What events led to the firing of the first shots of the Civil War? What were the major strategies of the Civil War?
How did the war affect the home front in both the North and the South?
What were the reasons for the Emancipation Proclamation?
How did most enslaved people become free in the United States?
N mid-February 1861, Abraham Lincoln boarded a train in Springfield, Illinois, for a long, roundabout trip to Washington, D. C., for his presidential inauguration. Along the way, he told the New Jersey legislature that he was “devoted to peace” but warned that “it may be necessary to put the foot down.” At the end of the weeklong journey, Lincoln reluctantly yielded to threats against his life. Accompanied by his bodyguards, he passed unnoticed on a night train through Baltimore and slipped into Washington, D. C. before daybreak on February 23, 1861.
The End of the Waiting Game
In early 1861, as the possibility of civil war captured the attention of a divided nation, no one imagined that a prolonged conflict of horrendous scope and intensity lay ahead. On both sides, people mistakenly assumed that if fighting erupted it would be over quickly and that their daily lives would go on as usual. The new president of the United States still sought peace.
Lincoln’s inauguration In his March 4 inaugural address, the fifty-two-year-old Lincoln repeated his pledge not “to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists.” But the immediate question facing the nation and the new president had shifted from slavery to secession. Most of the speech emphasized Lincoln’s view that “the Union of these States is perpetual.” No state, Lincoln insisted, “can lawfully get out of the Union.” He pledged to defend federal forts in the South, collect taxes, and deliver the mail unless repelled, but beyond that “there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” In the final paragraph of the speech, Lincoln appealed for regional harmony:
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Southerners were not impressed with Lincoln’s eloquence. The next day a North Carolina newspaper warned that Lincoln’s inauguration made civil war “inevitable.”
Lincoln not only entered the White House amid the gravest crisis yet faced by a president, but he also confronted unusual problems of transition. The new president displayed his remarkable magnanimity in making his cabinet appointments. Four of the seven cabinet members had been his rivals for the presidency: William H. Seward at the State Department, Salmon P. Chase at the Treasury Department, Simon Cameron at the War Department, and Edward Bates as attorney general. Four were former Democrats, and three were former Whigs. They formed a group of better-than-average ability, though most were so strong-minded they thought themselves better qualified to lead than Lincoln. Only later did they acknowledge with Seward that Lincoln “is the best man among us.” Throughout the Civil War the leaders of the young Republican party remained a fragile coalition of former Whigs, Democrats, immigrants, conservatives, moderates, and radicals. One of Lincoln’s greatest challenges was to hold such a diverse coalition together amid the pressures of a ghastly civil war.
THE fall of fort SUMTER On March 5, 1861, President Lincoln began his first day in office by reading a letter from South Carolina revealing that time was running out for the federal troops at Fort Sumter in
War begins
An interior view of the ruins of Fort Sumter.
Charleston Harbor. Major Robert Anderson, the commander, reported that they had enough supplies for only a month to six weeks, and Confederates were encircling the fort with a “ring of fire.” On April 4, 1861, Lincoln faced his first major crisis as president. Most of his cabinet members and senior military officers urged him to withdraw the troops from Fort Sumter to preserve peace. Lincoln, however, believed that giving up Fort Sumter would mean giving up the Union. So he ordered that ships be sent to Charleston to resupply the sixty-nine federal soldiers at Fort Sumter. On April 9, President Jefferson Davis and his Confederate cabinet in Montgomery, Alabama, decided to oppose Lincoln’s effort to resupply the fort. Only Robert Toombs, the Confederate secretary of state, opposed the decision. He told Davis that attacking Fort Sumter “will lose us every friend at the North. You will only strike a hornet’s nest. . . . Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.”
On April 11 the Confederate general Pierre G. T. Beauregard, a dapper Louisiana native who had studied the use of artillery under Robert Anderson at West Point repeated the demand that Fort Sumter surrender. Anderson, his former professor, refused. At four-thirty on the morning of April 12 the Confederate shelling of Fort Sumter began. After some thirty-four hours, his ammunition exhausted, the outgunned Anderson lowered the flag on April 13. The fall of Fort Sumter started the Civil War and ignited a wave of bravado across the Confederate states. A southern woman prayed that God would “give us strength to conquer them, to exterminate them, to lay waste every Northern city, town and village, to destroy them utterly.”
The guns of Charleston signaled the end of the waiting game. The New York poet Walt Whitman wrote that the Confederate “firing on the flag” at Fort Sumter generated a “volcanic upheaval” in the North. On April 15, Lincoln called upon the loyal states to supply seventy-five thousand militiamen to subdue the rebellious states. Volunteers flocked to military recruiting s tations on both sides. On April 19, Lincoln ordered a naval blockade of southern ports, which, as the Supreme Court later ruled, confirmed the existence of war. Federal ships closed the Mississippi River to commerce while naval squadrons cordoned off the southern ports along the Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico. The massive naval operation quickly choked off southern commercial activity. Shortages of basic commodities generated a dramatic inflation in the prices of foodstuffs in the Confederacy. By the spring of 1863, prices for food were rising 10 percent a month.
THE CAUSES OF WAR Many southerners, then and since, argued that the Civil War was fought on behalf of states’ rights rather than because of slavery. In this view, South Carolina and the other states had a constitutional right to secede from the Union to protect their sovereign rights, including the right to own slaves and to transport them into the western territories. To be sure, southerners had many grievances against the North. Southerners had long claimed that federal tariffs and taxes discriminated against their region. With the election of the Republican Lincoln, they were convinced that the federal government would continue to “oppress” them and abridge their “states’ rights.” One of those “rights” was the right to secede from the Union. Southern leaders argued that the 1787 federal constitution created a “compact” among the original thirteen states, all of which thereafter retained their sovereign rights, including the right to leave the Union.
