History Test 3 Chapter 14
Wartime reconstruction in the west
A very different rehearsal for reconstruction, involving far larger area and population than the sea island, took place in Louisiana and Mississippi Valley. After the capture of Vicksburg, the union army establish regulations for plantation labor. Military authorities insisted that the emancipated slaves must sign labor contracts with plantation owners who took an oath of loyalty. But unlike before the war, the laborers would be paid wages and provided with education, physical punishment was prohibited, and their families were safe from disruption by sale. Neither Side was satisfied with the new labor system. Blacks resented having to resume working for whites and being forced to sign labor contracts. Planters complain that their workers were insubordinate. But only occasionally did army officer seek to implement a different version of freedom. At Davis Bend, Mississippi, site of the cotton plantations of Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph, The emancipated slaves saw the land divided among themselves. In addition, a system of government was established that allowed the former slaves to elect their own judges and sheriffs.
Victory at last
After Lincolns reelection, the war hastened to its conclusion. In November 1864, Sherman and his army of 60,000 set out from Atlanta on their march to the sea. Cutting a 60 mile wide swath through the heart of Georgia, they destroyed railroads, buildings, and all the food and supplies they could not use. His aim, Sherman Road, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inner most recess, and make them fear and dread us. Here was a modern war and all its destructiveness , Even though if you civilians were physically harmed. In January 1865, after capturing Savannah, Sherman moving to South Carolina, bringing even greater distraction. On January 31, 1865, congress approved the 13th amendment, Which abolished slavery throughout the entire union and in doing so introduced the word slavery into the constitution for the first time. In March, and his second inaugural address, Lincoln called for reconsiliation ; With malice toward none, with charity for all, let us, bind up the nations wounds . Yeah he also leveled a harsh judgment on the nations past. Perhaps Lincoln suggested, God had brought on the war to punish the entire nation, not just the south, for the sin of slavery. And if God willed that the war continue until all the wealth created by 250 years of slave labor had been destroyed, and every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, this too would be an act of justice.
The two combatants
Almost any comparison between union and confederacy seemed to favor the union. The population of north and the oil border slave states number 22,000,000 in 1860, whereas only 9 million persons lived in the confederacy, 3.5 million of them slaves. in manufacturing, railroads mileage, and financials resources, the union for outstripped its opponent. On the other hand, the union confronted by far the greater task. To restore the shatter nation, it had to invade and conquer an area larger then Western Europe. Moreover, Confederate soldiers were highly motivated fighters, defending their homes and families. On both sides, the outbreak of war stirred powerful feelings of patriotism. Recruits rush to enlist, expecting a short, glorious war. Later, as enthusiasm waned, both size resorted to a draft. By 1865, more than 2 million men had served in the union army and 900,000 in the confederate army. Each was a cross-section of a society; the Norths was composed largely of farmboys, shopkeepers, artisans, and urban workers, while the south consisted mostly of non-slave holding small farmers, with slave owners dominating the officer corps.
The public and the war
Another modern feature of the Civil War was that both sides employed a vast propaganda effort to mobilize public opinion. 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 south of numerous crimes against Union soldiers and loyal civilians. Comparable items appeared in the confederacy. At The same time, the wars brutal realities were brought home with unprecedented immediacy to the public at large. War correspondent accompanied the armies, and newspapers reported the results of battles on the following day and quickly published long lists of casualties. The infant or of photography carried images of war into millions of American living rooms.
Victory at last continued
April 1865 brought some of the most momentous events in American history. On April 2, Grant finally broke through Lee's lines at Petersburg forcing the army of northern Virginia to abandon the city and leaving Richmond defenseless. The following day, union soldiers occupied the southern capital. On April 4, headless of his own safety, Lincoln walk the streets of Richmond accompanied only by a dozen sailors. At every step he was besieged by former slaves, some of him fell on their knees before the embarrassed president, who urged them to remain standing. On April 9, realizing that further resistance was useless, Lee surrendered at Appomattox courthouse, Virginia. Although some Confederate unions remain in the field, the Civil War was over. Lincoln did not live to savor victory . On April 11, and what proved to be his last speech, he called publicly for the first time for limited black suffrage in the south. Three days later, while attending a performance at Ford's theater in Washington DC, The president was mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth, one of the nations most celebrated actors. Lincoln died the next morning. A train carry the presidents body to its final resting place in Illinois on a winding 1600 mile journey that illustrated how tightly the railroad now bound the northern states. Grieving crowds line the train route, and Solem processions carried us presidents and body to lie in state in major cities so that mourners could pay their respects. It was estimated that 300,000 persons passed by the coffin in Philadelphia, 500,000 in New York, and 200,000 in Chicago.
The politics of wartime reconstruction
As the Civil War progressed, the future political status of African-Americans emerged as a key dividing line in public debates. Events in Union occupied Louisiana brought that issue to national attention. Hoping to establish a functioning civilian government in the state, Lincoln in 1863 announced his 10% plan of reconstruction. He essentially offered an amnesty and full Restoration of rights, including property except and slaves, to nearly all white southerners who took an oath affirming loyalty to the union and support for emancipation. When 10% of the voters of 1860 had taken the oath, they could elect a new state government, which would be required to abolish slavery. Lincolns plan offered no role to blacks and shaping the post slavery order. Another Group now stepped onto the stage of politics, the free blacks of New Orleans, who saw the union occupation as a golden opportunity to press for equality before the law and a role in government for themselves. Their complaints at being excluded under Lincolns reconstruction plan won a sympathetic hearing from radical Republicans in Congress. Bye the summer of 1864, Disatification with events in Louisiana helped inspire the wade Davis bill, named for two leading republican members of Congress. The bill required a majority not 1/10 of white male southerners to pledge support for the union before reconstruction could begin in any state, and guaranteed blacks equality before the law, although not the right to vote. The bill passed Congress only to die when Lincoln refused to sign it and Congress adjourned. As the war drew to a close, it was clear that although slavery was dead, No agreement existed as to what social and political system should take its place.
