Civil War

Civil War CausesMilitary and Diplomatic CourseDomestic EffectsChanging Interpretations
Causes Modern historians agree that the problem of slavery was central in causing the American Civil War, and that this problem first emerged as a result of the Revolutionary War. Although the use of enslaved black laborers had been common throughout the British colonies, the impact of the Revolution began a complicated process of legislated emancipation in the North that had no equivalent in the South. As the new nation emerged after 1776, so did the recognition that it contained two contrasting regions that possessed potentially conflicting understandings of such values as “liberty,” “rights,” and “equality.”

When framing the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the founders demonstrated their eagerness to compromise on such conflicts. Consequently, they granted so many concessions to all parties that later generations were to find themselves arguing endlessly over the Constitution's “true” meaning. Defenders of slavery could point to clauses that defined a slave as three‐fifths of a free person for purposes of apportioning representatives to Congress, that provided for the enactment of a federal fugitive slave law, and that obliged the federal government to quell slave insurrections. Opponents of the institution could counter that the Constitution never referred directly to “slavery,” that it allowed for the prohibition of the international slave trade, and that its Tenth Amendment relieved the federal government of any support for slavery in the states. The point is not that these differing interpretations led to Civil War, but instead that the Constitution's ambiguity left it incapable of providing authoritative guidance in subsequent decades when sectional animosities grew dangerous. Southern planters who constantly espoused states' rights and abolitionists who insisted that the federal government must legislate against slavery had equally plausible constitutional grounds for their conflicting points of view.

During the first four decades of the nineteenth century, disagreements over slavery were never absent. In Congress, in 1820, serious North‐South divisions developed over the proposed admission of Missouri as a slave state, a conflict that was finally mitigated by legislation known as the Missouri Compromise. Maine was admitted as a free state to balance the addition of Missouri, and further legislation provided that no slave states could subsequently be created north of 36°30 north latitude within the territory acquired, as Missouri had been, in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. A decade later, well‐organized northern groups of black and white abolitionists began voicing militant opposition to slaveholding, thereby increasing southern whites' fears of slave insurrection and the frequency of North‐South disagreements in Congress.

Yet for all their disruptiveness, these early debates over slavery did little to weaken ties between North and South. By the 1830s, the southern cotton industry had become integral to an expanding national economy. In the political realm, the establishment of universal white male suffrage encouraged voters from both sections to join one of two broadly based political parties, the Whig party or the Democratic party which debated important but sectionally neutral economic issues such as the banking system, federally funded internal improvements, trade and monetary policy, and the sale of federally owned western lands. Members of the two parties in all parts of the country also agreed that their “white” skin was what most qualified them for citizenship, thereby expressing a shared antipathy toward African Americans that further cemented ties between North and South.

As long as voters and politicians focused on these national issues and remained united by race and party preferences, North‐South disagreements over slavery were subordinated. But once sectional loyalties as “Northerners” or “Southerners” began to be substituted for national loyalties as “Whigs,” “Democrats,” and “white” Americans, interregional ties of economy and politics frayed, party structures crumbled, and war drew closer.

The outlines of this disruptive process emerged in the later 1840s, when the federal government embarked on a policy of rapid westward expansion and conquest through the annexation of Texas (1845), the Mexican War (1846–1848), and the settlement of boundary disputes with Great Britain over Oregon (1846). After the federal government acquired the territories that today comprise California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, the question of slaveholders' constitutional rights to extend their labor system into these areas suddenly became paramount. As congressional debate turned to the southern demand for unlimited slavery expansion versus the increasing northern insistence on “free soil,” voters and politicians took increasingly hostile sectional positions.

Behind this intransigence lay southern whites' belief that slavery would decline as an economic system unless it was allowed to expand westward, resentment at the prospect of being excluded from national expansion, and suspicion that meddlesome “Yankees” were conspiring to challenge slavery in the existing slave states. From northern points of view, the planters' demands for the unlimited expansion of slavery threatened to populate new western states with “degraded” blacks and their “autocratic” masters, a situation that would make white, free‐labor homesteading unthinkable and transform the republic into a “slaveocracy.”

