XII.

The Civil War

A.

The South Secedes

White Southerners fully realized what had happened: National politics now pitted the North against the South, and the North had a solid and growing majority. The South would never again control the federal government or see it controlled by friendly Northerners. Many saw no alternative to seceding from the Union.

Southerners justified secession with what was called the compact theory. This theory held that the Constitution had created not a perpetual union but a compact between independent states that retained their sovereignty. The compact could be broken in the same way that it had been created: with state conventions called for that purpose. By this means South Carolina seceded from the Union in late December 1860. By February 1 (before Lincoln’s inauguration) six more states from the Deep South had left the Union.

Northerners—including President Buchanan, Stephen Douglas, and other Democrats—denied the right of secession. The more lawyerly among them reminded the South that the Constitution was written “to form a more perfect Union” than the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution had stated that “the union shall be perpetual.” Thus secession was a legal impossibility. And in practical terms, Northerners argued, secession would be a fatal disaster to the American republic. Republics had a history of splitting into smaller parts and descending into anarchy. Secession, Lincoln argued, was revolution. Many Southerners agreed and claimed that they were exercising their sacred right to revolt against oppressive government.

Congress tried to come up with compromise measures in early 1861, but there was no way of compromising in the argument over secession. The seven states of the lower South (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) formed themselves into the Confederate States of America. Their Constitution was nearly identical to the Constitution of the United States, although it affirmed state sovereignty, guaranteed slavery, and limited the president to a single six–year term.

In his inaugural address, Lincoln was conciliatory without compromising on secession. He also hinted that the national government would use force to protect military garrisons in the Confederate states—in particular, Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. When he tried to resupply the garrison (which had moved to the stronger Fort Sumter), the South Carolina militia fired thousands of artillery rounds into the fort, forcing its surrender. With that, the Civil War began.

With the beginning of the war, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded and joined the Confederacy. Unionist legislative majorities kept the remaining slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, and Missouri from joining the rebel states. Meanwhile the western counties of Virginia seceded from that state when Virginia seceded from the Union and became the new state of West Virginia. Thousands of men from these border states, however, traveled south and joined the Confederate Army.

B.

North vs. South

On paper, the North possessed overwhelming military superiority over the South. The North had a free population of about 22 million. The South had a population of 9 million, including almost 4 million slaves. The North was a modern industrial power; the South was overwhelmingly rural. The North possessed nine–tenths of the nation’s industrial capacity, four–fifths of its bank capital, and three–fourths of its taxable wealth. The North financed 60 percent of its war effort through the sale of bonds in its prosperous region. Its paper currency inflated by only 80 percent during the whole war. The South, on the other hand, had to finance the war by printing paper money that inflated 9,000 percent in four years.

Yet the South had advantages as well. To succeed, the South did not have to invade and conquer the North. The South had only to prevent the North from invading and conquering the Confederacy. In a similar situation during the American Revolution, the British had far greater military superiority over the Americans than the Union possessed over the Confederacy, but the British failed to subdue the American revolutionaries. Many predicted that the Union would fail as well. The South had only to prolong the war until the North gave up and went home. In addition, the South’s economic backwardness was an advantage: Northern armies had to operate in hostile territory in which transportation and communications were very difficult. Finally, improved weapons (most notably rifled muskets that were accurate at more than 300 yards) gave a lethal advantage to entrenched defenders over opponents who attacked them across open ground. Union soldiers did most of the attacking.

Differing objectives of North and South and the topography of the contested ground helped determine the nature of the war. In the west, Northern armies used the Mississippi and Tennessee rivers (navigable streams that ran into the South) to capture Confederate territory and to control the river system. By the spring of 1863 the Union controlled all of the Mississippi River except a Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, Mississippi. That city fell in July, and the Confederacy was cut in half (see Campaign of Vicksburg).

In northern Virginia, however, the South defended land with Chesapeake inlets and east–west rivers that the Union had to cross. In this theater the South also had General Robert E. Lee, an almost mystically skilled commander who constantly outthought his attackers and forced them to assault him under bad conditions. On two occasions, Lee invaded Northern territory. He suffered defeats at the Battle of Antietam (in Maryland) in 1862 and the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863. For the remainder of the war he fought defensively. General Ulysses S. Grant took control of the Union Army opposed to Lee in early 1864 and attacked Lee that spring. In horrific battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor (all in northern Virginia), Grant took heavy casualties before trapping and besieging Lee at Petersburg, south of Richmond, Virginia.

At the same time, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman marched from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Atlanta, Georgia. After a monthlong siege, he captured and burned Atlanta. While Atlanta and Petersburg were besieged, Northern voters reelected Lincoln in 1864 in an election that was regarded as a referendum on the war. The South had succeeded in avoiding defeat and in turning the contest into a war of attrition. But it had not, as Southerners had hoped, broken the North’s will to continue fighting.

