Decades of conflict and controversy between the North and the South finally culminated in war in 1861. Longstanding economic, political, social, and constitutional differences had steadily divided the two areas during the antebellum period. By 1860, the North had grown increasingly industrial, and the South remained primarily agricultural. The Republican Party dominated the free states of the North and the West, and the slave states of the South were solidly Democratic. The majority of Northerners opposed the spread of slavery, and Southerners wholeheartedly pushed for its expansion. Northerners believed the national government, the Union of the states, was indivisible and not dissolvable, and Southerners subscribed to the doctrine of states’ rights and the legitimacy of secession. Extremists on both sides exacerbated tensions in an already charged political environment until compromise became impossible.
Decades of conflict and controversy between the North and the South finally culminated in war in 1861. Longstanding economic, political, social, and constitutional differences had steadily divided the two areas during the antebellum period. By 1860, the North had grown increasingly industrial, and the South remained primarily agricultural. The Republican Party dominated the free states of the North and the West, and the slave states of the South were solidly Democratic. The majority of Northerners opposed the spread of slavery, and Southerners wholeheartedly pushed for its expansion. Northerners believed the national government, the Union of the states, was indivisible and not dissolvable, and Southerners subscribed to the doctrine of states’ rights and the legitimacy of secession. Extremists on both sides exacerbated tensions in an already charged political environment until compromise became impossible.
The November, 1860, election of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican antislavery candidate, precipitated the secession of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas by February 1, 1861. Representatives for these states met in Montgomery, Alabama, later that month, formed the Confederate States of America, and demanded that all federal property in the South be turned over to Confederate authorities.
The North’s refusal to relinquish several forts within the Confederacy led to the outbreak of hostilities in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The war began when Southern artillery units attacked and captured Fort Sumter (April 12–14, 1861).
Following the surrender of Fort Sumter, Lincoln declared a naval blockade of Southern ports and called 75,000 militiamen into national service. Quotas were assigned to all the states still in the Union, including the slave states of the Upper South. Compelled to decide whether to use force to bring the seven seceded states back into the Union or to support their sister slave states, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina seceded in April and May and joined what became the eleven-state Confederacy. Lincoln, fearing further defections, labored effectively to keep the four northern-most slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—in the Union, thereby adding to the North’s great numerical superiority. Although the Union had more men, more industry, more resources, and more of almost everything needed to wage war, the Confederacy attracted many of the best officers in the prewar regular army. As a result, the South early on enjoyed an advantage in military leadership.
Both sides expected the war to be a brief, relatively painless, and successful affair; however, despite these expectations, only one major battle was fought in 1861. Near Manassas Junction southwest of Washington, D.C., Union forces under Irvin McDowell attacked Confederates along Bull Run (July 21, 1861). The armies, though small and inexperienced, fought valiantly, but the late-afternoon arrival of reinforcements allowed the Confederates to rout McDowell and send his army fleeing back to the nation’s capital. Lincoln, who always suspected the war would be a long, hard-fought struggle, soon thereafter called for 500,000 volunteers to serve for up to three years. The Confederacy also sought long-term volunteers, but as the wild enthusiasm for war waned, each of the rival governments would eventually be forced to resort to conscription. Lincoln replaced McDowell with George B. McClellan who would command the rapidly assembling army around Washington, the Army of the Potomac. Despite repeated pleas and orders from his commander in chief, McClellan refused to advance until he, and he alone, was ready. That would not be until March, 1862.