To argue that the Civil War was primarily a defense of liberty and the right of self-government, however, ignores the actual reasons that southern leaders used in 1860-1861 to justify secession and war. In 1860, for example, William Preston, a prominent South Carolina leader, declared: “Cotton is not our king—slavery is our king. Slavery is our truth. Slavery is our divine right.” The South Carolina Declaration on the Immediate Causes of Secession highlighted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery.” Yes, southerners asserted their constitutional right to secede from the Union, but it was the passionate desire to preserve slavery that led southern leaders to make such constitutional arguments. It is inconceivable that the South would have seceded from the Union in 1860-1861 had there been no institution of slavery. As Abraham Lincoln noted in his second inaugural address, everyone knew that slavery “was somehow the cause of the war.”
TAKING SIDES The fall of Fort Sumter prompted four more southern states to join the Confederacy. Virginia acted first. Its convention passed an Ordinance of Secession on April 17. The following month, the Confederate Congress in Montgomery voted to move the new nation’s capital from Montgomery, Alabama to much larger Richmond, Virginia (Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina voted against the move). Three other states quickly followed Virginia in seceding: Arkansas on May 6, Tennessee on May 7, and North Carolina on May 20. All four of the holdout states, especially Tennessee and Virginia, had areas (mainly in the mountains) where slaves were scarce and Union support ran strong. In east Tennessee the mountain counties would supply more volunteers to the Union than to the Confederate cause. Unionists in western Virginia, bolstered by a Union army from Ohio under General George B. McClellan, organized a loyal government of
Why did South Carolina and six other states secede from the Union before the siege at Fort Sumter? Why did secession not win unanimous approval in Tennessee and Virginia? How did Lincoln keep Missouri and Kentucky in the Union?
Virginia that formed a new state. In 1863, Congress admitted West Virginia to the Union with a constitution that provided for gradual emancipation of the few slaves there.
Of the other “border” slave states, Delaware remained firmly in the Union, but Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri went through bitter struggles to decide which side to support. All of these border states eventually stayed in the Union, but not without fierce debates and even civil wars within them.
CHOOSING SIDES The Civil War affected everyone—men and women, white and black, immigrants and Native Americans, free and enslaved. Those already serving in the U. S. Army faced an agonizing choice: which side to support. On the eve of the Civil War, the U. S. Army was small, comprising only 16,400 men, about 1,000 of whom were officers. Of these, about 25 percent, like Robert E. Lee, resigned to join the Confederate army. On the other hand, many southerners made great sacrifices to remain loyal to the Union. Some left their native region once the fighting began; others remained in the South but found ways to support the Union. In every Confederate state except South Carolina, whole regiments were organized to fight for the Union. Some 100,000 men from the southern states fought against the Confederacy. One out of every five soldiers from Arkansas killed in the war fought on the Union side.
The Balance of Force
Shrouded in an ever-thickening mist of larger-than-life mythology, the Union triumph in the Civil War has acquired an aura of inevitability. The Confederacy’s fight for independence, on the other hand, has taken on the aura of a romantic lost cause, doomed from the start by the region’s sparse industrial development, smaller pool of able-bodied men, paucity of gold and warships, and spotty transportation network. But in 1861 the military situation did not seem so clear-cut by any means. For all of the South’s obvious disadvantages, it initially enjoyed a huge captive labor force (slaves) and the benefits of fighting a defensive campaign on familiar territory. Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders were confident that their cause would prevail. The outcome of the Civil War was not inevitable: it was determined as much by human decisions and human willpower as by physical resources.
REGIONAL advantages The South seceded in part out of a growing awareness of its minority status in the nation; a balance sheet of the regions in 1861 shows the accuracy of that perception. The Union held twenty-three states, including four border slave states, while the Confederacy included eleven states. The population count was about 22 million in the Union to 9 million in the Confederacy, and about 4 million of the latter were enslaved African Americans. The Union therefore had an edge of about four to one in human resources. To help redress the imbalance, the Confederacy mobilized 80 percent of its military-age white men, a third of whom would die during the prolonged war.
An even greater advantage for the North was its industrial development. The southern states that formed the Confederacy produced just 7 percent of the nation’s manufactured goods on the eve of the war. The Union states produced 97 percent of the firearms and 96 percent of the railroad equipment. The North’s advantage in transportation weighed heavily as the war went on. The Union had more wagons, horses, and ships than the Confederacy and an impressive edge in the number of railroad locomotives.
As the Civil War began, the Confederacy enjoyed a major geographic advantage: it could fight a defensive war on its own territory. In addition, the South had more experienced military leaders. Some of those advantages were soon countered, however, by the Union navy’s blockade of the major southern ports. On the inland waters Federal gunboats and transports played an even more direct role in securing the Union’s control of the Mississippi River and its larger tributaries, which provided easy invasion routes into the center of the Confederacy.
The War’s Early Course
After the fall of Fort Sumter, partisans on both sides hoped that the war might end with one sudden bold stroke, the capture of Washington or the fall of Richmond. Nowhere was this naive optimism more clearly displayed than at the First Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas).2 General Beauregard hurried the main Confederate army to the railroad center at Manassas Junction, Virginia, about twenty-five miles southwest of Washington. Lincoln decided that General Irvin McDowell’s hastily assembled Union army of some thirty-seven thousand might overrun the outnumbered Confederates and quickly march on to Richmond, the Confederate capital.
It was a hot, dry day on July 21, 1861, when McDowell’s raw Union recruits encountered Beauregard’s army dug in behind a meandering stream called Bull Run. The two generals, former classmates at West Point, adopted markedly similar battle plans: each would try to turn the other’s left flank. The Federals almost achieved their purpose early in the afternoon, but Confederate reinforcements, led by General Joseph E. Johnston, poured in to check the Union offensive. Amid the fury a South Carolina officer rallied his men by pointing to Thomas Jackson’s brigade: “Look! there is Jackson with his Virginians, standing like a stone wall!” The reference thereafter served as “Stonewall” Jackson’s nickname.
