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The Civil War (1861-1865) broke out in the early hours of April 12, 1861, when Confederate cannons opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. The battle over the fort, which had become a symbol for both North and South, was both an end and a beginning. The assault marked the conclusion of years of spiraling hostility and suspicions between the North and South and of a series of escalating political, legal, and even physical altercations over the question of slavery. Slavery had been a point of contention since the inception of the United States, with the founders arguing over it in the debates over both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In the interest of building the nation, however, they agreed to compromises that left the question of what to do about slavery to another generation. From that point until the 1840s, the matter stood, simmering, on the back burner.

Reasons For The Civil War

The Mexican War gave the subject new urgency. Defeated, Mexico in 1848 ceded half a million square miles of territory to the United States (including the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah; most of New Mexico and Arizona; and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, and Wyoming). Now the nation would have to decide whether—or what parts of—this new territory would be free or slave. Aside from the abolitionists, who were considered a radical fringe group, few people in the North disputed slavery in the states where it already existed because the Constitution protected the peculiar institution there. Congress, however, had the power to dictate whether the territories would be free or slave.

Thus the 1850s became a time of increasing hostility and suspicion between North and South as the nation wrestled with the issue of slavery in the territories. A new party, the Republicans, formed on the platform of opposing the expansion of slavery into the territories. By the time Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, the sectional divisions had grown so great that many Southerners refused to believe the president-elect when he said that he was interested in eliminating slavery only in the territories. Seven Southern states seceded in the months after Lincoln’s election and declared themselves the Confederate States of America. Four more would leave the Union and complete the Confederacy after the attack on Fort Sumter.

Over the years, historians have blamed a number of forces for secession—including the industrializing North versus the rural South, cultural differences between the sections, and myopic and self-serving political leader-ship—but since the 1960s most historians have come to agree that while those factors may have contributed to secession, the fundamental cause was slavery.

Bloody Battles

After the attack on Fort Sumter, people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line enthusiastically greeted the news of war. The common belief on both sides was that this would be a 90-day war. The first notable battle came July 21, 1861, at Manassas, Virginia, about 20 miles west of Washington, D.C. The battle was a Confederate rout that sent picnicking observers from the capital and green Union troops alike flying back to Washington. This loss would haunt most of the upper command of the Army of the Potomac for the rest of the war, imbuing them with a defeatist attitude that only Ulysses S. Grant was able to shake in 1864.

General Grant first came to the fore in early 1862 with major wins at Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. His victory at Shiloh, Tennessee, in April was the first harbinger of how costly the war was going to be, however. After nearly losing the field on April 6, Grant battled back the next day. Casualties (killed, wounded, missing, and captured) on both sides approached 24,000. The toll was the highest in the history of the hemisphere, but by the end of the war Shiloh would rank as only the seventh bloodiest battle.

Robert E. Lee was appointed commander of the Virginia forces in June 1862 after General Joseph E. Johnston was seriously wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines. Lee quickly took control of what he now called the Army of Northern Virginia and unleashed it on the Army of the Potomac in the Seven Days’ Battles. Two months later he again scored a searing victory against the Northerners at a second encounter at Manassas (also known as Second Bull Run). From there, Lee began to move into Maryland. He saw this as an opportunity to pull the occupying enemy out of Virginia and to allow his hungry troops to live off the Northern countryside. He clashed again with the Yankees on September 17 at Antietam, a ferocious battle that remains the single bloodiest day in American history, with about 23,000 casualties.

Antietam was a draw, but Lincoln claimed it as a victory—one that gave him an opportunity to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that had been sitting in his desk drawer since July. For the first year of the war, Lincoln believed the South held a significant number of Unionists who would rise up against the government of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. As the war proceeded, however, Lincoln learned he was wrong. Unwilling to abolish slavery early in the war, Lincoln came to see emancipation as a way to strike at the heart of the Confederacy: Freedom for the slaves would deprive the South of its labor force and give the North an additional pool from which to draw soldiers and laborers for its own armies. Moreover, emancipation promised to keep the European powers, France and England, from formally recognizing the Confederacy and therefore kept them out of the war. It is impossible to know how European intervention might have affected the war’s outcome, but the assistance the French provided the Patriots during the American Revolution suggests that neutrality in this war was an important development in favor of the North. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued as a war measure, went into effect January 1, 1863. Slavery would be permanently abolished in 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

The winter of 1862-1863 was a dismal one for the Union. Lee crushed the Yankees at Fredericksburg in December. A month later the Army of the Potomac tried to move around Lee but got stuck in the mud and had to turn back. Grant’s efforts to gain Vicksburg, Mississippi, “the Gibraltar of the West,” were fruitless. The one bright spot for the Union was the Battle of Stones River, at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, over the New Year’s holiday.

