Oaks, or Seven Pines (May 31–June 1), and holding his ground. Johnston, badly wounded, was replaced by Robert E. Lee, who then recalled Stonewall Jackson from the Shenandoah Valley. With a combined force of 85,000 to face McClellan’s 100,000, Lee launched a new offensive, known as the Battle of Page 342the Seven Days (June 25–July 1), in an effort to cut McClellan off from his base on the York River. But McClellan fought his way across the peninsula and set up a new base on the James.
McClellan was now only twenty-five miles from Richmond and in a good position to renew the campaign. But despite continuing pressure from Lincoln, he did not advance. Hoping to force a new offensive against Richmond along the direct overland route he had always preferred, Lincoln finally ordered the army to move back to northern Virginia and join up with a smaller force under General John Pope. As the Army of the Potomac left the peninsula by water, Lee moved north with the Army of northern Virginia to strike Pope before McClellan could join him. Pope was as rash as McClellan was cautious, and he attacked the approaching Confederates without waiting for the arrival of all of McClellan’s troops. In the Second Battle of Bull Run, or Manassas (August 29–30), Lee threw back the assault and routed Pope’s army, which fled to Washington. With hopes for an overland campaign against Richmond now in disarray, Lincoln removed Pope from command and put McClellan back in charge of all the federal forces in the region.
Lee soon went on the offensive again, heading north through western Maryland, and McClellan moved out to meet him. McClellan had the good luck to get a copy of Lee’s orders, which revealed that a part of the Confederate army, under Stonewall Jackson, had separated from the rest to attack Harpers Ferry. But instead of attacking quickly before the Confederates could recombine, McClellan stalled, again giving Lee time to pull most of his forces back together behind Antietam Creek, near the town of Sharpsburg. There, on September 17, McClellan’s 87,000-man army repeatedly attacked Lee’s force of 50,000, with staggering casualties on both sides. Late in the day, just as the Confederate line seemed ready to break, the last of Jackson’s troops arrived from Harpers Ferry to reinforce it. McClellan might have broken through with one more assault. Instead, he allowed Lee to retreat into Virginia. Technically, Antietam was a Union victory; but in reality, McClellan had squandered an opportunity to destroy much of the Confederate army. In November, Lincoln finally removed McClellan from command for good.
McClellan’s replacement, General Ambrose E. Burnside, was a short-lived mediocrity. He tried to move toward Richmond by crossing the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg. There, on December 13, he launched a series of attacks against Lee, all of them bloody, all of them hopeless. After losing a large part of his army, he withdrew to the north bank of the Rappahannock. He was relieved at his own request. The year 1862 ended, therefore, with a series of frustrations for the Union.
THE VIRGINIA THEATER, 1861–1863 Much of the fighting during the first two years of the Civil War took place in what became known as the Virginia theater—although the campaigns in this region eventually extended north into Maryland and Pennsylvania. The Union hoped for a quick victory over the newly created Confederate army. But as these maps show, the Southern forces consistently thwarted such hopes. The map at top left shows the battles of 1861 and the first half of 1862, almost all of them won by the Confederates. The map at lower left shows the last months of 1862, during which the Southerners again defeated the Union in most of their engagements—although Northern forces drove the Confederates back from Maryland in September. The map on the right shows the troop movements that led to the climactic battle of Gettysburg in 1863.
Why were the Union forces unable to profit more from material advantages during these first years of the war?
The Progress of the War
Why did the Union—with its much greater population, its much larger population, and its much better transportation and technology than the Confederacy—make so little decisive progress in the first two years of the war? Had there been a crushing victory by the North early in the war—for example, a routing at the First Battle of Bull Run—the conflict might have ended quickly by destroying the Confederacy’s morale. But none occurred.
