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American Civil War
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WIKIMAG n. 8 - Luglio 2013
American
Civil War
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American Civil War |
A House Divided 1861–1865 |
|
Belligerents |
United
States |
Confederate
States |
Commanders and leaders |
Abraham Lincoln
Edwin M. Stanton
Ulysses S. Grant
William T. Sherman
David Farragut
David D. Porter
and others |
Jefferson Davis
Judah P. Benjamin
Robert E. Lee
Joseph E. Johnston
Raphael Semmes
Josiah Tattnall
and others |
Strength |
2,100,000 |
1,064,000 |
Casualties and losses |
140,414
killed in action[2]
~ 365,000 total dead[2]
275,200 wounded |
72,524 killed in
action[2]
~ 260,000 total dead
137,000+ wounded |
[show]
Theaters
of the American Civil War
|
|
The American Civil War, also known as the War between the
States or simply the Civil War (see
naming), was a
civil
war fought from 1861 to 1865 in the United States after several[3]
Southern
slave states declared their
secession and formed the
Confederate States of America (the "Confederacy" or the "South").
The states that did not declare secession were known as the "Union"
or the "North".
The
war had its origin in the fractious issue of
slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western
territories.[4]
Foreign powers did not intervene. After four years of bloody combat that
left over 600,000 soldiers dead and destroyed much of the South's
infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and
the difficult
Reconstruction process of restoring national unity and guaranteeing
rights to the freed slaves began.
In the
1860 presidential election,
Republicans, led by
Abraham Lincoln, opposed expanding slavery into
United States' territories. Lincoln won, but before
his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slave states with
cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. Outgoing
Democratic President
James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as
illegal.
Lincoln's inaugural address declared his administration would not
initiate civil war. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject
calls for secession. Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts
within territory claimed by the Confederacy. A
Peace Conference failed to find a compromise, and both sides
prepared for war. The Confederates assumed that European countries were
so dependent on "King
Cotton" that they would intervene; none did and none recognized the
new Confederate States of America.
Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired
upon
Fort Sumter, a key fort held by Union troops in South Carolina.
Lincoln called for each state to provide troops to retake the fort;
consequently, four more slave states joined the Confederacy, bringing
their total to eleven. The Union soon controlled the
border states and established a
naval blockade that crippled the southern economy. The Eastern
Theater was inconclusive in 1861–62. The autumn 1862 Confederate
campaign into Maryland (a Union state) ended with Confederate retreat at
the
Battle of Antietam, dissuading British intervention.[5]
Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal.[6]
To the west, by summer 1862 the Union destroyed the Confederate river
navy, then much of their western armies, and the Union
siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi
River. In 1863,
Robert E. Lee's Confederate incursion north ended at the
Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to
Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. In the
Western Theater,
William T. Sherman drove east to capture
Atlanta and
marched to the sea, destroying Confederate infrastructure along the
way. The Union marshaled the resources and manpower to attack the
Confederacy from all directions, and could afford to fight
battles of attrition through the
Overland Campaign towards Richmond, the Confederate capital. The
defending Confederate army failed, leading to Lee's surrender to Grant
at
Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
The American Civil War was one of the earliest true
industrial wars. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, and
mass-produced weapons were employed extensively. The mobilization of
civilian factories, mines, shipyards, banks, transportation and food
supplies all foreshadowed
World War I. It remains the deadliest war in
American history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 750,000
soldiers[7]
and an undetermined number of civilian casualties. Historian
John Huddleston estimates the death toll at ten percent of all
Northern males 20–45 years old, and 30 percent of all Southern white
males aged 18–40.[8]
Causes of
secession
The causes of the Civil War were complex and have been controversial
since the war began. The issue has been further complicated by
historical revisionists, who have tried to offer a variety of
reasons for the war.[9]
Slavery was the central source of escalating political tension in the
1850s. The
Republican Party was determined to prevent any spread of slavery,
and many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican
candidate,
Lincoln, won the
1860 election. After Lincoln had won without carrying a single
Southern state, many Southern whites felt that disunion had become their
only option, because they felt as if they were losing representation,
which hampered their ability to promote pro-slavery acts and policies.[10]
Slavery
The slavery issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery
was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with
Republicanism in the United States, or a state-based property system
protected by the Constitution.[11]
The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was
containment--to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to
gradual extinction.[12]
To the white South, this strategy was perceived as infringing upon their
Constitutional rights.[13]
Slavery was being phased out of existence in the North and was fading in
the
border states and urban areas, but was expanding in highly
profitable cotton districts of the
Deep South.
|
|
|
A New Orleans woman and the child she held
in slavery, 1850
|
|
Man whipped; the guilty overseer was fired.[14][15]
|
Despite compromises in 1820 and 1850, the slavery issues exploded in
the 1850s. Causes include controversy over admitting Missouri as a slave
state in 1820, the
acquisition of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and the status of
slavery in western territories won as a result of the
Mexican–American War and the resulting
Compromise of 1850.[16]
Following the U.S. victory over Mexico, Northerners attempted to exclude
slavery from conquered territories in the
Wilmot Proviso; although it passed the House, it failed in the
Senate. Northern (and British) readers recoiled in anger at the horrors
of slavery as described in the novel and play
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by
abolitionist
Harriet Beecher Stowe.[17]
Irreconcilable disagreements over slavery ended the
Whig and
Know Nothing political parties, and later split the
Democratic Party between North and South, while the new
Republican Party angered slavery interests by demanding an end to
its expansion. Most observers believed that without expansion slavery
would eventually die out; Lincoln argued this in 1845 and
1858.[18]
Meanwhile, the South of the 1850s saw an increasing number of slaves
leave the
border states through sale,
manumission and escape. During this same period, slave-holding
border states had more free African-Americans and European immigrants
than the lower South, which increased Southern fears that slavery was
threatened with rapid extinction in this area.[19]
With tobacco and cotton wearing out the soil, the South believed it
needed to expand slavery.[20]
The Deep South had advocates arguing to reopen the international slave
trade to populate territory that was to be newly opened to slavery.[21]
Southern demands for a slave code to ensure slavery in the territories
repeatedly split the
Democratic Party between North and South by widening margins.[22]
To settle the dispute over slavery expansion, Abolitionists and
proslavery elements sent their partisans into Kansas, both using ballots
and bullets. In the 1850s, a miniature civil war in
Bleeding Kansas led pro-South Presidents
Franklin Pierce and
James Buchanan to attempt a forced admission of Kansas as a slave
state. The 1857 Congressional rejection of the pro-slavery
Lecompton Constitution was the first multi-party solid-North vote,
and that solid vote was anti-slavery to support the democratic majority
voting in the Kansas Territory.[23]
Violence on behalf of Southern honor reached the floor of the Senate
when a Southern Congressmen,
Preston Brooks, physically assaulted Republican Senator
Charles Sumner when he ridiculed prominent slaveholders as pimps for
slavery.[24]
|
|
|
Slaves posed planting sweet potatoes by a
waiting cart
|
|
Slaves returning at sundown after the day
picking cotton
|
The earlier political party structure failed to make accommodation
among sectional differences. Disagreements over slavery caused the
Whig and "Know-Nothing"
parties to collapse. In 1860, the last national political party, the
Democratic Party, split along sectional lines. Anti-slavery
Northerners mobilized in 1860 behind moderate Abraham Lincoln because he
was most likely to carry the doubtful western states. In 1857, the
Supreme Court's
Dred Scott decision ended the Congressional compromise for
Popular Sovereignty in Kansas. According to the court, slavery in the
territories was a property right of any settler, regardless of the
majority there. Chief Justice
Taney's decision said that slaves were "so far inferior that they
had no rights which the white man was bound to respect". The decision
overturned the
Missouri Compromise which banned slavery in territory north of the
36°30' parallel.[25]
Republicans denounced the Dred Scott decision and promised to
overturn it; Abraham Lincoln warned that the next Dred Scott
decision could threaten the Northern states with slavery. The Republican
party platform called slavery "a national evil", and Lincoln believed it
would die a natural death if it were contained.[26]
The Democrat Stephen A. Douglas developed the
Freeport Doctrine to appeal to North and South. Congress could not
decide either for or against slavery before a territory was settled. The
anti-slavery majority in Kansas could stop slavery with its own local
laws if their police laws did not protect slavery introduction.[27]
Most 1850 political battles followed the arguments of Lincoln and
Douglas, focusing on the issue of slavery expansion in the territories.[28]
But political debate was cut short throughout the South with Northern
abolitionist
John Brown's 1859 raid at
Harpers Ferry Armory in an attempt to incite
slave insurrections. The Southern political defense of slavery
transformed into widespread expansion of local militias for armed
defense of their "peculiar" domestic institution.[29]
Lincoln's assessment of the political issue for the 1860 elections was
that, "This question of Slavery was more important than any other;
indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national
question can even get a hearing just at present."[30]
The Republicans gained majorities in both House and Senate for the first
time since Democrats in the 1856 elections, they were to be seated in
numbers which Lincoln might use to govern, a national parliamentary
majority even before pro-slavery House and Senate seats vacated.[31]
Meanwhile, Southern Vice President,
Alexander Stephens, in the
Cornerstone Speech, declared the new confederate "Constitution
has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our
peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper
status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate
cause of the late rupture and present revolution."[32]
Considering the relative weight given to causes of the Civil War by
contemporary actors, historians such as Chandra Manning argue that both
Union and
Confederate fighting soldiers believed slavery to be the cause of
the Civil War. Union men mainly believed the war was to bring
emancipation to the slaves. Confederates fought to protect southern
society, and slavery as an integral part of it.[33]
Addressing the causes,
Eric Foner would relate a historical context with multidimensional
political, social and economic variables. The several causes united in
the moment by a consolidating nationalism. A social movement that was
individualist, egalitarian and perfectionist grew to a political
democratic majority attacking slavery, and slavery's defense in the
Southern pre-industrial traditional society brought the two sides to
war.[34]
Sectionalism
Status of the states, 1861.
States that seceded before April 15, 1861
States that seceded after April 15, 1861
Union states that permitted slavery
Union states that banned slavery
Territories
Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social structure,
customs and political values of the North and South.[35][36]
It increased steadily between 1800 and 1860 as the North, which phased
slavery out of existence, industrialized, urbanized and built prosperous
farms, while the deep South concentrated on plantation agriculture based
on slave labor, together with subsistence farming for the poor whites.
The South expanded into rich new lands in the Southwest (from Alabama to
Texas).[37]
However, slavery declined in the border states and could barely
survive in cities and industrial areas (it was fading out in cities such
as Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis), so a South based on slavery
was rural and non-industrial. On the other hand, as the demand for
cotton grew, the price of slaves soared. Historians have debated whether
economic differences between the industrial Northeast and the
agricultural South helped cause the war. Most historians now disagree
with the
economic determinism of historian
Charles Beard in the 1920s and emphasize that Northern and Southern
economies were largely complementary.[38]
Fears of slave revolts and abolitionist propaganda made the South
militantly hostile to abolitionism.[39][40]
Southerners complained that it was the North that was changing, and was
prone to new "isms", while the South remained true to historic
republican values of the Founding Fathers (many of whom owned
slaves, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison). Lincoln said that
Republicans were following the tradition of the framers of the
Constitution (including the
Northwest Ordinance and the
Missouri Compromise) by preventing expansion of slavery.[41]
The issue of accepting slavery (in the guise of rejecting
slave-owning bishops and missionaries) split the largest religious
denominations (the
Methodist,
Baptist and
Presbyterian churches) into separate Northern and Southern
denominations.[42]
Industrialization meant that seven European immigrants out of eight
settled in the North. The movement of twice as many whites leaving the
South for the North as vice versa contributed to the South's
defensive-aggressive political behavior.[43]
States' rights
Main article:
States' rights
Everyone agreed that states had certain rights—but did those rights
carry over when a citizen left that state? The Southern position was
that citizens of every state had the right to take their property
anywhere in the U.S. and not have it taken away—specifically they could
bring their slaves anywhere and they would remain slaves. Northerners
rejected this "right" because it would violate the right of a free state
to outlaw slavery within its borders. Republicans committed to ending
the expansion of slavery were among those opposed to any such right to
bring slaves and slavery into the free states and territories. The
Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 bolstered the Southern
case within territories, and angered the North.[44]
Secondly, the South argued that each state had the right to
secede—leave the Union—at any time, that the
Constitution was a "compact"
or agreement among the states. Northerners (including President
Buchanan) rejected that notion as opposed to the will of the Founding
Fathers who said they were setting up a "perpetual union".[44]
Historian James McPherson writes concerning states' rights and other
non-slavery explanations:
“ |
While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among
the
Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage
groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them. Of
all these interpretations, the state's-rights argument is
perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, state's
rights for what purpose? State's rights, or sovereignty, was
always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a
certain goal more than a principle.[45] |
” |
Protectionism
New Orleans the largest cotton exporting port for New
England and Great Britain textile mills, shipping
Mississippi River Valley goods from North, South and Border
states.
Historically, southern slave-holding states, because of their low
cost manual labor, had little perceived need for mechanization, and
supported having the right to
sell cotton and purchase manufactured goods from any nation.
Northern states, which had heavily invested in their still-nascent
manufacturing, could not compete with the full-fledged industries of
Europe in offering high prices for cotton imported from the South and
low prices for manufactured exports in return. For this reason, northern
manufacturing interests supported tariffs and protectionism while
southern planters demanded free trade.
The Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote the
tariff laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates so
that the 1857 rates were the lowest since 1816. The South had no
complaints but the low rates angered Northern industrialists and factory
workers, especially in Pennsylvania, who demanded protection for their
growing iron industry. The Whigs and Republicans complained because they
favored high tariffs to stimulate industrial growth, and Republicans
called for an increase in tariffs in the 1860 election. The increases
were finally enacted in 1861 after Southerners resigned their seats in
Congress.[46][47]
Historians in the 1920s emphasized the tariff issue but since the
1950s they have minimized it, noting that few Southerners in 1860–61
said it was of central importance to them. Some secessionist documents
do mention the tariff issue, though not nearly as often as the
preservation of slavery.
