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Horace Greeley
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USS Monitor
Northern politicians were opposed to extending slavery into new territories west of the Mississippi River. Southern politicians held that slavery should be allowed to follow the flag into new territories and new states, and they were concerned about their power to influence. These southern politicians were Democrats, in coalition with northern Democrats, a coalition from the days of Andrew Jackson. These southern politicians feared an imbalance between slave states and free states would subvert their influence and give too much power to those hostile toward slavery. It was this concern that would lead to southern states attempting to secede from the union.
Texas and Florida entered the union as a slave states in 1845. Iowa entered as a free state in 1846 and Wisconsin as a free state in 1848. Oregon was organized as a territory without slavery. The President, Zachary Taylor, a member of the Whig party and a slave owner from Virginia, told Californians to bypass territorial status and apply for admission to the union as a free state. Southerners were outraged. Their support for Taylor had given him the presidency, and they felt betrayed.
Those digging for gold in California, and others, did not want competition from slaves and they did not want their dignity undermined by being seen as doing the same work as slaves. The slavery that was brought to California was driven out. A convention met in California and drafted a constitution that prohibited slavery. This was ratified by a vote of 12,000 to 800. In Congress, shouting matches erupted over the question of admitting California into the union, with southern politicians complaining that they had suffered the "wrongs and insults of the North long enough." Talk of the South seceding from the union arose again, and President Taylor, the old veteran of the U.S.- Mexican War, declared that he would crush secession if he had to lead the army himself. The aging Senator known as the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay of Kentucky - a slave state - tried to calm his fellow southerners. He believed that secessionists were being lightheaded. On the Senate floor he spoke of the benefits to the South of remaining in the Union. He described as delusional the view that secession was constitutional, and warned that it could not be accomplished peacefully.
President Taylor died in July and was succeeded by the vice president, Millard Fillmore - America's last Whig president. On September 9, 1850, Congress voted California into the union as a free state, but it was done as part of a compromise. For the slaveholders, Congress passed the nation's second Fugitive Slave Law.
The first Fugitive Slave Act, passed back in 1793, allowed slave catchers to function in any state or territory, and that they have only an oral claim given to a federal or state judge that the person was an escaped slave. And under the first Fugitive Slave Act anyone sheltering an escaped slave could be fined 500 dollars - a large amount of money at that time. By the mid-1800s, northern states were doing little about runaway slaves. Runaways were being considered free persons when reaching states that had outlawed slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, changed this. A federal marshal who failed to arrest an alleged runaway slave could be fined 1,000 dollars and the federal government was now obligated to track down and apprehend runaway slaves in the North. In the North, any black could be arrested without a warrant and turned over to someone who claimed him or her to be a runaway and himself as the owner. A fine of 1,000 dollars and six months' imprisonment could be charged against anyone caught providing shelter, food or any other assistance to a slave.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 intensified the hunt for runaways. It jeopardized all free blacks and intensified help from people for slaves, with calls in the North for civil disobedience and with more energy devoted to the rescue of slaves through the "underground railroad." More support for the Underground Railroad came in 1852 with the publication of a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe:Uncle Tom's Cabin. The popularity of the book made southerners feel more besieged. They complained that the novel was exaggerated fiction, and in the South owning a copy of the book was made illegal.
According to an 1850 census, the U.S. population was 23,191,867 - up from 13 million in 1830. And the 1850s was a decade of more growth and more immigration into the North. According to the 1860 census, the U.S. population was 31,443,321 - an increase of 39 percent in one decade, the South having about 8 million whites in 1860, compared to about 20 million in the North.
Southerners complained of the advantage that the North had in attracting immigrants - although the North, with its different kind of economy, could absorb the increase of free people better than could the South. What southern planters wanted was more slaves. Cotton production had been growing, from 160,000,000 in 1820 to1,000,000,000 (one billion) in 1850, and to 2.3 billion pounds in the year of 1860 - a growth of 230 percent in the 1850s.
The number of slaves in the U.S. at the beginning of the century was 1.2 million. According to the 1860 census it was 3,953,760, almost all in the South. In the U.S., slave mortality rates had been exceeding slave birth rates, and the growth in slave population was dependent on the illegal importing of new slaves from Africa. The United States and most Western nations had declared the slave trade with Africa to be piracy and punishable by death, but only the British had been seriously combating the trade. From 1843 to 1857 the U.S. had seized only 19 ships transporting slaves, and of those 19 only 6 were prosecuted. The British in this same period had seized nearly 600 ships and had prosecuted all but 38.
The North and South were different in a variety of ways. In the North, especially New England, was more of a middleclass, with more small manufacturing industries, capitalists and banking. By 1840 there were 1,200 cotton factories in the United States, two-thirds of them in New England, which was importing cotton from the South and using water power from its rivers. By 1850 the North had more than 1,500 woolen mills, most of them individually owned, producing blankets, flannel and worsteds. Firearms and furniture were being produced in the North. There was boot and shoemaking - a winter occupation of New England farmers and fishermen. And people were investing in labor saving machinery - advancing technology in order to reduce manual labor or labor costs.
New England was also the heart of sea born commerce in the United States. By the late 1840s, ships powered by steam engines had replaced sailing ships in hauling freight and passengers across the Atlantic Ocean, the new technology and competition reducing shipping rates. Foreign commerce grew dramatically in the 1840s and 1850s. The North was manufacturing power looms and exporting them to Europe. Ships owned by northerners were shipping the South's cotton to Europe, mainly to Britain - cotton being two-thirds of U.S. exports.
Northern communities were an anthill of activity. There were not yet many city parks, pleasure resorts, or much game playing. A Puritan work ethic prevailed, people working long hours and six days per week. College rowing teams was the only competitive sport, the average adult seeing leisure and games as a waste of time. But oddity shows had begun - the Jerry Springer shows of that time, but with some real freaks, some fake freaks and dwarfs as had been practiced by kings. Orchestras were beginning to appear in the bigger cities, and operas were performed, while in New England the name "theater" was in bad repute and the names museum or athenaeum were used instead.