Many Northerners blamed the military stalemate on timid or incompetent Union generals, and there was some truth to that view. But the more important reason for the drawn-out conflict was that it was not a war of traditional tactics and military strategy. It was, even if the leaders of both sides were not yet fully aware of it, a war of attrition, and the Confederacy could survive only if the Union quit fighting. Winning or losing battles here and there would not determine the outcome of the war. What would bring the war Page 343to a conclusion was the steady destruction of the resources that were necessary for victory. More than two bloody years of fighting were still to come. But those last years were a testimony to the slow, steady deterioration of the Confederacy’s ability to maintain the war, and the consistent growth of the resources that allowed the Union armies to grow steadily stronger.Page 344
1863: Year of Decision
At the beginning of 1863, General Joseph Hooker was commanding the still-formidable Army of the Potomac, which remained north of the Rappahannock, opposite Fredericksburg. Taking part of his army, Hooker crossed the river above Fredericksburg and moved toward the Page 345town and Lee’s army. But at the last minute, he drew back to a defensive position in a desolate area of brush and scrub trees known as the Wilderness. Lee divided his forces for a dual assault on the Union army. In the Battle of Chancellorsville, May 1–5, Stonewall Jackson attacked the Union right and Lee himself charged the front. Hooker barely managed to escape with his army. Lee had frustrated Union objectives, but he had not destroyed the Union army. And his ablest officer, Jackson, was fatally wounded in the course of the battle.
While the Union forces were suffering repeated frustrations in the East, they were winning some important victories in the West. In the spring of 1863, Ulysses S. Grant was driving at Vicksburg on the Mississippi River. Vicksburg was well protected on land and had good artillery coverage of the river itself. But in May, Grant boldly moved men and supplies—over land and by water—to an area south of the city, where the terrain was reasonably good. He then attacked Vicksburg from the rear. Six weeks later, on July 4, Vicksburg—whose residents were by then starving as a result of the prolonged siege—surrendered. At almost the same time, the other Confederate strongpoint on the river, Port Hudson, Louisiana, also surrendered to a Union force that had moved north from New Orleans. With the achievement of one of the Union’s basic military aims—control of the whole length of the Mississippi—the Confederacy was split in two, with Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas cut off from the other seceded states. The victories on the Mississippi were one of the great turning points of the war.
THE SIEGE OF VICKSBURG, MAY–JULY 1863 In the spring of 1863, Grant began a campaign to win control of the final piece of the Mississippi River still controlled by the Confederacy. To do that required capturing the Southern stronghold at Vicksburg—a well-defended city sitting above the river. Vicksburg’s main defenses were to the north, so Grant boldly moved men and supplies around the city and attacked it from the south. Eventually, he cut off the city’s access to the outside world, and after a six-week siege, its residents finally surrendered.
What impact did the combined victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg have on Northern commitment to the war?
During the siege of Vicksburg, Lee proposed an invasion of Pennsylvania, which would, he argued, divert Union troops north. Further, he argued, if he could win a major victory on Northern soil, England and France might come to the Confederacy’s aid. The war-weary North might even quit the war before Vicksburg fell.
In June 1863, Lee moved up the Shenandoah Valley into Maryland and then entered Pennsylvania. The Union Army of the Potomac, commanded first by Hooker and then (after June 28) by General George C. Meade, moved north, too. The two armies finally encountered each other at the small town of Gettysburg , Pennsylvania. There, on July 1–3, 1863, they fought the most celebrated battle of the war.
GETTYSBURG, JULY 1–3, 1863 Gettysburg was the most important single battle of the Civil War. Had Confederate forces prevailed at Gettysburg, the future course of the war might well have been very different. The map on the left shows the distribution of Union and Confederate forces at the beginning of the battle, July 1, after Lee had driven the Northern forces south of town. The map on the right reveals the pattern of the attacks on July 2 and 3. Note, in particular, Pickett’s bold and costly charge, whose failure on July 3 was the turning point in the battle and, some chroniclers have argued, the war.
Why did Robert E. Lee believe that an invasion of Pennsylvania would advance the Confederate cause?
Meade’s army established a strong, well-protected position on the hills south of the town. Lee attacked, but his first assault on the Union forces on Cemetery Ridge failed. A day later, he ordered a second, larger effort. In what is remembered as Pickett’s Charge, a force of 15,000 Confederate soldiers advanced for almost a mile across open country while being swept by Union fire. Only about 5,000 made it up the ridge, and this remnant finally had to surrender or retreat. By now, Lee had lost nearly a third of his army. On July 4, the same day as the surrender of Vicksburg, Lee withdrew from Gettysburg. The retreat was another major turning point in the war. Never again were the weakened Confederate forces able seriously to threaten Northern territory. Months later Lincoln visited the battlefield site and delivered one of the most famous speeches in American history. (See “ Consider the Source: The Gettysburg Address .”)