After McDowell’s last assault faltered, the Union army’s frantic retreat turned into a panic as fleeing soldiers and terrified civilians clogged the road to Washington, D. C. But the Confederates were about as disorganized and exhausted by the battle as the Yankees were, and they failed to give chase. The Battle of Bull Run was a sobering experience for both sides, each of which had underrated the other’s strength and tenacity. Much of the romance—the splendid uniforms, bright flags, rousing songs—gave way to the agonizing realization that this would be a long, costly struggle. Harper’s Weekly bluntly warned: “From the fearful day at Bull Run dates war. Not polite war, not incredulous war, but war that breaks hearts and blights homes.”
THE war’s early PHASE General Winfield Scott, the seasoned seventy-five-year-old commander of the Union armies, devised a threepronged plan that called first for the Union Army of the Potomac to defend Washington, D. C., and exert constant pressure on the Confederate capital at Richmond. At the same time the Federal navy would blockade southern ports and cut off the Confederacy’s access to foreign goods and weapons. The final component of the plan would divide the Confederacy by invading the South along the main water routes running from north to south: the Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland Rivers. This so-called “anaconda” strategy would slowly entwine and crush the southern resistance, like an anaconda snake strangling its prey.
The Confederate strategy was simpler. Jefferson Davis was better prepared than Lincoln at the start of the war to guide military strategy. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, he had commanded a regiment during the Mexican War and had served as secretary of war in the Franklin Pierce administration from 1853 to 1857. If the Union forces could be stalemated, Davis and others hoped, then the cotton-hungry British or French might be persuaded to join their cause, or perhaps public sentiment in the North would force Lincoln to seek a negotiated settlement. So while armies were forming in the South, Confederate diplomats were seeking assistance in London and Paris, and Confederate sympathizers in the North were urging an end to the Union’s war effort.
CONFEDERATE DIPLOMACY Both the Union and the Confederacy sent agents to influence opinion in Britain and Europe. The first Confederate emissaries to England and France were pleased when the British foreign minister met with them after their arrival in London in 1861; they even won a promise from France to recognize the Confederacy if Britain would lead the way. But the British foreign minister refused to meet the Confederates again, partly in response to Union pressure and partly out of British selfinterest.
One incident early in the war threatened to upset British neutrality. In November 1861 a Union warship near Cuba stopped a British steamship, the Trent, and took into custody two Confederate agents, James M. Mason and John Slidell, who were on their way to London and Paris to seek foreign assistance. Celebrated as a heroic deed by a northern public still starved for victories, the Trent affair roused a storm of protest in Britain. The British government condemned the violation of neutral rights and threatened war with the United States if Mason and Slidell were not released. Lincoln reluctantly decided to release the two agents. Mason and Slidell were more useful as martyrs to their own cause than they could ever have been as diplomats in London and Paris.
FORMING ARMIES Once the fighting began, the Federal Congress recruited five hundred thousand more men and after the Battle of Bull Run added another five hundred thousand. The nineteenth-century U. S. army often organized its units along community and ethnic lines. The Union army, for example, included a Scandinavian regiment (the 15th Wisconsin Infantry), a Highland Scots unit (the 79th New York Infantry), a French regiment (the 55th New York Infantry), a Polish Legion (the 58th New York Infantry), and a mixed unit of Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians (the 39th New York Infantry).
In the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis initially called up one hundred thousand twelve-month volunteers. Once the fighting started, he was authorized to enlist up to four hundred thousand three-year volunteers. Thus, by early 1862 most of the veteran Confederate soldiers were nearing the end of their enlistment without having encountered much significant action. They were also resisting bonuses and furloughs offered as incentives for reenlistment. The Confederate government thus turned to conscription. By an act passed
The U. S. Army recruiting office in City Hall Park, New York City
The sign advertises the money offered to those willing to serve: $677 to new recruits, $777 to veteran soldiers, and $15 to anyone who brought in a recruit.
On April 16, 1862, all white male citizens aged eighteen to thirty-five were declared members of the army for three years, and those already in service were required to serve out three years. In 1862 the upper age was raised to forty-five, and in 1864 the age range was further extended from seventeen to fifty.
The Confederate conscription law included two loopholes, however. First, a draftee might escape service either by providing an able-bodied substitute who was not of draft age or by paying $500 in cash. Second, exemptions, designed to protect key civilian work, were subject to abuse by men seeking “bombproof” jobs. The exemption from the draft of planters with twenty or more slaves led to bitter complaints about “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Equally galling to many Confederate soldiers was the behavior of wealthy officers who brought their enslaved servants with them to army camps.
The Union took nearly another year to force men into service. In 1863 the government began to draft men aged twenty to forty-five. Exemptions were granted to specified federal and state officeholders and to others on medical or compassionate grounds. For $300 one could avoid service. Widespread public opposition to the draft impeded its enforcement in both the North and the South.
BLACKS IN THE SOUTH The
Draft riots
This broadside called upon store owners to defend their shops during the New York draft riots of 1863.
Outbreak of the Civil War disrupted everyday life, especially in the South. The white planter-merchant elite struggled to maintain the traditional social system that sustained the power of whites over blacks, free people over the enslaved, rich over poor, and men over women. Initially, most slaves bided their time. Before long, however, enslaved African Americans took advantage of the turmoil created by the war to run away, engage in sabotage, join the Union war effort, or pursue their own interests. A white owner of three plantations in war-ravaged Tennessee was disgusted by the war’s effect on his slaves, as he confessed in his diary: “My Negroes all at home, but working only as they see fit, doing little.” Some of them had reported that they had “rather serve the federals rather than work on the farm.” Later, he revealed that with the arrival of Union armies in the vicinity, his slaves had “stampeded” to join the Union armies. “Many of my servants have run away and most of those left had [just] as well be gone, they being totally demoralized and ungovernable.” Some enslaved blacks served as spies or guides for Union forces; others escaped to join the Union army or navy. Union generals whose armies took control of Confederate areas enlisted escaped slaves to serve as laborers in the camps. In Corinth, Mississippi, General Grenville Dodge armed a thousand escaped male slaves to form the 1st Alabama Infantry Regiment of African Descent. The rebellion of southern whites against the Union’s efforts to constrain slavery had spawned a rebellion of slaves against their white masters.
