Again, the very reason why DC is the capital, and it still is not Philly, is b/c of a concession on part of the north to the southerners...................this being back in the 1790s..............when the decision to move the capital was made.................and former commanding officer of the revolutionary army.........George Washington, his family estate is just down the Potomac.............
The Roots of Sectional Conflict.
Within a generation of the Revolution, all the states north of Maryland embarked on programs of gradual emancipation. By the early nineteenth century, slavery was almost exclusively a sectional institution confined to the South, home to over 90 percent of American blacks. At the same time as the North was moving away from slavery, the invention of the cotton gin and rising demand in English textile factories for raw cotton were stimulating the westward expansion of slavery throughout the southeastern United States.
As social and economic patterns of development diverged sharply along sectional lines, the South's national share of political power began to slip. From a rough balance of power with the North in 1790, the South held only 42 percent of the votes in the House of Representatives by 1820. Worried over their growing minority status, and enraged over the attempt of the North to force emancipation upon Missouri when it applied for admission as a slave state in 1819, white southerners for the first time threatened secession during the debates that resulted in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The heart of the compromise was the drawing of a line through the Louisiana Purchase territory that prohibited slavery north of the latitude 36°30′ and allowed it to the south.
In addition to proclaiming their right to an equal share of the expanding West, southern proponents of slavery protested protective tariffs that they insisted sacrificed the agricultural export economy of the South on behalf of northern manufacturers. This issue precipitated the sectional crisis of 1832–33 in which South Carolina planters, led by John C. Calhoun, held that a state could constitutionally nullify federal legislation that it determined violated its interests.
President Andrew Jackson forced the Nullifiers to back down, but of greater concern in the 1830s to southerners anxious over the future of slavery was the sudden emergence of an abolitionist movement in the North. Inspired by northern evangelical Protestantism and a belief in the right of African Americans to freedom and self‐betterment, the abolitionists denounced slavery as the nation's greatest moral abomination and urged all Americans to begin immediately the work of emancipation. Skillful at spreading their message, the abolitionists launched a major propaganda campaign in the mid‐1830s and deluged Congress with antislavery petitions.
The agitation of the slavery issue by the abolitionists predisposed many northerners to see in the admission of the slave republic of Texas in 1845 and the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846 the fearful designs of a conspiracy of slaveholders—the “slave power”—to expand slavery throughout new regions in the West and thereby deprive northern farmers and workers of the opportunity to settle the West for their social and economic advancement. When northern congressmen rallied behind the Wilmot Proviso in 1846 in an effort to bar slavery from any territories gained in the Mexican War, southerners formed their own sectional bloc and forced the ultimate defeat of the proviso. The divisive issue of the expansion of slavery had moved to center stage in American politics and would continue to dominate it through the 1850s.
Rising Sectional Tensions in the 1850s.
Since slavery within the states was protected by the Constitution, antislavery sentiment focused on keeping it out of the territories. Southerners, arguing that the territories were the common property of all the states, insisted on what they deemed their constitutional right to carry slaves into the territories. Furthermore, slaves and land were the major sources of wealth in the South, particularly with the cotton boom. The result was a decade of sectional strife.
A complex sectional agreement, the congressional Compromise of 1850, permitted California to enter the Union as a free state. The remaining land won in the Mexican War was divided into the territories of Utah and New Mexico with no conditions placed on the status of slavery. In 1854, the Kansas‐Nebraska Act reopened the entire controversy. In order to gain essential southern support for his bill organizing the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36°30′, Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois had to revoke the Missouri Compromise restriction on slavery. Northerners reacted by charging that the Slave Power was moving to monopolize the territories for slavery at the expense of free labor.
The Whig Party split and collapsed in the storm of northern protest over the Kansas‐Nebraska Act, and a sectionalized Republican Party quickly formed around the core principle of blocking the expansion of slavery. The major Protestant denominations had already split into sectional wings over the slavery issue, and only the Democratic Party now remained as an important national institution that represented northern and southern interests. Democratic unity, however, shattered during the administration of James Buchanan (1857–61). The ruling of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in the territory further polarized sectional attitudes, and northern Democrats led by Douglas lost the trust of the southern wing of the party when they joined Republicans in blocking the admission of Kansas as a slave state.
The decade came to a close with abolitionist John Brown's raid against the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Brown's unsuccessful attempt to incite a slave rebellion sent paroxysms of fear and anger through the South and touched off rumors of conspiracies and slave uprisings. Brown was hanged, and although the Republicans denounced him as a wild‐eyed fanatic, many white southerners were convinced that the Republican Party was dominated by abolitionists and plotting with them to unleash a bloodbath in the slave states.
Lincoln's Election and the Secession Crisis.
Pushing the constitutional doctrine of states' rights to its logical extreme, the secessionists held that individual states retained ultimate sovereignty within the Union and could peacefully leave the Union the same way they had entered it through special state conventions. Rejecting any plan of prior cooperation among the slave states, they pursued a strategy of separate state action, accurately predicting that the momentum of secession would force wavering states to join those that had already gone out.
South Carolina took the lead on 20 December 1860, and within six weeks seven states from the Lower South left the Union. Delegates from these states set up the provisional government of the Confederate States of America at Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861. This original Confederacy represented those states with the heaviest concentration of slaves and the highest percentage of white families owning slaves. Planters were in the forefront of secession. What opposition they encountered from the majority of nonslaveholding farmers took the form of cooperationism, the argument that secession should be delayed until a united bloc of Southern states agreed to go out together. The cooperationists polled about 40 percent of the vote in the secession elections, but in the end they followed the leadership of the secessionist planters.
Fort Sumter and the Outbreak of War.
When inaugurated on 4 March 1861, Lincoln thus faced a dilemma. If he took no action against the Confederacy, he risked demoralizing his party and subjecting his administration to the same derision that had pilloried the outgoing Buchanan Democrats for standing by while the secessionists broke up the Union. On the other hand, any forceful step against the seceded states threatened to divide the North and drive the Upper South into the Confederacy.
Realizing that he could not afford to be locked into an endless policy of drift and delay, Lincoln decided to take a stand for the Union over Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the most visible installation in the Confederacy that was still under federal control. Aware that the garrison at Fort Sumter would be forced to surrender for lack of supplies sometime in early April, he ordered a relief expedition to the fort on 6 April. He stressed that the fort would be supplied “with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made, without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the Fort.”
Lincoln in effect placed the decision for war in the hands of Confederate authorities. The government of Confederate President Jefferson Davis accepted that burden as the price it had to pay to establish the Confederacy as a sovereign power. On 9 April, Davis ordered Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard to demand the immediate surrender of Fort Sumter. Fearful of Union duplicity and anxious to avoid any possibility of having to fight two Union forces at the same time, Davis wanted Sumter in Confederate hands before the relief expedition arrived.
In the predawn hours of 12 April 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter. The capture of Fort Sumter occurred on April 13 and Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered the fort on 14 April. The next day, Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 state militia to put down what he defined as an insurrection. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina scornfully rejected Lincoln's call for troops and joined the Confederacy in the next five weeks. Still, Lincoln now had a Northern majority behind the goal of preserving the Union with force. The Confederacy was cast as the aggressor that had fired the first shot of the Civil War, and the Northern crusade to save the Union persisted through four agonizing years of war.
[See also War: Causes of War.]
Bibliography
Roy F. Nichols , The Disruption of American Democracy, 1948.
Kenneth M. Stampp , And War Came, 1950.
Eric Foner , Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 1970.
William L. Barney , The Road to Secession, 1972.
Michael F. Holt , The Political Crisis of the 1850s, 1973.
David M. Potter , The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, 1976.
J. Mills Thornton III , Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 1978.
Daniel W. Crofts , Reluctant Confederates, 1989.
Bruce Levine , Half Slave and Half Free, 1992.
Kenneth M. Stampp , And War Came, 1950.
Eric Foner , Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 1970.
William L. Barney , The Road to Secession, 1972.
Michael F. Holt , The Political Crisis of the 1850s, 1973.
David M. Potter , The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, 1976.
J. Mills Thornton III , Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 1978.
Daniel W. Crofts , Reluctant Confederates, 1989.
Bruce Levine , Half Slave and Half Free, 1992.
William L. Barney
Civil War (1861–65): Military and Diplomatic Course The war between the North and South that followedAbraham Lincoln's election to the presidency in 1860 claimed over 600,000 American lives and seriously threatened the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere. When Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to suppress the southern rebellion after the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, the federal government possessed overwhelming superiority in manpower and the material resources needed to conduct war in an industrial age. The Confederacy had a number of factors in its favor, however. To win, the North had to conquer vast territories and break the will of the Southern people. Furthermore, the railroads that made it possible to supply the large military forces it would take to occupy and conquer the South restricted the strategic flexibility of Union commanders. Finally, Southern armies enjoyed the advantage of operating in sympathetic and supportive territory.The South also benefitted, although not to a crucial extent, from a generally superior level of military leadership. The traditional notion that a Southern dominance prevailed at West Point and the antebellum army has an element of truth to it, but should not be exaggerated. On the whole, Northern students tended to perform better at the technically oriented Military Academy. Consequently, after graduation they were assigned to the more prestigious artillery and engineering units, rather than the cavalry and infantry branches. There lesser‐performing Southern graduates tended to dominate, and the Civil War would be an infantryman's war.
The status of the West Point–trained military officer would be a source of friction for both sides throughout the war. The Union and the Confederacy benefitted immeasurably from the professional knowledge and expertise of the West Pointers. Yet neither society completely appreciated nor understood the specialized skills and standards the professionals deemed essential for conducting a modern war. In the North, suspicion of professional officers was further inflamed by the number of Southern officers who joined the Confederate army; in the South, by the clear preference President Jefferson Davis accorded West Pointers. For their part, professional officers often let their contempt for politics and civilians manifest itself in a haughty cliquishness and were at times unduly harsh in their efforts to impose military discipline.
