US: A Narrative History Volume 1 – Chapter 16
Review
Total War and the
Republic [1861-1865]
Rout at Bull Run
The war won't last sixty days!” Of that Jim
Tinkham was confident. With dreams of a hero's return, Tinkham quit his job as
a grocery store clerk and enlisted for three months in a Massachusetts
regiment. Soon he was transferred to Washington as part of the Union army being
assembled under General Irvin McDowell. Tinkham was elated when in mid-July the
army was finally ordered to march toward the Confederates concentrated at
Manassas Junction, 25 miles away. The battle began at dawn on July 21, with
McDowell commanding 30,000 troops against General Pierre Beauregard's 22,000.
Tinkham did not arrive on the field until early afternoon. As his regiment pushed
toward the front, he felt faint at his first sight of the dead and wounded,
some mangled horribly. But the Massachusetts troops were caught up in the
excitement of battle as they charged up Henry Hill. Suddenly the Confederate
ranks broke, and exuberant Union troops shouted, “The war is over!” The arrival
of fresh Confederate troops, however, enabled the rebels to regroup. Among the
reinforcements who rushed to Henry Hill was 19-year-old Randolph McKim of
Baltimore. A student at the University of Virginia when the war began, McKim
joined the First Maryland Infantry as a private when Abraham Lincoln imposed
martial law in his home state. “The cause of the South had become identified
with liberty itself,” he explained. After only a week of drill, McKim boarded a
train on July 21 bound for Manassas. When he and his comrades disembarked, they
could hear the cannon firing in the distance, so they marched double-quick to
the battlefield. The arrival of the First Maryland and other reinforcements in
the late afternoon turned the tide of battle. The faltering Confederate line
held and Union troops began to withdraw. But, with retreat came confusion. Discipline
dissolved once McDowell ordered a retreat, and the army quickly degenerated
into a stampeding mob. As they fled terrified troops threw away their
equipment, shoved aside officers who tried to stop them, and raced frantically
past the wagons, artillery pieces, and civilian carriages that clogged the
road. Joining the stampede was Jim Tinkham, who confessed he would have
continued on to Boston if he had not been stopped by a guard after crossing the
Long Bridge into Washington. All the next day in a drizzling rain,
mud-spattered troops straggled into the capital in complete disorder. The rout
at Bull Run sobered the North. Gone were dreams of ending the war with one
glorious battle. Gone was the illusion that 75,000 volunteers serving three
months could crush the rebellion. As one perceptive observer noted, “We have
undertaken to make war without in the least knowing how.” Having cast off his
earlier illusions, a newly determined Jim Tinkham reenlisted for a three-year
hitch. Still, it was not surprising that both sides underestimated the
magnitude of the conflict. Previous warfare as it had evolved in Europe was
limited in comparison. Battles consisted largely of maneuverings that took
relatively few lives, generally respected private property, and left the
majority of civilians unharmed. The Civil War, however, was the first war whose
major battles routinely involved more than 100,000 troops. So many combatants
could be equipped only through the use of factory-produced weaponry, they could
be moved and supplied only with the help of railroads, and they could be
sustained only through the concerted efforts of civilian society as a whole.
The morale of the population, the quality of political leadership, and the
utilization of industrial and economic might were all critical to the outcome.
Quite simply, the Civil War was the first total war in history.
The
Demands of Total War
When the war began, the
North had an enormous advantage in manpower and industrial capacity. The
Union's population was 2.5 times larger, and its advantage in white men of
military age even greater. The North had a much larger merchant marine;
produced more iron, firearms, and textiles; contained more railroad track and
rolling stock; and possessed more than ten times the industrial capacity. From
a modern perspective, the South's attempt to defend its independence against
such odds seems a hopeless cause. Yet this view indicates how much the
conception of war has changed. European observers, who knew the strength and
resources of the two sides, believed that the Confederacy, with its large area,
poor roads, and rugged terrain, could never be conquered. Indeed, the South
enjoyed definite strategic advantages. To be victorious, it did not need to
invade the North—only to defend its own land and prevent the North from
destroying its armies. Southern soldiers knew the topography of their home country
better, and a friendly population regularly supplied them with intelligence
about Union troop movements. The North, in contrast, had to invade and conquer
the Confederacy and destroy the southern will to resist. To do so it would have
to deploy thousands of soldiers to defend long supply lines in enemy territory,
a situation that significantly reduced the northern advantage in manpower. Yet
in the end the Confederacy was not only invaded and conquered but also utterly
destroyed. By 1865 the Union forces had penetrated virtually every part of the
500,000 square miles of the Confederacy and were able to move almost at will.
