United States Civil War
Overview
United States Civil War
In the aftermath of the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the U.S., slaveholders and those who aspired to be slaveholders took seven Southern slaveholding states out of the Union. These seven Southern states intended to establish a new nation founded on the premise of enslaving African Americans and precipitating an existential conflict with the United States. This conflict was born out of the disagreement between the slaveholding southern states and the non-slaveholding northern and western states over the future of slavery, particularly after territory was taken from Mexico in the U.S. war of aggressive conquest against that nation. Until the war against Mexico states entering the Union had entered in pairs: one slave and one non-slave. Members of Congress from the slaveholding and non-slaveholding states were able to work out a fragile and tenuous compromise in 1850 over the status of slavery in conquered or settled territories, but events during the 1850s exacerbated tensions and hostilities between the two groups. Lincoln’s November 1860 election set off the secession of seven, later eleven, southern states from the United States. Formal hostilities between the two nations began the following April.
Learning Objectives
- Discuss the US in the 19th century: the Civil War.
- Explain the causes, course, outcome, and consequences of the United States Civil War.
- Assess the historic impact and significance of the United States Civil War.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
chattel slavery: a form of slavery in which slaves are seen as property, and thus dehumanized
Confederate States of America - nation formed in 1861 by slaveholding interests in the souheastern and south, central states of the United States toward the end of not only protecting chattel slavery but expanding it, leading to the U.S. Civil War
Emancipation Proclamation: a policy implemented by the Lincoln Administration in 1863 by which slaves in Confederate-held areas were freed
For southerners who owned slaves or aspired to own slaves, chattel slavery was not just part of their sectional economy, it was part of their culture. Owning slaves was a measure of status in Southern society. As part of this culture many European-Americans in the South went from seeing slavery as a “necessary evil” in the late eighteenth century, to defending it as a positive good in human civilization by the 1840s. With a number of other Western nations beginning to turn away from slavery, Southern supporters of slavery became increasingly defensive about their “peculiar institution.” By the 1850s these Southerners advocated U.S. expansion to acquire Cuba and/or Central America to add new slaveholding states to the Union in order to ensure parity with the non-slave states in Congress. By the 1850s a number of Southerners came to favor secession of the slaveholding states from the U.S. and the formation of a new nation that would protect and expand slavery. They believed that remaining part of the U.S. would ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery. Accruing events made Southerners who supported slavery feel unwelcome in the U.S; these included the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was a critique of slavery, and Northern support for escaping slaves via the Underground Railroad, as well as John Brown’s 1859 raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
Ironically, most European Americans in the non-slave states were not concerned about slavery or slaves. While they believed that slavery was wrong, they only feared competition from slave labor in their own states or the new western territories beyond the Mississippi River. This fear manifested itself in the creation of the Republican Party in 1854 in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of that year, which allowed voters in each of these two newly organized territories to determine whether or not slavery would be allowed. Northerners feared that such a competition, based on the political principle of popular sovereignty, would open part or all of the West to slave labor, threatening free labor in the process. Until the Civil War the Republican Party was dedicated to preventing the spread of slavery westward, with a number of Republicans going further by advocating the abolition of slavery in the states in which it already existed. In the 1856 presidential election the Republican presidential candidate, John Fremont, carried the support all of the states in the upper North, along with New York and Ohio, which was taken as an ominous sign for the future of slavery. When Lincoln won the presidential election in 1860, he brought with him the support of all the Northern states, but not the Southern states, and Southern supporters of slavery no longer felt part of the U.S.
Forming the Confederate States of America was a relatively simple process. With the geographic configuration of the war neatly sectional in nature, separation between the two sides was a simple process, as was the war they fought. With secession, Southern states had to do little more than change the signs on post offices. In 1860 the U.S. government presence in the states was little more than post offices and a small number of army and navy bases.