The inner Civil War
As the war progress, social change and internal turmoil in golfed much of the confederacy. At the outset, most white southerners Rallied to the confederate cars. No less fervently than northern troops, southern soldiers spoke of their cause in the language of freedom. We are fighting for our liberty, wrote one volunteer, without any sense of contradiction, against tyrants of the north, who are determined to destroy slavery. But even as it waged a desperate struggle for independence, the south found itself increasingly divided. One greviance was the draft. Like the union, the confederacy allowed individuals to provide a substitute. Because of the accelerating disintegration of slavery, It also exempted one white male for every 20 slaves on plantations, that's really sing many overseers and planters sons from service. The 20 Negro provision convinced many yeomen not the struggle for southern independence had become a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.
Rehearsals for construction and the end of the war
As war drew toward a close and more and more parts of the confederacy came under union control, Federal authorities found themselves presiding over the transition from slavery to freedom. In South Carolina, Louisiana, and other parts of the south, debates took place over issues, access to land, control of labor, and the new structure of political power that would reverberate in the post war world.
The divided North
Despite Lincolns political skills, the war and his administration's policies divide in northern society. Republicans labeled those opposed to the war copperheads, after a poisonous snake that strikes without warning. Mounting casualties and rapid societal changes divided the north. Disaffection was strongest among the large southern born population of states like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and working class Catholic immigrants in eastern cities. As The war progressed, it heightened existing social tensions and creating new ones. The growing power of the federal government challenged traditional notions of local autonomy. The unions draft law, which allowed individuals to provide a substitute or buy their way out of the army, caused widespread indignation. Workers resented manufacturers and financers who reaped large profits while their own Real incomes dwindled because of inflation. The prospect of a sweeping change in the status of blacks called forth a racist reaction in many parts of the north. Throughout the war, the democratic party subjected Lincolns policies to weathering criticism, although it remained divided between war Democrats, who supported the military effort while criticizing emancipation and the draft, and those who favored immediate peace. On occasion, descent degenerated into our right violence. In July 1863 the introduction of the draft provoked four days of rioting in New York City. The mob, composed largely of Irish immigrants, assaulted symbols of the new order being created by the war, draft offices, the mansions of wealthy Republicans, industrial solutions, and the cities block population, many of them fled to New Jersey or Took refuge in Central Park. Only the arrival of union troops quelled the uprising, but not before more than 100 persons had died.
Turning points Gettysburg and Vicksburg
Despite accelerating demise of slavery and the decline of morale in the south, the wars outcome remained very much and out for much of its third and fourth years . In April 1863, Fighting Joe, Hooker, Who had succeeded Ambrose E burnside as a union commander in the east, brought the army of the Potomac into central Virginia to confront Lee. Outnumbered 2 to 1, Lee repelled hookers attack at Chancellor Ville, although he lost his ablest lieutenant, stonewall Jackson, mistakingly killed by fire from his own soldier. Lee now gambled on another invasion in the north, although his strategic objective remains unclear. Perhaps he believed a defeat on its own territory would destroy the morale of the northern army and public. In any event, the two armies, with the union soldier is now under the command of General George G Meade, met at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the first three days of July 1863. With 165,000 troops involved, the battle of Gettysburg remains the largest battle ever fight on the North American continent. On July 3, confederate forces, led by General George E pickets crack division, marched across an open field toward union forces. Withering artillery and rifle fire met the charge, and most of Picketts soldiers never reached union lines. Picketts charge was Lee's greatest blunder. His army retreated to Virginia, never again to set foot on Northern soil. On The same day that Lee began his retreat from Gettysburg, the union achieved a significant victory in the west at the battle of Vicksburg. Late in 1862, Grant had moved into Mississippi toward the city of Vicksburg. From its height, defended by miles of trenches and earthworks, The confederacy commanded the central Mississippi river. When direct attacks failed, Grant launched a siege. On July 4, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered, and with a John C Pemberton's army of 30,000 men, a loss the confederacy could ill afford. The entire Mississippi Valley now lay in Union hands.
Lincoln's decision
During the summer of 1862, Lincoln concluded that emancipation had become a political and military necessity. Many factors contributed to his decision, lack of military success, hope that emancipated slaves might help me the armies growing manpower needs, Changing northern public opinion, and the calculation that making slavery a target of the war effort would counteract sentiment in Britain for recognition of the confederacy. But on the advice of secretary of state William H Seward, Lincoln delayed his announcement until after a union victory, lest it seem an act of desperation. On September 22, 1862, five days after McClellan's army forced Lee to retreat at antietam , Lincoln issue the preliminary emancipation proclamation. It warned that unless the south lay down its arms by the end of 1862, he would decree abolition. The intitial Northern reaction was not encouraging. In the fall elections of 1862, Democrats made opposition to emancipation the center piece of their campaign. The Republicans suffered sharp reverses. In his annual message to congress, early in December, Lincoln tried to calm Northerners racial fears; in giving freedom to the slave, reassure freedom to the free honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.
Military strategies
Each side try to find ways to maximize its advantages. Essentially, the confederacy adopted a defensive strategy, with occasional thrusts into the north. 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 a series of defeats would weaken The Norths resolve and lead it eventually to abandon the conflict and recognize southern independence. Lincolns Early generals initially concentrated on occupying southern territory and attempting to capture Richmond, the confederate capital. They attacked sporadically and withdrew after a battle, the sacrificing the Norths man power of superiority and allowing the south to concentrate its smaller forces when an engagement impeded. Well before his general, Lincoln realized that simply capturing an occupied territory would not win the war, and that defeating the South's army, not capturing its capital, had to be the Norths battlefield objective. And when he came to adopt a policy of emancipation. Lincoln acknowledge that to win the war, the union must make the institution that lay at the economic and social foundation of southern life military target.
