The American Civil War, 1861-1865

Reid Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317882404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The American Civil War caused upheaval and massive private bereavement, but the years 1861-1865 also defined a great nation.This book provides a concise introduction to events from the secession to the end of the war. It focuses on

• the military progress of the war
• Union and Confederate politics
• social change - particularly the emancipation of North American slaves

The social history associated with the war is dealt with alongside the familiar military and political events. This inclusive approach allows the reader to consider equally the history of men and women, blacks and whites in the conflict. It deals with both the Union and the Confederacy, integrating the latest literature on the war and society into a clear account. The book concludes with an assessment of emancipation, the rebuilding of the economy, and the war's consequences.An array of primary documents supports the text, together with a chronology, glossary and Who's Who guide to key figures.

Part One
Background

Chapter One
Introduction: The Problem

In 1861, former United States Army officer William Tecumseh Sherman lived in Pineville, Louisiana, where he worked as the head of the newly-established Louisiana Seminary of Learning and Military Academy. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and the secession of South Carolina, Louisiana seceded from the Union, joined the new Confederacy, and seized federal arsenals within the state. When war between the Confederacy and the Union appeared inevitable, the Louisiana Seminary broke up. The students and faculty would join the Confederate army; Sherman would return to the North and fight for the Union. In a last meeting with a fellow professor, Sherman warned him that southerners had no idea what they were doing, that no agricultural people could defeat a mechanized people, and that the North would fight in earnest. When it was time, however, for Sherman to make his formal farewell to the students and faculty, he discovered himself unable to speak. All he could do was touch his hand to his heart and say, ‘You are here.’

* * *

Civil War historians have the habit of pointing to the war’s death toll as a sign of its importance. The figures are daunting - an estimated 620,000 dead, almost as many American dead as in all other wars put together. (There is a kind of deceit built into these figures, as Americans fought on both sides of the Civil War; still, the estimated 320,000 Union dead would be impressive enough on their own.) Almost one in five white male southerners of military age died in the war; northern deaths - an estimated six percent - were a far lower proportion but still the highest percentage of deaths the United States has suffered in a war. Furthermore, about 275,000 soldiers on each side were maimed.

Lest this grisly catalogue somehow continue the romanticization of the war, we should remember that disease killed about two-thirds of these men. Diarrhea and dysentery - which is diarrhea with the presence of blood in the stool - killed as many soldiers as all the gunshots, saber-cuts, and cannon fire combined. The soldier of the era was less likely to die in a spectacular charge than lying in his own filth until dehydration put an end to him.

Sometimes the consequences of a war do come largely from its carnage and attendant horrors; one thinks of the First World War. But very few historians have considered the impact that all those deaths had on the Civil War generation. Its importance is more often summarized by its results: the preservation of the Union and the end of slavery. Emancipation was the single most revolutionary event in American history. Unfortunately, the war failed to resolve another fundamental issue for the United States: the question of race, racial conflict, and the institutions and culture of white supremacy.

Historians, however, have been too eager to attribute more to the Civil War than even it merits. Changes in governmental structure, economic development, the status of women and minorities, American ideas and literature, and many more have been credited to the war. In his masterful The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, however, J. Matthew Gallman finds more continuity than change in the North. Even in the revolutionized South, historians have been able to trace significant continuities between the old order and the new.

How much of postwar American development to attribute to the war is one of the many questions fundamental to Civil War history. Other questions include the war’s place in the history of warfare, why the Confederacy lost and the Union won, the unfolding of emancipation, what the war reveals about northern and southern society. The war was more than a matter of brave men killing other brave men - it involved the homefront, the economy, the political system, the Constitution, the diplomatic arena, it affected women as well as men. Many of the issues of the period - warfare and violence, the sovereignty of nations, and matters of race - are not safely in the past, to be taken down and admired and put back on the shelf where they can’t hurt us. Finally, that which William Faulkner called the ‘eternal verities of the human heart’ were with us then as much as now.

The number of questions brought to the Civil War for answer seems endless. They are best summed up by the nonsensical, inevitable, heartfelt question that underlies most Civil War history: what did the Civil War mean? One should follow the poets perhaps, and announce ‘a war doesn’t mean, it is.’ To look for the meaning of the Civil War is to return to providential history. Abraham Lincoln was only the best known American of the Civil War generation to encourage a providential explanation, and his Second Inaugural Address is its most famous statement.

The Almighty has His own purposes. Woe unto the world because of offences, for it must needs be that offences come, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh. If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of these offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern there any departure from those Divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as it was said three thousand years ago, so, still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

Faced with the magnitude of the Civil War and its repercussions, it was impossible that Americans of the mid-nineteenth century would fail to look to God for its meaning. And even today some find only in the notion of providential history a cause commensurate with the consequences.