The Civil War demonstrated the capacity of a modern society to overcome the
problems of distance and terrain with technology.
Political Leadership
To sustain a commitment to total war required effective
political leadership. This task fell on Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis,
presidents of the rival governments. Jefferson Davis grew up in Mississippi
accustomed to life's advantages. Educated at West Point, he fought in the
Mexican War, served as Franklin Pierce's secretary of war, and became one of
the South's leading advocates in the Senate. Although he was hardworking and
committed to the cause he led, his temperament was not well suited to his new
post. He quarreled tactlessly with generals and politicians and refused to work
with those he disliked. “He cannot brook opposition or criticism,” one member
of the Confederate Congress testified, “and those who do not bow down before him
have no chance of success with him.” His legalistic approach to problems hurt
his efforts to rouse the South. Yet for all Davis's personal handicaps, he
faced an institutional one even more daunting. The Confederacy had been founded
on the ideology of states' rights. Yet to meet the demands of total war, Davis
would need to increase the authority of the central government beyond anything
the South had ever experienced. When Lincoln took the oath of office, his
national experience consisted of one term in the House of Representatives. But
Lincoln was a shrewd judge of character and a superb politician. To achieve a
common goal, he willingly overlooked withering criticism and personal slights.
(The commander of the Union army, General George McClellan, for one,
continually snubbed the president and referred to him as “the original
Gorilla.”) He was not easily humbugged, overawed, or flattered and never
allowed personal feelings to blind him to his larger objectives. “This is
essentially a People's contest,” Lincoln asserted at the start of the war, and
few presidents have been better able to communicate with the average citizen.
He regularly visited Union troops in camp, in the field, and in army hospitals.
“The boys liked him,” wrote Joseph Twichell, from a Connecticut regiment. “[I]n
fact his popularity with the army is and has been universal.” Always Lincoln
reminded the public that the war was being fought for the ideals of the
Revolution and the Republic.It was a test, he remarked in his famous address at
Gettysburg, of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal,” could “long endure.” Lincoln also proved the more effective military leader.
Jefferson Davis took his title of commander in chief literally, interfering
with his generals even on the smallest matters. But he failed to formulate an
effective overarching strategy. In contrast, Lincoln had a clear grasp of the
challenge confronting the Union. He accepted General Winfield Scott's proposal
to blockade and surround the Confederacy, cut off its supplies, and slowly
strangle it into submission, just as the anaconda snake squeezes its prey. But
unlike Scott he realized that an “anaconda plan” was not enough. The South
would also have to be invaded and defeated, not only on an eastern front in
Virginia but also in the West, where Union control of the Mississippi would
divide the Confederacy fatally. Lincoln understood that the Union's superior
manpower and matériel would become decisive only when the Confederacy was
simultaneously threatened along a broad front. The Union forces could then
break through at the weak points. It took time before the president found
generals able to execute this novel strategy.
The Border States
When the war began, only Delaware of the border slave
states was certain to remain in the Union.
Lincoln's immediate political challenge was to retain the loyalty of Maryland,
Kentucky, and Missouri. Maryland especially was crucial, for if it were lost,
Washington itself would have to be abandoned. The danger became immediately
apparent when pro-Confederate forces destroyed the railroad bridges near
Baltimore and isolated Washington. Only with difficulty was the administration
able to move troops to the city. Once the capital was safe, Lincoln moved
vigorously—even ruthlessly—to secure Maryland. He suspended the writ of habeas
corpus, the right under the Constitution of an arrested person either to be
charged with a specific crime or to be released. That done, he held without trial
prominent Confederate sympathizers and suppressed pro-Confederate newspapers.
Intervention by the army ensured that Unionists won a complete victory in the
fall state election. The election ended any possibility that Maryland would
join the Confederacy. As for Kentucky, which had officially proclaimed
itself neutral, Lincoln forbid Union generals from to occupying the state,
preferring to act cautiously and wait for Unionist sentiment to assert itself.