THE WEST AND THE CIVIL WAR During the Civil War western settlement continued. New discoveries of gold and silver in eastern California and in Montana and Colorado lured thousands of prospectors and their suppliers. New transportation and communication networks emerged to serve the growing population in the West. Telegraph lines sprouted above the plains, and stagecoach lines fanned out to serve the new communities. Dakota, Colorado, and Nevada gained territorial status in 1861, Idaho and Arizona in 1863, and Montana in 1864. Silver-rich Nevada gained statehood in 1864.
The most intense fighting in the West occurred along the Kansas-Missouri border. There the disputes between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers of the 1850s turned into brutal guerrilla warfare. The most prominent proConfederate leader in the area was William Quantrill. He and his pro-slavery followers, mostly teenagers, fought under a black flag, meaning that they would kill anyone who surrendered. In destroying Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863, Quantrill ordered his forces to “kill every male and burn every house.” By the end of the day, 182 boys and men had been killed. Their opponents, the Jay-hawkers, responded in kind. They tortured and hanged pro-Confederate prisoners, burned houses, and destroyed livestock.
Many Indian tribes found themselves caught up in the Civil War. Indian regiments fought on both sides, and in Oklahoma they fought against each other. Indians among the “Five Civilized Tribes” held African American slaves and felt a natural bond with southern whites. Oklahoma’s proximity to Texas influenced the Choctaws and Chickasaws to support the Confederacy. The Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles were more divided in their loyalties. For those tribes the Civil War served as a wedge that fractured their unity. The Cherokees, for example, split in two, some supporting the Union and others supporting the South.
FIGHTING IN THE WESTERN THEATER Little happened of military significance in the eastern theater (east of the Appalachians) before May 1862. On the other hand, the western theater (from the Appalachians to the Mississippi River) flared up with several encounters and an important penetration of the Confederate states. In western Kentucky, the Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston had perhaps forty thousand men stretched over some 150 miles. Early in 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant made the first Union thrust against the weak center of Johnston’s overextended lines. Moving on boats out of Cairo, Illinois, and Paducah, Kentucky, the Union army swung southward up the Tennessee River and captured Fort Henry in northern Tennessee on February 6. Grant then moved quickly overland to attack nearby Fort Donelson, where on February 16 a force of twelve thousand Confederates surrendered. It was the first major Union victory of the war, and it touched off wild celebrations throughout the North. President Lincoln’s elation was tempered by the death of his eleven-year-old son Willie, who succumbed to typhoid fever. The tragedy in the White House “overwhelmed” the president. It “showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before,” a grieving Lincoln confessed to a friend.
SHILOH After suffering defeats in Kentucky and Tennessee, the Confederate forces in the western theater regrouped at Corinth, in northern Mississippi, near the Tennessee border. Ulysses Grant, meanwhile, moved his Union army southward along the Tennessee River during the early spring of 1862. Grant then made a costly mistake. While planning his attack on Corinth, he exposed his forty-two thousand troops on a rolling plateau
Between two creeks flowing into the Tennessee River and failed to dig defensive trenches. General Albert Sidney Johnston shrewdly recognized Grant’s oversight, and on the morning of April 6 the Kentuckian ordered an attack on the vulnerable Federals, urging his men to be “worthy of your race and lineage; worthy of the women of the South.”
The forty-four thousand Confederates struck suddenly at Shiloh, the site of a log church in the center of the Union camp in southwestern Tennessee. They found most of Grant’s troops still sleeping or eating breakfast; many died in their bedrolls. After a day of carnage and confusion, the Union soldiers were pinned against the river. The Union army might well have been defeated had General Johnston not been mortally wounded at the peak of the battle; his second in command called off the attack. Bolstered by reinforcements, Grant took the offensive the next day, and the Confederates glumly withdrew to Corinth, leaving the Union army too battered to pursue. Casualties on both sides totaled over twenty thousand.
Shiloh, a Hebrew word meaning “Place of Peace,” was the costliest battle in which Americans had ever engaged, although worse was yet to come. Like so many battles thereafter, Shiloh was a story of missed opportunities and debated turning points punctuated by lucky incidents and accidents. Throughout the Civil War, winning armies would fail to pursue their retreating foes, thus allowing the wounded opponent to slip away and fight again.
After the battle at Shiloh, General Henry Halleck, already jealous of Grant’s success, spread the false rumor that Grant had been drinking during the battle. Some called upon Lincoln to fire Grant, but the president refused: “I can’t spare this man; he fights.” Halleck, however, took Grant’s place as field commander, and as a result the Union thrust southward ground to a halt. For the remainder of 1862, the chief action in the western theater was a series of inconclusive maneuvers.
McClellan’s peninsular campaign The eastern theater remained fairly quiet for nine months after the Battle of Bull Run. In the wake of the Union defeat, Lincoln had replaced McDowell with General George B. McClellan, Stonewall Jackson’s classmate at West Point. As head of the Army of the Potomac, the thirty-four-year-old McClellan, handsome and imperious, set about building a powerful, well-trained army that would be ready for its next battle. Yet for all of McClellan’s organizational ability, his innate caution would prove crippling. Months passed while McClellan remained in a state of perpetual preparation, building and training his massive army to meet the superior numbers he claimed the Confederates were deploying. Worried that the Union was running out of money, Lincoln
Finally lost his vaunted patience and ordered McClellan to attack. “[You] must strike a blow,” he told his reluctant commander.
In mid-March 1862, McClellan finally moved his army down the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay to the Virginia peninsula southeast of Richmond. This bold move put the Union forces within sixty miles of the Confederate capital. Thousands of Richmond residents fled the city in panic, but McClellan waited to strike, failing to capitalize on his advantages. As Lincoln told McClellan, the war could be won only by engaging the rebel army, not by endless maneuvers and efforts to occupy Confederate territory. “Once more,”
Lincoln told his commanding general, “let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow.”