The nation's political system ultimately proved incapable of reconciling these concerns. In the Compromise of 1850, congressional leaders sought to fashion a comprehensive settlement of conflicting claims over slavery's expansion into territories conquered from Mexico, and other points at issue relating to slavery, but this arrangement proved short‐lived once the prospect arose in 1854 of admitting two additional new states, Kansas and Nebraska. Since both territories were located north of 36°30°, the limit for slavery's expansion established by the Missouri Compromise, slaveholding interests insisted that this earlier legislation be repealed. Passed by a deeply divided Congress, the Kansas‐Nebraska Act did exactly this, thereby inaugurating six years of escalating violence and sectional polarization that destroyed the two‐party system and drove the South toward secession. Meanwhile, the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, written in response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, deepened the moral revulsion against slavery spreading across the North.

Both northern and southern partisans began moving into Kansas after the passage of the 1854 act, seeking to dictate the legal status of slavery in the territory's constitution. As bloody guerrilla warfare erupted, the intersectional ties undergirding the two‐party system began to rupture. As politicians divided over “bleeding Kansas,” the Whig party collapsed, and its northern members joined a large minority of northern Democrats to form a new, exclusively northern political party unalterably opposed to slavery's further expansion—the Republican party—which competed strongly in the 1856 elections.

After the U.S. Supreme Court decreed in Scott vs. Sandford (1857) that citizens possessed unlimited rights to hold slaves as property throughout the Union, Republicans' power in the North grew even more rapidly. Meanwhile, the Democrats became ever more closely tied to slaveholders' interests and southern votes. By late 1859, after the U.S. Army crushed John Brown's attempt to foment a slave insurrection by capturing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the nation's political culture polarized almost completely.

Hence when the Republican Abraham Lincoln captured the presidency in 1860 by pledging unbending hostility to slavery's further expansion, he attracted not a single southern electoral vote. His election did, however, lead an increasing number of influential slaveholders to conclude that secession constituted the only alternative to living under a wholly unrepresentative government dedicated to the overthrow of slavery and to the extinction of “southern rights.” At this point, secession movements took power in the Deep South and moved to occupy the federal military installations. Though Lincoln made clear his intention to defend the Union with force if necessary, South Carolina's secessionists on 12 April 1861 turned their cannons against Fort Sumter, and the war began.
See also Antebellum Era; Antislavery; Calhoun, John C.; Early Republic, Era of the; Free Soil Party; Racism.

Bibliography

Eric Foner , Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, 1970.
David M. Potter , The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, 1976.
Richard H. Sewell , Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860, 1976.
William Cooper , The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856, 1978.
James Brewer Stewart , Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, 1997.
Michael F. Holt , The Political Crisis of the 1850s, 1978.

James Brewer Stewart

Military and Diplomatic Course In retrospect, it may seem surprising that during the Civil War the South was able to endure for four years against so much stronger a military foe. In fact, each side had important strengths and liabilities.

North and South Compared.

The North's population dwarfed the South's by a ratio of more than two to one (22 million to 9 million), and 3.5 million of the South's population comprised slaves whom the Confederacy refused to arm. In industry, transportation, and the financial capacity to provision armies, the South was far outdistanced, even before the North's Union Navy effectively blockaded the Confederacy's Atlantic trade routes.

Yet the South did possess advantages, especially during the war's first two years. Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson were more skillful military leaders than those the Union initially brought forward. The South also had the advantage of fighting a largely defensive war on its own soil, terrain its armies knew well and within which they could maneuver advantageously. Then, too, most of the war's important battles in the eastern theater were fought in the hundred‐mile corridor between the Northern and Southern capitals, Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Virginia, a setting easier for Confederates to defend than for Union armies to occupy.

1861: Military Stalemate and Diplomatic Maneuverings.

Whatever the balance of comparative strengths and weaknesses, neither side anticipated a war of such complexity, ferocity, or duration. The young men who eagerly responded to President Abraham Lincoln's 1861 call for 75,000 volunteers expected an easy march to Richmond and a rapid end to the war, not the rout they experienced at Confederate hands in July 1861 at the Battle of Bull Run, in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Now realizing the urgency of developing a consolidated military strategy, Lincoln appointed George B. McClellan (1826–1885) as overall commander of Union forces and furnished him support to develop an army, quartered outside Washington, D.C., of close to 80,000 and requiring unprecedented levels of provisioning and armament.

