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The American Civil War
The American Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, or simply the Civil War in the United States (see naming), was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 in the United States after several[3] Southern slave states declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "Confederacy" or the "South"). The states that remained were known as the "Union" or the "North". The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories.[4] Foreign powers did not intervene. After four years of bloody combat that left over 600,000 soldiers dead and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and the difficult Reconstruction process of restoring national unity and guaranteeing rights to the freed slaves began.
In the 1860 presidential election, Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, opposed the expansion of slavery into United States' territories. Lincoln won, but before his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln's inaugural address declared his administration would not initiate civil war. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession. Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. A peace conference failed to find a compromise, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates assumed that European countries were so dependent on "King Cotton" that they would intervene; none did and none recognized the new Confederate States of America.
Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter, a key fort held by Union troops in South Carolina. Lincoln called for each state to provide troops to retake the fort; consequently, four more slave states joined the Confederacy, bringing their total to eleven. The Union soon controlled the border states and established a naval blockade that crippled the southern economy. The Eastern Theater was inconclusive in 1861–62. The autumn 1862 Confederate campaign into Maryland (a Union state) ended with Confederate retreat at the Battle of Antietam, dissuading British intervention.[5] Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal.[6] To the west, by summer 1862 the Union destroyed the Confederate river navy, then much of their western armies, and the Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863, Robert E. Lee's Confederate incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. In the Western Theater, William T. Sherman drove east to capture Atlanta and marched to the sea, destroying Confederate infrastructure along the way. The Union marshaled the resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions, and could afford to fight battles of attrition through the Overland Campaign towards Richmond, the Confederate capital. The defending Confederate army failed, leading to Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. All Confederate generals surrendered by that summer.
The American Civil War was one of the earliest true industrial wars. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, and mass-produced weapons were employed extensively. The mobilization of civilian factories, mines, shipyards, banks, transportation and food supplies all foreshadowed World War I. It remains the deadliest war in American history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 750,000 soldiers[7] and an undetermined number of civilian casualties. Historian John Huddleston estimates the death toll at ten percent of all Northern males 20–45 years old, and 30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18–40.[8]
Causes of secession
Main articles: Origins of the American Civil War, Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War, and History of the United States
The causes of the Civil War were complex and have been controversial since the war began. The issue has been further complicated by historical revisionists, who have tried to offer a variety of reasons for the war.[9] Slavery was the central source of escalating political tension in the 1850s. The Republican Party was determined to prevent any spread of slavery, and many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican candidate, Lincoln, won the 1860 election. After Lincoln had won without carrying a single Southern state, many Southern whites felt that disunion had become their only option, because they felt as if they were losing representation, which hampered their ability to promote pro-slavery acts and policies.[10]
Slavery
Main article: Slavery in the United States
The slavery issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United States, or a state-based property system protected by the Constitution.[11] The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment—to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction.[12] To slave holding interests in the South, this strategy was perceived as infringing upon their Constitutional rights.[13] Slavery was being phased out of existence in the North and was fading in the border states and urban areas, but was expanding in highly profitable cotton districts of the south.