Economic problems
Economic deprivation also sparked disaffection. As a blockade tightened, areas of the confederacy came under union occupation, and production by slaves declined, shortages arose of essential communities such as salt, corn, and meat. The war left countless farms, plantations, businesses, and railroads in ruins. The economic crisis, which stood in glaring contrast to the North boom, Was an unavoidable result of the war. But confederate policies exaggerated its effects. War require sacrifice, and civilian support for wars depends in part on the belief that sacrifice is being fairly shared. Many non-slaveholders, however, became convinced that they were bearing an unfair share of the wars burdens. Like the union, the confederacy borrowed heavily to finance the war. Unlike federal lawmakers, however, the planter dominated confederate congress proved unwilling to Levi heavy taxes that planters would have to pay. It relied on paper money, of which issued 1.5 billion, far more than the north green backs. The confederate congress also authorized military officers to seize farm goods to supply the army, paying with increasingly worthless confederate money. Small farmers deeply resented this practice, known as impressment. Third riots broke out in many places, including Richmond Virginia, and mobile Alabama where in 1863 large crowds of women plundered army food supplies. As the war progressed, Desertion became what one officer called a crying evil for the southern armies. By the wars end, more than 100,000 men had deserted, almost entirely from among The poorest class of non-slaveholders whose labor is indispensable to the daily support of their families. By 1864, organized peace movement had appeared in several Southern states, and secret prounion societies such as the heroes of America we're actively promoting disaffection.
The Norths transformation
Even as he invoked traditional values, Lincoln presided over far reaching changes in northern life. The effort to mobilize the resources of the union greatly enhance the power not only of the federal government but also of a rising class of capitalist entrepreneurs. Unlike the south, which suffered economic devastation, the north experienced the war as a time of prosperity. Nourished by wartime inflation and government contracts, the prophets of industry boomed . New England mills worked day and night to supply The army with blankets and uniforms, and Pennsylvania coal mines and ironworks rapidly expanded their production. Mechanization proceeded apace In many industries, especially those, such as boot and shoe production and meat packing, that supplied the armies ever increasing needs. Agriculture also florished, for even as farm boys by the hundreds of thousands join the army, the frontier of cultivation pushed Westward, With machinery and immigrants replacing lost labor.
Women and the confederacy
Even more than in the north, the war placed unprecedented burdens on southern white women. Left alone on farms and plantations, they were often forced to manage business affairs and discipline slaves, previously the responsibility of men. As in the north, women mobilized to support soldiers in the field and stepped out of their traditional sphere to run commercial establishments and work in arms factories. In Richmond, a government girls staffed many of the clerkships in the new confederate bureaucracy. All Confederate women struggle to cope as their loved ones were drawn off into the Army. The war led to the political mobilization, for the first time, of non-slave holding white women. Lacking the aid of slave labor, they found that the absence of their husbands from their previously self-sufficient farms made it impossible to feed their families. They flooded Confederate authorities with petitions seeking assistance, not as charity but as a right. Politicians cannot ignore the police of soldiers wives, and state governments began to distribute supplies to needy families. Southern women's self-sacrificing devotion to the cause became legendary. But as the war went on and the death toll mounted, increasing numbers of women came to believe that the goal of independence was not worth the cost. The growing disaffection of southern white women, conveyed in letters to loved ones at the front, contributed to the decline in civilian morale and encouraged dissertion from the army.
The black soldier
For Black soldiers themselves, military service proved to be a liberating experience. Out of the army came many of the leaders of the reconstruction era. At least 130 former soldiers served in political office after the Civil War. In time, the memory of black military service would fade from white America's collective memory. Of the hundreds of Civil War monuments that still dot the northern landscape , Fewer than a dozen contain an image of a black soldier. But well into the 20th century, it remained a point of pride in black families throughout the United States that their fathers and grandfathers had fought for freedom. Within The army, however, black soldiers received treatment that was anything but equal to that other white counterparts. Organized into segregated units under sometimes abusive white officers, they initially received a lower pay, $10 per month, compared to $16 for white soldiers. They were disproportionately assigned to labor rather than combat, and they cannot rise to the rank of commissioned officer until The very end of the war. In a notorious incident in 1864, 200 of 262 black soldiers died when southern troops under the command of Nathan B Forest overran fort pillow in Tennessee, some of those who perished had been killed after surrendering. Nonetheless black soldiers played a crucial role not only in winning the Civil War but also in defining the war is consequences. Thanks in part to black military service, many Republicans in the last two years of the war came to believe that emancipation must bring with it equal protection of The laws regardless of race. 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. The service of black soldiers affected Lincolns own outlook. In 1864, Lincoln, who before the war had never supported suffrage for African-Americans, urged the governor of Union occupied Louisiana to work for the partial enfranchisement of blacks, singling out soldiers as especially deserving. At some future time, he observed, they might again we called upon to keep the jewel of liberty in the family of freedom.
Women and the war
For many northern women, the conflict opened new doors to opportunity. Women taken vantage of the war time labor shortage to move into jobs in factories and into certain largely male professions, particularly nursing. The expansion of the activities of the national government open new jobs for women as clerks and government offices. Many of these wartime gains were short-lived, but in white-collar government jobs, retail sales, and nursing, women found a permanent place in the workforce. Hundreds of thousands of northern women Took part in organizations that gathered money and medical supplies for soldiers and sent books, clothes, and food to freedmen. The US sanitary commission emerged as a centralized national relief agency to coordinate donations on the northern homefront. Although control at the national level remained in Male hands, Patriotic women did most of the grassroots work. Women played the leading role in organizing sanitary fairs, grand bazaar's that displayed military banners, uniforms, and other relics of the war and sold goods to raise money for soldiers aid. Many Men understood women's war work as an extension of their natural capacity for self sacrifice. But the very active volunteering for the war effort brought many northern women into the public sphere and offered them a taste of independence. From the ranks of this war time Mobilization came many of the leaders of the postwar movement for women's rights. Clara Barton organized supply lines and nursed wounded soldiers in northern Virginia. After the war, she became not only an advocate of women's suffrage but also as president of the American national Red Cross, strong proponent of the humane treatment of battlefield Casualties.