While McClellan's army amassed matériel and maneuvered for advantage in Virginia in late 1861 and early 1862, Unionists also struggled successfully for control in the Confederacy's various border regions. These areas included slave states that had not seceded, such as Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and strategic areas such as northern Virginia (admitted to the Union during the war as present‐day West Virginia) and eastern Tennessee. Despite strong pro‐Confederate sympathies, these locales by 1862 had all been at least partially secured by pro‐Union governments, making possible a concerted military strategy for the war's western theater. The abiding hostility to abolition among whites in these border regions, however, influenced President Lincoln's resistance to the idea of attacking slavery, especially during the war's first two years.

The Lincoln administration also worked to build diplomatic support abroad. Secretary of State William Seward, a diplomat of unusual acumen, immediately warned the European powers, Great Britain in particular, that the war was a domestic conflict in which other nations should not become involved; above all, they must refuse diplomatic recognition to the Confederate States of America. The Confederate urgently sought such recognition to gain international legitimacy and to facilitate trade, credit, and arms purchases abroad. Confederates hoped that European, and particularly British, dependence on Southern‐grown cotton would work in their favor. During the 1850s, as much as 80 percent of the region's total crop had been exported to England's textile industry. If faced with idle factories and an angry working class, Confederates reasoned, British textile interests would surely insist that the Confederacy be recognized.

Several factors weighed against this strategy. British textile factories possessed large raw cotton inventories, precluding immediate shortages. British public opinion showed no marked preference for the Confederate over the Union cause. And most important to the British government, the potential benefit of Confederate recognition never outweighed the risks of alienating Washington. Accordingly, although response did not fully satisfy the Lincoln administration, it clearly fell short of Confederate expectations. While refusing diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy, Britain did recognize the South's status as a belligerent. This halfway measure, with its nod of sympathy to the Confederacy cause, denied Washington's contention that the war was simply a civil uprising of domestic traitors and upheld the Confederacy's use of privateers against the Union's shipping. Yet the withholding of recognition made it harder for the Confederacy to obtain credit and arms and easier for Great Britain and France to honor the Union blockade of Southern ports.

Most important, this arrangement also enabled the United States and Great Britain to weather subsequent wartime diplomatic crises. One such crisis was provoked in late 1861 when Captain Charles Wilkes violated British sovereignty by capturing and returning to the United States two Confederate emissaries, James M. Mason and John Slidell, who were traveling to Europe aboard the Trent, a British vessel. This action, plainly illegal under international law, drew official British protests and threats to send troops to Canada should the United States refuse to apologize. Valuing Britain's continuing refusal to recognize the Confederacy, Lincoln and Seward quickly admitted the error and permitted the two Confederates to continue their mission to Europe. The successful resolution of the “Trent Affair” helped the two powers to resolve subsequent controversies involving Confederate privateers that relied on British outfitters and operated out of British ports.

1862–Early 1863: Battlefront Frustration and Homefront Tensions.

Though military stalemate prevailed in the East through 1862, the Union Army and Navy did capture large swaths of the Atlantic coastline from North Carolina to Florida, including the rich cotton‐growing regions of South Carolina and Georgia. In April 1862, Fort Pulaski fell, exposing approaches to Savannah, Georgia. Less than a month later, Admirals David Farragut and David D. Porter captured New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast. The Civil War's most spectacular naval battle took place on 9 March 1862, the historic but inconclusive clash between iron‐clad warships, the Union's Monitor and the Confederacy's Merrimack, off Hampton Roads, Virginia.

The Mississippi River Valley also saw Union initiatives as Commander Henry W. Halleck (1815–1872) began to engage his Confederate counterpart, Albert Sidney Johnston (1803–1862). Two of Halleck's subordinates, Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Don Carlos Buell, collaborated to capture Fort Henry and Fort Donaldson on the Mississippi, which in turn led to the occupation of Nashville, Tennessee, a major Cumberland River port and an important strategic objective. Seeking to recoup these losses, Johnston mounted a deadly but inconclusive counteroffensive against Grant and Buell at the Battle of Shiloh (6–7 April 1862), which Union armies countered with victories at Corinth and Memphis, two river towns that gave them control over much of the Mississippi.