A 1863 photo of a whipped slave Gordon, distributed in the North during the war.[14]
Despite compromises in 1820 and 1850, the slavery issues exploded in the 1850s. Causes include controversy over admitting Missouri as a slave state in 1820, the acquisition of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and the status of slavery in western territories won as a result of the Mexican–American War and the resulting Compromise of 1850.[15] Following the U.S. victory over Mexico, Northerners attempted to exclude slavery from conquered territories in the Wilmot Proviso; although it passed the House, it failed in the Senate. Northern (and British) readers recoiled in anger at the horrors of slavery as described in the novel and play Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.[16] Irreconcilable disagreements over slavery ended the Whig and Know Nothing political parties, and later split the Democratic Party between North and South, while the new Republican Party angered slavery interests by demanding an end to its expansion. Most observers believed that without expansion slavery would eventually die out; Lincoln argued this in 1845 and 1858.[17]
Meanwhile, the South of the 1850s saw an increasing number of slaves leave the border states through sale, manumission and escape. During this same period, slave-holding border states had more free African-Americans and European immigrants than the lower South, which increased Southern fears that slavery was threatened with rapid extinction in this area.[18] With tobacco and cotton wearing out the soil, the South believed it needed to expand slavery.[19] The Southern states had advocates arguing to reopen the international slave trade to populate territory that was to be newly opened to slavery.[20] Southern demands for a slave code to ensure slavery in the territories repeatedly split the Democratic Party between North and South by widening margins.[21]
To settle the dispute over slavery expansion, Abolitionists and proslavery elements sent their partisans into Kansas, both using ballots and bullets. In the 1850s, a miniature civil war in Bleeding Kansas led pro-South Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan to attempt a forced admission of Kansas as a slave state through vote fraud.[22] The 1857 Congressional rejection of the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution was the first multi-party solid-North vote, and that solid vote was anti-slavery to support the democratic majority voting in the Kansas Territory.[23] Violence on behalf of Southern honor reached the floor of the Senate in 1856 when a Southern Congressmen, Preston Brooks, physically assaulted Republican Senator Charles Sumner when he ridiculed prominent slaveholders as pimps for slavery.[24]
The earlier political party structure failed to make accommodation among sectional differences. Disagreements over slavery caused the Whig and "Know-Nothing" parties to collapse. In 1860, the last national political party, the Democratic Party, split along sectional lines. Anti-slavery Northerners mobilized in 1860 behind moderate Abraham Lincoln because he was most likely to carry the doubtful western states. In 1857, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision ended the Congressional compromise for Popular Sovereignty in Kansas. According to the court, slavery in the territories was a property right of any settler, regardless of the majority there. Chief Justice Taney's decision said that slaves were "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect". The decision overturned the Missouri Compromise which banned slavery in territory north of the 36°30' parallel.[25]
Members of slave-owning planter aristocracy dominated society and politics in the South.
Republicans denounced the Dred Scott decision and promised to overturn it; Abraham Lincoln warned that the next Dred Scott decision could threaten the Northern states with slavery. The Republican party platform called slavery "a national evil", and Lincoln believed it would die a natural death if it were contained.[26] The Democrat Stephen A. Douglas developed the Freeport Doctrine to appeal to North and South. Douglas argued, Congress could not decide either for or against slavery before a territory was settled. Nonetheless, the anti-slavery majority in Kansas could stop slavery with its own local laws if their police laws did not protect slavery introduction.[27] Most 1850 political battles followed the arguments of Lincoln and Douglas, focusing on the issue of slavery expansion in the territories.[28]
But political debate was cut short throughout the South with Northern abolitionist John Brown's 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry Armory in an attempt to incite slave insurrections. The Southern political defense of slavery transformed into widespread expansion of local militias for armed defense of their "peculiar" domestic institution.[29] Lincoln's assessment of the political issue for the 1860 elections was that, "This question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present."[30] The Republicans gained majorities in both House and Senate for the first time since Democrats in the 1856 elections, they were to be seated in numbers which Lincoln might use to govern, a national parliamentary majority even before pro-slavery House and Senate seats vacated.[31] Meanwhile, Southern Vice President, Alexander Stephens, in the Cornerstone Speech, declared the new confederate "Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution."[32] The Republican administration enacted the Confiscation Acts that set conditions for emancipation of slaves prior to the official proclamation of emancipation.[33] Likewise, Lincoln had previously condemned slavery and called for its "extinction."[34]
Considering the relative weight given to causes of the Civil War by contemporary actors, historians such as Chandra Manning argue that both Union and Confederate fighting soldiers believed slavery to be the cause of the Civil War. Union men mainly believed the war was to bring emancipation to the slaves. Confederates fought to protect southern society, and slavery as an integral part of it.[35] Addressing the causes, Eric Foner would relate a historical context with multidimensional political, social and economic variables. The several causes united in the moment by a consolidating nationalism. A social movement that was individualist, egalitarian and perfectionist grew to a political democratic majority attacking slavery, and slavery's defense in the Southern pre-industrial traditional society brought the two sides to war.[36]
Here is Part 1 of the information of the civil war! Enjoy
The American Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, or simply the Civil War in the United States (see naming), was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 in the United States after several[3] Southern slave states declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "Confederacy" or the "South"). The states that remained were known as the "Union" or the "North". The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories.[4] Foreign powers did not intervene. After four years of bloody combat that left over 600,000 soldiers dead and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and the difficult Reconstruction process of restoring national unity and guaranteeing rights to the freed slaves began.