1864 continued
Grant had become the only union general to maintain the initiative against Lee, but at a cost that lead critics to label him a butcher of men. Victory still eluded him, grant attempted to capture Petersburg, which controlled the railway link to Richmond, but Lee got to Petersburg first, and Grant settled in for a prolonged siege. Meanwhile, General William T Sherman, who had moved his forces into Georgia from Tennessee, encountered dogged resistance from confederate troops. Not until September 1863 did he finally enter Atlanta, seizing Georgia's main railroad center. As casualty roles mounted in the spring and summer of 1864, northern Morral sank to its lowest point of the war. Lincoln for a time believe he would be unable to win reelection. In May, hoping to force Lincoln to step aside, radical Republicans nominated John C Fremont on a platform calling for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, federal protection of the freedmen's rights, And confiscation of the land leading Confederates. The Democratic candidate for president, general George B McClellan, was banpered from the outside of the campaign by a platform calling for an immediate seize fire and peace conference, a plan that even war weary Northerners viewed as equivalent to surrender. In the end, Fremont withdrew , And Buoyed by Shermans capture of Atlanta, Lincoln won a sweeping victory. He captured every state but Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey. The result ensure that the war would continue until the confederacy's defeat.
The war and the world
In 1877, soon after retiring as president, Ulysses S Grant embarked with his wife on a two-year tour of the world. At almost every location, he was greeted as a modern day hero. What did America in the aftermath of the Civil War represent to the world? In England, the son of the Duke of Wellington created Grant as a military genius. In Newcastle, Parading English workers held him as a man whose military prowess Add save the worlds leading experiment in democratic government and as a hero of freedom. In Berlin, Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor of Germany, welcome to grant as a nation builder, who had accomplished on the battlefield something, national unity, that Bismarck was attempting to create for his own people.
The war begins
In the east, most of the wars fighting took place in a narrow corridor between Washington and Richmond , A distance of only 100 miles as a succession of union generals led the army of the Potomac, as a main northern force in the east was called, toward the confederate capital, only to be turned back by southern forces. The first significant engagement, the first battle of bull run, took place in Northern Virginia on July 21, 1861. It ended with a chaotic retreat of the union soldiers, along with the sightseers seers and politicians who had come to watch the battle. In The week of bull run, George B McClellan an army engineer who had Recently won a minor engagement with confederate troops in western Virginia, assumed command of the union army of the Potomac. A brilliant organizer, McClellan succeeded in wielding his men into a superb fighting for us. He seemed reluctant, however, to commit them to battle, since he tended to overestimate the size of enemy forces. And as a Democrat, he hoped a compromise might and the war without large scale loss of life or weakening of slavery. Months of military and actively followed.
Introductory paragraph
Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, Marcus M Spiegel volunteered in 1861 to fight in the Civil War. Born into a Jewish family in Germany in 1829, Spiegel immigrated to Ohio, where he married the daughter of a local farmer. When the Civil War broke out, the nations 150,000 years represented less than 1% of the total population. But Spiegel shared wholeheartedly in American patriotism. He went to war, he wrote to his brother-in-law, to defend the flag that was ever ready to protect you and me and every one who sought its Protection from oppression. He never wavered in his commitment to the glorious cause of preserving the union and its heritage of freedom. What One Pennsylvania recruit called the magic word freedom shaped how many union soldiers understood the conflict. But as the war progressed, prewar understandings of liberty gave away to something new, millions of Northerners who had not been abolitionists became convinced that preserving the union required the destruction of slavery. Marcus Spiegel's changing views mirrored this transformation. Spiegel was an ardent Democrat. He shared the eras racist attitudes and that Lincolns emancipation proclamation A serious mistake. Yet as the union army penetrated the heart of the lower south, Spiegel became increasingly opposed to slavery. Since I am here, he wrote to his wife from Louisiana in January 1864, I have learned and seen the horrors of slavery, never here after will by either speak or vote in favor of slavery. Marcus Spiegel was killed in a minor engagement in Louisiana in May 18 64, One of hundreds of thousands of Americans to perish in the Civil War.
Liberty, Union, and nation continued
Lincoln summarized his conception of the wars meaning in November 1863 and brief remarks at the dedication of military a cemetery at the site of the war his greatest battle. The Gettysburg address is considered his finest speech. In less than three minutes, he identified the nations mission with the principle that all men are created equal, spoke of the war as bringing about a new birth of freedom, and defined the essence of democratic government. The sacrifices of union soldiers, he declared, would ensure that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. The mobilization of the unions resources for modern war brought into being a new American nation State with greatly expanded powers and responsibilities. The United States remained a federal Republic with sovereignty divided between the state and national governments. But the war forged a new nation self-conscious, reflected in the increasing use of the word nation, a unified political entity, in place of the older union of separate states. In his inagrual address in 1861, Lincoln used the word union 20 times, while making no mention of the nation. By 1863, union does not appear at all in the 269 word Gettysburg address, While Lincoln referred five times to the nation.
The coming of emancipation continued
Meanwhile slaves took actions that helped propel reluctant white America down the road to emancipation. Well before Lincoln made emancipation of war aim, Blacks, in the north and south were calling the conflict the freedom war. In 1861 and 1862, as a federal army occupied confederate territory, slaves by the thousands headed for union lines. Unlike fugitives before the war, these runaways included large numbers of women and children, as entire families abandon their plantations. Not a few passed along military intelligence and detailed knowledge of the South's terrain. In the southern Louisiana, the arrival of the union army in 1862 led slaves to sack plantation houses and refused to work unless wages were paid. Slavery there, wrote a northern reporter, is forever destroyed and worthless, no matter what Lincoln or anyone else may say on the subject.