After Unionists won control of the legislature in the summer election, a
Confederate army entered the state, giving Lincoln the opening he needed. He
quickly sent in troops, and Kentucky stayed in the Union. In Missouri, Union
forces secured the state only after the Union victory at the Battle of Pea
Ridge in March 1862. Even so, guerrilla warfare continued throughout the
remainder of the war. In Virginia, internal divisions led to the creation of a
new border state, as the hilly western counties, where slavery was not strong,
refused to support the Confederacy. West Virginia was formally admitted to the
Union in June 1863. The Union scored an important triumph in holding the border
states. The population of all five equaled that of the four states of the Upper
South that had joined the Confederacy, and their production of military
supplies—food, animals, and minerals—was greater. Furthermore, Maryland and
West Virginia contained key railroad lines and were critical to the defense of
Washington, while Kentucky and Missouri gave the Union army access to the major
river systems of the western theater, down which it launched the first
successful invasions of the Confederacy.
Opening Moves
After the Confederate victory at Bull Run Congress
authorized a much larger army of long-term volunteers, and Lincoln named
34-year-old George McClellan, a West Point graduate, to be the new commander of
the Union army. Energetic and ambitious, McClellan had been working as a
railroad executive when the war began. For the next eight months he appeared
the very model of businesslike efficiency as he settled into the much-needed
task of organizing and drilling the Army of the Potomac.
Blockade and Isolate
Although, the U.S. Navy began the war with only 42 ships
available to blockade 3,550 miles of Confederate coastline, by the spring 0f
1862 it had taken control of key islands off the coasts of the Carolinas and
Georgia, to use as supply bases. In April 1862 Flag Officer David G. Farragut
ran a gauntlet of Confederate shore batteries to capture New Orleans, the
Confederacy's largest city and most important port. Memphis, another important
river city, fell to Union forces in June.
The blockade was hardly leakproof, and Confederates
slipped through it using small, fast ships. Still, southern trade suffered
badly. In hopes of lifting the blockade, the Confederacy converted the wooden
U.S.S. Merrimack, which was rechristened the Virginia, into an ironclad
gunboat. In March 1862 a Union ironclad, the Monitor, battled it to a standoff,
and the Confederates were forced to scuttle the Virginia when they evacuated
Norfolk in May. After that, the Union's naval supremacy was secure. The Confederacy
looked to diplomacy as another means to lift the blockade. With cotton so vital
to European economies, especially Great Britain's, southerners believed that
Europe would formally recognize the Confederacy and come to its aid. The North,
for its part, claimed that it was merely putting down a domestic insurrection,
but European countries allowed the Confederacy to purchase supplies abroad. As
cotton supplies dwindled France and Great Britain considered recognizing the
Confederacy. They never did, however, as new supplies of cotton from Egypt and
India enabled the British textile industry to recover. In the end, the South
was left to stand or fall on its own resources.
Grant in the West
In the western war theater the first decisive Union
victory was won by a short, shabbily dressed, cigar-chomping general named
Ulysses S. Grant. An undistinguished student at West Point, Grant eventually
resigned his commission. He failed at everything he tried in civilian life, and
when the war broke out he was a store clerk in Galena, Illinois. Almost 39, he
promptly volunteered, and two months later he became a brigadier
general.Grant's quiet, self-effacing manner gave little indication of his
military ability or iron determination. Alert to seize any opening, he remained
extraordinarily calm and clear-headed in battle. He absorbed details on a map
almost photographically, and in battles that spread out over miles, he was
superb at coordinating an attack. He would “try all sorts of cross-cuts,”
recalled one staff officer, “ford streams and jump any number of fences to
reach another road rather than go back and take a fresh start.” Grant also took
full advantage of the telegraph to track troop movements, stringing new lines
as he advanced. (Some of his Union telegraphers were so adept that they could
receive messages before a station was set up by touching the end of the wire to
their tongues to pick up Morse code.) Most important, Grant grasped that hard
fighting, not fancy maneuvering, would bring victory. “The art of war is simple,”
he once explained. “Find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can
and strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.” Grant realized that
rivers were avenues into the interior of the Confederacy. In February 1862,
supported by Union gunboats, he captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and
Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. These victories forced the Confederates to
withdraw from Kentucky and middle Tennessee.Grant continued south with 40,000 men, but he was
surprised on April 6 by General Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh, just north of
the Tennessee-Mississippi border. Johnston was killed in the day's fierce
fighting, but by nightfall his army had driven the Union troops back to the
Tennessee River, where they huddled numbly as a cold rain fell. William
Tecumseh Sherman, one of Grant's subordinates, found the general standing under
a dripping tree, his coat collar drawn up against the damp, puffing on a cigar.