President Lincoln, meanwhile, was struggling to develop an understanding of grand strategy and to identify generals who could implement such a vision. Turning to an overly cautious McClellan, Lincoln demanded action on the eastern front, and by early April a huge Union army was camped ten miles from Richmond. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson moved quickly to relieve this threat in late June with a series of battles (the so‐called Seven Days) that all but drove the defeated McClellan out of Virginia. Lincoln replaced him with the impetuous John Pope (1822–1892), who marched once more on Richmond, only to be defeated by Lee and Jackson at the Second Battle of Bull Run.

By late August 1862, a thoroughly frustrated Lincoln had reluctantly reappointed McClellan, who now faced a crisis as the armies of Lee and Jackson marched through Maryland in an all‐out effort to capture Washington, D.C. At the Battle of Antietam, on 17 September, McClellan stopped Lee's invasion at a cost of 12,000 Union casualties, which, combined with a Confederate toll of 9,000, constituted the bloodiest single day of the war. When McClellan refused to pursue this dearly bought advantage, Lincoln again dismissed him, this time in favor of Ambrose E. Burnside (1824–1881), who declared himself unprepared for the task and then confirmed the truth of this self‐appraisal by sacrificing 12,500 men in a failed offensive at Fredericksburg, Virginia. As 1862 ended, the Confederates had proven themselves exceptional defensive tacticians, and Lincoln had yet to achieve a grand strategy.

In both North and South, domestic politics influenced battlefield events. Confederate President Jefferson Davis, although able and dedicated, found his efforts to support the war effort on the home front blocked by obstruction from zealous defenders of “states' rights.” The Confederacy's 1862 Conscription Act proved nearly unenforceable in numerous locales. Worse still, Confederate governors like Joseph Brown in Georgia and Zebulon Vance in North Carolina refused to share supplies and soldiers with armies that were not defending their respective states. Pockets of Unionist resistance to the war effort compounded these organizational problems, as did inflation, which spiraled out of control despite the best efforts of Confederate Secretary of the Treasury Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884).

Lincoln's political critics, by contrast, included those who called for stronger central government, particularly for powers appropriate for abolishing slavery. His own cabinet represented a wide diversity of opinion, ranging from the abolitionist Salmon P. Chase (1808–1873), secretary of the treasury, to the staunchly proslavery Montgomery Blair (1812–1883), the postmaster general. Lincoln's adroitness in managing this diverse group, however, did not transfer easily to congressional politics, where abolitionist‐minded Republican critics demanded military emancipation of the slaves while conservative “war” Democrats decried the administration's “tyranny.” In dealing with his domestic opponents, Lincoln jealously guarded his powers as commander in chief, sometimes using them to stifle pro‐Confederacy dissent with military courts‐martial, denials of bail, and suppressions of “subversive” publications.

When Congress formed a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Lincoln initially resisted the efforts of its Radical Republican members to push him toward emancipation. As his prewar speeches had made clear, Lincoln hated slavery, regarding it as antithetical to the republican spirit of the Declaration of Independence. He considered African Americans as fully human as he but saw no necessary argument for intellectual, political, or social equality. These views, combined with his preoccupation with retaining the loyalty of the proslavery border states, caused him to respond warily to emancipationist pressures. Hence when abolitionist military commanders issued field orders in 1861 emancipating the slaves of pro‐Confederate masters, Lincoln countermanded them.

Seeking alternatives to general emancipation, Lincoln attempted in 1861 and 1862 to persuade border‐state slaveholders to accept gradual, compensated emancipation and embarked on an ill‐starred attempt to colonize freed slaves outside the United States. Of the 450 blacks who attempted to settle on an island off Haiti, for example, at least 80 died from disease and starvation before returning to the United States. Abandoning the colonization idea, Lincoln began to implement military measures that incrementally favored general emancipation, such as permitting Union commanders to grant refuge—and de facto freedom—to slaves who fled to army camps. He also chose not to veto congressional legislation known as the Confiscation Acts, which sanctioned the seizure of Confederate sympathizers' property, including their slaves.

By the summer of 1862, Union military reversals made Radical Republicans even more vocal about the need to destroy the Confederacy by uprooting slavery. At the same time, the British and French governments, sensing Union military weakness, signaled that they might now be willing to extend diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy. After considerable deliberation, and following the Union victory at Antietam, Lincoln announced on 22 September 1862 that if the rebellion continued, the slaves of the South would be freed as of 1 January 1863. Though the Emancipation Proclamation freed no slaves when it was announced, it transformed the Union Army into an army of liberation that abolished slavery as it conquered Confederate territory. Lincoln's action also opened the Union Army to African American soldiers, a step he authorized when he issued the final proclamation on New Year's Day, 1863.