Chapter Two
Origins of the Civil War

Secession

If we choose, we can trace the origins of the secession crisis to one of the most famous years in colonial history, 1619. That was when a Dutch manof-war sold ‘20 odd Negars’ to the colony of Virginia, although we will never know if these Africans were enslaved for life or not. While choosing this year has the appropriate sweep for a crisis that was indeed predicated on so much of America’s past, picking 1619 would be facile. That Dutch man-of-war has too often been portrayed as the serpent in the American Eden. It took several generations for slavery to become established in Virginia; given the strength of slavery in the Sugar Islands, it was unlikely that slavery would not spread to the mainland of British North America. Furthermore, all of the thirteen colonies that declared independence from Britain in 1776 recognized slavery. It would be surprising if they had not, since, as David Brian Davis has shown, slavery is so nearly ubiquitous throughout time that the real historical question is how antislavery and emancipation arose in the western world during the eighteenth century [6].

The American Revolution itself could be considered the best starting point for a study of the secession crisis. Confederates justified secession by the Constitution but they also claimed the right of revolution, whereupon Unionists argued that the United States, by winning the War for Independence, had created the states themselves. During the Revolutionary period the North began the process of gradual emancipation that led to the conflict between free-labor and slave-labor states. But the Revolutionary generation failed to commit the new United States to universal freedom; nor was the continued existence of slavery sufficient to prevent the union of all thirteen states. While Americans like to believe that the Revolution was somehow inherently antislavery, it led to the creation of the world’s largest slaveholding republic. Furthermore, while most northerners and indeed many southerners of 1861 insisted that the Revolutionary War and the Constitution had created a ‘perpetual Union,’ Kenneth Stampp has shown that this belief originated not with the generation of 1776 but in the nineteenth century [32].

Southern secessionists and Unionists North and South had profoundly different ideas about the origins of the United States. Secessionists argued that the Constitution created the nation upon its ratification by the states that were party to it. It was a compact among the states and if some states failed to honor it, that failure relieved other states of its obligations. Unionists looked toward the Revolutionary War rather than the Constitution. Without the efforts of the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, there would have been no sovereign states to ratify the Constitution; the nation had created the states.

Perhaps the origins of the Civil War are best looked for in the nineteenth century, which witnessed the capitalist transformation of the United States, the growth of nationalism throughout the western world, and a new sense of religious commitment in many Americans. Certainly the newly invigorated antislavery movements came from the religious fervor of the early nineteenth century.

In the middle of the eighteenth century some Europeans and Americans began questioning the enslavement of Africans, challenging first the African slave trade and then the institution of slavery itself. Three strands of not-entirely compatible beliefs influenced this shift. Radical Christians, particularly Quakers and Methodists, saw slaveholding as sinful, a perpetual act of war. Enlightenment thinkers held that slavery conflicted with the natural rights of man. Finally, an emerging capitalist argument condemned slavery as inefficient.

Emancipation was an international movement. As Latin American countries gained independence from Spain, they freed their slaves. France abolished slavery in the French West Indies - although Napoleon reinstated it. In 1833, the British abolished slavery in the British West Indies. By the time of the Civil War, the United States was one of the four largest remaining slaveholding societies in the western world.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had also witnessed the abolition of slavery in states north of Maryland. The gradual emancipation that followed the Revolution was gradual indeed; its course can be mapped in terms of dollars and cents. States where slavery provided only a small proportion of overall wealth passed laws freeing those born slaves not now but sometime in the future. So slavery continued to exist in many of these states right up till Thirteenth Amendment - although New Jersey, with an Orwellian strategy of doublespeak, renamed its slaves ‘servants for life.’ Emancipation stopped, however, south of Pennsylvania. While the issue might be raised-Virginia considered emancipation as late as the 1830s - states whose prosperity was based on slavery retained the institution albeit with sighs and handwringing that the proslavery generation to come would find embarrassing.

The generation that began the process of emancipation still worried about the proper disposition of African Americans. In 1816, Henry Clay and others founded the American Colonization Society, designed to ‘return’ to Africa black Americans, most of whom had been born in the United States. This meddling with Africa created Liberia, an African-American country modeled on Sierre Leone and sadly marred by assumptions of American superiority, but it had little impact on slavery in the United States. However, colonization remained a possible avenue to many white Americans; up until his death, Abraham Lincoln himself had leanings toward colonization.

By the 1820s, free African Americans in the North had formed at least fifty antislavery societies that demanded an immediate end to slavery and recognition of the rights of African Americans to remain in the United States. Not surprisingly, black abolitionists tended to be more militant than white ones and more willing to advocate the use of violence.

The Second Great Awakening, a widespread evangelical movement of the early nineteenth century, rejuvenated antislavery among white Americans. Convinced that slavery was a sin, not a social problem, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison called not for gradual emancipation but for an immediate end to slavery. Abolitionists hoped to convert all Americans, including slaveholders, to a belief in slavery’s sinfulness. The more radical among them also embraced the idea of equal rights for African Americans.

Abolitionists called the means by which they thought they must achieve their goals ‘moral suasion.’ One reason that they objected to slavery was that it was maintained by violence; that reasoning also made them reluctant to turn to the government to abolish slavery, as governments also rely on force. Thus, they initially relied more on reforming human souls than human laws. They engaged in a propaganda war against slavery, which was as notable for its invective against slaveholders and the South as it was for its charity toward the enslaved.