CONSIDER THE SOURCE
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS (1863)
Lincoln gave this speech on November 19, 1863, on the occasion of the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four months after the famous battle.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. What purpose did Lincoln ascribe to the Civil War in the first two sentences of his speech?
2. Why did Lincoln state that he and his audience could not dedicate the battlefield?
3. What significance did Lincoln ascribe to the Battle of Gettysburg in the last sentence of this speech?
4. Why do you think this address endeared President Lincoln to many of his contemporaries and so many Americans since?
Source: Johnson, Michael P. (ed.), Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Writings and Speeches, Boston, MA: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2010, 263.
Before the end of the year, there was one more important turning point, this time in Tennessee. After occupying Chattanooga on September 9, Union forces under General William Rosecrans began an unwise pursuit of Bragg’s retreating Confederate forces. The two armies engaged in western Georgia, in the Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20). Union forces could not break the Confederate lines and retreated back to Chattanooga.
Bragg now began a siege of Chattanooga itself, seizing the heights nearby and cutting off fresh supplies to the Union forces. Grant came to the rescue. In the Battle of Chattanooga (November 23–25), the reinforced Union army drove the Confederates back into Georgia. Union forces had now achieved a second important objective: control of the Tennessee River.Page 346
The Last Stage, 1864–1865
By the beginning of 1864, President Lincoln had appointed General Ulysses S. Grant as chief of all the Union armies. Grant, like Lincoln, believed in using the North’s great advantage in troops and material resources to overwhelm the South. He planned two great offensives for 1864. In Virginia, the Army of the Potomac would advance toward Richmond and force Lee into a decisive battle. In Georgia, the western army, under General William T. Sherman , would advance east toward Atlanta and destroy the remaining Confederate force, now under the command of Joseph E. Johnston.Page 347
The Northern campaign began when the Army of the Potomac, 115,000 strong, plunged into the rough, wooded Wilderness area of northwestern Virginia in pursuit of Lee’s 75,000-man army. After avoiding an engagement for several weeks, Lee turned Grant back in the Battle of the Wilderness (May 5–7). Without stopping to rest or reorganize, Grant resumed his march toward Richmond and met Lee again in the bloody Battle of Spotsylvania Court House (May 8–21) in which 12,000 Union troops and a large, but unknown, number of Confederates fell. Grant kept moving, but victory continued to elude him. Lee kept his army between Grant and the Confederate capital and on June 1–3 repulsed the Union forces again, just northeast of Richmond, at Cold Harbor.
Grant now moved his army east of Richmond and headed south toward the railroad center at Petersburg. If he could seize Petersburg, he could cut off the capital’s communications with the rest of the Confederacy. But Petersburg had strong defenses; and once Lee came to the city’s relief, the assault became a prolonged siege.
VIRGINIA CAMPAIGNS, 1864–1865 From the Confederate defeat at (and retreat from) Gettysburg until the end of the war, most of the eastern fighting took place in Virginia. By now, Ulysses S. Grant was commander of all Union forces and had taken over the Army of the Potomac. Although Confederate forces won a number of important battles during the Virginia campaign, the Union army grew steadily stronger and the Southern forces steadily weaker. Grant believed that the Union strategy should reflect the North’s greatest advantage: its superiority in men and equipment.
What effect did this decision have on the level of casualties?
In Georgia, meanwhile, Sherman was facing less ferocious resistance. With 90,000 men, he confronted Confederate forces of 60,000 under Johnston. As Sherman advanced, Johnston tried to delay him by maneuvering. The two armies fought only one real battle—Kennesaw Mountain, northwest of Atlanta, on June 27—where Johnston scored an impressive victory. Even so, he was unable to stop the Union advance toward Atlanta, prompting Davis to replace him with General John B. Hood. Sherman took the city on September 2 and burned it.Page 348
Hood now tried unsuccessfully to draw Sherman out of Atlanta by moving back up through Tennessee and threatening an invasion of the North. Sherman sent Union troops to reinforce Nashville. In the Battle of Nashville on December 15–16, 1864, Northern forces practically destroyed what was left of Hood’s army.
Meanwhile, Sherman had left Atlanta to begin his soon-to-be-famous “March to the Sea.” Living off the land, destroying supplies it could not use, his army cut a sixty-mile-wide swath of desolation across Georgia. Sherman sought not only to deprive the Confederate army of war materials and railroad communications. He was also determined to break the will of the Southern people by burning towns and plantations along his route. By December 20, he had reached Savannah, which surrendered two days later. Early in 1865, Sherman continued his destructive march, moving northward through South Carolina. He was virtually unopposed until he was well inside North Carolina, where a small force under Johnston could do no more than cause a brief delay.