Sherman was about to suggest retreat, but something in Grant's eyes, lighted by
the glow of his cigar, made him hesitate. So he said only, “Well, Grant, we've
had the devil's own day, haven't we?” “Yes,” the Union commander quietly
replied. “Lick 'em tomorrow, though.” And he did.With the aid of reinforcements, which he methodically
ferried across the river all night, Grant counterattacked the next morning and
drove the Confederates from the field. But, victory came at a high price:
Shiloh inflicted more than 23,000 casualties. The Confederacy would not yield
easily. “The scenes on this field would have cured anyone of war,” Sherman
testified. Grant, who had doubted the commitment of Confederate troops; after
Shiloh “gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”
Eastern Stalemate
Grant's victories did not silence his critics, who
charged he drank too much. But Lincoln was unmoved. “I can't spare this man. He
fights.” That was a quality in short supply in the East, where General
McClellan directed operations. McClellan looked like a general, but beneath his
arrogance and bravado lay a self-doubt that rendered him excessively cautious.
As the months dragged on and McClellan did nothing but train and plan,
Lincoln's frustration grew. “If General McClellan does not want to use the army
I would like to borrow it,” he remarked sarcastically. In the spring of 1862
the general finally transported his 130,000 troops to the Virginia coast and
began inching toward Richmond, the Confederate capital. In May, when McClellan
was within five miles of Richmond, General Joseph Johnston suddenly attacked
him near Fair Oaks, from which he barely escaped. Worse for McClellan, when
Johnston was badly wounded, the formidable Robert E. Lee took command of the
Army of Northern Virginia. Where McClellan was cautious and defensive, the
aristocratic Lee was daring and ever alert to assume the offensive. His first
name, one of his colleagues commented, should have been Audacity: “He will take
more chances, and take them quicker than any other general in this country.”
Joining Lee was Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a deeply religious Calvinist whose
rigorous discipline honed his troops to a hard edge. In the Seven Days'
battles, McClellan maneuvered brilliantly to parry the attacks of Lee and
Jackson; still, he always stayed on the defensive, finally retreating until he
was under the protection of the Union gunboats. Frustrated, Lincoln ordered the
Peninsula campaign abandoned and formed a new army under John Pope. After Lee
badly mauled Pope at the second Battle of Bull Run, Lincoln restored McClellan
to command. Realizing that the Confederacy needed a decisive victory,
Lee convinced Davis to allow him to invade the North, hoping to detach Maryland
and isolate Washington. But as the army crossed into Maryland, Union soldiers
discovered a copy of Lee's orders, accidentally left behind at a campsite by a
Confederate officer. From this document McClellan learned that his forces
vastly outnumbered Lee's—yet still he hesitated before launching a series of
badly coordinated assaults near Antietam Creek on September 17 that Lee barely
repulsed. The bloody exchanges horrified both sides for their sheer carnage.
Within the space of seven hours nearly 5,000 soldiers were killed and another
18,000 wounded, making it the bloodiest single day in American history. Two
months after McClellan allowed the Confederate army to escape back into
Virginia, the president permanently relieved him of command. The winter of 1862
was the North's Valley Forge, as morale sank to an all-time low. It took
General Ambrose Burnside, who assumed McClellan's place, little more than a
month to demonstrate his utter incompetence. In December, at the Battle of
Fredericksburg, he suffered a disastrous defeat, which prompted Lincoln to put
“Fighting Joe” Hooker in charge.In the West, Grant had emerged as the dominant figure,
but the Army of the Potomac still lacked a capable commander, the deaths kept
mounting, and no end to the war was in sight.
Emancipation
In 1858 Lincoln had proclaimed that an American “house
divided” could not stand and that the United States would eventually become
either all slave or all free. When the house divided, however, Lincoln
hesitated to strike at slavery. He perceived, accurately, that most white
northerners were not deeply committed to emancipation. He feared the social
upheaval that such a revolutionary step would cause, and he did not want to
alarm the wavering Border States. Still, Republican radicals such as Senator
Charles Sumner and Horace Greeley pressed Lincoln to adopt a policy of
emancipation. Slavery had caused the war, they argued; its destruction would
hasten the war's end. Lincoln, however, placed first priority on saving the
Union. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or to destroy slavery,” he told Greeley in 1862. “If I could
save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it
by freeing all the slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some
and leaving others alone, I would also do that.” This statement summarized
Lincoln's policy during the first year of the war.
