American Civil War

The **American Civil War** was a bloody civil war fought between the United States government (also called "the Union" or "the North") and the secessionist Confederate States of America (also called "the Rebels" or "the South") from 12 April 1861 to 9 May 1865. The war, caused by the secession of eleven states in the American South due to their opposition to abolitionism, resulted in the abolition of slavery across the country, the creation of West Virginia as a state, and the Reconstruction reforms.

The American Civil War began as a result of the secession of the Confederate States from the union in response to the election of President Abraham Lincoln, a member of the US Republican Party and a moderate abolitionist. The southern states had been talking of secession since the 1830s under John C. Calhoun, as the South felt that the federal government was impeding on its people's rights by pressing for the abolition of slavery and by supposedly prioritizing the affairs of the North over those of the South. On 20 December 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the union, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana by 26 January 1861. Several US Army soldiers in these states defected to the Confederacy or were forced to surrender at their outposts, and many American generals from the South resigned their commissions to join the newly-formed Confederate States Army. On 8 February 1861, the Confederacy passed a provisional constitution, and Democratic Party politician Jefferson Davis was elected President.

Most Union forts in the seceding states were convinced to surrender peacefully, but this came to an end on 12 April 1865, when P.G.T. Beauregard's Confederate army laid siege to Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The Union garrison refused to surrender, leading to the bombardment of the fort. Although the only death in the battle was the result of an accidental gunpowder explosion within the fort, the Union took the Confederate attack as a declaration of war, and President Lincoln called up 75,000 volunteers on 15 April.

Many slave states refused to take up arms against their neighbors, and from 17 April to 20 May Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina also seceded from the Union to join the Confederacy. The Confederacy's new capital was the Virginia state capital of Richmond, while the Union capital remained at Washington DC. For four years, the Confederacy and Union would engage in a series of bloody battles that turned neighbors against neighbors, with the Confederacy winning most of the battles of 1861 before the Union began to recover in 1862-1863 and launch a series of decisive counterattacks in 1864 and 1865.

The war was the first war to see the use of machine guns and ironclads, both of which shaped land and naval warfare forever. Most armies still engaged in the traditional style of battle, involving the use of firing lines by regiments, but they were equipped with new weapons, including Colt and Henry repeater rifles. Warfare was brutal at times, with the Union waging a war of attrition on the South by 1864. William T. Sherman introduced the concept of "total war" with his March to the Sea, ravaging the states of Georgia and South Carolina during his march from Tennessee up the Atlantic Ocean coast. He figured that civilians were a part of the war as well, and destroying railroad lines, towns, public works, and farms would be crucial to winning the war, as it drained the Confederacy of supplies and morale. The war saw former West Point classmates fight against each other in battle, many of whom had fought together in the Mexican-American War, and it was common to see former neighbors, friends, and even family members fight against each other. The war would come to an end in April 1865 when the Union captured the Confederate capital of Richmond after the successful Overland Campaign and the Siege of Petersburg, and the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered the main Confederate army at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer while viewing a play at Ford Theater on 14 April 1865, but the war was already coming to an end. On 2 May 1865, President Andrew Johnson proclaimed that the war had met its end, and that the union was preserved. 647,000 Union soldiers and 427,000 Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded in the war, making it the bloodiest war in US history; the bloodiest single-day battle in US history was the Battle of Antietam in 1862. The war was followed with social change, as Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, and the Republican Party became the dominant party in the north. The Civil War's political and social divisions are still felt today, as the Southern tradition of states' rights and neo-Confederatism continued to influence the Southern Democratic mindset, and American conservatism as a whole, into the 20th century; meanwhile, the Northeast, whose Republicans led the charge against slavery and for the free labor ideal, would remain a bastion of forward-thinking reformers and liberals.

## Background

The American Civil War arose from a deep divide between North and South over slavery. The convention of 1787 that drew up the US Constitution allowed each of the 13 states to decide for itself whether to allow slavery. The seven northern states abolished slavery, while the six southern states kept it, as slaves provided cheap labor on their lucrative cotton, tobacco, and sugar plantations. But as new states were admitted to the Union, the southern states grew increasingly concerned that the balance would shift against slavery, leading to its abolition and massively damaging their plantation-based economy.

For a while the Missouri Compromise of 1820 balanced the admission of free and slave states to the Union. In 1857, however, the US Supreme Court overturned the Missouri Compromise as unconstitutional. Then in 1860 Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election. Lincoln was already a figure of hate in the southern states, having promised that he would refuse to extend slavery to new territories in the west if elected. The stage was set for war.

