1860, President Abraham Lincoln is elected president of the United States of America. 1861, the American Civil War begins as Jefferson Davis becomes the first and only President of the Confederate States of America to fight for the new Confederacy’s independence from the United States and to preserve a way of life. President Lincoln and the Union Army begin the fight to preserve their beloved Union and to end slavery, the disease they believe that plagues the country. The war would rage for five years and would end with a total of 970,000 American casualties, more than all other American wars combined. It is not the amount of blood spilt that makes this war unique, however. The American Civil War is one of the few wars in history that was not fought for land, money or freedom from a ruler, but rather for lofty concepts and ideals. These ideals meant everything to the soldiers that fought and died for them in the bloodiest war in American history.
The roots and causes of the war extend back into the early years of the 19th century. As the United States began acquiring new land and forming new states, it discovered a conflict. It had previously been decided during the ratification of the Constitution that certain states, all in the north, would be free and not allow slavery, while the southern states could legally have slaves. Because of this, a delicate balance had to be kept to make sure that there were an equal number of free states and slave states so as not to give one side a greater advantage in the government. However, with the new land acquired from the Mexican-American War, this became almost impossible. This separation translated into a fundamental difference of labor and work forces. The vast majority of the Southern land was made up of plantations and farms, and thus most of the work force was agriculturally based, and nearly all of the workers were black slaves. Therefore, most of the South’s exports were cash crops. The South’s main crop was cotton, which its economy relied heavily on. The North, however, had been investing the entire century in industrializing and industrial growth. Much of its economy was run by factories, mills, canals and railroads. Its work force consisted mostly of immigrants and the lower middle class. The South noticed the North’s growing population and feared that it would begin to lose seats in the House of Representatives, and thus an equal say in the government. This economic imbalance also led the North to take advantage of its power by imposing tariffs and taxes, which resulted in Southern distrust of the government. As South Carolina Senator John Townsend said, “‘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.’(Wikipedia)”
The North also hosted the body of the abolitionist movement in America that was crying out for human equality and equal rights. A moderate on this subject came onto the scene in the middle of the century. Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer and Senator of Illinois when he was chosen to be the candidate for the new Republican Party in 1860. Later that year, he was elected President of the United States of America with only forty percent of the votes. The Democratic Party, the Republicans’ main opposition, had split along the sectional line and was weaker on both sides. With the election of Lincoln and the Republican Party controlling the government, the South began to seriously fear that Lincoln would follow through on his promise to stop the expansion of slavery and even begin to end it.On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union. Six other southern states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and later Texas—joined South Carolina in what is known now as secession winter. They formed the Confederate States of America on February 4, 1861 and elected Jefferson Davis as their president on February 9. The Confederacy took control of the land and establishments inside its border, and the southern senators and state representatives left the United States government. On March 11, seven days after Lincoln took office, the Confederacy adopted the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, which was very similar to the United States Constitution. The most notable change was that it protected the institution of slavery, though it still prohibited international slave trading. It also gave more power to the states, or took power away from the central government, and it invoked God’s support. After the opening battle at Fort Sumter, four more states—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina—seceded and joined the Confederates States. However, President Lincoln worked hard to retain states in the Union, and succeeded in holding on to five slaves states—West Virginia (which seceded from Virginia), Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky—called border states. Not surprisingly, Lincoln declared secession illegal by the Constitution. That meant, however, that a war would be inevitable if the Union wished to punish the Southern states for their crime.
The war officially began on April 12, 1861 as Confederate soldiers began to bombard Fort Sumter, the only fort still in the Union’s possession in South Carolina. Lincoln declared a state of insurrection and called for 75,000 troops to join the army. Lincoln also sent a request to Robert E. Lee, a Virginian and graduate from West Point, to sign on as the General of the Union Army. He was a moderate who initially opposed the secession of Virginia, but when his home stated joined the Confederacy, so did he. Lee declined Lincoln’s request and instead accepted Jefferson Davis’ request for him to lead the Confederate Army. It was the beginning of the Union’s struggle to find an effective and lasting general, which led to a series of major losses for the Union troops in 1861.
The First Battle of Bull Run (also known as the First Manassas) took place on July 21, 1861 in Virginia. The Confederate troops under General Jackson, later to be nicknamed Stonewall Jackson, and Beauregard routed the Union army under General McDowell. On the sea, General Winfield Scott devised and enacted his Anaconda Plan, a Union naval blockade along the entire southern Atlantic coast and up the Mississippi River. It prevented most trading between the South and Britain and caused a lot of the inflation the South incurred. However, losses at Wilson’s Creek and the Battle of Ball’s Bluff lead Lincoln to replace his general in-chief, General Winfield Scott with George B. McClellan. The Union finally received a major victory on February 6, 1862 when General Ulysses S. Grant captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and later took Fort Donelson near Nashville. Nashville surrendered to Union troops on February 25. However, Lincoln became tired of waiting for McClellan to take action, so he replaced him with General Henry Halleck and instead assigned him to the Army of the Potomac, which then began a campaign to take Richmond, the Confederacy’s capitol.At the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, April 6-7, the Union troops under Grant were nearly defeated by General Albert Johnston’s forces, but reinforcements came at the last minutes, and Grant was able to drive the Confederate troops back. The 20,000 men lost on both sides those two days are more than the total losses from the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War combined. The Union continued to see success as Union Flag Officer David Farragut captured New Orleans and moved up the Mississippi river. Shortly before that, Jefferson Davis responded to the Confederate losses by signing the first draft in American history, yet the Confederacy continued to see losses until McClellan reached Richmond and was stopped first by Johnston and later Lee. The South’s hope was rekindled, however, when the Confederate Army won one of its most significant victories at the Second Battle of Bull Run (or Second Manassas) on August 30, 1862.
