The long, torturous path leading to the American Civil War began in Virginia in 1619, when about 20 African men were brought to the English settlement of Jamestown to work as indentured servants. Many workers in the colonies were indentured servants, that is, in return for paid passage to America, they agreed to work for no wages for a set period, usually about seven years. Within a generation, however, thousands of Africans were taken involuntarily from their homes, transported across the Atlantic, and sold as slaves to white settlers in England’s American colonies. The economy of the southern colonies, based on labor-intensive agriculture in an unforgiving climate, grew dependent on an ever-increasing number of slaves to harvest crops such as tobacco and cotton. Many leading members of the nation’s founding generation, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves.
Slavery was legal in the North until the early 19th century, but the institution never caught on, in part because the region’s soil did not allow for the system of large plantations that took hold in the South. Northern political and religious leaders began to develop misgivings about slavery during and after the American Revolution, especially as the nation began to expand westward. The Northwest Ordinance, which Congress passed in July 1787, prohibited slavery in new states as they formed in the region now called the Midwest. As northern states began to abolish slavery, the Northwest Ordinance had the effect of creating a large regional bloc where slavery was prohibited.
Differences over slavery were played out even during the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as southern delegates sought implicit recognition of slavery in the nation’s basic set of laws and warned their colleagues from the North that they would not support a document perceived to contain antislavery language. The convention chose not to confront slavery but to evade it through compromises. For example, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of electoral representation and taxation, and the Constitution included a provision calling for the return of escaped slaves. Northern interests, however, were ambiguously addressed
in the Constitution as well, establishing a ban on the slave trade within 20 years of ratification.
In 1820, tensions rose over the prospective statehood of Missouri, which was carved out of the Louisiana Territory, purchased in 1803 by President Thomas Jefferson. With Congress evenly divided between free states and slave states, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Henry Clay of Kentucky, worked out a compromise in which Maine was admitted as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, adding that slavery would be banned in the Louisiana Territory north of Missouri’s southern border, parallel 36°30’ north (Missouri was exempted from the prohibition). While the Missouri Compromise maintained the balance of power between free states and slave states in Congress, the debate itself prompted fear for the nation’s future. As he followed this debate, Thomas Jefferson described sectional differences over slavery as a “fire bell in the night … the death knell of the Union.”
In 1828, Jefferson’s nightmarish vision of a divided Union moved closer to reality when political figures in South Carolina led by John C. Calhoun began to argue that they had the power to declare federal laws null and void in their state. Senators Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Hayne of South Carolina engaged in a famous debate over states’ rights and the nature of the American Union in 1830.
South Carolina objected to high federal tariffs, which many Southerners believed favored the industrial North over the import-dependent, agricultural South. When President Andrew Jackson signed a new tariff policy in 1832, Calhoun, his vice president, resigned and became a national spokesman for its nullification. South Carolina declared that the tariffs did not have the force of law within its borders. Jackson threatened the use of force against the dissidents, and South Carolina backed down as Washington reduced the tariff. Although the issue of the moment had been resolved, sectional differences were at a fever pitch, and the state of the Union was very unstable. Adding to the tension was the slaveowner’s worst fear—a slave revolt. Some 60 white people died in Virginia in 1831, when a slave named Nat Turner led an uprising of slaves and free blacks. The rebellion was crushed quickly, and dozens of African Americans, including Turner, were killed or later executed.
As the North became more urban, more industrial, and more heterogeneous,
southern slaveholders developed a narrative to justify the region’s continued dependence on slavery. As the slave population neared 4 million (in an overall U.S. population of 31 million), southern whites drew a favorable contrast between enslavement, which they argued was beneficial for blacks, and industrial wage labor in the North, which they saw as demeaning and inhumane work performed by alien immigrants who supported corrupt political machines. The growing antislavery movement in the North saw southern plantation culture as decadent and immoral, an institution with which there could be no compromise.
A Boston-based journalist named William Lloyd Garrison became a leading spokesman for the abolitionist cause through his newspaper, The Liberator, which he published for 34 years, 1831–65. Garrison and other abolitionists, inspired by evangelical Christianity, became zealous critics of slavery and denounced not only slaveholders, but those in the North who sought compromise rather than outright abolition. In 1844, Garrison burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution, which he called “A Covenant With Death” for its compromises over slavery. Northern abolitionists and their newspapers became objects of hate and scorn in the South. The abolitionists were vocal and eloquent, but they had a narrow base of support, centered in Boston and led by elite clergy and journalists.
