Civil War (1861–65) CausesMilitary and Diplomatic CourseDomestic CoursePostwar ImpactChanging Interpretations
Civil War (1861–65): Causes The election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November 1860 triggered a chain of events that within six months shattered the Union and culminated in the outbreak of the Civil War. The coming to power of a Republican and Northern administration committed to prohibiting the expansion of slavery struck at the vital interests of the slave South; it was the signal eagerly awaited by the proponents of Southern independence to launch a secession movement. Tensions over slavery and the struggles to perpetuate or end the institution that dated back to the incomplete American Revolution of 1776 had now become so polarized along sectional lines that the North and South lacked common ground on which to compromise the issue.

The Roots of Sectional Conflict.

The democratic revolution in which the United States gained its independence from Britain rested on a profound paradox. The Revolution produced both the world's leading model of political democracy and one of its greatest slaveholding powers. Freedom for whites coexisted uneasily with bondage for African Americans, some 20 percent of the population. The federal Union crafted at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 also embodied this contradiction when the U.S. Constitution recognized the right of a state to regulate slavery within its jurisdiction. Indeed, without this express acknowledgment of their sovereign power over slavery, the slave states would never have joined the proposed Union. Thus, white liberty and black slavery were constitutionally joined in the very creation of the federal Union.

Within a generation of the Revolution, all the states north of Maryland embarked on programs of gradual emancipation. By the early nineteenth century, slavery was almost exclusively a sectional institution confined to the South, home to over 90 percent of American blacks. At the same time as the North was moving away from slavery, the invention of the cotton gin and rising demand in English textile factories for raw cotton were stimulating the westward expansion of slavery throughout the southeastern United States.

As social and economic patterns of development diverged sharply along sectional lines, the South's national share of political power began to slip. From a rough balance of power with the North in 1790, the South held only 42 percent of the votes in the House of Representatives by 1820. Worried over their growing minority status, and enraged over the attempt of the North to force emancipation upon Missouri when it applied for admission as a slave state in 1819, white southerners for the first time threatened secession during the debates that resulted in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The heart of the compromise was the drawing of a line through the Louisiana Purchase territory that prohibited slavery north of the latitude 36°30′ and allowed it to the south.

In addition to proclaiming their right to an equal share of the expanding West, southern proponents of slavery protested protective tariffs that they insisted sacrificed the agricultural export economy of the South on behalf of northern manufacturers. This issue precipitated the sectional crisis of 1832–33 in which South Carolina planters, led by John C. Calhoun, held that a state could constitutionally nullify federal legislation that it determined violated its interests.

President Andrew Jackson forced the Nullifiers to back down, but of greater concern in the 1830s to southerners anxious over the future of slavery was the sudden emergence of an abolitionist movement in the North. Inspired by northern evangelical Protestantism and a belief in the right of African Americans to freedom and self‐betterment, the abolitionists denounced slavery as the nation's greatest moral abomination and urged all Americans to begin immediately the work of emancipation. Skillful at spreading their message, the abolitionists launched a major propaganda campaign in the mid‐1830s and deluged Congress with antislavery petitions.

The agitation of the slavery issue by the abolitionists predisposed many northerners to see in the admission of the slave republic of Texas in 1845 and the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846 the fearful designs of a conspiracy of slaveholders—the “slave power”—to expand slavery throughout new regions in the West and thereby deprive northern farmers and workers of the opportunity to settle the West for their social and economic advancement. When northern congressmen rallied behind the Wilmot Proviso in 1846 in an effort to bar slavery from any territories gained in the Mexican War, southerners formed their own sectional bloc and forced the ultimate defeat of the proviso. The divisive issue of the expansion of slavery had moved to center stage in American politics and would continue to dominate it through the 1850s.

Rising Sectional Tensions in the 1850s.

Whether measured by rates of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, or the cultural willingness to embrace reforms such as public education aimed at promoting social improvement, the free and slave states were set apart far more significantly by the mid‐nineteenth century than at the birth of the Union. The North was growing and evolving at a more rapid pace than the predominantly agrarian South. Most ominously for slaveholders, a northern majority was forming that viewed slavery as a moral wrong that should be set on the road to extinction. Northerners also now saw slavery as a barbaric relic from the past, a barrier to secular and Christian progress that contradicted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and degraded the free labor aspirations of northern society.

Since slavery within the states was protected by the Constitution, antislavery sentiment focused on keeping it out of the territories. Southerners, arguing that the territories were the common property of all the states, insisted on what they deemed their constitutional right to carry slaves into the territories. Furthermore, slaves and land were the major sources of wealth in the South, particularly with the cotton boom. The result was a decade of sectional strife.

A complex sectional agreement, the congressional Compromise of 1850, permitted California to enter the Union as a free state. The remaining land won in the Mexican War was divided into the territories of Utah and New Mexico with no conditions placed on the status of slavery. In 1854, the Kansas‐Nebraska Act reopened the entire controversy. In order to gain essential southern support for his bill organizing the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36°30′, Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois had to revoke the Missouri Compromise restriction on slavery. Northerners reacted by charging that the Slave Power was moving to monopolize the territories for slavery at the expense of free labor.

The Whig Party split and collapsed in the storm of northern protest over the Kansas‐Nebraska Act, and a sectionalized Republican Party quickly formed around the core principle of blocking the expansion of slavery. The major Protestant denominations had already split into sectional wings over the slavery issue, and only the Democratic Party now remained as an important national institution that represented northern and southern interests. Democratic unity, however, shattered during the administration of James Buchanan (1857–61). The ruling of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in the territory further polarized sectional attitudes, and northern Democrats led by Douglas lost the trust of the southern wing of the party when they joined Republicans in blocking the admission of Kansas as a slave state.

The decade came to a close with abolitionist John Brown's raid against the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Brown's unsuccessful attempt to incite a slave rebellion sent paroxysms of fear and anger through the South and touched off rumors of conspiracies and slave uprisings. Brown was hanged, and although the Republicans denounced him as a wild‐eyed fanatic, many white southerners were convinced that the Republican Party was dominated by abolitionists and plotting with them to unleash a bloodbath in the slave states.

Lincoln's Election and the Secession Crisis.

Vowing to use federal power both to keep slavery in check and to promote the free labor economy of the North through protective tariffs, subsidies for railroads, and free homesteads in the West, the Republicans ran Abraham Lincoln of Illinois for the presidency in 1860. His victory over three rivals—Stephen Douglas for the Northern Democrats, John C. Breckinridge for the Southern Democrats, and John Bell, the candidate of former Whigs in the Upper South—was achieved with no basis of support in the South. Rather than accept Republican rule, Southern radicals immediately provoked a crisis by organizing a campaign for secession.

Pushing the constitutional doctrine of states' rights to its logical extreme, the secessionists held that individual states retained ultimate sovereignty within the Union and could peacefully leave the Union the same way they had entered it through special state conventions. Rejecting any plan of prior cooperation among the slave states, they pursued a strategy of separate state action, accurately predicting that the momentum of secession would force wavering states to join those that had already gone out.

South Carolina took the lead on 20 December 1860, and within six weeks seven states from the Lower South left the Union. Delegates from these states set up the provisional government of the Confederate States of America at Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861. This original Confederacy represented those states with the heaviest concentration of slaves and the highest percentage of white families owning slaves. Planters were in the forefront of secession. What opposition they encountered from the majority of nonslaveholding farmers took the form of cooperationism, the argument that secession should be delayed until a united bloc of Southern states agreed to go out together. The cooperationists polled about 40 percent of the vote in the secession elections, but in the end they followed the leadership of the secessionist planters.

Fort Sumter and the Outbreak of War.

Northerners rejected the doctrine of secession. Believing that the Union was sovereign and perpetual, they viewed secession as illegal, indeed, revolutionary. They equated secession with anarchy and feared that it would lead quickly to a fragmentation of the United States and an end to America's mission of serving as a beacon of free government to the rest of the world. Still, no consensus existed on using coercion to force the seceded states back into the Union. In particular, Democrats were against coercion and favored negotiations to heal the sectional rift, even with the continuation of slavery. At the same time, the Unionists in the Upper South who had turned back secession in their slave states had hedged their Unionism by proclaiming that they would resist any Republican use of military force against a seceded state.

When inaugurated on 4 March 1861, Lincoln thus faced a dilemma. If he took no action against the Confederacy, he risked demoralizing his party and subjecting his administration to the same derision that had pilloried the outgoing Buchanan Democrats for standing by while the secessionists broke up the Union. On the other hand, any forceful step against the seceded states threatened to divide the North and drive the Upper South into the Confederacy.

Realizing that he could not afford to be locked into an endless policy of drift and delay, Lincoln decided to take a stand for the Union over Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the most visible installation in the Confederacy that was still under federal control. Aware that the garrison at Fort Sumter would be forced to surrender for lack of supplies sometime in early April, he ordered a relief expedition to the fort on 6 April. He stressed that the fort would be supplied “with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made, without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the Fort.”

Lincoln in effect placed the decision for war in the hands of Confederate authorities. The government of Confederate President Jefferson Davis accepted that burden as the price it had to pay to establish the Confederacy as a sovereign power. On 9 April, Davis ordered Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard to demand the immediate surrender of Fort Sumter. Fearful of Union duplicity and anxious to avoid any possibility of having to fight two Union forces at the same time, Davis wanted Sumter in Confederate hands before the relief expedition arrived.

In the predawn hours of 12 April 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter. The capture of Fort Sumter occurred on April 13 and Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered the fort on 14 April. The next day, Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 state militia to put down what he defined as an insurrection. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina scornfully rejected Lincoln's call for troops and joined the Confederacy in the next five weeks. Still, Lincoln now had a Northern majority behind the goal of preserving the Union with force. The Confederacy was cast as the aggressor that had fired the first shot of the Civil War, and the Northern crusade to save the Union persisted through four agonizing years of war.
[See also War: Causes of War.]

Bibliography

Roy F. Nichols , The Disruption of American Democracy, 1948.
Kenneth M. Stampp , And War Came, 1950.
Eric Foner , Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 1970.
William L. Barney , The Road to Secession, 1972.
Michael F. Holt , The Political Crisis of the 1850s, 1973.
David M. Potter , The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, 1976.
J. Mills Thornton III , Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 1978.
Daniel W. Crofts , Reluctant Confederates, 1989.
Bruce Levine , Half Slave and Half Free, 1992.

William L. Barney

Bibliography

David P. Crook , The North, the South, and the Powers 1861–1865, 1974.
Grady McWhiney and and Perry D. Jamieson , Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage, 1982.
Herman Hattaway and and Archer Jones , How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War, 1983.
Edward Hagerman , The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command, 1988.
Richard M. McMurray , Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History, 1989.
Steven E. Woodworth , Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West, 1990.
Howard E. Jones , Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War, 1992.
Mark Grimsley , The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865, 1995.
Robert May, ed., The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim, 1995.
Herman Hattaway , Shades of Blue and Gray: An Introductory Military History of the Civil War, 1997.
Charles Hubbard , The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy, 1997.
Joseph L. Harsh , Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Confederate Strategy, 1861–1862, 1998.
Steven E. Woodworth, ed., Civil War Generals in Defeat, 1999.

Herman Hattaway and and Ethan Rafuse

Manpower.

At the outset, mobilization in both North and South took on an almost carnival air. Young men rushed to volunteer for hastily organized companies, anxious to get in on the glory while there was still time. Before long, both sides discovered that they could no longer rely on such unfettered passion, and thus they turned—in stages—to various strategies initially to coax young men into uniform in the Union army or the Confederate army. The North enjoyed a huge numerical advantage. The free Union states had a total population of 19 million; the slaves states that stayed with the Union—Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri—added another 3.2 million, although that number included many Southern sympathizers. The eleven Confederate states totaled just over 9 million people. These numbers understate the Union's numerical superiority by including the Confederacy's 3.5 million black slaves, who were central to the Southern economy and war effort but not deemed fit for military service. Furthermore, roughly 800,000 foreign immigrants arrived in the North during the war.

Both central governments initially relied on the states and localities to orchestrate recruiting. When Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis called for volunteers, each state received a quota to fill. By the time the three‐month recruits were returning home in late summer 1861, the North had issued calls for three‐year volunteers that yielded more than 700,000 men. The infant Confederacy had already requested 100,000 men before the capture of Fort Sumter in April and added another 400,000 the following month.

With winter approaching and the most willing recruits already in uniform, the Confederate Congress offered bounties and furloughs to convince volunteers to reenlist. In April 1862, the Confederacy passed the first national draft legislation, making white men between ages eighteen and thirty‐five eligible for conscription. The North was not too far behind. In June 1862, Lincoln called for 300,000 more three‐year volunteers. When the citizenry responded slowly, Congress passed the Militia Act giving state governors the power to draft men. That August, the Union implemented this new legislation by requisitioning 300,000 nine‐month militiamen, with the provision that states failing to meet their quota would be subject to a draft. In March 1863, the North replaced the controversial state militia drafts with federal conscription measures that were more on a par with the Confederacy's system.

The initial conscription legislation in both the Union and the Confederacy provided military‐aged men with ample opportunities for avoiding service. In addition to excluding men with certain disabilities, the Confederate legislation exempted a long list of professions, ranging from political and judicial officers to teachers and clergymen to workers in war‐related occupations. A later act exempted one white man from every plantation with twenty or more slaves. Each of these provisions could be defended in the name of military necessity or domestic stability, but together they triggered angry complaints of class legislation from nonslave owning Southern whites. The North's federal draft act had no occupational exemptions, but it did exclude men with numerous medical ailments or certain family obligations, as well as unnaturalized aliens. Most controversial were the provisions enabling wealthier conscripts simply to buy their way out of service. Following long‐standing European tradition, both sides allowed draft ees to send substitutes in their place, the North permitting conscripts to pay a commutation fee of $300 (an amount equal to a worker's annual wages) rather than serving.

As the war dragged on, the Confederacy was forced to widen its conscription net. The list of exemptions gradually shrank; the Southern Congress repealed the substitute clause and made all those who had furnished substitutes eligible for the draft; and the age parameters expanded to include white males between seventeen and fifty. The more populous North tinkered with its rules but made fewer substantial revisions other than restricting the controversial commutation clause to members of certain religious groups. (As many had feared, this resulted in a steady increase in the market price for substitutes.)

Despite the superficially similar rules, conscription played different roles in the two nations. Only about eight percent of Union soldiers were conscripts or substitutes. The four federal drafts were really designed to encourage enthusiastic local recruiting rather than to put conscripts into uniform. The Union army's provost marshal general announced draft days long in advance, giving communities every opportunity to fill their quotas and avoid a draft. Cities and towns responded by raising large bounty funds—which supplemented existing federal and state bounties—to encourage enlistment. The poorer South soon exhausted funds available for enlistment bounties, limiting the effectiveness of pre‐draft recruiting. Roughly one in five Confederate soldiers was either a draftee or a substitute.

In 1863, the North tapped a further manpower ad vantage when it decided to accept African Americans in the military. Blacks had served in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, but black enlistment was prohibited in 1820. Many Northern blacks offered their services to the Union, but for long months racist assumptions about the ability of African American troops and political qualms about the costs of arming black volunteers conspired to keep black men out of uniform (although thousands did serve in the navy). The 1862 Militia Act allowed Lincoln to accept black volunteers, but it was not until after the 1 January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that the North aggressively recruited black volunteers. By the end of the Civil War, 179,000 African American men had served in 166 black regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops. The North commissioned few black officers and persisted in giving black regiments inferior wages, equipment, and assignments. In the war's waning months the Confederate Congress voted to accept black soldiers, but this legislation was passed too late to be tested in practice.

