The Civil War was a watershed event in American history. Lasting four long and tragic years, it transformed the nation. Almost five million soldiers and sailors fought for one side or the other; virtually every American was caught up in the cauldron of conflict. An expensive war, it cost at least 620,000 American lives, nearly as many as all other wars combined (approximately 213,000 died in combat and another 407,000 from wounds, disease, accidents, and other causes). Thousands of civilians lost their lives as well, and military operations destroyed millions of dollars in property, laying waste to the entire economic system of the Old South.
Nearly a century and a half since the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, in April 1861, the origins of the war remain a subject of debate. Should primacy be given to disagreements over states’ rights and the nature of the union, to the issue of slavery, or to other causes? Whichever factor one assigns primacy to, one thing is clear: When Abraham Lincoln was elected president on a platform that pledged to block the expansion of slavery into the western territories, seven states—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas—voted to secede from the United States and to form the Confederate States of America. Lincoln asserted that he had no plans to interfere with slavery where it existed, but when he called for troops to put down the rebellion and force the states of the Deep South to return to the Union, 4 states of the Upper South—North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas—joined the 7. The 11 southern states were opposed by the 23 states that remained loyal to the United States, a number that grew by 3 during the war as Nevada and West Virginia were admitted to the Union and rebellion in Tennessee was subdued by Union armies and that state was reabsorbed into the United States.
Within months of the firing on Fort Sumter, armies confronted each other along a 1,200-mile-front stretching from Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean in the east to Missouri and Arkansas in the west. The balance of resources favored the Union. Twenty-two million people lived in the North versus nine million in the Confederacy (that included more than three million slaves, one-third of the population of the predominantly agricultural South). Most American manufacturing facilities were located in the North, which also had significantly more natural resources and raw materials, a far better developed transportation system, a functioning government, and an established navy. Southern leaders believed that a greater sense of purpose and higher morale would offset these advantages; they also believed that Southern armies were more ably led than those of their opponents.
The Confederacy was in reality independent by mid-1861, and its political and military leaders had faith that the South’s ability to pursue a defensive strategy, one aimed at maintaining the status quo, gave them an advantage. Southern leaders believed that “Cotton was King,” and that European dependence on the Southern staple would lead Britain and France to recognize their independence and extend material aid to the new nation. Union leaders, on the other hand, knew it was imperative that they take the offensive to reunite the nation. At the outbreak of hostilities many expected, or at least hoped for, a quick military victory and rapid reunion; others, including General Winfield Scott, believed that it would be a long war, and Scott, as commander in chief of Union armies, devised the “Anaconda Plan,” a strategy designed to: 1) exert continued pressure on the Confederacy, particularly in northern Virginia; 2) blockade the southern coast to prevent the export of cotton and import of foreign manufactures, especially war supplies; and 3) subdivide the South to prevent the movement of men and material from one section to another. This strategy ultimately succeeded, and the South was squeezed to death much as its namesake, the anaconda constrictor, crushed it prey.
But this would take four years and, as the war wore on, issues that pitted brother against brother and state against state evolved. The war resulted in an end to slavery as an institution and proved that states’ rights were secondary to those of the majority of Americans as expressed through the national government in Washington. The nation was reunited during the dozen postwar years commonly referred to as “Reconstruction,” but many Southerners were not reconciled to their fate until the following century.
A struggle of such magnitude brought forth leaders of heroic stature on both sides. Abraham Lincoln, consistently ranked as the greatest U.S. president and the subject of more books than any other American, regularly receives much of the credit for Union victory. The reputation of Jefferson Davis, his southern counterpart, has not fared as well, but those of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Jeb Stuart, and Nathan Bedford Forrest compare favorably with assessments of Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, George H. Thomas, and Winfield Scott Hancock. Historians and Civil War enthusiasts continue to debate who was the better overall commander, the better theater commander, and the most effective combat leader. Having the larger navy, the Union produced more operational heroes—for example, David Glasgow Farragut, David Dixon Porter, and Andrew Foote—than the Confederacy, but the South’s Raphael Semmes and Franklin Buchanan made the most of their nation’s limited naval assets, and Semmes did so with a romantic dash that matched cavalry commanders such as the Confederacy’s John Singleton Moseby and the Union’s George Armstrong Custer. Both sides produced controversial commanders, including George B. McClellan, who built and trained but always seemed reluctant to commit the Army of the Potomac to battle, and Joseph E. Johnston, who commanded Confederate forces and fought defensive campaigns in Virginia before ceding command in that theater to Lee and moving west to defend Atlanta against Sherman. Could his strategy of standing on the defensive, yielding ground slowly—that is, to win by not losing, a strategy followed by George Washington during the American Revolution—have succeeded in the long run, or would it merely have prolonged the agony of the South given the superior resources of the North?
The Civil War is often judged to be both the last old-fashioned war in which men charged one another across open fields to grapple hand to hand and the first modern war in which railroads, the telegraph, rifled artillery, and iron warships played significant roles. These, as well as more mundane artifacts, can be viewed at innumerable museums located throughout the nation.
When, after four long years of combat engaged on great battlefields such as Bull Run/Manassas in Virginia; Fort Donaldson and Shiloh/Pittsburg Landing in Tennessee; Pea Ridge in Arkansas; the Peninsula between the York and James River in Virginia; at Antietam in Maryland; Vicksburg in Mississippi; Gettysburg in Pennsylvania; and the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Petersburg in Virginia; fought along the coasts at North Carolina’s Outer Banks; Port Royal and Charleston, South Carolina; Mobile Bay, Alabama; and Galveston, Texas; and in operations waged on the rivers of the Mississippi Valley with Fort Henry and Island No. 10 in the north, New Orleans to the south, and Port Hudson and Vicksburg in between, plus in the Red and Arkansas Rivers; the guns fell silent, America was transformed. Factories built to supply the ready-made uniforms and shoes that clothed and shod the armies, the national currency and financial system developed to finance the war, and the rail network constructed to move men and material to the battlefields survived the war and shifted to serving the civilian population. Many of the citizen soldiers who had never ventured more than a few miles from home had their perspectives transformed; thousands moved West rather than return home permanently.
From southern Pennsylvania west to southern Missouri and in the region to the south of the Ohio River, it is difficult to drive an hour without encountering a reminder of the Civil War, be it the statue of a soldier on a county courthouse lawn, a roadside historical marker, or the site of a battlefield, many of which are preserved in state or national parks. These sites allow the traveler to revisit the nation’s past, to glimpse events that laid the basis for the emergence of modern America. Reading can supply knowledge of political, social, and military aspects of the war, but nothing substitutes fully for viewing the terrain on which battles were fought. Such visits provide valuable lessons concerning the very fabric of American life. This volume is designed to help one locate the key sites of the war and to make the most of available time by guiding the visitor to the most significant parts of those sites. It can serve as the basic resource for planning forays into America’s past and once on the scene of historic events, a guide to what to see and how to allocate one’s time.
—James C. Bradford