The war consisted of U.S. military forces trying to regain control of the seceded states, and Confederate military forces trying to stop them. The U.S. had the advantage in material and human resources, while the C.S. had the advantage in that it only had to outlast the U.S. Most people on both sides underestimated the resolve of their opponents, and, thus, underestimated the length of the war, assuming the other side would surrender before Christmas of 1861. That optimism is reflected in the U.S. government’s first hastily organized offensive, the object of which was to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital. This offensive failed with the first major battle of the war: the 21 July 1861 Battle of Bull Run. In the aftermath of this loss the Lincoln Administration reconfigured the U.S. war effort toward a longer struggle across several large border areas between the two sides. In Virginia the Lincoln Administration continued its campaigns to capture Richmond, not succeeding until March 1865.
In the area west of the Appalachian mountains and east of the Mississippi River, the Lincoln Administration launched a string of successful campaigns to take control of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, along with their tributaries; the objective was to disrupt Confederate transportation and trade. Arguably it was in this area that the Confederacy was broken geographically and economically. As part of these campaigns, U.S. forces also liberated Memphis, Nashville, and New Orleans, which exacerbated Confederate economic difficulties and hurt Confederate morale. With the successful conclusion of the Vicksburg, Mississippi campaign in July 1863, the U.S. controlled the Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in two.
While the Confederacy tried to defend the new nation’s eleven states, it also sought to expand westward to the Pacific coast. In 1862 Confederate forces invaded the New Mexico Territory, but were not able to maintain their occupation due to supply problems. This invasion was part of a larger effort to bring the Arizona Territory and the southern half of California into the Confederacy, with ultimate goal of secure a port on the Pacific coast.
Another area where U.S. forces were succeeding was along the coastal areas of the states occupied by the Confederates. As the war progressed the U.S. Navy imposed an increasingly effective blockade along these coastlines. This blockade reduced the flow of much-needed resources to the Confederacy from abroad. It also inspired Confederate efforts to break the blockade, including the construction of ironclad naval vessels—a new type of ship being developed by various countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. The C.S.S. Virginia—formerly the U.S.S. Merrimack—was the first Confederate ironclad. It took part in the first battle between ironclads when it fought against the U.S.S. Monitor, the first U.S. ironclad naval vessel. Ironclads were just one of a number of innovations during the Civil War.
Photography also experienced advancement during the Civil War. This conflict was the first war in U.S. history extensively and comprehensively covered by photographers. Photographers such as Matthew Brady provided images of all the major battles, along with conditions for soldiers in their camps and on the battlefields, civilians in their communities, and freed slaves in their efforts to establish new lives for themselves. These photographs presented another challenge for the Lincoln Administration in terms of their impact on Northern morale and support for the U.S. war effort. The Lincoln Administration had to ensure continual progress was photographed, so that Northern civilians could see evidence of success in their local newspapers.
Along with technological advances the Civil War also was influenced by industrialization. Each side used factories for the production of guns, artillery, uniforms, rations, and other war materials, with the U.S. having a significant advantage over the Confederacy in this area. For transportation both sides relied on railroads; the defense of friendly railroads and the destruction of enemy-held railroads was a significant part of each side’s strategy. Both sides also developed new methods for enlisting and training hundreds of thousands of soldiers, using methods similar to those being developed in manufacturing industries. In this respect trained soldiers and their units might be seen as the finished goods of each nation’s soldier factories.
Although the Civil War was not an international war, it did have global implications. The Lincoln Administration had to work to keep the British and French governments from aiding the Confederacy, a possibility at certain times of the war. Some British leaders wanted to see the Confederacy succeed in order to protect British imperial interests in the Americas. These leaders thought that a smaller U.S. would present less of a threat to these interests. Other British leaders, along with many in Britain, opposed slavery and would not support the Confederacy. Louis Napoleon, Emperor of the Second Empire of France, wanted to see the Confederacy succeed so as to be able to pursue his own plans to conquer Mexico. He would not, however, support the Confederacy openly unless the British government did. The Civil War struck a chord with other nations as well. While the Confederates were trying to break away from the U.S., the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia already had orchestrated the unification of most of the Italian states into the Kingdom of Italy. At the same time Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismark was beginning his campaign to create the German Empire under Prussian auspices. In 1861 the Russian government freed Russian serfs. Coincidentally, the Russian government supported the U.S. in the war. One of the reasons for this support was to be able to secure visits of Russian ships at U.S. Pacific ports, which unlike Russian Pacific ports, were free of ice during the winter months.