By the end of the war, roughly half of the North's military‐aged white men had served in uniform, as compared with nearly four‐fifths of Southern white males of military age. Some critics at the time and some later historians charged that the war became “A Rich Man's War But a Poor Man's Fight,” yet comparisons of the occupational distribution of sampled soldiers with data from the 1860 census indicate that both armies were surprisingly representative of the white male populations. The Northern army was also not, as sometimes suggested, dominated by foreign mercenaries; immigrants were actually underrepresented in the Union ranks.

Economic Mobilization and Its Effects.

The North enjoyed enormous economic advantages over its weaker adversary. In 1860, roughly 90 percent of the nation's manufacturing output was from the Northern states. The Union's economic superiority was particularly pronounced in key war‐related sectors, such as textiles, boots and shoes, iron, and firearms. Moreover, the North had a near monopoly in railroads and shipping. The agrarian South was even behind its Northern neighbor in some critical foodstuffs. In 1860, Northern agriculture was producing half the nation's corn and four‐fifths of its wheat.

With a few key exceptions, the Union was able to outfit its armies through private contracting rather than establishing federally owned factories. Unlike modern conflicts, this war did not call for the vast production of uniquely military goods. Most of the items needed to feed, outfit, and arm a soldier could be provided by existing farms and factories; a few government arsenals produced the rest. Lacking an established industrial base, the Confederacy found itself in far more challenging circumstances.

Here was one of the war's many ironies. Whereas the Union could rely on private enterprise, the states' rights–oriented Confederacy was forced to build nationally owned factories, subsidize private enterprises, regulate prices, and impress goods and services (including slave labor) to meet the war's economic needs. With the passage of time, the South's economic deficiencies became more glaring. The Union blockade limited Confederate access to foreign ports, and the North's military successes destabilized portions of the Southern economy. Above all, Southerners learned to reuse materials where they could and to manage with less wherever possible.

The Northern war effort cost an estimated $2.3 billion; the smaller Confederacy spent roughly $1 billion. As he developed strategies to fund the war, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase had a host of advantages over his Confederate counterpart, Christopher G. Memminger. In many senses, the fiscal history of the war runs parallel to the mobilization of the armies, with both sides employing similar strategies tailored in distinctive ways to meet their individual needs. The wealthier North funded most of its costs through the sale of interest‐bearing bonds. These bonds, sold largely under the enthusiastic direction of Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, enabled the Union, effectively, to “borrow” roughly two‐thirds of its military expenses from its own citizens or from foreign investors. The North covered an additional 20 percent of its expenses through a assortment of import duties and taxes, including a modest federal income tax. It paid for the war's remaining costs by issuing “greenbacks,” printed notes not backed by specie or any precious metal.

This new currency, which was authorized by the Legal Tender Act of 1862, proved crucial to the smooth functioning of the wartime economy while passing on part of the war's costs to consumers in the form of relatively high inflation. The South, with less disposable wealth and a poorly developed financial structure, could fund only about 40 percent of its costs through taxation and the sale of bonds. Instead, the Confederacy had to rely on massive issues of paper money, triggering a disastrously high inflation.

The war's economic strains fell unevenly on different groups across the home front. The booming Northern economy assured low unemployment, but soon wage earners chafed at the burden of rising prices. The more skilled urban artisans managed to organize and negotiate comfortable raises; the less skilled, including scores of women who worked for unscrupulous military subcontractors, for example, in the manufacture of uniforms, suffered through declining real wages. Federal forces only intervened in a handful of labor conflicts, and then only under the guise of claimed military necessity. Heavy wartime demands for food, poor European harvests, and disproportionately high enlistment rates among agricultural workers combined to produce a variety of results: unusually high profits for farm owners; increased wages for the agricultural workers who remained at home; and unprecedented investment in agricultural machinery. Women and men on the Confederate home front felt the war's economic pains even more acutely. By mid‐1863, the combination of high prices and food shortages had driven many Southerners into open dissent. In April, an angry mob composed largely of women destroyed much of Richmond's shopping district after their appeals for relief from inflated food prices had gone unanswered.

Richmond's “bread riots” underscored the war's effect on women and children on the home front. In the prosperous North, some benevolent institutions reported proportionally greater demands from women, perhaps reflecting the combined weight of more economic opportunities for male workers and soldiers and the loss of family income when men fell on the battlefield. Cities and towns across the North collected special funds for the “families of volunteers,” providing much needed relief while adding further incentives to reluctant enlistees. Southern women bore the brunt of the Confederacy's economic ills without much opportunity for relief. When private charities ran dry, Southerners turned to unprecedented public welfare measures, at the local, state, and national levels. But inflation, inefficiency, and overwhelming numbers conspired to limit the effectiveness of these initiatives.

For some women, the Civil War's economic challenges brought new opportunities. Although the Union's military demands did not produce an army of nineteenth‐century factory women, the war did accelerate the movement of Northern women into positions as clerks, teachers, and nurses. In both the North and the South, white women took on expanded agricultural roles when white men left for the front. This was particularly true in the Confederacy, where women often acted independently of any male influence. Wartime necessity also forced Southern women into new positions, but they continued to run up against cultural barriers. The North, for instance, proved more receptive to the use of female nurses.

For Southern blacks, there was no such ambiguity. Long before the war ended, hundreds of thousands of slaves had won their freedom. The story of wartime emancipation reflects the complexity of national, local, and individual forces. As official Northern policy slowly inched its way toward Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect 1 January 1863, individual slaves responded to their own circumstances, pursuing freedom when absent masters or approaching Union troops provided the best opportunities. Many of these freed slaves remained in the South, finding refuge behind Union lines, while others fled to the North. The process of piecemeal emancipation left much of the Southern agricultural economy in disarray while laying the groundwork for various wartime experiments with the ramifications of free labor.

Politics and Dissent.

Four years of war produced serious strains on domestic politics in both the Union and the Confederacy. In most fundamental ways the Confederate leaders modeled their new constitution and government after the nation that they had abandoned. After all, the seceding states had insisted that they were the true heirs to the founders of the republic. Beneath the structural similarities, however, lay important political differences. Whereas Lincoln entered a political arena with a strong two‐party system, Davis presided over a nation that would be torn by factionalism but without any party mechanisms to register (and control) dissent. Moreover, many of the Confederacy's leaders had worked during the antebellum decades as political dissenters, resisting perceived challenges to states' rights.

From his first days in office, Lincoln had to navigate between the radical Republicans in his own party, such as Thaddeus Stevens, and an increasingly vocal array of dissenting Peace Democrats. The relative unanimity that followed the outbreak of hostilities quickly dissolved as Northerners debated a series of controversial war measures including the Habeas Corpus Act, conscription, greenbacks, and, above all, emancipation. Even Unionist War Democrats in Washington and across the North criticized policies that they claimed enacted an unconstitutional Republican agenda.

The administration countered with aggressive measures to silence the most dangerous dissent, the Peace Democrats. Soon after the capture of Fort Sumter, Lincoln ordered the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in the border states. This set in motion a critical series of events in Maryland: military authorities threw several prominent local figures, including wealthy secessionist John Merryman, in jail; in Ex Parte Merryman (1861), U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland responded by ordering Merryman's release; and Lincoln refused to yield, leaving it to history to judge his actions. The following year, with the state militia drafts underway, federal officials arrested several hundred vocal draft resisters and five dissenting newspaper editors while suspending publication of several opposition newspapers. By 1863, the Northern “Copperheads”—the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party—had won important strongholds across the Midwest and in some areas of the East. In May, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside ordered the arrest of dissenting Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham, triggering another round of angry outbursts.

As the election of 1864 approached, Lincoln had every reason to fear that he would lose to the Democratic challenger, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. McClellan, long a thorn in the president's side, had repeatedly criticized emancipation, the loss of civil liberties, and Lincoln's overall handling of the war. When the votes were counted, Lincoln had managed to garner 55 percent, aided by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's recent successes in the South and the overwhelming support of absentee ballots from the Union Army.

Historians have often compared Lincoln with Jefferson Davis, generally finding the Confederate president lacking. The South's material disadvantages forced Davis into a series of measures that dramatically expanded the central government while placing him in the center of controversy. This process of central government growth, which Emory Thomas (1979) has termed a “political revolution,” included the continent's first draft legislation, impressment of goods and labor, the suspension of civil liberties, and a wide range of ventures into economic control. Davis faced heated opposition from strong‐minded state governors as well as attacks from much closer to home, often led by his vice president, the surly Georgian Alexander Stephens. Davis, like Lincoln, used his authority to declare martial law in sensitive areas, but civil liberties for whites may have in fact fared better in the Confederacy (for instance, freedom of the press survived unscathed in the South).

Much of the most rigorous wartime dissent was voiced beyond the boundaries of normal political discourse. Northerners fretted over secret societies, such as the notorious Knights of the Golden Circle, which reputedly conspired against the Union. Portions of the nonslave hill country and mountain region in the South remained bastions of pro‐Union sympathy throughout the conflict. The North's worst internal violence followed tension‐filled conscription days, but often reflected broader tensions. In July 1863, disgruntled conscripts attacked a draft office, triggering four days of New York City antidraft riots, which led to much carnage. Many of the rioters were Irish immigrants who took out their hostilities on African Americans.

In addition to periodic food riots, portions of the Confederacy experienced violence at the hands of roving companies of guerrillas. Some of these groups had at least passing connections to formal military bodies, but others were little more than desperate bands of hungry deserters. Even where the South did not divide into open warfare, declining troop morale eventually took a tremendous toll, inciting soldiers to flee the army and accelerating the demise of the Confederacy.

Supporting the War Effort.

For most people on the home front, the “citizens' war” provided a wealth of opportunities to assist the war effort. In the North, women and men labored in a wide variety of voluntary societies designed to fill the gaps in the official governmental machinery. Local women's groups sewed clothing, rolled bandages, visited hospitals, fed traveling soldiers, and provided refuge for escaped slaves. Fund‐raising concerts and fairs, modeled on antebellum practices, enabled the volunteers to mail packages off to distant soldiers. Two national bodies—the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the U.S. Christian Commission—emerged to organize and direct some of these benevolent efforts. Confederate women threw themselves into war work with equal vigor. White women of all classes gathered at sewing circles to produce all manner of goods for the men in gray. As the Confederacy faced financial ruin, Southern women demonstrated their patriotism by staging fund‐raisers or sacrificing heirlooms. Even in its heyday, Southern voluntarism did not spawn bodies comparable to the North's national commissions, and long before the war had ended the South had exhausted whatever funds the volunteers could raise.

Civil War voluntarism raises important questions of gender for historians. Women in both the North and South earned widespread notice and praise for their “noble” wartime sacrifices. Sacrifice for larger benevolent causes was nothing new for American women, but the scale of wartime activities and the paucity of civilian men (at least white men in the South) enabled some women to go beyond established practices. Southern historians—weighing the economic, political, and voluntaristic experiences of Confederate women—remain divided over how much, and for how long, the war opened the door to changing gender roles.

A few Northern women such as Clara Barton rose to positions of national prominence, but the Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission remained largely under male direction. Nevertheless, women in some communities (Chicago, for instance) took on unfamiliar authority, and the organizational skills and theories that scores of volunteers developed at the grassroots level proved crucial in molding the postwar activities of a key cohort of female activists. Overall, the conflict helped expand the range of experiences for many women while probably doing little to alter commonly held assumptions about gender and war.

In addition to providing material and emotional assistance to the soldiers, home front volunteers sought to affect public opinion and otherwise contribute to wartime discourse. Most of the organized Civil War “propaganda” emerged from a handful of Northern publication societies. The first few years of the war saw the occasional printing of partisan pamphlets by interested individuals, a practice that had a long American tradition. In 1863, the Democrats raised the stakes with the establishment of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Political Knowledge. Soon Philadelphia's Union League had countered with its own Board of Publications while the equally partisan Loyal Publication Society began operations in New York City. These, and a few other smaller bodies, flooded the North with millions of copies of several hundred political publications, many of which aimed to sway the electorate in 1864. Some authors wrote extremely sophisticated pamphlets, examining esoteric constitutional issues; others aimed their rhetoric at a broader, less educated, audience. Taken together, these Northern pamphlets provided members of the Union League and their antagonists with a crucial vehicle for reaching a broad audience outside formal party politics. So did patriotic songs such as “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Conclusions.

The Civil War home front offers a host of perspectives. The military historian can find seeds of success and failure in the goings‐on behind the lines. For instance, although the South was outmanned and outgunned, a strong case can be made that the Confederacy's fall owed much to the loss of civilian morale. Scholars of race, gender, and class have mined the war years for evidence of both changing relationships and stubborn continuities. Emancipation forever reshaped American race relations, but racial inequalities persisted in both the North and South. Although wartime women earned approval for their highly public patriotic efforts, suffragists had to wait three more generations for the vote. Economic historians have dismissed the notion that the war launched a “takeoff” into postwar industrial growth, while stressing the importance of emancipation in reducing Southern agriculture.

The political and institutional history of the home front is full of interesting ironies. Focusing on the North, it is tempting to tell a tale of Lincoln and the Republican Party using the pressures of war to promote sweeping national reform. After all, the legislative litany includes taxation, greenbacks, banking reform, conscription, and emancipation. But if we widen our lens to include the Confederacy—the bastion of militant individualism and states' rights—we find far more evidence of an expanded national state, including more aggressive conscription and a much greater federal role in economic affairs. In truth, both regions remained devoted to tradition and localism throughout the war. Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy went further than the Union in using the machinery of a central government to support the war effort, but only because conditions required it.
[See also Agriculture and War; Civil Liberties and War; Congress, War, and the Military; Economy and War; Industry and War; Labor and War; Race Relations and War; Society and War.]

Bibliography

Emory Thomas , The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865, 1979.
Phillip Shaw Paludan , “A People's Contest”: The Union and the Civil War, 1861–1865, 1988.
George C. Rable , Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism, 1989.
Roger Ransom , Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation and the American Civil War, 1989.
Richard F. Bensel , Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877, 1990.
Maris A. Vinovskis, ed., Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays, 1990.
James W. Geary , We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War, 1991.
Mark E. Neely , The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, 1991.
Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, 1992.
James M. McPherson , Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1982; 2nd ed. 1992.
J. Matthew Gallman , The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, 1994.
Drew Faust , Mothers of Invention, 1996.

J. Matthew Gallman

Bibliography

Charles A. and and Mary R. Beard , The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols., 1927.
Jay Luvaas , The Military Legacy of the Civil War, 1959.
Emory M. Thomas , The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, 1971.
Robert M. Utley , Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890, 1973.
Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience, 1982.
Edward Hagerman , The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare, 1988.
Philip Shaw Paludan , “A People's Contest”: The Union and Civil War, 1861–1865, 1988.
Richard Franklin Bensel , Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in American, 1859–1877, 1990.
Theda Skocpol , Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992.

Joseph P. Reidy

Bibliography

Thomas J. Pressly , Americans Interpret Their Civil War, 1954.
David Donald, ed., Why The North Won the Civil War, 1960.
Marvin R. Cain , A ‘Face of Battle’ Needed: An Assessment of Motives and Men in Civil War Historiography, Civil War History, 28 (March 1982), pp. 5–27.
Joseph T. Glatthaar , The ‘New’ Civil War History: An Overview, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 115 (July 1991), pp. 339–69.
Gabor Boritt , Why the Confederacy Lost, 1992.
Gabor Boritt, ed., Lincoln the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures, 1992.
Gary W. Gallagher , The Confederate War, 1997.
Allen C. Guelzo , The Crisis of the American Republic: A History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1994.