While Grant and Lee faced each other at Petersburg, Sherman left Atlanta and set out across country to Savannah, Georgia, destroying everything in his path that was of military value and much that was not (see Sherman’s March to the Sea). Sherman then turned north, burned the South Carolina capital at Columbia and kept moving into North Carolina. Before Sherman could join Grant, Lee’s army fled Petersburg. Grant caught him at Appomattox, and Lee surrendered. At a cost of 360,000 Union dead and 260,000 Confederate dead, the United States had been preserved.

C.

The Emancipation Proclamation

At first, the Union and the Confederacy fought only over the question of secession. The leaders of both sides wanted to avoid talking about slavery—which all of them knew was the root cause of the war. Southerners did not present the war as a defense of slavery for two reasons. First, most white Southerners owned no slaves and might not fight to protect slavery. Second, the South was trying to win recognition and help from Britain and France—neither of which would have supported a war for slavery. The North included many abolitionists, but it also included Democrats and border–state slaveholders who would fight for the Union but not for abolition.

As the war dragged on, however, even Northern anti–abolitionists came to see slaves as a great economic and military asset for the South. Slaves grew most of the South’s food and performed work that freed white Southerners for military service. At the same time, thousands of slaves made the issue of slavery unavoidable by abandoning their masters—even those in the border states who were Unionists—and fleeing to Union lines. Union Army commanders called these escaped slaves contrabands (captured property). As the number of contrabands grew, President Lincoln proposed a gradual, compensated emancipation of slaves in border states. Lincoln hated slavery on moral grounds. But he could justify emancipation only as a military necessity in the war to save the Union.

In a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, issued after the Northern victory at Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln declared that slaves in all states that remained in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be “forever free.” The proclamation exempted pro–Union border states and parts of the Confederacy already under Union occupation, and it was carefully worded as a measure to assist the North in preserving the Union. But it transformed the Union Army into an army of liberation—fighting to end slavery as well as to preserve the Union.

Blacks confirmed their emancipation by enlisting in the Union Army. The North resorted to conscription in 1863 and gladly accepted volunteers from among freed slaves. Blacks were first used as support troops and were paid less than white soldiers, but beginning in 1864 they became combatants serving at equal pay. In January 1865 Congress passed the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery forever. It was ratified and became part of the Constitution in December 1865.

D.

Results of the Civil War

The Civil War finally established the United States as a nation–state. Secession and state veto power had been recurring questions from the beginning of government under the Constitution. Americans before the Civil War spoke of the United States as a plural noun. Walt Whitman, the great poet of the Union, declared in the prewar years that “the United States need poets.” Since the Civil War the United States has been a singular noun (The United States is …). Thus at the highest constitutional levels, the Founders’ Latin motto E Pluribus Unum (“From many, one”) finally became a reality.

However, the unification of the country went further than most Northerners had wanted. The enormous government debt incurred during the war, followed by the postwar occupation of the South, created a central government more powerful than even the most nationalistic Americans had imagined before the war. The many had indeed become one, but only under a national government that would have frightened most of the Founding Fathers.

The Civil War had long-term economic and social results as well. The South was the theater of war, and the physical destruction of that region was enormous. White Southerners lost their plantation labor system and their huge investment in slaves. Egyptian and Indian cotton had entered world markets during the war, and American cotton never regained its prewar dominance. The South remained the poorest region of the United States for a very long time.

The Northeast’s economic dominance was secured by the war, and—although historians debate this point—the war seems to have sped Northern economic development. Finally, the status of the trans–Mississippi West (the great prize in the argument between North and South) was settled on Northern terms. In 1862 Republicans and Northern Democrats passed the Homestead Act, which gave free government land to settlers if they turned the land into farms (see Homestead Laws). In the same year Congress subsidized private companies that built a railroad from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California. The same Congress, in the Morrill Land–Grant College Act, gave huge amounts of federal land to state governments for the purpose of establishing state universities. Southerners had blocked similar bills for many years. With the South out of Congress, Northerners imposed their blueprint for Northern–style family farms, public education, and market society upon the West.

Disfranchised groups often saw their positions improve as a result of the war. Irish and German immigrants had experienced (and returned) the hostility of native–born Americans in the decades before the war. About one in four Union soldiers was an immigrant, and their help in defeating the South temporarily eased anti–immigrant feeling.

Northern women saw new possibilities open up during and after the war. In wartime they often took jobs previously done by men on farms and in factories, and thousands served in the Union nursing corps. Partly as a result, postwar women’s political and reform groups were larger and more militant than the groups that preceded them.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, the Civil War was a watershed in the history of African Americans. The war permanently ended slavery. At the same time, it raised questions about the economic, social, and political place of African Americans in the United States. Those questions have been near the center of American public life ever since, providing the strongest evidence that E Pluribus Unum is a contested possibility and not an established fact of American history.