Slave power
and free soil
Main article:
Slave Power
Antislavery forces in the North identified the "Slave Power" as a
direct threat to
republican values. They argued that rich slave owners were using
political power to take control of the Presidency, Congress and the
Supreme Court, thus threatening the rights of the citizens of the North.[48]
"Free soil" was a Northern demand that the new lands opening up in
the west be available to independent
yeoman
farmers and not be bought out by rich slave owners who would buy up the
best land and work it with slaves, forcing the white farmers onto
marginal lands. This was the basis of the
Free Soil Party of 1848, and a main theme of the Republican Party.[49]
Free Soilers and Republicans demanded a
homestead law that would give government land to settlers; it was
defeated by Southerners who feared it would attract to the west European
immigrants and poor Southern whites.[50]
Territorial crisis
Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of
territory through purchase, negotiation, and conquest.[51]
Of the states carved out of these territories by 1845, all had entered
the union as slave states: Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida and
Texas, as well as the southern portions of Alabama and Mississippi.[52]
And with the conquest of northern Mexico, including California, in 1848,
slaveholding interests looked forward to the institution flourishing in
these lands as well. Southerners also anticipated garnering slaves and
slave states in Cuba and Central America.[53][54]
Northern free soil interests vigorously sought to curtail any further
expansion of slave soil. It was these territorial disputes that the
proslavery and antislavery forces collided over.[55][56]
The existence of slavery in the southern states was far less
politically polarizing than the explosive question of the territorial
expansion of the institution westward.[57]
Moreover, Americans were informed by two well-established readings of
the Constitution regarding human bondage: first, that the slave states
had complete autonomy over the institution within their boundaries, and
second, that the domestic slave trade – trade among the states – was
immune to federal interference.[58][59]
The only feasible strategy available to attack slavery was to restrict
its expansion into the new territories.[60]
Slaveholding interests fully grasped the danger that this strategy posed
to them.[61][62]
Both the South and the North drew the same conclusion: "The power to
decide the question of slavery for the territories was the power to
determine the future of slavery itself."[63][64]
By 1860, four doctrines had emerged to answer the question of federal
control in the territories, and they all claimed to be sanctioned by the
Constitution, implicitly or explicitly.[65]
Two of the "conservative" doctrines emphasized the written text and
historical precedents of the founding document (specifically, the
Northwest Ordinance and the
Missouri Compromise), while the other two doctrines developed
arguments that transcended the Constitution.[66]
The first of these "conservative" theories, represented by the
Constitutional Union Party, argued that the historical designation
of free and slave apportionments in territories should become a
Constitutional mandate. The
Crittenden Compromise of 1860 was an expression of this view.[67]
The second doctrine of Congressional preeminence, championed by
Abraham Lincoln and the
Republican Party, insisted that the Constitution did not bind
legislators to a policy of balance – that slavery could be excluded
altogether in a territory at the discretion of Congress
[67][68]
– with one caveat: the
due process clause of the Fifth Amendment must apply. In other
words, Congress could restrict human bondage, but never establish it.[66]
The
Wilmot Proviso announced this position in 1846.[67]
Of the two doctrines that rejected federal authority, one was
articulated by northern Democrat of Illinois Senator
Stephen A. Douglas, and the other by southern Democrats Senator
Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and Vice-President
John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky.[66]
Douglas proclaimed the doctrine of territorial or "popular"
sovereignty, which declared that the settlers in a territory had the
same rights as states in the Union to establish or disestablish slavery
– a purely local matter.[66]
Congress, having created the territory, was barred, according to
Douglas, from exercising any authority in domestic matters. To do so
would violate historic traditions of self-government, implicit in the US
Constitution.[69]
The
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine.
The fourth in this quartet is the theory of state sovereignty ("states'
rights"),[69]
also known as the "Calhoun doctrine",[70]
named after the South Carolinian political theorist and statesman
John C. Calhoun.[71]
Rejecting the arguments for federal authority or self-government, state
sovereignty would empower states to promote the expansion of slavery as
part of the Federal Union under the US Constitution – and not merely as
an argument for secession.[72][73]
The basic premise was that all authority regarding matters of slavery in
the territories resided in each state. The role of the federal
government was merely to enable the implementation of state laws when
residents of the states entered the territories.[74]
The Calhoun doctrine asserted that the federal government in the
territories was only the agent of the several sovereign states, and
hence incapable of forbidding the bringing into any territory of
anything that was legal property in any state. State sovereignty, in
other words, gave the laws of the slaveholding states
extra-jurisdictional effect.[75]
"States' rights" was an ideology formulated and applied as a means of
advancing slave state interests through federal authority.[76]
As historian Thomas L. Krannawitter points out, "[T]he Southern demand
for federal slave protection represented a demand for an unprecedented
expansion of federal power."
[77][78]
By 1860, these four doctrines comprised the major ideologies
presented to the American public on the matters of slavery, the
territories and the US Constitution.[79]
National elections
Beginning in the American Revolution and accelerating after the War
of 1812, the people of the United States grew in their sense of country
as an important example to the world of a national republic of political
liberty and personal rights. Previous regional independence movements
such as the Greek revolt in the Ottoman Empire, division and redivision
in the Latin American political map, and the British-French Crimean
triumph leading to an interest in redrawing Europe along cultural
differences, all conspired to make for a time of upheaval and
uncertainty about the basis of the nation-state. In the world of 19th
century self-made Americans, growing in prosperity, population and
expanding westward, "freedom" could mean personal liberty or property
rights. The unresolved difference would cause failure—first in their
political institutions, then in their civil life together.
Nationalism and
honor
Abraham Lincoln
16th U.S. President (1861–1865)
Nationalism was a powerful force in the early 19th century, with
famous spokesmen such as
Andrew Jackson and
Daniel Webster. While practically all Northerners supported the
Union, Southerners were split between those loyal to the entire United
States (called "unionists") and those loyal primarily to the southern
region and then the Confederacy.[80]
C. Vann Woodward said of the latter group, "A great slave
society ... had grown up and miraculously flourished in the heart of a
thoroughly bourgeois and partly puritanical republic. It had renounced
its bourgeois origins and elaborated and painfully rationalized its
institutional, legal, metaphysical, and religious defenses ... When the
crisis came it chose to fight. It proved to be the death struggle of a
society, which went down in ruins."[81]
Perceived insults to Southern collective honor included the enormous
popularity of
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)[82]
and
the actions of abolitionist John Brown in trying to incite a slave
rebellion in 1859.[83]
While the South moved toward a Southern nationalism, leaders in the
North were also becoming more nationally minded, and rejected any notion
of splitting the Union. The Republican national electoral platform of
1860 warned that Republicans regarded disunion as treason and would not
tolerate it: "We denounce those threats of disunion ... as denying the
vital principles of a free government, and as an avowal of contemplated
treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant people sternly
to rebuke and forever silence."[84]
The South ignored the warnings: Southerners did not realize how ardently
the North would fight to hold the Union together.[85]
Lincoln's
election
The election of Lincoln in November 1860 was the final trigger for
secession.[86]
Efforts at compromise, including the "Corwin
Amendment" and the "Crittenden
Compromise", failed. Southern leaders feared that Lincoln would stop
the expansion of slavery and put it on a course toward extinction. The
slave states, which had already become a minority in the House of
Representatives, were now facing a future as a perpetual minority in the
Senate and Electoral College against an increasingly powerful North.
Before Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven slave states had
declared their secession and joined to form the Confederacy.
Secession
and war begins
Resolves
and developments
Secession
of South Carolina
South Carolina did more to advance nullification and secession than
any other Southern state. South Carolina adopted the "Declaration
of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South
Carolina from the Federal Union" on December 24, 1860. It argued for
states' rights for slave owners in the South, but contained a complaint
about states' rights in the North in the form of opposition to the
Fugitive Slave Act, claiming that Northern states were not
fulfilling their federal obligations under the Constitution. All the
alleged violations of the rights of Southern states were related to
slavery.
Secession winter
Before Lincoln took office, seven states had declared their secession
from the Union. They established a Southern government, the Confederate
States of America on February 4, 1861.[87]
They took control of federal forts and other properties within their
boundaries with little resistance from outgoing President
James Buchanan, whose term ended on March 4, 1861. Buchanan said
that the
Dred Scott decision was proof that the South had no reason for
secession, and that the Union "was intended to be perpetual", but that
"the power by force of arms to compel a State to remain in the Union"
was not among the "enumerated powers granted to Congress".[88]
One quarter of the U.S. Army—the entire garrison in Texas—was
surrendered in February 1861 to state forces by its commanding general,
David E. Twiggs, who then joined the Confederacy.
As Southerners resigned their seats in the Senate and the House,
Republicans were able to pass bills for projects that had been blocked
by Southern Senators before the war, including the
Morrill Tariff, land grant colleges (the
Morill Act), a
Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad (the
Pacific Railway Acts), the
National Banking Act and the authorization of
United States Notes by the Legal Tender Act of 1862. The
Revenue Act of 1861 introduced the
income tax to help finance the war.
States align
Confederate states
Seven
Deep South cotton states seceded by February 1861, starting with
South Carolina,
Mississippi,
Florida,
Alabama,
Georgia,
Louisiana, and
Texas.
These seven states formed the Confederate States of America (February 4,
1861), with
Jefferson Davis as president, and a
governmental structure closely modeled on the
U.S. Constitution.
Following the
attack on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for a volunteer army
from each state. Within two months, an additional four Southern slave
states declared their secession and joined the Confederacy:
Virginia,
Arkansas,
North Carolina and
Tennessee. The northwestern portion of Virginia subsequently seceded
from Virginia, joining the Union as the new state of
West Virginia on June 20, 1863. By the end of 1861,
Missouri and
Kentucky were effectively under Union control, with Confederate
state governments in exile.
Among the ordinances of secession passed by the individual states,
those of three – Texas, Alabama, and Virginia – specifically mentioned
the plight of the 'slaveholding states' at the hands of northern
abolitionists. The rest make no mention of the slavery issue, and are
often brief announcements of the dissolution of ties by the
legislatures,[89]
however at least four states – South Carolina,[90]
Mississippi,[91]
Georgia,[92]
and Texas[93]
– also passed lengthy and detailed explanations of their causes for
secession, all of which laid the blame squarely on the influence over
the northern states of the movement to abolish slavery, something
regarded as a Constitutional right by the slaveholding states.[94]
Union states
Twenty-three states remained loyal to the Union:
California,
Connecticut,
Delaware,
Illinois,
Indiana,
Iowa,
Kansas,
Kentucky,
Maine,
Maryland,
Massachusetts,
Michigan,
Minnesota,
Missouri,
New Hampshire,
New
Jersey, New York,
Ohio,
Oregon,
Pennsylvania,
Rhode Island,
Vermont,
and
Wisconsin. During the war,
Nevada
and
West Virginia joined as new states of the Union.
Tennessee and
Louisiana were returned to Union military control early in the war.
The territories of
Colorado,
Dakota,
Nebraska,
Nevada,
New Mexico,
Utah, and
Washington fought on the Union side. Several
slave-holding Native American tribes supported the Confederacy,
giving the
Indian Territory (now
Oklahoma) a small, bloody civil war.[95][96][97]
Border states
The border states in the Union were
West Virginia (which separated from Virginia and became a new
state), and four of the five northernmost slave states (Maryland,
Delaware,
Missouri, and
Kentucky).
Maryland had numerous pro-Confederate officials who tolerated
anti-Union
rioting in Baltimore and the burning of bridges. Lincoln responded
with
martial law and sent in militia units from the North.[98]
Before the Confederate government realized what was happening, Lincoln
had seized firm control of Maryland and the District of Columbia, by
arresting all the prominent secessionists and holding them without trial
(they were later released).
The
Union: blue, yellow ( slave);
The
Confederacy: brown
*territories in light shades; control of Confederate
territories disputed
In Missouri, an
elected convention on secession voted decisively to remain within
the Union. When pro-Confederate Governor
Claiborne F. Jackson called out the state militia, it was attacked
by federal forces under General
Nathaniel Lyon, who chased the governor and the rest of the State
Guard to the southwestern corner of the state. (See also:
Missouri secession). In the resulting vacuum, the convention on
secession reconvened and took power as the Unionist provisional
government of Missouri.[99]
Kentucky did not secede; for a time, it declared itself neutral. When
Confederate forces entered the state in September 1861, neutrality ended
and the state reaffirmed its Union status, while trying to maintain
slavery. During a brief invasion by Confederate forces, Confederate
sympathizers organized a secession convention, inaugurated a governor,
and gained recognition from the Confederacy. The rebel government soon
went into exile and never controlled Kentucky.[100]
After Virginia's secession, a Unionist government in
Wheeling asked 48 counties to vote on an ordinance to create a new
state on October 24, 1861. A voter turnout of 34% approved the statehood
bill (96% approving).[101]
The inclusion of 24 secessionist counties[102]
in the state and the ensuing guerrilla war[103]
engaged about 40,000 Federal troops for much of the war.[104]
Congress admitted
West Virginia to the Union on June 20, 1863. West Virginia provided
about 20,000–22,000 soldiers to both the Confederacy and the Union.[105]
A Unionist secession attempt occurred in
East Tennessee, but was suppressed by the Confederacy, which
arrested over 3,000 men suspected of being loyal to the Union. They were
held without trial.[106]
Beginning the war
Lincoln's victory in the
presidential election of 1860 triggered South Carolina's declaration
of secession from the Union in December, and six more states did so by
February 1861. A pre-war February
Peace Conference of 1861 met in Washington, Lincoln sneaking into
town to stay in the Conference's hotel its last three days. The attempt
failed at resolving the crisis, but the remaining eight slave states
rejected pleas to join the Confederacy following a two-to-one no-vote in
Virginia's First Secessionist Convention on April 4, 1861.[107]
Lincoln's policy
Since December, secessionists with and without state forces seized
Federal Court Houses, U.S. Treasury mints and post offices. Southern
governors ordered militia mobilization, seized most of the federal forts
and cannon within their boundaries and U.S. armories of infantry
weapons. The governors in big-state Republican strongholds of
Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania quietly began buying weapons
and training militia units themselves.[108]
President Buchanan protested seizure of Federal property, but made no
military response apart from a failed attempt to resupply Fort Sumter
using the ship
Star of the West, which was fired upon by South Carolina forces
and turned back before it reached the fort.[107]
Merchant
Star of the West intended to resupply Ft. Sumter.
