Chapter 11
The Civil War
In This Chapter
Debating expansion, slavery, and states’ rights
Going to war with fellow Americans
Bleeding and dying in so many hallowed places
Experiencing the realities of war — North and South
Debating what it all meant
The Civil War was the main event of 19th-century American history. Lasting four awful years, from 1861 through 1865, the war touched nearly every American who lived at that time. The war claimed the lives of nearly 620,000 Americans, the most of any conflict in the country’s history. It led to massive destruction of property, homes, and wealth. The war ended slavery and a distinct way of life in the South. Indeed, the South was so devastated by the Civil War that the region’s economy didn’t truly recover until World War II. Whether northern or southern, very few Americans were the same — economically, politically, culturally, or emotionally — after the war as before it.
The war was the final, violent resolution to decades of tension between North and South. The deep-rooted causes of the Civil War dated back to colonial times. From the late 18th century onward, the two regions developed differently. A rural, slave-based plantation economy, based upon individual autonomy and racial hierarchy, flourished in the South. The North’s development was dominated by small farming, urbanization, industrialization, and entrepreneurial capitalism. These two distinct Americas couldn’t reconcile their differences peacefully.
In this chapter, I explain the main causes of the war. I describe the war’s most important battles, explain why the North won the war, and convey what the wartime experience was like for northerners and southerners, on and off the battlefield. Americans, of course, still argue today about the meaning of the Civil War. Historians do too. So at the tail end of the chapter, I point out the different interpretations of the war that Civil War scholars still debate. If you want to read even more about the Civil War after you finish this chapter, check out The Civil War For Dummies by Keith D. Dickson (Wiley).
Deepening Roots of Conflict
In the summer of 1776, the Continental Congress passed a declaration of independence from Great Britain (see Chapter 7). But the declaration almost didn’t happen because of a rift between southerners and northerners. Northerners wanted the declaration to denounce slavery and the Atlantic Ocean trade system that brought slaves to America. Southerners, many of whom owned slaves, refused to agree to this denunciation. If the provision remained, the southern delegates wouldn’t sign the declaration. The provision was stricken, and the Declaration of Independence passed, but the incident was a sign that slavery would cause friction again.
After the Revolution, the northern states abolished slavery. The southern states didn’t. Two distinct economic systems and ways of life developed in these regions. Northern life was based on free labor; southern life was based on slavery. Northerners tended to believe in strong central government; southerners favored states’ rights. As the country expanded west, the two regions often bickered over whose vision would prevail in new states entering the Union, but in the end, they always compromised. However, after the Mexican-American War, the arguments took on an especially harsh, bitter, and even violent tone that eventually led to war.
Arguing over the fruits of the Mexican-American War
Between 1846 and 1848, the United States fought and won a war with Mexico (see Chapter 10). In the peace settlement, Mexico ceded more than half a million square miles of land, comprising much of the Southwest, including Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Nevada, plus parts of Colorado and Utah. Everyone in the U.S. recognized that someday these newly won territories, known as the Mexican cession, would become states. The question was whether those new states would be slave or free. Southerners worried that new free states would upset the delicate balance of power in Congress between North and South in favor of the North. Northerners were concerned that if slavery expanded all the way to the West, black slave labor would undercut free white labor.
With this in mind, David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania congressman, proposed in 1848 that slavery be prohibited in the new territories. This proposal, named the Wilmot Proviso, sparked a furious debate between northerners and southerners. The proviso didn’t pass, but the debate grew into an actual secession crisis by 1850.
In 1850, with southerners threatening to secede (formally withdraw) from the Union, and civil war a distinct possibility, cooler heads from both the North and South forged a compromise. Senators Henry Clay of Kentucky and Stephen Douglas of Illinois were the main architects of the compromise.
Here’s what the compromise did for northerners:
Admitted California as a free state
Awarded disputed territory to free-soil New Mexico at slaveholding Texas’s expense
Prohibited the selling of slaves in Washington, D.C.
Here’s what the compromise did for southerners:
Did not place a federal restriction on slavery in the Mexican cession
Transferred Texas’s public debt to the federal government
Kept slavery legal in Washington, D.C.
Created a strong fugitive slave law that allowed southerners to apprehend escaped slaves even if they made it to the North
Testing popular sovereignty
When President Millard Fillmore signed the Compromise of 1850 into law, he believed it represented a final peace between North and South. Millions of other Americans shared his optimistic view, but they were wrong.