In the 1860 presidential election, Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, opposed the expansion of slavery into United States' territories. Lincoln won, but before his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln's inaugural address declared his administration would not initiate civil war. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession. Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. A peace conference failed to find a compromise, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates assumed that European countries were so dependent on "King Cotton" that they would intervene; none did and none recognized the new Confederate States of America.
Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter, a key fort held by Union troops in South Carolina. Lincoln called for each state to provide troops to retake the fort; consequently, four more slave states joined the Confederacy, bringing their total to eleven. The Union soon controlled the border states and established a naval blockade that crippled the southern economy. The Eastern Theater was inconclusive in 1861–62. The autumn 1862 Confederate campaign into Maryland (a Union state) ended with Confederate retreat at the Battle of Antietam, dissuading British intervention.[5] Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal.[6] To the west, by summer 1862 the Union destroyed the Confederate river navy, then much of their western armies, and the Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863, Robert E. Lee's Confederate incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. In the Western Theater, William T. Sherman drove east to capture Atlanta and marched to the sea, destroying Confederate infrastructure along the way. The Union marshaled the resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions, and could afford to fight battles of attrition through the Overland Campaign towards Richmond, the Confederate capital. The defending Confederate army failed, leading to Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. All Confederate generals surrendered by that summer.
The American Civil War was one of the earliest true industrial wars. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, and mass-produced weapons were employed extensively. The mobilization of civilian factories, mines, shipyards, banks, transportation and food supplies all foreshadowed World War I. It remains the deadliest war in American history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 750,000 soldiers[7] and an undetermined number of civilian casualties. Historian John Huddleston estimates the death toll at ten percent of all Northern males 20–45 years old, and 30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18–40.[8]
Causes of secession
Main articles: Origins of the American Civil War, Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War, and History of the United States
The causes of the Civil War were complex and have been controversial since the war began. The issue has been further complicated by historical revisionists, who have tried to offer a variety of reasons for the war.[9] Slavery was the central source of escalating political tension in the 1850s. The Republican Party was determined to prevent any spread of slavery, and many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican candidate, Lincoln, won the 1860 election. After Lincoln had won without carrying a single Southern state, many Southern whites felt that disunion had become their only option, because they felt as if they were losing representation, which hampered their ability to promote pro-slavery acts and policies.[10]
Slavery
Main article: Slavery in the United States
The slavery issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United States, or a state-based property system protected by the Constitution.[11] The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment—to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction.[12] To slave holding interests in the South, this strategy was perceived as infringing upon their Constitutional rights.[13] Slavery was being phased out of existence in the North and was fading in the border states and urban areas, but was expanding in highly profitable cotton districts of the south.