Even the professionals were inadequately prepared for the revolution in warfare brought about by innovations in military technology. They did not appreciate how the dramatic enhancement of firepower provided by the widespread use of rifled muskets gave an overwhelming advantage to forces operating on the tactical defensive and rendered traditional assault tactics obsolete. And although West Pointers recognized the importance of field fortifications, none really anticipated the extent to which Civil War armies would employ them.
Both sides also encountered significant strategic problems. In the western theater (primarily the area between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains), three major rivers, the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi, provided Northern armies with excellent invasion routes. However, they would be vulnerable to raids and turning movements any time they operated away from river supply lines. In the east, Union and Confederate armies, for the most part, focused on the direct overland route between the two capitals, Washington and Richmond, through Fredericksburg Virginia. Yet both sides were capable of conducting strategic turning movements. The North, with its overwhelming naval superiority, could operate from the lower Chesapeake Bay along the rivers that reached into the Virginia heartland, which it did with some success in 1862 and 1864. The Shenandoah Valley could be used for the same purpose by the Confederate armies, and was in 1862, 1863, and 1864.
Although the war was ultimately decided on the battlefield, the diplomatic contest was no less important. By 1860 a state of detente prevailed between the United States and the European powers. The most important of these, Great Britain and France, valued the United States as a check against the ambitions of other European powers in the Western Hemisphere. Both countries also had strong ties of economic interdependence with North and South. Not only did both Britain and France need southern cotton to feed their textile industries, they also had heavy investments in northern land, railroads, and public securities.
Southerners nonetheless went to war confident of success in the diplomatic arena. The European powers, they surmised, would find it difficult to resist the opportunity presented by the rebellion to diminish U.S. power in the hemisphere. To assuage European fears of an overweening Confederacy, southern diplomats and statesmen continually emphasized their limited war aims, and portrayed themselves as a people merely seeking freedom from Yankee tyranny. British freetraders were also expected to resent protectionist trade policies a Republican administration was certain to implement.
However, the Confederate cause overseas was compromised during the early months of the war, when the European powers were establishing their initial policies, by overconfidence in their ability to achieve military success and a lack of a seasoned diplomatic corps. The South also underestimated Europe's determination to avoid involvement. Although sympathetic to the Southern struggle for self‐determination, and confident that the Union cause would ultimately fail, Europe was unwilling to recognize the Confederacy without some demonstration of its via bility as a nation. Yet if the South could meet this test, why, European statesmen could fairly ask, antagonize the North by getting involved if the Confederacy was going to win anyway?
The North had the advantage of merely advocating preservation of the status quo, which the European powers, especially Great Britain, had a powerful interest in maintaining. If sufficiently aroused, British statesmen feared the North might attempt to seize Canada. There was also the danger that diminution of American power might promote instability in the Americas, and compel a diversion of energy, resources, and attention away from affairs on the European Continent. Finally, British statesmen had to take into account the fact that their constituents were highly dubious of foreign adventures in the wake of the Crimean War.
This did not mean the North would have an easy time diplomatically. The British prime minister, Lord Viscount Palmerston, held a deep antipathy toward republican government in general, and Americans in particular. Furthermore, Palmerston viewed the war as a pointless one. Secession was in his mind an irrevocable fait accompli, and he doubted the Lincoln administration had either the means or the will necessary to restore the Union. To Palmerston, the question was not whether the South would win her independence, but whether the North would give up the fight before too much death and destruction had occurred. Britain's role, as he saw it, was to keep a pointless war from threatening the peace and stability upon which British imperial interests depended.
Responsibility for the North's diplomatic efforts rested with Secretary of State William H. Seward, a crafty and pragmatic politician who recognized the value of bluster in diplomacy. His sincere advocacy of a war against European intrusions in the Caribbean during the Fort Sumter crisis to revitalize southern Unionism shocked the diplomatic corps in Washington. Although Lincoln rejected the idea of a foreign war, Seward's actions during this critical period successfully fostered an image of American bellicosity that reinforced British and French caution in their dealings with the South.
The Union also benefitted immensely from the skill of the American Minister in Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams. His handling of affairs played a major role in settling a number of crises that threatened the Union war effort. The issue of slavery helped the North. Although European statesmen consistently approached the “American question” from a purely pragmatic standpoint, they and their constituents were unenthusiastic about supporting a nation founded in part to protect the institution of slavery.
In April 1861, however, Lincoln committed a grave blunder by declaring a blockade, which, according to international law, implied the existence of a conflict between two independent states. Britain responded with a proclamation of neutrality—in effect implying belligerent status on the Confederacy. Seward responded with a harsh warning that further steps in favor of the South would lead to a serious breach in U.S.–British relations. In London, Adams toned down Seward's message without losing its essence, and obtained assurances from Palmerston that he had no present intention of recognizing the Confederacy. Although both the proclamations of neutrality and the blockade would remain sources of friction, the North, by fixing the British and French into noninterventionist positions at the outset, had won a major diplomatic victory.
When Lincoln issued his call for volunteers after Fort Sumter, he made it clear that the North was fighting solely for the Union. No effort would be made to molest Southern civilians, their property or institutions, nor would any attempt be made to abolish slavery where it then existed. The president adopted this position for two reasons. First, he realized he needed a broad coalition of support in the North for the war. Adopting radical war aims might alienate more conservative elements of public opinion, particularly in those slave states that remained loyal. Lincoln also believed that the vast majority of Southerners were lukewarm about independence and had been forced to accept secession by irresponsible political leaders. To declare war on Southern institutions would, Lincoln and most northerners feared in 1861, unite the white South behind secession.
The task of developing a military strategy to achieve these political goals feel upon Gen. Winfield Scott, commander of all the Union armies. Scott put forth a two‐part plan, dubbed the “Anaconda” by the press, after the strangling snake, that represented both his and Lincoln's desire for an easy reconciliation between the sections. First, the Union navy would establish a complete blockade of the Southern states. Second, a combined army‐navy force of 80,000 men would capture the Mississippi Valley. Cut off from the outside world, Scott believed economic pressure would lead Southerners to reassert their natural loyalty to the Union with a minimum of bloodshed. Lincoln, however, felt Scott's plan would take too much time to implement and perhaps years to produce desirable results. Despite vigorous protests from many of his professional military advisers, Lincoln ordered an advance on the Confederate position near Manassas Junction, Virginia.
On 26 July 1861, the South won a close, but decisive, victory at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). A chastened Lincoln called Gen. George B. McClellan to Washington and appointed him commander of Union forces around the capital. McClellan's magnetic personality, success building the Army of the Potomac, and record of military victories in western Virginia impressed the president. On 1 November 1861, McClellan replaced Scott as general‐in‐chief of the Union army.
Rejecting the idea that large‐scale fighting could be avoided, McClellan advocated taking the time to assemble, organize, and train an overwhelming military force to render Southern resistance futile. At the same time, he championed a lenient policy toward the South and slavery to make returning to the Union as attractive as possible. McClellan's operational strategy called for the main land offensive to be made in Virginia against Richmond, the Southern capital and industrial center. Supporting op erations would be undertaken into East Tennessee to liberate the loyal population there and break the railroad that connected the eastern Confederacy with the west, and along the Mississippi River. Finally, McClellan wanted the navy to establish enclaves along the Southern coastline to support the blockade and pin down Confederate troops that might otherwise be sent to resist Union operations in Virginia.
In November 1861, however, only McClellan's Army was anywhere near ready to commence operations. To give Gen. Henry W. Halleck in Missouri and Gen. Don Carlos Buell in Kentucky time to organize their forces, McClellan decided to postpone offensive operations until the spring of 1862. By the time spring came, however, dissatisfaction with military delay had dramatically eroded McClellan's personal prestige with the Northern public and his relations with the President.
Among the sources of discontent with military inactivity in the winter of 1861–62 was a crisis in U.S.–British relations. In November 1861, a British mail steamer, the Trent, was stopped by a Union warship that took into custody two Confederate emissaries, James Mason and John Slidell. The Palmerston government was enraged, and quickly made it clear that if the Lincoln administration did not apologize and release Mason and Slidell, there would be serious consequences. To bolster the threat, the British began active military preparations in Canada. After several tense weeks the Lincoln administration backed down and surrendered the two emissaries in late December.
Responsibility for the formation of Southern military strategy fell upon President Davis, a West Pointer, Mexican War hero, and former secretary of war. On the surface, the Confederacy's strategic problem appeared much simpler: Southerners merely had to offer sufficient resistance to convince the North it could not be conquered. However, geography and political factors imposed serious limitations on strategic planning. The location of the Confederacy's small industrial base and vital agricultural areas in the upper South ruled out the adoption of a Fabian strategy. Such a strategy would also have placed the institution of slavery at risk, as the sight of Union armies marching through the South would have undermined the moral authority of the master class and served as a haven for runaway slaves. Perhaps even more important than these material considerations in shaping Southern strategy was a too widely espoused belief that as a point of honor the Confederacy should defend every inch of its soil.
Also widely espoused was a belief that Europe's voracious appetite for cotton would compel intervention. Although not officially sanctioned by the Confederate government, Southerners imposed an effective embargo on cotton exports to increase demand for the crop overseas. “King Cotton diplomacy” proved a disastrous failure, however. Bumper crops in 1857–60 had left British mills with more than enough cotton to process for an already satiated market. By the time the lack of cotton might have seriously affected the British economy, alternative sources in Egypt and India had been developed, and they more than made up the difference. Furthermore, poor harvests during the first two years of the war increased European demand for Northern food crops, making King Corn as important to European statesmen as King Cotton.