Moving toward Freedom
As the Union army began to occupy Confederate territory,
slaves flocked to the Union camps. In May 1861 the army adopted the policy of
declaring runaway slaves contraband of war and refused to return them to their
rebel owners. In the Confiscation Act of August 1861, Congress provided that
slaves used for military purposes by the Confederacy would become free if they
fell into Union hands. For a year Lincoln accepted that position but would go
no further. When two of his generals, acting on their own authority, abolished
slavery in their districts, he countermanded their orders. By the time Congress
reconvened in December 1861, opinion was beginning to shift. Congress
prohibited federal troops from capturing or returning fugitive slaves and freed
the 2,000 slaves living in the District of Columbia with compensation to their
owners. In July 1862 it passed the Second Confiscation Act, which declared that
the slaves of anyone who supported the rebellion would be freed if they came
into federal custody. Unlike the stipulations of the first act, it did not
matter whether the slaves had been used for military purposes. Lincoln signed
this bill and then proceeded to ignore it. Instead, he emphasized state action,
since slavery was a domestic institution. Twice the president summoned white
representatives from the border states and prodded them to support a
state-sponsored program of gradual emancipation. Both times they rejected his
plea. So on July 22, 1862, Lincoln presented to his cabinet a proposed
proclamation freeing the slaves in the Confederacy. He was increasingly
confident that the border states would remain in the Union, and he wanted to
strike a blow that would weaken the Confederacy militarily. By making the
struggle one of freedom versus slavery, such a proclamation would also
undermine Confederate efforts to obtain diplomatic recognition. But Lincoln
decided to wait for a Union military victory so that the act would not appear
one of desperation.
The Emancipation Proclamation
On September 22, following the victory at Antietam,
Lincoln announced that all slaves within rebel lines would be freed unless the
seceded states returned to their allegiance by January 1, 1863. When that day
came, the Emancipation Proclamation went formally into effect. Excluded from
its terms were the Union slave states, all of Tennessee, and the other areas of
the Confederacy that were under Union control. In all, about 830,000 of the
nation's 4 million slaves were not covered by its provisions.Because Lincoln justified his actions on strictly
military grounds, he believed that there was no legal right to apply the Proclamation
to areas not in rebellion. After initial criticism of the Proclamation,
European public opinion swung toward the Union. Within the Union popular
reaction was mixed. Despite the mixed reaction, the Emancipation Proclamation
had immense symbolic importance, for it redefined the nature of the war. The
North was fighting not to save the old Union but to create a new nation. The
war had become, in Lincoln's words, “remorseless revolution.”
African Americans' Civil War
Contrary to white southerners' fears that a race war
would erupt behind the lines, the institution of slavery did not explode: it
simply disintegrated. Well before federal troops entered an area, slaves took
the lead in undermining the institution by openly challenging white authority and
claiming greater personal freedom. One experienced overseer reported in
frustration that now the “slaves will do only what pleases them, go out in the
morning when it suits them, come in when they please, etc.” Throughout the
Confederacy the vital psychological relationship between master and slave was
strained, and sometimes it snapped. Early in the conflict slaves concluded that
emancipation would be one consequence of a Union victory. Perhaps as many as
half a million—one-seventh of the total slave population of the
Confederacy—fled to Union lines, where they faced an uncertain reception since
northern troops manifested a deep-seated racism and were often hostile. The
ex-slaves, called freedmen, ended up living in refugee or contraband camps that
were overcrowded and disease-ridden and provided only rudimentary shelter and
food. “The poor Negroes die as fast as ever,” one northern missionary reported.
“The children are all emaciated to the last degree and have such violent coughs
and dysenteries that few survive.” Convinced that freed slaves would not work
on their own initiative, the U.S. government put some contrabands to work
assisting the army as cooks, teamsters, woodchoppers, and other unskilled
laborers. Their wages were well below those paid white citizens for the same
work. In the Mississippi valley, where two-thirds of the freedpeople under
Union control were located, most were forced to work on plantations leased or
owned by loyal planters. This policy was officially adopted in the summer of 1863
as a way to free the army from the cost of supporting former slaves and
strengthen Unionism in the South. Freedpeople had no say in the contracts
negotiated between military authorities and planters, found themselves strictly
disciplined, and had so many deductions taken from their wages that in the end
most received only room and board. In short, the conditions often approximated
slavery.