The raising of the Confederate flag over Fort Sumter signaled the start of the Civil War. (To avoid confusion on battlefields, the design of the Confederate flag was later changed from the Stars and Bars to the more familiar “Southern Cross” battle flags.) (National Archives)
From the moment he was inaugurated president in March, 1861, until shortly before he was assassinated in April, 1865, Abraham Lincoln struggled to keep the Union together. He died a martyr to his cause but has been ever afterward remembered as the savior of the Union. (Library of Congress)
No major battles occurred in the western theater during 1861, but Union forces were active in the critical border states, especially in Kentucky. Occupation of northern Kentucky in late 1861 allowed the Union forces the following year to assail the center of the long Confederate defensive line that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Cumberland Gap. Ulysses S. Grant, recognizing the strategic value of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, seized control of these crucial waterways with his February capture of Fort Henry (February 6, 1862) and Fort Donelson (February 11–16, 1862). He pushed southward along the Tennessee until struck unexpectedly by Confederates under Albert Sidney Johnston near Pittsburg Landing. The ensuing two-day Battle of Shiloh (April 6–7, 1862) ended as a tactical draw; however, the battered Confederates were forced to retreat. The unprecedented casualties at Shiloh shocked all Americans. Almost 25,000 American soldiers fell, making it the most severe, costliest battle in U.S. history to that point. Shiloh merely hinted of things to come.
The Union concentrated its western forces, took the rail center of Corinth, Mississippi (October 3–4, 1862), and began eying Vicksburg. Then, action in the west shifted to eastern Tennessee where Braxton Bragg and his Southern army were moving northward into Kentucky. The North hurriedly dispatched Don Carlos Buell to Louisville to meet the Confederate threat. At Perryville (October 8, 1862), Bragg and Buell clashed in a strange conflict that saw only small portions of the two armies actually engaged because of an “acoustic shadow.” A drawn battle, Perryville turned into a strategic defeat after Bragg retreated back into Tennessee. When Buell refused to pursue, Lincoln replaced him with William S. Rosecrans. Near Murfreesboro along Stones River (December 31, 1862-January 2, 1863), Rosecrans and Bragg fought a vicious three-day battle that earned the distinction of having the highest combined casualty rate of the war, with 32 percent of the combatants killed, wounded, or missing. Although Stones River ended inconclusively, Bragg withdrew toward Chattanooga.
Union general Ulysses S. Grant at his Cold Harbor camp in June, 1864. (National Archives)
Back in the east, 1862 began auspiciously but ended miserably. McClellan’s long-anticipated offensive on Richmond began in March when he landed his army at the base of the peninsula formed by the James and York Rivers. By mid-May, he had advanced to within five miles of the Confederate capital. Recognizing that McClellan’s plans to employ his artillery and engineering skills to capture Richmond would probably succeed, Joseph Eggleston Johnston attacked McClellan at Seven Pines or Fair Oaks (May 31-June 1, 1862). He made no headway and was severely wounded, but Johnston’s aggressiveness disturbed McClellan—especially in conjunction with Stonewall Jackson’s brilliant spring campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, which prevented troops originally assigned to McClellan from reaching him at Richmond.
Always guilty of overestimating the strength of his opponent and unwilling to commit his forces fully when engaged, McClellan never took the offensive around Richmond. Robert E. Lee, the fortuitous choice to replace Johnston, attacked in late June, initiating the Seven Days’ Battles (June 25-July 1, 1862). Despite his numerical superiority, the Union commander steadily retreated across the peninsula until he assumed an impregnable position around Harrison’s Landing on the James. Stalemate developed.
Disappointed by McClellan’s lack of aggressiveness and inactivity, Lincoln began assembling another army in Northern Virginia to march overland against Richmond. He appointed John Pope to command the scattered forces in the region as well as units being withdrawn from McClellan. Lee, in mid-August, gambling that McClellan would not attack, marched northward to meet Pope’s growing threat, and at Second Bull Run (August 29–30, 1862) he decisively defeated the inept Pope. Hoping to capitalize on his summer success, Lee invaded Maryland the following week; however, when the two armies fought near Sharpsburg along Antietam Creek (September 17, 1862), Lee faced disaster. Had the recently restored-to-command McClellan moved more quickly, had he fully utilized his two-toone advantage in a coordinated assault, or had he renewed his attack the next day, he probably would have destroyed Lee’s army. He did not, and thus Antietam ended as a draw, allowing Lee to retreat into Virginia.