In January 1862, Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, under the command of Gen. Albert S. Johnston, held a badly overextended line that stretched from Columbus, Kentucky, on the Mississippi River to Mill Springs in eastern Kentucky. At the center of the line stood Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. In February, both fell to a joint army‐navy force commanded by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. This opened the Confederate heartland to invasion. With his flanks exposed by the penetration of his center, Johnston abandoned Kentucky and most of Tennessee. The industrial center of Nashville fell, and Union forces moved quickly up the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers.
Political pressure and a belief that the burden of simultaneously serving as field commander and general in chief was too much led Lincoln to remove McClellan from the latter post in March 1862. Lincoln named no replacement, and instead intended to perform the functions of general in chief himself. He did, however, combine the western departments and appoint Henry Halleck as their overall commander. Upon assuming this position, Halleck decided to concentrate his forces for an operation against the strategic rail point at Corinth, Mississippi. Before Halleck could complete his concentration, Johnston, on 6 April 1862, attacked unprepared Union forces under Grant near Shiloh Church by the Tennessee River. Grant's army managed to hold on despite extremely heavy losses, and, reinforced by forces under Buell, launched a successful counterattack the next day. The Confederates retreated to Corinth, having lost the Battle of Shiloh; Johnston, who had been mortally wounded; and their bid to reverse Southern fortunes in western Tennessee.
In March, McClellan launched a combined navy‐army campaign from the lower Chesapeake Bay. After a month‐long siege before Yorktown, McClellan commenced a steady advance toward Richmond in the Peninsular Campaign. By early June, the Army of the Potomac was within ten miles of the Confederate capital, and the end of the rebellion appeared at hand.
But then two men emerged who would transform the war in Virginia, Gen. Robert E. Lee and his lieutenant, “Stonewall” Jackson. They recognized that if the Confederacy remained wholly on the defensive and continued to concede the strategic initiative, it would inevitably be crushed by superior numbers. To prevent this, they decided to seize the initiative by assuming the strategic and tactical offensive while attempting to defend the South.
It has been argued that Lee's aggressive strategy led him into tactical blunders and high casualties that bled the Confederacy white. Clearly, in retrospect, the ultimate objective of an offensive strategy, the destruction of the opposing army in battle, was a practical impossibility given the size and firepower of Civil War armies. Yet Lee recognized that if the South could only frustrate Northern military operations until the 1864 elections, the Northern public might replace the Lincoln administration with one more amenable to Southern independence. In May and June 1862, Jackson, with Lee's active support and encouragement, conducted a brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah Valley that induced the Lincoln administration to hold back reinforcements from McClellan's army. Lee then called Jackson's force to Richmond, and took the offensive. In the Seven Days' Battle of 25 June–1 July 1862, McClellan responded to Lee's and Jackson's attack by conducting a successful fighting retreat to a new position on the James River.
The setback on the Peninsula and the tremendous casualties suffered by McClellan and by Grant at Shiloh had a profound effect on Northern opinion. Until the Seven Days' Battle, Lincoln had resisted calls for a more radical approach out of fear that it would stimulate Southern resistance. In July 1862, however, Lincoln saw little evidence that the conservative policy was convincing many southerners to lay down their arms. Lincoln also perceived a hardening of Northern public opinion, and began moving toward a more radical position on the war. In July, he read to his cabinet a draft of a proclamation emancipating the slaves in the Confederacy, but was persuaded to await a military victory before issuing it.
To achieve that victory, Lincoln organized a new army in Virginia and placed it under the command of John Pope, who issued a series of orders promulgating a tougher policy toward Southern property and civilians. Next, Lincoln restored the position of general in chief and appointed Halleck to the post. Finally, Lincoln then, through Halleck, ordered McClellan's army back to Washington to unite with Pope's forces. But Pope proved no match for Lee. In a brilliant campaign, Lee forced Pope back to the old battlefield of Bull Run before all of McClellan's army could join him, and, on 29–30 August 1862, won a crushing victory at the Second Battle ofBull Run.
Lee then decided to cross the Potomac River into Maryland. Lee did this hoping to feed his army in Maryland rather than Virginia, recruit Marylanders into his army, and win a decisive victory on Union soil that would bring the North to the peace table. Lincoln reluctantly restored McClellan to command. The speed with which McClellan got his army reorganized and on the march surprised Lee, who had divided his army, and allowed the Federal commander to seize the strategic initiative. Compelled to abandon his plan of pushing into Pennsylvania, Lee reconcentrated his army near Sharpsburg, Maryland. There, on 17 September 1862, the two armies fought the battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of combat in American military history. Although McClellan and his subordinates mismanaged the battle and failed fully to commit their superior forces, Lee was forced to return to Virginia.
While Lee was in Maryland, Confederates under Gen. Braxton Bragg were on the offensive in the West. After the capture of Corinth, a force under Buell was pushed east toward Chattanooga and East Tennessee. To counter this, Bragg decided to seize the strategic initiative by invading Kentucky. The invasion began well, but a drought that had plagued Buell's advance on Chattanooga also took a severe toll on Bragg's army and slowed its advance, giving Buell time to return to Kentucky. The two armies met in the Battle of Perryville, Kentucky, on 8 October 1862. Neither side gained a decisive victory, but Bragg, with his supply line overextended, was compelled to retreat to Tennessee.
Confederate victories in the summer of 1862 reinforced the Palmerston government's conviction that the Union could not be restored. Furthermore, suffering among British textile workers was increasing as the lack of cotton started to pinch. Consequently, after Second Bull Run, Palmerston began to seriously ponder an effort to bring the North and South to the negotiating table. It was hoped that an offer of mediation that did not explicitly recognize Confederate independence, would be amenable to the North now that the impossibility of the task of conquering the South had been proven. To facilitate the process of bringing the combatants to the table, the British sought partners in the venture abroad. France, although facing a crisis in Italy, had long been sympathetic to the Southern cause. But Russia, a staunch supporter of the north, was much cooler to the proposal for mediation.
On 22 September 1862, Lincoln finally issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation expecting that it, in combination with the victory at Antietam, would demonstrate both the Union's ability to achieve success on the battlefield and, by making the war one between slavery and freedom, destroy British interest in intervention. He was wrong on both counts, at least in the short term. The stalemated condition of the war after Antietam seemed only to demonstrate that even if the North could win battles, it could never do so in so overwhelming a fashion as to conquer the South, and that some form of outside intervention was necessary to stop the war. More importantly, the Palmerston government feared the Emancipation Proclamation would incite slave insurrections in the South and make restoration of a stable political, social, and economic environment in North America impossible. Consequently, Palmerston allowed members of his government to seriously discuss an armistice plan put forward by France.
Republican defeats in the 1862 congressional elections, however, were not significant enough to suggest the North's commitment to military victory had eroded to the point where an offer of mediation would be accepted. If Britain was to bring the North to the negotiating table, clearly there would have to be some coercion involved. At this point Secretary for War George Lewis brought a memorandum before the cabinet. Lewis shared Palmerston's view that the Union could not be restored by force of arms, and that the purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation was to foment servile insurrection in the South. Yet in his memorandum, Lewis concluded that the South had yet to earn recognition. More importantly, Lewis gave a pessimistic assessment of Britain's ability to compel the North to accept an armistice or develop a workable solution that both sides would accept. Lewis's arguments carried the day. The British pulled back, and the crisis ended.
After Antietam and Perryville the Union high command attempted to impose an element of coordination among its main armies. In December, major operations were undertaken by Union armies at Fredericksburg in Virginia, Chickasaw Bayou in Mississippi, and Murfreesboro in Tennessee. Neither side achieved a decisive success, however, and as 1862 ended, the war settled into a stalemate.
The armies went into winter quarters and the Union high command adjusted its overall strategy. In Halleck, Lincoln had a man who would carry out his wishes without the acrimony and conflict that had characterized his relationship with McClellan. Halleck helped shape Lincoln's strategic thought and translated the president's wishes into military strategy. Both agreed that in making the Confederate capital the main target of strategic planning, McClellan had given insufficient priority to the security of Washington. They decided the Army of the Potomac would operate along the overland route with its focus more on defending Washington and neutralizing Lee's army than capturing Richmond. As long as it did not uncover Washington, the Army of the Potomac was to keep Lee's army busy to prevent it from detaching forces to reinforce Confederate armies in the west, and, if possible, catch Lee in a tactical or strategical mistake. Although willing to accept the prospect of stalemate in Virginia, Lincoln understood that Lee's aggressive generalship had offered an opportunity in Maryland to achieve a decisive victory. Such an opportunity might come again.
With the shift to a defensive strategy in the east and the change in Northern war aims, operations in the west took on greater importance and received greater priority. Halleck and Lincoln recognized that the adoption of emancipation as a war aim raised the stakes for the Confederacy, and dramatically reduced the chances for a quick end to the war. Despite its political, psychological, and material importance to the Confederacy, simply capturing Richmond would not end the rebellion. The entire South would have to be conquered. Halleck and Lincoln gambled that the Union armies could either win the war by 1864, or at least gain enough victories in the west to sustain popular support for the Lincoln administration and ensure its reelection that year.
By 1863, the Union had established control of the entire Mississippi Valley except for a stretch between Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Port Hudson, Louisiana. A Union army‐navy expedition in 1862 had reached Vicksburg, but had been unable to take the town. In the summer of 1863, Grant, in a brilliant campaign, captured that fortified city commanding the Mississippi. Marching overland on the Louisiana side, and crossing the Mississippi below town, Grant moved quickly inland, drove off a force sent to assist the army defending Vicksburg, then turned back toward the town. After victories at Champion's Hill on 16 May and the Big Black River on 17 May, Grant drove the Confederate army back into the defenses of Vicksburg. On 4 July 1863, after a month‐long siege, Vicksburg surrendered, followed by Port Hudson less than a week later; thus allowing the Mississippi, in Lincoln's words, to flow “unvexed to the sea.” The Confederacy was divided in two.