♦The Union in Peril American expansion collided with Mexico’s claim to Texas, which had been admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1845, leading to war in 1846. Southern politicians were particularly enthusiastic about the war, for they saw the possibility of new slave states in the vast territories of the Southwest then under Mexican rule. Some Northerners, however, opposed the war, in part because they feared victory would foment the growth of slavery. Among the conflict’s opponents were a congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln and a writer in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau, who refused to pay his taxes in protest of what he saw as an unjust war. The U.S. victory over Mexico in 1848 added territory that included the future states of California, Utah, and Nevada, as well as portions of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona.
In anticipation of these vast territorial gains, a Pennsylvania congressman named David Wilmot introduced a clause in an appropriations bill in 1846 that sought to ban slavery from any land won from
Mexico. The measure, known as the Wilmot Proviso, violated a tacit agreement in Congress to avoid discussion of slavery on the House and Senate floors. The bill, with the proviso attached, won narrow approval in the House; Northerners supported it regardless of party affiliation, and Southerners were unanimously opposed. During this time, American politics were not dominated by the two major political parties, Democrat and Whig; instead they were dictated by the real division, that of North and South. The proviso never passed the full Congress, but it inspired debate over the future of slavery as never before. A later version of the proviso called for a ban on slavery in all new territories, not just those acquired from Mexico. With southern Democrats seeking to stop the antislavery movement, some northern Democrats left the party and formed the Free Soil Party, which formally opposed the extension of slavery.
As slavery continued to threaten the Union’s stability, politicians desperately sought to postpone, or perhaps avoid altogether, a day of reckoning. Under the legislative leadership of Henry Clay, Congress constructed what became known as the Compromise of 1850. It granted admission of California as a free state, banned the internal slave trade from Washington, D.C., allowed for slavery to be decided by popular vote in the new territories of New Mexico and Utah, and enforced a stringent new Fugitive Slave Law, which required all U.S. citizens to assist in the return of escaped slaves. Southern slave owners were adamant about the return of escaped slaves, a response to the success of former slaves like Harriet Tubman, who fled bondage in Maryland for freedom in Pennsylvania. Tubman, assisting the flight of other slaves, was one of the guiding lights of the Underground Railroad.
The Compromise of 1850 eased political tensions, but the publication of the antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 created an uproar in both North and South. The book’s portrayal of slavery’s cruelty won new recruits to the abolitionist movement, but southern whites saw the tale as yet another northern assault on their distinctive way of life.
The political consensus engineered in 1850 broke down after just four years, when Congress passed the Kansas–Nebraska Act. The legislation repealed the Missouri Compromise by permitting the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska, both of them north of the old Missouri Compromise line, to decide for themselves whether they would be free or slave states. Democrats, most prominently Senator
Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, saw this exercise in popular sovereignty as a justifiably democratic solution to the issue of slavery’s expansion. The abolitionist movement, however, was horrified. Debate over the act in Congress was vicious, even leading to threats of physical violence. When it passed, even more violence erupted as pro-slavery forces and abolitionists converged on Kansas, which was nearing a vote on slavery. Among the combatants was a passionate abolitionist named John Brown. As Kansas bled, a Democratic congressman from South Carolina, Preston Smith Brooks, assaulted Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, a leading abolitionist, with a cane on May 22, 1855. Sumner nearly died in the attack—it took him three years to recover.
As the nation moved closer to the abyss, the Supreme Court ruled in 1857 against a slave named Dred Scott, who had sued for his freedom because he had lived for a short time in Illinois, where slavery was illegal. The Court ruled that Scott had no right to sue in the first place because he was not and could never be a citizen. The ruling went much further, however, asserting that Congress could not prohibit slavery in any territories. The decision provoked outrage in the North and satisfaction in the South.
Two years later, in 1859, John Brown and a band of militant abolitionists attacked a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to provoke a slave revolt. The attempt failed, and Brown was hanged for treason, becoming a martyr in the eyes of fellow abolitionists.
The Whig Party, hopelessly divided between its northern and southern wings, broke up, and many of its northern members formed the Republican Party. The presidential election of 1860 saw the emergence of Abraham Lincoln as the Republican Party’s nominee. He had gained national fame two years earlier when he challenged Stephen Douglas for the Illinois senate seat and bested him in seven public debates. Although Douglas won the election, Lincoln’s fame spread, helping him earn the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. Lincoln, who was not on the ballot in nine southern states, opposed the extension of slavery and had argued against slavery as immoral, but he said he would not support its abolition in states where it already existed. In a four-way race that included Stephen Douglas, Lincoln won the presidency with just 39.8 percent of the vote.