As the 1850s unfolded, the tension between northerners and southerners grew much worse. The main question was this: Should slavery spread to new territories like Kansas and Nebraska? Southern slaveholders argued that, with no federal restrictions on slavery, they could take their “property” with them wherever they went. Opponents of slavery believed that such unrestricted spread of slavery would undercut the competition of a free-labor market.
To solve this vexing problem, the nation, for a few years, rallied around the idea of popular sovereignty. Instead of deciding these issues in Washington, D.C., with federal mandates, the people of each territory would decide the slavery issue themselves, in their own way.
At first glance, this seemed reasonable and democratic. But, in practice, popular sovereignty was a disaster. Extremists from both sides, determined to prevail by force if necessary, gravitated to the new territories. The result was violence. Kansas, for instance, was little more than a bloody, armed caldron of tension by the late 1850s.
Visiting Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Added to this was major cultural tension between North and South. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of a northern minister, published an antislavery (abolitionist) novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the first year alone, the book sold 300,000 copies, almost all in the North. Eventually, the novel became the number-one selling book of the 19th century. The average southerner thought of Stowe’s book as a clumsy, unfair attack on southern culture. The average northerner — even the racist white majority who didn’t want to abolish slavery — viewed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a long overdue indictment of a backward institution. Most historians believe that the book fueled the abolitionist movement of the 1850s, raising tensions to a fever pitch.
During the Civil War, when Harriet Beecher Stowe met President Abraham Lincoln, he allegedly gazed at her and exclaimed: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”
Raiding Harper’s Ferry
In October 1859, an antislavery zealot named John Brown led a raid against the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown and his followers — including several of his sons — planned to seize weapons and arm slaves for a general uprising in the South. Brown’s little band of abolitionists were no strangers to violence. Several years before, they had killed several proslavery men in Kansas. Their Harper’s Ferry raid was poorly planned. Federal soldiers quickly recaptured the armory and took Brown into custody. In two quick months, he was tried and executed.
Even though few northerners agreed with Brown’s tactics, many thought of him as a martyr. Southerners despised him as the lowest kind of criminal. Slave owners had for decades worried about potential slave uprisings, and Brown’s raid only compounded those fears. Learning of Brown’s ties to many prominent northerners, some southerners came to believe that the North was full of many more John Browns, itching for the chance to free the slaves.
The federal troops who took back Harper’s Ferry armory and captured John Brown were under the command of Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee, a professional soldier from Virginia who would one day become the most famous southern general.
Electing Abraham Lincoln
By 1860, the mistrust and anger between northerners and southerners were so bad that only one more divisive event would drive the southern states to secede from the union. The presidential election of that year proved to be just such an event. The Democratic Party split along regional lines. John Breckinridge ran as a proslavery southern candidate. Democrat Stephen Douglas tried to win support in both the North and South, but neither side really trusted him. Abraham Lincoln, from the new Republican Party, advocated the idea of prohibiting slavery’s spread to the Mexican cession. Lincoln was so unpopular in the South that he wasn’t even on the ballot there. However, he won by sweeping most of the northern states, giving him only 39 percent of the national popular vote but plenty of electoral votes to become president.
In 1860, Lincoln did not yet propose to abolish slavery in the South. He simply wanted to prevent it from spreading west. Thinking of Lincoln as a mere frontman for more John Browns, most southerners viewed his election as an insult and a threat to their way of life. In spite of what Lincoln said, they believed that he would one day abolish slavery everywhere. They also thought that his election represented a new surge toward a northern-dominated central government that would soon threaten southern liberty and the autonomy of states.
Appalled at Lincoln’s election, and exasperated with the North in general, several southern states seceded from the Union during the winter of 1860–1861. South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas were all gone by February 1861. These states comprised the deep South, where slavery was strongest. They banded together to form their own country, called the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.) or Confederacy.
The Most Important Battles, 1861–1862
To Lincoln and the majority of northerners, southern secession was the equivalent of rebellion and even treason. To pro-secession southerners, secession was a right. They were simply leaving a voluntary union to pursue their own freedom from a despot (a person who rules with absolute power), much like the patriots during the Revolutionary War period (see Chapter 7).
The seceded southern states quickly established a government with Mississippian Jefferson Davis as president. Initially, the capital was in Montgomery, Alabama, but later they moved it to Richmond, Virginia. The Confederacy armed itself with weapons confiscated from federal armories and purchased from overseas. Attuned to the possibility of war with the North, young southern men flocked to join the new Confederate Army.
