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The Civil War
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as President of the United States. Less than a month had passed since the formation of the Confederacy. In his inaugural address as President, Lincoln appealed to the southern states to stay in the Union. He promised that he would not interfere with slavery in any of them. But he warned that he would not allow them to break up the United States by seceding- Quoting from his oath of office, he told them: "You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I have a most solemn one to 'preserve, protect and defend1 it."
The southern states took no notice of Lincoln's appeal. On April 12 Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter, a fortress in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, that was occupied by United States troops. These shots marked the beginning of the American Civil War.
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Lincoln called for 75,000 men to fight to save the Union. Jefferson Davis, the newly elected President of the Confederate States, made a similar appeal for men to fight for the Confederacy. Volunteers rushed forward in thousands on both sides.
Some people found it difficult and painful to decide which side to support. The decision sometimes split families. The son of the commander of the Confederate navy was killed fighting in a Union ship. Two brothers became generals—but on opposite sides. And three of President Lincoln's own brothers-in-law died fighting for the Confederacy.
From the first months of the war Union warships blockaded the ports of the South. They did this to prevent the Confederacy from selling its cotton abroad and from obtaining foreign supplies.
hi both men and material resources the North was much stronger than the South. It had a population of twenty-two million people. The South had only nine million people and 3.5 million of them were slaves. The North grew more food crops than the South. It also had more than five times the manufacturing capacity, including most of the country's weapon factories. So the North not only had more fighting men than the South, it could also keep them better supplied with weapons, clothing, food and everything else they needed.
However, the North faced one great difficulty. The only way it could win the war was to invade the South and occupy its land. The South had no such problem. It did not need to conquer the North to win independence. All it had to do was to hold out until the people of the North grew tired of fighting. Most southerners believed that the Confederacy could do this. It began the war with a number of advantages. Many of the best officers in the pre-war army of the United States were southerners. Now they returned to the Confederacy to organize its armies. Most of the recruits led by these officers had grown up on farms and were expert riders and marksmen. Most important of all, the fact that almost all the war's fighting took place in the South meant that Confederate soldiers were defending their own
12 The Civil War
homes. This often made them fight with more spirit than the Union soldiers.
Southerners denied that they were fighting mainly to preserve slavery. Most were poor farmers who owned no slaves anyway. The South was fighting for its independence from the North, they said, just as their grandfathers had fought for independence from Britain almost a century earlier.
The war was fought in two main areas —in Virginia and the other cast coast states of the Confederacy, and in the Mississippi valley.
In Virginia the Union armies suffered one defeat after another in the first year of the war. Again and again they tried to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital. Each time they were thrown back with heavy losses. The Confederate forces in Virginia had two great advantages. The first was that many rivers cut across the roads leading south to Richmond and so made the city easier to defend. The second was their leaders. Two Confederate generals in particular, Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson, showed much more skill than the generals leading the Union army at this time. Jackson got his nickname "Stonewall" because he stood firm against advancing Union troops. A fellow officer, encouraging his soldiers shouted out, "Look, there is Jackson, standing like a stone wall!"
The North's early defeats in Virginia discouraged its supporters. The flood of volunteers for the army began to dry up. Recruitment was not helped by letters home like this one, from a lieutenant in the Union army in 1862:
"The butchery of the boys, the sufferings of the unpaid soldiers, without tents, poor rations, a single blanket each, with no bed but the hard damp ground - it is these things that kill me."
Fortunately for the North, Union forces in the Mississippi valley had more success. In April 1862, a naval officer named David Farragut sailed Union ships into the mouth of the river and captured New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy. At the same time other Union forces were fighting their way down the Mississippi from the north.
By spring 1863, the Union armies were closing in on an important Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi called Vicksburg. On July 4, after much
bloody fighting and a siege lasting six weeks, Vicksburg surrendered to a Union army led by General Ulysses S. Grant. Its fall was a heavy blow to the South. Union forces now controlled the whole length of the Mississippi. They had split the Confederacy in two. It became impossible for western Confederate states like Texas to send any more men and supplies to the east.
