THE CIVIL WAR    

I. INTRODUCTION

The Civil War (1861-65) was a social and military conflict between the United States of America in the North and the Confederate States of American in the South. A result of long developing tensions between the North and South, the war had two immediate triggers: the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, and the resulting secession of seven Southern states by February 1861. Combat began on 12 April 1861 at Fort Sumter in Charleston , South Carolina , and quickly intensified as four more states joined the Confederacy. Although many Confederate and Unionist leaders believed the war would be short, it dragged on until 26 May 1865 , when the last major Confederate army surrendered. More than 620,000 people died as a result of the conflict, and property damage was estimated at $5 billion. In the end, the victory of the United States meant the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery with the 13 th Amendment (1865).  

II. CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR

The most obvious cause of the Civil War was the dispute over slavery and its extension into the territories. As American politicians struggled with these issues during the first seventy-five years of the Republic (1776-1850), most pursued a pragmatic course of compromise, which resulted in three great settlements. First, delegates from Northern Revolutionary states that were emancipating their slaves compromised at the Constitutional Convention (1787) with Southern state representatives, who sought to maintain their slave systems. Although the words "slave" and "slavery" do not appear in the Constitution, the institution was ensconced in the document by the three-fifths and fugitive-slave clauses. Between 1818 and 1820, Northerners and Southerners bargained again this time on slavery's extension across the Mississippi River. With the Missouri Compromise (1820), Congress granted Missouri admission to the Union as a slave state, but forbid the further extension of slavery north of the 36° 30' line drawn across the Louisiana Territory. Thirty years later came the final compromise. As a result of the War with Mexico (1846-48), the United States won a Mexican Land Cession, which added more than 500,000 square mile in the southwest to the national domain. The Democratic and Whig parties handled the ensuing debate over slavery in the new lands by cobbling together the Compromise of 1850, which provided among other things that California would be admitted as a free state, while the rest of the Mexican Cession would be divided into two territories – Utah and New Mexico – where the legality of slavery would be decided by popular sovereignty. In return for California 's admission as a free state , enough Northerners of both parties agreed to a stronger fugitive slave law to benefit Southern slaveholders.

Although political compromise on the slavery issue had been consistently pursued during the first seventy-five years of the Republic, the ten year period between 1851 and 1861 witnessed the end of sectional settlement. The decade began with Harriet Beecher Stowe's serial publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851), an abolitionist novel that leveled a blistering attack on slave owners in the South. As Stowe's book intensified sectional animosities over slavery, Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas introduced the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which brought the idea of popular sovereignty from Utah and New Mexico to the newly organized territories of Kansas and Nebraska . This was controversial because both Kansas and Nebraska were above the 36° 30' line in the Louisiana Territory , and had been declared free by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Once passed with Southern and Western support, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had three dramatic results. First, it led to Bleeding Kansas (1854-60), a local civil war in which slaveholders from Kansas and Missouri fought anti-slavery men for control of the Kansas statehood process. Second, it heralded the disintegration of the Whig party, whose Southern supporters increasingly voted by section rather than party. And third, and most significantly, it led to the creation of the Republican Party in the North.

The Republican Party formed in 1854 as Northern men of both major parties joined in opposition to the expansion of slavery into the territories. At Ripon, Wisconsin first and then at Jackson, Michigan, coalitions formed between disaffected Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, and members of the smaller Free Soil Party. The Republican coalition solidified after the Supreme Court handed down its Dred Scott decision in 1857. The case had been brought to court by the slave Dred Scott, who argued that once his master took him into free territory, he was no longer a slave. The Court's majority found, however, that Scott was not free, and that he did not have the right to file suit in state or federal court because he was not a citizen of the United States , but instead was considered property. The Court also stated that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the territories, and thus the Missouri Compromise and all other legislation limiting slavery's expansion was unconstitutional. The Dred Scott decision boosted the Republican Party's appeal as many Northerners decried the Southern "slave power" that they felt was undermining the Constitution to protect its peculiar institution.