After the Union defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Lincoln appointed Gen. Joseph Hooker commander of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker did a magnificent job reinvigorating the army, but in the field he proved no match for Lee and Jackson. In his tactical masterpiece, although outnumbered two‐to‐one, Lee won a brilliant victory at the Chancellorsville, Virginia in May 1863. The victory came at a tremendous cost, however. Jackson died after being accidentally shot by his own men.
Lee then embarked on another invasion of the North, this time into Pennsylvania. Lincoln recognized that Lee's action provided a second opportunity to catch the rebel army far from its base and administer the crippling blow McClellan had failed to deliver at Antietam. Having lost faith in Hooker, Lincoln replaced him with Gen.George Gordon Meade on 30 June 1863. Two days later the armies came into contact near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. For three days—1–3 July 1863 —Lee attacked the Union army in quest of decisive victory. Meade held his ground and the rebel army was compelled to return to Virginia. It had suffered such severe losses at the Battle of Gettysburg that it would never be the same again. The war in the east returned to a state of stalemate, with the two armies engaging in a war of maneuver that produced no major results.
Gettysburg and Vicksburg greatly diminished Southern prospects overseas. Beginning in 1863, the North's campaign to prevent intervention also benefitted from Great Britain and France's preoccupation with events in Europe, including the Polish insurrection of 1863 and the controversy over Schleswig‐Holstein in 1864. Yet in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, the French government of Napoleon III, in 1863, took advantage of the U.S. Civil War to install a puppet regime in Mexico under Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian. Confederate agents offered to recognize the new Mexican government in exchange for French recognition of Southern independence. Napoleon, however, remained unwilling to do this without Britain.
The French enterprise in Mexico did not go unnoticed by the Lincoln administration. After the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Nathaniel Banks was directed to conduct operations in the Trans‐Mississippi West, in part to capture cotton in that region, but also to show the flag. Although a campaign along the Red River in Louisiana failed, Banks was able to occupy Brownsville, Texas. After Lee's surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, the federal government sent 50,000 soldiers to the Mexican border. But by then Napoleon had already begun scaling back his enterprise. In 1867, the French misadventure collapsed, and Maximilian was executed by the Mexicans.
The most serious controversy on the diplomatic front during the last two years of the war was prompted by the efforts of Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory to obtain ironclad ships in Europe to break the Union blockade. The British government facilitated this enterprise by applying a narrow interpretation of a law that prohibited the construction and arming of warships in British territory. The Southern agent, James D. Bulloch, exploited this loophole by arranging for ships to be built unarmed in Britain, whence they would be sent to the Bahamas to complete construction. In 1862, Bulloch was able to acquire the steam and sailcruisers Florida and Alabama; both would enjoy productive careers as commerce raiders.
Bulloch then contracted with the Laird firm in Britain for two new vessels with rams to break the blockade. As they neared completion in the summer of 1863, Union minister Adams issued a series of hotly worded protests to the British Foreign Office warning of the consequences of allowing the ships to be released. Palmerston resented the tone of Adams's protests, but, with the Polish insurrection threatening the peace of Europe, could not afford a conflict with the United States. In September, his government ordered the detention of the ships.
In addition to its diplomatic triumphs, the Union achieved a second major military objective in 1863, the occupation of East Tennessee. That summer Union Gen. William S. Rosecrans conducted a brilliant campaign of maneuver and seized East Tennessee without a fight. After pausing briefly at Chattanooga, Rosecrans pushed on into Georgia. In September Bragg brought the Confederate retreat to a halt, and, his force augmented by reinforcements from Virginia, prepared a counterstroke to crush one of Rosecrans's three widely separated wings. Rosecrans awakened to the danger in the nick of time and quickly reconcentrated his army near Chickamauga Creek. However, a blunder by one of Rosencrans's subordinates allowed the Confederate army to win a smashing victory on 20 September 1863. Instead of following up his victory at the Battle of Chickamauga with a vigorous attack, Bragg decided to lay siege to the Union army in Chattanooga. Washington reacted to the crisis by placing Grant in command of all Union forces west of the Appalachian Mountains, and sent him two corps from the Army of the Potomac. After reestablishing a secure line of supplies, Grant smashed the Confederate line at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge near Chattanooga on 24–25 November 1863.
In early 1864, Grant was called to Washington and promoted to general‐in‐chief. Grant appointed Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to replace him as overall commander in the western theater, and assigned him the task of bringing Bragg's army, now under the command of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, to battle by campaigning against Atlanta. Grant would accompany Meade's army as it campaigned against Lee. Supporting movements would be made in the Shenandoah Valley and along the James River. To prevent the Confederacy, as it had at Chickamauga, from exploiting its interior lines, the Union armies would all begin their campaigns at the same time.
On 4 May 1864, the Army of the Potomac began its sixth campaign against Richmond. Over the next few weeks the Virginia theater endured the bloodiest month of the war, as the two armies fought the Battle of the Wilderness and the battles at Spotsylvania, the North Anna River, and Cold Harbor. Grant continually maneuvered in an effort to force Lee out of his entrenchments. Lee successfully countered all of Grant's moves, leading the Union commander to adopt a strategy of attrition. Willing to accept tremendous casualties, Grant, by pinning Lee in his entrenchments, made it impossible for the rebel commander to attempt another of the brilliant counteroffensives that had disrupted earlier Union campaigns.
After a futile attempt to break Lee's lines at Cold Harbor, Grant crossed the James River in June 1864, bypassing Richmond in hopes of seizing Petersburg and the railroads supplying Lee's army. When commanders on the scene failed vigorously to attack the lightly guarded town, Lee was able to bring his army down to defend Petersburg. The armies then settled into the Siege of Petersburg, a campaign of siegecraft that presaged the trench warfare of World War I. Throughout the fall and winter of 1864–65, Grant continually extended his left flank to the west, one by one seizing the railroads leading into Petersburg and inexorably forcing Lee to stretch his lines ever more thin.
Meanwhile, after a several‐weeks campaign of maneuver, Sherman's army reached the outskirts of Atlanta in July 1864. However, he had not “bagged” Johnston's army, nor did the town's capitulation appear in any way certain. Northern morale plummeted as Grant and Sherman's grand offensive, which had began with such promise, bogged down in frustrating and bloody stalemate before Petersburg and Atlanta.
But Confederate leaders were not encouraged by the situation. Uncomfortable with the idea of allowing Grant and Sherman to maintain their grip on Petersburg and Atlanta, they decided to take the offensive. Realizing Grant's army was too strong for them to attack directly, Confederate leaders sent a force under Gen. Jubal Early on a raid in the Shenandoah Valley. In the west, the cautious and defensive‐minded Johnston was replaced on President Davis's orders by Gen. John Bell Hood, an aggressive young corps commander. Early reached the outskirts of Washington, but, after Grant sent back a full army corps to defend the capital, Early was forced to return to the valley. The Union forces around the capital and in the valley were then organized into a single force under the command of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan. Sheridan then pursued Early into the Shenandoah Valley, winning battles at Winchester, Fisher's Hill, and Cedar Creek in September and October 1864. Sheridan then undertook a campaign to destroy the valley, burning crops and any other resources that could be of use to the Confederate war effort.
In Georgia, Hood launched a series of costly and unsuccessful attacks on the Union army during the last week of July 1864. Afterwards, the Confederate army retreated to the defenses of Atlanta, but was forced to abandon the town in September 1864. The fall of Atlanta, combined with Sheridan's victories in the Shenandoah Valley, and a victory by naval forces under David Farragut at Mobile Bay in August, reinvigorated Northern morale and set the stage for Lincoln's reelection that November.
Sherman then obtained Grant's approval for a type of operation the two had been experimenting with for some time—large‐scale raids using army‐size forces. Recognizing that Southern civilians and their resources were as important as Southern armies in sustaining the rebellion, Sherman made them the objective of his campaign. The famous (or infamous, depending on one's viewpoint) Sherman's March to the Sea cut a sixty‐mile wide trail of destruction through Georgia. Not only was severe damage inflicted on Southern resources, but the fact that the North could morally and materially undertake such an operation had a severe impact on Confederate morale.
After reaching the coast at Savannah, Georgia, in December 1864, Sherman turned northward to join Grant for the final battle of the war. That same month, a desperate attempt by Hood to invade Tennessee ended with the destruction of his army at the Battles of Franklin and Nashville. Johnston was restored to command to resist Sherman's movement through the Carolinas, but lacked the resources or manpower to be effective. Before Sherman could reach Virginia, Grant captured the last Confederate supply line at the Battle of Five Forks on 1 April 1865. Lee evacuated Richmond and Petersburg and made a bold attempt to link up with Johnston. Grant cut off Lee's retreat near a small crossroads town called Appomattox, Virginia. There Lee surrendered on 9 April. A few days later, Johnston surrendered to Sherman at Raleigh, North Carolina. With the surrender of the two major field armies resistance throughout the South ended despite the pleas of President Davis. The war was over, and with the sectional conflict finally settled, the United States was free to complete the task of conquering the continent and move toward realizing its destiny as one of the great nations of the world.
[See also Army Combat Branches; Army, U.S.: 1783–1865; Commander in Chief, President as; Confederacy, the Military in the; Marine Corps, U.S.: 1775–1865; Navy, U.S.: 1783–1865.]
Bibliography
David P. Crook , The North, the South, and the Powers 1861–1865, 1974.