Eventually the divergent views between North and South led to war when fighting broke out between Federal soldiers and Confederates at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The fort was located in Charleston harbor and occupied by Federal troops. Believing that Sumter was part of their new nation, the Confederates besieged it. In April 1861, when Lincoln tried to resupply his men with food, southern leaders decided to open fire on Sumter. Thus began the Civil War. The North was determined to force the seceded states back into the Union, thus quelling the rebellion. The South was equally committed to winning its independence.
After Fort Sumter, the four states of the upper South — generally more moderate than the deep South — finally seceded. Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and, most notably, Virginia all joined the Confederacy. Lincoln was deeply concerned that every slave state would secede. Much to his relief, though, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri all stayed in the Union, even though slavery was legal within their borders.
In the spring and summer of 1861, both sides began feverishly mobilizing for war. The North held most of the advantages:
22 million people versus 9 million in the South, one-third of whom were slaves
97 percent of firearm production; 3 percent for the South
71 percent of all railroad mileage; 29 percent for the South
91 percent of all factory production; 9 percent for the South
75 percent of all farm acreage; 25 percent for the South
The South did have some advantages, though. The Confederacy could win if European nations recognized the legitimacy of the new southern nation. The Europeans would then come to the South’s aid or put intense international pressure on Lincoln’s government to agree to southern independence. Failing that, the South could simply break the will of northerners to fight and win the war.
Initially, though, both sides hoped for a quick victory. The first major battle occurred outside of Manassas, Virginia, about 25 miles west of Washington, D.C.
The Battle of Bull Run
In July 1861, a Union army of 35,000 soldiers advanced on Manassas with the intention of destroying the main rebel army of 25,000 troops, and then taking Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital (see Figure 11-1). The two sides clashed on July 21, 1861, north of Manassas. Both armies were raw and ill-trained. After several hours of bloody struggle, southern soldiers broke through the Union line, prompting a panicked retreat all the way back to Washington, D.C. The battle was a major Confederate victory. Both sides lost about 2,000 men.
Figure 11-1: Map of the early battles of the Civil War, 1861–1862.
During the Civil War, the North and South couldn’t even agree on the names of battles! The North named battles after the most prominent geographic feature on the battlefield; the South named them after the nearest town. So, for instance, the North called this first battle “Bull Run.” The South called it the “Battle of Manassas.” The legacy of these different naming customs continues today, as northerners and southerners still call battles by different names.
Invading the York peninsula
Bull Run was a wakeup call for the North that this war wouldn’t be a walkover. Lincoln now recruited tens of thousands of soldiers into federal service and planned for a total war. He also sacked Gen. Irvin McDowell, the commander at Bull Run, in favor of Gen. George B. McClellan (see Figure 11-2), a 34-year-old dynamo who rejuvenated the Union Army in the East (now known as the Army of the Potomac).
Figure 11-2: Gen. George B. McClellan wasn’t a very aggressive military leader in battle.
© CORBIS
McClellan excelled at training and building an army, but he suffered from a perpetual lack of aggressiveness. He was the political opposite of Lincoln. Like many of his fellow Democrats, McClellan thought the war should be a limited one, fought simply to sway the South back into the Union, with no change in the status of slavery.
Gen. McClellan spent the entire fall of 1861 training his army, refusing to launch the offensive Lincoln wanted. In spite of the fact that the North held a huge manpower advantage over the South, McClellan believed that the Confederate Army outnumbered his by a margin of two-to-one. He used this as an excuse to drag his feet. Finally, in March 1862, after many months of tension with the president, McClellan made his move.
Instead of attacking the southern army directly in northern Virginia, his army — 100,000 strong now — embarked on boats for an amphibious invasion of the York peninsula, just east of Richmond. He expected to outflank the Confederates, march on their capital, and win the war.
The plan was a good one, causing a real crisis for the rebels, but McClellan let them off the hook by moving very slowly across the York peninsula. As usual, his caution grew from his strong belief that he was outnumbered. By late June, when his army finally advanced to within 7 miles of Richmond, the Confederates had enough troops in place to stop him. The campaign then climaxed in a series of bloody engagements, often referred to as the Seven Days Battles, fought between June 25 and July 1.
The Union won all but one of the battles fought over those seven days. However, McClellan was deeply troubled by the thousands of casualties his army was suffering, and, convinced as always that he was outnumbered, he didn’t order an advance on Richmond. Instead, he retreated in the belief that he was saving his army from total destruction. In late July, a bitterly disappointed Lincoln finally ordered McClellan to bring his army back to Washington. Thus, the Peninsula Campaign ended up as a major defeat for the North, even though the South suffered more casualties.