By the Presidential election of 1860, the slavery issue overshadowed all others. The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, a lesser-known but influential moderate who insisted that the Dred Scott decision was wrong and that slavery must not expand into the territories. The Democrats – as they searched for a nominee and platform – divided, much as the Whigs had done, along sectional lines. Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas, while Southern Democrats supported a pro-slavery platform led by John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Finally, the Constitutional Union Party, which condemned the sectional nature of the emerging political scene, nominated a Tennessee politician, John Bell, who argued that the Union was more important than the slavery issue. Lincoln won the election with 180 electoral votes and 1,866,452 popular votes. Although Douglas had 1,376,957 popular votes he received only 12 electoral votes, since Breckinridge secured all 72 Southern electoral votes. Bell received support in the middle states, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, where he won 39 electoral votes and most of his 588,879 popular votes.

Throughout the campaign, radical Southern leaders threatened to secede from the Union if Lincoln was elected in 1860. When the election result was clear, the South Carolina legislature led the way by summoning a special convention to consider secession. In December, 1860, the convention unanimously passed an ordinance dissolving "the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States." Other Southern states soon held similar conventions, and seceded. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas all left the Union by 1 February 1861.  

III. POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS AND THE WAR

After secession, delegates from six southern states met in Montgomery, Alabama on 4 February 1861 to set up a provisional government for the Confederate States of America. On 8 February, they adopted a constitution, and the next day the provisional Confederate Congress elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as President and Alexander Stephens of Georgia as Vice President. When Lincoln entered the Presidency on 4 March 1861, he said the federal government would not "assail" the states of the South, but that he meant to "hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government."

Within a month, however, Confederates had pushed yielding Union military forces out of the South, with one exception: those soldiers at Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. It was there that the war began when Confederate General Pierre Beauregard, ordered his troops to flush the Union forces out on 12 April 1861. The next day, Sumter fell to the Confederates, leading Lincoln to call up 75,000 militia from the states on 15 April 1861. Facing this show of federal force, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina seceded, doubling the population of the Confederacy and adding significant power and wealth to the new Southern nation.

With Southern delegates out of the United States Congress, many Northerners – mostly Republicans and old Whigs – set out to bring their progressive economic ideals to fruition. First, they dealt with financing the war and providing a stable economic order for the country. In 1861, Congress passed the Morrill Tariff, which raised import duties to about twice what they were before the war, protecting infant industry in the North. Then, Congress passed the National Banking Act, which was meant to replace the old National Banks (1791, 1816) by creating a uniform financial order and a fluid system of paper notes that would foster trade and help finance the war. As expenses rose during the conflict, Congress also passed the Internal Revenue Act (1862), which levied the first tax on income in American history to help defray the cost of blockading and invading the South.

The United States Congress also made three great leaps in Western development. In 1862, it passed the Transcontinental Railway plan, which assigned grants of land to be given to railroad companies that would seek to tie the east with the west. The first transcontinental line was completed in 1869, when the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific at Promontory, Utah. Next, by the Homestead Act of 1862, Congress granted 160 acres of Western land to settlers who would homestead for at least five years on the frontier. And finally, Congress began giving Morrill Land Grants to loyal states for the establishment of public universities.

Although Congress made great strides in national development, Union forces in 1861 and 1862 did not fare well in the most important theater of the war, the East. After losses in Virginia at First Bull Run (July 1861), in the Peninsular Campaign (Fall-Summer 1862), and at Second Bull Run (August 1862), many Northern critics of Lincoln were demanding an Eastern victory. Radical Republicans in Congress demanded a more forceful prosecution of the war, the abolition of slavery, and the introduction of black troops into Federal ranks. Although Lincoln opposed these measures, he was in a weak position because he felt that with public support the Radicals might force these actions upon him. Therefore, the President decided, and secretly declared, that he would soon emancipate Rebel slaves. Lincoln did just this after Confederate General Robert E. Lee's foray into the North was halted at the Battle of Antietam, near Sharpsburg, Maryland on 17 September 1862 – the bloodiest day in American military history with 26,000 dead, missing, and wounded. Five days later, with this "victory" Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which was made final on 1 January 1863. By freeing all the slaves in territories held by Confederates and emphasizing the enlisting of black soldiers in the Union army, Lincoln sought to rally support in the North, undermine the solidarity of the Southern states, and make it impossible for foreign powers to support the war for slavery being waged by the South. In addition to making this a moral war in 1863, the United States Congress followed the Confederates lead by instituting a draft in July under the Enrollment Act. In the course of the war, about 900,000 Confederates served, while the North raised 1.5 million troops for the Union and to free the slaves.