The tide turned the other way for the Confederate army once again when General Lee decided that an invasion of the North was necessary to win the war. He moved his army into Maryland where they met McClellan across the river Antietam on September 17. McClellan had come across Lee’s battle plan and knew that his army was split up. Despite his great numerical advantage over Lee, McClellan remained convinced that Lee had twice as many troops as he actually did and refused to take the opportunity to press the attack. However, the Confederate losses were substantial enough that Lee retreated to Virginia the next evening, leaving behind the bloodiest day of the Civil War. President Lincoln’s next action was to remove McClellan from command and replace him with Ambrose Burnside, which turned out to be a mistake because he did not know how to command an entire army. Thus, the Battle of Fredericksburg was won by Lee while suffering less then half of the casualties of the North.
1863 began on January 1 with Lincoln’s official issue of the Emancipation Proclamation, which stated that all slaves in the Confederacy were freed. It did not actually free any slaves, but it did change the official purpose of the war from preserving the Union to freeing slaves. This change lost the support of many Northerners who had previously supported the war. It was also a turning point for Britain and France, who no longer felt it would be beneficial to support the South. By January 26, blacks were being authorized to be recruited into the Union army. Eventually, there was a total of 185,000 black soldiers in the army and in the navy.In June of 1863, Lee made a second attempt to invade the North, this time into Pennsylvania. As he marched his troops across the Potomac, General Joseph Hooker, who had replaced Burnside in January, was replaced by General George Meade, began to prepare for confrontation with Lee’s army. By chance, the two armies collided at a small town called Gettysburg on July 1. The fighting lasted three days as both sides continued to pour in more troops. Lee’s goal was to fight through the Union forces and get closer to Washington D.C. Lee’s second in command, General James Longstreet, tried to convince him that the Confederate troops should pull back and move around to get between the Union army and Washington in a defensive position so that the Union troops would be forced to attack, but Lee refused to pull out. This allowed the Union troops to set up a defensive position where they could successfully repulse the attacks that lasted for three days. The fighting culminated in a final Confederate assault of 13,500 men known as Pickett’s Charge, which utterly failed. On July 4, Lee was forced to retreat to Virginia. The Battle of Gettysburg was a major turning point in the war for both sides. On the same day, the Confederates on the western front at Vicksburg, Mississippi made an unconditional surrender to Ulysses S. Grant.
On November 19, Lincoln delivers his very famous Gettysburg Address. It reminds those listening, and later the whole nation, why the war was raging. He reminds the Union that the United States was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” in his iconic opening sentence, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal(Wikipedia).” Although the speech was not written on the back of a letter, as popularly thought, it was composed bit by bit over a few days and was finished the morning of its presentation.In 1864, the final operations of the war were beginning to take place .On June 30, 1864, Grant began the Siege of Petersburg after a failed attempt to capture it in one attack. His objective was to the cut the supply lines that converged there and were the source of supplies for Richmond. An elaborate trench system was set up by each side, led by Grant and Lee, very much like the trenches that were dug 50 years later during World War I. For nine months, Grant successfully thinned and weakened Lee’s lines. On April 2, 1865, Grant finally made a full front attack on Lee’s forces that broke through the line in a few places. Lee sent a telegraph to Richmond saying that he could no longer defend Richmond and Petersburg.
Meanwhile, the Union General William Sherman began his siege on Atlanta, Georgia in mid-July, 1864. The four battles (Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church and Jonesborough) ensured Sherman’s capture of the city on September 2. He proceeded to set most of it on fire. This victory came just in time to essentially ensure President Lincoln’s reelection later that year. It also marked the beginning of Sherman’s March to the Sea. It ended when Sherman captured Savannah on the Atlantic coast, but he continued to march north through the Carolinas, the army fighting and burning cities that stood in the way. Several smaller battles were fought near the end of 1864 and into 1865, but the Confederate Army was never able to recover from Sherman’s victories.