Another battle at Bull Run
During the Peninsula Campaign, Gen. Robert E. Lee was given command of all Confederate armies in the East. Gentlemanly and polite, he was nonetheless an aggressive, brilliant tactician. With the Union armies in disarray after the Peninsula Campaign and Richmond secure, Lee wanted to hit them with a knockout punch. He marched to northern Virginia with 50,000 soldiers. On August 29–30, outside of Manassas, Virginia, his army clashed with a Union force of equivalent size under the command of Gen. John Pope, an arrogant braggart who was no match for Lee.
Over the course of those two violent days, the Confederates defeated Pope’s army in what northerners called the Second Battle of Bull Run (southerners call it Second Manassas). The fighting raged on the same battlefield where the war’s first major battle had taken place the year before. Soldiers fought in withering heat made worse by clouds of gunpowder smoke. The volume of firepower was intense, which was bad enough, but this battle featured a special ghoulishness. Many of those who were killed the year before had been buried in shallow graves on the battlefield. Explosions unearthed their remains, spraying decomposed body parts over the living and dead alike.
The North suffered about 15,000 casualties, the South about 9,000 at Second Bull Run. After this defeat, the Union Army was in headlong retreat toward Washington, D.C., but Lee’s army was not quite strong enough to take the Federal capital.
Surprise at Shiloh
In the meantime, the war was going better for the Yankees in the West. The key to victory in this region was control of the Mississippi, Tennessee, Ohio, and Cumberland rivers. By the spring of 1862, northern armies controlled major stretches of those rivers. The Federals had captured Nashville and much of Tennessee. They also controlled Kentucky, Missouri, and parts of Arkansas. Their plan was to keep moving south along the Mississippi River with the purpose of cutting the Confederacy in two.
Realizing that the Union was steadily strangling the western states of the Confederacy, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederate commander in the West, decided to counterattack. He scraped together an army of 55,000 soldiers and, on April 6, 1862, launched a surprise attack against 35,000 Union soldiers who were camped along the Cumberland River in southwestern Tennessee, at a place called Pittsburg Landing or Shiloh. Johnston aimed to push this force into the river, annihilating it.
Initially, the Confederate advantage of surprise overwhelmed the northern soldiers. Southern troops swept through Yankee camps, capturing prisoners and war booty alike, prompting panicked survivors to run for their lives. Gradually, though, as the day wore on, Union troops rallied, fought hard, and staved off annihilation. In the midst of the fight, Johnston took a bullet in the thigh, severing his femoral artery. He bled to death in a few short minutes. After Johnston’s death, the Confederate advance lost cohesion. Johnston’s successor, Gen. Pierre Beauregard, decided to call off the attack, regroup, and finish the Yankees off in the morning. By nightfall, the battle had settled into an uneasy stalemate.
The Union commander at Shiloh was Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the most successful northern commander of the war. Instead of retreating after a rough day, he decided to attack at sunrise on April 7. Employing newly arrived reinforcements, he did just that, pushing the Confederates back to their original starting points. Rather than lose his army, Beauregard decided to retreat. Thus, Shiloh ended up as a bloody Union victory. In fact, with nearly 24,000 casualties between the two sides, Shiloh was the costliest battle ever fought in North America up to that point.
With the victory at Shiloh, the Union now controlled western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Plus they soon took New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Union was definitely winning in the West. However, Vicksburg, Mississippi, still eluded them, leaving the Confederacy in control of a major stretch of the Mississippi River. Plus, in the East, the war was going well for the South.
Ironically, the word Shiloh means “place of peace” in Hebrew.
Bloodshed at Antietam
After defeating the Union Army at Second Bull Run, Gen. Lee unleashed a bold plan designed to win the war in 1862. He decided to march his veteran army of 45,000 soldiers north and invade Maryland. The invasion had several strategic purposes:
Draw Maryland, a slave state, into the Confederacy.
Threaten the security of Washington, D.C.
Strengthen peace candidates in the upcoming northern elections. If elected, they would pressure Lincoln’s government to end the war on the South’s terms.
Convince Europeans to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate nation.
In early September 1862, Lee’s army crossed into Maryland. Because his forces were so poorly supplied, they had to live off the land, alienating the very Maryland farmers on whom they counted for support. This ended any hope that Maryland would join the Confederacy. Nonetheless, Lee could still achieve his strategic aims if he could defeat the Union Army in battle. Even now, a powerful force of 87,000 Yankees under the command of George McClellan was moving north, searching for Lee’s army. On September 17, 1862, the two sides clashed near Sharpsburg, Maryland, at Antietam Creek.