On May 31 the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston struck at McClellan’s forces along the Chickahominy River. In the Battle of Seven Pines (Fair Oaks), only the arrival of Federal reinforcements, who somehow crossed the swollen river, prevented a disastrous Union defeat. Both sides took heavy casualties, and General Johnston was severely wounded.
At this point, Robert E. Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia, a development that changed the course of the war. Dignified yet fiery, Lee was an audacious commander. He led by example, and his men loved him. Unlike Joseph E. Johnston, Lee enjoyed Jefferson Davis’s trust. More important, he knew how to use the talents of his superb field commanders such as Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the pious, fearless mathematics professor from the Virginia Military Institute.
On July 9, when Lincoln visited McClellan’s headquarters, the general complained that the administration had failed to support him and instructed the president at length on military strategy. Such insubordination was ample reason to remove McClellan. After returning to Washington, Lincoln called Henry Halleck from the West to take charge as general in chief. Miffed at his demotion, McClellan angrily dismissed Halleck as an officer “whom I know to be my inferior.”
SECOND BULL RUN Lincoln and Halleck ordered McClellan to leave the Virginia peninsula and join the Washington defense force, now under the command of the bombastic John Pope, who had been called back from the West for a new overland assault on Richmond. In a letter to his wife, McClellan predicted—accurately—that “Pope will be thrashed and disposed of” by Lee. As McClellan’s Army of the Potomac began to pull out, Lee moved northward to strike Pope’s army before McClellan’s troops arrived. Dividing his forces, Lee sent Jackson’s “foot cavalry” around Pope’s right flank to attack his supply lines in the rear. At the Second Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas), fought on almost the same site as the earlier battle, Pope assumed that he faced only Jackson, but Lee’s main army by that time had joined in. On August 30, a crushing Confederate attack on Pope’s flank drove the Federals from the field.
SLAVES IN THE WAR The Confederate victories in 1862 devastated Northern morale and convinced Lincoln that bolder steps would be required to win the war over an enemy fighting for and aided by enslaved labor. Now the North had to assault slavery itself. Once fighting began in 1861, the Union’s need to hold the border slave states dictated caution on the volatile issue of emancipation. Beyond that, several other considerations deterred action. For one, Lincoln had to contend with a deep-seated racial prejudice in the North. While most abolitionists promoted both complete emancipation and the social integration of the races, many anti-slavery activists wanted slavery prohibited only in the new western territories and states. They were willing to allow slavery to continue in the South and were
Opposed to racial integration. Though committed to the view that the rebellious states remained legally in the Union, Lincoln himself harbored doubts about his constitutional authority to emancipate slaves. The only way around the problem would be to justify emancipation as a military necessity.
The expanding war forced the issue. As Federal forces pushed into the Confederacy, fugitive slaves began to turn up in Union army camps, and the army commanders did not know whether to declare them free. One Union general designated the fugitive slaves “contraband of war,” and thereafter the slaves who sought protection and freedom with Union forces were known as “contrabands.” Some Union officers put the contrabands to work digging trenches and building fortifications; others set them free. Lincoln, meanwhile, began to edge toward emancipation. On April 16, 1862, he signed an act that abolished slavery in the District of Columbia; on June 19 another act excluded slavery from the western territories, without offering owners compensation. A Second Confiscation Act, passed on July 17, liberated slaves held by anyone aiding the rebellion. Still another act forbade the army to help return runaways to their border-state owners.
In 1862, Lincoln decided that emancipation of slaves in the Confederate states was necessary to win the war. Millions of enslaved laborers were being used to bolster the Rebel war effort. Moreover, sagging morale in the North needed the boost of a moral cause, and public opinion was swinging toward emancipation as the war dragged on. Proclaiming a war on slavery, moreover, would end forever any chance that France or Britain would support the Confederacy. In July 1862, Lincoln confided to his cabinet that he had decided to issue a proclamation freeing the slaves in Confederate-controlled areas. “Decisive and extreme measures must be adopted,” he explained. Emancipation was “a military necessity, absolutely necessary to the preservation of the Union. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” Secretary of State William H. Seward concurred, but he advised Lincoln to delay the announcement until after a Union victory on the battlefield in order to avoid any semblance of desperation.
ANTIETAM Robert E. Lee made a momentous decision in the summer of 1862: he would invade the North and perhaps thereby gain foreign recognition and military supplies for the Confederacy. In September 1862, he and his battle-tested troops pushed north into western Maryland headed for Pennsylvania. The Rebel army encountered Union forces at Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland. On September 17, 1862, the Union and Confederate armies commenced the furious Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg). Outnumbered more than two to one, the Confederates forced a standoff in the most costly day of the Civil War. The next day the battered Confederates slipped south across the Potomac River to the safety of Virginia. General Lee’s northern invasion had failed. McClellan called the Battle of Antietam “the most terrible battle of the age.” It was the bloodiest single day in American history. Some 6,400 soldiers on both sides were killed, and another 17,000 were wounded. A Union officer counted “hundreds of dead bodies lying in rows and in piles.” The scene was “sickening, harrowing, horrible. O what a terrible sight!”
President Lincoln was pleased that Lee’s army had been forced to retreat, but he was disgusted by General McClellan’s failure to gain a truly decisive victory by staying engaged with the retreating Confederates. The president sent a curt message to the general: “I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done. . . that fatigues anything?” Failing to receive a satisfactory answer, Lincoln relieved McClellan of his command of the Army of the Potomac and assigned him to recruiting duty in New Jersey. Never again would he command troops.