Through 1863 the U.S. was stalemated in efforts to capture Richmond. In fact, a Confederate field army under Robert Lee invaded Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863, culminating in the Battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, respectively. Following the 17 September 1862 Battle of Antietam, Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared slaves in Confederate-held areas to be free. This proclamation changed the war from just a struggle to restore the Union into a struggle to abolish slavey. This proclamation was also one of a number of steps which turned the Civil War into a revolution of sorts, leading to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865, which abolished slavery.
In the spring of 1864 Lincoln named Ulysses Grant general-in-chief of the U.S., with responsibility for managing the U.S. war effort. Grant had succeeded in a number of military campaigns in Tennessee and along the Mississippi River, including the successful liberation of the Mississippi River from Confederate control. As general-in-chief Grant implemented the first coordinated strategy for the defeat of the Confederates in all areas where there was fighting. The two main tasks were to capture Atlanta and Richmond, along with the Confederate forces that defended each. By April 1865 U.S. forces had captured both, and the process of the Confederate surrender and disintegration had begun.
In the generation that followed the end of the Rebellion, former Confederates and their descendants created their own mythology about this conflict toward the end of justifying this uprising, often depicting themselves as the victims of Northern aggression. The 1915 motion picture “Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, is one example of such a depiction of Confederates as victims of Northerners and freed slaves. Former Confederates after the war also partially replaced slavery with Jim Crow, an informal system of white supremacy imposed through state and local statutes and policies, cultural customs, and socially sanctioned violence. These efforts by former Confederates and their biological and ideological descendants have left a legacy of hate and racism that plagues the U.S. to the present; this has manifested in several ways, one of which is the continued support, violent at times, for the public display of Confederate leaders in the form of monuments.
The U.S. Civil War was a revolutionary struggle in a number of ways. First, it was an effort to reverse the progress toward equality of opportunity among people in the U.S. and around the world. The Confederate Rebellion was a purposeful and all but explicit effort by Southern slaveholders, along with non-slaveholding Southern European-Americans, not only to protect slavery in the Southern states in which it had been legalized but also expand it geographically—northward, at least to the Ohio River, and westward to the Pacific Ocean. Ironically the Confederate Rebellion was also revolutionary in that it resulted in an abrupt end to slavery as a legal institution in the U.S. By precipitating a war with the U.S., the Confederacy provoked many European Americans in the North to accept, if not support, the immediate abolition of slavery as a necessary step in stopping the existential threat to the U.S. that the Confederacy presented. Many Northerners did not support abolition for the sake of the freed slaves; rather, they wished to hurt the Confederacy. The Confederate Rebellion also resulted in expected revolutionary advances in medicine, military technology, and governmental organization that usually accompany wars.
Regardless of the changes that occurred during and in the aftermath of the Civil War, in many ways the U.S. still has not come to terms with slavery. While the U.S. government abolished the enslavement of African Americans as chattel, it had not officially repudiated the institution; this left a bitter legacy which includes the continual denial of many aspects of legalized slavery. Many European Americans today still do not recognize all the implications of this institution, including structural inequities built on race, which is not surprising to many as it is logical to remember that a problem cannot be solved until it is acknowledged.
Attributions
Images courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Title Image - 1862 Matthew Brady photo of "Contrabands at Headquarters of General Lafayette," Attribution: Matthew Benjamin Brady, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Provided by: Wikipedia. Location: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Contrabands_at_Headquarters_of_General_Lafayette_by_Mathew_Brady.jpg. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
Boundless World History
"North America"
Adapted from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/chapter/north-america/