In the 1850s a boom in railroad development across the North was changing business organization and management and reducing freight costs. Railroads were influencing a rise in real estate values, increasing regional concentrations of industry, the size of business units and stimulating growth in investment banking and agriculture. Wheat production was moving westward with the rail lines. The federal government was granting federal lands to states for building railroads, and railroad companies were selling their land grants they had received from the federal government to individuals as farm sites.
The Northern economy was still largely farming - small farms - with adolescents having time for fishing and hunting. The North was growing mainly food, and farmers were investing in steel plows and mechanical reapers, which were reducing the labor and time required to plant and harvest.
In the North was still plenty of misery. Plumbing - what there was of it - froze in the winter, and in the 1850s most homes were still heated by wood or coal in open furnaces. Cooking used the same fuel, while whale oil was being used in lamps in the cities and candles were still being used in rural areas. Health care was still largely in a realm of ignorance, with no one knowing how to cure tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, yellow fever, typhus and other diseases. But in the North was some optimism, with predictions that electricity and machinery would be transforming life and relieving mankind of drudgery.
New England was more devoted to education than was the South. Of the nation's 321 public high schools only 30 were in the South. In the South the sons of the poor were likely to receive no education. Illiteracy was more common in the South. Education there was more for the gentry, and teaching tended to be private.
The South was more of an agricultural society, with more of a division between a landed gentry and their poorer, often barefoot, cousins. Women were viewed differently. In New England, women were more active and hard working, a few of them becoming doctors, writers or activists in their church. Women of the landed gentry in the South were put on pedestals, and they had slaves to do their work. The southern gentry was more into fox hunting, horseracing, and into dueling, for which the Puritans of New England had scorn. The South had a higher percentage of horsemen and soldiers than did the North.
Southerners looked askance at developments in the North. They disliked the increase in loudness of Puritanism's proclamations in the 1850s. They disliked the Puritan strictures and prohibitions against a good drink, strong language and fun on Sundays. They believed more in leisure than did the Puritans, and were aided in this by milder winters.
Southerners were investing in slaves rather than in machines. Planters were interested in the size of their holdings rather than in cash to invest elsewhere in the economy, and those with a good spread of land were more happy to breakeven than were the capitalists of New England. Southerners looked upon New Englanders - whom they called Yankees - as greedy and boorish - as did some in the North outside of New England. People in slave-owning families did not have the same work ethic as northerners. Planters were borrowing from New England banks in order to do their spring planting and they had little love for their creditors.
Professionals in the south were little interested in becoming investors in the economy in general. Instead of becoming Yankee-like, they dreamed of buying land and a few slaves and retiring as a southern gentleman on their small plantation. Only 25 percent of southerners owned slaves. Most slave owners owned fewer than five slaves, and only 12 percent of Southerners had twenty or more slaves. Many whites who had no slaves looked with envy upon the wealthy, and to a degree admired them. The poor, scraping hard on little plots of land for subsistence, knew how hard the plantation slaves were driven, and had some sympathy for the slave in this regard, but they did not want to see the slaves freed. Similar to most northerners, they saw themselves as superior to blacks, and the southern poor drew some comfort from their belief that they were not on the bottom of society's hierarchies. And with large numbers of slaves nearby, the southern poor feared that if the slaves were freed, they would overrun them and steal from and perhaps murder them.
In the North was a general dislike of slavery but little favor in coercing the South into freeing the slaves. Abolitionists were a minority - and more in New England than elsewhere in the North. But there was also hostility toward slavery from abroad, and it reached its peak in the 1850s. Britain had ended slavery in the 1830s, and France in 1848. Outside of the South, only two major powers still had legal slavery:Spain, in its colonies, notably Cuba; and Brazil.
Southerners were moved by arguments that countered the rising hostility toward slavery in the 1840s and 1850s - arguments led by the South's religious leaders. The religious denomination of the planters was largely Episcopalian, which was more ritualistic (liturgical) and more hierarchical and conservative than the Congregationalists of New England - whose tradition was more hostile toward aristocracy and, in the 1850s, decidedly anti-slavery. The North and South had common religious denominations, such as the Methodists and Baptists, but social and economic circumstances had split the way they viewed the world and had split these denominations into northern and southern halves.
The interconnection between the economies of the North and South mollified the differences in opinion for some northerners. Commerce was peace-minded, and among manufactures in the New England was a tendency to avoid the slavery issue. They wanted no irreparable split from their source of cotton. And northerners had an interest in keeping the South as a good customer of its food and manufactured products. The South grew more cotton than food and was importing its food from the North. The South bought its shoes from the North, much of their weaponry, and it rode on carriage wheels produced in the North. The federal government had high tariffs on products from Europe which protected the North's markets in the South, in addition to supplying the government with 85 to 90 percent of its revenues. (There was as yet no federal income tax.) By people in the North who worried about such things, it was feared that secession and no more high tariff barriers by the federal government, the South would start buying from Britain. And it was feared that secession might also be accompanied by a repudiation of debts owned by southerners to northerners.
The cotton growers in the South, meanwhile, were tied economically, and culturally, to the rest of the South, including Virginia and Kentucky. Virginia and Kentucky were not the cotton producers that other southern states were, but they were supplying the cotton states with food, mules, iron products and other goods.
In 1847, Lincoln was a congressman from Illinois and a member of the Whig party - a party that had been disliked by frontier whites for being middleclass, abolitionist, Indian-loving and opposed to westward expansion. Abraham Lincoln in 1847 joined others in describing the war with Mexico as wicked and an attempt to extend slavery. In Illinois, pro-war Democrat newspapers called him a latter day Benedict Arnold and denounced his views as a slur against the volunteers of Illinois serving in the military. Lincoln did not run for re-election and returned to the practice of law.