FREDERICKSBURG The Battle of Antietam was significant on many levels. It revived sagging northern morale, emboldened Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in the Confederate states, and dashed the Confederacy’s hopes of foreign recognition. Yet the war was far from over. In his search for a fighting general, Lincoln now made the worst choice of all. He turned to Ambrose E. Burnside, who had twice before turned down the job on the grounds that he felt unfit for so large a command. But if the White House wanted him to fight, he would attack, even in the face of the oncoming winter. Burnside was an eager fighter and a poor strategist. He was said to possess “ten times as much heart as he has head.”
On December 13, 1862, Burnside foolishly sent the 122,000 men in the Army of the Potomac west across the icy Rappahannock River to assault Lee’s forces, who were well entrenched on ridges and behind stone walls west of Fredericksburg, Virginia, between Richmond and Washington, D. C. Confederate artillery and muskets chewed up the advancing blue columns as they crossed a mile of open land outside the town. It was, a Federal general sighed, “a great slaughter-pen.” The scene was both awful and awesome, prompting Lee to remark, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.” After taking more than twelve thousand casualties, compared with fewer than six thousand for the Confederates, General Burnside wept as he gave the order to withdraw.
The year 1862 ended with forces in the East deadlocked and the Union advance in the West stalled since midyear. Union morale plummeted: northern Democrats were calling for a negotiated peace. Republicans—even Lincoln’s own cabinet members—grew increasingly fierce in their criticism of the president. Lincoln referred to the mounting dissension as being a “fire in the rear.” General Burnside, too, was under fire, with some of his own officers ready to testify publicly to his shortcomings.
But amid the dissension the deeper currents of the war were turning in favor of the Union: in the lengthening war, the North’s superior resources turned the tide. In both the eastern and the western theaters the Confederate counterattack had been repulsed. And while the armies clashed, Lincoln, by the stroke of a pen, changed the conflict from a war to restore the Union to a struggle to end slavery. On January 1, 1863, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Emancipation
On September 22, 1862, five days after Lee’s Confederate army had been forced to retreat from Maryland, Lincoln issued a proclamation in which he repeated that his goal was mainly to restore the Union and that he favored proposals for paying slaveholders for their losses. He promised that if the southern states abandoned secession and returned to the Union they could retain their slaves (none accepted the offer). But the essential message of the document was his warning that on January 1, 1863, all slaves in the Rebel states would be “forever free.” On January 1, 1863, Lincoln urged blacks to abstain from violence except in self-defense, and he added that free blacks would now be received into the armed services of the United States. As he wrote his name on the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln said, “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing the right thing than I do in signing this paper.” reactions to emancipation Among the Confederate states, Tennessee and the Union-controlled parts of Virginia and Louisiana were exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation. Thus no slaves who were within Union lines at the time were freed. But many enslaved African Americans living in those areas claimed their freedom anyway. The African American abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was overjoyed at Lincoln’s “righteous decree.” By contrast, Democratic newspapers in the North savagely attacked the proclamation, calling it dictatorial, unconstitutional, and catastrophic.
Two views of the Emancipation Proclamation
The Union view (top) shows a thoughtful Lincoln composing the proclamation, the Constitution and the Holy Bible in his lap. The Confederate view (bottom) shows a demented Lincoln, his foot on the Constitution and his inkwell held by the devil.
BLACKS IN THE MILITARY Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation sparked new efforts to organize all-black Union military units. Frederick Douglass stressed that military service was the best route for African Americans to gain the rights of citizenship. Once a black man enlisted in the Union army, he predicted, “there is no power on earth. . . which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.” More than 180,000 blacks responded to the government’s efforts to recruit African Americans into the United States Colored Troops. Some 80 percent of the “colored troops” were former slaves or free blacks from the South. Some 38,000 gave their lives. In the navy, African Americans accounted for about a fourth of all enlistments; of these, more than 2,800 died. Their courage under fire was quite evident; once in battle, they fought tenaciously. A white Union army private reported in the late spring of 1863 that the black troops “fight like the Devil.”
To be sure, racism influenced the status of African Americans in the Union military. Blacks were not allowed to be commissioned officers. They were also paid less than whites (seven dollars per month for black privates versus sixteen dollars for white privates), and black recruits were ineligible for the enlistment bounty paid to white recruits. Still, as Frederick Douglass declared, “this is no time for hesitation. . . . this is our chance, and woe betide us if we fail to embrace it.” Service in the Union army provided former slaves with a unique educational opportunity to grow in confidence, awareness, and maturity. As soldiers they were able to mingle former slaves and free blacks from North and South. Many of them also learned to read and write while in the army camps. A northern social worker in the South Carolina Sea Islands was “astonished” at the positive effects of “soldiering” on ex-slaves. “Some who left here a month ago to join [the army were] cringing, dumpish, slow,” but now they “are ready to look you in the eye— are wide awake and active.”
By mid-1863, African American units were involved in significant action. Commenting on Union victories at Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, Lincoln reported that “some of our commanders. . . believe that. . . the use of colored troops constitutes the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebels.” As the war entered its final months, freedom for enslaved blacks emerged more fully as a legal reality. Three major steps occurred in January 1865, when both Missouri and Tennessee abolished slavery by state action and the U. S. House of Representatives passed an abolition amendment. Upon ratification by three fourths of the reunited states, the Thirteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution on December 18, 1865, and removed any lingering doubts about the legality of emancipation. By then, in fact, slavery remained only in the border states of Kentucky and Delaware.
The War Behind the Lines
The scale and scope of the Civil War affected everyone—not simply the combatants. Feeding, clothing, and supplying the vast armies required tremendous sacrifices on the home fronts. The fighting knew no boundaries, as farms and villages were transformed into battlefields and churches became makeshift hospitals.
Women and the war While breaking the bonds of slavery, the Civil War also loosened traditional restraints on female activity. “No conflict in history,” a journalist wrote at the time, “was such a woman’s war as the Civil War.” Women on both sides played prominent roles in the conflict. They worked in factories, sewed uniforms, composed patriotic poems and songs, and raised money and supplies. In Greenville, South Carolina, when T. G. Gower went off to fight in the Confederate army, his wife Elizabeth took over the family business, converting their carriage factory to produce military wagons, caissons for carrying artillery shells, and ambulances. Thousands of northern women worked with the U. S. Sanitary Commission, a civilian agency that collected enormous sums of donations to provide organized medical relief and other services for soldiers. Other women, black and white, supported the freedmen’s aid movement to help impoverished freed slaves.