Lincoln's policy to hold federal property was unlike
Buchanan's
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President. In his
inaugural address, he argued that the Constitution was a
more perfect union than the earlier
Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, that it was a binding
contract, and called any secession "legally void".[109]
He had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did he intend to end
slavery where it existed, but that he would use force to maintain
possession of federal property. The government would make no move to
recover post offices, and if resisted, mail delivery would end at state
lines. Where popular conditions did not allow peaceful enforcement of
Federal law, U.S. Marshals and Judges would be withdrawn. No mention was
made of bullion lost from U.S. mints in Louisiana, Georgia and North
Carolina. In Lincoln's Inaugural, U.S. policy would only collect import
duties at its ports, there could be no serious injury to justify
revolution in the politics of four years. His speech closed with a plea
for restoration of the bonds of union.[110]
The South sent delegations to Washington and offered to pay for the
federal properties and enter into a peace treaty with the United States.
Lincoln rejected any negotiations with Confederate agents because he
claimed the Confederacy was not a legitimate government, and that making
any treaty with it would be tantamount to recognition of it as a
sovereign government.[111]
Secretary of State
William Seward who at that time saw himself as the real governor or
"prime minister" behind the throne of the inexperienced Lincoln, engaged
in unauthorized and indirect negotiations that failed.[111]
President Lincoln was determined to hold all remaining Union-occupied
forts in the Confederacy,
Fort Monroe in Virginia, in Florida,
Fort Pickens,
Fort Jefferson, and
Fort Taylor, and in the city first passing state Resolves for
Secession, Charleston, South Carolina's
Fort Sumter.[112]
Battle of Fort
Sumter
Mass meeting April 20, 1861 to support the Government at
Washington's equestrian statue in
Union Square NYC
Ft. Sumter was located in the middle of the harbor of
Charleston, SC where the U.S. forts garrison had withdrawn to avoid
incidents with local militias in the streets of the city. Unlike
Buchanan who allowed commanders to relinquish possession to avoid
bloodshed, Lincoln required Maj. Anderson to hold on until fired upon.
Jefferson Davis ordered the surrender of the fort. Anderson gave a
conditional reply which the Confederate government rejected, and Davis
ordered
P. G. T. Beauregard to attack the fort before a relief expedition
could arrive. Troops under Beauregard bombarded Fort Sumter on April
12–13, forcing its capitulation. On April 15, Lincoln's Secretary of War
then called on Governors for
75,000 volunteers to recapture the fort and other federal property.[113]
Northerners rallied behind Lincoln's call for all the states to send
troops to recapture the forts and to preserve the Union,[114]
citing presidential powers given by the
Militia Acts of 1792. With the scale of the rebellion apparently
small so far, Lincoln called for
75,000 volunteers for 90 days.[115]
Several Northern governors began to move forces the next day, and
Secessionists seized
Liberty Arsenal in
Liberty, Missouri the next week.[108]
Two weeks later, on May 3, 1861, Lincoln called for an additional 42,034
volunteers for a period of three years.[116]
Four states in the middle and upper South had repeatedly rejected
Confederate overtures, but now
Virginia,
Tennessee,
Arkansas, and
North Carolina refused to send forces against their neighbors,
declared their secession, and joined the Confederacy. To reward
Virginia, the Confederate capital was moved to
Richmond.[117]
The War
The Civil War was a contest marked by the ferocity and frequency of
battle. Over four years, 237 named battles were fought, and many more
minor actions and skirmishes. In the scales of world military history,
both sides fighting were characterized by their bitter intensity and
high casualties. "The American Civil War was to prove one of the most
ferocious wars ever fought". Without geographic objectives, the only
target for each side was the enemy's soldier.[118]
Mobilization
As the first seven states began organizing a Confederacy in
Montgomery, the entire US army numbered 16,000, however Northern
governors had begun to mobilize their militias.[119]
The Confederate Congress authorized the new nation up to 100,000 troops
sent by governors as early as February in the opinion of historian E.
Merton Coulter. After Fort Sumter, Lincoln called out
75,000 three-month volunteers, by May Jefferson Davis was pushing
for 100,000 men under arms for one year or the duration, and that was
answered in kind by the U.S. Congress.[120]
In the first year of the war, both sides had far more volunteers than
they could effectively train and equip. After the initial enthusiasm
faded, reliance on the cohort of young men who came of age every year
and wanted to join was not enough. Both sides used a draft law—conscription—as
a device to encourage or force volunteering; relatively few were
actually drafted and served. The Confederacy passed a draft law in April
1862 for young men aged 18 to 35; overseers of slaves, government
officials, and clergymen were exempt.[121]
The U.S. Congress followed in July, authorizing a militia draft within a
state when it could not meet its quota with volunteers. European
immigrants joined the
Union Army in large numbers, including 177,000 born in Germany and
144,000 born in Ireland.[122]
|
|
|
Numbers could not be had without conscription. Here
Union soldiers before Marye's Heights,
Second Fredericksburg
|
|
Confederate losses were not replaced easily. Here
Rebel dead overrun at Marye's Heights, reoccupied
next day May 4, 1863
|
When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in January 1863,
ex-slaves were energetically recruited by the states, and used to meet
the state quotas. States and local communities offered higher and higher
cash bonuses for white volunteers. Congress tightened the law in March
1863. Men selected in the draft could provide substitutes or, until
mid-1864, pay commutation money. Many eligibles pooled their money to
cover the cost of anyone drafted. Families used the substitute provision
to select which man should go into the army and which should stay home.
There was much evasion and overt resistance to the draft, especially in
Catholic areas. The great
draft riot in New York City in July 1863 involved Irish immigrants
who had been signed up as citizens to swell the machine vote, not
realizing it made them liable for the draft.[123]
Of the 168,649 men procured for the Union through the draft, 117,986
were substitutes, leaving only 50,663 who had their personal services
conscripted.[124]
North and South, the draft laws were highly unpopular. An estimated
120,000 men evaded conscription in the North, many of them fleeing to
Canada, and another 280,000 Northern soldiers deserted during the war,[125][126]
along with at least 100,000 Southerners, or about 10% all together.[127]
However, desertion was a very common event in the 19th century; in the
peacetime Army about 15% of the soldiers deserted every year.[128]
In the South, many men deserted temporarily to take care of their
families,[129]
then returned to their units.[130]
In the North, "bounty jumpers" enlisted to get the generous bonus,
deserted, then went back to a second recruiting station under a
different name to sign up again for a second bonus; 141 were caught and
executed.[131]
By 1865, the soldiers of the Union and Confederacy had grown to be
the "largest and most efficient armies in the world". European observers
dismissed them as amateur and unprofessional, but a modern military
historian's assessment is that each outmatched the French, Prussian and
Russian armies of the time, and but for the Atlantic, would have
threatened any of them with defeat.[132]
Motivation
Perman and Taylor (2010) say that historians are of two minds on why
millions of men seemed so eager to fight, suffer and die over four
years:
- ”Some historians emphasize that Civil War soldiers were driven
by political ideology, holding firm beliefs about the importance of
liberty, Union, or state rights, or about the need to protect or to
destroy slavery. Others point to less overtly political reasons to
fight, such as the defense of one's home and family, or the honor
and brotherhood to be preserved when fighting alongside other men.
Most historians agree that, that no matter what a soldier thought
about when he went into the war, the experience of combat affected
him profoundly and sometimes altered his reasons for continuing the
fight.”[133]
Naval war
The small U.S. Navy of 1861 was rapidly enlarged to 6,000 officers
and 45,000 men in 1865, with 671 vessels, having a tonnage of 510,396.[134][135]
Its mission was to blockade Confederate ports, take control of the river
system, defend against Confederate raiders on the high seas, and be
ready for a possible war with the British Royal Navy.[136]
Meanwhile, the main riverine war was fought in the West, where a series
of major rivers gave access to the Confederate heartland, if the U.S.
Navy could take control. In the East, the Navy supplied and moved army
forces about, and occasionally shelled Confederate installations.
Union blockade
General Scott's " Anaconda
Plan" 1861. Tightening naval blockade, rebels out of
Missouri along Mississippi River, Kentucky Unionists sit on
the fence, idled cotton industry illustrated in Georgia
By early 1861, General
Winfield Scott had devised the
Anaconda Plan to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible.[137]
Scott argued that a Union blockade of the main ports would weaken the
Confederate economy. Lincoln adopted parts of the plan, but he overruled
Scott's caution about 90-day volunteers. Public opinion however demanded
an immediate attack by the army to capture Richmond.[138]
In April 1861, Lincoln announced the Union blockade of all Southern
ports; commercial ships could not get insurance and regular traffic
ended. The South blundered in embargoing cotton exports in 1861 before
the blockade was effective; by the time they realized the mistake it was
too late. "King Cotton" was dead, as the South could export less than
10% of its cotton. The blockade shut down the ten Confederate seaports
with railheads that moved almost all the cotton, especially New Orleans,
Mobile, and Charleston. By June 1861, warships were stationed off the
principal Southern ports, and a year later nearly 300 ships were in
service.[139]
Confederate countermeasures
The Confederacy responded to the blockade by building or converting
more than 130 vessels, including twenty-six ironclads and floating
batteries. Only half of these saw active service. Many were equipped
with ram bows, creating "ram fever" among Union squadrons wherever they
threatened. But in the face of overwhelming Union superiority, they were
unsuccessful.[140]
The Confederacy experimented with a submarine, but it did not work
well,[141]
and with building an ironclad ship, the
CSS Virginia based on rebuilding a sunken Union ship the
Merrimac. On its first foray on March 8, 1862, the Virginia
decimated the Union's wooden fleet, but the next day the first Union
ironclad the
USS Monitor showed up to challenge it. The
Battle of the Ironclads was a draw, but it marks the worldwide
transition to ironclad warships. The Confederacy lost the Virginia
when the ship was scuttled to prevent capture, and the Union built many
copies of the Monitor. Lacking the technology to build effective
warships, the Confederacy attempted to obtain warships from Britain.
Blockade runners
British investors built small, very fast, steam-driven
blockade runners that traded arms and luxuries brought in from
Britain through Bermuda, Cuba, and the Bahamas in return for high-priced
cotton. The ships were so small that only a small amount of cotton went
out. When the Union Navy seized a blockade runner, the ship and cargo
were condemned as a
Prize of war and sold with the proceeds given to the Navy sailors;
the captured crewmen were mostly British and they were simply released.[142]
The Southern economy nearly collapsed during the war. There were
multiple reasons for the severe deterioration of food supplies,
especially in cities, the failure of Southern railroads, the loss of
control of the main rivers, foraging by Northern armies, and the seizure
of animals and crops by Confederate armies. Historians agree that the
blockade was a major factor in ruining the Confederate economy. However,
Wise argues that they provided just enough of a lifeline to allow Lee to
continue fighting for additional months, thanks to fresh supplies of
400,000 rifles, lead, blankets, and boots that the homefront economy
could no longer supply.[143]
Gunline of nine Union ironclads.
South Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Charleston.
Continuous blockade of all major ports was sustained by
North's overwhelming war production
Economic impact
Surdam argues that the blockade was a powerful weapon that eventually
ruined the Southern economy, at the cost of very few lives in combat.
Practically, the entire Confederate cotton crop was useless (although
was sold to Union traders), costing the Confederacy its main source of
income. Critical imports were very scarce and the coastal trade was
largely ended as well[144]
The measure of the blockade's success was not the few ships that slipped
through, but the thousands that never tried it. Merchant ships owned in
Europe could not get insurance and were too slow to evade the blockade;
they simply stopped calling at Confederate ports.[145]
To fight an offensive war the Confederacy purchased ships from
Britain, converted them to warships, and raided American merchants ships
in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Insurance rates skyrocketed and the
American flag virtually disappeared from international waters. However,
the same ships were reflagged with European flags and continued
unmolested.[146]
After the war, the U.S. demanded that Britain pay for the damage done,
and Britain paid the U.S. $15 million in 1871.[147]
Rivers
The 1862 Union strategy called for simultaneous advances along four
axes. McClellan would lead the main thrust in Virginia towards Richmond.
Ohio forces were to advance through Kentucky into Tennessee, the
Missouri Department would drive south along the Mississippi River, and
the westernmost attack would originate from Kansas.[148]
Clashes on the rivers were melees of ironclads,
cottonclads gunboats and rams, complicated by torpedoes and
fire rafts
Ulysses Grant used river transport and
Andrew Foote's gunboats of the Western Flotilla to threaten the
Confederacy's "Gilbraltar of the West" at Columbus, Kentucky. Grant was
rebuffed at Belmont, but cut off Columbus. The Confederates, lacking
their own gunboats, were forced to retreat and the Union took control of
western Kentucky in March 1862.[149]
In addition to ocean-going warships coming up the Mississippi, the
Union Navy used timberclads, tinclads, and armored gunboats. Shipyards
at Cairo, Illinois, and St. Louis built new boats or modified steamboats
for action.[150]
They took control of the Red, Tennessee, Cumberland, Mississippi, and
Ohio rivers after victories at
Fort Henry and
Fort Donelson, and supplied Grant's forces as he moved into
Tennessee. At
Shiloh, (Pittsburg Landing) in Tennessee in April 1862, the
Confederate made a surprise attack that pushed Union forces against the
river as night fell. Overnight, the Navy landed additional
reinforcements, and Grant counter-attacked. Grant and the Union won a
decisive victory – the first battle with the high casualty rates that
would repeat over and over.[151]
Memphis fell to Union forces and became a key base for further
advances south along the Mississippi River. In April 1862, US Naval
forces under Farragut ran past Confederate defenses south of New
Orleans. Confederates abandoned the city, which gave the Union a
critical anchor in the deep South.[152]
Naval forces assisted Grant in his long, complex campaign that resulted
in the surrender of Vicksburg in July 1863, and full Union control of
the Mississippi soon after.[153]
Eastern theater
Because of the fierce resistance of a few initial Confederate forces
at
Manassas, Virginia, in July 1861, a march by Union troops under the
command of
Maj. Gen.