## War

Before Abraham Lincoln was even inaugurated as the new president, southern leaders withdrew their states from the Union. South Carolina left first, on 20 December 1860, and ten more followed early the next year. Together they set up the Confederacy, choosing Jefferson Davis as president and establishing a capital at Richmond, Virginia. On 12 April 1861, Confederate forces bombarded the Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina, marking the start of the civil war.

The two sides were by no means evenly matched. The Union's population of 23 million dwarfed the Confederacy's 9 million, more than a third of whom were salves. The Union held most of the country's industry and railroads, while the Confederacy lacked most essential supplies other than food. Neither side, however, had an army, for the regular US Army as only 16,000 strong and had divided with the states. Both sides therefore started to recruit new armies staffed with volunteers and state militia members. Holding the naval advantage, the Union blockaded Confederate ports to prevent supplies from etting in, and began amphibious operations, the most successful of which was the capture of New Orleans in April 1862.

### First battles

The Union's first aim was to capture the Confederate capital, Richmond, only 100 miles south of the old national, now Union, capital of Washington DC. Inexperienced troops under General Irvin McDowell headed south into Virginia, but in July 1861 faced a hastily assembled Confederate army, reinforced by troops moved in by train, between Bull Run stream and Manassas rail junction. Initially the Union troops had the advantage of surprise, but soon ran into Colonel Thomas J. Jackson's brigade standing before them "like a stone wall", as Confederate general Barnard E. Bee put it. A counterattack saw off the Union troops at this First Battle of Bull Run, earning "Stonewall" Jackson promotion to general.

Further battles in Virginia in 1862 showed the Union that the war would be hard won. A new front opened to the west when Union general Ulysses S. Grant captured forts in Tennessee and forced the Confederates to abandon Nashville. Grant then advanced down the Tennessee River and waited near Shiloh Church for the Army of the Ohio to join him. Before the two armies could meet, Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston launched a surprise attack on 6 April 1862. Grant was forced back, but with the overnight arrival of Ohio troops he was able to launch his own attack at dawn the next day, and force the Confederates to withdraw.

### New technology

Union victory at Shiloh weakened the Confederate hold of the west and opened the way to Union seizure and control of the Mississippi River. A range of naval craft took part in this campaign, including ironclad gunboats, often converted from paddle steamers. These revolutionary craft were first seen on 8 March 1862, at the Battle of Hampton Roads. In an effort to break the Union blockade of the coast of Virginia, the Confederates clad the half-burned hull of the captured USS *Merrimack* with thick iron plates from the waterline up. Renamed the CSS *Virginia*, it rammed and sank one Union ship, and drove two more aground. The next day the Union navy responded with another revolutionary ship, the semi-submerged armored iron raft USS *Monitor*. The two met in the first-ever clash of iron warships, although neither caused sufficient damage to decide the contest.

Modern technology made an impact throughout the war. Railroads and the telegraph eased communications over long distances, despite being vulnerable to enemy disruption. Photographers and reporters brought the war home to people via newspapers. But weaponry advanced little. The muzzle-loading rifle-musket used Minie bullets that could be loaded quickly and fired accurately, but still only from a standing position. Modern breech-loading repeater rifles were restricted to cavalry and sniper use, while cannon were little improved from Napoleonic times.

### Stalemate

Throughout 1862 the war in Virginia swung from side to side. A Union army advanced toward Richmond but was met by a bold counterattack by General Robert E. Lee at the end of June at the series of encounters known as the Seven Days Battles. Although the Union forces outnumbered their opponents and were better equipped, the offensive unnerved their commander, General George B. McClellan, who wtihdrew to the coast. The Confederates then won the Second Battle of Bull Run in August and decided to invade the North.

McClellan learned of the invasion plan but was too slow to act, allowing Lee to regroup behind Antietam Creek in Maryland. The one-day battle that followed on 17 September 1862 was unevenly matched, as Lee's army was greatly outnumbered. But McClellan was too cautious. Holding too many troops back, he failed to overwhelm his enemy, and suffered 12,000 casualties - the Confederates suffered almost as many. Worse still, he allowed Lee to withdraw the next day. But the battle ended Lee's invasion plans for good.

A last Union effort to take Richmon dfailed in December that year when Union troops heading south to the city crossed the Rappahannock River in an attempt to seize Fredericksburg, but were repelled by superior firepower.