Grady McWhiney and and Perry D. Jamieson , Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage, 1982.
Herman Hattaway and and Archer Jones , How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War, 1983.
Edward Hagerman , The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command, 1988.
Richard M. McMurray , Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History, 1989.
Steven E. Woodworth , Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West, 1990.
Howard E. Jones , Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War, 1992.
Mark Grimsley , The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865, 1995.
Robert May, ed., The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim, 1995.
Herman Hattaway , Shades of Blue and Gray: An Introductory Military History of the Civil War, 1997.
Charles Hubbard , The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy, 1997.
Joseph L. Harsh , Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Confederate Strategy, 1861–1862, 1998.
Steven E. Woodworth, ed., Civil War Generals in Defeat, 1999.
Grady McWhiney and and Perry D. Jamieson , Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage, 1982.
Herman Hattaway and and Archer Jones , How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War, 1983.
Edward Hagerman , The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command, 1988.
Richard M. McMurray , Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History, 1989.
Steven E. Woodworth , Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West, 1990.
Howard E. Jones , Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War, 1992.
Mark Grimsley , The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865, 1995.
Robert May, ed., The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim, 1995.
Herman Hattaway , Shades of Blue and Gray: An Introductory Military History of the Civil War, 1997.
Charles Hubbard , The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy, 1997.
Joseph L. Harsh , Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Confederate Strategy, 1861–1862, 1998.
Steven E. Woodworth, ed., Civil War Generals in Defeat, 1999.
Herman Hattaway and and Ethan Rafuse
Civil War (1861–65): Domestic Course In the days following the capture of Fort Sumter, few Americans anticipated a lengthy conflict. President Abraham Lincoln responded to the crisis by calling for 75,000 90‐day volunteers, reflecting his confidence that the war would not last the summer. But, of course, such optimism proved ill‐founded. By any measure, the next four years would be the bloodiest in American history. How did the men and women on the home front respond to the war's enormous challenges?In some fundamental ways, the North and the South faced very similar situations in April 1861. The outbreak of open hostilities, after months of uncertainty and division, prompted most citizens above and below the border states to “rally ‘round” their flag. Town dignitaries delivered bellicose speeches with puffed chests; editorials urged readers to new patriotic heights; bands blared. Military recruiters had no trouble obtaining volunteers in such an atmosphere; those who persisted in dissent generally maintained a judicious silence.
The Union and the Confederacy also faced comparable obstacles. Neither side was remotely prepared to fight a major war. The federal army only numbered about 16,000 men. The Confederacy had to start with nothing, although it did have the advantage of a more military‐oriented population, including compulsory military service and a disproportionate share of the nation's Mexican War veterans. And despite all the excitement, mid‐nineteenth‐century Americans had little familiarity with—and less enthusiasm for—the sort of activist central government a long war might require. These similarities notwithstanding, both sides went to war with dissimilar material and human resources. Moreover, the Confederate government was constructed in a society committed to states' rights and lacking a functioning two‐party system. Such differences helped mold distinctive patterns of wartime mobilization, and as the war dragged on, they created quite different home front experiences.
Manpower.
Both central governments initially relied on the states and localities to orchestrate recruiting. When Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis called for volunteers, each state received a quota to fill. By the time the three‐month recruits were returning home in late summer 1861, the North had issued calls for three‐year volunteers that yielded more than 700,000 men. The infant Confederacy had already requested 100,000 men before thecapture of Fort Sumter in April and added another 400,000 the following month.
With winter approaching and the most willing recruits already in uniform, the Confederate Congress offered bounties and furloughs to convince volunteers to reenlist. In April 1862, the Confederacy passed the first national draft legislation, making white men between ages eighteen and thirty‐five eligible for conscription. The North was not too far behind. In June 1862, Lincoln called for 300,000 more three‐year volunteers. When the citizenry responded slowly, Congress passed the Militia Act giving state governors the power to draft men. That August, the Union implemented this new legislation by requisitioning 300,000 nine‐month militiamen, with the provision that states failing to meet their quota would be subject to a draft. In March 1863, the North replaced the controversial state militia drafts with federal conscription measures that were more on a par with the Confederacy's system.
The initial conscription legislation in both the Union and the Confederacy provided military‐aged men with ample opportunities for avoiding service. In addition to excluding men with certain disabilities, the Confederate legislation exempted a long list of professions, ranging from political and judicial officers to teachers and clergymen to workers in war‐related occupations. A later act exempted one white man from every plantation with twenty or more slaves. Each of these provisions could be defended in the name of military necessity or domestic stability, but together they triggered angry complaints of class legislation from nonslave owning Southern whites. The North's federal draft act had no occupational exemptions, but it did exclude men with numerous medical ailments or certain family obligations, as well as unnaturalized aliens. Most controversial were the provisions enabling wealthier conscripts simply to buy their way out of service. Following long‐standing European tradition, both sides allowed draft ees to send substitutes in their place, the North permitting conscripts to pay a commutation fee of $300 (an amount equal to a worker's annual wages) rather than serving.
As the war dragged on, the Confederacy was forced to widen its conscription net. The list of exemptions gradually shrank; the Southern Congress repealed the substitute clause and made all those who had furnished substitutes eligible for the draft; and the age parameters expanded to include white males between seventeen and fifty. The more populous North tinkered with its rules but made fewer substantial revisions other than restricting the controversial commutation clause to members of certain religious groups. (As many had feared, this resulted in a steady increase in the market price for substitutes.)
Despite the superficially similar rules, conscription played different roles in the two nations. Only about eight percent of Union soldiers were conscripts or substitutes. The four federal drafts were really designed to encourage enthusiastic local recruiting rather than to put conscripts into uniform. The Union army's provost marshal general announced draft days long in advance, giving communities every opportunity to fill their quotas and avoid a draft. Cities and towns responded by raising large bounty funds—which supplemented existing federal and state bounties—to encourage enlistment. The poorer South soon exhausted funds available for enlistment bounties, limiting the effectiveness of pre‐draft recruiting. Roughly one in five Confederate soldiers was either a draftee or a substitute.
In 1863, the North tapped a further manpower ad vantage when it decided to accept African Americans in the military. Blacks had served in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, but black enlistment was prohibited in 1820. Many Northern blacks offered their services to the Union, but for long months racist assumptions about the ability of African American troops and political qualms about the costs of arming black volunteers conspired to keep black men out of uniform (although thousands did serve in the navy). The 1862 Militia Act allowed Lincoln to accept black volunteers, but it was not until after the 1 January 1863Emancipation Proclamation that the North aggressively recruited black volunteers. By the end of the Civil War, 179,000 African American men had served in 166 black regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops. The North commissioned few black officers and persisted in giving black regiments inferior wages, equipment, and assignments. In the war's waning months the Confederate Congress voted to accept black soldiers, but this legislation was passed too late to be tested in practice.
By the end of the war, roughly half of the North's military‐aged white men had served in uniform, as compared with nearly four‐fifths of Southern white males of military age. Some critics at the time and some later historians charged that the war became “A Rich Man's War But a Poor Man's Fight,” yet comparisons of the occupational distribution of sampled soldiers with data from the 1860 census indicate that both armies were surprisingly representative of the white male populations. The Northern army was also not, as sometimes suggested, dominated by foreign mercenaries; immigrants were actually underrepresented in the Union ranks.
Economic Mobilization and Its Effects.
With a few key exceptions, the Union was able to outfit its armies through private contracting rather than establishing federally owned factories. Unlike modern conflicts, this war did not call for the vast production of uniquely military goods. Most of the items needed to feed, outfit, and arm a soldier could be provided by existing farms and factories; a few government arsenals produced the rest. Lacking an established industrial base, the Confederacy found itself in far more challenging circumstances.
Here was one of the war's many ironies. Whereas the Union could rely on private enterprise, the states' rights–oriented Confederacy was forced to build nationally owned factories, subsidize private enterprises, regulate prices, and impress goods and services (including slave labor) to meet the war's economic needs. With the passage of time, the South's economic deficiencies became more glaring. The Union blockade limited Confederate access to foreign ports, and the North's military successes destabilized portions of the Southern economy. Above all, Southerners learned to reuse materials where they could and to manage with less wherever possible.
The Northern war effort cost an estimated $2.3 billion; the smaller Confederacy spent roughly $1 billion. As he developed strategies to fund the war, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase had a host of advantages over his Confederate counterpart, Christopher G. Memminger. In many senses, the fiscal history of the war runs parallel to the mobilization of the armies, with both sides employing similar strategies tailored in distinctive ways to meet their individual needs. The wealthier North funded most of its costs through the sale of interest‐bearing bonds. These bonds, sold largely under the enthusiastic direction of Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, enabled the Union, effectively, to “borrow” roughly two‐thirds of its military expenses from its own citizens or from foreign investors. The North covered an additional 20 percent of its expenses through a assortment of import duties and taxes, including a modest federal income tax. It paid for the war's remaining costs by issuing “greenbacks,” printed notes not backed by specie or any precious metal.
This new currency, which was authorized by the Legal Tender Act of 1862, proved crucial to the smooth functioning of the wartime economy while passing on part of the war's costs to consumers in the form of relatively high inflation. The South, with less disposable wealth and a poorly developed financial structure, could fund only about 40 percent of its costs through taxation and the sale of bonds. Instead, the Confederacy had to rely on massive issues of paper money, triggering a disastrously high inflation.