Allen C. Guelzo

CIVIL WAR

CIVIL WAR. Historians have long debated the causes of the Civil War. They have argued that a split developed between the industrialized North and the agricultural South as both sections vied for control of the nation. Closely related is the belief that the two sections fought over the tariff, which, some have stated, protected Northern manufactures. Others have contended that the war erupted over states' rights. Northerners advocated a more expanded federal government than did Southerners, who held fast to a federal system in which the preponderant power lay with the states. Some have also suggested that politicians in the 1850s failed by their own in competency to broker a compromise to the sectional controversy during the secession crisis, so that the nation blundered into civil strife.

Each of these explanations has serious shortcomings. The Northern states accounted for two of every three farms in the United States, and Southern staple crop production, especially cotton, provided raw material for many Northern factories. The tariff was not a powerful political issue in the critical decade leading up to the war. Nor did Southerners complain about the import duty when it protected regional interests, such as those of sugar growers. Like their Southern countrymen, many Northerners—perhaps even a majority—believed instates' rights, and on the surface, the differences of opinion were not sufficient to warrant separation or war. The blundering generation argument assumes that politicians in Washington were unusually incompetent in the 1850s or that there was room to compromise on the vital moral issue of the day: slavery. There is little evidence to substantiate charges of massive political incompetence and the argument plays down the buildup of mistrust that controversies and compromises had generated since the Missouri Crisis four decades earlier. The willingness of so many millions of people to march off to war or endure hardships for their section proves just how deeply people in the North and South felt about the great issues of their day.

Slavery, Secession, and the War's Onset

Slavery lay at the root of the Civil War. The Republican Party dedicated itself to blocking the expansion of the "peculiar institution," and many of its leaders had publicly avowed their desire to see slavery abolished. Southern states had maintained that if a member of the Republican Party were elected president, they would secede. When the voters chose the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln in 1860, seven slave states voted to leave the union and began to form a Southern confederacy. In their ordinances of secession or justifications, they stated clearly that they dissolved their connection to the United States to protect slavery. As the state of Mississippi argued, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." Slavery had divided families, religions, institutions, political parties, and finally, the nation itself.

Although the U.S. Constitution did not specifically forbid secession, Lincoln and most Northerners believed that the concept would undercut the linchpin of any democratic republic, respect for the outcome of fair elections. By allowing secession, a group could nullify the expressed wishes of the people acting under constitutional law.

Northerners viewed the union and the Constitution as sacrosanct. It was the basis for the world's great experiment, a democratic republic, a kind of beacon of light for people everywhere. All freedoms derived from the Constitution and the union. For those who had gone before them and for future generations, they had an obligation to preserve that system.

Representatives from the seceding states met during the months of February and March in Montgomery, Alabama, to form a new government, the Confederate States of America. The convention chose Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as provisional president and Alexander Stephens of Georgia as provisional vice president. The constitution itself greatly resembled that of the United States. Major distinctions included a single, six-year term as president, a line-item veto for the president, and a provision stipulating that states could not secede from the country. The most fundamental difference, according to Stephens, rested with the underlying premise: the United States acknowledged the notion that all men were created equal, whereas the Confederate States of America insisted that "the negro is not the equal of the white man" and that "slavery …is his natural and normal condition."

The fighting began when the Lincoln administration determined to preserve the union and to protect federal property. Lincoln attempted to maintain Union control of several forts on Confederate soil, including Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. As food supplies for the garrison began to run low, the president let it be known that he would send a resupply ship that would carry no munitions of war. The plan forced the Rebels' hand. If the Confederacy allowed the ship to deposit supplies safely, it would be tolerating the existence of a United States fort not just on Confederate soil, but in the birthplace of secession. Such a presence was a slap at the viability of the new nation. The other alternative would be for the new Confederate government to employ force to prevent the re-supply, and thus commit the first act of violence. Rather than endure the insult of a Union post on secessionist soil, the Confederates began shelling Fort Sumter on 12 April. After a thirty-four-hour bombardment, the garrison surrendered. In response to the attack, Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand militiamen to suppress the insurrection. The war was on.

Rather than fight their fellow slave states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded and joined the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy then shifted its seat of government from Montgomery to Richmond, Virginia. While the new Confederate capital would be only 110 miles from Washington, D.C., and in a more exposed area than Montgomery, the choice of Richmond made good sense. Richmond was a larger city and could better accommodate the new government. It was the seat of vital manufacturing operations that would be essential to preserve during the war and it served as a key railroad nexus in a powerful agricultural state. Moving the capital to Richmond had the effect of bonding Virginia more strongly to the Confederacy. The site also reminded everyone of the legacy to the American Revolution and the work of the founding fathers. Secessionists insisted that they were the true inheritors of the Constitution, one that forged compromises to permit slave ownership. Like their forefathers, they would fight a war for independence to protect their rights.

Comparative Advantages

The Union possessed the preponderance of resources. It had a population of twenty-two million, well educated and with a sound work ethic. Ninety percent of U.S. manufacturing was produced in the loyal states and virtually all arms manufacturing took place there. One half of its adult males listed farming as their occupation, and the region's output of food crops was staggering. Almost three times as many draft animals, an extremely valuable wartime asset, were in Northern hands. The Union had a vast financial network, with four of every five bank accounts, huge gold reserves, and ready access to commercial credit, all of which were essential to finance a massive war. It had a sophisticated and modern railroad network, with two and one-half times as many miles as the South, and a large commercial fleet to carry trade and, in wartime, to haul supplies. Finally, the Union inherited a small U.S. Army, numbering around sixteen thousand, with experienced officers, and a U.S. Navy with only twenty-three active ships, but an industrial base that could transform it into the largest and probably the best in the world.

As history has demonstrated time after time, however, overwhelming resources do not guarantee victory. Furthermore, the Confederacy had some advantages of its own. It had a population of 9 million, 5.5 million of whom were white, scattered over an area of almost 750,000 square miles. Its white citizenry, on the whole, was educated and motivated to support the cause. The seceding states produced some superb military leaders, many from the regular army. One in eight regular army officers resigned their commissions to join the Confederacy. A number of them were among the most respected, including Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Joseph E. Johnston, to name a few. To join those, the South had hundreds of graduates from military schools such as the Virginia Military Institute and The Citadel, who could teach recruits the basics in drill, tactics, and soldierly comportment. Even more so than their revolutionary ancestors, they had a wealth of experienced politicians on the state, local, and national levels. And perhaps most importantly, the Confederacy had to be conquered to lose. A stalemate was tantamount to Rebel victory.

Over the course of the war, the Confederacy steadily lost a resource on which it had depended heavily: its slave population. Confederates expected their 3.5 million slaves would help produce foodstuffs, manufacture materials for the army and their people, and serve the Rebel cause in sundry other ways. Instead, hundreds of thousands of slaves ultimately escaped to Union lines, many of them taking up arms against their old masters. Other slaves disrupted life on the home front, generated fears of servile insurrections while most of the young adult white males were away in the service, slowed production of essential wartime commodities, or aided the Union armies in many different ways.

From a legal standpoint, the war began when Lincoln called out the militiamen and ordered the Union navy to blockade Confederate ports. Internationally, the Confederacy achieved recognition as a belligerent, but never received recognition as an independent state by any foreign power. No nation attempted to intervene, although the British government considered it and the French government offered to mediate, an overture the United States rebuffed.

Before Lincoln's first Congress met in July 1861, the president adopted measures that gave the Union war policy its controlling character. Besides proclaiming an insurrection, calling out militia, and blockading Rebel ports, he suspended the habeas corpus privilege, expanded the regular army, directed emergency expenditures, and in

general assumed executive functions beyond existing law. That summer, Congress ratified his actions and in 1863, by a five to four vote, the U.S. Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of his executive decisions in the Prize Cases. In general, Lincoln's method of meeting the emergency and suppressing disloyal tendencies was to employ arbitrary executive power, such as his extensive program of arbitrary arrests, wherein thousands of citizens were thrust into prison on suspicion of disloyal or dangerous activity. These prisoners were held without trial, deprived of their usual civil rights, and subjected to no accusations under the law. Such policies, which Lincoln justified as necessary for the survival of the union, led to severe and widespread criticism of the Lincoln administration. Yet it cannot be said that Lincoln became a dictator. He allowed freedom of speech and of the press, contrary examples being exceptional, not typical. He tolerated newspaper criticism of himself and of the government, interposed no party uniformity, permitted free assembly, avoided partisan violence, recognized opponents in making appointments, and above all submitted his party and himself, even during war, to the test of popular election.

Confederate president Jefferson Davis also faced dissent, but Davis suffered from the additional burden of attempting to build a government and a nation during wartime. Many Confederates opposed the kind of concentration of power under the central government that was necessary to prosecute the war. With only one political party, vicious factions emerged, heaping sharp criticism on the overworked Davis and many of his appointees.

Enlistment and Conscription

Neither side was prepared for war, yet both sides rallied around their flag and cause. That regular army of only sixteen thousand men was transformed into two massive national armies. Before the war was over, the Union would maintain more than one million men in uniform at one time; the Confederacy's peak estimate was about one half that number. In order to draw people into military service, both sides relied primarily on volunteers. Locals organized companies, batteries, or regiments and offered them to the governor, who then tried to convince the secretary of war to accept them. Those early waves of recruits left home with a hero's good-bye. Over time, the celebrations ceased as more and more men failed to return home.

Early in the war, both sides had more volunteers than they could arm and clothe, and many frustrated volunteers were not accepted. By 1862, however, matters began to change. Most of the Confederates who enlisted in 1861 did so for a one-year term. As both sides geared up for spring offensives, the Davis administration and his generals feared their armies would dissolve. In April 1862, the Confederate Congress passed laws that established all white males between ages eighteen and thirty-five as eligible for military service. Everyone called into service would be subject to a three-year term, unless the war ended sooner, and those people already in service who were of draft age had their terms of service extended to three years. This was the first conscription act in American history. Draftees had the opportunity to hire substitutes, and in October 1862 the act was amended so that individuals who owned more than twenty slaves could acquire an exemption for an adult white male. Throughout the remainder of the war, the Confederacy continued to draft, expanding the age limits on both ends, and to recruit to fill its ranks. The Confederacy eventually forbade substitutes as well.

The Lincoln administration suffered similar problems. In The summer of 1862, dismal Union progress in the East convinced most people that the war would extend on for years. As enlistment slowed to a trickle, the Northern government also resorted to conscription through the Militia Act of 17 July 1862, which could keep individuals in uniform for only nine months. This proved so unsatisfactory that Congress replaced it with a stronger law in March 1863, establishing state quotas for three-year terms of service. Local communities raised bounty money to lure individuals to enlist, there by reducing or filling their draft quotas. For those slots that volunteers did not fill, locals would have to draft. Inmost cases, results were achieved by the threat of being drafted and the amount of money available as bounty for recruits.

Recruitment policies in the North and the South generated complaints against both governments, including charges that it was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, and even sparked draft riots. In The end, though, comparatively few soldiers were drafted. Conscription acted as a stick to encourage enlistments, while bounties and avoiding the shame of being drafted were the carrots.

Virtually all of those who entered the two armies did so with naive notions of military service, duty, and combat. Disease took greater tolls on their ranks than did enemy shot and shell. Perceptions of glory faded as hard-ships mounted. Approximately one in eight, unwilling to endure the sacrifices and suffering any longer, deserted. Yet for the bulk of those who donned the blue and the gray, their commitment to cause and comrades sustained them through the most trying moments. Over time, they learned to be skilled soldiers, men who knew how to execute on the battlefield and care for themselves in camp. They took pride in themselves, their units, and their service and vowed to stay the course until they achieved victory or all hope was lost.

The Early War

The first major engagement of the war took place in July 1861, near Manassas Junction, Virginia. Confederates under Major General P. G. T. Beauregard had assembled in northern Virginia to defend the area and guard the connection of the Manassas Gap Railroad from the Shenandoah Valley, running east-west, and the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, which sliced from southwest Virginia toward Washington, D.C. A Union army of a little more than thirty thousand men, the largest ever assembled for battle in American history, under Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, pushed southwest from Washington. After marching all night, McDowell's columns engaged the Confederates around a creek called Bull Run. McDowell feigned an attack on the Rebel right and swung wide on the opposite side, crossing Bull Run and rolling up on Beauregard's left. Just as it appeared that the Union would win the day, two events occurred. Soldiers under Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson held firm, like a "stone wall," and critical reinforcements from the Shenandoah

Valley under Major General Joseph E. Johnston arrived by rail to bolster the defenders. As the Union attackers grew exhausted, the Confederates launched a counterattack that swept the battlefield. President Davis, who arrived that afternoon, joined his generals in trying to mount a pursuit, but Confederate confusion in victory was almost as bad as Union panic in defeat. The Federals fled back to Washington, having endured a staggering three thousand casualties; in triumph, the Confederates suffered almost two thousand losses.

Lincoln promptly replaced McDowell with Major General George B. McClellan, a highly touted engineer who oversaw a minor Union victory in western Virginia. McClellan accumulated and trained a massive army, but tarried so long that winter fell before he moved out. Meanwhile, McClellan politicked to remove the aged commanding general of all Union armies, Winfield Scott, and got himself installed. "I can do it all," a cocky McClellan boasted.

The following spring, after much prodding from Lincoln, the Union army shifted its base by water to the Virginia coast east of Richmond and began an arduous advance up the peninsula between the York and James Rivers. As the Union forces neared Richmond, Confederates under Joseph E. Johnston attacked; Johnston was badly wounded, and the Federals held.

To replace Johnston, Davis chose his military adviser, General Robert E. Lee, a highly regarded West Point graduate who had not achieved much success theretofore. With his back up against Richmond, Lee drew Stonewall Jackson's men in from the Shenandoah Valley, where they had conducted a spectacular campaign against superior Union numbers, and launched a massive surprise attack on McClellan's right flank. In the Seven Days' Battles in June and July 1862, Lee's army failed to crush McClellan, but it drove the Federals back twenty miles to the protection of the Union navy. With the fight whipped out of McClellan, Lee began moving northward in August. At the Battle of Second Manassas, Lee crushed a Union army under Major General John Pope, and then turned on the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry and crossed over into Maryland in September. A lost copy of the Confederate invasion plan, which a Union soldier had discovered and passed on to headquarters, emboldened McClellan, who had replaced Pope. He fought Lee to a draw at Antietam in the single bloodiest day of fighting in the war, with combined casualties of nearly twenty-three thousand. After the fight, Lee fell back to Virginia while McClellan dawdled until an exasperated Lincoln replaced him with Major General Ambrose P. Burnside. In just three months, though, Lee had completely reversed Rebel fortunes in the East and had established himself as the great Confederate general.

Emancipation and Black Enlistment

Strangely enough, despite Lee's overall achievements, the Union repulse of Lee's raid offered Lincoln an opportunity to transform the war. With the failure of McClellan's Richmond campaign, Lincoln had decided on emancipation and black enlistment. The war was all about slavery, Lincoln had concluded, and if the nation reunited, the United States would have to settle the slavery issue and move beyond it. Federal recruitment, moreover, had slowed to a trickle. The largest untapped resource available was African Americans. They produced for the Confederacy; they could contribute in and out of uniform to the Union.