Then the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which became law in May, 1854, returned Lincoln to politics. The Democrat senator from Lincoln's state, Illinois, Stephen Douglas, wanted Chicago to be the nation's railway hub through which trains passed westward into the Kansas-Nebraska territory, rather than a more southern route. Douglas was interested in running for the presidency and in support from his fellow Democrats in the South. Southerners supported Douglas in exchange for allowing people in the Kansas-Nebraska territory (which included the Dakotas) a choice between permitting or prohibiting slavery - contrary to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had restricted the expansion of slavery above 36o 30' latitude. Douglas led the drive for the bill, and the president, Franklin Pierce, another Democrat, signed it. People opposed to slavery were outraged. Protest meetings took place across the North, attended by abolitionists and members of various political parties, including the Free Soil party, a number of northern Democrats and some Whigs. Men such Salmon Chase, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, were disturbed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and organized a rally at Ripon, Wisconsin, aimed at bringing together people opposed to slavery. It was an informal beginning of the Republican Party, borrowing half of the name of Jefferson's old party, the Republican-Democrats.
In October 1854, Lincoln responded to the Kansas-Nebraska Act with a speech in Peoria, Illinois. Congressional elections were near and the speech won him new political support in the state. Lincoln helped organize the Illinois branch of the Republican Party, and that year the Republicans won 44 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. A few Republicans were elected to the U.S. Senate and some were elected to state legislatures. Northern Democrats lost seats, which threatened their partners in the old Andrew Jackson coalition: the southern Democrats. Another loser that year was Lincoln, who failed in a try for the U.S. Senate.
In 1855 the essayist and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, proposed to end slavery by granting full compensation to slave-owners - as had Britain. Emerson's estimate of the cost of compensation was 2 billion - about $500 for each slave and a much larger sum overall than the 100 million dollars that the British had paid to end slavery. The United States had eight times as many slaves as had Britain, and each as a commodity was worth more money. Emerson's proposal attracted no serious attention.
Receiving much attention in the nation was the conflict in Kansas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had opened that territory to a contest between people supporting slavery and those opposed - a contest that turned bloody. The U.S. government in 1854 opened a land office in the territory of Kansas, northern newspapers wrote about the fertility of Kansas soil, and farming people rushed to Kansas to stake land claims. People from Missouri who favored slavery - described by anti-slave people as ruffians - tried to discourage settlement by people from the North, and wealthy northerners conspired to encourage and help people from the North to enter the territory.
On May 19, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts made his "crime against Kansas" speech in the Senate. Two days later, a congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, entered the Senate chamber and with a cane beat Sumner unconscious. In the South, Brooks became a folk hero. In the North were rallies and claims that beating a senator senseless was not an acceptable parliamentary procedure. There were demands that Brooks be punished. Responding to the controversy in Congress, southern congressmen shouted at northern congressmen, and some called for duels. Congressmen managed to establish a committee to investigate the beating, and weeks later the committee recommended the expulsion of Brooks and the censure of two of his colleagues. Passions erupted in Congress again, with more threats and more challenges to duels. Then, in mid-July, the House voted. Every southern congressman but one voted against expulsion, and, needing two-thirds to win, expulsion was defeated.
In the year 1856, James Buchanan, a northern Democrat, won the presidency with the help of southern voters, and following his election, Buchanan wrote that the "great object" of his administration was "to arrest the agitation of the slavery question."
On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court handed down its Dred Scott ruling, which was another outrage for northerners opposed to slavery. Scott's master had died while he and Scott were in Missouri. Scott had sought his freedom from slavery and freedom to return to the North where he had lived with his master, an army officer, for some years. The court decided that Dred Scott had no right to freedom, that he could not be a citizen of the United States and therefore had a no right to sue in a federal court. This decision appeared to jeopardize blacks both slave and free, leaving them without recourse in the courts and giving sanction to the notion that slavery was legal nationally. The decision raised acrimony between North and South to a new height.
In 1854, five sons of an abolitionist, John Brown, went to Kansas, and on their way, in Missouri, they met hostility from people who identified them by their northern speech and, perhaps, dress. The boat captain, a southerner, cheated them, leaving them stranded in Missouri. And people there would not sell them food, saying "We have nothing for you." Seeing what they did of southerners entering Kansas - and thinking of them as drinkers and men of profane language, with Bowie knives and revolvers - the sons worried about the security of people going to Kansas to pursue the occupation of peace: farming.
In 1855, amid the fighting in Kansas, John Brown joined his sons. He witnessed the passivity of northerners who were intimated by the pro-slavers. He thought of these passive folks as cowards, and he organized a militia that began killing those he deemed to have been bullying the anti-slave settlers.
Migration from northern states was greater than the migration of people from the Missouri and elsewhere from the South, and in 1857 the U.S. Army sent in peacekeeping troops. Southerners with slaves lacked interest in taking their slaves into Kansas, which, like California, was unsuited for slavery. A majority of the people in Kansas voted against slavery, and unhappy southern politicians began delaying admission of the territory to statehood.
Brown had left Kansas in 1856, believing he had done well there. Then, with his hatred of slavery and his belief in action, and with money from a few wealthy abolitionists, he planned to seize the U.S. armory at Harper's Ferry - 50 miles northwest of Washington (at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers). His purpose was to begin a war for the liberation of all slaves in the United States. Only13 whites and five blacks joined him, and they attacked on October 16, 1859. The local mayor and a few others were killed, a few of Brown's men died, and Brown was captured, ending Brown's rise against slavery within 36 hours. Brown was transported to a jail in Charlestown, South Carolina - the heart of South. Southerners saw Brown's raid as an example of what northerners wanted to do with the South. Brown was tried and convicted that same month, and on December 2 he was hanged.