Irvin McDowell on the Confederate forces there was halted in the
First Battle of Bull Run, or First Manassas,[154]
McDowell's troops were forced back to Washington, D.C., by the
Confederates under the command of Generals
Joseph E. Johnston and
P. G. T. Beauregard. It was in this battle that Confederate General
Thomas Jackson received the nickname of "Stonewall" because he stood
like a stone wall against Union troops.[155]
|
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The
Battle of Antietam, the Civil War's deadliest
one-day fight. Union troops committed piecemeal had
little effect
|
|
Confederate ironclads at
Norfolk and New Orleans dispersed blockade,
until Union ironclads could defeat them
|
Alarmed at the loss, and in an attempt to prevent more slave states
from leaving the Union, the
U.S. Congress passed the
Crittenden-Johnson Resolution on July 25 of that year, which stated
that the war was being fought to preserve the Union and not to end
slavery.
Maj. Gen.
George B. McClellan took command of the Union
Army of the Potomac on July 26 (he was briefly general-in-chief of
all the Union armies, but was subsequently relieved of that post in
favor of Maj. Gen.
Henry W. Halleck), and the war began in earnest in 1862. Upon the
strong urging of President Lincoln to begin offensive operations,
McClellan attacked Virginia in the spring of 1862 by way of the
peninsula between the
York River and
James River, southeast of Richmond. Although McClellan's army
reached the gates of Richmond in the
Peninsula Campaign,[156][157][158]
Johnston halted his advance at the
Battle of Seven Pines, then General
Robert E. Lee and top subordinates
James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson[159]
defeated McClellan in the
Seven Days Battles and forced his retreat. The
Northern Virginia Campaign, which included the
Second Battle of Bull Run, ended in yet another victory for the
South.[160]
McClellan resisted General-in-Chief Halleck's orders to send
reinforcements to
John Pope's Union
Army of Virginia, which made it easier for Lee's Confederates to
defeat twice the number of combined enemy troops.
Emboldened by Second Bull Run, the Confederacy made its first
invasion of the North. General Lee led 45,000 men of the
Army of Northern Virginia across the
Potomac River into Maryland on September 5. Lincoln then restored
Pope's troops to McClellan. McClellan and Lee fought at the
Battle of Antietam[159]
near
Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single
day in United States military history.[161]
Lee's army, checked at last, returned to Virginia before McClellan could
destroy it. Antietam is considered a Union victory because it halted
Lee's invasion of the North and provided an opportunity for Lincoln to
announce his
Emancipation Proclamation.[162]
When the cautious McClellan failed to follow up on Antietam, he was
replaced by Maj. Gen.
Ambrose Burnside. Burnside was soon defeated at the
Battle of Fredericksburg[163]
on December 13, 1862, when over 12,000 Union soldiers were killed or
wounded during repeated futile frontal assaults against Marye's Heights.
After the battle, Burnside was replaced by Maj. Gen.
Joseph Hooker.
Hooker, too, proved unable to defeat Lee's army; despite outnumbering
the Confederates by more than two to one, he was humiliated in the
Battle of Chancellorsville[164]
in May 1863. Gen. Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men
during the battle and subsequently died of complications. Gen. Hooker
was replaced by Maj. Gen.
George Meade during Lee's second invasion of the North, in June.
Meade defeated Lee at the
Battle of Gettysburg[165]
(July 1 to July 3, 1863). This was the bloodiest battle of the war, and
has been called the war's
turning point.
Pickett's Charge on July 3 is often considered the
high-water mark of the Confederacy because it signaled the collapse
of serious Confederate threats of victory. Lee's army suffered 28,000
casualties (versus Meade's 23,000).[166]
However, Lincoln was angry that Meade failed to intercept Lee's retreat,
and after Meade's inconclusive fall campaign, Lincoln turned to the
Western Theater for new leadership. At the same time, the Confederate
stronghold of Vicksburg surrendered, giving the Union control of the
Mississippi River, permanently isolating the western Confederacy, and
producing the new leader Lincoln needed,
Ulysses S. Grant.
Western theater
While the Confederate forces had numerous successes in the Eastern
Theater, they were defeated many times in the West. They were driven
from Missouri early in the war as a result of the
Battle of Pea Ridge.[167]
Leonidas Polk's invasion of
Columbus, Kentucky ended Kentucky's policy of neutrality and turned
that state against the Confederacy.
Nashville and central
Tennessee fell to the Union early in 1862, leading to attrition of
local food supplies and livestock and a breakdown in social
organization.
|
|
|
The
Battle of Chickamauga, the highest two-day
losses. Confederate victory held off Union offensive
for two months.
|
|
New Orleans captured. Union ironclads forced
passage, sank Confederate fleet, destroyed
batteries, held docks for Army.
|
The
Mississippi was opened to Union traffic to the southern border of
Tennessee with the taking of
Island No. 10 and
New Madrid, Missouri, and then
Memphis, Tennessee. In April 1862, the
Union Navy captured New Orleans,[168]
which allowed Union forces to begin moving up the Mississippi. Only the
fortress city of
Vicksburg, Mississippi, prevented Union control of the entire river.
General
Braxton Bragg's second Confederate invasion of Kentucky ended with a
meaningless victory over Maj. Gen.
Don Carlos Buell at the
Battle of Perryville,[169]
although Bragg was forced to end his attempt at invading Kentucky and
retreat due to lack of support for the Confederacy in that state. Bragg
was narrowly defeated by Maj. Gen.
William Rosecrans at the
Battle of Stones River[170]
in
Tennessee.
The one clear Confederate victory in the West was the
Battle of Chickamauga. Bragg, reinforced by Lt. Gen.
James Longstreet's corps (from Lee's army in the east), defeated
Rosecrans, despite the heroic defensive stand of Maj. Gen.
George Henry Thomas. Rosecrans retreated to
Chattanooga, which Bragg then besieged.
The Union's key strategist and tactician in the West was
Ulysses S. Grant, who won victories at Forts
Henry and
Donelson (by which the Union seized control of the
Tennessee and
Cumberland Rivers);
the Battle of Shiloh;[171]
and the
Battle of Vicksburg,[172]
which cemented Union control of the Mississippi River and is considered
one of the
turning points of the war. Grant marched to the relief of Rosecrans
and defeated Bragg at the
Third Battle of Chattanooga,[173]
driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee and opening a route to
Atlanta and the heart of the Confederacy.
Trans-Mississippi
|
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|
Quantrill's Raid captured a hotel in free-state
Kansas for a day in a town of 2,000, burned 185
buildings, killed 182 men and boys[175]
|
|
Nathaniel Lyon secured St. Louis docks and
arsenal, led Union forces to expel Missouri
Confederate forces and government[174]
|
Extensive
Guerrilla warfare characterized the trans-Mississippi region, as the
Confederacy lacked the troops and the logistics to support regular
armies that could challenge Union control.[176]
Roving Confederate bands such as
Quantrill's Raiders terrorized the countryside, striking both
military installations and civilian settlements.[177]
The "Sons of Liberty" and "Order of the American Knights" attacked
pro-Union people, elected officeholders, and unarmed uniformed soldiers.
These partisans could not be entirely driven out of the state of
Missouri until an entire regular Union infantry division was engaged.
By 1864, these violent activities harmed the nationwide anti-war
movement organizing against the re-election of Lincoln. Missouri not
only stayed in the Union, Lincoln took 70 percent of the vote for
re-election.[178]
Areas south and west of Missouri saw numerous small-scale military
actions which sought to control
Indian Territory and
New Mexico Territory for the Union. Confederate incursions into New
Mexico were repulsed in 1862, the exiled Arizona government withdrew
into Texas. In the Indian Territory, civil war broke out inside the
tribes. About 12,000 Indian warriors fought for the Confederacy, and
smaller numbers for the Union.[179]
The most prominent Cherokee was Brigadier General
Stand Watie, the last Confederate general to surrender.[180]
After the fall of
Vicksburg in July 1863, General
Kirby Smith in Texas was informed by Jefferson Davis that he could
expect no further help from east of the Mississippi River. Although he
lacked resources to beat Union armies, he built up a formidable arsenal
at Tyler, along with his own Kirby Smithdom economy, a virtual
"independent fiefdom" in Texas, including railroad construction and
international smuggling. The Union in turn did not directly engage him.[181]
Its 1864
Red River Campaign to take Shreveport, Louisiana was a failure and
Texas remained in Confederate hands throughout the war.
End of war
Conquest of
Virginia
At the beginning of 1864, Lincoln made Grant commander of all Union
armies. Grant made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, and
put Maj. Gen.
William Tecumseh Sherman in command of most of the western armies.
Grant understood the concept of
total
war and believed, along with Lincoln and Sherman, that only the
utter defeat of Confederate forces and their economic base would end the
war.[182]
This was total war not in terms of killing civilians but rather in terms
of destroying homes, farms, and railroads. Grant devised a coordinated
strategy that would strike at the entire Confederacy from multiple
directions. Generals
George Meade and
Benjamin Butler were ordered to move against Lee near Richmond,
General
Franz Sigel (and later
Philip Sheridan) were to
attack the Shenandoah Valley, General Sherman was to capture
Atlanta
and march to the sea (the Atlantic Ocean), Generals
George Crook and
William W. Averell were to operate against railroad supply lines in
West Virginia, and Maj. Gen.
Nathaniel P. Banks was to capture
Mobile, Alabama.
Union forces in the East attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought
several battles during that phase ("Grant's
Overland Campaign") of the Eastern campaign. Grant's
battles of attrition at the
Wilderness,
Spotsylvania, and
Cold Harbor[183]
resulted in heavy Union losses, but forced Lee's Confederates to fall
back repeatedly. An attempt to outflank Lee from the south failed under
Butler, who was trapped inside the
Bermuda Hundred river bend. Grant was tenacious and, despite
astonishing losses (over 65,000 casualties in seven weeks),[184]
kept pressing Lee's Army of Northern Virginia back to Richmond. He
pinned down the Confederate army in the
Siege of Petersburg, where the two armies engaged in
trench warfare for over nine months.
Grant finally found a commander, General
Philip Sheridan, aggressive enough to prevail in the
Valley Campaigns of 1864. Sheridan was initially repelled at the
Battle of New Market by former U.S. Vice President and Confederate
Gen.
John C. Breckinridge. The Battle of New Market would prove to be the
Confederacy's last major victory of the war. After redoubling his
efforts, Sheridan defeated Maj. Gen.
Jubal A. Early in a series of battles, including a final decisive
defeat at the
Battle of Cedar Creek. Sheridan then proceeded to destroy the
agricultural base of the
Shenandoah Valley,[185]
a strategy similar to the tactics Sherman later employed in Georgia.
Meanwhile, Sherman maneuvered from Chattanooga to Atlanta, defeating
Confederate Generals
Joseph E. Johnston and
John Bell Hood along the way. The
fall of Atlanta on September 2, 1864, guaranteed the reelection of
Lincoln as president.[186]
Hood left the Atlanta area to swing around and menace Sherman's supply
lines and invade Tennessee in the
Franklin-Nashville Campaign.[187]
Union Maj. Gen.
John Schofield defeated Hood at the
Battle of Franklin, and
George H. Thomas dealt Hood a massive defeat at the
Battle of Nashville, effectively destroying Hood's army.
Leaving Atlanta, and his base of supplies, Sherman's army marched
with an unknown destination, laying waste to about 20% of the farms in
Georgia in his "March
to the Sea". He reached the Atlantic Ocean at
Savannah, Georgia in December 1864. Sherman's army was followed by
thousands of freed slaves; there were no major battles along the March.
Sherman turned north through South Carolina and North Carolina to
approach the Confederate Virginia lines from the south,[188]
increasing the pressure on Lee's army.
Lee's army, thinned by desertion and casualties, was now much smaller
than Grant's. Union forces won a decisive victory at the
Battle of Five Forks on April 1, forcing Lee to evacuate Petersburg
and Richmond. The Confederate capital fell[189]
to the
Union XXV Corps, composed of black troops. The remaining Confederate
units fled west and after a defeat at
Sayler's Creek, it became clear to Robert E. Lee that continued
fighting against the United States was both tactically and logistically
impossible.
Confederacy
surrenders
Map of Confederate territory losses year by year
Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at
the
McLean House in the
village of Appomattox Court House.[190]
In an untraditional gesture and as a sign of Grant's respect and
anticipation of peacefully restoring Confederate states to the Union,
Lee was permitted to keep his sword and his horse,
Traveller. On April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was
shot by
John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer. Lincoln died early the
next morning, and
Andrew Johnson became president. Meanwhile, Confederate forces
across the South surrendered as news of Lee's surrender reached them.[191]
President Johnson officially declared a virtual end to the insurrection
on May 9, 1865.[1]
On June 23, 1865, Cherokee leader
Stand Watie was the last Confederate General to surrender his
forces.[192]
Diplomacy
Europe in the 1860s was more fragmented than it had been since before
the American Revolution. France was in a weakened state while Britain
was still shocked by their poor performance in the
Crimean War.[193]
France was unable or unwilling to support either side without Britain,
where popular support remained with the Union though elite opinion was
more varied. They were further distracted by Germany and Italy, who were
experiencing unification troubles, and by Russia, who was almost
unflinching in their support for the Union.[193][194]
Though the Confederacy hoped that Britain and France would join them
against the Union, this was never likely, and so they instead tried to
bring Britain and France in as mediators.[193][194]
The Union, under Lincoln and Secretary of State
William H. Seward worked to block this, and threatened war if any
country officially recognized the existence of the Confederate States of
America. In 1861, Southerners voluntarily embargoed cotton shipments,
hoping to start an economic depression in Europe that would force
Britain to enter the war in order to get cotton but this did not work.[195]
Cotton diplomacy proved a failure as Europe had a surplus of cotton,
while the 1860–62 crop failures in Europe made the North's grain exports
of critical importance. It also helped to turn European opinion further
away from the Confederacy. It was said that "King Corn was more powerful
than King Cotton", as U.S. grain went from a quarter of the British
import trade to almost half.[195]
When Britain did face a cotton shortage, it was temporary, being
replaced by increased cultivation in Egypt and India. Meanwhile, the war
created employment for arms makers, ironworkers, and British ships to
transport weapons.[196]
Charles Francis Adams proved particularly adept as
minister to Britain for the U.S. and Britain was reluctant to boldly
challenge the blockade. The Confederacy purchased several warships from
commercial ship builders in Britain. The most famous, the
CSS Alabama, did considerable damage and led to serious
postwar disputes. However, public opinion against slavery created a
political liability for European politicians, especially in Britain (who
had herself abolished slavery in her own colonies in 1834).[197]
War loomed in late 1861 between the U.S. and Britain over the
Trent Affair, involving the U.S. Navy's boarding of a
British mail steamer to seize two Confederate diplomats. However,
London and Washington were able to smooth over the problem after Lincoln
released the two. In 1862, the British considered mediation—though even
such an offer would have risked war with the U.S.