The west and the war
Most accounts of the Civil War say little or nothing about the west. Yet the conflict engulfed Missouri, Kansas, and Indian territory, and spread into the southwest border lands. The war divided western communities as residents flocked to both armies. Since the beginning of the republic, the question of slavery had been tied up with the status of new Western lands. Jefferson Davis had long been interested in the expansion of slavery into the southwest. In Pursuit of this goal, in october 1861, confederate units from texas launched an invasion of new mexico, which Texans had long claimed as part of their state, they hoped to conquer the region as a gateway to acquisition of southern California and northern Mexico, continuation of a southern version of manifest destiny, evidenced before the war in filibustering expeditions in the Caribbean. But the Confederates were defeated at Glorieta pass in March 1862 by a small Union army Contingent reinforced by volunteers from Colorado and California. With their retreat to Texas died the dream of a slavery empire in the far west.
1864
Nearly 2 years, however, would pass before the war ended. Brought east to take command of union forces, Grant in 1864 began a war of attrition against Lee's army in Virginia. That is, he was willing to except high numbers of casualties, knowing that the north could replace its manpower losses, where is the south could not. Grant understood that to bring the Norths manpower advantage into play, he must attack continuously all along the line, thereby preventing the enemy from concentrating its forces or retreating to safety after an engagement. In May 1864, the 115,000 man Army of the Potomac cross the Rapidan river to do battle with lees forces in Virginia. At the end of six weeks of fighting, grants casualties stood at 60,000 almost the size of Lee's entire army , While lee had lost 30,000 men. The sustained fighting in Virginia was a turning point in modern warfare. With daily combat and a fearsome casualty tall, I had far more in common with the trench warfare of World War I then the almost gentle manly fighting with which the Civil War began.
The technology of war
Neither the soldier nor their officers were prepared for the way technology had transformed warfare. The Civil War was the first major conflict in which the railroad transported troops and supplies and the first to see railroad junctions such as Atlanta and Petersburg become major military objectives. The famous sea battle between the union vessel monitor and the confederate Merrimack in 1862 was the first demonstration of the superiority of ironclads over wooden ships , Revolutionizing naval warfare. The war saw the use of The telegraph for military communication, the introduction of observation balloons to view enemy lines, and even primitive hand grenades and submarines. Perhaps most important, a revolution in arms manufacturing how to replace the traditional musket, accurate at only a short range, with the more modern rifle, deadly at 600 yards or more because of its grooved or rifled barrel. This development change the nature of combat, emphasizing the importance of heavy fortifications and elaborate trenches and giving those on the defensive, usually southern armies, a significant advantage over attacking forces. The war rifle and trench produce the appalling casualty statistics of Civil War battles. The most recent estimate of those who perished in the war, around 750,000 men, represents the equivalent, in terms of todays population, of more than 7 million. To death toll in the Civil War exceeds the total number of Americans who died in all the nations other wars, from the revolution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor was either side ready for other aspects of modern warfare. Medical care remained primitive. Diseases such as measles, the century, malaria, and typhus swept through army camps, killing more men then did combat. The Civil War was the first war in which large numbers of Americans were captured by the enemy and held in dire conditions in military prisons. Some 50,000 men died in these prisons, victims of starvation and disease including 13,000 union soldiers at Andersonville, Georgia.
Liberty, Union, and nation
Never was freedom's contested nature more evident then during the Civil War. We all declare for liberty, Lincoln observed in 1864, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. To the north, he continued freedom meant for each man to enjoy the product of his labor. To southern whites, it conveyed mastership, the power to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. The unions triumph consolidated the northern understanding of freedom as the national norm. But it was Lincoln himself linked to conflict with the deepest beliefs of northern society. It is sometimes sad that the American Civil War was part of a broader 19th century process of nation building. Throughout the world, powerful, centralized nation states developed in old countries, and new nations emerged where none had previously existed. The Civil War took place as modern states were consolidating their power and reducing local autonomy. Lincoln has been called the American equivalent of Giuseppe Mazzini or Otto von Bismarck, who during this same era created nation states in Italy and Germany from disunited collections of principalities. But Lincolns nation was different from those being constructed in Europe. They were based on the idea of unifying a particular people with a common ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heritage. To Lincoln, the American nation embodied, instead, A set of universal ideas, centered on political democracy and human liberty.
The war in the East 1862
Not until the spring of 1862, after a growing clamor for action by Republican newspapers, members of Congress, and an increasingly impatient Lincoln, did McClellan lead his army of more than 100,000 men into Virginia. Here they confronted the smaller army of northern Virginia under the command of the Confederate General Joseph E Johnston, and after he was wounded, Robert E Lee . In the 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 a throught to the vicinity of Washington DC. In August 1862 Lee again emerged victorious at the second battle of bull run against union forces under the command of General John Pope. Successful on the defensive, lee now launched a invasion of the north. At the battle of Antietam, Maryland, McClellan and the army and of the Potomac repelled lees advance. In a single day of fighting, nearly 4000 men were killed and 18,000 wounded, 2000 of whom later died of their injuries. More Americans died on September 17, 1862, when the battle of antietam what is five, then on any other day in the nations history, including Pearl Harbor and D-Day in World War II and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Enlisting black troops
Of the proclamation provisions, few were more radical in their implications than the enrollment blacks into military service. Since sailor had been one of the few occupations open to free blacks before the war, secretary of the navy Gideon Welles had already allowed African-Americans to serve on union warships. But at the outset, the administration feared that whites would not be willing to fight alongside blacks and that enlisting black soldiers would alienate what's a border slave states that are made from the union. By the end of the war, however, more than 180,000 black men had served in the union army and 24,000 in the Navy. 1/3 died in battle, or of wounds or disease. Some black units one considerable renown call mom among them the 54th Massachusetts volunteers, company of free blacks from throughout the north commanded by Robert Gould Shaw, a young reformer from a prominent Boston family. The bravery of the 54th in the July 1863 attack on fort Wagner, South Carolina, where nearly half the unit, including Shaw, perished, helped to dispel widespread doubts about blacks ability to withstand the pressures of the Civil War battlefield. Most Black soldiers were emancipated slaves who joined the army in the south. After union forces in 1863 seize control of the rich plantation land of the Mississippi Valley, General Lorenzo Thomas raised 50 regiments of black soldiers, some 76,000 men in all. Another large group hailed from the border states exempted from the emancipation proclamation, where enlistment was, for most of the war, the only route to freedom. Here black military service undermine to slavery, for Congress expanded the emancipation proclamation to liberate the families of black soldiers..