It is unlikely that slaveholders would have been receptive to abolitionist doctrine in any case. In the generation before the Civil War, the Old South developed a well-articulated, cogent proslavery ideology, one which was spread by writers and professors but most particularly by ministers, the intelligentsia of the South. Southerners argued that all great societies, whether ancient Egypt, classical Athens and Rome, biblical Israel, or England at the time of the Magna Carta, rested on coerced labor. Beyond claiming that the Bible justified slavery, they maintained that slavery was part of the divine plan for the redemption of Africa. As Mitchell Snay has shown, proslavery divines attempted to make slavery sacred. To war on slavery was, some southerners held, to war on God [30].

While the abolition movement continued through the Civil War, many antislavery advocates found it impossible to stick to its anti-political sentiments. By the 1830s, political abolition had made its appearance. The Liberty Party, formed in 1839, ran its first presidential candidate, James G. Birney, in 1840. He received only 7,000 votes - one-third of one percent of the total number of votes cast.

Pure abolitionists had warned those considering politics that the political process would inevitably lead to a dilution of their stance on slavery. What emerged as the most effective antislavery strategy was the idea of Free Soil. Free Soil attacked slavery, particularly its expansion, as a threat to the independence and economic success of white Americans. The problem with slavery, according to this line of argument, was that it placed small farmers in competition for the land with wealthy slaveholders. Thus, if Americans wanted to reserve the West for honest labor hoping to rise, they must keep slavery out. In some cases, some advocates of Free Soil also remarked on what they perceived as another advantage of keeping slavery out of the Western territories - keeping African Americans out.

The concept of Free Soil was closely linked to Free Labor. Free Labor ideology may be viewed as capitalist ideology for workers and smallholders, but it was also a transformation of traditional republicanism. Where republicanism had placed economic independence as ‘the greatest good’, Free Labor ideology emphasized upward mobility. But the goal of this mobility - to become a farmer employing young men who would rise in their time - can hardly be equated with the aggressive industrial capitalism that, partially created by it, followed the Civil War.

The party that founded itself around Free Soil mainly served as a vehicle for the political aspirations of ex-President Martin van Buren. When he ran for president in 1846, van Buren received a healthy ten percent of the votes cast, hardly enough to make the Free Soil Party politically successful, but markedly more than the Liberty Party and its more aggressive antislavery policy had received.

The doctrine of Free Soil spread in response to the policies of the Polk administration. If judged by the fulfillment of his political goals, James K. Polk was perhaps the single most successful president in American history; he was certainly the last American president of vigor until Abraham Lincoln took office. A Democrat, Polk ran for the presidency promising to resolve boundary disputes between the United States and Great Britain in the northwest, and the United States and Mexico in the southwest; one slogan of his campaign, referring to the former dispute, was ‘Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!’

Despite the bellicose slogan, Polk sensibly compromised with Britain, and the Canadian-American border in the west was established at the 49th parallel. Polk had no interest in entering a war the United States was unlikely to win. He had great interest, however, in entering a war he thought he could not lose, and so deliberately provoked a war with Mexico. ‘Mr. Polk’s War’ led to the American capture of Mexico City, a resolution in favor of the United States of the Texas-Mexico border, and the acquisition of much of the southwest. Having so brilliantly served ‘manifest destiny,’ Polk refused to run for re-election and died shortly after leaving the presidency.

Like most other American wars, the Mexican War created great dissension within the United States. Besides the moral outrage created by America starting a war against a weaker neighbor, northerners raised questions about the war’s purpose. Polk, they noted, had compromised the northern border, letting Canada take good land away from free American farmers. But where slavery desired to expand, Polk chose war. Henry David Thoreau wrote his ‘Civil Disobedience,’ an essay that later influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, in opposition to the Mexican War, and other northerners proclaimed the war as simply a war for slavery.

This widespread perception created particular problems for northern Democrats. After all, it was a Democratic president who stood accused of having put southern interests ahead of northern ones. In August 1846, a northern Democratic Congressman, David Wilmot, offered an amendment to an appropriations bill, saying that should any territory be acquired from the ongoing war with Mexico, it would remain closed to slavery.

Up until the Wilmot Proviso, both parties had worked hard and generally successfully to keep the issue of slavery out of national politics for a generation. The issue of the expansion of slavery had been considered closed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The so-called Gag Rule practically had kept antislavery petitions out of Congress from 1836 until 1844. But when David Wilmot introduced his amendment opposing slavery in any new territories, emotions that had been held just below the surface by Congressmen and other politicians exploded into protests, counter-protests, name-calling, and abuse. Northerners said that they had submitted too often to the South on the issue of slavery; southerners responded that perpetual northern insinuations about the immorality of slavery were offensive and that they had the same constitutional rights to bring their property into federal territories as did any other Americans.

Party allegiances were ignored when the House of Representatives voted on the Wilmot Proviso, and the northern majority passed the amendment. But in the end the Polk administration, calling on all the resources of Democratic Party discipline, defeated the measure. Nonetheless, the dominant issue of nation...