The issue of slavery had caused the war, and it was a resolution of this issue taht President Lincoln used to break the deadlock. On 1 January 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring free all slaves residing in slaves still in rebellion against the Union. Its immediate effect was limited, as it did not free slaves in the Union and could not yet be enforced in the Confederacy. But it gave the Union the moral high ground and ended Confederate hopes of recognition and support from Europe - particularly Britain, a major customer for its cotton and tobacco exports. The proclamation also helped recurit large numbers of black soldiers. Some 200,000 joined up, although they were paid less than white soldiers and could not become officers. Conscription, which the Confederacy had introduced in 1862, was enforced by the Union in 1863. By the end of the war around 50% of eligible Union men and some 75% of Confederate men had been mobilized.

### The tide turns

In both Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, Lincoln found the generals he needed to achieve victory. Superior manpower, greater resources, and the industrial roduction of weapons and other supplies did the rest. The genius of General Lee, however, still had a part to play. Boldly taking the war into Union territory, he advanced toward Pennsylvania, his tactical victories winning a superb victory at Chancellorsville in May 1863. But two months later his offensive was turned back at the fiercely contested three-day Battle of Gettysburg and he was forced to retreat south. On the same day Union forces finally took the city of Vicksburg on thet Mississippi after a length siege, cutting off the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas from the rest of the Confederacy.

The Confederacy was now on the defensive. As the Union naval blockade slowly throttled the economy of the South, the Confederate army was denied extra manpower by Lincoln's decision in April 1864 to end prisoner exchanges between the two sides - to the much greater detriment of the resource-starved South than the North. Any hope that the Confederacy might have had of holding out until the Union wearied of fighting would disappear once and fora ll as Lincoln headed for re-election as president in late 1864.

The character of the war changed, the skirmishes and pitched battles of the first two or so years replaced by a brutal war of attrition that was designed to attack the Confederate economy and intimidate its population. Lincoln and Grant did not seek such a war, preferring to win quickly on thte battlefield, but they were prepared to achieve victory at any cost. They agreed with Sherman, who in 1864 wrote bluntly: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it."

In March 1864, Grant planned to end the war with a giant pincer movement. The Army of the Potomac would head south into Virginia to engage General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and finally capture the Confederate capital, Richmond, while further to the west, SHerman's army would sweep from Tennessee southeast into Georgia.

### The final months

The war in Virginia was bloody and initially inconclusive. Union attacks at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in May 1864 and at Cold Harbor in early June failed to break through Confederate defenses. In June Grant crossed the James River to attack Richmond from the south, but the town of Petersburg lay in his path. There developed a nine-month siege, both sides digging defensive trenches and earthworks. Tied down, the Confederates grew increasingly hungry and demoralized as well-supplied Union reinforcements kept arriving.

In May 1864, Sherman and his troops swept into Georgia, taking Atlanta by the end of August. His troops then cut a 50-mile wide swathe of destruction as they headed east through Georgia. at the coast he headed north to complete the Union encirclement. With the Confederate army now down to barely 60,000 men, Lee decided to withdraw from Petersburg, abandon Richmond, and try to link up with troops still fighting Sherman in North Carolina. But he had left it too late.

On 2 April 1865, Union troops broke through and finally captured Petersburg. A day later Richmond fell at last. Lee managed to withdraw, but was blocked at Appomattox Court House on 8 April. The next day, he surrendered. The Union had been saved, but at huge cost. The economy and towns of the South were in ruins. Some 360,000 Union soldiers were dead and 275,000 wounded. Confederate deaths totaled 258,000, with 100,000 wounded.

## Aftermath

The effect of the US Civil War were felt for years, as the Union struggled to reunite its divided people and pput slavery behind it. On 14 April 1865, five days after the Confederate surrender, Abraham Lincoln attended Ford's Theatre in Washington, where hew as shot in the head with a .44 Derringer pistol by the actor John Wilkes booth, a Confederate sympathizer. Lincoln died the next day.

All US slaves were freed in 1865 when the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 became law as the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 granted them US citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 guaranteed their right to vote.

The defeated Confederate states were occupied by Union troops. "Reconstruction" laws prohibited Confederates from holding public office and required ex-soldiers to pledge allegiance to the Union. Defeated states were allowed to rejoin the Union only after they approved the 14th Amendment. All did so by 1871, but white Southerners manipulated laws to disenfranchise black people again.

In 1864, near the end of the US Civil War, conflict broke out in the west as Native Americans out of the Great Plains fought the US Cavalry to protect their ancestral hunting grounds from encroaching white settlers.