Several days earlier, McClellan had been the benefactor of some freak luck. Union soldiers found a misplaced envelope containing Lee’s entire campaign plan. Even with this knowledge, McClellan moved so slowly that, by the time he launched his main attack on September 17, Lee had ensconced his men into a fairly good defensive position, averting total disaster.
Throughout the day on September 17, the battle raged over the gentle, rolling country around Sharpsburg and Antietam Creek. The sheer violence of the fighting was unprecedented, worse even than at Shiloh. Soldiers had eyes shot out, limbs shattered, and feet crushed. In the middle of the battlefield, at a sunken farm road known forever after as the “Bloody Lane,” Confederate soldiers fought desperately to thwart a Union attack. Along an 800-yard stretch of this little dirt road, men fought to the death. “We were shooting them like sheep in a pen,” one Union soldier later wrote. More than 5,000 men became casualties. Dead bodies were stacked two and three deep. Blood — Yankee and Rebel — stained the earth.
The fighting went on like this all day, with neither side winning a decisive victory. As the sun set, both armies were crippled, content to lick their wounds in an uneasy stalemate. Eventually, Lee disengaged and retreated back to Virginia, having lost more than one-quarter of his army.
Antietam is the single bloodiest day in American history, even surpassing September 11, 2001. At Antietam, more than 6,000 Americans lost their lives in a 24-hour period (see Figure 11-3). The Union suffered 12,401 casualties in the battle; the Confederates, 10,316.
Figure 11-3: Confederate soldiers, killed during the Battle of Antietam, lie along a dirt road.
© CORBIS
Even though the actual fighting at Antietam ended in a standoff, the battle was an important Union victory. This is because Lee’s strategic purpose failed. He did not persuade Maryland to secede; he did not strengthen peace candidates; he did not threaten Washington; finally, foreign powers like Britain and France thought of Antietam as a Union victory and withheld diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. Even so, McClellan allowed Lee’s army to escape to fight again another day. This was the last straw for Lincoln. He relieved the passive McClellan.
Antietam was important for another reason. For several months, Lincoln had planned to announce the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all the slaves in the Confederate states (but not border states like Maryland). To give the proclamation some political weight, Lincoln knew he must announce it after a military victory, or else many observers, foreign and domestic, would see it as a desperation move. Antietam was that victory. The proclamation was important for several reasons:
The North was not just fighting a war to maintain the Union; it was now fighting a war for the abolition of slavery.
The average citizen in Britain and France hated slavery. So they sympathized with the North. Thus, public opinion in both countries was firmly against recognition of the Confederacy.
The North was now fighting a total war to subdue the South. This meant freeing the slaves, but it also meant training and arming them as soldiers.
The South was appalled by the proclamation and was determined to fight even harder for independence.
Many pro-Union northerners, especially in western states like Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, withdrew their support for the war. They wanted to end secession, not free the slaves.
A Violent Year, 1863
In spite of the victory at Antietam, 1862 ended badly for the North with a bitter defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia. So, as 1863 began, the North held the advantage in the western theater, while the South was winning in the eastern theater. The two sides now redoubled their efforts to win what had become a total war. This led to a series of ghastly, costly battles fought over the course of the year. This included three of the most important engagements of the Civil War.
Fighting the war at sea
Throughout the Civil War, the North dominated the war at sea. From the beginning of the war, the U.S. Navy blockaded southern ports, slowly strangling the southern economy. The Confederate Navy, consisting only of a few raiding ships that harassed Yankee shipping, could not hope to break the blockade or fight any sizable battle with the Union Navy. Both sides built steam-powered ironclad boats, a harbinger of the future. The Union mass-produced armored gunboats that helped the North control the rivers, shuttle troops on them, and destroy Confederate river traffic. It’s fair to say that naval superiority is a major reason why the North won the war.
Lee’s great win at Chancellorsville
In the spring of 1863, President Lincoln entrusted the Army of the Potomac to Gen. Joe Hooker, a brash, hard-drinking man who had lobbied hard for the job. Unlike McClellan, Hooker understood that his army was twice as big as Lee’s. Hooker had 133,000 men, Lee half that many. With the advantage of numbers, Hooker was determined to move against Lee’s forces (now known as the Army of Northern Virginia), destroy them, and then capture Richmond. “May God have mercy on General Lee, for I shall not,” Hooker boasted. In late April 1863, Hooker’s troops moved south toward Fredericksburg, where Lee’s men were still entrenched after their victory there the previous year.