Although Robert E. Lee and his Confederate soldiers had won two great victories in Virginia at Fredericksburg (December 1862) and Chancellorsville (May 1863), by the summer of 1863 the Union was turning the tide of the war. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (1-3 July 1863), Lee was pushed from the North again, and at Vicksburg, Mississippi the same day as Lee retreated (4 July 1863), Union General Ulysses S. Grant captured the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River, and with it an army of 27,000 Confederates. Grant was soon given command of all U.S. forces (November 1863), and by May 1864, under his command the United States launched a coordinated campaign of invasion. Grant commanded the Army of the Potomac, and William T. Sherman commanded Union forces in the West.

In the fall of 1864, as Grant and Sherman led Union troops in the South, President Lincoln faced another election year. He had support from moderate and conservative Republicans and “War Democrats,” but was opposed by Radical Republicans, who felt he was too lenient on the South, and Copperheads, Democrats who wanted peace without victory and an end to Lincoln 's “tyranny” in the North. The Democrats nominated General George McClellan to face Lincoln . But, after Sherman 's capture of Atlanta , Georgia (September 1864) and Philip Sheridan's successful Shenendoah Valley Campaign (Fall 1864), Union sentiment was behind Lincoln . He won 212 of 233 electoral votes and 2.2 million of 4 million popular votes cast.

With Lincoln 's reelection, the South's cause was lost. It was only a matter of time before Grant and Sherman 's armies wore down Southern forces. Sherman led his infamous “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah , Georgia in late 1864, wreaking havoc on the South. Then, in early 1865 Grant's long siege of Petersburg , Virginia paid off when Lee abandoned his position there to move to Lynchburg , Virginia . Grant captured Petersburg and then the Confederate capital at Richmond . By the spring of 1865, the Confederate losses had mounted to such an extent that Lee surrendered his army to Grant at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865 . The war ended shortly thereafter, when the last Confederate forces surrendered.

IV. The Significance of the Civil War

Union victory in the Civil War meant first and foremost the preservation of the Union. Although President Lincoln was assassinated on 14 April 1865 at Ford's Theater, his vision of a united and free America was ultimately realized. Furthermore, Lincoln's Republican Party continued to dominate American political life until 1912 when Woodrow Wilson was elected (only one Democratic President, Grover Cleveland, was elected between 1860 and 1912).

The Civil War also resulted in significant Constitutional change. The 13 th Amendment (1865) carried Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation to its logical conclusion by outlawing slavery in the United States. The 14 th Amendment (1868) was the most far reaching of the Reconstruction Amendments: it “incorporated” much of the Bill of Rights at the state level; it established American citizenship for all persons born in the United States (overturning the Dred Scott decision that had denied African-Americans citizenship); it provided for due process rights at the state level; and finally, it declared that states must not deny any person the equal protection of the laws. The 15 th Amendment (1870) denied states the ability to limit voting rights based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Although white Democratic Southerners worked their way around the 14 th and 15 th Amendments, slavery was never reestablished in the South.

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Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970).

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction, 1863-1877 (1988).

Fredrickson, George. The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965).

Gallagher, Gary. Lee and His Generals in War and Memory (1998).

Gallagher, Gary. The Confederate War (1997).

McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom : The Civil War Era (1988).

Sutherland, Daniel. Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865 (1995).