Lord Palmerston reportedly read
Uncle Tom's Cabin three times when deciding on this.[197]
The Union victory in the
Battle of Antietam caused them to delay this decision. The
Emancipation Proclamation over time would reinforce the political
liability of supporting the Confederacy. Despite sympathy for the
Confederacy, France's own
seizure of Mexico ultimately deterred them from war with the Union.
Confederate offers late in the war to end slavery in return for
diplomatic recognition were not seriously considered by London or Paris.
After 1863, the
Polish revolt against Russia further distracted the European powers,
and ensured that they would continue to remain neutral.[198]
Victory and
aftermath
Results and costs
The
causes of the war, the reasons for its outcome, and even
the name of the war itself are subjects of lingering contention
today. There is much less dispute about the results. Confederate
nationalism died. American nationalism triumphed. The North and West
grew rich while the once-rich South became poor for a century. The
national political power of the slaveowners and rich southerners ended.
Historians are less sure about the results of the postwar
Reconstruction, especially regarding the second class citizenship of the
Freedmen and their poverty. The Freedmen did indeed get their freedom,
their citizenship, and control of their lives, their families and their
churches.
Results
Historians have debated whether the Confederacy could have won the
war. Most scholars, such as
James McPherson, argue that Confederate victory was at least
possible.[199]
McPherson argues that the North's advantage in population and resources
made Northern victory likely but not guaranteed. He also argues that if
the Confederacy had fought using unconventional tactics, they would have
more easily been able to hold out long enough to exhaust the Union.[200]
Comparison of Union and CSA, 1860–1864[201]
|
Year |
Union |
CSA |
Population |
1860 |
22,100,000 (71%) |
9,100,000 (29%) |
1864 |
28,800,000 (90%)[202] |
3,000,000 (10%)[203] |
Free |
1860 |
21,700,000 (81%) |
5,600,000 (19%) |
Slave |
1860 |
400,000 (11%) |
3,500,000 (89%) |
1864 |
negligible |
1,900,000
[204] |
Soldiers |
1860–64 |
2,100,000 (67%) |
1,064,000 (33%) |
Railroad miles |
1860 |
21,800 (71%) |
8,800 (29%) |
1864 |
29,100 (98%)
[205] |
negligible |
Manufactures |
1860 |
90% |
10% |
1864 |
98% |
negligible |
Arms production |
1860 |
97% |
3% |
1864 |
98% |
negligible |
Cotton bales |
1860 |
negligible |
4,500,000 |
1864 |
300,000 |
negligible |
Exports |
1860 |
30% |
70% |
1864 |
98% |
negligible |
Confederates did not need to invade and hold enemy territory to win,
but only needed to fight a defensive war to convince the North that the
cost of winning was too high. The North needed to conquer and hold vast
stretches of enemy territory and defeat Confederate armies to win.[200]
The Confederacy sought to win independence by out-lasting Lincoln;
however, after Atlanta fell and Lincoln defeated McClellan in the
election of 1864, all hope for a political victory for the South ended.
At that point, Lincoln had succeeded in getting the support of the
border states, War Democrats, emancipated slaves, Britain, and France.
By defeating the Democrats and McClellan, he also defeated the
Copperheads and their peace platform.[206]
Many scholars argue that the Union held an insurmountable long-term
advantage over the Confederacy in terms of industrial strength and
population. Confederate actions, they argue, only delayed defeat.[207][208][209]
Civil War historian
Shelby Foote expressed this view succinctly: "I think that the North
fought that war with one hand behind its back ... If there had been more
Southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought
that other hand out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever
had a chance to win that War."[210]
Also important were Lincoln's eloquence in rationalizing the national
purpose and his skill in keeping the border states committed to the
Union cause. Although Lincoln's approach to emancipation was slow, the
Emancipation Proclamation was an effective use of the President's war
powers.[211]
The Confederate government failed in its attempt to get Europe involved
in the war militarily, particularly the United Kingdom and France.
Southern leaders needed to get European powers to help break up the
blockade the Union had created around the Southern ports and cities.
Lincoln's naval blockade was 95% effective at stopping trade goods;
as a result, imports and exports to the South declined significantly.
The abundance of European cotton and the United Kingdom's hostility to
the institution of slavery, along with Lincoln's Atlantic and Gulf of
Mexico naval blockades, severely decreased any chance that either the
United Kingdom or France would enter the war.
Costs
The war produced about 1,030,000 casualties (3% of the population),
including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease, and 50,000
civilians.[212]
Binghamton University historian J. David Hacker believes the number of
soldier deaths was approximately 750,000, 20% higher than traditionally
estimated, and possibly as high as 850,000.[213][214]
The war accounted for roughly as many American deaths as all American
deaths in other U.S. wars combined.[215]
|
|
|
|
|
One in thirteen veterans were amputees
|
|
Remains of both sides were reinterred
|
|
National cemeteries dot the South; this is
one in
Andersonville GA
|
Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43
died in the war, including 6% in the North and 18% in the South.[216][217]
About 56,000 soldiers died in prisons during the Civil War.[218]
An estimated 60,000 men lost limbs in the war.[219]
One reason for the high number of battle deaths during the war was
the use of
Napoleonic tactics, such as
charging. With the advent of more accurate rifled barrels,
Minié balls and (near the end of the war for the
Union army) repeating firearms such as the
Spencer Repeating Rifle and the
Henry Repeating Rifle, soldiers were mowed down when standing in
lines in the open. This led to the adoption of
trench warfare, a style of fighting that defined the better part of
World War I.
The wealth amassed in slaves and slavery for the Confederacy's 3.5
million blacks effectively ended when Union armies arrived; they were
nearly all freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves in the border
states and those located in some former Confederate territory occupied
prior to the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state action or (on
December 18, 1865) by the
Thirteenth Amendment.
The war destroyed much of the wealth that had existed in the South.
All accumulated investment Confederate bonds was forfeit; most banks and
railroads were bankrupt. Income per person in the South dropped to less
than 40% of that of the North, a condition which lasted until well into
the 20th century. Southern influence in the US federal government,
previously considerable, was greatly diminished until the latter half of
the 20th century.[220]
The full restoration of the Union was the work of a highly contentious
postwar era known as
Reconstruction.
Emancipation
Issue
of Slavery During the War
While not all Southerners saw themselves as fighting to preserve
slavery, most of the officers and over a third of the rank and file in
Lee's army had close family ties to slavery. To Northerners, in
contrast, the motivation was primarily to preserve the
Union, not to abolish slavery.[221]
Abraham Lincoln consistently made preserving the Union the central goal
of the war, though he increasingly saw slavery as a crucial issue and
made ending it an additional goal.[222]
Lincoln's decision to issue the
Emancipation Proclamation angered both
Peace Democrats ("Copperheads") and
War Democrats, but energized most Republicans.[223]
By warning that free blacks would flood the North, Democrats made gains
in the
1862 elections, but they did not gain control of Congress. The
Republicans' counterargument that slavery was the mainstay of the enemy
steadily gained support, with the Democrats losing decisively in the
1863 elections in the northern state of Ohio when they tried to
resurrect anti-black sentiment.[224]
Emancipation Proclamation
- Main Article:
Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation enabled African-Americans, both free
blacks and escaped slaves, to join the Union Army.[225]
About 190,000 volunteered, further enhancing the numerical advantage the
Union armies enjoyed over the Confederates, who did not dare emulate the
equivalent manpower source for fear of fundamentally undermining the
legitimacy of slavery.[226]
During the Civil War, sentiment concerning slaves, enslavement and
emancipation in the United States was divided. In 1861, Lincoln worried
that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss of the
border states, and that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose
the whole game."
[227]
Copperheads and some
War Democrats opposed emancipation, although the latter eventually
accepted it as part of
total
war needed to save the Union.[228]
|
|
|
Contrabands — fugitive slaves — cooks,
laundresses, laborers, teamsters, railroad repair
crews — fled to the Union Army, but were not
officially freed until 1863
Emancipation Proclamation
|
|
In 1863, the Union army accepted
Freedmen. Here are Black and White teen-aged
soldiers.
|
At first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by Secretary of
War
Simon Cameron and Generals
John C. Frémont (in Missouri) and
David Hunter (in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida) to keep the
loyalty of the border states and the War Democrats. Lincoln warned the
border states that a more radical type of emancipation would happen if
his gradual plan based on compensated emancipation and voluntary
colonization was rejected.[229]
But only the District of Columbia accepted Lincoln's gradual plan, which
was enacted by Congress. When Lincoln told his cabinet about his
proposed emancipation proclamation, Seward advised Lincoln to wait for a
victory before issuing it, as to do otherwise would seem like "our last
shriek on the retreat".[230]
Lincoln laid the groundwork for public support in an open letter
published letter to abolitionist Horace Greeley's newspaper.[231]
In September 1862, the
Battle of Antietam provided this opportunity, and the subsequent
War Governors' Conference added support for the proclamation.[232]
Lincoln issued his preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, and his final
Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In his letter to Hodges,
Lincoln explained his belief that "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is
wrong ... And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred
upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and
feeling ... I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly
that events have controlled me."
[233]
Lincoln's moderate approach succeeded in getting border states, War
Democrats and emancipated slaves fighting on the same side for the
Union. The Union-controlled border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland,
Delaware and West Virginia) and Union controlled regions around New
Orleans, Norfolk and elsewhere, were not covered by the Emancipation
Proclamation. All abolished slavery on their own, except Kentucky and
Delaware.[234]
Since the Emancipation Proclamation was based on the President's war
powers, it only included territory held by Confederates at the time.
However, the Proclamation became a symbol of the Union's growing
commitment to add emancipation to the Union's definition of liberty.[235]
The Emancipation Proclamation greatly reduced the Confederacy's hope of
getting aid from Britain or France.[236]
By late 1864, Lincoln was playing a leading role in getting Congress to
vote for the
Thirteenth Amendment, which made emancipation universal and
permanent.[237]
Reconstruction
Reconstruction began during the war, with the Emancipation
Proclamation of January 1, 1863 and continued to 1877.[238]
It comprised multiple complex methods to resolve the war, the most
important of which were the three "Reconstruction Amendments" to the
Constitution which remain in effect to the present time: the 13th
(1865), the 14th (1868) and the 15th (1870). From the Union perspective,
the goals of Reconstruction were to guarantee the Union victory on the
battlefield by reuniting the Union; to guarantee a "republican
form of government for the ex-Confederate states; and to permanently
end slavery—and prevent semi-slavery status.[239]
President Johnson took a lenient approach and saw the achievement of
the main war goals as realized in 1865, when each ex-rebel state
repudiated secession and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment.
Radical Republicans demanded strong proof that Confederate
nationalism was dead and the slaves were truly free. They came to the
fore after the 1866 elections and undid much of Johnson's work. They
used the Army to dissolve Southern state governments and hold new
elections with Freedmen voting. The result was a Republican coalition
that took power in ten states for varying lengths of time, staying in
power with the help of U.S. Army units and black voters. Grant was
elected president in 1868 and continued the Radical policies. Meanwhile
the
Freedman's Bureau, started by Lincoln in 1865 to help the freed
slaves, played a major role in helping the blacks and arranging work for
them. In opposition paramilitary groups such as the first
Ku Klux Klan used violence to thwart these efforts.[240]
The
"Liberal Republicans" argued the war goals had been achieved and
Reconstruction should end. They ran a ticket in 1872 but were decisively
defeated as Grant was reelected. In 1874 Democrats took control of
Congress and opposed any more reconstruction. The disputed 1876 election
was resolved by the
Compromise of 1877 which put Republican
Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House. He pulled out the last
federal troops and the last Republican state governments in the South
collapsed, marking the end of Civil War and Reconstruction.[241]
Memory and
historiography
The Civil War is one of the central events in America's collective
memory. There are innumerable statues, commemorations, books and
archival collections. The memory includes the home front, military
affairs, the treatment of soldiers, both living and dead, in the war's
aftermath, depictions of the war in literature and art, evaluations of
heroes and villains, and considerations of the moral and political
lessons of the war.[242]
The last theme includes moral evaluations of racism and slavery, heroism
in combat and behind the lines, and the issues of democracy and minority
rights, as well as the notion of an "Empire
of Liberty" influencing the world.[243]
Memory of the war in the white South crystallized in the myth of the
"Lost Cause", which shaped regional identity and race relations for
generations.[244]
150th anniversary
2011 marked the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. Many in
the American South attempted to incorporate both
black history and white perspectives. A Harris Poll given in March
2011 suggested that Americans were still uniquely divided over the
results and appropriate memorials to acknowledge the occasion.[245]
While traditionally American films of the Civil War feature "brother
versus brother" themes[246]
film treatments of the war are evolving to include African American
characters. Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama
NAACP, said celebrating the Civil War is like celebrating the "Holocaust".
In reference to slavery, Simelton said that black "rights were taken
away" and that blacks "were treated as less than human beings." National
Park historian Bob Sutton said that slavery was the "principal cause" of
the war. Sutton also claimed that the issue of state rights was
incorporated by the Confederacy as a justification for the war in order
to get recognition from Britain. Sutton went on to mention that during
the 100th anniversary of the Civil War white southerners focused on the
genius of southern generals, rather than slavery. In Virginia during the
fall of 2010, a conference took place that addressed the slavery issue.
During November 2010, black Civil War reenactors from around the country
participated in a parade at
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.[247]
Hollywood
Hollywood's take on the war has been especially influential in
shaping public memory, as seen in such film classics as
Birth of a Nation (1915),
Gone with the Wind (1939), and
Lincoln (2012).[248]
Filmography
See also
General reference
Union (Federals)
Confederacy (Rebels)
Ethnic articles
|
Topical articles
National articles
Commemorative articles
|
-
^
a
b
"IMPORTANT PROCLAMATIONS. – The Belligerent Rights of the Rebels
at an End. All Nations Warned Against Harboring Their
Privateers. If They Do Their Ships Will be Excluded from Our
Ports. Restoration of Law in the State of Virginia. The
Machinery of Government to be Put in Motion There.". New
York: NYTimes.com. Retrieved
2012-11-19.