General Robert E. Lee in a photograph made by Mathew Brady shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War. (National Archives)
The impact of Antietam cannot be overemphasized. This day of unprecedented carnage cost the two armies more than 26,000 casualties. The blunting of Lee’s invasion also doused European enthusiasm for entering the war on the South’s side, but even more important, the draw at Antietam gave Lincoln the opportunity he had been seeking to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. His broadening of the war from a political struggle to restore the Union into a moral crusade to free the slaves virtually eliminated the possibility of foreign intervention or recognition. Still, 1862 ended tragically for the North when Ambrose E. Burnside, McClellan’s successor, futilely sacrificed his army at Fredericksburg (December 13, 1862). This devastating defeat sent morale in the army and the North plummeting to its lowest level of the war.
Union plans in the west in 1863 centered on Vicksburg on the Mississippi River and Chattanooga in eastern Tennessee. Grant, who began operations against Vicksburg in October, 1862, made several unsuccessful attempts to take the river fortress, but in the spring of 1863, he conducted an unconventional campaign to capture Vicksburg (May 18-July 4, 1863). Severing his lines of supply and communication and fighting south and east of Vicksburg, Grant successfully drove the Confederates back into the city where he laid siege to the garrison. A six-week siege—perhaps the most grueling of the war—ended on Independence Day when the Confederates surrendered Vicksburg. With the fall of Port Hudson, Louisiana, five days later, the Union conquered the Mississippi River line, dividing the Confederacy by cutting off the trans-Mississippi west.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which exposed the horrors of slavery and helped arouse the wrath of the North against the South. When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said to her, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” (National Archives)
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In eastern Tennessee, Rosecrans, though often slow to advance, conducted a brilliant campaign of maneuver during the summer of 1863. He first forced Bragg to abandon a strong position near Tullahoma and then, amazingly, compelled the Confederates to retreat from Chattanooga without a fight in early September. The two armies finally came to blows in northwestern Georgia at Chickamauga (September 19–20, 1863). A Confederate breakthrough on the second day threatened to destroy the Union army, but a resolute holding action by the George H. Thomas allowed most of Rosecrans’s men to escape to Chattanooga. Bragg pursued and laid siege to the city as effectively as possible given the terrain and the size of his army.
In October, following his appointment to overall command in the west, Grant relieved Rosecrans and assumed personal control at Chattanooga. He reopened supply lines and assembled a large army to break the siege. During the battles for Chattanooga (November 23–25, 1863), elements from three Union armies—Tennessee, Mississippi, and Potomac—combined to drive Bragg’s forces away from the gateway city and into winter quarters in Georgia. The Union controlled all Tennessee.
In the east in 1863, Joseph Hooker reorganized and revitalized the Army of the Potomac and moved against Lee in late April. His excellent plan to compel Lee to fall back or to give battle under unfavorable conditions disintegrated when Hooker lost his nerve near Chancellorsville (May 1–4, 1863). He surrendered the initiative to the bold Confederate and retreated, humiliated in defeat. Having just bested an army twice as large as his, Lee decided, despite the death of Stonewall Jackson, that he must again invade the North. Recognizing that Confederate military manpower was at its peak in the spring of 1863 and that the fighting had to be taken out of war-ravaged Virginia, Lee marched into Pennsylvania, hoping a decisive victory on Northern soil would attract foreign intervention or break the North’s will to fight.
The two major eastern armies met at Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) and fought the bloodiest battle of the entire war. More than 51,000 fell during the three days of combat. Following the repulse of a charge led by George E. Pickett, Lee retired to Virginia, painfully aware that his 28,000 casualties had broken the offensive backbone of his army, confining him to the strategic defensive in the future. Indeed, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga—all decisive Union victories—eliminated the Confederacy’s chance of winning the war on the battlefield. Independence was not impossible because the North might still abandon its effort to restore the Union, but by the end of 1863, the Northern military held the upper hand.