Despite the hopes of Lincoln and other politicians to keep blacks out of the war, they had forced their way to the heart of it from the beginning. In April 1861, several slaves who were being used for Confederate military construction projects fled to Union lines. The Union general, Benjamin Butler, declared them contraband of war and subject to confiscation, in accordance with international law, and then hired them to work for the Union army. Congress established Butler's ruling as the law of the land in the First Confiscation Act in August 1861. But soon, slaves who worked for the Rebel army began arriving with family members who had not labored on Rebel military projects and the original law broke down as many Union officers were loath to return anyone to slavery. In July 1862 Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, which allowed the president to authorize the seizure of any Rebel property, including slaves. It also passed legislation that enabled Lincoln to use blacks for any military duties he found them competent to perform.

Lincoln issued his most important executive pronouncement, the Emancipation Proclamation, in September 1862, just after the Battle of Antietam. In it, Lincoln announced that slaves in all areas beyond control of Union armies on 1 January 1863, would become free. Based on his powers as commander in chief, Lincoln rightly believed that slavery aided the Confederacy and that its destruction would strengthen the Union effort. Yet the program also fulfilled one of Lincoln's dreams: the destruction of an immoral institution. By eradicating it, Lincoln altered the Union goal from a war to restore the Union to one that would destroy slavery as well. The decision generated some opposition, but in the end, those who were principally responsible for enforcing the proclamation, the Union soldiery, embraced it as a vital step in winning the war.

Although Lincoln waited to issue his emancipation decree until the Union won its next victory—almost three months later—he had begun bringing blacks into Union uniform in the summer of 1862. He tried to control the experiment carefully, but after black troops fought heroically at the Battles of Port Hudson, Milliken's Bend, and Fort Wagner in 1863, he authorized a dramatic expansion of black enlistment. Blacks served in segregated units, largely under white officers, and in time they proved to be an invaluable force in the Union war effort.

Union Progress in the Western Theater

While the Yankees struggled to achieve positive results in the eastern theater, out west their armies made great progress. Ulysses S. Grant, a West Point graduate who resigned under a cloud in 1854, emerged as an unlikely hero. In February 1862, he launched an outstandingly effective campaign against Confederate forces at Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, respectively. In conjunction with the Union gun-boat fleet, he secured Fort Henry and then besieged the prize, Fort Donelson and its garrison of nearly twenty thousand men. Although some Confederates escaped, its fall resulted in the first great Union victory of the war and shattered the cordon of Rebel defenses in the Kentucky-Tennessee region. Several weeks later, Union troops occupied Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, and by the end of March, Grant's reinforced command had occupied a position around Shiloh Church near the Mississippi border.

Then, early on 6 April, Confederates under General Albert Sidney Johnston launched a vicious attack. Grant, caught unprepared, saw his men driven back. Valiant fighting and some timely reinforcements saved the day, however, and the following afternoon, Union troops swept

the field. Johnston was wounded and bled to death on the first day of fighting. At Shiloh, Grant's army suffered thirteen thousand casualties, horrifying politicians and civilians alike, and he soon found his reputation damaged and his command responsibilities curtailed.

When his superior, Major General Henry W. Halleck, returned East to become the new general in chief that summer, however, Grant was given a second chance. On 1 May 1862, Union forces began entering New Orleans; opening the entire length of the Mississippi River became a high priority. Grant began the difficult task of securing Vicksburg, Mississippi, a Confederate bastion located high on bluffs that dominated the Mississippi River. After months of toil and failure, including a repulsed assault on the bluffs, Grant finally conceived a way to defeat the Rebels. With Navy help, he shifted his army below the city in April 1863 by marching men along the opposite bank and shuttling them across the river. He then pushed inland toward Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, and turned on Vicksburg. Over the course of several weeks, in perhaps the most brilliant campaign of the war, Grant's forces defeated two Confederate armies in five separate battles and then laid siege to the city. On 4 July 1863, the Vicksburg garrison of nearly thirty thousand men surrendered. Grant had captured his second army, and with news of the fall of Vicksburg, the Confederates at Port Hudson, Louisiana, surrendered, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River and isolating a large portion of the Confederacy.

After a Union disaster at Chickamauga, Georgia, in September, Grant was brought in to preserve the Federal hold on Chattanooga, Tennessee. With extensive reinforcements and an audacious assault up a steep incline called Missionary Ridge, Grant's command shattered the Rebel positions. The victory drove the Confederates back into Georgia and pushed Grant's star into the ascendancy. In March 1864, Grant was promoted to lieutenant general, commander of all U.S. forces, while his key subordinate, William Tecumseh Sherman, took over in the West.

The Road to Union Victory

To the east, the Union army under Burnside suffered a disastrous repulse at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862. Again in April and May 1863, the same reinforced army under Major General Joseph Hooker was crushed by a much smaller force under Lee. In the Battle of Chancellorsville, Jackson led a brilliant flanking march that surprised and routed the Union forces, but that night Jackson sustained an accidental mortal wound from his own troops.

With some momentum from the Chancellorsville victory, Lee decided to raid Pennsylvania and perhaps

convince the Northern public that continuation of the war was pointless. His troops marched through Maryland and approached Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, before pulling back. At a vital crossroad village called Gettysburg, Lee and Hooker's new replacement, Major General George G. Meade, fought the most costly battle of the war. After three days and close to fifty thousand casualties, Lee withdrew back to Virginia, his third-day assault having been repulsed. For the second time, Lee had invaded the Union states and failed.

For the spring campaign of 1864, Grant determined to launch simultaneous offensives to squeeze the outnumbered Confederates. He elected to travel alongside Meade's army in Virginia, while Sherman commanded a group of armies in the West that advanced toward Atlanta. Against Grant, Lee put up a bold defense. His Army of Northern Virginia inflicted unprecedented losses, some sixty thousand, in seven weeks at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and elsewhere, yet the Yankees kept the initiative. Eventually, Grant was able to lock Lee's army up in a siege around Petersburg. Yet he could not crush Lee's men.

Meanwhile, to the westward, Sherman had more success against the Confederates, led by Joseph E. Johnston. Sherman largely avoided the enormous casualties of the eastern theater, holding and then turning his Rebel opponents. By mid-July, as the Confederates backed up near Atlanta, President Davis replaced Johnston with the aggressive John Bell Hood. Hood did what Davis expected of him: fight. But in each instance, the Confederates lost. In early September, Sherman forced the Rebel defenders out of Atlanta, a victory that ensured Lincoln's reelection two months later.

By mid-November, Sherman—with three-fifths of his army—began his famous March to the Sea, wrecking railroads, consuming foodstuffs, and proving to the Southern people that their armies could not check these massive Union raids. The other two-fifths of his army served as the core of a large force under Major General George Thomas that crushed the remainder of Hood's army around Nashville, a victory that elevated the importance of Sherman's march all the more.

On water, the Union navy contributed mightily to the ultimate victory. Those original twenty-three active vessels increased to more than 700 thanks to Northern shipbuilding. With this huge fleet, the Federal blockade closed ports or discouraged trading ships, while the wood and ironclad river boats supported land campaigns on the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi Rivers and also along the coast. In January 1865, the Union sealed the last significant port city, Wilmington, with the fall of Fort Fisher.

That same month, Sherman launched a destructive overland campaign through the Carolinas, once again

wrecking railroads; eating foodstuffs; destroying anything of military value; terrifying civilians; and in the case of South Carolina, burning homes and towns. By late March, the end was in sight. Sherman's army had reached central North Carolina and could be in Virginia in a few weeks. Grant, meanwhile, slowly extended his superior numbers around Lee's flank, severing the railroads that supplied Richmond and Petersburg and penetrating the Confederate rear. His works outflanked, Lee abandoned the Petersburg-Richmond line and took flight westward, hoping to swing around Grant's army and unite with Johnston, who was back in command opposing Sherman. Before Lee could escape, a Union force under Philip Sheridan boxed him in and he surrendered at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865.Several weeks later, Johnston surrendered to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, and all Confederate resistance soon succumbed.

Sustaining the Soldier and Civilian Populations

Approximately 2.25 million served in the Union army, and from 800,000 to 900,000 donned Confederate gray. The Union had over 20,000 African American sailors and almost 180,000 African American soldiers, about 150,000 of whom came from the Confederate States. In the final stages of the war, the Confederacy attempted to create black regiments, with very limited success.

With a large industrial and agricultural base, the Union provided better for its soldiery. After some initial scandals over ostensibly shoddy clothing and shoes and accusations of profiteering on a grand scale, the Northern states churned out vast quantities of food, clothing, weapons, ammunition, and other equipment necessary for war, while providing for its domestic market as well. To offset the labor loss of the up to one million young males who were in service at a given time, women took to the fields and factories and owners adopted more labor-saving machinery. Through hard work, cooperation, technology, and innovation, the Union produced enough food and clothing to provide for those soldiers in the field, the people at home, and in some cases, a number of people in Europe.

To pay for the war, the Union Congress raised the tariff dramatically and passed into law a series of taxes, including the first income tax, under the Internal Revenue Act of 1862.Despite this heavy taxation by the Lincoln administration, much of the war was financed by bond sales and the printing of paper money called greenbacks. The banker Jay Cooke and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase convinced the Northern public to buy long-term war bonds.(Cooke's firm alone sold over $1.2 billion worth.) The paper money circulated as legal tender. Still, inflation drove prices up to twice their prewar level,

causing considerable hardship for those on fixed wages and those who did not grow their own food. Families and communal organizations attempted to ease the burden on those with breadwinners in uniform.

Philanthropic organizations also contributed to the well-being of the soldiers. The United States Sanitary Commission was formed to combat the atrocious conditions in Union hospitals. The group promoted cleanliness, better medical care, proper nursing, and a host of other issues to improve care for the sick and injured. The U.S. Christian Commission championed religion through the publication of vast amounts of religious tracts. For those seeking spiritual comfort or for activity-starved soldiers in camp, these readings filled an important void.

The Davis administration lacked the established apparatus to collect taxes, and with the Union blockade, little in the way of import taxes entered the coffers. Congressional laws establishing an income tax, a levy on agricultural products at the source, and a duty on the buying and selling of most basic goods generated more frustration with the government than revenue. The government floated war bonds, which raised a little more than a third of the needed funds. The Confederates generated the remainder by printing money. Early on, the notes circulated reasonably well, but as the fortunes of war declined and the amount of paper money in circulation escalated, its value plummeted. Late in the war, these paper notes were more a keepsake than a circulating medium.

The Confederate States performed minor miracles in creating a munitions industry, but in other areas, scarcity plagued the armies and the civilian population. Refugees flooded cities, driving up prices and reducing the amount of food crops harvested. Despite an extraordinary agricultural base, southerners devoted too many acres to the production of tobacco and cotton and not enough to food. A congressional resolution and state laws tried to rectify this problem, but they did not succeed satisfactorily. Other basic items, like clothing and shoes, became so rare that only the well-off could afford them. People made do with makeshift footgear, homespun garments, whatever they could. Still, basic shortages damaged morale and resulted in protests and even riots. In one instance, Davis tossed all the money he had in his pockets into a crowd to quell a bread riot.

With limited financial means, huge government expenses, and shortages, inflation rates soared. By the last two years of the war, prices rose so rapidly that many Southern farmers refused to sell their crops and livestock to the Confederate government; the authorized price could not keep up with escalating market prices. In order to feed and supply soldiers, many commissary and quartermaster officials simply impressed the goods or foodstuffs

and provided receipts to the owner. Even though Confederate law authorized these seizures, they alienated many people from the Confederate cause and did little to check inflation. Throughout the war, but especially in the last few months, soldiers and civilians alike suffered severe shortages.

Military Strategy and Administration

Both the Lincoln and the Davis administrations ran their respective war efforts well. For the most part they managed military affairs effectively, appointed fairly competent officers (although both sides suffered through a few dreadful politicians who were appointed as generals), and adopted sensible strategies. Davis was aware of both the demands for protection from all Confederate citizens and the limited resources available to provide it. He therefore attempted to employ what historians have called an "offensive-defensive" strategy. Davis oversaw the creation of large military departments. He had the officers in charge position their major army or armies along the logical invasion routes, and called on them to concentrate their forces to defeat major Union advances. Whenever they had opportunities, Davis encouraged offensives, even raids into Union territories. Those raids would take the war to the enemy, compelling the Northern public to taste the hazards of invasion. He also hoped to draw valuable supplies from the Northern populace. While there was some Confederate guerrilla fighting, the Davis administration never embraced it, largely because guerrilla warfare would have exposed their people and property, including slaves, to Federal harassment, destruction, or confiscation.

When both sides optimistically believed the war would be of relatively brief duration, Lincoln embraced Win-field Scott's Anaconda Plan, which called for a blockade, river gunboats to penetrate deep into the Confederacy, and Union armies to slice their way through the rebellious territory. As the war expanded, Lincoln urged his generals to target the Confederate armies as their objectives, not simply Confederate territory. With Rebel military forces crushed, resistance would collapse, Lincoln believed. He skillfully tapped diplomacy to keep European powers and their money out of the conflict, and he used a blockade to cut off supplies to the under-industrialized Confederacy. By proclaiming emancipation, Lincoln won over all advocates of human rights, co-opted those in the North who criticized him for his slowness to embrace the concept, and allowed him to use a weapon that worked doubly, depriving Southerners of a valuable laborers force and putting them to work for the Union cause as soldiers, sailors, teamsters, stevedores, cooks, and farmers. Where Lincoln failed as a strategist was in his belated grasp of the value of Grant and Sherman's raiding strategy. Both generals realized that by marching Union armies directly through the Confederacy, destroying military resources and terrifying Southern people, they could promote the destruction of Rebel armies without suffering the staggering losses of direct military campaigns. Lincoln acquiesced because of his faith in those commanders, a faith that events fully justified, not just in Georgia and the Carolinas but also in Virginia under Philip Sheridan. Those marches destroyed valuable supplies, severed rail connections, damaged Southern morale, and caused mass desertions as soldiers abandoned the army to look after their loved ones.

The greatest administrative failure was in the area of prisons. Neither side prepared adequately for the huge number of captives as both sections assumed that they would exchange or parole prisoners regularly. But two major factors resulted in the breakdown of exchange. The Confederates claimed that many of the prisoners Grant took at Vicksburg were paroled illegally and could therefore return to service without formal exchange. The second revolved around black soldiers. The Confederacy resisted notions of treating them like white soldiers, and refused to exchange them. In response, the trading cartel broke down and prison populations soared beyond anyone's expectations. Lacking adequate preparation, camps quickly became overcrowded. Food, clothing, and housing shortages developed, and sanitary problems escalated as a consequence of these conditions. Over fifty-six thousand men died from the spread of disease as a result of overcrowding and food and clothing shortages in these horrible prison camps.

Confederate and Union Politics

In the political arena, the Confederate Congress exhibited some foresight when it established conscription and passed innovative taxing legislation, but it generally got mired in the inconsequential and failed to address many important issues in a timely way. Congress never passed legislation to flesh out a Supreme Court and other important pieces of legislation died of inertia or petty squabbles. Quite a number of legislators used the halls of Congress as a forum in which to bash Davis, his appointees, and the policies they opposed. Davis's popular election to the presidency in 1861 was unopposed, but administration critics had already begun to complain publicly. The congressional elections of 1863 reflected the public's growing disillusionment. When the second Congress convened in May 1864, clear opponents of Davis fell just short of a majority in both houses. Without organized political parties, however, opposition to the Davis administration splintered. In just one instance did Congress override a presidential veto, and only on a minor postage bill.

