Chapter 14 DCUSH
Gettysburg and Vicksburg
1. "Fighting Joe" Hooker brought the Army of the Potomac into central Virginia to confront Lee. 2. The Union soldiers under command of General George G. Meade, met at Gettysburg. The Battle of Gettysburg remains the largest battle ever fought on the North American Continent. On July, 3, Confederate forced, led by Major General George E. Pickett's division, marched across an open field toward Union forces. 3. On the same day Lee began his retreat from Gettysburg, the Union achieved a victory at the Battle of Vicksburg. Grant moved to the Mississippi towards Vicksburg. The confederacy demanded the central Mississippi River. On July 4, Vicksburg surrendered. The entire Mississippi Valley laid in the hands of the Confederates.
Slavery and the War
1. As the Confederacy set slaves to work as military laborers and blacks began to escape to Union lines, the policy of ignoring slaves unraveled. 2. In 1861-1862, slaves and their families ran towards Union lines and abandoned their plantations.
Wartime Reconstruction in the West
1. At Davis Bend, Mississippi. sure of the cotton plantations of Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph, the emancipated slaves saw the land dived among themselves. 2. A system of government was established that allowed the former slaves to elect their own judges and sheriffs.
The Black Soldier
1. Black soldiers did not receive equal treatment; they were placed in segregated units, sometimes abused by white officers, they received lower pay, assigned to labor rather than combat, they could not rise in rank of commissioned officer until the end of the war. 2. One of the first acts of the federal government to recognize this principle was the granting of retroactive equal pay to black soldiers early in 1865.
Lincoln's Decision
1. Emancipation Proclamation- warned that unless the South laid down its arms by the end of 1862, he would decree abolition.
Military Strategies
1. General Robert E. Lee, the leading southern commander, was a brilliant battlefield tactician who felt confident of his ability to fend off attacks by larger Union forces. He hoped that the north would eventually recognize the south's independence by weakening it. 2. Richmond, Virginia was the Confederate capital. 3. When Lincoln went to adopt the policy of emancipation, he acknowledged that to win the war, the Union must make the institution that lay at the economic and social foundation of southern like a military target.
The War in the West
1. In April, naval forces under Admiral David G. Farragut steamed into New Orleans, giving the Union control of the South's largest city and the rich sugar plantation parishes to its south and west.
The Public and the War
1. In the Union, an outpouring of lithographs, souvenirs, sheet music, and pamphlets issued by patriotic organizations and the War Department reaffirmed northern values, tarred the Democratic Party with the brush of treason, and accused the South of numerous crimes against Union soldiers and loyal civilians.
The War in the East, 1862
1. McClellan lead his army into Virginia where they confronted the smaller Army of Northern Virginia under the command of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston. 2. Seven Days campaign- a series of engagements in June 1862 on the peninsula south of Richmond, Lee blunted McClellan's attacks and forced him to withdraw to the vicinity of Washington, D.C. 3. In August 1862, Lee again emerged victorious at the second Battle of Bull Run against Union forced under the command of General John Pope.
The First Modern War
The war became a conflict of society against society
Victory at Last
1. Sherman and his army marched on their way to Georgia, destroying railroads, buildings, and all the food and supplies they could not use. 2. The thirteen amendment abolished slavery throughout the entire Union and introduced the word slavery in the Constitution for the first time.
Enlisting Black Troops
1. The 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, a company of free blacks from throughout the North commanded by River Gould Shaw, a young reformer from a prominent Boston family. On July 1863 were attacked on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. They helped to dispel widespread doubts about blacks ability to withstand the pressures of the Civil War Battle.
The War in American History
1. The Civil War guaranteed the Union's permanence, destroying slavery, and shifting power in the nation from the south to he north.
The Emancipation Proclamation
1. The Emancipation Proclamation only effected the areas that the Union controlled. It did not apply to the border state slaves. 2. For the first time, black soldiers were allowed to fight in the Union Army. 3. The Emancipation was immediate, not gradual, and did not offer compensation to slave holders for their loss of property.
Government and the Economy
1. The Homestead Act spurred agricultural development. It offered 160 acres of free public land to settlers in the West. 2. The Morrill Land Grant College Act assisted the states in establishing agricultural and mechanic colleges. 3. The Chinese built the transcontinental railroad, which ran from Omaha, Nebraska, to San Francisco. This railroad expanded the national market, facilitated the spread of settlement and investment in the West, and heralded the doom of the Plains Indians.
The War Begins
1. The Union led the army of Potomac (the main northern force in the East) toward the confederate capital, only to be turned back by southern forces. 2. McClellan succeeded in welding his men into a superb fighting force. He was a Democrat, and hoped that compromise might end the war without large-scale loss of life or a weakening of slavery.
The Technology of War
1. The battle between the Union vessel, Monitor, and the Confederate, Merrimac, in 1862 was the first demonstration of the superiority of ironclads. 2. The introduction of the telegraph along with observation balloons and even hand grenades and submarines were introduced. 3. Medical care remained primitive, diseases such as measles, dysentery, malaria, and typhus swept through army camps, killing more men than combat.
A New Financial System
1. The government also borrowed more than $2 billion by selling interest-bearing bonds, thus creating an immense national debt. They also printed $400 million worth of paper money, called greenbacks. Congress then started a system of nationally chartered banks, which were required to purchase government bonds. 2. The government was now forever strengthened
Steps toward Emancipation
1. The most uncompromising opponents of slavery before the war, abolitionists and radical Republicans, quickly concluded that the institution must become a target of the Union war effort. 2. Congress prohibited the army from returning fugitive slaves. 3. The Second Confiscation Act- liberated slaves of disloyal owners in Union occupied territory, as well as slaves who escaped to Union lines.
The Inner Civil War
1. The south found itself increasingly divided. 2. Southern white males were allowed to provide a substitute for going to war, and because of the accelerating disintegration of slavery, it also exempted one white make for every twenty slaves on a plantation.
Leadership and Government
1. The southern government failed to find an effective way of utilizing the South's major economic resource, cotton. 2. The overproduction of cotton drove the price down, and led to a worldwide crisis.
Economic Problems
1. The war left countless farms, plantations, businesses, and railroads in ruins. The economic crisis was unavoidable for the South. 2. The planter-dominated Confederate Congress proved unwilling to levy heavy taxes that planters would have to pay. 3. Impressment- Confederate Congress seized fame good supply to supply the army, paying with worthless confederate money.
Black Soldiers for the Confederacy
1. The war undermined not only slavery, but also the proslavery ideology. "If slaves make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong."
Mobilizing Resources
1. There were no national banking system, no tax system capable of raising the enormous funds needed to finance the war, and not even accurate maps of the southern states. 2. Lincoln proclaimed a naval blockade of the south, part of the Anaconda Plan, which aimed to strangle the South economically. 3. The Union army eventually became the best-dad and best-supplied, while the Southern armies were suffering from acute shortages.
Women and the Confederacy
1. Women were left alone on farms and plantations and forced to manage business affairs and discipline slaves. 2. As in the North, women mobilized to support soldiers in the field and stepped out of their traditional spheres to run commercial establishments and work in arm factories.
The Two Combatants
The north's army was composed largely of farm boys, shopkeepers, artisans, and Urban workers, while the south's consisted mostly of non-slaveholding small farmers