Hooker planned to hit Lee from two sides: In the east, at Fredericksburg, he would feign an attack. Meanwhile, the bulk of his army would bear down on the Confederates from the west, rout them from their fortifications at Fredericksburg, and destroy them. On May 1, 1863, after several days of maneuvering, Hooker was in a position to do exactly that. But he lost his nerve, decided to retreat, and dug his army into defensive positions around an inn called Chancellorsville (see Figure 11-4). This yielded the initiative to Lee, who promptly attacked and defeated the massive Union force in a bloody five-day battle. Hooker and the Federal army fled north. Chancellorsville was Lee’s greatest victory.
Figure 11-4: Map of the battles of the second half of the Civil War, 1863–1865.
Crushing Lee at Gettysburg
After his smashing victory at Chancellorsville, Gen. Lee devised a bold plan. He would invade Pennsylvania, a bona fide free state of the North. He hoped to sever Washington, D.C., from all the northeastern states and force Lincoln to end the war on the South’s terms. On July 1, 1863, as elements of Lee’s army approached an eastern Pennsylvania crossroads town named Gettysburg, they clashed with a smaller Union force. By day’s end, both sides had fed in reinforcements.
Believing that he had a chance to crush the Army of the Potomac, Lee decided to mass his forces for a decisive attack. In all, he had 71,000 veteran soldiers. But soon the Union had 94,000 men around Gettysburg, and many of them were deployed along a prominent ridge that dominated the area. For two days, Lee tried, and failed, to overwhelm the Yankees. By the end of the day on July 3, his army had suffered 23,231 casualties. The Army of the Potomac lost a similar number of men but still held the key ground. Lee knew he must retreat. He and his survivors were fortunate to escape back to Virginia.
Gettysburg was the biggest Union victory to this point in the war. After the battle, Lee’s army was so crippled that, from here on out, he could only fight a defensive war in hopes of wearing down northern resolve to win.
A surrender at Vicksburg
Gen. Grant, the Union commander in the West, spent much of 1863 trying to take Vicksburg, Mississippi. Taking Vicksburg would give the North control of the whole Mississippi River; plus the Confederacy would be cut in two, with Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas stranded from the rest of the South. After a sprawling campaign that featured river crossings, cavalry movements, and a series of battles, Grant besieged Vicksburg from May to July 1863. Hungry, desperate, isolated, and filled with despair, the town’s 30,000 Confederate defenders were doomed. Their commander, Gen. John Pemberton, surrendered them and the town on July 4, 1863. The Union had now triumphed in the western theater. Vicksburg was every bit as important as Gettysburg in deciding the outcome of the war.
The people of Vicksburg were so scarred by the July 4 surrender of their town that they did not celebrate the Independence Day holiday until World War II, a full 80 years later.
Finishing the War, 1864–1865
By 1864, the South was clearly losing the war, but victory was still possible. War weariness was so great in the North that, if the Confederacy could keep fighting and inflicting major casualties on the Yankees, Lincoln would lose the fall presidential election in favor of a peace government that would agree to southern independence. For the South, this was the last hope. For the North, the key to victory was a swift conclusion to hostilities through the use of overwhelming force.
Bleeding in the East
In the wake of Vicksburg, President Lincoln appointed the victorious Gen. Grant to command of the Union armies. Grant’s plan was simple: Attack Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, destroy it, and then take Richmond.
In early May 1864, Grant’s army, numbering some 118,000 soldiers, crossed the Rapidan River, west of Fredericksburg. In so doing, the men threatened Lee’s supply lines, forcing him to react. Thus began a running series of costly battles fought north and east of Richmond over the course of two months. The most prominent battles were the Wilderness (May 5–7), Spotsylvania (May 8–21), and Cold Harbor (May 31–June 12). Each one of these engagements cost Grant thousands of casualties and ended in stalemate, which, of course, favored the Confederates.
The battle at Cold Harbor, a few miles east of Richmond, was especially horrible. Grant ordered a frontal assault against what he hoped were thinly defended enemy positions. Instead, the rebels had firmly fortified the whole area. As a result, the Union lost 7,000 soldiers killed, wounded, and captured in just one day of fighting. They were pinned down, raked by a deadly crossfire of bullets, shattering their skulls, tearing off arms and legs. Before going forward, many of these veteran soldiers had sensed the danger ahead. Some wrote their names and addresses on slips of paper and pinned them to the inside of their uniforms so their bodies could be identified by burial details.