Abraham Lincoln’s strong yet reasoned approach to slavery distinguished him from rivals in the 1860 election. His most famous speech on the subject took place in Springfield, Illinois, in June 1858, when he was running for the Senate. Paraphrasing a famous passage from the New Testament’s Gospel of St. Matthew, he said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
On December 20, 1860, weeks after Lincoln’s election, South Carolina officially “dissolved” its bond with the Union, seceding from the United States of America. Six more slave states—Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas—quickly followed. Within months, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined with them to form a new nation, the Confederate States of America.
Determined to maintain federal authority, Lincoln attempted to resupply Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston harbor. On April 12, 1861, Confederates shelled the Union garrison, which surrendered the next day. On April 15, Lincoln declared the lower South to be in a state of “insurrection” and called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion.
Many on both sides believed the conflict would be over within a few months, but when Confederates routed the undisciplined Union Army in their first major battle at Bull Run, Virginia (July 21, 1861), it became clear that the war would be protracted and costly. The loss was deeply embarrassing to the Lincoln administration and greatly boosted morale in the Confederacy.
♦1862 The Union’s original plan (Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda” Plan) was to blockade Confederate ports and control the Mississippi River, thus encircling and constricting the South like a snake. In February 1862, a then-unknown Union general, Ulysses S. Grant, seized Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee River. His victory at Shiloh, Tennessee, (April 6–7) meant the Union controlled the Mississippi River to Memphis. At the river’s mouth, Union Navy Flag Officer David G. Farragut captured New Orleans (May 1). Union forces then
moved to take the Confederacy’s last stronghold on the Mississippi: Vicksburg, Mississippi.
The Union Army in Virginia (called the Army of the Potomac), under the leadership of Major General George B. McClellan, sought to take the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. McClellan postponed the attack to drill his soldiers, then slowly moved them up the James River from the south and across the Virginia Peninsula. During this stage, the first ironclad vessels, the Virginia (Confederate) and the Monitor (Union), fought to a draw near Hampton Roads (March 9). The Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia dealt a blow at the Battle of Fair Oaks/Seven Pines (May 31–June 1), although their commander, Joseph E. Johnston, was wounded and replaced by Robert E. Lee. A series of battles from June 25 to July 1 forced McClellan back to the James River, where the campaign had begun.
Thoroughly frustrated, Lincoln ordered McClellan to abandon the Peninsular Campaign, unite with a new army under Major General John Pope, and attack Richmond from the north. The Confederate army under Lee and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson moved north to Manassas and checked Pope’s forces in the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 28–30).
Lee then moved across the Potomac River into Maryland. McClellan attacked at Antietam Creek, near Sharpsburg (September 17). In one day, 6,000 died and 17,000 were wounded, making it the bloodiest single day of the war. Lee withdrew his tattered army to Virginia, handing McClellan, who opted not to pursue, a technical victory.
Lincoln used the victory to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Unless the seceded states returned to the Union by January 1, 1863, Lincoln said, their slaves “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
On November 7, Lincoln replaced McClellan with General Ambrose E. Burnside, who immediately formulated plans for an offensive against Richmond. Burnside’s impulsiveness proved almost as ruinous as McClellan’s timidity. At Fredericksburg (December 13), he ordered 16 attacks on fortified Confederate positions with disastrous results, losing nearly 13,000 men compared to Lee’s 5,300.
The Army of the Potomac was unable to take Richmond, and Grant’s assault on Vicksburg (December 26–29), led by Lieutenant General
William T. Sherman, was a failure. However, the Union successfully defended Kentucky from General Braxton Bragg’s “Heartland Offensive” with victories at Perryville, Kentucky, (October 8), and Stones River near Murfreesboro, Tennessee in late December.
♦1863 In April, a 120,000-strong Army of the Potomac, now under General Joseph Hooker, once again set out to defeat Lee and take Richmond. Lee nearly destroyed the force at Chancellorsville (April 30–May 6, 1863). However, Lee’s stunning victory cost more than 20 percent of his force, including “Stonewall” Jackson, killed accidentally by his own men.
Lee now gambled on a risky offensive into Union territory in June, figuring he could feed his army on northern farms and gather supplies, and that victory might also lead to a negotiated end to the war. “Peace Democrats” in the North were already calling for a settlement with the Confederacy. The Army of the Potomac, now 83,000 strong and under the command of General George C. Meade, faced Lee’s 75,000 troops near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (July 1–3). Three days of Confederate assaults culminated in “Pickett’s Charge,” when General George Pickett led 15,000 troops against the heavily fortified Union center at Cemetery Ridge. Half were killed or wounded in the failed rush across a mile of open field. Having lost one-third of his men (28,000 casualties), Lee retreated toward Virginia on July 4. That same day, Grant accepted the surrender of Vicksburg, meaning the Union had taken the entire Mississippi River and thereby severed the South in two.