At the Republican convention in 1856, Lincoln received 110 votes for the vice-presidential nomination, bringing him national attention. In June, 1858, he was nominated to be the Republican senator from Illinois, opposing Democrat Stephen Douglas. He gave his "House Divided" speech at the state convention in Springfield and he engaged Douglas in a series of debates. Lincoln said, "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races ..." Of blacks he said that he was not for "qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people." And he said that "there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." Lincoln was expressing a common view among whites opposed to slavery. Like the Founding Fathers, Lincoln and these other people of good will were people of their time. Lincoln had been opposed to slavery because he thought it morally wrong and an assault on everyone's dignity, especially that of the slave. He and other whites had been concerned too about white workers being unable to compete with slaves for jobs. And Lincoln had been arguing that slavery threatened democracy.
For the Senate seat in 1858, the Illinois legislature chose the more conservative candidate, Douglas, over Lincoln - by a vote of 54 to 46. Lincoln continued his speech-making, and he won more attention in March 1860 with the publication of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. And at the Republican convention in May he won the party's nomination for President of the United States.
He ran against two Democrats, the Democratic Party having split between his old rival, Douglas and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Another candidate for the presidency was John Bell of Tennessee, nominated by the Constitutional Union Party - a party of former Whigs who were interested in compromise between the North and South and keeping the Union together.
Lincoln had the active support of Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune. With Lincoln, Greeley opposed slavery but held that if slavery were to be overthrown it should not be forced upon the South by northerners, that it should be done by the southerners themselves. But the views of Lincoln and Greeley seldom made it into the South. Southern postmasters refused to distribute Greeley's newspaper. And with the electoral college as the means of electing a president, which candidate received the most votes for the nation as a whole meant nothing, and Lincoln did not bother campaigning in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee or Texas.
The election results included 26,000 votes for Lincoln in the slave states, and he received 1,800,000 votes in the free states. He won in all of the northern states but New Jersey and, overall, only 40 percent of the popular vote. But in the electoral college he won 180 votes and the other candidates combined won only 123, leaving Lincoln as president-elect and scheduled to take office in early March.
After the election, Horace Greeley tried to calm Southern fears, while southern politicians saw Lincoln as committed to the extinction of slavery and as owing the South nothing politically. Many southern politicians allowed themselves exaggeration and panic. It appeared to them that the political power that the South had been exercising had come to an end. James Henry Hammond, Senator from South Carolina, cautioned his southern colleagues against this panic, pointing out that Lincoln's party, the Republicans, controlled neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives, nor the Supreme Court and that the Republicans lacked the means to distribute patronage. He said that seceding would be foolish and self-destructive, like those Japanese who when insulted ripped open their bowels.
The emotional reaction to Lincoln's election that swept across the South was too much for Hammond and the few who agreed with him. Hammond caved in to Southern opinion and resigned from the Senate. Delegates to a state convention in South Carolina voted to secede from the union, and, on January 9, twenty days after South Carolina's secession, Mississippi seceded, then Florida on the 10th, and Alabama on the 11th. A week later, Georgia seceded.
On January 21, Jefferson Davis, Senator from Mississippi, resigned his Senate seat. And, with fewer southerners around, on January 29, 1861, Kansas was voted into the union as a free state.
On February 9, at Montgomery Alabama, representatives from the seceding states formed what they called a confederacy. They drew up a constitution but with greater emphasis on the autonomy of each state than existed in the U.S. Constitution. On February 18, they inaugurated Jefferson Davis the Confederacy's president. On February 23, Texas voters chose to join the Confederacy, and, three days later, Louisiana became the seventh state of the Confederacy.
Lincoln hoped to avoid war and to lure the seceding states back into the Union. In his inauguration speech, on March 4, 1861, he quoted from one of his previous speeches:
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
He argued that no state "upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union." The Union, he said, was an association of states by contract and a contract that could not be undone except by all parties. The Union, he said, was formed by the Articles of Association in 1774, was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and was further matured in 1778 by the Articles of Confederation. "And finally in 1787," he added, "one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was 'to form a more perfect Union.'"
Lincoln hoped that the secessionists would see their act as an overreaction to his presidency. He described acts of violence from within any of the states against the authority of the federal government as "insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances." "There needs to be no bloodshed or violence," he said, "and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority." He was, he said, ready to cooperate with the South, including mail service.
Following his inauguration, Lincoln sent a message to South Carolina's government that he was sending needed supplies to the federal fort in that state - Fort Sumter. South Carolinians responded with hostility and sought to take over the fort by force, beginning with a bombardment of the fort on April 12. Lincoln declared a "state of insurrection." The fort was lost to the South Carolinians, and, on April 15, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to serve in the military for a three month tour of duty, and more than this number responded.
Lincoln asked one of the Union's generals, Robert E. Lee, to become field commander of the Union forces. Lee was opposed to slavery and had freed his slaves, but he believed that states had voluntarily joined the Union and had a right to secede if they wished. "A union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets," he held, "has no charms for me." Lee resigned his commission and returned to Virginia, and he vowed to draw his sword again only in self-defense.
On April 17, Jefferson Davis invited southern ship owners to prey on northern merchant vessels, and two days later Lincoln declared a naval blockade of all ports and coasts of the Confederate states.
Davis called on the Confederacy's Congress to "convene at the earliest practicable moment to devise measures necessary for the defense of the country." Before that Congress, Davis spoke of Lincoln as having declared war on the Confederacy, and he spoke of the wrongs suffered by the slave states. "Fanatical organizations," he said, "supplied with money by voluntary subscriptions, were assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent and revolt. Means were furnished for their escape from their owners, and agents secretly employed to entice them to abscond."