May 1863–April 1865: Chancellorsville to Appomattox.

Though the North's war to preserve the Union had now been recast into a war for emancipation, the military momentum in the vital eastern theater remained with the Confederates. At the Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia (1–4 May 1863), Lee's army so roundly defeated the Union forces under General Joseph Hooker (1814–1879) that Lee decided to carry the war for the first time into the North by invading Pennsylvania. Lee hoped to secure provisions, achieve strategic surprise, and stimulate Confederate sympathizers to rise up in Philadelphia and Harrisburg. As Lee moved into Pennsylvania, Union General George Meade (1815–1872) followed, and the two clashed at the Battle of Gettysburg, in an epic three‐day engagement (2–4 July) that produced over 43,000 casualties and a Union victory. Gettysburg proved it was a decisive turning point in the East; thereafter, as Lee fought defensively, his armies ever more weakened by death, desertion, and hunger.

The war in the West also turned in the Union's favor in July 1863 as Grant and his subordinate William T. Sherman successfully concluded a siege of the Mississippi River town of Vicksburg. This victory, together with Grant's conquest of Jackson, Mississippi, opened the entire Mississippi Valley to Union domination. Turning his attention to Tennessee, the last significant Confederate presence in the West, Grant defeated General Braxton Bragg (1817–1876) at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge.

With the Confederacy in slow retreat everywhere as 1864 opened, Lincoln, having finally established his grand strategy, appointed Ulysses S. Grant general in chief of all the Union armies. During May, Grant's forces pushed deep into Virginia, vanquishing Lee's armies in a brutal series of battles in the wilderness, at Cold Harbor, and at Petersburg. Farther West, Sherman moved inexorably toward Atlanta, Georgia, which fell just before Lincoln's reelection victory in November 1864. In a devastating scorched‐earth campaign, Sherman's forces marched on to the sea, reaching Savannah by Christmas.

Though hostilities continued through March 1865, the Confederate cause was clearly lost. On 9 April, unable to hold out any longer, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. The war's human toll: some 360,000 Union dead, 275,000 wounded; 258,000 Confederate dead, at least 100,000 wounded. Prisoners of war on both sides suffered severely, especially at the notorious Confederate camp at Andersonville, Georgia, where many thousands of Union soldiers died. The bloodletting ended at last, but neither sectional reconciliation nor full equality for the freedmen were necessarily to follow.
See also Cotton Industry; Vicksburg, Siege of; Weaponry, Nonnuclear.

Bibliography

Bruce Catton , The Centennial History of the Civil War, 3 vols., 1961–1965.
Willie Lee Rose , Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment, 1965.
Hans L. Trefousse , The Radical Republicans: Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Justice, 1969.
David Crook , The North, the South and the Powers, 1861–1865, 1974.
Leon Litwack , Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery, 1979.
James L. Roark , Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1979.
Herman Hattaway and and Archer Jones , How the North Won, 1988.
James M. McPherson , Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, 1988.
Garry Wills , Lincoln at Gettysburg: Words That Remade America, 1992.

James Brewer Stewart

Domestic Effects The Civil War's domestic impact was so extensive and varied that it almost defies description. Total casualties on both sides (360,000 Union, 258,000 Confederate) equal the number lost in all other American wars combined. The percentage of the eligible population mobilized (50 percent in the North, 75 percent in the South) remains unsurpassed in Western military history. The nearly four million African American slaves liberated by the war represent a process of emancipation unequaled in the Western Hemisphere in scope and degree of governmental coerciveness. The war also had deep and enduring impacts on civilians; on women and families; on various ethnic groups; and on the nation's economy, government, and law.

Initially regarded as a specialized exercise conducted by traditional rules, the war soon came to be understood, especially in the North, as a comprehensive process demanding the resources and involvement of the entire society. While the Union and Confederate governments both sought unprecedented new powers when organizing their war efforts, it was the federal government in Washington, D.C., that ultimately mobilized its total resources in a rationalized fashion, and, in the process, began to assume the functions of a modern administrative state.