Lee had more in store for the bluecoats. In early May 1863, he staged his most audacious victory, at Chancellorsville, Virginia, defeating a Union army nearly twice the size of his own. This success came with tremendous cost for the rebels, however. After a night reconnaissance, General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson—more beloved in the South even than Lee at that time—was shot by his own jittery troops as he approached his lines. He died eight days later.

Tide Turns Against Confederates

Lee took advantage of his win at Chancellorsville to move into the North again, this time into Pennsylvania. This again would be a chance to move the Union army out of Virginia and allow his own men to forage off the North’s bounty. It is not known where Lee intended to go, but when an advance column on July 1 bumped into Union cavalry on the west side of Gettysburg, Lee decided to fight. His decision on the third day of the battle to send thousands of men across about 1,300 yards of open ground against an entrenched enemy was suicidal. In fifty minutes, Lee suffered about 50 percent casualties, including three brigadier generals (James L. Kemper, Lewis A. Armistead, and Richard B. Garnett). Major General Isaac R. Trimble was badly wounded and had his leg amputated. The three days of battle would be the most costly of the war, claiming 51,000 casualties, and Lee, who favored offensive warfare, would spend the rest of the war on defense.

More bad news came for the Confederacy. On July 4, the day after Gettysburg ended, Grant finally succeeded in taking Vicksburg. Now the Mississippi River was entirely open to the Federals, and the Confederacy was cut in half.

Grant had emerged as the North’s long-sought hero general, and when Lincoln promoted him to command all the armies in March 1864, many in the war-weary North thought that victory was certain and would come soon. They were wrong. Grant went on the attack, engaging Lee in a series of bloody battles in the spring of 1864, losing 64,000 men in six weeks. The fighting came to a halt at Petersburg, Virginia, where the two sides settled in for a siege that would last nine months.

Public sentiment turned on Grant and soured on Lincoln, too, as General William T. Sherman stalled outside of Atlanta and General Nathaniel Banks was turned back from an effort to move into Texas. Many people in the North were “wild for peace,” as one Republican politico said. Lincoln would not accept peace without the dual conditions of reunion and emancipation. Davis had just one requirement: independence. The two leaders were at loggerheads.

In the South, food shortages had plagued the Confederacy since 1862, and people at home began to starve the following year. Desertion became a problem for the Southern armies as men drifted home to help their families. By the summer of 1864, when Lincoln’s political fortunes tanked, many Southerners pinned their hopes for victory less on their armies’ winning than on Lincoln losing in the fall elections.

Beginning Of The End

Like many others in the North—Republicans and Democrats—Lincoln was certain his bid for re-election would fail. Buoyant Democrats met at the end of August, pronounced the war a failure, and called for an immediate cessation of hostilities. But two days after the convention ended, Sherman took Atlanta, and Northerners were suddenly convinced the war was nearly won. Riding the tide of good feeling, Lincoln won by a landslide.

Just after the election, Sherman set out on his march across Georgia. His goal was to destroy the Southern civilians’ continuing will to wage war. Moving to Savannah in a 60-mile-wide swath, he succeeded. Meanwhile, the rebel army that had been in Atlanta moved toward Nashville, hoping to draw Sherman north. The effort failed disastrously when the Federals decimated the army on November 30 at Franklin, Tennessee. From this point on, Lee’s was the only viable army remaining in the Confederacy.

From Savannah, Sherman turned north in January 1865 and began a devastating march through South Carolina. Union soldiers unleashed their wrath on the people they held responsible for starting the war. Sherman continued to move north, ultimately intending to hook up with Grant and squeeze Lee in a pincer movement. Grant, meanwhile, was busy cutting all of Lee’s supply lines. On April 2, Lee decided to move to the west. Deprived of its military protection, Richmond, the capital, quickly fell.

With Grant in pursuit, Lee’s starving, ragged, and depleted army headed southwest. The chase lasted a week, until Grant cut Lee off at Appomattox Court House. There the two men signed a surrender that for all practical purposes ended the war that had claimed 620,000 lives (although fighting would go on for several weeks thereafter in other theaters). Clearly, Union victory was not inevitable. Lincoln’s tenacious commitment to victory, even if it cost him the presidency, was a key factor in the North’s success. Another critical factor was the willingness of generals such as Sherman, Phil Sheridan, and especially Grant to press the war ruthlessly on Confederate armies and civilians, even—in Grant’s case—at the cost of their own men’s lives. While one cannot discount the industrial, financial, and manpower advantages the North had over the South, ultimately the men in blue defeated the men in gray.

The last casualty of the war was Lincoln, who was shot in a theater on April 14—Good Friday—by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer. Lincoln died the next morning. Standing at his bedside, his secretary of war said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Bibliography:

Glatthaar, Joseph T. 1985. The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns.New York: New York University Press.
Grimsley, Mark. 1995. The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press.
McPherson, James M. 2001. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction. 3rd ed. Boston: McGraw Hill.
McPherson, James M. 2002. Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam. New York: Oxford University Press.
Weber, Jennifer L. 2006. Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North. New York: Oxford University Press.