## Politics of the War

### The North

At the start of the Civil War, Northerners were divided in their stances towards slavery, with some backing the Radical Republicans' demand for the immediate abolition of slavery, others backing the Conservative Republicans' proposal of gradually abolishing slavery, and many others backing the Democrats' policy of leaving slavery alone, with the preservation of the Union being the sole cause of the War Democrats' support for the war. These conflicting attitudes were carried over into the armies raised from among the Northern populace during the war, with Radical Republicans claiming that emancipation of slaves was a military necessity, and the Conservative Republicans and War Democrats arguing that the restoration of the Union should be the sole war goal; the Copperheads (or "Peace Democrats") supported a truce and the reconstruction of the nation with guaranteed rights for the South. These debates caried over into military camps, where the overwhelming majority of both officers and privates were citizen-soldiers who were politicians and voters in civilian life, and remained such during the war. This resulted in bitter factionalism among both officers and common men, occasionally leading to fears of a military coup.

At the start of the war, Representative William A. Richardson (D-IL) complained in the House that the government had commissioned four Breckinridge Democrats as generals, while not a single appointment had gone to a Douglas Democrat. The volunteers flocking to the Union cause in the West were mostly Douglas Democrats who wished to be commanded by officers from their own faction. Meanwhile, the *New York Tribune* complained about the Democratic composition of the officers of the Ohio troops, as 12 of the 23 colonels appointed were Democrats, 9 Republicans, one a Know Nothing, and one of unknown persuasions. In the first year of the war, the great majority of generals were Democrats, including 80 of the 110 Brigadier-Generals and four-fifths of all the Brigadier and Major Generals; among thtese Democratic generals were George B. McClellan, Henry Halleck, and Don Carlos Buell. Most West Pointers happened to be Democrats, and these Democrats despised the Republican "political generals" appointed by Lincoln. After 1862, many Democratic officers were removed from command or relegated to unimportant positions, as the Radical Republicans created the Committee on the Conduct of the War to poison Lincoln's mind against Democratic officers. However, a large proportion of Democrats remained among the generals until the end of the war

The loyalty of the Democratic generals was frequently questioned by Radical Republican editors such as Horace Greeley, arguing that the Democrats sympathized with the South and did not want to defeat the Confederacy, and arguing for the removal (and, for some officers, even trial and execution) of every officer who opposed emancipation as an aim of the war. The slavery issue also divided Republican and Democratic officers, and officers who wanted promotion assured Republican politicians that they were abolitionists and emancipationists, as in the case of General John Schofield. Factionalism emerged whenever a general from one party was replaced by another, such as when Democrats grew angry when the Republican Joseph Hooker was their commander, and when Republicans cursed when Hooker was replaced by the Democrat George Meade. Meade was also accused of elevating his Democratic friends to positions of power and keeping Republicans down, with General Albion P. Howe claiming that there was too much Copperheadism in the corps commands of the army, and saying that there were some who had no faith or heart in the war. General Abner Doubleday also claimed that, in the Army of the Potomac, no anti-slavery man or anti-McClellan man could expect decent treatment in the army, and he claimed that pro-slavery cliques controlled the army. In 1863, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical, started a campaign to remove Democratic officers (especially those who opposed the Emancipation Proclamation) from command, causing the Democrats to complain that their freedom of speech was being violated.

The soldiers serving in the armies were individualistic and engaged in campfire criticism of generals and mess-time debates about strategy, leading to the demoralization of the army and the mass estrangement of troops from their generals. McClellan, affectionately known to his men as "Little Mac", was idolized by his soldiers, and his men clamored for his return after John Pope's defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run. After McClellan's removal following the Battle of Antietam, there were rumors of mutiny in the Union Army. Desertions were rife, morale was at a low ebb, and the camps flamed with criticism of Ambrose Burnside's generalship. Morale improved after a reorganization and shake-up in the winter of 1863, resulting in the removal or transfer of some of the McClellan officers. The soldiers in the Western armies also criticized their generals, with officers and privates openly condemning General Buell following his failure to smash Braxton Bragg in the Kentucky campaign of late 1862. Buell's loss of control over his army led to his removal.