In the North alone, some twenty thousand women served as nurses or other health-related volunteers. The most famous nurses were Dorothea Lynde Dix and Clara Barton, both untiring volunteers in service to the wounded and the dying. Dix, the earnest reformer of the nation’s insane asylums, became the Union army’s first superintendent of women nurses. She soon found herself flooded with applications from around the country. Dix explained that nurses should be “sober, earnest, self-sacrificing, and selfsustained” women between the ages of thirty-five and fifty who could “bear the presence of suffering and exercise entire self control” and who could be “calm, gentle, quiet, active, and steadfast in duty.”
In many southern towns and counties the home front became a world of white women and children and African American slaves. A resident of Lexington, Virginia, reported in 1862 that there were “no men left” in town
By mid-1862. Women suddenly found themselves farmers or plantation managers, clerks, munitions-plant workers, and schoolteachers. Hundreds of women disguised themselves as men and fought in the war; dozens served as spies; others traveled with the armies, cooking meals, writing letters, and assisting with amputations.
Clara Barton oversaw the distribution of medicines to Union troops. She later helped found the American Red Cross of which she remained president until the age of eighty-three.
RELIGION AND THE CIVIL
WAR Wars intensify religious convictions (and vice versa), and this was certainly true of the Civil War. Religious concerns pervaded the conflict.
Both sides believed they were fighting a holy war with God’s divine favor.
Nursing and the war
The Confederate constitution, unlike the U. S. Constitution, explicitly invoked the guidance of Almighty God. Southern leaders thus asserted that the Confederacy was the only truly Christian nation. Clergymen in the North and the South—Protestant,
Catholic, and Jewish—saw the war as a righteous crusade. They were among the most partisan advocates of the war, in part because they were so certain that God was on their side and would ensure victory. During the war both President Lincoln and President Davis proclaimed numerous official days of fasting and prayer in the aftermath of important battles. Such national rituals were a means of mourning the “martyrs” who had given their lives for the righteous cause. Salmon P. Chase, the U. S. secretary of the Treasury, added the motto “In God We Trust” to American coins as a means of expressing the nation’s religious zeal. Many soldiers were armed with piety as well as muskets.
Every regiment on both sides had an ordained chaplain, and devotional services in military camps were regularly held and widely attended. More than 1,300 clergymen served in the military camps, with the Methodists providing the largest number. By late 1862, Christian religious revivals were sweeping through both northern and southern armies. To facilitate such battlefield conversions, religious organizations distributed millions of Bibles and religious tracts to soldiers and sailors. During the winter of 1863-1864, the widespread conversions among the Union army camped in northern Virginia led one reporter to claim that the soldiers’ martial piety might “win the whole nation to Christ.” The revivals in the Confederate camps were even larger. Mary Jones, the wife of a Confederate minister in Georgia whose son was a soldier, reported the good news that “revivals in our army are certainly the highest proofs we can possible desire or receive of the divine favor” shrouding the Confederacy. Abraham Lincoln took keen interest in the religious fervor among Confederate soldiers. He expressed concern that “rebel soldiers are praying with a great deal more earnestness” than Union soldiers.
With so many ministers away at the front, lay people, especially women, assumed even greater responsibility for religious activities in churches and synagogues. The war also transformed the religious life of African Americans, who saw the war as a recapitulation of the biblical Exodus: God’s miraculous intervention in history on behalf of a chosen people. In those areas of the South taken over by Union armies, freed slaves were able to create their own churches for the first time.
In the end the war revealed how important religion was in American life. It also showed how problematic it is to claim that God is on any particular side. Yes, he observed, both sides claimed providential sanction. In this regard, he said, “Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for and against the same thing at the same time.” After all, Lincoln noted, God could give victory to either side at any moment. “Yet the contest proceeds.” Thus Lincoln was one of the few Americans to suggest that God’s divine purpose might be something other than simple victory or defeat.
Government during the War
Freeing 4 million slaves and loosening the restraints on female activity constituted a momentous social and economic revolution. But an even broader revolution began as power in Congress shifted from South to North during the Civil War. Before the war, southern congressmen exercised disproportionate influence, but once the secessionists had abandoned Congress to the Republicans, a dramatic change occurred. Several projects that had been stalled by sectional controversy were adopted before the end of 1862. Congress passed a higher tariff bill to deter imports and thereby “protect” American manufacturers. A transcontinental railroad was approved, to run through Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California. A Homestead Act granted 160 acres to settlers who agreed to work the land for five years. The National Banking Act followed in 1863. Two other key pieces of legislation were the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862), which provided federal aid to state colleges teaching “agriculture and mechanic arts,” and the Contract Labor Act (1864), which encouraged the importation of immigrant labor. All of these had long-term significance for the expansion of the national economy—and the federal government.
UNION FINANCES In December 1860, as southern states announced their plan to secede from the Union, the federal treasury was virtually empty. There was not enough cash on hand to pay the salaries of Congress, much let fund a massive war. To meet the war’s escalating expenses, Congress focused on three options: raising taxes, printing paper money, and borrowing. The taxes came chiefly in the form of the Morrill Tariff on imports and taxes on manufactures and nearly every profession. A butcher, for example, had to pay thirty cents for every head of beef he slaughtered, ten cents for every hog, and five cents for every sheep. In 1862, Congress passed the Internal Revenue Act, which created an Internal Revenue Service to implement a new income tax.