- ^
a
b
c
John W. Chambers, II, ed. in chief,
The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Oxford
University Press, 1999,
ISBN 978-0-19-507198-6. P. 849.
-
^ Seven states
originally formed the Confederacy. Four more states officially
joined after formation (making 11). The Confederacy recognized
as members two additional states with less formal declarations.
-
^ Territories are
organized areas that could potentially become states.
-
^ Howard Jones,
Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and
Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War (1999), p. 154.
-
^ Frank J. Williams,
"Doing Less and Doing More: The President and the
Proclamation—Legally, Militarily and Politically," in Harold
Holzer, ed. The Emancipation Proclamation (2006) pp.
74–5.
-
^ A novel way of
calculating casualties by looking at the deviation of the death
rate of men of fighting age from the norm through analysis of
census data found that at least 627,000 and at most 888,000
people, but most likely 761,000 people, died through the war.
See J. David Hacker (December
2011).
"A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead". Civil War
History 57 (4): 307–348.
doi:10.1353/cwh.2011.0061.
Retrieved 2012-04-04.
-
^ "Killing
ground: photographs of the Civil War and the changing American
landscape". John Huddleston (2002).
Johns Hopkins University Press.
ISBN 978-0-8018-6773-6. Retrieved 2012-11-28.
-
^ James C. Bradford,
A companion to American military history (2010) vol. 1,
p. 101
-
^ See sections below
this introduction, including citations in these four: Freehling,
William W., The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant
1854–1861, pp. 9–24, and Martis, Kenneth C., "The Historical
Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress,
1789–1989",
ISBN 0-02-920170-5, p. 111–115, and Foner, Eric. Politics
and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War, Oxford U. Press, 1980
ISBN 0-19-502781-7, p. 18–20, 21–24, and Eskridge, Larry
(Jan 29, 2011). "After 150 years, we still ask: Why 'this cruel
war'?.". Canton Daily Ledger (Canton, Illinois). Retrieved
2011-01-29.
-
^
Fletcher Melvin Green (1930).
Constitutional Development in the South Atlantic States,
1776-1860: A Study in the Evolution of Democracy. U. of
North Carolina Press. p. 291.
-
^
William Earl Weeks (2013).
The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations.
Cambridge U.P. p. 240.
-
^
Christopher J. Olsen (2002).
Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity,
Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860. Oxford
University Press. p. 237.
-
^ Miriam
Forman-Brunell, Leslie Paris (2010) "The
Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Nineteenth Century".
University of Illinois Press. p.136.
ISBN 978-0-252-07765-4. This famous 1863 photo shows a
victim who likely suffered from
keloid, according to Kathleen Collins, making the scars more
prominent and extensive. See Kathleen Collins, "The
Scourged Back," History of Photography 9 (January 1985):
43–45.
-
^ "Recognized as a
searing indictment of slavery, Gordon's portrait was presented
as the latest evidence in the abolitionist campaign. ...
Abolitionist leaders such as
William Lloyd Garrison referred to it repeatedly in their
work." See Frank H. Goodyear, III, "Photography
changes the way we record and respond to social issues,"
Smithsonian Photography Initiative.
-
^ Gienapp, William
E., "The Crisis of American Democracy: The Political System and
the Coming of the Civil War." in Boritt ed. Why the Civil War
Came 79–123. See also Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor,
Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil
War (2nd ed. 1995), pp. 311–12.
-
^ McPherson, "Battle
Cry", pp. 88–91. In Gerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 68;
See also Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1953), p. 39.
-
^ Allen C. Guelzo,
Lincoln: a very short introduction (Oxford U.P., 2009),
p. 61. See also Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln
and American Slavery (2010), p. 100.
-
^ William W.
Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant
1854–1861, pp. 9–24. Such fears greatly increased Southern
efforts to make
Kansas a slave state. By 1860, the number of white border
state families owning slaves plunged to only 16 percent of the
total. Slaves sold to lower South states were owned by a smaller
number of wealthy slave owners as the price of slaves increased.
-
^ Eugene D.
Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the
Economy and Society of the Slave South (Wesleyan U.P,.
1988). p. 244
-
^ Manisha Sinha,
The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in
Antebellum South Carolina (2000), pp. 127–8. Failing that,
their 1854
Ostend Manifesto was an unsuccessful attempt to annex
Cuba as a slave state. See Potter, David. The Impending
Crisis, pp. 201–204.
-
^ Lipset, Seymour
Martin. Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics
(Doubleday, 1960), p. 349. As sectional divisions hardened,
support for breaking up the Democratic party and secession on
the issue of slavery in the territories was strongly correlated
to the number of plantations in each region. Lipset looked at
the secessionist vote in each Southern state in 1860–61. In each
state he divided the counties into high, medium or low
proportion of slaves. He found that in the 181 high-slavery
counties, the vote was 72% for secession. In the 205 low-slavery
counties. the vote was only 37% for secession. (And in the 153
middle counties, the vote for secession was in the middle at
60%). States of the
Deep South, which had the greatest concentration of
plantations, were the first to secede. The upper South slave
states of
Virginia,
North Carolina,
Arkansas, and
Tennessee had fewer plantations and rejected secession until
the
Fort Sumter crisis forced them to choose sides. Border
states had fewer plantations still and never seceded. See
McPherson, Battle Cry, pp. 242, 255, 282–83. Maps on p.
101 (The Southern Economy) and p. 236 (The Progress of
Secession) are also relevant. See also David Potter. The
Impending Crisis. pp. 503–505.
-
^ Potter, The
Impending Crisis, 299–327.
-
^ See Williamjames
Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and
the Origins of the Civil War (2010), pp. 62, 131–33.
-
^ Don E.
Fehrenbacher, Don E.,
Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical
Perspective. (1981). Oxford U.P. p. 208.
-
^ Potter, David.
The Impending Crisis, p. 275.
-
^ Foner, Eric. 'Free
Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party
before the Civil War (2nd ed. 1995), pp. 311–12.
-
^ Guelzo, Allen C.,
Lincoln: a very short introduction (Oxford U.P., 2009),
p. 61
-
^ Potter, David.
The Impending Crisis, pp. 356–384.
-
^ Abraham Lincoln,
Speech at New Haven, Conn., March 6, 1860. The slavery issue was
related to sectional competition for control of the territories.
See McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 195. The Southern demand
for a
slave code for the territories was the issue used by
Southern politicians to split the Democratic Party in two, which
all but guaranteed the election of Lincoln and secession. When
secession was an issue, South Carolina planter and state Senator
John Townsend said that, "our enemies are about to take
possession of the Government, that they intend to rule us
according to the caprices of their fanatical theories, and
according to the declared purposes of abolishing slavery." See
John Townsend, The Doom of Slavery in the Union, its Safety out
of it, October 29, 1860. Similar opinions were expressed
throughout the South in editorials, political speeches and
declarations of reasons for secession. Even though Lincoln had
no plans to outlaw slavery where it existed, whites throughout
the South expressed fears for the future of slavery. See
McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 243.
-
^ Martis, Kenneth
C., "The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United
States Congress, 1789–1989",
ISBN 0-02-920170-5, p. 111–115. Though elected in November
by the Electoral College with a plurality of popular votes, he
was certified Constitutionally elected President by Congress in
December before the Republican majorities were seated. Both
Lincoln and the Republican Platform guaranteed no interference
with slavery where it existed, and in his Inaugural Address he
supported the proposed
Corwin Amendment to Constitutionally restate it. But
secessionists claimed that such guarantees were meaningless.
They feared that Republicans would use patronage to incite
slaves and antislavery Southern whites such as
Hinton Rowan Helper. Then they feared slavery in the lower
South, like a "scorpion encircled by fire, would sting itself to
death." See Freehling, William W., The Road to Disunion:
Secessionists Triumphant 1854–1861, pp. 9–24. Besides the loss
of Kansas to free soil Northerners, secessionists feared that
the loss of slaves in the border states would lead to
emancipation, and that upper South slave states might be the
next dominoes to fall.
-
^
Schott, Thomas E. (1996).
Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press. p. 334.
ISBN 978-0-8071-2106-1.
-
^
Eskridge, Larry (Jan 29, 2011).
"After 150 years, we still ask: Why 'this cruel war'?.".
Canton Daily Ledger (Canton, Illinois).
Retrieved 2011-01-29.
"The power of the federal government to affect the institution
of slavery, specifically limiting it in newly added
territories." was the primary political debate in Southern
states over secession, rather than states' rights in general.
-
^ Foner, Eric.
Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War, Oxford U.
Press, 1980
ISBN 0-19-502781-7, p. 18–20, 21–24.
-
^ Charles S. Sydnor,
The Development of Southern Sectionalism 1819–1848
(1948).
-
^ Robert Royal
Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 1840–1861
(1973).
-
^ Adam Rothman,
Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep
South (2005).
-
^ Kenneth M. Stampp,
The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil
War (1981) p. 198; Woodworth, ed. The American Civil War:
A Handbook of Literature and Research (1996), 145 151 505
512 554 557 684; Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive
Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1969).
-
^ Clement Eaton,
Freedom of Thought in the Old South (1940)
-
^ John Hope
Franklin, The Militant South 1800–1861 (1956).
-
^ Abraham Lincoln,
Cooper Union Address, New York, February 27, 1860.
-
^ Sydney E.
Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People
(1972) pp. 648–69.
-
^ James McPherson,
"Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old
Question," Civil War History 29 (September 1983).
-
^
a
b
Forrest McDonald, States' Rights
and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776–1876 (2002)
-
^ James McPherson,
This Mighty Scourge, pp. 3–9.
-
^ Frank Taussig,
The Tariff History of the United States (1931), pp. 115–61
-
^
Hofstadter, Richard (1938). "The
Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War".
American Historical Review 44 (1): 50–55.
JSTOR 1840850.
-
^ Before 1850, slave
owners controlled the presidency for fifty years, the Speaker's
chair for forty-one years, and the chairmanship of the House
Ways and Means Committee that set tariffs for forty-two years,
while 18 of 31 Supreme Court justices owned slaves. Leonard L.
Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern
Domination, 1780–1860 (2000) pp. 1–9
-
^ Eric Foner,
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican
Party before the Civil War (1970).
-
^ Charles C. Bolton,
Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in
Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (1993) p.
67.
-
^ Bestor, 1964, pp.
10–11
-
^ McPherson, 2007,
p. 14.
-
^ McPherson, 2007,
p. 14.
-
^ Stampp, pp.
190–193.
-
^ Bestor, 1964,
p. 11.
-
^ Krannawitter,
2008, pp. 49–50.
-
^ McPherson, 2007,
pp. 13–14.
-
^ Bestor, 1964, pp.
17–18.
-
^ Guelzo, pp. 21–22.
-
^ Bestor, 1964,
p. 15.
-
^ Miller, 2008,
p. 153.
-
^ McPherson, 2007,
p. 3.
-
^ Bestor, 1964,
p. 19.
-
^ McPherson, 2007,
p. 16.
-
^ Bestor, 1964, pp.
19–20.
-
^
a
b
c
d
Bestor, 1964, p. 21
-
^
a
b
c
Bestor, 1964, p. 20
-
^ Russell, 1966,
p. 468–469
-
^
a
b
Bestor, 1964, p. 23
-
^ Varon, 2008, p. 58
-
^ Russell, 1966,
p. 470
-
^ Varon, 2008, p. 34
-
^ Bestor, 1964,
p. 24
-
^ Bestor, 1964, pp.
23–24
-
^ Holt, 2004, pp.
34–35.
-
^ McPherson, 2007,
p. 7.
-
^ Krannawitter,
2008, p. 232.
-
^ Gara, 1964, p. 190
-
^ Bestor, 1964, pp.
24–25.
-
^
Potter, David M. (1962). "The
Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa".
American Historical Review 67 (4): 924–950.
JSTOR 1845246.
-
^ C. Vann Woodward
(1971), American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the
North-South Dialogue, p.281.
-
^ Bertram
Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace,
and War, 1760s–1880s (2000).
-
^ Avery Craven,
The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861 (1953).
-
^ "Republican
Platform of 1860," in Kirk H. Porter, and Donald Bruce Johnson,
eds. National Party Platforms, 1840–1956, (University of
Illinois Press, 1956) p. 32.
-
^ Susan-Mary Grant,
North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity
in the Antebellum Era (2000); Melinda Lawson, Patriot
Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North
(2005).
-
^ David Potter,
The Impending Crisis, p. 485.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, p. 254.
-
^
President James Buchanan, Message of December 8, 1860.
Retrieved 2012-11-28.
-
^
Ordinances of Secession by State. Retrieved 2012-11-28.
-
^ The text of
the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and
Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.
-
^ The text of
A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and
Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the
Federal Union. Retrieved 2012-11-28.
-
^ The text of
Georgia's secession declaration. Retrieved 2012-11-28.
-
^ The text of
A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to
Secede from the Federal Union. Retrieved 2012-11-28.
-
^
Declaration of Causes of Secession. Retrieved 2012-11-28.
-
^ Gibson, Arrell.
Oklahoma, a History of Five Centuries (University
of Oklahoma Press, 1981) pg. 117–120
-
^
"United States Volunteers – Indian Troops".
civilwararchive.com. January 28, 2008.
Retrieved 2008-08-10.
-
^
"Civil War Refugees".
Oklahoma Historical Society.
Oklahoma State University.
Retrieved 2008-08-10.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 284–287.
-
^ Nevins, The War
for the Union (1959) 1:119-29.
-
^ Nevins, The War
for the Union (1959) 1:129-36.
-
^
"A State of Convenience, The Creation of West Virginia".
West Virginia Archives & History.
Retrieved 2012-04-20.
-
^ Curry, Richard Orr
(1964), A House Divided, A Study of the Statehood Politics &
the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia, Univ. of
Pittsburgh Press, map on page 49.
-
^ Weigley, Russell
F., "A Great Civil War, A Military and Political History
1861–1865, Indiana Univ. Press, 2000, p. 55.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, p. 303.