A 1863 photo of a whipped slave Gordon, distributed in the North during the war.[14]
Despite compromises in 1820 and 1850, the slavery issues exploded in the 1850s. Causes include controversy over admitting Missouri as a slave state in 1820, the acquisition of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and the status of slavery in western territories won as a result of the Mexican–American War and the resulting Compromise of 1850.[15] Following the U.S. victory over Mexico, Northerners attempted to exclude slavery from conquered territories in the Wilmot Proviso; although it passed the House, it failed in the Senate. Northern (and British) readers recoiled in anger at the horrors of slavery as described in the novel and play Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.[16] Irreconcilable disagreements over slavery ended the Whig and Know Nothing political parties, and later split the Democratic Party between North and South, while the new Republican Party angered slavery interests by demanding an end to its expansion. Most observers believed that without expansion slavery would eventually die out; Lincoln argued this in 1845 and 1858.[17]
Meanwhile, the South of the 1850s saw an increasing number of slaves leave the border states through sale, manumission and escape. During this same period, slave-holding border states had more free African-Americans and European immigrants than the lower South, which increased Southern fears that slavery was threatened with rapid extinction in this area.[18] With tobacco and cotton wearing out the soil, the South believed it needed to expand slavery.[19] The Southern states had advocates arguing to reopen the international slave trade to populate territory that was to be newly opened to slavery.[20] Southern demands for a slave code to ensure slavery in the territories repeatedly split the Democratic Party between North and South by widening margins.[21]
To settle the dispute over slavery expansion, Abolitionists and proslavery elements sent their partisans into Kansas, both using ballots and bullets. In the 1850s, a miniature civil war in Bleeding Kansas led pro-South Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan to attempt a forced admission of Kansas as a slave state through vote fraud.[22] The 1857 Congressional rejection of the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution was the first multi-party solid-North vote, and that solid vote was anti-slavery to support the democratic majority voting in the Kansas Territory.[23] Violence on behalf of Southern honor reached the floor of the Senate in 1856 when a Southern Congressmen, Preston Brooks, physically assaulted Republican Senator Charles Sumner when he ridiculed prominent slaveholders as pimps for slavery.[24]
The earlier political party structure failed to make accommodation among sectional differences. Disagreements over slavery caused the Whig and "Know-Nothing" parties to collapse. In 1860, the last national political party, the Democratic Party, split along sectional lines. Anti-slavery Northerners mobilized in 1860 behind moderate Abraham Lincoln because he was most likely to carry the doubtful western states. In 1857, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision ended the Congressional compromise for Popular Sovereignty in Kansas. According to the court, slavery in the territories was a property right of any settler, regardless of the majority there. Chief Justice Taney's decision said that slaves were "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect". The decision overturned the Missouri Compromise which banned slavery in territory north of the 36°30' parallel.[25]
Members of slave-owning planter aristocracy dominated society and politics in the South.
Republicans denounced the Dred Scott decision and promised to overturn it; Abraham Lincoln warned that the next Dred Scott decision could threaten the Northern states with slavery. The Republican party platform called slavery "a national evil", and Lincoln believed it would die a natural death if it were contained.[26] The Democrat Stephen A. Douglas developed the Freeport Doctrine to appeal to North and South. Douglas argued, Congress could not decide either for or against slavery before a territory was settled. Nonetheless, the anti-slavery majority in Kansas could stop slavery with its own local laws if their police laws did not protect slavery introduction.[27] Most 1850 political battles followed the arguments of Lincoln and Douglas, focusing on the issue of slavery expansion in the territories.[28]
But political debate was cut short throughout the South with Northern abolitionist John Brown's 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry Armory in an attempt to incite slave insurrections. The Southern political defense of slavery transformed into widespread expansion of local militias for armed defense of their "peculiar" domestic institution.[29] Lincoln's assessment of the political issue for the 1860 elections was that, "This question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present."[30] The Republicans gained majorities in both House and Senate for the first time since Democrats in the 1856 elections, they were to be seated in numbers which Lincoln might use to govern, a national parliamentary majority even before pro-slavery House and Senate seats vacated.[31] Meanwhile, Southern Vice President, Alexander Stephens, in the Cornerstone Speech, declared the new confederate "Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution."[32] The Republican administration enacted the Confiscation Acts that set conditions for emancipation of slaves prior to the official proclamation of emancipation.[33] Likewise, Lincoln had previously condemned slavery and called for its "extinction."[34]
Considering the relative weight given to causes of the Civil War by contemporary actors, historians such as Chandra Manning argue that both Union and Confederate fighting soldiers believed slavery to be the cause of the Civil War. Union men mainly believed the war was to bring emancipation to the slaves. Confederates fought to protect southern society, and slavery as an integral part of it.[35] Addressing the causes, Eric Foner would relate a historical context with multidimensional political, social and economic variables. The several causes united in the moment by a consolidating nationalism. A social movement that was individualist, egalitarian and perfectionist grew to a political democratic majority attacking slavery, and slavery's defense in the Southern pre-industrial traditional society brought the two sides to war.[36]
Here is Part 1 of the information of the civil war! Enjoy
Hey Hey Hey! Whats shakin' bacon'?