Lincoln's relationship with Congress and his own party varied. Early in his administration, with Republicans in the clear majority after secession, Congress passed into law all of the party's important planks for promoting economic growth and opportunity: an increase in the tariff; a homestead bill that offered free western land to anyone agreeing to settle on it; land subsidies for the construction of a transcontinental railroad; and federal land grants to promote agricultural and mechanical colleges. In addition to war legislation, Congress established the first national currency in the Legal Tender Act. Yet the president's relations with Congress and his own party waxed and waned in accordance with progress in the war. The failure of eastern campaigns in 1862, perhaps compounded by an initial backlash to the Emancipation Proclamation, resulted in Republican losses at the polls that year.

Numerous individuals within the Republican Party came to believe that Lincoln was not up to the job of president. They began lobbying to dump him from the 1864 ticket, rallying around John C. Frémont or Salmon Chase. Like so many other people, both men and their supporters underestimated Lincoln's political savvy, and the president outmaneuvered them to secure renomination.

Much has been made about divisions between Lincoln and the more extreme wing in his own party, the Radical Republicans. In fact, Lincoln generally got along with the radical element. His differences with them were often minor policy distinctions, issues of timing or arguments over legislative versus executive power, not necessarily policy objectives.

Many administration critics outside the Republican Party, fueled by wartime failures, huge casualty lists, the draft, emancipation, and civil rights violations, organized into the Peace Democrats. These Copperheads, as supporters of the war called them, made some election gains in 1862, and their leading spokesman, Clement L. Vallandigham, almost won the governorship of Ohio in 1863.

During the difficult days in the summer of 1864, with the armies of both Grant and Sherman apparently bogged down, and Confederate Jubal Early threatening Washington, it appeared to Lincoln that he would not win reelection. The Democratic Party nominated for president the former general George B. McClellan, a pro-war administration critic, on a peace platform. Yet Lincoln stayed the course, and the war issue turned his way when Sheridan defeated Early and Sherman captured Atlanta. With the overwhelming support of Union soldiers, who detested the Copperheads, Lincoln and the Union Party (a coalition of Republicans and pro-war Democrats) swept the 1864 election.

Between his reelection and his assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth in April 1865, Lincoln endorsed several important initiatives to help those who had been held in bondage to succeed after the war. He pressed for passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery; encouraged and signed into law the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which created an organization to assist blacks in the transition from slavery to freedom; and began discussing with close political friends the idea of giving blacks the vote.

Davis and Lincoln As Leaders

Most modern scholars believe that Jefferson Davis did a competent job as Confederate president under extremely adverse circumstances. However, his inability to under-stand alternative viewpoints and his lack of personal charm served him badly. The distinction of Lincoln, on the other hand, was discernible not in the enactment of laws through his advocacy, nor in the adoption of his ideals as a continuing postwar policy, nor even in his persuasion of Republicans to follow his lead. Rather, the qualities that marked him as a leader were vision, personal tact, fairness toward opponents, popular appeal, dignity and effectiveness in state papers, absence of vindictiveness, and withal a personality that was remembered for its own uniqueness while it was almost canonized as a symbol of the Union cause. Military success, though long delayed, and the dramatic martyrdom of his assassination must also be reckoned as factors in Lincoln's fame. On the Southern side, the myth of the lost cause has diminished the true role of slavery in the war and has elevated the reputation of numerous talented Confederate individuals, most notably Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, to extraordinary heights.

The Consequences of the War

The cost of the war was staggering. Some 258,000 Confederates soldiers gave their lives for slavery and an independent nation; more than 360,000 Federals paid the ultimate price for the union. In addition, one-half million sustained wounds in the war and untold thousands permanently damaged their health by contracting wartime illnesses. From a monetary standpoint, the best guess places the cost of the war at $20 billion. The Confederate States alone suffered an estimated $7.4 billion worth of property damage. In fact, so devastated was the Southern economy that it was not until well into the twentieth century that its annual agricultural output reached the 1860 level.

Among the other consequences of the war, the union was established as inviolate. The central government would continue to increase its power at the expense of the states, and the Northern vision of rights, economic opportunity, and industrialization would prevail. For African Americans, in addition to the abolition of slavery forever, the Fourteenth Amendment granted them citizenship. Unfortunately, the court system refused to apply the due process and equal protection clause of that amendment to African Americans, and it was not long before whites regained control in the South and stripped blacks of many of their newfound rights. Southern whites even managed to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African Americans the right to vote. All the while, as Southern whites restored themselves to power and forced blacks into a subordinate position, a Northern public, tired of war and reform, acquiesced. It took another one hundred years for blacks to gain their civil liberties.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boritt, Gabor S., ed. Why the Confederacy Lost. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Cooper, William C., Jr. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Davis, William C. Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

———. Look Away!; A History of the Confederate States of America. New York: Free Press, 2002.

Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

———, ed. Why the North Won the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960.

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Gienapp, William E. The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852– 1856. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Glatthaar, Joseph T. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. New York: Free Press, 1990.

Hattaway, Herman, and Archer Jones. How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Paludan, Phillip Shaw. "A People's Contest": The Union and the Civil War, 1861–1865. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Roland, Charles P. An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

Thomas, Emory M. The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.

Joseph T.Glatthaar

J.G.Randall

See alsoAntietam, Battle of ; Appomattox ; Army, Confederate ; Army, Union ; Assassinations, Presidential ; Atlanta Campaign ; Bull Run, First Battle of ; Bull Run, Second Battle of ; Chattanooga Campaign ; Chickamauga, Battle of ; Cold Harbor, Battle of ; Confederate States of America ; Confiscation Acts ; Conscription and Recruitment ; Contraband, Slaves as ; Copperheads ; Donelson, Fort, Capture of ; Draft Riots ; Emancipation Proclamation ; Fredericksburg, Battle of ; Freedmen's Bureau ; Gettysburg, Battle of ; Inflation in the Confederacy ; Legal Tender Act ; Nashville, Battle of ; New Orleans, Capture of ; Petersburg, Siege of ; Radical Republicans ; Richmond Campaigns ; Sanitary Commission, United States ; Seven Days' Battles ; Sherman's March to the Sea ; Shiloh, Battle of ; Slavery ; Spotsylvania Courthouse, Battle of ; States' Rights in the Confederacy ; Suffrage: African American Suffrage ; Union Party ; Vicksburg in the Civil War ; White House of the Confederacy ; Wilderness, Battles of the ; andvol. 9:Benjamin Butler's Report on Contrabands of War ; A Confederate Blockade-Runner ; Emancipation Proclamation ; Gettysburg Address ; Head of Choctow Nation Reaffirms His Tribe's Position ; Robert E. Lee's Farewell to His Army ; Letter to President Lincoln from Harrison's Landing ;Letters from Widows to Lincoln Asking for Help ; Prisoner at Andersonville ; Second Inaugural Address ; South Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession .

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

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

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

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

Civil War in U.S. history, conflict (1861–65) between the Northern states (the Union) and the Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy . It is generally known in the South as the War between the States and is also called the War of the Rebellion (the official Union designation), the War of Secession, and the War for Southern Independence. The name Civil War, although much criticized as inexact, is most widely accepted.

Causes

The name Civil War is misleading because the war was not a class struggle, but a sectional combat having its roots in political, economic, social, and psychological elements so complex that historians still do not agree on its basic causes. It has been characterized, in the words of William H. Seward, as the "irrepressible conflict." In another judgment the Civil War was viewed as criminally stupid, an unnecessary bloodletting brought on by arrogant extremists and blundering politicians. Both views accept the fact that in 1861 there existed a situation that, rightly or wrongly, had come to be regarded as insoluble by peaceful means.

In the days of the American Revolution and of the adoption of the Constitution, differences between North and South were dwarfed by their common interest in establishing a new nation. But sectionalism steadily grew stronger. During the 19th cent. the South remained almost completely agricultural, with an economy and a social order largely founded on slavery and the plantation system. These mutually dependent institutions produced the staples, especially cotton, from which the South derived its wealth. The North had its own great agricultural resources, was always more advanced commercially, and was also expanding industrially.

Hostility between the two sections grew perceptibly after 1820, the year of the Missouri Compromise , which was intended as a permanent solution to the issue in which that hostility was most clearly expressed—the question of the extension or prohibition of slavery in the federal territories of the West. Difficulties over the tariff (which led John C. Calhoun and South Carolina to nullification and to an extreme states' rights stand) and troubles over internal improvements were also involved, but the territorial issue nearly always loomed largest. In the North moral indignation increased with the rise of the abolitionists in the 1830s. Since slavery was unadaptable to much of the territorial lands, which eventually would be admitted as free states, the South became more anxious about maintaining its position as an equal in the Union. Southerners thus strongly supported the annexation of Texas (certain to be a slave state) and the Mexican War and even agitated for the annexation of Cuba.

The Compromise of 1850 marked the end of the period that might be called the era of compromise. The deaths in 1852 of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster left no leader of national stature, but only sectional spokesmen, such as W. H. Seward , Charles Sumner , and Salmon P. Chase in the North and Jefferson Davis and Robert Toombs in the South. With the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and the consequent struggle over "bleeding" Kansas the factions first resorted to shooting. The South was ever alert to protect its "peculiar institution," even though many Southerners recognized slavery as an anachronism in a supposedly enlightened age. Passions aroused by arguments over the fugitive slave laws (which culminated in the Dred Scott Case ) and over slavery in general were further excited by the activities of the Northern abolitionist John Brown and by the vigorous proslavery utterances of William L. Yancey , one of the leading Southern fire-eaters .

The Election of 1860

The "wedges of separation" caused by slavery split large Protestant sects into Northern and Southern branches and dissolved the Whig party . Most Southern Whigs joined the Democratic party , one of the few remaining, if shaky, nationwide institutions. The new Republican party , heir to the Free-Soil party and to the Liberty party , was a strictly Northern phenomenon. The crucial point was reached in the presidential election of 1860, in which the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln , defeated three opponents—Stephen A. Douglas (Northern Democrat), John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat), and John Bell of the Constitutional Union party .

Lincoln's victory was the signal for the secession of South Carolina (Dec. 20, 1860), and that state was followed out of the Union by six other states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Immediately the question of federal property in these states became important, especially the forts in the harbor of Charleston, S.C. (see Fort Sumter ). The outgoing President, James Buchanan , a Northern Democrat who was either truckling to the Southern, proslavery wing of his party or sincerely attempting to avert war, pursued a vacillating course. At any rate the question of the forts was still unsettled when Lincoln was inaugurated, and meanwhile there had been several futile efforts to reunite the sections, notably the Crittenden Compromise offered by Sen. J. J. Crittenden. Lincoln resolved to hold Sumter. The new Confederate government under President Jefferson Davis and South Carolina were equally determined to oust the Federals.

Sumter to Gettysburg

When, on Apr. 12, 1861, the Confederate commander P. G. T. Beauregard , acting on instructions, ordered the firing on Fort Sumter, hostilities officially began. Lincoln immediately called for troops to be used against the seven seceding states, which were soon joined by Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, completing the 11-state Confederacy. In the first important military campaign of the war untrained Union troops under Irvin McDowell , advancing on Richmond, now the Confederate capital, were routed by equally inexperienced Confederate soldiers led by Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston in the first battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861). This fiasco led Lincoln to bring up George B. McClellan (1826–85), fresh from his successes in W Virginia (admitted as the new state of West Virginia in 1863).

After the retirement of Winfield Scott in Nov., 1861, McClellan was for a few months the chief Northern commander. The able organizer of the Army of the Potomac, he nevertheless failed in the Peninsular campaign (Apr.–July, 1862), in which Robert E. Lee succeeded the wounded Johnston as commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Lee planned the diversion in the Shenandoah Valley, which, brilliantly executed by Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson , worked perfectly. Next to Lee himself Jackson, with his famous "foot cavalry," was the South's greatest general.

Lee then went on to save Richmond in the Seven Days battles (June 26–July 2) and was victorious in the second battle of Bull Run (Aug. 29–30), thoroughly trouncing John Pope . However, he also failed in his first invasion of enemy territory. In September, McClellan, whom Lincoln had restored to command of the defenses of Washington, checked Lee in Maryland (see Antietam campaign ). When McClellan failed to attack the Confederates as they retreated, Lincoln removed him again, this time permanently.

Two subsequent Union advances on Richmond, the first led by Ambrose E. Burnside (see Fredericksburg, battle of ) and the second by Joseph Hooker (see Chancellorsville, battle of ), ended in resounding defeats (Dec. 13, 1862, and May 2–4, 1863). Although Lee lost Jackson at Chancellorsville, the victory prompted him to try another invasion of the North. With his lieutenants Richard S. Ewell , James Longstreet , A. P. Hill , and J. E. B. (Jeb) Stuart , he moved via the Shenandoah Valley into S Pennsylvania. There the Army of the Potomac, under still another new chief, George G. Meade , rallied to stop him again in the greatest battle (July 1–3, 1863) of the war (see Gettysburg campaign ).

Naval Engagements

With the vastly superior sea power built up by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles , the Union established a blockade of the Southern coast, which, though by no means completely effective, nevertheless limited the South's foreign trade to the uncertain prospects of blockade-running. In cooperation with the army the Union navy also attacked along the coasts. The forts guarding New Orleans, the largest Confederate port, fell (Apr. 28, 1862) to a fleet under David G. Farragut , and the city was occupied by troops commanded by Benjamin F. Butler (1818–93). The introduction of the ironclad warship (see Monitor and Merrimack ) had revolutionized naval warfare, to the ultimate advantage of the industrial North. On the other hand, Confederate cruisers , built or bought in England (see Alabama claims ) and captained by men such as Raphael Semmes , destroyed or chased from the seas much of the U.S. merchant marine.

The War in the West

That the "war was won in the West" has become axiomatic. There the rivers, conveniently flowing either north (the Cumberland and the Tennessee) or south (the Mississippi), invited Union penetration, as they did not in Virginia. In Feb., 1862, the Union gunboats of Andrew H. Foote forced the Confederates to retire from their post Fort Henry on the Tennessee to their stronghold on the Cumberland, Fort Donelson . There, on Feb. 16, 1862, Grant, commanding the Army of the Tennessee, won the first great Union victory of the war, and Nashville promptly fell without a struggle.

Farther down the Tennessee, Grant was lucky to escape defeat in a bloody contest (Apr. 6–7) with Albert S. Johnston and Beauregard (see Shiloh, battle of ). Minor Union successes at Iuka (Sept. 19) and Corinth (Oct. 3–4) followed, while the counterinvasion by the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg was stopped by Don Carlos Buell at Perryville, Ky. (Oct. 8, 1862). William S. Rosecrans , Buell's successor, then stalked Bragg through Tennessee, fought him to a standoff at Murfreesboro (Dec. 21, 1862–Jan. 2, 1863), and finally, by outmaneuvering him, forced the Confederate general to withdraw S of Chattanooga.

Union gunboats had cleared the upper Mississippi (see Island No. 10 ; Fort Pillow ), leading to the fall of Memphis on June 6, 1862. Grant's Vicksburg campaign , at first stalled by the raids of Confederate cavalrymen Nathan B. Forrest and Earl Van Dorn, was pressed to a victorious end in a brilliant movement in which the navy, represented by David D. Porter , also had a hand. The Union now controlled the whole Mississippi, and the trans-Mississippi West was severed from the rest of the Confederacy. The fighting in that area (see Pea Ridge ; Arkansas Post ) had held Missouri for the Union and led to the partial conquest of Arkansas, but after the fall of Vicksburg, the war there, with the exception of the unsuccessful Union Red River expedition of Nathaniel P. Banks and a last desperate Confederate raid into Missouri by Sterling Price (both in 1864), was largely confined to guerrilla activity.