-
^ Snell, Mark A.,
West Virginia and the Civil War, History Press, Charleston,
SC, 2011, pg. 28
-
^ Mark Neely (1993),
Confederate Bastille: Jefferson Davis and Civil Liberties,
pp. 10–11.
-
^
a
b
McPherson, Battle Cry, pp.
234–266.
- ^
a
b
Schouler, William.
[1]|Massachusetts in the Civil War, William Schouler. 1868
republished by Digital Scanning Inc, 2003. Retrieved book cover
November 28, 2012
-
^ Abraham Lincoln,
First Inaugural Address, Monday, March 4, 1861.
-
^ Lincoln, First
Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.
-
^
a
b
David Potter. The Impending
Crisis. pp. 572–573.
-
^ Charleston, South
Carolina had additional historical significance. It was the
center of the earlier
Nullification Crisis where the Union had faced threats of
secession during the
Jackson Administration. Throughout the war, Lincoln kept a
portrait of Andrew Jackson over his desk at the War Department
where he read army telegraph messages to stay abreast of
movement and combat. See Tom Wheeler's "Mr. Lincoln's T-mails:
the untold story of how Abraham Lincoln use the telegraph to win
the Civil War"
-
^
Bornstein, David (April 14, 2011).
"Lincoln's Call to Arms". Opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com.
Archived from the original on 2011-07-13.
Retrieved 2011-08-11.
-
^
"Lincoln's Call for Troops".
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, p. 274.
-
^
"Abraham Lincoln: Proclamation 83 – Increasing the Size of the
Army and Navy". Presidency.ucsb.edu.
Retrieved 2011-11-03.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 276–307.
-
^ Keegan, "The
American Civil War", p.73. Over 10,000 military engagements took
place during the war, 40% of them in Virginia and Tennessee. See
Gabor Boritt, ed. War Comes Again (1995), p. 247.
-
^ "With an actual
strength of 1,080 officers and 14,926 enlisted men on June 30,
1860, the Regular Army ..."
War Extracts p. 199–221, American Military History.
-
^ Coulter, E.
Merton, "Confederate States of America", p.308. Accounts of
historians differ as to the date and the agency of the
Confederate 100,000-man call. See also
Matloff, Maurice (1973).
"American Military History". U.S. Army and U.S. Government
Printing Office,
ISBN 0-938289-70-5,
ISBN 978-0-938289-70-8.
Retrieved 2012-11-28.,
"Secession, Sumter, and Standing to Arms", "... on March 6 the
new Confederate Executive, Jefferson Davis, called for a
100,000-man volunteer force to serve for twelve months ..." .
See also
Civil War extracts, American Military History Online.
Retrieved 2012-11-28. and Nicolay, J.G. and Hay, John.
Abraham Lincoln: a history, vol. 4, p.264. Retrieved
2012-11-28. "Since the organization of the Montgomery government
in February, some four different calls for Southern volunteers
had been made ... In his message of April 29 to the rebel
Congress, Jefferson Davis proposed to organize for instant
action an army of 100,000 ..." Coulter reports that Alexander
Stephens took this to mean Davis wanted unilateral control of a
standing army, and from that moment on became a implacable
opponent.
-
^ Albert Burton
Moore. Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy
(1924)
online edition.
-
^ Albert Bernhardt
Faust,
The German Element in the United States (1909)
v. 1, p. 523 online. The railroads and banks grew rapidly.
See
Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson.
Jay Cooke: Financier Of The Civil War, (1907) Vol. 2 at
Google Books, pp. 378–430. See also Oberholtzer, A
History of the United States Since the Civil War (1926)
3:69–122.
-
^ Barnet Schecter,
The Devil's Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight
to Reconstruct America (2007).
-
^ Eugene Murdock,
One million men: the Civil War draft in the North (1971).
-
^ Mark Johnson,
That body of brave men: the U.S. regular infantry and the Civil
War in the West (2003) p. 575.
-
^
"Desertion No Bar to Pension". New York Times. May
28, 1894. Retrieved
2011-10-03.
-
^ Mark A. Weitz
(2005), More Damning than Slaughter: Desertion in the
Confederate Army.
-
^ Edward M. Coffman,
The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime,
1784–1898 (1986) p. 193.
-
^ Hamner,
Christopher. "Great
Expectations for the Civil War."
Teachinghistory.org. Retrieved 2011-07-11.
-
^ Ella Lonn,
Desertion during the Civil War (1928), pp. 205–6.
-
^ Robert Fantina,
Desertion and the American soldier, 1776–2006 (2006), p. 74
-
^ Keegan, John.
The American Civil War: a military history. 2009.
ISBN 978-0-307-26343-8, p. 57.
-
^
Michael Perman and Amy Murrell
Taylor, eds. (2010).
Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Cengage. p. 177.
-
^ American Seamen's
Friend Society (1865).
The sailors' magazine and seamen's friend. p. 152.
-
^ Spencer C. Tucker
(2010).
The Civil War Naval Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 462.
-
^ Donald L. Canney
(1998).
Lincoln's Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1861–65.
Naval Institute Press. p. ??.
-
^
William Richter (2009).
The A to Z of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Scarecrow Press. p. 49.
-
^ Timothy D.
Johnson, Winfield Scott (1998) p. 228
-
^ Anderson, By
Sea and by river, p. 288–289, 296–298.
-
^ Anderson, By
Sea and by river, p. 300
-
^ Gerald F. Teaster
and Linda and James Treaster Ambrose, The Confederate
Submarine H. L. Hunley (1989)
-
^ Mark E. Neely, Jr.
"The Perils of Running the Blockade: The Influence of
International Law in an Era of Total War," Civil War History
(1986) 32#2, pp. 101–118
in Project MUSE
-
^ Stephen R. Wise,
Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running during the
Civil War (1991)
-
^ David G. Surdam,
"The Union Navy's blockade reconsidered," Naval War College
Review (1998) 51#4, pp. 85–107
-
^ David G. Surdam,
Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American
Civil War (University of South Carolina Press, 2001)
-
^ Anderson, "By Sea
and by river". p.300"
-
^
Howard Jones (2002).
Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to
1913. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 225.
-
^ Bern Anderson,
By Sea and by river, p. 91.
-
^ Robert D.
Whitsell, "Military and Naval Activity between Cairo and
Columbus," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
(1963) 62#2, pp. 107–121
-
^ Myron J. Smith,
Tinclads in the Civil War: Union Light-Draught Gunboat
Operations on Western Waters, 1862–1865 (2009)
-
^
Joseph Allan Frank; George A. Reaves
(2003).
Seeing the Elephant: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh.
University of Illinois Press. p. 170.
-
^
Craig L. Symonds; William J. Clipson
(2001).
The Naval Institute Historical Atlas of the U.S. Navy.
Naval Institute Press. p. 92.
-
^ Ronald Scott
Mangum, "The Vicksburg Campaign: A Study In Joint Operations,"
Parameters: U.S. Army War College (1991) 21#3, pp. 74–86
online
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 339–345.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, p. 342.
-
^ Shelby Foote, The
Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville, pp. 464–519.
-
^ Bruce Catton,
Terrible Swift Sword, pp. 263–296.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 424–427.
-
^
a
b
McPherson, Battle Cry, pp.
538–544.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 528–533.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 543–545.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 557–558.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 571–574.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 639–645.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 653–663.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, p. 664.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 404–405.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 418–420.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 419–420.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 480–483.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 405–413.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 637–638.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 677–680.
-
^ Keegan, "The
American Civil War: a military history", p.100
-
^ Keegan, John. "The
American Civil War: a military history"
ISBN 978-0-307-26343-8, p.270
-
^ James B. Martin,
Third War: Irregular Warfare on the Western Border 1861–1865
(Combat Studies Institute Leavenworth Paper series, number 23,
2012). See also, Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla
Conflict in Missouri during the Civil War (1989). Missouri
alone was the scene of over 1,000 engagements between regular
units, and uncounted numbers of guerrilla attacks and raids by
informal pro-Confederate bands, especially in the recently
settled western counties.
-
^ Sarah Bohl, "A War
on Civilians: Order Number 11 and the Evacuation of Western
Missouri," Prologue, (2004) 36#1, pp. 44–51
-
^ Keegan, "The
American Civil War: a military history", p.270
-
^ William H. Graves,
"Indian Soldiers for the Gray Army: Confederate Recruitment in
Indian Territory," Chronicles of Oklahoma (1991) 69#2,
pp. 134–145.
-
^ J. Frederick Neet,
Jr. "Stand Watie: Confederate General in the Cherokee Nation,"
Great Plains Journal (1996) 6#1 pp 36–51.
-
^ Keegan, "The
American Civil War: a military history", p. 220–221
-
^ Mark E. Neely Jr.;
"Was the Civil War a Total War?" Civil War History, Vol.
50, 2004, pp. 434+
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 724–735.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 741–742.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 778–779.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 773–776.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 812–815.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 825–830.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 846–847.
-
^ William Marvel,
Lee's Last Retreat: The Flight to Appomattox (2002) pp.
158–81.
-
^ Unaware of the
surrender of Lee, on April 16 the last major battles of the war
were fought at the
Battle of Columbus, Georgia and the
Battle of West Point.
-
^ Morris, John
Wesley, Ghost towns of Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma
Press, 1977, pp. 68–69,
ISBN 0-8061-1420-7
-
^
a
b
c
McPherson, Battle Cry, pp.
546–557.
-
^
a
b
George C. Herring, From colony
to superpower: U.S. foreign relations since 1776 (2008).
p. 237
-
^
a
b
McPherson, Battle Cry, p.
386.
-
^ Allen Nevins,
War for the Union 1862–1863, pp. 263–264.
-
^
a
b
Stephen B. Oates, The
Approaching Fury: Voices of the Storm 1820–1861, p. 125.
-
^ George C. Herring,
From colony to superpower: U.S. foreign relations since 1776
(2008). p. 261
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 855.
-
^
a
b
James McPherson, Why did the
Confederacy Lose?. p. ?.
-
^ Railroad length is
from:
Chauncey Depew (ed.), One Hundred Years of American
Commerce 1795–1895, p. 111; For other data see:
1860 US census and Carter, Susan B., ed. The Historical
Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition (5
vols), 2006.
-
^ "Union population
1864" aggregates 1860 population, average annual immigration
1855–1864, and population governed formerly by CSA per Kenneth
Martis source. Contrabands and after the Emancipation
Proclamation freedmen, migrating into Union control on the
coasts and to the advancing armies, and natural increase are
excluded.
-
^ Martis, Kenneth
C., "The Historical Atlas of the Congresses of the Confederate
States of America: 1861–1865" Simon & Schuster (1994)
ISBN 0-13-389115-1 pp.27. At the beginning of 1865, the
Confederacy controlled one-third of its congressional districts,
which were apportioned by population. The major
slave-populations found in Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee,
and Alabama were effectively under Union control by the end of
1864.
-
^ "Slave 1864, CSA"
aggregates 1860 slave census of VA, NC, SC, GA and TX. It omits
losses from contrabands and after the Emancipation Proclamation,
freedmen migrating to the Union controlled coastal ports and
those joining advancing Union armies, especially in the
Mississippi Valley.
-
^ Digital History
Reader,
U.S. Railroad Construction, 1860–1880 Virginia Tech,
Retrieved 2012-08-21. "Total Union railroad miles" aggregates
existing track reported 1860 @ 21800 plus new construction
1860–1864 @ 5000, plus southern railroads administered by USMRR
@ 2300.
-
^ McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 771–772.
-
^
Williamson Murray; Alvin Bernstein;
MacGregor Knox (1996).
The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War.
Cambridge U.P. p. 235.
-
^
Dennis Sydney Reginald Welland
(1987).
The United States: A Companion to American Studies.
Taylor & Francis. pp. 174–75.
-
^
David Stephen Heidler; Jeanne T.
Heidler; David J. Coles (2002).
Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social,
and Military History. W. W. Norton. pp. 1207–10.
-
^ Ward 1990. p. 272
-
^
Fehrenbacher, Don (2004).
"Lincoln's Wartime Leadership: The First Hundred Days".
University of Illinois.
Retrieved 2007-10-16.
-
^
Nofi, Al (June 13, 2001).
"Statistics on the War's Costs". Louisiana State University.
Archived from
the original on 2007-07-11.
Retrieved 2007-10-14.
-
^
"U.S. Civil War Took Bigger Toll Than Previously Estimated, New
Analysis Suggests". Science Daily. September 22, 2011.
Retrieved 2011-09-22.
-
^
Hacker, J. David (September 20,
2011).
"Recounting the Dead". The New York Times.com.
Retrieved 2011-09-22.
-
^ C. Vann Woodward,
"Introduction" in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom,
p. xix.
-
^ "Toward
a social history of the American Civil War: exploratory essays".
Maris Vinovskis (1990).
Cambridge University Press. p.7.
ISBN 978-0-521-39559-5.
-
^ Richard Wightman
Fox (2008)."National
Life After Death".
Slate.com.
-
^ "U.S.
Civil War Prison Camps Claimed Thousands". National
Geographic News. July 1, 2003.
-
^ "When
Necessity Meets Ingenuity: Art of Restoring What's Missing".
The New York Times. March 8, 2004
-
^
The Economist, "The
Civil War: Finally Passing", April 2, 2011, pp. 23–25.
-
^
Foner, Eric (1981).
Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War.
ISBN 978-0-19-502926-0.
Retrieved 2012-04-20.
-
^ Foner, Eric. "The
Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery" (2011).
p. 74.