That fall, Union Major General William S. Rosecrans pursued General Bragg to Chickamauga, Georgia (September 18–20), where his army suffered a devastating loss. Rosecrans retreated to Chattanooga, and Bragg, in pursuit, surrounded the city. Grant and the general he increasingly counted on, William T. Sherman, successfully dislodged the Confederates (November 23–25) and Bragg retreated to Georgia.
♦1864 In the beginning of 1864, Lincoln called on Grant to take command of all Union armies. He ordered simultaneous assaults by every Union army and left Sherman in Tennessee to command an attack on Atlanta, an industrial hub.
Grant, after joining forces with General Meade, planned a quick overland march of 120,000 troops through the thickets and scrub brush of north-central Virginia toward Richmond, aiming to draw out and destroy
Lee’s army of 66,000. Lee moved faster than Grant anticipated. Using the rough, wooded terrain of the wilderness between the Rapidan and James Rivers (May 5–7) to his advantage, Lee forced a costly face-off, leading to 18,400 federal and 11,400 rebel casualties. Grant withdrew but continued his advance on Richmond. It stalled at Spotsylvania Court House, where a two-week engagement (May 8–21) between the armies was equally inconclusive and bloody (18,000 federal casualties to 12,000 for the rebels). One Union attack at “Bloody Angle” (May 12–13) stretched for 20 hours in some of the war’s most horrific fighting.
Grant neared Richmond, hoping to draw Lee out for a final, decisive battle. A massive assault at Cold Harbor on June 3 ended up as the worst Union rout since Fredericksburg as upward of 7,000 federals fell, compared to fewer than 1,500 Confederates. Grant changed his strategy, moving south past Richmond to seize the vital railroad junction at Petersburg in an attempt to cut the capital’s supply line. On June 9, Grant’s army settled into a siege outside Petersburg, digging trenches, intercepting rebel supplies, and slowly whittling away at Lee’s line.
General Sherman’s advance on Atlanta faced far less resistance. He had double the forces of his opponent, General Joseph Johnston (110,000 to 55,000), who chose to backtrack toward Atlanta, picking at Sherman’s army in a series of strategically executed stands. Johnston repulsed Sherman’s only direct assault at Kennesaw Mountain (June 27), but the Confederate president Jefferson Davis nonetheless replaced him with General John B. Hood. Hood’s botched assaults around Atlanta in July allowed Sherman to cut the city’s supply line, prompting Hood to evacuate on September 1. It was a crushing blow that all but doomed the Confederacy, boosting the North’s morale and helping reelect Lincoln in November.
Shortly after seizing Atlanta, Sherman’s army embarked on an epic journey across Georgia to deprive the Confederate Army of badly needed supplies and demoralize its people. Less than a week after troops ended Hood’s invasion of Tennessee at Nashville (December 15–16), Sherman’s army took Savannah. His 285-mile “March to the Sea” left a 60-mile-wide swath of destruction in its wake.
♦1865 In January, Grant called Sherman’s army north to help pinch Lee at Petersburg. Sherman chose to continue his destructive march through the Carolinas. By then, Grant’s siege of Petersburg had stretched into its ninth month. Lee’s men, nearly completely cut off
from supplies, were starving. Thousands deserted. In a final attempt to break through Grant’s line, Lee took Fort Stedman (March 25) but couldn’t hold it. On April 1, General Philip Sheridan’s cavalry and a large force of infantry attacked Lee’s right flank under General Pickett at Five Forks, cutting off the only remaining railroad line into Petersburg. An all-out attack the next day forced Lee to retreat from both Richmond and Petersburg.
Lee’s one remaining hope was to somehow slip his ragged army west and south to join forces with Johnston in North Carolina. To prevent this, Grant dispatched Sheridan’s cavalry, which headed them off at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. Lee made one last attempt to break out but failed. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered. Almost four years to the day after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, the Civil War was over. More than 600,000 American soldiers died in the conflict. Both Grant and Lincoln hoped to lead the country to a peaceful healing after the war; Lincoln pledged to “bind up the nation’s wound,” and Grant refused punitive measures by allowing Lee’s army to simply disperse and return home.
In the end, these efforts toward peaceful reconciliation would fail, so bitter was the hatred the war had engendered on both sides. One of the first casualties was President Lincoln himself, who was murdered in Ford’s Theatre by a crazed southern sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth, just a few days after Lee’s surrender. A short time later, Union troops would be dispatched throughout the South as a vindictive “reconstruction” was imposed for nearly a decade.