On May 3, Lincoln asked states to gather 42,000 more volunteers - for three-year tours of duty in the military. That month, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina and Virginia joined the confederacy, making eleven states for the Confederacy. Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, although slave states, were divided in their loyalties and chose not to secede. Some western counties in Virginia did not want to secede from the Union and seceded instead from Virginia - the beginning of what would, in 1863, become the state of West Virginia.
Also in May, Britain declared its neutrality and its intention to respect the Union's blockade of southern ports. The Confederates were disappointed. They had believed that Britain, because its industries were dependent on the South's cotton, would side with them and if necessary for the sake of cotton would go to war against the Union.
In June a minor battle was fought near Fort Monroe, Virginia. Union regiments became confused and fired on one another before being driven back. The losses were seventy-six casualties for the Union and six for the Confederates, and the Confederates were encouraged. The larger battle came in July - the first battle of Bull Run. The General-in-Chief of the Union armies, Winfield Scott, of Mexican War fame, ordered General Irvin McDowell to advance, with inadequately trained troops, against Confederate troops at Manassas Junction, Virginia - 25 miles west and a little south of Washington D.C. People with packed lunches watched from hills what they believed would be the deciding battle of the war. The Union forces fell back in a rout, suffering 3,000 causalities and losing 1,200 as prisoners. The Confederates suffered roughly 2,000 casualties, and they gained a hero, a general with a thirst for battle who had acquired a new nickname by holding his ground: Stonewall Jackson.
The liberal newspaper publisher in New York, Horace Greeley, lost confidence and asked Lincoln to sue for peace. The general public in the Union was more steadfast, and more volunteers poured into state militias. Congress passed a law for an income tax to help pay for what appeared would be a prolonged war. General McDowell was replaced by General George B. McClellan as commander of the Union's army in the East - the Army of the Potomac. Before the year was over, McClellan replaced General Scott as overall commander of the Union forces, and McClellan was focusing on military training.
In the West, meanwhile, a Union force abandoned Forts Breckinridge in the territory of New Mexico in order to combat Texan Confederates toward the east, and Apache Indians responded to freedom from the presence of U.S. forces by looting, burning and killing. On July 24, the Texans, with 300 men, and the Union force of 432, met at Mesilla, by the Rio Grande, forty miles upriver from El Paso. Two days later the Union force abandoned its fort. The Texans rode into the Union encampment and the Union force surrendered.
In August, a battle was fought in Missouri, at Wilson's Creek, eleven miles southwest of Springfield. A Union force of around 6,000 was forced to withdraw, and, the two armies sparing for position, the Confederates advanced 130 miles to the north and captured a Union garrison at Lexington, Missouri. At the end of the month the Union commander in the West, John Fremont, panicked and ordered the confiscation of property of Confederate sympathizers, which helped to rally recruitment for the Confederacy in Kentucky and jeopardized Kentucky's neutrality. In September, a Confederate force moved to Columbus Kentucky, and a Union force, under the command of a newly appointed brigadier general, Ulysses S. Grant, moved from Illinois to Paducah, Kentucky, preempting a Confederate advance there.
Meanwhile, people were not using the phrase "civil war." In the South it was called a "war between the states," suggesting their right to break away from the northern states. And in the North people were calling the war the Rebellion of 1861.
The Union had been constructing river gunships with plans to dominate the Mississippi and other rivers. In February, Union forces launched assaults on Confederate held riverside forts, and on February 25, Nashville, on the Cumberland River, became the first capital of a Confederate state to fall. On April 6, Confederates struck back in a surprise attack against Union forces that had advanced to Shiloh, Tennessee. Casualties were heavy: 13,000 out of 63,000 Union soldiers died, and 11,000 of 40,000 Confederate troops - together, more Americans in one battle than had fallen in all of the country's previous wars. The slaughter came with an increase in firepower, and the extent of the casualties was a shock to the military and to civilians.
In early February, 1862, a combined Union army and navy force scored victories along the Atlantic seacoast, defeating Confederates at Roanoke Island at the coast of North Carolina. Within a few weeks the Union took several more ports, giving the Union bases for attempts to extend control inland. The Confederacy had been rushing to build naval vessels to defend its rivers and harbors, and it converted a scuttled Union frigate, the U.S.S. Merrimac, into an iron-sided vessel, renamed the C.S.S. Virginia. On March 8, the Virginia sank two wooden Union warships off Norfolk, Virginia. The following day as it was attacking Union ships, a small Union ironclad ship, the U.S.S.Monitor, emerged and gave battle - the first battle between iron-clad ships - with no decisive results.
The Union navy was blockading the Confederacy's coastline, but Confederates at night were passing through and making money smuggling goods that the Union wished to keep out of the South. The Union navy sailed a fleet of 24 ships upriver toward New Orleans, successfully enduring fire from two forts and sinking six of the eight makeshift gunboats sent out from New Orleans against them. The Union took control over New Orleans - a port in the cotton trade and the richest city in the Americas.
Fighting in New Mexico in April resulted in Confederates retreating to Texas by May, leaving the far west and the Pacific coast in the hands of the Union. Texans had begun a trading friendship with Mexico. The Confederacy had begun conscription, and, in 1862, growers planted a good crop of cotton - the second largest on record - while the Confederacy could have used a greater food crop.
President Lincoln was hoping for a knockout blow in Virginia. Instead, in May, Confederate forces stopped McClellan's advance at Williamsburg. Confederates forced Union forces out of the Shenandoah Valley and across the Potomac River, putting Washington in jeopardy. On May 31, the Confederates attacked and almost defeated Union forces at Seven Pines. Between June 26 and July 2, battles were fought at Mechanicsville, Gaines's Mill, Savage's Station, Frayser's Farm and Malvern Hill, which ended with the Confederates withdrawing to Richmond but no knockout blow for Lincoln.