-
^ McPherson,
pp. 506–8
-
^ McPherson. p. 686
-
^ At the beginning
of the war, some Union commanders thought they were supposed to
return escaped slaves to their masters. By 1862, when it became
clear that this would be a long war, the question of what to do
about slavery became more general. The Southern economy and
military effort depended on slave labor. It began to seem
unreasonable to protect slavery while blockading Southern
commerce and destroying Southern production. As one Congressman
put it, the slaves "... cannot be neutral. As laborers, if not
as soldiers, they will be allies of the rebels, or of the
Union." See McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 495. The same
Congressman—and his fellow Radical Republicans—put pressure on
Lincoln to rapidly emancipate the slaves, whereas moderate
Republicans came to accept gradual, compensated emancipation and
colonization. See McPherson, Battle Cry, pp. 355, 494–6,
quote from
George Washington Julian on 495. Enslaved African Americans
did not wait for Lincoln's action before escaping and seeking
freedom behind Union lines. From early years of the war,
hundreds of thousands of African Americans escaped to Union
lines, especially in occupied areas like Nashville, Norfolk and
the Hampton Roads region in 1862, Tennessee from 1862 on, the
line of Sherman's march, etc. So many African Americans fled to
Union lines that commanders created camps and schools for them,
where both adults and children learned to read and write. See
Catton, Bruce. Never Call Retreat, p. 335. The American
Missionary Association entered the war effort by sending
teachers south to such contraband camps, for instance
establishing schools in Norfolk and on nearby plantations. In
addition, approximately 180,000 or more African-American men
served as soldiers and sailors with Union troops. Most of those
were escaped slaves. Probably the most prominent of these
African-American soldiers is the
54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.
-
^ In spite of the
South's shortage of soldiers, most Southern leaders — until 1865
— opposed enlisting slaves. They used them as laborers to
support the war effort. As
Howell Cobb said, "If slaves will make good soldiers our
whole theory of slavery is wrong." Confederate generals
Patrick Cleburne and
Robert E. Lee argued in favor of arming blacks late in the
war, and
Jefferson Davis was eventually persuaded to support plans
for arming slaves to avoid military defeat. The Confederacy
surrendered at
Appomattox before this plan could be implemented. See
McPherson, Battle Cry, pp. 831–837. The great majority of
the 4 million slaves were freed by the Emancipation
Proclamation, as Union armies moved south. See Historian
John D. Winters, in The Civil War in Louisiana
(1963), referred to the exhilaration of the slaves when the
Union Army came through
Louisiana: "As the troops moved up to
Alexandria, the Negroes crowded the roadsides to watch the
passing army. They were 'all frantic with joy, some weeping,
some blessing, and some dancing in the exuberance of their
emotions.' All of the Negroes were attracted by the pageantry
and excitement of the army. Others cheered because they
anticipated the freedom to plunder and to do as they pleased now
that the Federal troops were there." See
John D. Winters, The Civil War in Louisiana,
Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1963,
ISBN 978-0-8071-0834-5, p. 237. Confederates enslaved
captured black Union soldiers, and black soldiers especially
were shot when trying to surrender at the
Fort Pillow Massacre. See Catton, Bruce. Never Call
Retreat, p. 335. This led to a breakdown of the
prisoner and mail exchange program and the growth of prison
camps such as
Andersonville prison in Georgia, where almost 13,000 Union
prisoners of war died of starvation and disease. McPherson,
Battle Cry, pp. 791–798.
-
^ Lincoln's letter
to O. H. Browning, September 22, 1861. Sentiment among
German Americans was largely anti-slavery especially among
Forty-Eighters, resulting in hundreds of thousands of German
Americans volunteering to fight for the Union. "
Wittke, Carl (1952). Refugees
of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
press.
", Christian B. Keller, "Flying Dutchmen and Drunken Irishmen:
The Myths and Realities of Ethnic Civil War Soldiers",
Journal of Military History, Vol/ 73, No. 1, January 2009,
pp. 117–145; for primary sources see Walter D. Kamphoefner and
Wolfgang Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War: The Letters
They Wrote Home (2006). " On the other hand, many of the
recent immigrants in the North viewed freed slaves as
competition for scarce jobs, and as the reason why the Civil War
was being fought. " Baker, Kevin (March 2003). "Violent
City"
American Heritage. Retrieved 2010-07-29. " Due in large
part to this fierce competition with free blacks for labor
opportunities, the poor and working class
Irish Catholics generally opposed emancipation. When the
draft began in the summer of 1863, they launched
a major riot in New York City that was suppressed by the
military, as well as much smaller protests in other cities.
Barnet Schecter, The Devil's Own Work: The Civil War Draft
Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (2007), ch 6.
Many Catholics in the North had volunteered to fight in 1861,
sending thousands of soldiers to the front and taking high
casualties, especially at
Fredericksburg; their volunteering fell off after 1862.
-
^ Baker, Kevin
(March 2003). "Violent
City"
American Heritage. Retrieved 2010-07-29. "
-
^ McPherson, James
in Gabor S. Boritt, ed. Lincoln, the War President pp.
52–54.
-
^ Oates, Stephen B.
Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths, p. 106.
-
^ "Lincoln Letter to
Greeley, August 22, 1862 "
-
^ Pulling, Sr. Anne
Francis. "Images of America: Altoona, 2001, 10.
-
^ Lincoln's Letter
to A. G. Hodges, April 4, 1864.
-
^
Harper, Douglas (2003).
"SLAVERY in DELAWARE".
Archived from the original on 2007-10-16.
Retrieved 2007-10-16.
-
^ " James McPherson,
The War that Never Goes Away"
-
^
Molefi Kete Asante; Ama Mazama
(2004).
Encyclopedia of Black Studies. SAGE. p. 82.
-
^
Harold Holzer; Sara Vaughn Gabbard
(2007).
Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the
Thirteenth Amendment. SIU Press. pp. 172–74.
-
^ Hans L. Trefousse,
Historical Dictionary of Reconstruction (Greenwood, 1991)
covers all the main events and leaders.
-
^ Eric Foner, A
Short History of Reconstruction (1990) is a brief survey
-
^ Hans L Trefousse,
Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (2005)
pp 161–238
-
^ C. Vann Woodward,
Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of
Reconstruction (2nd ed. 1991).
-
^ Joan Waugh and
Gary W. Gallagher, eds. (2009), Wars within a War:
Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War (U. of
North Carolina Press).
-
^ David W. Blight,
Race and Reunion : The Civil War in American Memory
(2001)
-
^ Gaines M. Foster
(1988), Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and
the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913.
-
^
Braverman, Samantha (March 29, 2011).
"150 Years Later Remembering the American Civil War". Harris
Interactive Polls. Retrieved
2011-04-22.
-
^
The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film.
Random House Digital, Inc.
Retrieved 2011-11-03.
-
^
Suddath, Claire (March 3, 2011).
"A Union Divided: South Split on U.S. Civil War Legacy".
Time. Retrieved
2012-10-20.
-
^ Gary Gallagher,
Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art
Shape What We Know about the Civil War (U. of North Carolina
Press, 2008)
References
Overviews
- Beringer, Richard E., Archer Jones, and Herman Hattaway,
Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986) influential analysis
of factors; an abridged version is The Elements of
Confederate Defeat: Nationalism, War Aims, and Religion
(1988)
- Bestor, Arthur. "The American Civil War as a Constitutional
Crisis," American Historical Review (1964) 69#2,
pp. 327–52
in JSTOR
-
Catton, Bruce, The Civil War, American Heritage,
1960,
ISBN 978-0-8281-0305-3, illustrated narrative
- Davis, William C. The Imperiled Union, 1861–1865 3v
(1983)
- Donald, David et al. The Civil War and Reconstruction
(latest edition 2001); 700 page survey
- Eicher, David J., The Longest Night: A Military History
of the Civil War, (2001),
ISBN 978-0-684-84944-7.
- Fellman, Michael et al. This Terrible War: The Civil War
and its Aftermath (2nd ed. 2007), 544 page survey
- Gara, Larry. 1964. The Fugitive Slave Law: A Double
Paradox in Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction, New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. (originally published in
Civil War History, X, No. 3, Sept 1964)
- Guelzo, Allen C. Fateful Lightning: A New History of the
Civil War and Reconstruction (2012) 593pp; covers 1848–1877
excerpt and text search
-
Foote, Shelby.
The Civil War: A Narrative (3 volumes), (1974),
ISBN 978-0-394-74913-6. Highly detailed military narrative
covering all fronts
- Holt, Michael F. 2004. The fate of their country:
politicians, slavery extension, and the coming of the Civil War
Hill and Wang, New York.
- Katcher, Philip. The History of the American Civil War
1861–5, (2000),
ISBN 978-0-600-60778-6. Detailed analysis of each battle
with introduction and background
- Krannawitter, Thomas L. 2008. Vindicating Lincoln:
Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President. Rowman &
Littlefield, London.
-
McPherson, James M.
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988), 900
page survey of all aspects of the war; Pulitzer prize
- McPherson, James M. This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on
the Civil War. Oxford University Press. New York.
- McPherson, James M. Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and
Reconstruction (2nd ed 1992), textbook
-
Nevins, Allan.
Ordeal of the Union, an 8-volume set (1947–1971). the
most detailed political, economic and military narrative; by
Pulitzer Prize winner
- 1. Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852; 2. A House
Dividing, 1852–1857; 3. Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos,
1857–1859; 4. Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861; vol. 5–8
have the series title "War for the Union"; 5. The Improvised
War, 1861–1862; 6. War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863; 7. The
Organized War, 1863–1864; 8. The Organized War to Victory,
1864–1865
-
Rhodes, James Ford.
A History of the Civil War, 1861–1865 (1918), Pulitzer
Prize; a short version of his 5-volume history
- Miller, William L. 2009. Abraham Lincoln: The Duty of a
Statesman Vintage Books.
- Russell, Robert R. (1966).
"Constitutional Doctrines with Regard to Slavery in
Territories".
Journal of Southern History 32 (4): 466–486.
doi:10.2307/2204926.
JSTOR 2204926.
- Stampp, Kenneth M. 1990. America in 1857: a nation on the
brink. Oxford University Press, New York.
- Varon, Elizabeth R. Disunion!: The Coming of the American
Civil War, 1789–1859. Chapel Hill [N.C.]: University of North
Carolina Press, 2008.
- Ward, Geoffrey C. The Civil War (1990), based on PBS
series by
Ken Burns; visual emphasis
- Weigley, Russell Frank. A Great Civil War: A Military and
Political History, 1861–1865 (2004); primarily military
Biographies
- American National Biography 24 vol (1999), essays by
scholars on all major figures;
online and hardcover editions at many libraries
- McHenry, Robert ed. Webster's American Military
Biographies (1978)
- Warner, Ezra J., Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union
Commanders, (1964),
ISBN 978-0-8071-0822-2
- Warner, Ezra J., Generals in Gray: Lives of the
Confederate Commanders, (1959),
ISBN 978-0-8071-0823-9
- Soldiers
- Berlin, Ira, et al., eds. Freedom's Soldiers: The Black
Military Experience in the Civil War (1998)
- Glatthaar, Joseph T. General Lee's Army: From Victory to
Collapse (2009)
- Hess, Earl J. The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the
Ordeal of Combat (1997)
- McPherson, James. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought
in the Civil War (1998)
- Power, J. Tracy. Lee's Miserables: Life in the Army of
Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox (2002)
- Wiley, Bell Irvin. The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common
Soldier of the Confederacy (1962) (ISBN
978-0-8071-0475-0)
- Wiley, Bell Irvin. Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier
of the Union (1952) (ISBN
978-0-8071-0476-7)
Reference books and bibliographies
- Blair, Jayne E. The Essential Civil War: A Handbook to
the Battles, Armies, Navies And Commanders (2006)
- Carter, Alice E. and Richard Jensen. The Civil War on the
Web: A Guide to the Very Best Sites- 2nd ed. (2003)
- Current, Richard N., et al. eds. Encyclopedia of
the Confederacy (1993) (4 Volume set; also 1 vol abridged
version) (ISBN
978-0-13-275991-5)
- Faust, Patricia L. (ed.) Historical Times Illustrated
Encyclopedia of the Civil War (1986) (ISBN
978-0-06-181261-3) 2000 short entries
- Esposito, Vincent J., West Point Atlas of American Wars
online edition 1995
- Heidler, David Stephen, ed. Encyclopedia of the American
Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History (2002),
1600 entries in 2700 pages in 5 vol or 1-vol editions
-
North & South - The Official Magazine of the Civil War Society
deals with book reviews, battles, discussion & analysis, and
other issues of the American Civil War.
- Resch, John P. et al., Americans at War: Society,
Culture and the Homefront vol 2: 1816–1900 (2005)
- Savage, Kirk,
Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in
Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1997. (The definitive book on Civil War
monuments.)
- Tulloch, Hugh. The Debate on the American Civil War Era
(1999), historiography
- Wagner, Margaret E. Gary W. Gallagher, and Paul Finkelman,
eds. The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference
(2002)
- Woodworth, Steven E. ed. American Civil War: A Handbook
of Literature and Research (1996) (ISBN
978-0-313-29019-0), 750 pages of historiography and
bibliography
online edition
Primary sources
- John S. Jackman; William C.
Davis (1 March 1997 – Vol. 58, No. 3 Aug., 1992). Diary of a
Confederate Soldier: John S. Jackman of the Orphan Brigade.
University of South Carolina Press.
ISBN 978-1-57003-164-9.
JSTOR online edition
- Commager, Henry Steele (ed.). The Blue and the Gray. The
Story of the Civil War as Told by Participants. (1950),
excerpts from primary sources
- Hesseltine, William B. ed.; The Tragic Conflict: The
Civil War and Reconstruction (1962), excerpts from primary
sources
- Simpson, Brooks D. et al. eds. The Civil War: The First
Year Told by Those Who Lived It (Library of America 2011)
840pp, with 120 documents from 1861
online reviews
Further reading
External links
-
American Civil War at the
Open Directory Project
-
Civil War photos at the
National Archives
-
View images from the
Civil War Photographs Collection at the Library of Congress
-
Civil War Trust
-
Civil War Era Digital Collection at Gettysburg College This
collection contains digital images of political cartoons, personal
papers, pamphlets, maps, paintings and photographs from the Civil
War Era held in Special Collections at Gettysburg College.
-
Civil War 150 Washington Post interactive website on 150th
Anniversary of the American Civil War.
-
Civil War in the American South – An Association of Southeastern
Research Libraries (ASERL) portal with links to almost 9,000
digitized Civil War-era items—books, pamphlets, broadsides, letters,
maps, personal papers, and manuscripts—held at ASERL member
libraries
-
The Civil War – site with 7,000 pages, including the complete
run of Harper's Weekly newspapers from the Civil War
- The short film
A HOUSE DIVIDED (1960) is available for free download at the
Internet Archive [more]
-
Civil War Living History Reenactments (videos)
-
West Point Atlas of Civil War Battles
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