The Emancipation Proclamation

Britain never formally recognized the Confederacy (neither did France) and maintained peaceful relations with the Union despite the provocation late in 1861 of the Trent Affair , which was adroitly handled by Secretary of State Seward. Charles Francis Adams (1807–86) at London and John Bigelow at Paris were able diplomats, but probably more important in winning popular support for the Union in England and France was the Emancipation Proclamation , which Lincoln issued after Antietam.

This act appeased for a time the anti-Lincoln radical Republicans in Congress, among them Benjamin F. Wade , Zachariah Chandler , Thaddeus Stevens , and Henry W. Davis , with whom Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton were allied. Not all Unionists were abolitionists, however, and the Emancipation Proclamation was not applied to the border slave states: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri had all remained loyal. For Lincoln and kindred moderates, such as Postmaster General Montgomery Blair , the restoration of the Union, not the abolition of slavery, remained the principal objective of the war.

Turning Point

The Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July, 1863, marked a definite turning point in the war. Both sides now had seasoned, equally valiant soldiers, and in Lee and Ulysses S. Grant each had a superior general. But the North, with its larger population and comparatively enormous industry, enjoyed a tremendous material advantage. Both sides also resorted to conscription, even though it met some resistance (see draft riots ).

Under Stanton, successor to Simon Cameron , the overall administration of the Union army was more efficient. Problems of organization still remained, however, and Henry W. Halleck continued in the difficult role of military adviser, with the title of general in chief. The Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, organized in Dec., 1861, attempted to influence the actions as well as the appointment of Union generals (its efforts were particularly strong on behalf of Hooker). The chairman, Benjamin F. Wade, was frequently at odds with Lincoln, and the committee's investigations and high-handed actions lowered morale among the Union forces.

Grant and Sherman

On the Georgia-Tennessee line in Sept., 1863, Bragg, having temporarily halted his retreat, severely jolted the Federals, who were saved from a complete rout by the magnificent stand of George H. Thomas , the Rock of Chickamauga (see Chattanooga campaign ). Grant, newly appointed supreme commander in the West, hurried to the scene and, with William T. Sherman , Hooker, and Thomas's fearless troops, drove Bragg back to Georgia (Nov. 25). After Knoxville, occupied in September, withstood Longstreet's siege (Nov.–Dec.), all Tennessee, hotbed of Unionism, was now safely restored to the Union.

In Mar., 1864, Lincoln, for many years an admirer of Grant, made him commander in chief. Leaving the West in Sherman's capable hands, Grant came east, took personal charge of Meade's Army of the Potomac, and engaged Lee in the Wilderness campaign (May–June, 1864). Outnumbered but still spirited, the Army of Northern Virginia was slowly and painfully forced back toward Richmond, and in July the tenacious Grant began the long siege of Petersburg .

Although Jubal A. Early won at Monocacy (July 9), threatening the city of Washington, the Confederates were unable to repeat Jackson's successful diversion of 1862, and Philip H. Sheridan , victorious in the grand manner at Cedar Creek (Oct. 19), virtually ended Early's activities in the Shenandoah Valley. For his part, Sherman, opposed first by the wily Joe Johnston and then by John B. Hood , won the Atlanta campaign (May–Sept., 1864).

The Election of 1864

On the political front, a movement within the Republican party to shelve Lincoln had collapsed as the tide turned in the Union's favor. With Andrew Johnson , Lincolm's own choice for Vice President over the incumbent Hannibal Hamlin , the President was renominated in June, 1864. The Democrats nominated McClellan, who still had a strong popular following, on an ambiguous peace platform (largely dictated by Clement L. Vallandigham , leader of the Copperheads ), which the ex-general repudiated. Even so, Lincoln was easily reelected.

Lee's Surrender

After the fall of Atlanta, which had contributed to Lincoln's victory, Sherman's troops made their destructive march through Georgia. Hood had failed to draw Sherman back by invading Union-held Tennessee, and after the battle of Franklin (Nov. 30) Hood's army was almost completely annihilated by Thomas at Nashville (Dec. 15–16, 1864). Sherman presented Lincoln with the Christmas gift of Savannah, Ga., and then moved north through the Carolinas. Farragut's victory at Mobile Bay (Aug. 5, 1864) had effectively closed that port, and on Jan. 15, 1865, Wilmington, N.C., was also cut off (see Fort Fisher ).

After Sheridan's victory at Five Forks (Apr. 1), the Petersburg lines were breached and the Confederates evacuated Richmond (Apr. 3). With his retreat blocked by Sheridan, Lee, wisely giving up the futile contest, surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse (see under Appomattox ) on Apr. 9, 1865. The surviving Confederate armies also yielded when they heard of Lee's capitulation, thus ending the conflict that resulted in over 600,000 casualties.

Aftermath

The long war was over, but for the victors the peace was marred by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest figure of the war. The ex-Confederate states, after enduring the unsuccessful attempts of Reconstruction to impose a new society on the South, were readmitted to the Union, which had been saved and in which slavery was now abolished. The Civil War brought death to more Americans than did any other war, including World War II. Photographs by Mathew B. Brady and others reveal some of the horror behind the statistics. The war cost untold billions and nourished rather than canceled hatreds and intolerance, which persisted for decades. It established many of the patterns, especially a strong central government, that are now taken for granted in American national life. Virtually every battlefield, with its graves, is either a national or a state park. Monuments commemorating Civil War figures and events are conspicuous in almost all sizable Northern towns and are even more numerous in the upper South.

Bibliography

Notable fictional treatments of the war are Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1896) and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), and there is one outstanding work in verse—Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body (1928). The quantity of historical literature on the Civil War is enormous, and there is no single, adequate bibliographical guide. For bibliographies, see Allan Nevins et al., ed., Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography (2 vol., 1967–69).

Civil War Constitutional history of the Civil War period underscores the principal characteristics of the Supreme Court as a coordinate branch of government in the context of nineteenth‐century political culture. As the war signaled the end of three decades of Democratic rule and the start of a long period of Republican dominance, so it marked the transition from the state sovereignty doctrines of the Taney Court to the constitutional nationalism of the Chase Court. The process of change that accelerated these political and jurisprudential trends was dramatically illustrated in the withdrawal from the federal government of southern members of Congress and the resignation from the Supreme Court of Justice John A. Campbell of Alabama.

Changes in the membership of the Supreme Court at the start of the Civil War permitted the effects of the political realignment that put Abraham Lincoln in the White House to be registered in constitutional law more rapidly than is usually the case following critical elections in American political history. Problems arising from the war encouraged the Court to refrain from judicial activist policy making at the expense of the political branches. Military exigencies caused most of the major constitutional questions that arose to be resolved by the executive and Congress and induced in the justices a more deferential attitude toward political officers than might otherwise have prevailed (see War).

Three vacancies existed on the Supreme Court at the start of President Abraham Lincoln's administration. Justice Peter V. Daniel died in 1860 and President James Buchanan's nomination of a Democratic successor was blocked by Republicans in the Senate in February 1861. Justice John McLean died on 4 April 1861, and on 25 April Justice Campbell resigned. Lincoln appointed Noah H. Swayne, an Ohio Republican, in January 1862, Republican Samuel F. Miller of Iowa in July, and Illinois Republican David Davis, a state judge, in October. When Congress created a tenth judicial circuit (thereby increasing the size of the Court to ten justices) in 1863, Lincoln named Stephen J. Field of California, a Democrat and ardent Unionist, to the high bench. These appointments produced a more politically balanced Court, consisting of six antebellum Democrats (Samuel Nelson, Nathan Clifford, James M. Wayne, Robert C. Grier, John Catron, and Roger B. Taney), and four wartime appointees sympathetic to the Republican administration. The composition of the Court remained stable until Chief Justice Taney died in October 1864 and was replaced by Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury under Lincoln.

The war raised constitutional questions that were inappropriate for judicial resolution because of their military and political nature. Confiscation, emancipation, taxation and fiscal policy, conscription, and treason were among these issues. Yet the judiciary's traditional concern for individual liberty and property rights provided the basis for limited Supreme Court involvement in matters relating to internal security policy and to the politically sensitive question of the legal nature of the war.

President Lincoln's suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in April 1861 presented an issue of government infringement of civil liberties that could reasonably be brought before the judiciary. The executive and Congress provided for the nation's internal security without benefit of any Supreme Court opinion on the constitutionality of the measures adopted. Before the government's policy was put in place, however, Chief Justice Taney attempted to control the actions of the executive branch by invalidating Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Taney questioned the president's action in Ex parte Merryman in May 1861.

John Merryman was a pro‐Confederate Maryland political leader who was arrested under authority of Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus in May 1861 for participating in the destruction of railroad bridges. He petitioned Chief Justice Taney, presiding judge of the circuit court at Baltimore, for a writ of habeas corpus. Taney issued the writ, but the military commander to whom it was addressed refused to produce Merryman. The chief justice then issued a writ of attachment ordering the military commander to be apprehended. He was again rebuffed. Holding a session at chambers as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (rather than presiding over a session of the circuit court), Taney on 28 May 1861 declared Merryman entitled to his freedom. In an unusual move, he filed an opinion condemning Merryman's arrest as an arbitrary and illegal denial of civil liberty (see Military Trials and Martial Law).

Taney stated that military detention of civilians like Merryman was unconstitutional because only Congress had authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. He based this conclusion on the fact that the provision authorizing suspension of the writ appears in Article I of the Constitution, dealing with the powers of the legislative branch. In a broader constitutional analysis, Taney described the president as a mere administrative officer charged with faithful enforcement of the laws. According to the chief justice, this amounted to a constitutional duty not to execute the laws on the president's own authority or initiative, but rather to act in support of the judicial authority by executing the laws “as they are expounded and adjudged by the co‐ordinate branch of the government, to which that duty is assigned by the Constitution.” Taney sent a copy of his opinion to Lincoln, who in his 4 July 1861 message to Congress justified his action suspending the writ of habeas corpus on the basis of his constitutional oath to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The president reasoned further that the Constitution did not expressly state who can order suspension of the writ and that the framers did not intend that in an emergency no action should be taken to protect the public safety by suspending habeas corpus until Congress could be assembled. Lincoln prevailed in the contest with Taney.

The Supreme Court at other times deferred to the government's internal security policy, even when executive action exceeded habeas corpus suspension, as in Ex parte Vallandigham in 1864. In April 1863, General Ambrose Burnside issued an order prohibiting in the area of his command any declarations of sympathy for the enemy. He also declared that persons who helped the enemy would be tried under military authority. Former Democratic representative Clement L. Vallandigham condemned the order and urged resistance to it. He was arrested, tried, and convicted by a military commission. Burnside imposed a prison sentence, which President Lincoln commuted into banishment beyond Confederate lines. Removing to Canada, Vallandigham petitioned a federal circuit court in Ohio for a writ of habeas corpus, but since he was no longer in custody, no basis existed for Supreme Court review of the lower court's denial of the petition. Vallandigham then applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari to review directly the decision of the military commission.

With Chief Justice Taney not participating in the case, the Court denied the petition for certiorari. Justice Wayne's opinion for a unanimous Court asserted that the Court lacked jurisdiction under the Judiciary Act of 1789 because a military commission was not a court whose decisions could be reviewed by the Supreme Court. He noted that the Constitution defined the original jurisdiction of the Court in a way that precluded review of the case. Although the disposition of the case was favorable to the government, the Court did not reach the issue of the constitutionality of military trial of civilians in circumstances like those surrounding the arrest of Vallandigham.

While generally refraining from decisions having an impact on military or war‐related policies, the Supreme Court handed down a major decision determining the legal nature of the conflict. This question was presented in the Prize Cases (1863), where the issue was the legality of the navy's capture of ships bound for Confederate ports under the blockade ordered by President Lincoln in April 1861. If a state of war recognized by international law existed, the blockade was legal and the captures legitimate. If a war did not exist when the executive imposed the blockade, the captures were illegal. In March 1863, the Supreme Court decided 5 to 4 that the blockade was legal. According to Justice Grier's majority opinion, a state of war existed in April 1861 that justified resort to a blockade. Grier wrote that although the conflict began as an insurrection against the federal government and without a formal declaration, it was nonetheless a war—a civil war. He observed that the Civil War was a fact of which the Supreme Court was bound to take notice. Turning to the Constitution, he pointed out that although neither Congress nor the executive could declare war on a state, the president was authorized by statutes of 1795 and 1807 to call out the militia and use military force to suppress insurrection against the United States. Grier stated that it was for the president as commander in chief to decide whether in suppressing an insurrection it was justifiable to treat the opponents as belligerents (see Presidential Emergency Powers). He furthermore contended that the Supreme Court must be governed by the president's decision. Grier concluded that the proclamation of the blockade was evidence that a state of war existed.

The Prize Cases recognized broad executive power to respond to military attack on the United States. Of more immediate practical import was the Court's holding that persons in the seceded states could be treated both as rebels and enemies, or as a belligerent party. The Court did not, however, acknowledge or confer executive authority unilaterally to declare and carry on a war indefinitely without legislative approval.

Justice Nelson wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Clifford, Catron, and Taney. Nelson argued that war did not exist when Lincoln ordered the blockade because Congress had not exercised its exclusive power to declare war. He said that whether war existed was a legal question unaffected by material facts and realities. When Congress on 13 July 1861 authorized the executive to declare the existence of a state of insurrection, war began and the blockade was legal. Before that date the conduct of hostilities by the United States was a “personal war” of President Lincoln.

During the Civil War the Supreme Court decided many nonmilitary questions. California land disputes arising out of Mexican rule were prominent on its docket, as were cases dealing with contracts, partnership, bankruptcy, usury, patent rights, and other commercial matters. A few cases illustrated continuity with earlier trends in constitutional law despite changes in the Court's membership.

In Gelpcke v. Dubuque (1864), the Court overruled an Iowa supreme court decision holding that a city's nonpayment of municipal bonds, issued for a railroad that was never built, was constitutional under the state constitution. Although not expressly stated, the effective basis of the Court's decision seemed to be the Contract Clause of the Constitution. The case also may have illustrated the Court's belief that it could shape a federal common law of commerce, as in Swift v. Tyson (1842).

The Supreme Court also ruled against state power in People ex rel. Bank of Commerce v. Commissioner of Taxes (1863). In this case the Court considered a New York tax on bank stock, including federal government securities that were otherwise exempt from state taxation. Although Congress in 1862 passed an act declaring stocks, bonds, and other U.S. securities exempt from state taxes, the Court struck down the state tax on constitutional grounds. Yet the Court declined to decide the constitutionality of the Legal Tender Act of 1862. In Roosevelt v. Meyer (1863), it inexplicably held that it lacked jurisdiction to review a New York state court ruling favorable to the Legal Tender Act. It is not clear whether this decision, which was overruled in 1872, reflected unwillingness to tackle the controversial issue of national currency policy or was instead a flawed legal analysis of the Judiciary Act of 1780. (See Legal Tender Cases.)