The Union fought the Second Battle of Bull Run on August 29-30. On September 15, Harper's Ferry, Virginia, fell to the Confederates. And a clash of armies occurred on September 17 in Maryland - the Battle of Antietam - with Union casualties at 12,410 and Confederate at 13,724, with no knockout blow for the Union. But there was a loss of prestige for the Confederacy. The British and French viewed the Battle of Antietam as a victory for the Union and put on hold their plans to recognize the Confederacy.
Lincoln had been under pressure from Northerners who wanted to take a harder line against the Confederacy and turn the war into an abolitionist crusade. In the preceding months he had been reluctant, but now he changed his mind. On September 22, he announced his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation - to be effective beginning January 1, 1863. All slaves in states rebelling against the United States were to be declared free - but not in the slave-holding border states still in the Union:Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. Lincoln resisted the purists who wanted all slavery abolished, not wishing to drive any of these four states into joining the Confederacy. Lincoln had good reason to limit his emancipation to those in belligerent secessionist states. His proclamation was an act of war and he, the president, could do it only as an act of war. It was up to Congress to free the slaves elsewhere in the U.S. and the Supreme Court to approve it. This was the court, still headed by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, that had ruled on the Dred Scott case. Taney had spoken of opposition to slavery as "northern aggression." Like all presidents, Lincoln had to consider what his powers were and were not.
For the Union, the year ended with more failures in Virginia. By now, George Halleck, who had commanded operations in the West, was appointed overall commander of the Union forces, and, in November, Lincoln replaced George McClellan as commander of his army in Virginia - the Army of the Potomac. In December, a Union offensive at Fredericksburg met the power of the defensive position - artillery and riflemen behind a barrier against men moving forward across an open field. A barrier in this instance was a stone wall. Waves of Union soldiers were butchered. Defeated, the Union army withdrew and went to camp through a winter of snow and mud.
Toward the end of April, Union armies were on the march again. In Virginia they attacked Lee's forces, and at Chancellorsville they fought a four-day battle that ended with the Union forces withdrawing. But in casualties it was the Confederacy's most costly battle. Then in the West, around Vicksburg Mississippi, Grant won several victories for the Union. On May 22, Grant began a siege of Vicksburg. Grant's artillery and gunboats shelled the town. Cut off from supplies, the Confederates in Vicksburg were starving, and in early July the Confederate general, John Pemberton, surrendered the city and his 30,000 men. Soon thereafter, the Union army captured Port Hudson, Louisiana. The Union now dominated the entire Mississippi River, and it had split the Confederacy east of the Mississippi from the state of Arkansas, much of Louisiana and Texas and the supplies that Texas offered.
In Virginia, after the Confederacy's victory at Chancellorsville, General Lee took the war to the enemy. On June 13, he defeated Union forces at Winchester, and he continued north into Pennsylvania. Union and Confederate forces ran into each other at Gettysburg on the first day of July . Lee had 75,000 men and the Union army had roughly 85,000 and a better defensive position. During the battle Lee lost 25,000 men and the Union 23,000. It was the bloodiest battle of the war. His offensive a failure, Lee retreated to Virginia, with the Union commander, General Meade, failing to follow. It was a turning point in the war. The Union had greater manpower and could replace its fallen, but Lee's army would never fully recover.
The Union had began its first conscriptions of men into the military in March. All men from ages 20 to 45 had to register, but if one had enough money he could pay someone to take his place. The casualty list for the Battle of Gettysburg was posted in New York City on July 12, the day after the names of the first draftees there were drawn. On July 13 an angry mob burned a draft office. The city was largely Democrat with extensive hostility toward the Republican president. Poor immigrants from Ireland had been competing with blacks for jobs, blacks were being used to break a strike on the waterfront, and the protest against the draft transformed into the sacking of ships and the homes of anti-slavery leaders. Blacks were attacked and several were lynched. Rioters controlled the streets and at least 120 people were killed. Military men sent by General Meade and local police restored order after four days.
Blacks had been fighting since 1862. In October that year, the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers repulsed a Confederate attack during the battle of Island Mound in Missouri. Blacks had fought well at the battle of Port Hudson in May, 1863, and now, on July 18, 1863, at Honey Springs, Indian Territory (Oklahoma), a black regiment, alongside white regiments, fought and defeated the Confederates, 600 of them dying in the battle. On July 18, blacks of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment led an assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. Whites had been accustomed to seeing subservience from blacks and had mistakenly supposed that blacks were split between diffidence and wild rage. President Lincoln and other whites had doubted that blacks would make adequate soldiers. People were now learning otherwise. And by August, 1863, the Union had 14 black regiments in the field.
In September, Confederates drove Union forces back from the Tennessee-Georgia border, at Chickamauga. In late November the two sides met against at Chattanooga, Tennessee. Grant arrived and in late November the Union troops revenged their loss at Chickamauga by driving the Confederates away from Chattanooga.
Meanwhile, violence continued in Missouri - a state divided between fervent and moderate Unionists and fervent and moderate Confederates. Anti-slavery guerrilla bands called jayhawkers had been roaming through Kansas and Missouri, attacking perceived enemies, living off of the land and viewed by Confederates as murderers and thieves. On the Confederate side was a former school teacher from Ohio, Captain William Quantrill, leading a company of 150 men on horseback, in the service of the Confederate army, also pursuing guerrilla warfare and terror. On March 7, 1862, Quantrill and his men raided the town of Aubrey, four miles into Kansas, killed 3 men and destroyed property. More such raids into Kansas took place in 1862, including an attack on a Santa Fe wagon train - total deaths in these raids, 29 or 30. They had accomplished nothing. But on August 21, 1863, they tried harder. They raided 35 miles into Kansas, at the bigger town of Lawrence, where they killed 182 men and boys. Then Union troops arrived to battle Quantrill, and Quantrill all but ended his raiding.
In November, Lincoln joined a gathering at Gettysburg and made his speech, to dedicate a portion of the battlefield as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so that the Union called the United States, created 87 years before, might live.