But by 1863 many northerners were tired of the war. They were sickened by its heavy cost in lives and money. General Lee, the Confederate commander, believed that if his army could win a decisive victory on northern soil, popular opinion there might force the Union government to make peace.
In the last week ofjune 1863, Lee marched his army north into Pennsylvania. At a small town named Gettysburg a Union army blocked his way. The battle which followed was the biggest that has ever been fought in the United States. In three days of fierce fighting more than 50,000 men were killed or wounded. On the fourth day Lee broke off the battle and led his men back into the'South. The Confederate army had suffered a defeat from which it would never recover.
The Emancipation Proclamation
By the summer of 1862 President Lincoln realized that the North would only win the war if he could arouse more enthusiasm for its cause. On September 22 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation with this aim. This Proclamation declared that from January 1, 1863, all slaves were to be made free—but only if they lived in areas that were part of the Confederacy, The Proclamation changed the purpose of the war. From a struggle to preserve the Union, it became a struggle both to preserve the Union and to abolish slavery.
At the time not everyone was impressed by Lincoln's action. A British leader, Lord Palmers-ton, said that all Lincoln had done was "to abolish slavery where he was without power to do so, while protecting it where he had the power to destroy it." Palmerston was right. But after the Emancipation Proclamation everyone knew that it was only a matter of time now before slavery was ended everywhere in the United States.
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A New Nation
The Battle of Gettysburg.
By 1864 the Confederacy was running out of almost everything— men, equipment, food, money. As fall colored the trees of the eastern woods, the Union armies moved in to end the war. In November 1864, a Union army led by General William T. Sherman began to march through the Confederate state of Georgia. Its soldiers destroyed everything in their path. They tore up railroad tracks, burned crops and buildings, drove off cattle. On December 22 they occupied the city of Savannah. The Confederacy was split again, this time from cast to west. After capturing Savannah, Sherman turned north. He marched through the Carolinas, burning and destroying again as he made for Richmond.
The Confederate capital was already in danger from another Union army led by General Grant. By March 1865, Grant had almost encircled the city and on April 2 Lee was forced to abandon it to save his army from being trapped. He marched south, hoping to hght on from a strong position in the mountains. But Grant followed close behind and other Union soldiers blocked Lee's way forward. Lee was trapped. On April 9, 1 865, he met Grant in a house in a tiny village called Appomattox and surrendered his army.
Grant treated the defeated Confederate soldiers generously. After they had given up their weapons and promised never again to fight against the United States, he allowed them to go home. He told them they could keep their horses "to help with the spring ploughing." As Lec rode away, Grant stood in the doorway chewing a piece of tobacco and told his men: "The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again."
The Civil War gave final answers to two questions that had divided the United States ever since it became an independent nation. It put an end to slavery. In 1865 this was abolished everywhere in the United States by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. And it decided finally that the United States was one nation, whose parts could not be separated.
But the war left bitter memories. The United States fought other wars later, but all were outside its own boundaries. The Civil War caused terrible destruction at home. All over the South cities and farms lay in ruins. And more Americans died in this war than in any other, before or since. By the time Lec surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, the dead on both sides totaled 635,000.
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The Gettysburg Address
Gettysburg in Pennsylvania is remembered for two things. The first is the battle that was fought there in July 1863. The second is the Gettysburg address, a speech that Abraham Lincoln made there a few months later.
On November 19, 1863, Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to dedicate part of the battlefield as a national war cemetery. This is part of what he said when he did so:
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we arc engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. But in a larger
sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living to resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth."
Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg became even more famous than the battle. At the time it was seen as a statement of what the North was fighting for. In later years it came to be seen as a moving expression of faith in the basic principles of democratic government.
Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox in 1865. Grant sits at the table behind Lee in this