SHERMAN’S MARCH TO THE SEA, 1864–1865 While Grant was wearing down Lee in Virginia, General William Tecumseh Sherman was moving east across Georgia. After a series of battles in Tennessee and northwest Georgia, Sherman captured Atlanta and then marched unimpeded to Savannah, on the Georgia coast—deliberately devastating the towns and plantations through which his troops marched. Note that after capturing Savannah by Christmas 1864, Sherman began moving north through the Carolinas. A few days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, Confederate forces farther south surrendered to Sherman.
What did Sherman believe his devastating March to the Sea would accomplish?
In April 1865, Grant’s Army of the Potomac—still engaged in the prolonged siege at Petersburg—finally captured a vital railroad junction southwest of the town. Without rail access to the South, and plagued by heavy casualties and massive desertions, Lee informed the Confederate government that he could no longer defend Richmond. Within hours, Jefferson Davis, his cabinet, and as much of the white population as could find transportation fled. That night, mobs roamed the city, setting devastating fires. And the next morning, Northern forces entered the Confederate capital. With them was Abraham Lincoln, who Page 349walked through the streets of the burned-out city surrounded by black men and women cheering him as the “Messiah” and “Father Abraham.” In one particularly stirring moment, the president turned to a former slave kneeling on the street before him and said: “Don’t kneel to me. . . . You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter.”
With the remnant of his army, now about 25,000 men, Lee began moving west in the forlorn hope of finding a way around the Union forces so that he could move south and link up with Johnston in North Carolina. But the Union army pursued him and blocked his escape route. Lee finally recognized that further bloodshed was futile. He arranged to meet Grant at a private home in the small town of Appomattox Court House , Virginia, where on April 9 he surrendered what was left of his forces. Nine days later, near Durham, North Carolina, Johnston surrendered to Sherman. The long war was now effectively over. Jefferson Davis was finally captured in Georgia. A few Southern diehards continued to fight, but even their resistance collapsed before long. General George Meade’s shout, “It’s all over,” described in simple terms one of the most momentous events in the nation’s history.
The war ensured the permanence of the Union, but many other issues remained far from settled. What would happen to the freedmen (the term used for slaves who were now liberated)? Could the South and the North reconcile? Would the massive industrial growth in Page 350the North during the Civil War spread to the South, or would the South remain an agrarian region with much less wealth than in the North? The end of the war was the beginning of more than a generation of struggle to determine the legacy of the Civil War.
CONCLUSION
The American Civil War began with high hopes and high ideals on both sides. In the North and the South alike, thousands of men enthusiastically enlisted in local regiments and went off to war. Four years later, over 600,000 of them were dead and many more maimed and traumatized for life. A fight for “principles” and “ideals”—a fight few people had thought would last more than a few months—had become one of the longest wars, and by far the bloodiest war, in American history, before or since.
During the first two years of fighting, the Confederate forces seemed to have all the advantages. They were fighting on their own soil. Their troops seemed more committed to the cause than those of the North. Their commanders were exceptionally talented, while Union forces were, for a time, erratically led. Gradually, however, the Union’s advantages began to assert themselves. The North had a stabler political system led by one of the greatest leaders in the nation’s history. It had a much larger population, a far more developed industrial economy, superior financial institutions, and a better railroad system. By the middle of 1863, the tide of the war had shifted; over the next two years, Union forces gradually wore down the Confederate armies before finally triumphing in 1865.
The war strengthened the North’s economy, giving a spur to industry and railroad development. It greatly weakened the South’s by destroying millions of dollars of property and depleting the region’s young male population. Southerners had gone to war in part because of their fears of growing Northern dominance. Ironically, the war itself confirmed and strengthened that dominance.
But most of all, the Civil War was a victory for millions of African American slaves. The war produced Abraham Lincoln’s epochal Emancipation Proclamation and, later, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery altogether. It also encouraged hundreds of thousands of slaves literally to free themselves, to desert their masters and seek refuge behind Union lines—at times to fight in the Union armies. The future of the freed slaves was not to be an easy one, but three and a half million people who had once lived in bondage emerged from the war as free men and women.