For Grant, the only good thing about Cold Harbor was that it eventually forced Lee to retreat south to Petersburg, a vital rail junction that he needed to defend Richmond. Here the campaign settled into a trench warfare stalemate for the next nine months. The southern army was in bad shape, but the stalemate at Petersburg, plus the horrendous casualties of Grant’s campaign — 66,000 in six weeks — caused northern morale to plummet. By the late summer of 1864, Lincoln was in real danger of losing the election.
Ravaging the South
In the summer of 1864, Gen. William Sherman, one of the North’s most ruthless commanders, began a campaign to take Atlanta, a city that was second only to Richmond in political importance for the Confederacy. Starting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Sherman’s men spent the summer steadily fighting their way closer to Atlanta. In late August, Sherman cut the city off, forcing it to surrender on September 2. The jubilant northern commander telegrammed the White House: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” He ordered the town evacuated and then had it burned to the ground.
The fall of Atlanta was of great importance:
Northern morale skyrocketed because a victorious end to the war was now in sight.
The surge in morale led to Lincoln’s reelection. In November, he easily defeated the pro-peace George McClellan, the general who had once worked for him.
Lincoln’s reelection ensured the South’s defeat because he was committed to total victory. Union victory was now just a matter of time.
After Atlanta, Sherman led his army on a “march to the sea” in which he conquered the rest of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, destroying anything of value to the Confederacy.
The end at Appomattox
By April 1, 1865, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Petersburg was under pressure from Grant, whose army was constantly battering the Confederate fortifications, and Sherman, who had knifed through North Carolina to join up with Grant. Casualties, disease, and desertion had whittled Lee’s army down to about 35,000 hungry men. They could not hold out against the vastly superior Union armies.
In early April, the Confederate line at Petersburg finally broke, forcing Lee to abandon not just Petersburg but also Richmond. On April 3, the Yankees took the Confederate capital. Meanwhile, Lee and the remnants of his army retreated west to Appomattox, Virginia. Grant’s army soon caught up with them. With a heavy heart, Lee now realized that further resistance was futile. On April 9, 1865, he surrendered his army to Grant. The Union general ordered his men to treat the surrendering rebels with respect, like wayward brothers returning home. Within two months of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, all the remaining Confederate military forces laid down their arms. With the war over, the healing could now begin.
The war was the bloodiest in American military history, costing the lives of 360,000 Union soldiers and 258,000 Confederates. The war preserved the Union, abolished slavery, and ensured that the United States would develop along the northern model of industrialization, urbanization, a strong central government, free labor, and entrepreneurial capitalism. But the war didn’t resolve the issue of racial equality. In general, African Americans did not enjoy any semblance of equality for at least another century.
Experiencing the Civilian Side of the Civil War
What was the Civil War like for the American people? Mainly an unhappy experience, especially if you were a southerner. Almost everyone, North and South, was affected in some way by the war. People lost homes, property, farms, and loved ones. Some Americans profited from the war. The people of the North generally had an easier time than southerners. During the war years, northerners experienced good economic times; southerners were lucky to eat three meals a day.
Diverging economies
The northern war economy was much stronger than the southern. In the North, jobs were plentiful. The average person ate decent food, earned reasonable wages, and could even afford the entertainment offered by books, newspapers, music, and plays. The war affected them because of the human cost of the casualties, not because of any major personal privations or rationing.
Some northern financiers and entrepreneurs got very rich making war materiel (items like weapons and military equipment) for the government, speculating on precious metals, and extending high-interest loans to Uncle Sam. A young Scottish immigrant named Andrew Carnegie got rich from investing in the rising oil industry. He eventually used his earnings to create the world’s leading steel company. J. Pierpont Morgan made millions by cornering the gold market. Both Carnegie and Morgan were of military age, but both used their wealth to avoid service in the Union Army.
The Confederate economy was quite weak. The South didn’t have the resources, industry, railroads, or farm acreage to provide for its population during the war. Inflation jacked up prices by 9,000 percent during the war. Yankee armies overrunning huge swaths of the South only compounded the miserable situation. As a result of all these problems, hunger and privation dogged southerners. Meat was scarce, especially in the cities. Average southerners often ate meager meals of corn mush and bread, with perhaps some fish or fatty bacon. Some verged on the brink of starvation, particularly rural women with husbands in the Confederate Army.
The food shortages boiled over into actual food riots in the South. In the most famous such riot, Richmond women broke into the stores of merchants who were hoarding meat and flour. The riot got so out of control that Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, took to the streets to restore order.