As the war entered its fourth year in the spring of 1864, Lincoln appointed a new general in chief. In Grant, Lincoln finally found a man who shared his strategic views, who would use all his resources to accomplish his goals, and who would drive the Union to victory. In early May, Grant initiated five separate offensives, the two largest and most important being the Army of the Potomac’s advance against the Army of Northern Virginia and William T. Sherman’s move against Johnston in Georgia. The Overland Campaign in Virginia (May 4-June 12, 1864) began in early May.
Although Grant attempted a campaign of maneuver, Lee’s skillful countering of all Grant’s flanking moves in the month and a half that followed turned their combat into a brutal slugging match that saw the hardest-fought, longest-sustained fighting of the war. Both armies suffered terrible losses in this war of attrition; however, the North could replace its casualties, the South could not. At each battle—the Wilderness (May 5–7, 1864), Spotsylvania Court House (May 8–20, 1864), the North Anna River (May 23–26, 1864), Totopotomy Creek (May 26–31, 1864), and Cold Harbor (June 1–3, 1864)—Lee stopped Grant momentarily, but the two armies moved steadily closer to Richmond.
The Union attempt in mid-June to slip south of the James River and seize Petersburg, twenty miles south of the capital, would have succeeded had not Union commanders’ mistakes and lack of aggressiveness enabled the Confederates to rush troops to the threatened area and stave off disaster. With room to maneuver gone, the armies constructed extensive trench networks around Richmond and Petersburg (June 15, 1864-April 3, 1865) and a ten-month siege followed.
While fighting slowed in Virginia, Sherman matched wits with Johnston in the Atlanta campaign (July 20-September 2, 1864). Sherman, advancing from Chattanooga in early May, repeatedly tried to outflank the Confederates, but Johnston thwarted each move. Casualties in this cat-and-mouse game of maneuver were light compared to the Virginia slugfest; however, the two western armies moved ever closer to Atlanta.
In mid-July, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, believing that Johnston would not fight, removed him from command. John Bell Hood, Johnston’s successor, assumed the offensive but could not defeat Sherman, and on September 1, he evacuated Atlanta. The Union occupation of the city the next day provided Lincoln with a powerful boost in his bid for reelection.
A strange situation developed after the fall of Atlanta. Although badly outnumbered, Hood launched a desperate invasion of Tennessee in an effort to draw Union forces out of Atlanta and divert Sherman from his plan to march to the sea. Hood’s offensive ended disastrously at Nashville (December 15–16, 1864), where his army was effectively destroyed. Sherman, on the other hand, brought a new psychological dimension to the war when he cut a sixty-mile-wide swath of destruction through the defenseless region between Atlanta and Savannah. He believed that his wholesale, unhindered devastation of the area’s resources and the Confederacy’s inability to protect the Southern heartland would seriously damage, if not destroy, Southerners’ will to resist. After capturing Savannah (December 9–21, 1864) in late December, Sherman’s army rested and refitted and then marched northward into the Carolinas toward Grant in Virginia.
Confederate president Jefferson Davis in a photograph taken by Mathew Brady before the Civil War began. (National Archives)
The four years of blood-letting ended in the spring of 1865. Grant finally turned Lee’s flank west of Petersburg on April 1, cutting the Confederate army’s last major railroad supply line. Heavy Union attacks the next day all along a more than forty-mile front necessitated Lee’s hurried evacuation of Petersburg and the Confederate capital. What ensued was a weeklong chase that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered to Grant. Other Confederate armies would surrender in North Carolina on April 26, in Alabama on May 4, and in the trans-Mississippi west on May 26. The war was over.
The Union victory vindicated Northerners’ interpretation of the Constitution, ended Southerners’ dreams of independence, and ensured emancipation of all slaves. The war preserved the Union, but reconstructing the nation would be a difficult, divisive process.