The emancipation proclamation
On January 1, 1863, after greeting visitors at the annual White House New Year's reception, Lincoln retired to his study to sign the emancipation proclamation. The document did not liberate all slaves, indeed, on the day it was issued, it applied to very few. Because it's legality derived from the presidents authority as military Commander in chief to combat the South's rebellion, the proclamation exempted areas firmly under union control, where the war, in affect, had already ended. Thus, it did not apply to the loyal border slave states that had never seceded or two areas of the confederacy occupied by union soldiers, such as Tennessee and parts of Virginia and Louisiana . But the vast majority of the south slaves, more than 3 million men, women, and children, it declared henceforth shall be free. Since most of the slaves were still behind Confederate lines, however, their liberation would have to await union victories. Despite it's a limitation, the proclamation set off scenes of jubilation among free blacks and abolitionists in the north and contrabands and slaves in the south. Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea, intoned a black preacher at a celebration in Boston. By making a union army an agent of emancipation and wedding the goals of union and abolition, the proclamation sounded the eventual death knell of slavery. Not only did the emancipation proclamation alter the nature of the Civil War and the course of American history, but it also marked a turning point in Lincolns own thinking. For the first time, it committed the government to enlisting black soldiers in the union army. And he would later with you suggestions that he rescind or modify The proclamation in the interest of peace. Were here to do so, he told one visitor , I should be damned in time and eternity.
The first modern war
The American Civil War is often called the first modern war. Never before had mass armies confronted each other on the battlefield with the deadly weapons created by the industrial revolution. The resulting casualties dwarfed anything in the American experience. Beginning as a battle of army versus army, the war became a conflict of society against society, in which the distinction between military and civilian targets often disappeared. In the war of this kind, the effectiveness of political leader ship, the ability to mobilize economic resources, and a society's willingness to keep up the fight despite setbacks are as crucial to the outcome as success or failure on individual battlefields.
The war in American history
The Civil War laid the foundation of modern America, guaranteeing the unions permanence, destroying slavery, and shifting power in the nation from the south to the north, and more specifically, from slaveowning planters to northern capitalists. It dramatically increase the power of the federal government and accelerated modernization of the northern economy. And it placed the postwar agenda the challenge of defining and protecting African-American freedom. Verily, as Frederick Douglass declared, the work does not end with the abolition of slavery, but only begins. Paradoxically , Both sides lost some thing they had gone to war to defend. Slavery was the cornerstones of the confederacy, but the war led inexorably to slavery as destruction. In the north, the war hastened the transformation A Lincolns America, the world of free labor, of the small shop and independent farmer, into an industrial giant. Americans in the words of the abolitionists Wendell Phillips, I would never again see the republic in which we were born.
The second American revolution
The changing status of black Americans only one dramatic example of what historians called The second American revolution, the transpiration of American government and society brought about by the Civil War.
Black soldiers for the confederacy
The growing shortage of white man power eventually Led confederate authorities to a decision no one could have foreseen when the war began; they authorize the arming of slaves to fight for the south. Many slaveholders fiercely resisted this idea, and initially, the confederate Senate rejected it. Not until March 1865, after Robert E Lee had endorsed the plan, did the confederate Congress authorize the arming of slaves. The war ended before the recruitment of black soldiers actually began. But the confederate army did employ numerous blacks, nearly all of them slaves, as laborers. This later led to some confusion over whether blacks actually fought for the confederacy, apart from a handful who passed for White, none in fact did. But the south decision to raise black troops illustrates how the war undermined not only slavery but also proslavery ideology. Declared Howell cob, A Georgia planter and politician , If slaves make a good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.
The confederate nation Leadership and government
The man charged with the task of rallying public support for the confederacy proved an equal to the task. Jefferson Davis moved to Mississippi as a youth, attended West Point, and acquired a large plantation. Aloof and stubborn, Davis lacked Lincolns political flexibility and ability to communicate the wars meaning effectively to ordinary men and women. Under Davis, the confederate nation became far more centralized than the old south had been. The government raised armies from scratch, took control of southern railroad, And built manufacturing plants. But it failed to find an effective way of utilizing the South's major economic resource, cotton. In the early part of the war, the administration tried to suppress cotton production, urging planters to grow food instead and banning cotton exports. This, it was hoped, would promote economic self-sufficiency and force Great Britain, whose textile mills could not operate without southern cotton, to intervene on the side of the confederacy. King Cotton diplomacy turned out to be ineffective. But the confederate policy had far-reaching global consequences. Recognizing their over dependent on southern cotton, other nations move to expand production. Britain promoted cultivation of the crop in Egypt and India, and Russia did the same in parts of central Asia. As a result, the resumption of American cotton production after the war led directly to a worldwide crisis of overproduction that drove down the prices of cotton, Impovershing farmers around the world.
The sea islands experiment
The most famous rehearsals for reconstruction took place on the sea Island just off the coast of South Carolina. The war was only a few months old win, in November 1861, the union Navy occupied the islands. Nearly the entire white population fled, leaving behind some 10,000 slaves. The Navy was soon followed by Other Northerners army officers, treasury agents, prospective investors in cotton land, and a group known as Gideons band, which included black and white reformers and teachers committed to uplifting the freed slaves. Northern born teachers like Charlotte Forten, a member of one of Philadelphia's most prominent black families, and Laura M towne, A white native of Pittsburgh, devoted themselves to teaching the freed blacks. Many northerners believed that the transition from slave to free labor meant enabling blacks to work for wages in more humane conditions than under slavery. When the federal government put land on the island up for sale, most was acquired not Buy former slaves but by northern investors bent on demonstrating The superiority of free wage labor and turning a tiny profit at the same time. 1865, the Sea Island experiment was widely held to be a success. But the experiment also bequeathed to postwar reconstruction the contentious Issue of whether landownership shed accompany black freedom.