The December 1864 term of the Supreme Court marked the end of the Taney era. While Congress debated and rejected a proposal to place a marble bust of the late Chief Justice Taney in the Supreme Court room in the Capitol, the Court under Chief Justice Chase disposed of a series of cases involving the illegal slave trade. In February 1865, John S. Rock was sworn in as the first African‐American attorney to be admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court. This event signified the emergence of racial equality as a major constitutional issue in the judicial history of the Reconstruction period that would soon engage the Court's attention.

See also History of the Court: Establishment of the Union.

Bibliography

David P. Currie , The Constitution in the Supreme Court: The First Hundred Years 1789–1888 (1985).
David M. Silver , Lincoln's Supreme Court (1956).
Carl B. Swisher , History of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 5, The Taney Period 1836–64 (1974).
Charles Warren , The Supreme Court in United States History, 2 vols (1926).

Herman Belz

Civil War PENSIONS

Norman Stein

The idea of veteran pensions is an old one, such pensions having been paid at least as far back as ancient Rome. In the United States, the first military pensions were paid to some disabled soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War. This pension program was originally paid for and administered by the states, until the creation of the new federal government in 1789 when responsibility gradually shifted to the new central government. In 1818 pensions were extended to impecunious veterans who had served at least nine months in the military during the Revolution, and in 1832 to all remaining living veterans of the War. Military pensions were also paid to disabled veterans (and the families of slain officers) of the War of 1812, the U.S. Mexican War, and the Indian wars. Ultimately, pensions based on military service alone were awarded to veterans of each of these wars.

The pension program for Union veterans of the Civil War was different, from its origins to its expansion into a massive old age support system some social scientists argue had important implications for social insurance in the twentieth century. What originally began as a limited regime of protections for soldiers, widows, and orphans, eventually morphed into a system of old age pensions for almost one third of the elderly population. The various Pension Acts for veterans of the Civil War also affected a range of social, economic, and political institutions, including the institution of marriage, the ascendancy of the Republican party as the dominant political party for half a century, the size of the peacetime federal government, and in some ways the beginnings of a modern regulatory state. The pension system also reflected national issues of race and class.

In 1861, shortly after the Civil War began, Congress, in large part to attract recruits to the military, enacted legislation providing pensions for soldiers who suffered war-related disabilities, as well as the widows and orphans of soldiers killed in action. Congress amended the law in 1862 to provide a maximum pension of $8 per month for total disability, with proportionately reduced awards for partial disability.

The same award was made for widows and orphans, although amendments to the law increased the allowance to widows by $2 per dependent child. Where a veteran left no widow or children, the law provided benefits to dependent mothers or sisters, and eventually, if there were no dependent mother or sister, dependent fathers and brothers.

The law was amended repeatedly in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. The amendments increased the generosity of the program, extended the program to veterans with disabilities that developed after the war but stemmed from wartime injuries, introduced finer distinctions between grades and specific types of disabilities, and tied the amount of the pension to the severity of the disability under this expanding matrix.

In 1890 Congress enacted a new law that paid pensions to any Union veteran of the Civil War who served for at least ninety days, was honorably discharged, and suffered from a disability, even if not war-related. In 1904 Theodore Roosevelt ruled that old age itself was a disability, basically transforming the system into a government pension system for all Civil War veterans. Three years later, in 1907, Congress legislatively endorsed this position in the Service and Age Act. Congress, in subsequent legislation during the first quarter of the twentieth century, increased pensions and tied the amount of the pension to the period of military service.

The last Civil War pensioner, Albert Woolson, who joined the Union Army as a seventeen-year-old in 1864, was collecting a monthly pension of $135.45 at the time of his death in 1956. And perhaps more remarkably, there were still nineteen dependents of Civil War veterans receiving benefits in the last years of the twentieth century. At its peak, the Civil War pension system consumed approximately 45 percent of all federal revenue and was the largest department of the federal government (other than the armed services). In addition, state pension systems were developed in the former Confederate states to provide pension and disability benefits to Confederate veterans.

For many historians and other social scientists, the Civil War pension system represents both a mirror of social and economic features of the United States between the Civil War and the turn of the century, and a bridge between an era of limited government and the regulatory state that emerged in the last seven decades of the twentieth century.

One question debated by historians is why the Civil War pension system expanded from a system of limited disability and survivor benefits into an old age entitlement program for Civil War veterans and dependent family members. Social scientists credit a number of reasons, but two seem most important: the first, was the political organizing ability of the veterans and their families, which emerged as special interest groups who engaged in lobbying and shaping public opinion. One of the groups, the Grand Army of the Republic, was national in scope and highly effective in advocating the interests of veterans and their families. The second reason was that the political parties competed for veteran votes and the Republican Party fashioned together a successful electoral coalition of Northern business interests and veterans of the Civil War.

The Civil War pension scheme attracted criticism in its time and after. The system attracted accusations of fraud and favoritism, bureaucratic incompetence, and class and racial bias. Some criticized veterans for greed and one of the enduring critiques of the program was that it transferred tax dollars to veterans regardless of need.

Theda Skocpal, a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard University, authored an important book that argued the Civil War pension system provided a structural model for a public system of old age support and also suggested that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries American citizens were willing to adopt a broad social insurance policy that veered from the liberal ideal of self-reliance and limited government. But Skocpal also argues that the Civil War pension system slowed U.S. progress toward adopting a comprehensive system of social insurance. Both public reaction to the shortcomings of the Civil War system and the cost of providing generous benefits aimed at a relatively narrow group of beneficiaries put the United States behind industrialized European nations in adopting social insurance schemes (and continues to leave Americans with a less comprehensive social insurance program).

The Civil War pension laws also created a large bureaucracy, of which doctors (who had to evaluate a veteran's disability) and lawyers (who were employed by claimants to contest denied claims) played an important part. Some scholars have suggested that this administrative system was an early harbinger of the modern regulatory state.

The Civil War pension legislation and its implementation provide insights into nineteenth century attitudes about race, class, disability, and family. Although the pension legislation was racially neutral and provided an important source of income to African American veterans and, as a result, contributed to the economic stability of some Northern African American communities, the administration of the pension laws also demonstrated racial bias, with African American veterans being denied benefits at greater rates than white veterans. Similarly, research suggests that officers and others of higher social class received preferential treatment. Interestingly, legal scholar Peter Blank has found that the pension administration favored some disabilities over others, and looked with relative disfavor at nervous disorders and infectious diseases. The pension system, by providing survivor benefits for widows and orphans, also led the government into defining what constituted acceptable families and gave government support to the idea of a nuclear family and traditional marriage.

See also: Bonus Bill; Veterans Preference Act of 1944.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blanck, Peter David, and Michael Millender. "Before Disability Civil Rights: Civil War Pensions and the Politics of Disability in America." In Alabama Law Review 52, no. 1 (2000).

Cott, Nancy. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Canbridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Frankel, Noralee. "From Slave Women to Free Women: The National Archives and Black Women's History in the Civil War Era." Government Archives (1997). <http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/summer_1997_slave_women.html.>

Glasson, William H. Federal Military Pensions in the United States, ed. David Kinley. New York: Oxford University Press.

Linares, Claudia. "The Civil War Pension Law." University of Chicago (2001). <http://www.cpe.uchicago.edu/publication/lib/pension_cpe.pdf>.

Shaffer, Donald R. "An Ambiguous Victory: Black Civil War Veterans from a National Perspective." <http://uwadmnweb.uwyo.edu/dshaffer/Hist4450Spring2000/B-Vets/blackvets.htm>.

Skocpal, Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Civil War, American (April 1861– April 1865) costing more than 600,000 American lives, the Civil War consolidated the Revolutionary War of 1776 by ensuring that the United States would remain a single republic rather than a collection of potentially independent states. The Civil War brought enormous changes to the United States, most notably in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery and gave citizenship to African Americans. The war also made use of several military innovations. Longer-range and more destructive ammunition, primarily the minié rifle bullet, made casualty rates much higher than in previous wars. The Civil War also was the first to make use of the draft and ironclad warships, and extensive use of rail transport and military telegraph lines, and it was first to be widely documented by photographers. Prompted by sectional disputes between slaveholding southern states and northern states, the Civil War began following the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, whose party was committed to free labor ideology. Rather than accepting Lincoln's leadership, seven southern states, led by South Carolina and comprising Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas elected to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States of America (CSA) in February 1861. The Confederacy elected Mexican War (1846–48) hero and former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis as their president, and began organizing an independent government modeled on the U.S. Constitution, with caveats guaranteeing slavery. On April 12, the Confederacy began fighting to assert its independence when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor. Soon after, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia joined the Confederacy.

Union commander Gen. Winfield Scott's strategic response was to blockade and encircle the Confederacy in a strategy dubbed the Anaconda Plan. Nevertheless, the first two years of fighting favored Confederate armies. Despite the superiority in men and supplies held by the Union's Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia led by Robert E. Lee won or dramatically stopped U.S. armies in a series of battles fought in northern Virginia and Maryland. Notable among these were the 1861 First Battle of Bull Run, in which southern armies won the war's first major contest; a series of dramatic raids conducted in the Shenandoah Valley by troops under Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson; the Seven Days' Battle (1862), in which Lee, at high cost, drove Union general George B. McClellan back from the Confederate capital at Richmond; the 1862 Second Battle of Bull Run, in which Lee virtually crushed Union armies fighting under John Pope; Antietam, that same year, where McClellan failed to capitalize on a costly victory that stopped Lee's advance into the heart of Maryland; and Fredericksburg (also 1862), which witnessed well-defended Confederates cutting down 13,000 Union troops with only 5,000 losses of their own.

While Lee stymied Union armies in the East, federal forces under Ulysses S. Grant chipped away at the South's western defenses. In February 1862 Grant launched joint army-navy attacks that took Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Kentucky and Tennessee, piercing the center of the Confederacy's western defenses. As Union armies began moving into the Confederacy from the West, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston counterattacked near Shiloh (1862) on the Tennessee River. Grant's unprepared troops suffered heavy casualties, but managed to repel the attack. The Union then began a long push into the South. The year 1863 proved crucial in many ways. After Antietam, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation stating that the federal government considered all slaves still in Confederate territory to be free, which went into effect on January 1, 1863. The proclamation had two important consequences. For many in the North it transformed the war into a crusade against slavery. It also dissuaded Britain from officially recognizing and aiding the Confederacy. That year, the United States accepted African American enlistments to the army for the first time since 1820. By war's end, over 179,000 African-American men served in the U.S. armed forces. the year 1863 also witnessed two of the most crucial Confederate military defeats. Lee attempted to bring the Union to negotiate a peace by making an offensive strike. Federal armies under Gen. George G. Meade stopped that advance in the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July—the war's largest and most consequential battle. In the west, on July 4, Grant took the city of Vicksburg, the Confederacy's last major stronghold on the Mississippi. In 1864, Lincoln promoted Grant to general-in-chief. As Grant pushed against Lee's armies toward the Confederate capital at Richmond, Gen. William T. Sherman assailed Atlanta and then conducted his infamous March to the Sea (1864–65). Aiming to undercut the Confederacy's ability to sustain warfare in terms of both material and morale, Sherman's forces cut a sixty-mile wide trail through Georgia from Atlanta to the Atlantic, earning him the longstanding enmity of many southerners, despite his own personal regard for the region and its people. These two offensives combined with a concerted Union press to shatter the Confederacy. The war effectively ended on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, Virginia. In something of an anticlimax, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston handed over the last Confederate army to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, on April 26. The Reconstruction that followed in its wake was fraught, a situation only made worse by Abraham Lincoln's death on April 15, 1865.

Civil War, the conflict (1861–65) between the Northern states which remained in the Union and the Southern states which seceded to form the Confederacy. The underlying causes became more pronounced after the Missouri Compromise (1820) in the hostility that developed from the two fundamentally different economic and social systems of the U.S. The South, with its large plantations, staple crops, and institution of slavery, inevitably came into conflict with the free industrial and commercial North. States'‐rights doctrines and tariff questions further complicated these differences. Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and others attempted solutions, but after the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas‐Nebraska bill, each side became more radical. Following Lincoln's election, the Southern states feared a hostile majority in Congress, and resorted to secession. The Confederacy was organized, South Carolina seized Fort Sumter (April 12, 1861), and the war began. Northern forces, beginning an advance on Richmond, the Confederate capital, were defeated in the first Battle of Bull Run (July 1861), although the Southerners failed to follow up this victory, while the North established a fairly successful blockade of Southern ports. In 1862 each side continued without decisive gains, Grant's forces taking much ground in the West, although at Shiloh (April 1862) he suffered severe losses. New Orleans was captured (May 1862), and the Union army had some success in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. McClellan launched the Peninsular Campaign to take Richmond, which ended in failure in the Seven Days' Battles (June–July, 1862) after Stonewall Jackson prevented McDowell from joining McClellan. Under Jackson and Lee, the Confederate forces were again victorious at Bull Run (Aug. 30, 1862). Lee was checked in his march northward at Antietam (Sept. 1862), but Burnside's Union army was stopped in its advance on Richmond at the Battle of Fredericksburg (Dec. 13, 1862). The Emancipation Proclamation was issued to take effect in January 1863, and the beginning of that year saw the death of Jackson at Chancellorsville (May 1863), where the new drive on Richmond was stopped. Lee then made a Northern campaign, which ended disastrously at Gettysburg (July 1863), the most decisive battle of the war. The South was split by Grant's capture of Vicksburg (July 4, 1863), Rosecrans's seizure of Tennessee, and Banks's victories in Louisiana, although in September the Confederates won the bloody battle of Chickamauga. In 1864 Grant became commander in chief of the Union forces, continuing in command despite tremendous losses in the Battle of the Wilderness (May 1864). Sherman captured Atlanta (Sept. 3, 1864) and began his devastating march to the sea. Meanwhile the Southern cruiser Alabama was defeated by the Kearsarge and the Confederacy was obviously doomed at sea and on land. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. A few days later Lincoln was assassinated, and the settlement of the effects of the war, the Reconstruction, fell into other hands.

A great many of the generals wrote memoirs, as did numberless plainer soldiers and other participants in the war. From the outbreak of hostilities the war began to generate a great variety of literature. In the beginning, poetry ranged from popular songs such as The Battle Hymn of Republic and Tramp, Tramp, Tramp of the Union and Maryland, My Maryland of the Confederacy to serious works like H.H. Brownell's Lyrics of a Day (1864) and War Lyrics (1866), Lowell's Biglow Papers, Second Series (1867), Melville's Battle‐Pieces (1866), Whitman's Drum‐Taps (1865), and Whittier's In War Time (1864) in the North, and Simms's War Poetry of the South (1866), gathering Hayne's Vicksburg—A Ballad and other such expressions of the Confederates.

Prisoner‐of‐War Camps, Civil War. Before 1861, Americans had never had to face the problem of internment of large numbers of captured enemy soldiers. British and Hessian soldiers had been exchanged or sent to farms on the frontier. The Civil War abruptly changed that situation. In four years of fighting, over 409,000 men became prisoners of war. That figure is at least four times more American soldiers captured than in all of the nation's other wars combined.

Neither side knew how to address the problem; neither made a concerted effort to do so. In place of badly needed attention and compassion were inexperience, clumsiness, and indifference. Suffering and the neglect of prisoners of war were present in both Union and Confederacy. Prison camp administrations were patchwork systems usually manned by second‐rate officials. Lack of resources was an impairment; so were inadequate facilities, overcrowded conditions, and general mismanagement. The few efforts at prisoner exchange during the war were bungled and short‐lived.