Powerful new agencies in the War and Treasury Departments, designed to fund and supply the Northern war effort, signaled this expansion of federal power. So did unprecedented government‐run systems of surveillance and intelligence. The close cooperation ultimately achieved between army and navy operations marked the emergence of integrated command structures and strategic planning. Given the North's strong and well‐organized industrial base, government agencies also worked closely with private interests in standardizing railway systems, multiplying telegraph networks, stimulating inventions, and industrializing the technology of warfare. By war's end, it was the North's industrial capacity and railroad networks that powered a Union Army built for invasion and conquest.

This consolidating further emerged in nonmilitary legislation passed by Congress during the war: the Legal Tender and National Banking Acts, which established new national currency and credit systems; the Homestead Act, which capitalized national agriculture through federal land sales to individual buyers; and the Morrill Land Grant Act, which helped fund the nation's embryonic system of state universities.

In a further manifestation of centralized state power, the Lincoln administration suppressed civil liberties. To combat draft resistance and antiwar opinion, particularly among northern “peace Democrats” (nicknamed by their opponents “Copperheads,” after the poisonous snake), Lincoln in 1863 suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Some fifteen thousand civilians were arrested, though most were quickly released.

In the Confederacy, by contrast, political and economic localism stifled such consolidating tendencies. Instead, deeply embedded traditions of slaveholding and family hierarchy fostered suspicions of concentrated power and stimulated conflicts between various levels of government. As a result, authorities financed the war not by fostering economic innovation, as in the North, but by printing inflationary amounts of paper money that seriously disrupted the economy and the lives of ordinary people. Because the Confederate government never succeeded in asserting its authority over state and local governments, systems of supply and communications remained uncertain and military command structures divided, leaving Confederate soldiers to struggle with inadequate provisions, limited armaments, and confusing orders. Again in contrast to the North, the war's impact ultimately reinforced the white South's ingrained distrust of social innovation and its hostility to centralized power.

Whatever their contrasting situations, ordinary Northerners and Southerners shared equally in the pains of deprivation, separation, and death and bereavement, experiences that would influence changes in family structures and gender roles. In both regions, homemaking women assumed the work responsibilities of their absent menfolk in farming, plantation management, factory labor, and commercial activity, thereby moving outside the traditional constraints of the “domestic sphere.”

In addition, a tide of sick and wounded soldiers drew impressive numbers of women into voluntary efforts to provide medical care. Since roughly two soldiers died of disease and infection for every one killed in battle, the need for nurses was obvious. In both North and South, thousands of women of all ages volunteered, thereby creating new opportunities in the rapidly professionalizing field of medicine. Many women also volunteered with the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a private agency that held fund‐raising events to supply sanitary supplies, bandages, blankets, and canned fruits and vegetables to the Union troops. Because of this wartime volunteering and the competencies they developed while performing “men's work,” middle‐ and upper‐class women in both regions also found themselves empowered to assume leadership roles in postwar reform associations and charitable bureaucracies such as the American Red Cross, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

The Civil War's most profound consequences, however, were experienced by the South's nearly four million slaves, their masters, and African Americans in the North. During the first two years of fighting, President Abraham Lincoln spoke for most Northern whites when he insisted that the war be fought exclusively to preserve the Union, not to emancipate slaves. Slowly, however, Lincoln revised this opinion, thanks to the combined actions of abolitionists in the North and escaping slaves in the South.

The large numbers of slaves who fled to the Union Army quickly proved their value to the military effort as soldiers, day laborers, and skilled workers. Meanwhile, militant African Americans across the North agitated successfully for the right to enlist in the Union Army. By 1863, as the North's military fortunes improved, regiments made up of Northern free blacks and Southern escapees were fighting very effectively. Military emancipation, viewed in this way, resulted as much from armed African Americans asserting their equality in a white nation's civil war as from Union victories. Put into force on 1 January 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation reflected these battlefield realities while adding President Lincoln's crucial assurance that the Union Army's southward march to victory guaranteed an unconditional end to slavery.

The draft riots that targeted New York City's African American communities in July 1863 thus expressed white racist opposition to black emancipation as well as anger over inequitable methods of military conscription.