The war's economic strains fell unevenly on different groups across the home front. The booming Northern economy assured low unemployment, but soon wage earners chafed at the burden of rising prices. The more skilled urban artisans managed to organize and negotiate comfortable raises; the less skilled, including scores of women who worked for unscrupulous military subcontractors, for example, in the manufacture of uniforms, suffered through declining real wages. Federal forces only intervened in a handful of labor conflicts, and then only under the guise of claimed military necessity. Heavy wartime demands for food, poor European harvests, and disproportionately high enlistment rates among agricultural workers combined to produce a variety of results: unusually high profits for farm owners; increased wages for the agricultural workers who remained at home; and unprecedented investment in agricultural machinery. Women and men on the Confederate home front felt the war's economic pains even more acutely. By mid‐1863, the combination of high prices and food shortages had driven many Southerners into open dissent. In April, an angry mob composed largely of women destroyed much of Richmond's shopping district after their appeals for relief from inflated food prices had gone unanswered.
Richmond's “bread riots” underscored the war's effect on women and children on the home front. In the prosperous North, some benevolent institutions reported proportionally greater demands from women, perhaps reflecting the combined weight of more economic opportunities for male workers and soldiers and the loss of family income when men fell on the battlefield. Cities and towns across the North collected special funds for the “families of volunteers,” providing much needed relief while adding further incentives to reluctant enlistees. Southern women bore the brunt of the Confederacy's economic ills without much opportunity for relief. When private charities ran dry, Southerners turned to unprecedented public welfare measures, at the local, state, and national levels. But inflation, inefficiency, and overwhelming numbers conspired to limit the effectiveness of these initiatives.
For some women, the Civil War's economic challenges brought new opportunities. Although the Union's military demands did not produce an army of nineteenth‐century factory women, the war did accelerate the movement of Northern women into positions as clerks, teachers, and nurses. In both the North and the South, white women took on expanded agricultural roles when white men left for the front. This was particularly true in the Confederacy, where women often acted independently of any male influence. Wartime necessity also forced Southern women into new positions, but they continued to run up against cultural barriers. The North, for instance, proved more receptive to the use of female nurses.
For Southern blacks, there was no such ambiguity. Long before the war ended, hundreds of thousands of slaves had won their freedom. The story of wartime emancipation reflects the complexity of national, local, and individual forces. As official Northern policy slowly inched its way toward Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect 1 January 1863, individual slaves responded to their own circumstances, pursuing freedom when absent masters or approaching Union troops provided the best opportunities. Many of these freed slaves remained in the South, finding refuge behind Union lines, while others fled to the North. The process of piecemeal emancipation left much of the Southern agricultural economy in disarray while laying the groundwork for various wartime experiments with the ramifications of free labor.
Politics and Dissent.
From his first days in office, Lincoln had to navigate between the radical Republicans in his own party, such asThaddeus Stevens, and an increasingly vocal array of dissenting Peace Democrats. The relative unanimity that followed the outbreak of hostilities quickly dissolved as Northerners debated a series of controversial war measures including the Habeas Corpus Act, conscription, greenbacks, and, above all, emancipation. Even Unionist War Democrats in Washington and across the North criticized policies that they claimed enacted an unconstitutional Republican agenda.
The administration countered with aggressive measures to silence the most dangerous dissent, the Peace Democrats. Soon after the capture of Fort Sumter, Lincoln ordered the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in the border states. This set in motion a critical series of events in Maryland: military authorities threw several prominent local figures, including wealthy secessionist John Merryman, in jail; in Ex Parte Merryman(1861), U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland responded by ordering Merryman's release; and Lincoln refused to yield, leaving it to history to judge his actions. The following year, with the state militia drafts underway, federal officials arrested several hundred vocal draft resisters and five dissenting newspaper editors while suspending publication of several opposition newspapers. By 1863, the Northern “Copperheads”—the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party—had won important strongholds across the Midwest and in some areas of the East. In May, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside ordered the arrest of dissenting Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham, triggering another round of angry outbursts.
As the election of 1864 approached, Lincoln had every reason to fear that he would lose to the Democratic challenger, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. McClellan, long a thorn in the president's side, had repeatedly criticized emancipation, the loss of civil liberties, and Lincoln's overall handling of the war. When the votes were counted, Lincoln had managed to garner 55 percent, aided by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's recent successes in the South and the overwhelming support of absentee ballots from the Union Army.
Historians have often compared Lincoln with Jefferson Davis, generally finding the Confederate president lacking. The South's material disadvantages forced Davis into a series of measures that dramatically expanded the central government while placing him in the center of controversy. This process of central government growth, which Emory Thomas (1979) has termed a “political revolution,” included the continent's first draft legislation, impressment of goods and labor, the suspension of civil liberties, and a wide range of ventures into economic control. Davis faced heated opposition from strong‐minded state governors as well as attacks from much closer to home, often led by his vice president, the surly Georgian Alexander Stephens. Davis, like Lincoln, used his authority to declare martial law in sensitive areas, but civil liberties for whites may have in fact fared better in the Confederacy (for instance, freedom of the press survived unscathed in the South).
Much of the most rigorous wartime dissent was voiced beyond the boundaries of normal political discourse. Northerners fretted over secret societies, such as the notorious Knights of the Golden Circle, which reputedly conspired against the Union. Portions of the nonslave hill country and mountain region in the South remained bastions of pro‐Union sympathy throughout the conflict. The North's worst internal violence followed tension‐filled conscription days, but often reflected broader tensions. In July 1863, disgruntled conscripts attacked a draft office, triggering four days of New York City antidraft riots, which led to much carnage. Many of the rioters were Irish immigrants who took out their hostilities on African Americans.
In addition to periodic food riots, portions of the Confederacy experienced violence at the hands of roving companies of guerrillas. Some of these groups had at least passing connections to formal military bodies, but others were little more than desperate bands of hungry deserters. Even where the South did not divide into open warfare, declining troop morale eventually took a tremendous toll, inciting soldiers to flee the army and accelerating the demise of the Confederacy.
Supporting the War Effort.
Civil War voluntarism raises important questions of gender for historians. Women in both the North and South earned widespread notice and praise for their “noble” wartime sacrifices. Sacrifice for larger benevolent causes was nothing new for American women, but the scale of wartime activities and the paucity of civilian men (at least white men in the South) enabled some women to go beyond established practices. Southern historians—weighing the economic, political, and voluntaristic experiences of Confederate women—remain divided over how much, and for how long, the war opened the door to changing gender roles.
A few Northern women such as Clara Barton rose to positions of national prominence, but the Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission remained largely under male direction. Nevertheless, women in some communities (Chicago, for instance) took on unfamiliar authority, and the organizational skills and theories that scores of volunteers developed at the grassroots level proved crucial in molding the postwar activities of a key cohort of female activists. Overall, the conflict helped expand the range of experiences for many women while probably doing little to alter commonly held assumptions about gender and war.
In addition to providing material and emotional assistance to the soldiers, home front volunteers sought to affect public opinion and otherwise contribute to wartime discourse. Most of the organized Civil War “propaganda” emerged from a handful of Northern publication societies. The first few years of the war saw the occasional printing of partisan pamphlets by interested individuals, a practice that had a long American tradition. In 1863, the Democrats raised the stakes with the establishment of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Political Knowledge. Soon Philadelphia's Union League had countered with its own Board of Publications while the equally partisan Loyal Publication Society began operations in New York City. These, and a few other smaller bodies, flooded the North with millions of copies of several hundred political publications, many of which aimed to sway the electorate in 1864. Some authors wrote extremely sophisticated pamphlets, examining esoteric constitutional issues; others aimed their rhetoric at a broader, less educated, audience. Taken together, these Northern pamphlets provided members of the Union League and their antagonists with a crucial vehicle for reaching a broad audience outside formal party politics. So did patriotic songs such as “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Conclusions.
The political and institutional history of the home front is full of interesting ironies. Focusing on the North, it is tempting to tell a tale of Lincoln and the Republican Party using the pressures of war to promote sweeping national reform. After all, the legislative litany includes taxation, greenbacks, banking reform, conscription, and emancipation. But if we widen our lens to include the Confederacy—the bastion of militant individualism and states' rights—we find far more evidence of an expanded national state, including more aggressive conscription and a much greater federal role in economic affairs. In truth, both regions remained devoted to tradition and localism throughout the war. Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy went further than the Union in using the machinery of a central government to support the war effort, but only because conditions required it.
[See also Agriculture and War; Civil Liberties and War; Congress, War, and the Military; Economy and War;Industry and War; Labor and War; Race Relations and War; Society and War.]
Bibliography
Emory Thomas , The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865, 1979.
Phillip Shaw Paludan , “A People's Contest”: The Union and the Civil War, 1861–1865, 1988.
George C. Rable , Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism, 1989.
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Richard F. Bensel , Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877, 1990.
Maris A. Vinovskis, ed., Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays, 1990.
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Mark E. Neely , The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, 1991.
Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, 1992.
James M. McPherson , Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1982; 2nd ed. 1992.
J. Matthew Gallman , The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, 1994.
Drew Faust , Mothers of Invention, 1996.
Phillip Shaw Paludan , “A People's Contest”: The Union and the Civil War, 1861–1865, 1988.
George C. Rable , Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism, 1989.
Roger Ransom , Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation and the American Civil War, 1989.
Richard F. Bensel , Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877, 1990.
Maris A. Vinovskis, ed., Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays, 1990.
James W. Geary , We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War, 1991.
Mark E. Neely , The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, 1991.
Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, 1992.
James M. McPherson , Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1982; 2nd ed. 1992.
J. Matthew Gallman , The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, 1994.
Drew Faust , Mothers of Invention, 1996.