But federal tax revenues trickled in so slowly—in the end they would meet only 21 percent of wartime expenditures—that Congress in 1862 resorted to printing paper money. Beginning with the Legal Tender Act of 1862, Congress ultimately authorized $450 million in paper currency, which soon became known as greenbacks because of the color of the ink used to print the bills. The congressional decision to allow the Treasury to print paper money was a profoundly important development for the U. S. economy, then and since. Unlike previous paper currencies issued by local banks, the federal greenbacks could not be exchanged for gold or silver. Instead, their value relied upon public trust in the government. Many bankers were outraged by the advent of the greenbacks, but the desperate need to finance the expanding war demanded such a solution. As the months passed, the greenbacks helped ease the Union’s financial crisis without causing the ruinous inflation that the unlimited issue of paper money caused in the Confederacy.
The federal government also relied upon the sale of bonds to help finance the war effort. A Philadelphia banker named Jay Cooke (sometimes tagged the Financier of the Civil War) mobilized a nationwide campaign to sell $2 billion in government bonds to private investors.
State currency
Banknotes were promissory notes. Generally, the better the art on the note, the more it was trusted.
CONFEDERATE FINANCES Confederate finances were a disaster from the start. The new Confederate government had to create a treasury and a revenue-collecting bureaucracy from scratch. Moreover, the South’s agrarian economy was land-rich but cash-poor when compared to the North. While the Confederacy owned 30 percent of America’s assets in 1861, it contained only 12 percent of the currency. In the first year of its existence, the Confederacy enacted a tax of one half of 1 percent on most forms of property, which should have yielded a hefty income, but the Confederacy farmed out its collection of the taxes to the states. The result was chaos. In 1863 the desperate Confederate Congress began taxing nearly everything, but enforcement of the taxes was poor and evasion easy. Altogether, taxes covered no more than 5 percent of Confederate costs; bond issues accounted for less than 33 percent; and treasury notes (paper money), for more than 66 percent. Over the course of the Civil War, the Confederacy issued more than $1 billion in paper money which exacerbated the inflationary effect on consumer prices caused by the Union naval blockade. By 1864 a turkey sold in the Richmond market for $100, flour brought $425 a barrel, and bacon was $10 a pound. Such rampant inflation caused great distress. Poverty drove some southerners to take desperate measures. Dissent over the price of war increasingly erupted into mass demonstrations, rioting, looting, burning of houses, and desertions from the military.
UNION POLITICS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES On the home front, the crisis of war brought no moratorium on partisan politics, northern or southern. Within his own party, Lincoln faced a radical wing in Congress composed mainly of militant abolitionists. Led by House members such as Thaddeus Stevens and George Washington Julian and senators such as Charles Sumner, Benjamin Franklin Wade, and Zachariah Chandler, the Radical Republicans pushed for confiscation of southern plantations, immediate emancipation of slaves, and a more vigorous prosecution of the war. The majority of Republicans, however, continued to back Lincoln’s more cautious approach. The party was generally united on economic policy.
The Democratic party suffered the loss of its southern wing and the death of its leader, Stephen A. Douglas, in June 1861. By and large, northern Democrats supported a war for the Union “as it was” before 1860, giving reluctant support to Lincoln’s policies but opposing restraints on civil liberties and the new economic legislation. “War Democrats,” such as Tennessee senator Andrew Johnson and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, supported Lincoln’s policies, while a peace wing of the party preferred an end to the fighting, even if that meant risking the Union. An extreme fringe of the peace wing even flirted with outright disloyalty. The Copperhead Democrats, as they were called, were strongest in states such as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. They sympathized with the Confederacy and called for an end to the war.
“Abraham’s Dream!”
This cartoon depicts President Lincoln having a nightmare about the election of 1864. Lady Liberty brandishes the severed head of a black man at the door of the White House as General McClellan mounts the steps and Lincoln runs away.
Such open sympathy for the enemy led Lincoln to crack down hard. Like all wartime leaders, he faced the challenge of balancing the needs of winning a war with the protection of civil liberties. Early in the war, Lincoln had assumed emergency powers, including the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which guarantees arrested citizens a speedy hearing. The Constitution states that habeas corpus may be suspended only in cases of rebellion or invasion, but congressional leaders argued that Congress alone had the authority to take such action. By the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863, Congress authorized the president to suspend the writ.
At their 1864 national convention in Chicago, the Democrats called for an immediate end to the war, to be followed by a national convention that would restore the Union. They named General George B. McClellan as their candidate, but McClellan distanced himself from the peace platform by declaring that agreement on Union would have to precede peace.
Radical Republicans, who still regarded Lincoln as soft on treason, tried to thwart his nomination for a second term, but he outmaneuvered them at every turn. Lincoln promoted the vice-presidential nomination of Andrew Johnson, a “war Democrat” from Tennessee, on the “National Union” ticket, so named to promote bipartisanship. As the war dragged on through 1864, however, with General Grant’s Union army taking heavy losses in Virginia, Lincoln expected to lose the 1864 election. Then Admiral David Farragut’s capture of Mobile, Alabama, in August and General William Tecumseh Sherman’s timely capture of Atlanta on September 2, 1864, turned the tide. As a Republican U. S. senator said, the Union conquest of Atlanta “created the most extraordinary change in public opinion here [in the North] that ever was known.” The South’s hope that northern discontent would lead to a negotiated peace vanished. McClellan carried only New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky, with 21 electoral votes to Lincoln’s 212, and he won only 1.8 million popular votes (45 percent) to Lincoln’s 2.2 million (55 percent).
CONFEDERATE POLITICS Unlike Lincoln, Jefferson Davis never had to face a presidential contest. He and his vice president, Alexander Stephens, were elected without opposition in 1861 for a six-year term. But discontent flourished as the war dragged on. The growing cost of the war aroused class tensions. More than ever before, poor white southerners expressed resentment of the planter elite. Food grew scarce, and prices skyrocketed. A bread riot in Richmond on April 2, 1863, ended only when Davis himself threatened to shoot the protesters (mostly women). After the Confederate congressional elections of 1863, about a third of the legislators were ardent critics of Davis.
World History