Of the 150 compounds established in the North and South, 25 could be termed major prisons or prison camps. Each had the same characteristics: poor food, lack of sanitation, often callous guards, and inadequate protection from the elements. Such ills produced epidemic outbreaks of sickness, malnutrition, mental depression, and—for thousands of helpless men—slow but certain death.

Totally divorced from the outside world, Civil War prisoners endured an unchanging routine. They arose from whatever bedding they had at dawn, answered roll call, and received something to eat. The rest of the day passed in boredom. A second meal came in late afternoon, along with another roll call. Then the men waited for some degree of sleep to blot out reality. Each succeeding day was the same.

No prison had sufficient medicines. Physicians were in short supply and not always attentive to enemy soldiers. Since many of the men had been captured because they were too wounded or sick to escape, and since prison life offered no curatives for recovery, death was a daily occurrence in every Civil War prison. In all, 56,000 cap‐tured soldiers perished in the crude compounds of the North and the South.

The two most infamous Civil War compounds went into operation in 1864, when prison authorities should have learned from mistakes and omissions earlier in the war. The South's Andersonville prison (officially known as Camp Sumter, Georgia) was the largest of all. It began receiving inmates before construction was completed. Some 52,300 Federal enlisted men were sent there; more than 13,200 perished from disease, exposure, and lack of medicines.

In the North, at a prison camp for Confederates at Elmira, New York, such scourges as diarrhea and pneumonia killed almost one‐fourth of the captured soldiers (of 12,123 inmates, 2,963 died) over the course of the prison's twelve‐month existence.

During and especially after the Civil War, each side pointed fingers of guilt at the other. Subsequently, hundreds of “memoirs of prison life” flowed from printing presses as soldiers (many seeking disability pensions) vied in converting questionable facts into dramatic fiction. As a consequence, no aspect of the bitter Civil War has triggered more accusations, more violent passions, and more unresolved controversy than the mistreatment of captured Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs.
[See also Civil War: Domestic Course.]

Bibliography

Clayton W. Holmes , The Elmira Prison Camp, 1912.
William B. Hesseltine , Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology, 1930; rep. 1962.
James I. Robertson, Jr. , The Scourge of Elmira, Civil War History, VIII (1962), pp. 184–201.
Lonnie R. Speer , Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War, 1997.

James I. Robertson, Jr.

Civil War, American (1861–65) War fought in the USA between the northern states (the Union) and the forces of the 11 southern states that seceeded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America (Confederacy). Its immediate cause was the determination of the southern states to withdraw from a Union that the northern states regarded as indivisible. The more general cause was the question of slavery, a well-established institution in the South but one which the northern abolitionists opposed. By the 1850s, slavery, abolition and states' rights had created insurmountable divisions between North and South. There was political polarization with the abolitionists forming the new Republican Party and those campaigning for the rights of southern states remaining in the Democratic Party. The 1860 election of a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, virtually assured southern withdrawal from the Union. The Unionists had superior numbers, greater economic power and command of the seas. The Confederates had passionate conviction and superior generals, such as Robert E. Lee and ‘Stonewall’ Jackson. The war began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The Union's first objective was to take the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, in the First Battle of Bull Run (July 1861). This campaign was unsuccessful, and the Confederates continued to be victorious with Lee winning the Peninsular Campaign (April–June 1862) and Jackson carrying off a brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah Valley (March–June 1862). The Confederates were also victorious at the Seven Days' Battles (June–July 1862) and the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 1862). However, Lee's army was checked by the strengthening Union troops (led by General George McClellan), in the Battle of Antietam (September 1862). The Union was defeated at the Battle of Fredericksburg (December 1862) under Ambrose Burnside, and at Chancellorsville (May 1863) under Joseph Hooker. The Union victory in the Battle of Gettysburg (June–July 1863) was a turning point. The Union Navy had blocked southern ports, thereby denying the Confederacy essential trade with Europe. The Union strategy was to divide the South by taking control of the Mississippi, Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. The first big Union victory was at Fort Donelson on the Tennessee River (February 1862) under the command of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant won a victory in the siege of Vicksburg (November 1862–July 1863), which, with the fall of Memphis (June 1862), gave Union troops control of the Mississippi. In 1864 Grant became supreme commander. He confronted Lee's army in the Wilderness Campaign (May–June 1864) and began the long siege of Petersburg, Virginia – the defence of which was vital to the survival of Richmond. Meanwhile, the Unionist General Sherman cut a devastating swathe across Georgia, burning Atlanta on the way. The Union victory at the battle of Five Forks blocked the retreat route for Confederate troops in Richmond. Petersburg fell two days later and Richmond was indefensible. The war ended with Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House village, Virginia in April 1865. The South was economically ruined by the war, and Reconstruction policies poisoned relations between North and South for a century.

Pensions, Civil War. Often considered a welfare laggard, the United States pioneered generous disability and old‐age benefits for Union veterans of the Civil War.This was a break with precedent, because paltry benefits were opened to surviving veterans of the Revolutionary War only in the 1830s. When the South seceded in 1861, however, the federal government needed to recruit an army without the capabilities of a central bureaucracy. To help recruit citizen‐soldiers, Congress in February 1862 promised pensions to those disabled “from causes which can be directly traced to injuries received or disease contracted while in military service.” Benefits were graded by rank; yet privates as well as officers were eligible, and family dependents of the dead could also apply for aid.

Although the Civil War left millions dead and disabled, pension expenditures initially peaked in the mid‐1870s, with less than 10 percent of veterans enrolled. Then Congress passed the 1879 Arrears of Pension Act, which promised cumulative pensions from the date of discharge if veterans could prove that later disabilities were service‐related. Tempted by lump sums often sufficient to finance new homes, tens of thousands discovered latent injuries. A growing backlog enabled U.S. commissioners of pensions to influence close elections by speeding up the processing of applications from swing states.

Responding to southern voters after 1876, Democrats (including the two‐time president Grover Cleveland) sought to limit expenditures and trim the rolls. Hard‐pressed former Confederate states had to help pay for Union pensions, yet they could afford only hardship aid for Confederate veterans and survivors. Meanwhile, Republicans competed to fund ever more help for the “saviors of the Union” from “surplus” federal revenues generated by protective tariffs.

After capturing both houses of Congress and the presidency in 1888, Republicans in 1890 passed the Dependent Pension Act. Henceforth anyone who had honorably served the Union for ninety days or more could be pensioned when unable to do manual labor. Pension administrators soon decided that veterans met this criterion at age sixty‐two. By 1910, some 90 percent of surviving Union veterans—more than a third of elderly men in the North—received benefits that were very generous by the international standards of the day. Expenditures dwindled as the old soldiers died, but as late as the mid‐1970s, pensions were still being paid to a few widows who, in their youth, had married aging Union veterans.
See also Confederate States of America; Grand Army of the Republic; Republican Party; Welfare, Federal.

Bibliography

William H. Glasson , Federal Military Pensions in the United States, 1918.
Theda Skocpol , Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 1992, Ch. 2, pp. 102–151.

Theda Skocpol

Draft Riots, Civil War. By late 1862, as Civil War casualties mounted in costly military campaigns, the patriotic fervor that had inspired many northern men to enlist was waning. The Emancipation Proclamation further eroded support for the war in some quarters. Accordingly, in March 1863, Congress passed the Conscription Act to draft men into military service. Racial animosity, dissatisfaction with the Abraham Lincoln administration, and labor unrest all helped fuel draft opposition. Most odious to many was the commutation clause, which enabled a draftee to avoid service by hiring a substitute or paying a $300 fee. Draft resistance erupted across the Middle West, but was concentrated in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. New England resistance was centered mainly in Boston, Vermont, New Hampshire. Violent opposition also broke out in the Pennsylvania coal regions.

The most serious outburst arose in July 1863 in New York City, where Irish American immigrants bitterly resented the draft and feared job competition from free blacks. Violence erupted on 13 July and continued for four days, as mobs attacked draft offices, public buildings, the homes of city officials and Republican party leaders, and African Americans. Many blacks were lynched and an African American orphanage was destroyed. The rioting ended only after Lincoln dispatched to New York City Union troops from General George Meade's army, which was pursuing the Confederates after the Battle of Gettysburg. Overall, the violence claimed at least 105 lives.

The draft riots had several aftereffects. Draft resistance continued, but on a lesser scale after the New York City riot. In 1864, Congress repealed the commutation clause. Federal authorities vigorously enforced later drafts, employing sufficient military force to quell any resistance. In politics, Tammany Hall, the Democratic party's New York City machine, arose from the ashes of the riots by balancing the interests of immigrants and workers with those of the conservative elite.
See also Civil War: Domestic Effects; Conscription; Lynching; Riots, Urban.

Bibliography

Adrian Cook , The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863, 1974.
Iver Bernstein , The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War, 1990.

Jonathan M. Berkey

American Civil War (1861–65) A war between the Northern (Union) and Southern (CONFEDERACY) states of the USA. It was officially known as the War of the Rebellion and usually called the War between the States in the South. Economic divergence between the industrialized North and the agricultural, slave-based economy of the South was transformed into political rivalry by the ABOLITIONISTS, and by the dispute over the expansion of slavery into the western territories. By the late 1850s, all efforts at compromise had failed and violence had begun with John BROWN's armed descent on Harper's Ferry (1859). South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860 in the wake of Abraham LINCOLN's victory in the presidential election of that year. When the war began with the bombardment of FORT SUMTER (1861), the newly established Southern Confederacy increased to eleven states under the presidency of Jefferson DAVIS.

The war itself is best considered as three simultaneous campaigns. At sea, the North held the upper hand, but the blockade imposed in 1861 took a long time to become effective. Virtually no cotton was exported. Massive naval expansion produced a blockade which helped to cripple the Confederate war effort. On land a series of engagements took place in the Virginia Campaigns, where the close proximity of the Union and Confederacy capitals, Washington and Richmond, and the military genius of General LEE enabled the Confederacy to keep superior Union forces at bay for much of the war. In the more spacious western regions, after a series of abortive starts, the North managed to split the Confederacy in the Vicksburg Campaign, by gaining control of the Mississippi. From here General GRANT moved through Tennessee in the Chattanooga Campaign, opening the way for the drive by SHERMAN through Georgia to the sea. This ruthless strategy, together with Lee's surrender to Grant at APPOMATTOX, brought the war to an end in April 1865. Over 600,000 soldiers died in the Civil War. While the immediate results were the salvation of the union and the abolition of slavery, the challenges of revitalizing the South and promoting racial justice and equality persisted.

SUBSTITUTES, CIVIL WAR

SUBSTITUTES, CIVIL WAR. No conscription in the North during the Civil War was absolute. The drafted man could always hire a substitute if he could afford it. Starting in 1862, the U.S. government allowed this escape from military service on the theory that, so long as each name drawn from the wheel produced a man, it made no difference whether the drafted person or one hired to take his place appeared for muster. The Conscription Act of 3 March 1863 legalized this method of draft evasion. Until the act of 24 February 1864, the conscript could choose between hiring a substitute or paying the government $300 as commutation of service. Thereafter, the government only permitted substitution, except for conscientious objectors. Furthermore, exemption by furnishing a substitute extended only until the next succeeding draft, at which point the principal again became liable. Immediately, the prices of substitutes rose far above the $300 to which the commutation clause had held them. For this reason, legal draft evasion became the prerogative of only the unusually well-to-do.

From the early days of the war, the Confederacy also allowed a limited substitution system. The first Confederate Conscription Act permitted substitutes from men not legally liable to service to the extent of one man a month in each company. The second conscription act made men previously furnishing substitutes again liable to serve, thus causing much dissension and legal action. By the end of 1863, the Confederacy had abolished the whole system. Scholars have never accurately compiled the number of substitutes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Geary, James W. We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991.

Madden, David, ed. Beyond the Battlefield: The Ordinary Life and Extraordinary Times of the Civil War Soldier. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Wert, Jeffry D. A Brotherhood of Valor: The Common Soldiers of the Stonewall Brigade, C.S.A., and the Iron Brigade, U.S.A. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Fred A.Shannon/a. e.

See alsoArmy, Confederate ; Army, Union ; Bounty Jumper ; Conscription and Recruitment .

American Civil War (1861–5), fought between the federal government of the United States and eleven southern confederate states, who asserted their right to leave the Union in response to growing demands for the abolition of slavery. Irishmen fought on both sides, but in far greater numbers (perhaps in excess of 140,000) for the Union, whose armies included several Irish units. This was probably due less to ideology than to the concentration of Irish settlement in the northern states that formed the Union heartland. While many distinguished themselves in battle, it should be noted that Irishmen as a national group were actually under‐represented among the combatants. They were also prominent in agitation against conscription, and were often hostile to black Americans, whom they saw as their rivals for employment. In the short term, Irish involvement in the war gave rise to the Fenian raids into Canada (1866), and provided military experience for some who subsequently returned to Ireland. Later it would be used to bolster the image of Irish‐Americans as belligerent defenders of freedom.

Neal Garnham

PRIZE CASES, CIVIL WAR

PRIZE CASES, CIVIL WAR. In 1863 the Supreme Court upheld President Abraham Lincoln's exercise, at the outbreak of the Civil War, of emergency powers not previously authorized by Congress. After the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln all but declared war, called for volunteers, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and blockaded various southern ports. Not until July did Congress retroactively legalize these executive measures. Meanwhile, under the presidential blockade certain merchant vessels were captured as prizes by the Union navy for attempting to run the blockade. The Supreme Court upheld the seizures on the grounds that a de facto state of war had existed since April.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Neely, Mark, Jr. The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Paludan, Phillip Shaw. The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994.

Martin P.Claussen/t. g.

See alsoBlockade Runners, Confederate ; Habeas Corpus, Writ of ; Sumter, Fort .

CIVIL WAR GENERAL ORDER NO. 100

CIVIL WAR GENERAL ORDER NO. 100, a code comprising 157 articles "for the government of armies in the field" according to the "laws and usages of war." By order of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, it was drawn up by Francis Lieber and a special board, and utilized by Union officers. The first code of its kind, it later formed the basis for many codes of military field law and for the conventions of the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907. Ironically, at the same time that governments began to institute formal codes to regulate military behavior, the practice of targeting civilian populations in wartime became ever more common.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lieber, Francis. Code for the Government of Armies in the Field as Authorized by the Laws and Usages of War on Land. New York: U.S. War Department, 1863.

FrankFreidel/a. g.

See alsoArrest, Arbitrary, during the Civil War ; Contraband of War ; Desertion ; Military Law ; Unconditional Surrender ; War Department .

MORTARS, CIVIL WAR NAVAL

MORTARS, CIVIL WAR NAVAL. Civil War naval mortars were heavy guns designed to throw shells with a high angle of fire; they were first built in 1862 for use in the New Orleans campaign. In April 1862 twenty mortars bombarded Forts Jackson and Saint Philip, the principal defenses below New Orleans, with thirteen-inch shells, allowing Adm. David G. Farragut's Union fleet to pass them. After the surrender of New Orleans, the flotilla ascended the Mississippi and bombarded Vicksburg, Mississippi, enabling Farragut's fleet to run past the city. During the siege of Vicksburg the following year, a mortar fleet bombarded the city for forty-two days prior to its surrender.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ryan, J. W. Guns, Mortars, and Rockets. New York: Brassey's Publishers, 1982.

Louis H.Bolander/c. w.

See alsoMississippi River ; Navy, Confederate ; Navy, United States ; New Orleans, Capture of ; Vicksburg in the Civil War .

Civil War, see irish civil war; confederate war.