Steps toward emancipation
The most uncompromising opponents of slavery before the Civil War, Abolitionists and radical Republicans, quickly concluded that the institution must become a target of the union war effort. Outside of Congress, few pressed the case for emancipation more eloquently than Frederick Douglass. From the outset, he insisted that it was futile to separate the freedom of the slave from the victory of the government. These appeals won increasing support in a Congress frustrated by lack of military success. In March 1862, Congress prohibited the army from returning fugitive slaves. Then came abolition in the district of Columbia, with monetary compensation for slave holders, and the territories, followed in July by the second confiscation act, which liberated slaves of disloyal owners in union occupied territory, as well as slaves who escaped to union lines. Throughout These ones, Lincoln struggled to retain control of the emancipation issue. In August 1861, John C Fremont, commanding union forces in Missouri, a state racked by a bitter guerrilla war between pro northern and pro southern bands, decreed the freedom of its slaves. Fearful of the orders impact on the border states, Lincoln swiftly rescinded it. In November, the president propose that the border states embark on a program of gradual emancipation with the federal government paying owners for their loss of property. He also revived the idea of colonization. in August 1862, Lincoln met at the White House with a Delegation of black leaders and urged them to promote immigration from the United States. You and we are different races, he declared, it is better for us both to be separated. As late as December 1862, the president signed an agreement with a shady entrepreneur to settle former slaves on an island off the coast of Haiti.
A new financial system
The need to pay for the war produce dramatic changes in the financial policy. To raise money, the government increased tariff to unprecedented heights , thus promoting the further growth of northern industry, imposed new taxes on the production and consumption of goods, and enacted the nations first income tax. It also borrowed more than 2 billion by selling interest bearing bonds, thus creating an immense national debt. And it printed more than 400 million worth of paper money, called greenbacks, declared to be legal tender, that is, money that must be excepted for nearly all public and private payments and debts. To rationalize banking, Congress established a system of nationally chartered banks, which were required to purchase government bonds and were given the right to issue make notes as currency. Numerous Americans Who would take the lead in reshaping the nations postwar economy created or consolidated their fortunes during the Civil War, among them the iron and steel entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie, the oil magnate John D Rockefeller, the financers Jay Gould and JP Morgan, and Philip de armor, who earned million supplying beach to the union army. These and other captains of industry managed to escape military service, sometimes by purchasing exemptions or hiring substitutes, as allowed by the draft law. Taken Together, the unions economic policies Vastly increased the power and size of the federal government. The federal budget for 1865 exceeded 1 million, nearly 20 times out of 1860. With its new army of clerks, tax collectors, and other officials, the government became the nations largest employer. And although much of this expansion temporary, the government would never returned to its week and fragmented confition Mission of the prewar period.
Government and the economy
The new American nation state that emerged during the Civil War was committed to rapid economic development. Congress adopted policies that promoted economic growth and permanently altered the nations financial system. To spur agricultural development, the homestead act offered 160 acres of free public land to settlers in the west. It took affect on January 1, 1863, the same day as the emancipation proclamation, and like the proclamation, tried to implement a vision of freedom. By the 1930s more than 400,000 families had acquired farms under its provisions. In addition, Morrill land grant college act, named for Justin S Morrill of Vermont, Who introduced the measure, assisted the states in establishing agricultural and mechanic colleges. Congress also made huge grants of money and land for internal improvements, including up to 100 million acres to the union pacific and central pacific, two companies chartered in 1862 and charged with building a railroad from the Missouri river to the pacific coast. These were the first corporate charters issued by the federal government since the second bank of the United States in 1816. It required some 20,000 men to lay the tracks across prairies and mountains, a substantial number of them immigrant Chinese contract laborers, called coolies by many Americans. Hundreds of Chinese workers died blasting tunnels and building bridges through this treacherous terrain. When it was completed in 1869, the transcontinental railroad, which ran from Omaha, Nebraska, to San Francisco, reduce the time of a cross-country journey from 4 to 5 months to six days. It expanded of the National market, facilitated the spread of settlement and investment in the west, and heralded the doom of the plain Indians.
Mobilizing resources
The outbreak of the war found both sides unprepared. In 1861, there was no national railroad gauge, The distance separating the two rails, So trains built for one line could not run on another. There was 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. Soon after the firing on fort Sumter, Lincoln proclaimed a naval blockade of the south, part of the so-called anaconda plan, which aimed to strangle the south economically. But the Navy, charged with patrolling the 3500 mile coastline , Consisted of only 90 vessels, fewer than half of them steam powered. Not until late in the war did the blockade become effective. Then there was a problem of purchasing and distributing the food, weapons, and other supplies required by the soldiers. The union army eventually became the best fed and best supplied military forces in history. By the wars third-year, on the other hand, southern armies were suffering from acute shortages of food, uniforms and shoes.
The war and American religion
The upsurge of patriotism, and of national power, was reflected in many aspects of American life. Even as the war produced unprecedented casualties, the northern protestant clergy strive to provide it with a religious justification and to reassure their congregations that the dead had not died in vain. The religious press now devoted more space to military and political developments than two spiritual matters. In numerous wartime sermons, Christianity and patriotism were joined in civic religion that saw the war as God's mechanism for ridding the United States of slavery and enabling it to become where it had never really been, a land of freedom. Of course, the southern clergy was equally convinced that the confederate cars represented gods will. Religious beliefs enabled Americans to cope with mass death. Coping with death, moreover, required unprecedented governmental action, from notifying next of kin to accounting for the death and missing. Both the union and confederacy established elaborate systems for gathering statistics and maintaining records of Dead and wounded soldiers, and effort supplemented by private philanthropy organizations. After the war ended, the federal government embarked on a program to locate and re-bury hundreds of thousands of union soldiers in national military cemeteries. Between 1865 and 1871, the government reinterred More than 300,000 union, but not Confederate soldiers, including black soldiers, who were buried in segregated sections of military cemeteries.