On November 11, 1864, Lincoln was reelected as President and he was inaugurated on March 4, 1865 with Andrew Johnson as his Vice President. A month later on April 8, Lee finally surrendered his army after being surrounded at Appomattox Court House in Virginia by Grant’s army. Six days later while watching a play at Ford’s Theatre, Lincoln was shot by actor John Wilkes Booth. He died the next day, the first president to be assassinated. The same day, Vice President Andrew Johnson took the oath of office.Despite the tragedy of Lincoln’s death, the war ended triumphantly for the Union. Why was the North victorious over the South? According to historian David Kenneth in his book Don’t Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History But Never Learned, “The simplest answer is that the Confederacy was fighting history, not just the Union. In many respects, the Confederate states fielded an eighteenth-century army to fight a nineteenth-century war against a twentieth-century power. (p.240)” The Union Army at its peak had over 2 million men enlisted, out numbering the Confederacy by two to one. The North also had 4 million men of combat age while the South only had 3.5 million, 100,000 factories to the South’s 20,000 and 20,000 miles of railroad to the South’s 9,000. As Southern historian Shelby Foote put it in the Ken Burns’ documentary, The Civil War, “…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. (Burns)” Although the North might have been well equipped for war, it still had to face the issue of what to do with the surrendered Confederate States.The period after the war, known as Reconstruction, actually began early in the war. It was what its name suggests, a reconstruction of the Union. There were two issues that had to be dealt with: the secession had to end by readmitting each Confederate state, and all forms of slavery in every state had to be eliminated. However, there was little agreement about the criteria needed to accomplish these two goals. In 1863, Lincoln formed a moderate plan for readmitting states. Southerners could become citizens again by taking a simple loyalty oath. When ten percent of a state had taken it, then it could set up its own government again. By ten percent, however, Lincoln only meant ten percent of the white men who were registered to vote, a very small percent of each state’s entire population. After Lincoln died, however, Radical Republicans pushed for stricter terms, but they had to answer to President Johnson, who favored Lincoln’s approach. The only difference was that each state, including the Union states, had to ratify its constitution to include the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. In December, 1865, when two thirds of the states had added it, the required number to ratify the United Stats Constitution. Although the Southern Congressmen returned to Congress, they were not entirely cooperative with the Thirteenth Amendment and passed a series of “Black-Codes” that did not allow freedmen to vote, own land or have complete control of their employment. To counter this, Radical Republicans attempted to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The Act was vetoed by Johnson, but the Republicans, for the first time in American history, had enough votes to override the veto.
Congress then formed the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was designed to take care of the four million freed slaves, doing everything from starting schools, to giving them food, to helping them find employment. The result for most freed blacks was what is called sharecropping, a system that allowed blacks to work for plantation owners in return for a place to live and food. However, many only fell into permanent debt. Congress’s next act was to pass a series of Reconstruction Acts. They divided the South into military regions, and changed the criteria for statehood. Each state had to ratify its constitution to allow blacks to vote and to add the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended citizenship to blacks. Reconstruction finished in each state at different times, but the period officially ended with the Compromise of 1877, which exchanged a Republican Presidency for the removal of federal troops from South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana.Three of the most famous successes of the war are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in every state, finally ending the issue that had created conflict between the North and the South during the entire 19th century. The Fourteenth Amendment extended citizenship to include blacks. It also required that states give equal legal protection to all persons under their jurisdiction. It was ratified on July 9, 1868. The Fifteenth Amendment prevented states from denying the right to vote based on race, color, or previous servitude. Although it was ratified on February 3, 1870, it wasn’t until nearly a century later that that promise was completely fulfilled. Despite these giant steps toward equal civil rights, it did not stop extreme segregation in many states. The Jim Crow laws were enforced in the Southern and border states well into the 20th century. They required separate schools, public places, transportation, bathrooms and restaurants for blacks and whites. Services provided for blacks were nearly always much less than that for whites. It also resulted in hundreds of lynchings by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, a cult dedicated to eradicating blacks.
Even so, the United States has come far in the last 150 years on the issue of human rights. It makes one wonder what might have happened if the Confederacy had been successful in separating itself for the Union. There were many points in the war when one command, a difference of two hours, or a difference of one mile might have changed the overall outcome. What if Lee had listened to General Longstreet when he had advised that Lee’s army pull out and take a defensive position at Gettysburg? Might the Confederate army have won the battle, moved successfully into the North, and therefore won the war? If that had happened, the Confederacy might have gotten the recognition from Britain that it had been seeking in the war and become an independent, slave-owning nation. At that point, the Union would most likely still abolish slavery in the Border States, presuming they did not secede and join the Confederacy. However, because of the South’s lack of industrialization and its currency inflation after the war, it is unlikely that it would have survived for long on its own without outside help. As it was, Lincoln and the Union managed to heal the broken nation and that ultimately helped it become stronger.
Works Cited
“American Civil War.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Burns, Ken. The Civil War. Film. PBS. Burbanks, CA. 1990.
David, Kenneth C. Don’t Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History But Never Learned. HarperCollins. New York, NY. 2003.
“Rickard, J (10 May 2006), American Civil War Timeline.