Resisting the draft
Hundreds of thousands of Rebels and Yankees volunteered for the armed forces, but the costly battles created a never-ending demand for more troops. Both the North and the South needed military manpower so desperately that they resorted to implementing a draft (or conscription). The Confederate Congress passed a conscription law in April 1862. The U.S. Congress passed a similar law two months later. The draft was quite unpopular in both regions, especially because the wealthy could avoid it by hiring a substitute or paying a commutation fee.
In New York City, anti-draft sentiment exploded into horrendous violence in July 1863. Working-class Irish immigrants who couldn’t afford to pay their way out of the draft rioted when federal officials attempted to conscript them. The Irish were against the war and emancipation because they feared that freed slaves would take their jobs. For several days, the Irish killed or beat up draft officials, blacks, and anyone who favored the abolition of slavery. The rioters looted, burned, and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property. Eventually, Lincoln quelled the riot by sending in troops.
In the long run, the draft didn’t raise much manpower for either army. For instance, only 8 percent of Union Army soldiers were draftees. Moreover, most of these draftees were not very good soldiers. Volunteers carried the weight for both sides. Among the white population, about half of military-age northern men served in the armed forces; about four-fifths of young southern men served.
Rousing political rabble
Both Lincoln and Davis dealt with intense opposition. In the North, peace Democrats put constant pressure on Lincoln to end the war. As the war grew ever more terrible, they argued that the goal of reestablishing the Union was unattainable or not worth the cost. They also opposed abolition. Republicans derided these antiwar opponents as copperheads (after the poisonous snake).
Lincoln was also under pressure from intensely anti-secession members of his own party. Known as Radical Republicans, they wanted to conquer the South, end slavery, punish Confederates, and establish racial equality. They constantly accused Lincoln of too much leniency against the Rebels. In 1861–1862, they intensely pressured Lincoln to abolish slavery.
In the South, President Davis was plagued with similarly strident opponents. The Confederacy had no political parties, so Davis’s main opposition came from states’ rights advocates who resented the Confederate government’s power in Richmond. After all, many southerners went to war to protect states’ rights, so it was natural for them to oppose any strong central government policies, such as the draft, that Davis took in an effort to win the war. In the long run, the South collapsed under the weight of this contradiction — to win the war, the Confederacy needed a strong central government, similar to Lincoln’s, but then what would become of states’ rights?
Dancing around the race issue
At the outset of the war, both sides denied that the war was about slavery or, by extension, race. Northerners said they were fighting to reestablish the Union. Southerners were fighting for their homes and states’ rights.
All of this was true, but slavery was a key issue as well. As Union armies conquered major portions of the South, thousands of slaves fled from their masters (some of whom were away in the service) to the Union lines. Even the most anti-abolition Union commander wouldn’t return these fugitives to slavery. Thus, the institution of slavery began to erode as the war dragged on.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, the North was committed to ending slavery (see the “Bloodshed at Antietam” section earlier in this chapter). But the larger question was what would happen to the freed slaves. Would African Americans now enjoy full equality as American citizens? This great question did not just affect the South but also the North. In the North, free blacks didn’t enjoy any semblance of equality with whites, and many whites aimed to keep it that way.
Thus, the question of race was a major issue of the Civil War (some historians believe it was the major issue). African Americans played a major part in the war’s outcome. When slaves escaped, they seriously damaged the Confederate war effort, not just by their absence but also in helping the Union armies. The North mobilized 186,000 African American troops during the war. About half were freed slaves; the other half were free men from the North. Lincoln once commented that without these men, the North would not have won. Most served in support roles, under the control of white officers. Some, like the famous 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, did see combat.
The valorous service of units like the 54th created momentum for racial reform in some northern states. Even so, the war didn’t result in any kind of long-term racial equality, whether North or South. The issue of race reform festered in America until the civil rights movement of the 20th century. In that sense, the Civil War was incomplete.
What Did It All Mean?
Historians have written, literally, hundreds of thousands of Civil War books. So what do the experts say the war was really about? Opinions vary of course, but some predominant interpretations have emerged over the years:
White southern historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the South’s cause as noble, but ultimately doomed by northern material superiority.
In that same time period, northern historians saw the war as an abolitionist crusade to end slavery, but not racial inequality.
By the middle of the 20th century, many historians saw economics as the real cause of the war.
In the last 40 years, quite a few historians have argued that the war was an inevitable clash of distinct cultures — a slave-based society versus a free-labor society.
A more recent group of historians emphasizes the importance of racial inequality as the cause of the Civil War.