J. Matthew Gallman
Civil War (1861–65): Postwar Impact By their very nature, civil wars leave open wounds and unsettled scores behind. Despite the recently rejuvenated notion that the Civil War of 1861–65 created modern America, the legacy is far more ambiguous and complex. The war stifled the Confederacy's bid for national independence and destroyed the institution of slavery upon which it rested. The ensuing peace—specifically, the RadicalReconstruction crafted by the Republican Party—reunited the nation economically and politically, yet did so on terms that not just the defeated Confederates came to resent. Small wonder that each generation has assessed the war through the prism of its own central political concerns.The veterans from both sides were the first and probably the most partisan revisionists. On some points they found near unanimity: Northern veterans believed they had saved the Union and given a new birth to freedom; Confederate veterans believed they had fought nobly for independence and might well have prevailed had their resources not given out. But both argued endlessly over the specifics.
The legions of popular and academic authors who have studied the war have discerned no clearer pattern of grand truths from the clutter of documented facts. Moreover, today, thousands of ordinary citizens not only retrace the soldiers' steps literally across preserved battlefields but claim expertise about the war as they do for no other event in U.S. history. Partly because of and partly in spite of such interest, attempting to understand the long‐term impact of the Civil War has produced as much conflict as consensus.
From a strictly military standpoint, the war appears to many historians as the first modern war. A technological explosion around midcentury accounted for such innovations as rifled small arms and ordnance, armor‐plated steam vessels, and primitive machine guns and submarines. Corresponding changes in transportation andcommunications helped make the Civil War more like World War I than Napoleonic warfare. Yet old‐fashioned tactics retained grisly currency, and both armies depended upon animal power—mules for supply and horses for tactical mobility—to the very end. Clearly, this was a transitional time wherein elements of the old and the new were mixed.
In its unprecedented requirements for men and goods, the Civil War called forth novel administrative skills and structures. The Confederate central government took a commanding role in these affairs, largely due to the comparatively underdeveloped industrial and transportation infrastructure in the plantation states before the war. Although the U.S. government in Washington increased dramatically in size, and expenditures duringAbraham Lincoln's presidency surpassed those of all his predecessors combined, Northern officials relied upon conventional market mechanisms and the lure of profits rather than coercion to meet their need for supplies. Whereas early in the war, bureaucrats with extensive administrative experience—such as Edwin M. Stanton, whom Lincoln appointed secretary of war—were in short supply, the crucible of war quickly changed that.
From the standpoint of manpower, both sides departed sharply from precedent in resorting to conscription to replenish their ranks. Precisely because conscription was so European a practice, Americans had abhorred it from the time of the Revolutionary War. Citizens of the Confederate states, who endured the draft a year before their Yankee counterparts did, also suffered levies upon food, wagons, work animals, and other militarily useful supplies. Although Northerners escaped such material tolls and their demoralizing consequences, they found much to criticize in the draft of men. The New York City anti‐draft riots of July 1863 epitomized the opposition. Even apart from the disturbances that it produced, the Union's draft worked poorly. As a result, the military‐run, undemocratic conscription served largely as a negative example for the future.
The North's other major overture toward filling the ranks, the recruitment of African Americans in the military, left a much more significant legacy. This policy reflected the North's commitment to destroying slavery, as best expressed in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863. Besides its grant of freedom to slaves in the Confederate states, the proclamation also provided for the wholesale incorporation of black men into the Union army.
Like most other innovations of the Civil War years, the legacy of this mobilization was mixed. On the negative side of the ledger, African American soldiers endured separate and unequal treatment to the end. When the demographics of demobilization dictated that they would play a major role in occupying the defeated South, Washington forestalled that opportunity by assigning black regulars to positions along the Atlantic coast and the border with Mexico, far removed from possible contact with former slaves. And for their part, black sailors soon found themselves again subjected to the prewar quota system (5% of total enlistments) and consigned systematically to the ratings of cook and steward.
On the positive side of the ledger, African Americans won a permanent—though neither undisputed nor uncheckered—place in the armed forces of the reunited nation. The all‐black 24th and 25th Infantry and 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments (the fabled “Buffalo” Soldiers) created a legacy of loyalty and sacrifice that persisted well into the twentieth century. Even more important, the service of nearly 200,000 black soldiers and sailors—the overwhelming majority of whom were former slaves—established a claim for citizenship rights that the nation attempted to satisfy in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Participation by former slaves in the political life of the ex‐Confederate states followed. Affiliation with the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, persisted among black voters until the 1930s. Union army veterans played an important part in this allegiance.
The war conferred a similarly mixed legacy upon the officer corps of the army and the navy. Although most volunteer officers returned to civilian life after the war, men who opted for continued service encountered considerable frustration. Reduced from their inflated if temporary (brevet) rank to the more prosaic regular rank in the shrunken regular army, officers faced an abundance of boredom and danger but little glory on the western frontier. Naval officers likewise languished in the smaller postwar navy, often spending years at the same grade with little hope of promotion in a fleet a mere shadow of its wartime counterpart. In part because of their isolation from civilian life, officers in both branches cultivated a strong sense of professionalism. Postwar military school systems helped the officer corps regain the collective confidence it had enjoyed at the end of the Civil War.
Scholars have assessed the impact of the war on the national government variously over the years. Early studies stressed the transformation of the prewar state of limited constitutional authority into a powerful centralized government, which the metamorphosis of “the United States” from a plural to a singular construction neatly captures. During the past generation, social scientists from various disciplines have examined the Civil War from the standpoint of state formation. Often they employ a comparative method that likens the process of national consolidation in the United States with that in late nineteenth‐century Germany, Italy, Japan, and Brazil. Whereas some scholars take the approach that centralized bureaucratic states are the functional byproducts of industrial society, most insist that historically specific considerations determine the evolution of the state in relation to society. From the latter perspective, the Civil War presents a treasure trove of insights.
With nearly monopolistic control over the wartime government in Washington, the Republican Party enacted pivotal measures regarding homesteads, banking and the currency, education, railroads, and the freed slaves. But even in such circumstances, policymakers found it easier to prosecute military victory than to secure the peace. Amid increasingly rancorous debate, congressional Republicans seized the Reconstruction process from President Andrew Johnson, guaranteed the freedom and citizenship of the former slaves, and imposed temporary military rule on the South. Obstinate opposition from white southerners coupled with growing disenchantment among white northerners soon fragmented the Republican coalition. Party moderates backed away from guaranteeing citizenship rights, from supporting the elected Republican governments in the former Confederate states, and from radically transforming the southern economy. Content in the knowledge that the South (like the West) was subject to the economic dominion of the Northeast, Washington acquiesced in southern “home rule.” Former Confederate soldiers led the way in forcibly removing freedmen from public life.
If students of the late nineteenth‐century South tend to view the consequences of the war as devastating to the regional economy, students of the national economy show far less unanimity over the effects of the Civil War. Some seventy years ago, historians Charles R. and Mary A. Beard (1927) declared that the war constituted “The Second American Revolution,” which removed southern agrarians from national power and thereby made possible the industrial transformation of the nation after 1865. Historians who have examined this thesis using assorted interpretive frameworks and techniques have reached no firm consensus. Whereas some would confirm the Beards' assertion that the war ushered in the industrial transformation, others perceive it as a retardant force. Given the accelerating pace of industrialization before the war, the critics argue, the war in fact slowed development, largely due to the diversion of human and material resources. Yet statistics of economic performance do not tell the whole tale.
The true measure of the war's economic impact lies in its consolidation of federal dominion over the North Amer ican landmass the United States had accumulated during the first half of the nineteenth century. Just as reconstructing the South was key to this objective—even if remaking the southern economy along demonstrably northern lines was of secondary importance—controlling the Indians of the Great Plains figured prominently in the larger scheme. Although the wartime and postwar conflicts between Anglo‐Americans and Native Americans grew out of grievances present in such encounters from the seventeenth century onward, there were many new factors in the equation.
Aside from the growing desire of white homesteaders and prospectors for access to Indian lands, railroad interests laden with federal land grants increased the demand. Missionaries and officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs made strong overtures on behalf of “civilizing the savages,” all of which strengthened the federal commitment to confining each tribe to a specific reservation (and by 1887 produced the Dawes Severalty Act and the fixation with individual land allotments). Civil War politics further complicated the mix, the most famous instances being the “disloyalty” of the Five Civilized Tribes in the Indian Territory and the violent rebellions undertaken by the Sioux on the northern plains and the Comanches in the southwest desert. When in the late 1860s, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Gen. Philip H. Sheridan set out to subdue the Indians' resistance to federal authority, they took full advantage of the new weaponry and means of transportation that the Civil War had proven. Their use of the new tactics of unconditional surrender—winter campaigns, making war on women and children, and destroying villages and crops in the Plains Indians Warsforced the Native Americans to succumb.
In sum, the Civil War has left a mixed, even contentious, legacy in the different sections of the nation and among the different sectors of the population. Moreover, as each generation born since the war has found—alternately to its delight and its dismay—that legacy is not fixed and immutable. Instead, it is subject to reinterpretation. Perhaps the recurrent controversy that surrounds the public display of the Confederate battle flag best illustrates a key interpretive insight: though struggles over the legacy of the war may degenerate into mere skirmishes or escalate into full‐scale wars, their guns, unlike those of 1861–65, will never fall completely silent.
[See also Economy and War; Industry and War; Society and War; State, The.]
Bibliography
Charles A. and and Mary R. Beard , The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols., 1927.
Jay Luvaas , The Military Legacy of the Civil War, 1959.
Emory M. Thomas , The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, 1971.
Robert M. Utley , Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890, 1973.
Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience, 1982.
Edward Hagerman , The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare, 1988.
Philip Shaw Paludan , “A People's Contest”: The Union and Civil War, 1861–1865, 1988.
Richard Franklin Bensel , Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in American, 1859–1877, 1990.
Theda Skocpol , Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992.
Jay Luvaas , The Military Legacy of the Civil War, 1959.