Three years of war had hardened most of public opinion in both the Union and the Confederacy, each seeing the other side as demonic rather than just wayward, and deserving the hardest punishment. A Confederate shooting of seven Unionist prisoners-of-war had occurred in early October, in Missouri - a retaliation for deaths that had occurred in battle. The Union general in St. Louis retaliated by hanging an equal number of Confederate prisoners-of-war.
The Confederacy was enduring economic hardship. It had secured a 14.5 million dollar loan from France in 1863 - foolish investors available as usual. But mostly the war was being paid for by the printing of paper money - only five percent paid for from tax revenues. Confederate government spending and consumer shortages were creating a raging inflation most hurtful, of course, to the common poor. As winter was approaching, the Confederate states east of the Mississippi faced a shortage of food - while Texans were enjoying plenty to eat and luxuries imported from Mexico.
During the winter an evangelical revival swept through the ranks of Confederate soldiers. Among them was the feeling that they were being punished by hardship and that they could put things right if they cleansed themselves of sin. They thought that surely God would not reward the dishonorable and materialistic Yankee aggressors if they, the good Confederates, rededicated themselves to God's purposes.
A few from the South were less interested in a victory against the evil Yankees and were migrating to the West Coast. Among them was Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), who went West after having served in the Confederate military for a few weeks.
Lincoln made Ulysses S. Grant general-in-chief over all Union armies, believing that he had found a real general and a man of determination and willingness to fight. And for 1864 concerted offensives were planned for what was hoped would be a final drive to victory.
In early May, General William Tecumseh Sherman of Ohio and an army of 98,000 began their march from Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia. Also in early May, Grant and an army of 100,000 went southward into Virginia, back across ground covered the previous year. And on May 5 and 6, fifty miles from Richmond, they fought a bloody battle in woods and undergrowth (the Battle of the Wilderness) in which 17,666 were killed, wounded or missing, the trees and undergrowth catching fire and the wounded burning to death. Lee's army of 64,000 suffered around 12,000 casualties. Grant withdrew, but he turned his army southward on the attack. On May 8, the two armies met again, forty miles from Richmond, and they fought for four days. The Union suffered another 18,400 casualties and the Confederates another 12,000.
On May 11, thirty miles to the south, and ten miles from Richmond, at Yellow Tavern, the largest Union cavalry force assembled, 10,000 strong, drove 4,500 Confederates from the field, the casualties on both sides around 800. On May 15, in the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia, another of Grant's armies launched a campaign of deliberate destruction to deprive the Confederates of supplies. The advance of the Union force was stopped and Confederates supply lines were maintained.
Fighting was becoming an everyday business for Grant's men, without the break to peaceful camp life of the previous three years. Grant's army moved around Richmond, on its eastern side, driving toward Petersburg, a communications and railway center, twenty-two miles to its south. At Cold Harbor, east of Richmond, he clashed with Lee, who was short of men but dug in at a concave position. Grant sent his men against it, and with the superiority of the defense, and what is said to have been the greatest firepower that an assaulting force had ever faced, Lee's troops obliterated the assault. In the murderous cross fire, Grant was said to have lost over 7,000 men in just a eight minutes. A recent estimate holds it at around 3,500. [note] Lee lost less that 1,500 men. Grant was stopped. He was dismayed by his losses. His subordinate generals thought maybe now he had learned his lesson. A reluctance to go to slaughter was developing among his troops. Some of them were suffering from shell shock. And days later some newspapers responded to the Battle of Cold Harbor with the phrase "butcher Grant."
In July, Confederate troops led by General Jubal Early moved against Washington, D.C., trying to relieve the pressure on Lee's army. It got within five miles of the capital, but the city was well defended by seasoned troops who drove the Confederates back into Virginia.
Grant's army moved around Richmond, on its eastern side, driving toward Petersburg, a communications and railway center, twenty-two miles south of Richmond. At Cold Harbor, twenty miles east of Richmond, the Union army clashed with Lee, who was short of men but dug in. In the two weeks culminating at Cold Harbor. Grant lost more than 12,000 men, and Lee lost almost 4,000. For a few days both armies, from fortified positions, sniped at each other and exchanged artillery bombardments. Union forces than closed in on Petersburg, but rather than take the city, on June 20 a siege began, to last through the rest of the year.
Sherman and his army, meanwhile, were marching and fighting their way toward Atlanta. It had been circle about four miles wide, a city of around 9,000. Atlanta was the munitions producing center of the Confederacy and had been supplying the Confederacy with railway cars, cannons, tents, revolvers, saddles, canteens, belt buckles spurs and buttons. With refugees arriving ahead of Sherman the town's number had increased to around 70,000. Then with news of Sherman's advance some began leaving. In late July Sherman reached the city's periphery, and there a prolonged battle began.
In August the Union won the greatest naval contest of the war, at Mobile Bay, Alabama. The admiral of a fleet of seven wooden ships, David Farragut, cried "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead," referring to anchored mines across the channel leading to Mobile. There, his sailors and marines, supported by naval bombardment, captured Fort Morgan on August 23, making Union control over the Gulf Coast complete.
In the North preparations were being made for the presidential campaign that year. Northern Democrats favored an immediate end to the war. The president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, a Democrat before secession, refused to help the northern Democrats by agreeing to a negotiated end to the war, but he still believed in victory, saying on August 20 that he was open to proposals for peace but "on the basis of our independence." Lincoln's former general, McClellan, accepted the Democratic Party's nomination for president but rejected the party's peace plank. Lincoln's popularity was suffering, and he was being described as a boorish country bumpkin, a third-rate backwoods lawyer and as not knowing how to end the war. McClellan was looked to by many as their hope for saving the country.
