The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded from the Union to preserve slavery in the United States. The South saw slavery as threatened because of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the growing abolitionist movement in the North. The war ended with Union victory, the dissolution of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery, freeing four million African Americans.
Decades of controversy over slavery came to a head when Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who opposed slavery's expansion, won the 1860 presidential election. Seven slave states in the South responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and forming the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy seized US forts and other federal assets in the South. The war began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina. A wave of enthusiasm for war swept over the North and South, as military recruitment soared. Four more Southern states seceded after the war began and, led by its president, Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy comprised eleven states, containing a third of the US population. Four years of intense combat, mostly in the South, ensued.
During 1861–1862 in the western theater, the Union made permanent gains, though in the eastern theater the conflict was inconclusive. The abolition of slavery became a Union war goal on January 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in rebel states to be free, applying to more than 3.5 million of the 4 million enslaved people in the country. To the west, the Union first destroyed the Confederacy's river navy by the summer of 1862, then much of its western armies, and seized New Orleans. The successful 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River, while Confederate general Robert E. Lee's incursion north failed at the Battle of Gettysburg. General Ulysses S. Grant's western successes led Lincoln to promote him to command of all Union armies in 1864.
Inflicting an ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports, the Union marshaled resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions. This led to the fall of Atlanta in 1864 to Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, followed by his March to the Sea, which culminated in his taking Savannah. The last significant battles raged around the ten-month siege of Petersburg, gateway to the Confederate capital of Richmond. The Confederates abandoned Richmond, and on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant following the Battle of Appomattox Court House, setting in motion the end of the war. Lincoln lived to see this victory but was shot by an assassin on April 14, dying the next day.
By the end of the war, much of the South's infrastructure had been destroyed. The Confederacy collapsed, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and four million enslaved black people were freed. The war-torn nation then entered the Reconstruction era in an attempt to rebuild the country, bring the former Confederate states back into the United States, and grant civil rights to freed slaves. The war is one of the most extensively studied and written about episodes in the history of the United States. It remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. Of continuing interest is the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The war was among the first to use industrial warfare. Railroads, the electrical telegraph, steamships, the ironclad warship, and mass-produced weapons were widely used. The war left an estimated 700,000 soldiers dead, along with an undetermined number of civilian deaths, making it the deadliest in American history. The technology and brutality of the Civil War foreshadowed the coming world wars.
Origins
The origins of the war were rooted in the desire of the Southern states to preserve the institution of slavery. Historians in the 21st century overwhelmingly agree on the centrality of slavery in the conflict—at least for the Southern states. They disagree on the North's reasons for refusing to allow the Southern states to secede.Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "A Book for Every Perspective: Current Civil War and Reconstruction Textbooks", Civil War History (2005) 51#3 pp. 317–324 The pseudo-historical Lost Cause ideology denies that slavery was the principal cause of the secession, a view disproven by historical evidence, including the seceding states' own secession documents. After leaving the Union, Mississippi issued a declaration stating, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world."
The principal political battle leading to Southern secession was over whether slavery would expand into the Western territories destined to become states. Initially Congress had admitted new states into the Union in pairs, one slave and one free. This had kept a sectional balance in the Senate but not in the House of Representatives, as free states outstripped slave states in numbers of eligible voters. Thus, at mid-19th century, the free-versus-slave status of the new territories was a critical issue, both for the North, where anti-slavery sentiment had grown, and for the South, where the fear of slavery's abolition had grown. Another factor leading to secession and the formation of the Confederacy was the development of white Southern nationalism in the preceding decades.John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (1981) The primary reason for the North to reject secession was to preserve the Union, a cause based on American nationalism.Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (2000)
Background factors in the run-up to the Civil War were partisan politics, abolitionism, nullification versus secession, Southern and Northern nationalism, expansionism, economics, and modernization in the antebellum period. As a panel of historians said in 2011, "while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war."Elizabeth R. Varon, Bruce Levine, Marc Egnal, and Michael Holt at a plenary session of the organization of American Historians, March 17, 2011, reported by David A. Walsh "Highlights from the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Houston, Texas" HNN online
Lincoln's election
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election. Southern leaders feared Lincoln would stop slavery's expansion and put it on a course toward extinction. His victory triggered declarations of secession by seven slave states of the Deep South, all of whose riverfront or coastal economies were based on cotton that was cultivated by slave labor.
Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, four months after his 1860 election, which afforded the South time to prepare for war. Nationalists in the North and "Unionists" in the South refused to accept the declarations of secession, and no foreign government ever recognized the Confederacy. The US government, under President James Buchanan, refused to relinquish the nation's forts, which the Confederacy claimed were located in their territory.
According to Lincoln, the American people had demonstrated, beginning with their victory in the American Revolution and Revolutionary War and subsequent establishment of a sovereign nation, that they could successfully establish and administer a republic. Yet, Lincoln believed, a question remained unanswered: Could the nation be maintained as a republic, with its government selected by vote of the people, in the face of internal attempts to destroy it or separate from it?
Outbreak of the war Secession crisis
Lincoln's election provoked South Carolina's legislature to call a state convention to consider secession. South Carolina had done more than any other state to advance the notion that a state had the right to nullify federal laws and even secede. On December 20, 1860, the convention unanimously voted to secede and adopted a secession declaration. It argued for states' rights for slave owners but complained about states' rights in the North in the form of resistance to the federal Fugitive Slave Act, claiming that Northern states were not fulfilling their obligations to assist in the return of fugitive slaves. The "cotton states" of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed suit, seceding in January and February 1861.
Among the ordinances of secession, those of Texas, Alabama, and Virginia mentioned the plight of the "slaveholding states" at the hands of Northern abolitionists. The rest made no mention of slavery but were brief announcements by the legislatures of the dissolution of ties to the Union. At least four—South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas—provided detailed reasons for their secession, all blaming the movement to abolish slavery and its influence in the North. Southern states believed that the Fugitive Slave Clause made slaveholding a constitutional right. These states agreed to form a new federal government, the Confederate States of America, on February 4, 1861.
They took control of federal forts and other properties within their boundaries, with little resistance from outgoing president James Buchanan, whose term ended on March 4. Buchanan said the Dred Scott decision was proof the Southern states had no reason to secede and that the Union "was intended to be perpetual". He added that "The power by force of arms to compel a State to remain in the Union" was not among the "enumerated powers granted to Congress". A quarter of the US army—the Texas garrison—was surrendered in February to state forces by its general, David E. Twiggs, who joined the Confederacy.
Referring to the seven Southern states that initially seceded, historian James M. McPherson wrote, "Slaves constituted 47 percent of the population of the Confederate states but only 24 percent in the upper South." He added, "In the four border states the proportion of slaves and slaveowners was less than half what it was in the eleven states that seceded." Eastern Tennessee and western Virginia also had less slavery and showed more support for the Union than the rest of the Confederacy. West Virginia became a new state in 1863, formed from 50 counties of Virginia, citing sectional differences and taxation, though half the counties were secessionist.Foner, Eric (2002). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. HarperCollins, pp. 38-39.
Even within Virginia and Tennessee, which had seceded, McPherson wrote, "The voters in 35 Virginia counties with a slave population of only 2.5 percent opposed secession by a margin of three to one, while voters in the remainder of the state, where slaves constituted 36 percent of the population, supported secession by more than ten to one. The thirty counties of east Tennessee that rejected secession by more than two to one contained a slave population of only 8 percent, while the rest of the state, with a slave population of 30 percent, voted for secession by a margin of seven to one."
As Southerners resigned their Senate and House seats, Republicans could pass projects that had been blocked. These included the Morrill Tariff, land grant colleges, a Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, the National Bank Act, authorization of United States Notes by the Legal Tender Act of 1862,Library of Congress: First Legal Tender Act Passed the end of slavery in the District of Columbia, and a ban on slavery in the territories. The Revenue Act of 1861 introduced an income tax to help finance the war.