The west and the war continued
The war had a profound impact on western Indians. One of Lincolns first orders as president was to withdraw federal troops from the west so that they could protect Washington, DC. Recognizing that this would make it impossible for the army to keep white InterLopers from intruding on Indian land, as treaties required it to do, Indian leaders begged Lincoln to reverse this decision, but to no avail. Inevitably, conflict flared in the west between Native Americans and white settlers, with disastrous results. During the Civil War, the Sioux killed hundreds of white farmers in Minnesota before being subdued by the army. After a military court sentenced more than 300 Indians to death, Lincoln commuted the sentences of all but 38. But their hanging in December 1862 remains the largest official execution in American history. In November 1864, Colorado militia men attacked a group of around 700 Cheyennes and Arapahos camped along Sand Creek in Colorado. Led by colonal John Chivington , An abolitionist and a former Methodist minister, the soldiers were bent on punishing Indians responsible for raids on nearby settlements. They failed to locate the hostile Indians, but chose to assault the peaceful encampment with rifles and artillery, killing more than 150 men, women, children. The incident sparked intensified warfare on the southern plaine, as cheyennes and apropahos retailed with attacks of their own . The Union army also launched a series of campaigns in the southwest against tribes like Kiawas and comanches , Whose violent raids on ranches and settlements have been essential, although disruptive, part of the borderland economy, organized around trading and exchanging captives, usually women, livestock, and horses. The army also made war on the Navajo , Who were more victims than predators of these raids. Indian raiding parties had stolen more than 50,000 sheep from their settlements in 1860 alone. Union forces destroyed navajo orchards and sheep and forced 8000 people to move to a reservation set aside by the government. The navajo's long walk became as central to their historical experience as a trail of tears to the cherokee . Unlike the eastern Indians, however, the navajo were eventually allowed to return to portion of their land. The war against Native Americans, a small part of the violence that engulfed the nation during the Civil War, would continue for more than two decades after the sectional conflict ended. Some tribes that owned slaves, like the Cherokee, sided with the confederacy. After 1865, they were forced to cede much of their land to the federal government and to accept former slaves into the Cherokee nation and give them land, The only slaveowners required to do so. Their status remains a point of controversy to this day. The Cherokee constitution was recently amended to exclude descendants of slaves from citizenship, leading to lawsuits that have yet to be resolved.
Liberty in war time
This intense new nationalism made criticism of the war effort, or of the policies of the Lincoln administration, seem to Republicans equivalent to treason. During the conflict, declared a republican New York Times, the safety of the nation is the supreme law. Arbitrary arrests numbered in the thousands. They included opposition newspaper editors, democratic politicians, individuals who discouraged enlistment in the army, and ordinary civilians like the Chicago man briefly imprisoned for calling the president a damned fool. With the constitution unclear as to who possessed the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, thus allowing Prisoners to be held without charge, Lincoln claimed the right under the presidential war powers, and twice suspended the writ throughout the entire Union for those accused of disloyal activities. Not until 1866, after the fighting had ended, did the Supreme Court, in the case ex parte Milligan, declare it unconstitutional to bring accused persons before military tribunals where civil courts were operating. The constitution, declared Justice David Davis, is not suspended in wartime, it remains A law for rulers and people, equally in time of war and peace. Lincoln was not a despot. Most of these arrested work quickly released, the democratic press continue to flourish, and contested elections were held throughout the war. But the policies of the Lincoln administration offered proof, to be repeated during leader wars, of the fragility of civil liberties in the face of Assertive patriotism and wartime demands for national unity.
The coming of emancipation Slavery and the war
War, it has been said, is the midwife of revolution. And the Civil War produced for reaching changes in American life. The most dramatic of these was the destruction of slavery, the central institution of southern society. In numbers, scale, and the economic power of the institution of slavery, American emancipation dwarfed that of any other country, although far more people were liberated in 1861 when Czar Alexander the second abolished serfdom in the Russian empire. Lincoln initially insisted that slavery was a relevant to the conflict. In the wars first year, has paramount concerns were to keep the border slave states, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, in the union and to build the broadest base of support in the north for the war effort. Action against slavery, he feared, would drive the border, with its white population of 2.6 million nearly 500,000 slaves, into the confederacy and alienate conservatives and Northerners. Thus , In the early days of the war, A nearly unanimous congress adopt a resolution proposed by senator John J Crittenden of Kentucky, Which affirmed that the union had no intention of interfering with slavery. Northern military commanders even returned fugitive slaves to their owners, policy that raised an outcry in anti-slavery circles. Yet as the confederacy set slaves to work as military laborers and blacks began to escape to union lines, the policy of ignoring slavery unraveled, by the end of 1861, the military had adopted the plan, begun in Virginia by General Benjamin f Butler, of treating escaped blacks of contraband of war, that is, property of military value subject to confiscation. Butler's order added a word to the wars vocabulary. Escaping slaves, the contraband, were House by the army in contraband camps and educated in new contraband schools.
The war in the west
While the union accomplished a little in the east in the first years of the war, events in the west followed a different course. Here, the architect of early success was Ulysses S Grant. A West Point graduate who had resigned from the army in 1854, Grant had been notably and successful in civilian life. When the war broke out, he was working as a clerk and his brothers leather store in Galena, Illinois. But after being commissioned as a colonel Illinois regiment, grant quickly displayed the daring, the logical mind, and the grasp of strategy he would demonstrate throughout the war. In February 1862, Grant won the unions for a significant victory when he captured Fort Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. In April, naval forces under admiral David G Farragut steamed into New Orleans, given the union control of the south largest city in the rich sugar plantation parishes to its south and West. At the same time, Grant withstood surprise confederate attack at Shiloh, Tennessee. But union momentum in the west then stalled.