Then, after a little more than a month of maneuvering and fighting around Atlanta, Sherman captured the city, depressing Confederates and lifting the spirits of the war-weary in the Union. Among Unionists was a new confidence that they would win the war, and Lincoln's prospects of winning the election were much improved.
Until mid-October, Sherman rested his men and accumulated supplies. He ordered civilians to remove themselves from the city, and, on October 16, he set fire to Atlanta. In response to personal pleadings he left 400 structures in tact, including five churches. The following day he began a march to the southeast, toward the city of Savannah, by the sea, with an army of 62,000 and 2,500 mules, leaving two army corps behind to chase after his opponent, John Bell Hood, who had returned to fight in Tennessee. Sherman was cutting himself from communications with Washington, cutting his supply line from Union territory and planning to live off the land.
On November 8, Lincoln won re-election, 2.2 million votes to 1.8 million for McClellan, which translated into 212 electoral votes for Lincoln and 21 for McClellan.
Sherman was destroying everything in a varying width that reached 60 miles wide - factories, bridges, railroads, public buildings, cotton gins, mills, stores of provisions, standing crops and cattle. He fed his troops well. War was horror, he believed, and he wanted to convince Confederates sooner rather than later that they should give up their fight. Following his army were desperados, including some lost Confederates who had given up on the war, taking advantage of an opportunity to loot.
On December 15 and 16, Hood was defeated decisively outside Nashville. On December 22, Sherman took Savannah, a city he described as having "some twenty thousand people." Sherman brought joy to Unionists and he was hailed in Unionist newspapers. Sherman was holding the city and surrounding territory as a military post, but he treated the city with lenience. He kept Savannah's elected officials in office, and in his directive to his troops he wrote:
Where there is no conflict, every encouragement should be given to well-disposed and peaceful inhabitants to resume their usual pursuits. Families should be disturbed as little as possible in their residences, and tradesman allowed the free use of their shops, tools, etc.; churches, schools, and all places of amusement and recreation, should be encouraged, and streets and roads made perfectly safe to persons in their pursuits.
In January, transportation problems and successful blockades were creating severe shortages of food and supplies in the Confederacy. Starving soldiers were deserting Lee's forces. Desperate, Jefferson Davis approved the arming of slaves as a means of augmenting the Confederacy's shrinking army, but the measure was not put into effect. As many leaders do when facing military defeat, Davis was becoming delusional. He believed that however overwhelmed militarily, the Confederacy could live on as long as its people refused to submit. He was hoping for too much. A people could either extend military operations through guerrilla warfare or they could integrate their lives with economic circumstances that included cooperation with their victorious former enemy. Usually people opted for economic survival rather than guerrilla warfare.
Confederate soldiers had been deserting to save their families and farms, and many farms had been stripped of food and animals by the Confederate commissary. Davis, pressured by top advisers, asked for a peace conference in hope of obtaining from Lincoln a negotiated settlement. Lincoln responded that the war would end "whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it."
A conspicuous frivolity appeared among wealthy Confederates - the kind of "what the hell" desperation the sometimes emerges when hopes are dashed. Poor whites resented banquets that seemed to them to mock their poverty and hunger.
Sherman's army at Savannah was re-supplied by the Union Navy, and, in February, Sherman and his army were marching northward into South Carolina, pursuing his policy of devastation as he went, including the burning down of homes of the wealthy or prominent Confederates, feeding his anger and trying to drive fearful Confederates to surrender. In March he crossed into North Carolina.
On March 25, General Lee attacked Grant's forces near Petersburg, but without success, and on April 1 he attacked again without success. It was Lee's last effort to hold to his positions at Richmond and Petersburg, and having failed, on the night of April 2-3, he evacuated Richmond and slipped away from the line between Petersburg and the Union army. The next evening, Union forces entered Richmond, the capitol of the confederacy. Grant's army pursued Lee and his army of 30,000 men eastward, surrounded them near a place called Appomattox Courthouse and, on April 7, Grant called on Lee to surrender. Lee's troops were exhausted, and rather than try to cut through to the Allegheny Mountains and pursue guerrilla warfare, Lee agreed to meet his fellow Mexican-war veteran, Grant. A truce was called on April 9, and, on that day, Lee and Grant met at a home in Appomattox Courthouse and agreed to the terms of surrender.
Grant wanted no unnecessary humiliations and did not require Lee's officers to surrender their swords, their personal baggage and horses or side arms. Outside, Grant saluted Lee by taking off his hat, and Lee saluted back by taking off his hat. The war was over.
Battle deaths for the two sides added together have been counted as a little over 200,000 (110,070 for the Union and roughly 90,000 for the Confederacy). Deaths in the military from disease on both sides was over 414,000. Taking the battlefield deaths alone, with a population of 31 million at the beginning of the war, that was one for every 155 persons (white, black, North and South). For the year 2006, with a population of 300 million, one in every 155 persons would be 1,935,484, in other words around 2 million battle deaths - about 645 times the 3,000 Americans killed in Iraq from 2003 through 2006.
Another killing took place on April 14. President Lincoln was watching a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater in Washington. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth, an actor from Maryland who believed that he was avenging the Confederate defeat.
Lincoln died the next morning.
Before the Civil War a difference of opinion existed over whether the U.S. Constitution was a treaty between states or a founding document of a single country. After the Civil War it was more commonly agreed that the U.S. Constitution did not grant states the right of secede. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1856, reinforced this view. No state was to deny a citizen his right to remain a citizen of the United States, and states were not to conduct their own foreign policy.
Recommended Books
America's Civil War, by Brooks D. Simpson, published in 1996, 239 pages.
War and Ruin: William T. Sherman and the Savannah Campaign, by Anne J Bailey, 168 pages.
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: the End of Slavery in America, by Allen C Guelo.
The Civil War, by Shelby Foote, three volumes and more than 2,500 pages.
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| 16-19th centuries |
The United States, 1865 to 1900
Copyright © 2002 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
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