The issue of emancipation continued to be debated among the common soldiers, with the men publishing their own boldly partisan newspapers; General Buell suppressed the *Huntsville Reveille* because of its Republicanism. Whole units, companies, brigades, or regiments would be composed of Republicans and commanded by Democrats, or vice versa, leading to irritation and ven open dissension. Republican troops openly voiced their disapproval of slavery even when their officers attempted to silence dissent; abolition sentiment was deeply rooted in the Ohio troops. Many officers and privates refused to abide by Halleck's orders to bar fugitive slaves from his lines. Western soldiers in Arkansas, many of whom were from Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, and Iowa, nearly mutinied after they were ordered to arrest runaway Blacks. Campfire discussions, letters to the press, and formal resolutions adopted by regiments and brigades evidenced the army's political diversity, with Indiana troops in the West passing revolutions denouncing their Copperhead state legislators, and many Democratic officers and privates declaring their refusal to fight alongside Black soldiers after the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863. Some Iowa regiments in Mississippi denounced emancipation as a war aim, and soldiers from southern Illinois (nicknamed "Egypt" for its significant population of escaped slaves, as well as for the Democratic-majority region's Southern sympathies) deserted in large numbers upon hearing of the Emancipation Proclamation. After a Copperhead was elected to the US Senate from New Jersey, certain New Jersey regiments refused to fight any more, as their state professed its opposition to the Republican war aims.

Both the Democratic and Republican Parties worked vigorously to spread their political doctrines among the soldiers, partly to garner soldier votes in electinos, but also in order to have the allegiance of the armies. The parties distributed their propaganda to the armies through the media of newspapers and Congressional documents, with Republicans arguing that West Point Democratic generals tried to prevent the circulation of Republican papers in the camps, while encouraging the men to read Democratic journals. The Republicans also launched a propaganda counteroffensive within the Army of the Potomac, getting more Republican papers into the hands of the men and stopping the circulation of Democratic ones; the government prohibited the sending of "disloyal" journals to thet soldiers. The Republicans were worried about the armies' political compositions due to their insecurity over representing a safe and stable majority of the Northern people, fearing a revolutionary movement to overthrow their power, and growing concerned about a military coup led by McClellan. In September 1862, Senators Lyman Trumbull and grimes formed a contingency plan in the event of a coup by the Democratic Army of the Potomac: they would place a Republican general at the head of the western army, strengthen the size of that army, and hurl the western troops against the eastern army.

### The South

During the Second Party System, American politics was polarized between the Democrats (who supported the traditional Jeffersonian political-economic vision, agrarian interests, a small central government, and *laissez-faire* economics) and the Whigs (who supported economic interventionism, protective tariffs, subsidies for internal improvements, a national bank to make tax revenues available for private investment, and to promote commerce and industry). The rise of the slavery debate in the 1850s led to the collapse of the Whigs, and most Southern Whigs changed their allegiance to the nativist Know Nothings rather than affiliate themselves with the Northern, anti-extensionist Republican Party. The Know Nothings found themselves divided over slavery as well, and, in 1860, conservative former Whigs wishing to prevent Southern secession and pursue compromises between the North and South formed the Constitutional Union Party.

Southern voting patterns in the late 1850s mirrored earlier patterns, with Whig voters from the Upper South being more Unionist than the Whigs of the Deep South; during the secession conventions of 1860-1861, Whig delegates from Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky initially succeeded in preventing the secession of their states. In the Lower South, Whig delegates from Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana were outnumbered by secessionist Democratic delegates. While the South was initially politically polarized between the Whiggish unionists of the Constitutional Union Party and the secessionists of the Democratic Party, these differences disappeared after the Democratic majority banned protective tariffs and federal funding for internal improvements at the Confederate Constitutional Convention, removing the two major issues on which the Whigs were constructed. As a result, the Confederacy was devoid of a party system.

Nevertheless, the Confederate Congress was roughly equally divided between Democrats and Whigs, and partisanship continued in other ways. The Confederacy's exemption of owners of more than ten slaves from the draft led to many Confederate soldiers seeing the Civil War as a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight", while Confederate generals and governors also bickered among themselves as the Confederate government faltered. Many poor whites led an upcountry unionist movement in areas such as western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, North Georgia, northern Alabama, and Arkansas, serving as incubators for the postwar Republican Party and its Southern "Scalawag" supporters. Whigs also formed the core of a proto-party in the Confederacy which was opposed to the Democrat Jefferson Davis' administration. After the war, moderate and nationalist Southern Whigs regrouped as the "Conservative Party" in states such as Virginia and North Carolina, rejecting association with the Democratic Party while also attempting to rebound a conservative Whiggish party in opposition to the pro-Black Republican Party. When the Southern Republican Party proved to be more conducive towards the interests of Black freedmen and Northern "carpetbaggers", most Conservatives joined the Democratic Party from the mid-1870s to 1880s, and pro-business "Bourbon Democrats" would adopt Whiggish economic policies such as modernization, large-scale railroad construction, and founding public schools.