From most Southern whites' point of view, the end of the war revealed a region turned upside down, economically ruined, peopled by independent‐minded former slaves, stripped by plundering invaders, and dominated by Northern occupiers. The continuing struggle for African American equality and for political Reconstruction would thus unfold against the intransigent opposition of an embittered Southern white majority.
See also Banking and Finance; Confederate States of America; Davis, Jefferson; Draft Riots, Civil War; Education: Collegiate Education; Education: Rise of the University; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Industrialization; Land Policy, Federal; Monetary Policy, Federal; Nursing; Racism; Railroads; Women in the Labor Force; Woman Suffrage Movement.

Bibliography

Charles W. Ramsdell , Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy, 1944.
Clarence L. Mohr , Southern Blacks in the Civil War: A Century of Historiography, Journal of Negro History 69 (Apr. 1974), 177–95.
James M. McPherson , Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1987, pp. 386–403.
Patrick O'Brien , The Economic Effects of the American Civil War, 1988.
David W. Blight , Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee, 1989.
Drew Gilpin Faust , Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, 1996.

James Brewer Stewart

Changing Interpretations Historical interpretations of the Civil War were initially defined by writers whose views reflected the values of the victors. From the 1860s through the 1880s, New England historians such as James Ford Rhodes presented the Civil War as a noble crusade by patriotic Northerners to preserve the Union from secessionist traitors and to rid the republic of the moral blight of slaveholding.

Such views, however, were supplanted at the close of the nineteenth century by a new generation of scholars who sympathized with the defeated South and saw African Americans as innately inferior. By viewing slavery as well‐suited for an inferior and dependent people, scholars such as Woodrow Wilson, John W. Burgess, and John Spencer Bassett reflected contemporary anthropological theories of “scientific” racism as well as their own southern roots. Accordingly, they defended slaveholders' “states' rights” arguments and condemned abolitionists and Republican party politicians for their aggressions against an unoffending South that led to a tragic war of conquest.

In the 1920s, confronting the devastating consequences of World War I, a new generation of historians deepened this “pro‐Confederacy” interpretation but also modified it with condemnations of warfare in general. Viewed in the disillusioning aftermath of the 1914–1918 war, the Civil War, too, appeared unjustifiable to historians such as James G. Randall and Avery Craven, who condemned “extremist” abolitionists and irresponsible secessionists alike for this presumed unnecessary catastrophe. Slavery, from this point of view, should have presented no moral or political problems since it was demonstrably beneficial to racially “inferior” African Americans and was also unsuited to westward expansion—a system fated to slow economic extinction had not a “blundering generation” needlessly drifted into war. Though white supremacism dominated all these interpretations, a few egalitarian dissenters such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950), Herbert Aptheker, and Dwight Lowell Dumond argued during the 1930s that slavery, a moral abomination, had fostered unspeakable cruelty and the righteous crusade required to destroy it.

A minority view at the time, this interpretation was embraced by most historians after World War II, for a number of compelling reasons. By the later 1940s, Nazism had utterly discredited academic racism, and racial segregation seemed to mock the nation's moral posture in the emerging Cold War. The first phase of a militant civil rights movement had begun to take shape. By the mid‐1960s, a new generation of scholars led by Kenneth Stampp, John Hope Franklin, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reflected these influences when they passionately insisted that the moral issues of slavery and abolition lay at the heart of the Civil War's meaning and justified its human costs.

After the 1970s, this Cold War emphasis on the moral centrality of slavery was modified on several broad fronts. Neo‐Marxist historians such Eugene Genovese and Eric Foner argued that fundamental differences in political economy underlay irreconcilable sectional disagreements over slavery's westward expansion. A second group of scholars, typified by James Rawley and Michael Holt and stressing the underlying white supremacism and anti‐Catholicism in the free states, argued that these biases, as much as hatred of slavery, inspired the spread of disruptive sectional feelings among voters North and South. A third school of thought, represented by James McPherson and Richard H. Sewell, continued to emphasize slavery's immorality as the fundamental cause of the Civil War.
See also Historiography, American; Race, Concept of.

Bibliography

Thomas J. Pressley , Americans Interpret Their Civil War, 1962.
Eric Foner , The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions, Civil War History (Mar. 1974): 197–214.
David W. Blight , Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 2002.

James Brewer Stewart