Emory M. Thomas , The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, 1971.
Robert M. Utley , Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890, 1973.
Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience, 1982.
Edward Hagerman , The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare, 1988.
Philip Shaw Paludan , “A People's Contest”: The Union and Civil War, 1861–1865, 1988.
Richard Franklin Bensel , Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in American, 1859–1877, 1990.
Theda Skocpol , Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992.
Joseph P. Reidy
Civil War (1861–65): Changing Interpretations The Civil War had not even ended before it was being interpreted, although in many cases, the earliest interpretations of the war sprang directly out of the justifications Northerners and Southerners had offered for beginning and sustaining it. Resentful Southerners like Edward Pollard in The Lost Cause (1867) announced that the South had waged the war in defense of a genteel, noncompetitive agrarian society, and only the brute force of Northern numbers and weapons had defeated it. Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens defined the “Lost Cause” as a political one, in which the Confederacy stood for a strict reading of the federal Constitution and resistance to the centralization of power in the national government. The place of slavery in these Southern interpretations was reduced to a pretext Northerners had seized upon for provoking the war.By contrast, Northerners in the first two decades after the war interpreted it primarily as a moral crusade against slavery. Isaac N. Arnold in his History of Abraham Lincoln and the Overthrow of Slavery (1866), John W. Draper in his History of the American Civil War (1868–70), and former Senator Henry Wilson in his History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power (1872–77) all insisted that the war had been caused by the wicked ambitions of a “slave power” conspiracy to subvert American republican virtue.
By the end of the century, as Americans were faced with the problems of industrialization, immigration, and labor unrest, it became easier to downplay the divisiveness of the war and recast it as the painful but necessary forge in which a single, unshakable American national identity was created. Academic historians, from James Ford Rhodes —History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1893–1919
) to Arthur C. Cole —The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850–1865 (1934)
, urged that slavery be seen as an institutional problem which the war removed in the interest of achieving national unification, rather than as the basis for a conspiratorial “slave power.” However, professional historians who were shaped by the economic Progressive tradition and the horrors of World War I took this as evidence that the moral rhetoric of the war, whether for abolitionism or the “Lost Cause,” had been hollow from the start. In Avery Craven 's The Repressible Conflict, 1830–1861 (1939)
and James G. Randall 's multivolume history of the Lincoln administration and his long‐lived textbook, The Civil War and Reconstruction (1937
), the war became a needless conflict, triggered by a generation of blundering politicians, since slavery would have eventually proven economically unprofitable, they argued. Or worse than that, Charles and and Mary Beard , in The Rise of American Civilization (1927
), declared that the real agenda of the war had been the dominance of the national economy by Northern industry and finance. Southern historians like Charles Ramsdell and Frank L. Owsley, who were inspired by the unrepentant anticapitalism of the Southern agrarian movement of the 1930s, converted the Beards's thesis into an unintended echo of the “Lost Cause” myth, in which the South appeared as a helpless victim of Northern cultural and economic aggression.
The economic emphasis of the Progressive historians was itself challenged by the moral commitments of World War II. The defeat of totalitarian ideologies abroad, and later the power of the civil rights movement to shake the conscience of the nation, once again made it possible to see the Civil War as a moral moment. Kenneth Stampp 's And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (1950
) defiantly insisted that the moral argument over slavery was, after all, the vital element in the making of the war. Allan Nevius , over the course of his multivolume Ordeal of the Union (1947–50) and The War for the Union (1959–60
), also gradually moved slavery back to the center of the war's meaning. James M. McPherson 's two single‐volume histories, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1982) and Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988
), similarly shifted from treating the war as a Beardian conflict between a “modernizing” North and an underdeveloped South to describing it as the solution to the ideological contradiction of slavery in a liberal republic.
The tremendous upsurge in Civil War literature which began shortly before the centennial of the war in 1961, and which was renewed in the late 1970s and 1980s, encouraged the exploration of a number of new interpretations of specific aspects of the war. Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson resurrected the older arguments about the South's cultural uniqueness and applied them controversially to Southern military tactics, arguing that the South's “Celtic” culture explained the Confederacy's propensity for costly head‐on offensives. By contrast, political and intellectual historians argued that the Confederacy had not been unique enough: David Donald, Drew Faust, Paul Escott, Emory Thomas, and the authors of Why the South Lost the Civil War( Richard Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still) inverted the old nationalist argument and claimed that the Confederacy was as much an example as the North of an experiment in nation‐building. George Rable, in The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (1994), argued that the Confederacy actually saw its political experiment in the war as a struggle to resist ideological uniqueness and reassert the pristine virtues of eighteenth‐century republicanism.
The question of the Civil War's significance in military terms has taken on particularly new force in recent studies. The impact of British military social historians like John Keegan in the 1970s set off calls for the application of a “face of battle” interpretation to Civil War combat studies, and helped produce innovative studies of Civil War soldier behavior from Reid Mitchell and Gerald Linderman. Much more subject to debate were challenges to two cherished notions about the overall strategic significance of the war. One of these, beginning with David Donald and T. Harry Williams, claimed that Civil War field strategy had been dominated by the ideological lessons of Antoine Henr Jomini and Dennis Hart Mahan, both of which fostered a passion for Napoleonic‐style headlong offensive that had been rendered out‐of‐date by the rifled musket. Both Williams and Donald believed that a handful of federal generals, headed by Ulysses S. Grant, learned to ignore Jomini and Mahan, and to master the new lessons of industrial technology and communications sufficiently to lead the North to victory.
A second and related interpretation of Civil War strategy located the center of the Civil War's “modernity” in its development into a “total” war. From T. Harry Williams in Lincoln and His Generals (1952)
up through McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and Philip S. Paludan's “A People's Contest”: The Union and the Civil War (1988), the Civil War was repeatedly portrayed as the first example of warfare consciously directed at civilian as well as military targets.
Both of these views, however, came under strenuous criticism during the late 1980s: Edward Hagerman 's The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare (1988)
and the authors of the massive 1983 study How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War ( Herman Hattaway and and Archer Jones )
downplayed the extent of Jomini's influence on Civil War strategy. Paddy Griffith, a British military historian, argued that technology, whether in the form of the rifled musket or the railroads, could have made little difference on the small‐scale battlefields of North America, where, he said, the decisive factor was the sheer amateurism of Union and Confederate officers and volunteers. Above all, Mark Neely sharply criticized the notion that the Civil War had involved “total” warfare by questioning whether the Civil War had ever involved in any significant way the targeted destruction of enemy civilian lives and property or the curtailment of domestic civilian civil rights by the military.
One last major debate has concerned the quality and substance of Civil War military leadership. Robert E. Leeand Grant had been held up in many popular histories as antitheses in Civil War leadership, with Lee cast in Douglas S. Freeman's four‐volume R. E. Lee (1934–35) as a de fensive patrician who carefully hoarded the Confederacy's limited human resources, and Grant portrayed in biographies like William S. McFeely's Grant: A Biography (1981) as an unimaginative “butcher,” willing to achieve victory by using the North's numerical superiority to grind down the Confederate armies through attrition. Lee's image, however, began to crumble in 1977 with Thomas Connelly's The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society, which portrayed Lee as a fatalist always willing to yield to aggressive and costly impulses for the offensive. Grant, by comparison, was defended by biographers as diverse as Bruce Catton and Brooks Simpson as a swift‐moving strategic thinker, whose triumph over Lee in 1865 was a demonstration of superior management and operational skill.
Similarly, comparative evaluations of Presidents Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln as commanders in chief have usually favored Lincoln as the better overall strategist, with David Potter and T. Harry Williams holding up Lincoln as a model of strategic wisdom and even the head of the first “modern” staff system. But throughout the 1980s, Jefferson Davis's star rose considerably, with Ludwell Johnson, Hattaway and Jones, and Steven E. Woodworth all underscoring that Davis was an intelligent risk taker who ably managed and cooperated with his generals.
The controlling factor in these interpretations, apart from the debates over the merits of certain commanders or the details of specific battles, has been the place and understanding accorded slavery. The weight given to the motives of leaders, the role of economic conflict, and even the significance of civilian and troop morale, have all in the end contained judgments about the role of slavery. In the interpretation of a war so charged with political meaning, and which so clearly involved political direction‐giving, this not likely to change.
[See also Commander in Chief, President as; Disciplinary Views of War: Military History.]
Bibliography
Thomas J. Pressly , Americans Interpret Their Civil War, 1954.
David Donald, ed., Why The North Won the Civil War, 1960.
Marvin R. Cain , A ‘Face of Battle’ Needed: An Assessment of Motives and Men in Civil War Historiography, Civil War History, 28 (March 1982), pp. 5–27.
Joseph T. Glatthaar , The ‘New’ Civil War History: An Overview, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 115 (July 1991), pp. 339–69.
Gabor Boritt , Why the Confederacy Lost, 1992.
Gabor Boritt, ed., Lincoln the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures, 1992.
Gary W. Gallagher , The Confederate War, 1997.
Allen C. Guelzo , The Crisis of the American Republic: A History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1994.
David Donald, ed., Why The North Won the Civil War, 1960.
Marvin R. Cain , A ‘Face of Battle’ Needed: An Assessment of Motives and Men in Civil War Historiography, Civil War History, 28 (March 1982), pp. 5–27.
Joseph T. Glatthaar , The ‘New’ Civil War History: An Overview, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 115 (July 1991), pp. 339–69.
Gabor Boritt , Why the Confederacy Lost, 1992.
Gabor Boritt, ed., Lincoln the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures, 1992.
Gary W. Gallagher , The Confederate War, 1997.
Allen C. Guelzo , The Crisis of the American Republic: A History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1994.
Allen C. Guelzo
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