Black Soldiers
In adopting the policy of emancipation Lincoln also
announced that African Americans would be accepted in the navy and, more
controversially, the army. (Throughout its history, the navy had been
hard-pressed to get enough recruits, and as a result that service had always
included some black sailors.) Resistance to accepting black volunteers in the army
remained especially strong in the Midwest. Even black northerners were divided
over whether to enlist, but Frederick Douglass spoke for the vast majority when
he argued that once a black man had served in the army, there was “no power on
earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United
States.” In the end nearly 200,000 African Americans served in the Union
forces, constituting about 10 percent of the Union's total military manpower.
Some, including two of Douglass's sons, were free, but most were former slaves
who enlisted after escaping to the Union lines. As a concession to the racism
of white troops, blacks served in segregated units under white officers. They
were paid only $10 a month, with $3 deducted for clothing. White soldiers, in
contrast, received $13 a month plus a $3.50 clothing allowance. Not until June
1864 did Congress finally grant equal pay to black soldiers. At first given undesirable duties such as heavy labor and
burial details, black soldiers successfully lobbied for the chance to fight.
They impressed white troops with their courage under fire. “I have been one of
those men, who never had much confidence in colored troops fighting,” one Union
officer admitted, “but these doubts are now all removed, for they fought as
bravely as any troops in the Fort.” In the end 37,000 African American
servicemen gave their lives, a rate of loss about 40 percent higher than among
white soldiers. Black recruits had good reason to fight fiercely. They knew
that the freedom of their race hung in the balance, they hoped to win civil
rights at home by their performance on the battlefield, they resented racist
sneers about their loyalty and ability, and they knew that capture might mean
death.
The Confederate Home Front
“How shall we subsist this winter?” John Jones wondered
in the fall of 1862. A clerk in the War Department in Richmond, Jones found it
increasingly difficult to make ends meet on his salary. Prices kept going up,
essential items were in short supply, and the signs of hardship were
everywhere: in the darned and patched clothing, the absence of meat from the
market, the desperation on people's faces. Some of the residents of Richmond
“look like vagabonds,” Jones noted in his diary. Coffee was a luxury Jones could
no longer afford, he sold his watch to buy fuel, and he worried incessantly
about being able to feed his family. “I cannot afford to have more than an
ounce of meat daily for each member of my family of six,” he recorded in 1864.
“The old cat goes staggering about from debility, though Fannie [a daughter]
often gives him her share. We see neither rats nor mice about the premises
now.” Nowhere were the profound effects of war more complete than within the
Confederacy. These changes were especially ironic because the southern states
had seceded in order to preserve their traditional ways. Not only did the war
send hundreds of thousands of “Johnny Rebs” off to the front; it also put
extreme burdens on the women and families at home. It fundamentally transformed
the southern economy and forced the Confederate government to become more
centralized. And, of course, it ended by destroying the institution of slavery,
which the South had gone to war to preserve.
The New Economy
With the Union blockade tightening, the production of
foodstuffs became crucial to the South's economy. Many men who normally worked
in the fields had gone into the army, and with the lessening of discipline,
slaves became increasingly assertive and independent. More and more plantations
switched from growing cotton to raising grain and livestock. As a result,
cotton production dropped from 4.5 million bales in 1861 to 300,000 in 1864.
Even so, food production declined. By the last two years of the war, the
shortage was serious. The Union blockade also made it impossible to rely on
European manufactured goods. So the Confederate War Department built and ran
factories, took over the region's mines, and regulated private manufacturers so
as to increase the production of war goods. Although the Confederacy never
became industrially self-sufficient, it sustained itself far better in
industrial goods than it did in agricultural produce. It was symbolic that when
Lee surrendered, his troops had sufficient guns and ammunition to continue, but
they had not eaten in two days.
New Opportunities for Southern Women
Southern white women took an active role in the war. Some
gained notoriety as spies; others smuggled military supplies into the South.
Women also spent a good deal of time knitting and sewing clothes for soldiers.
“We never went out to pay a visit without taking our knitting along,” recalled
a South Carolina woman. Perhaps most important, with so many men fighting,
women took charge of agricultural production. On a plantation the mistress often
supervised the slaves as well as the wrenching shift from cotton to foodstuffs.
One such woman was 33-year-old Emily Lyles Harris, the wife of a small
slaveowner and farmer in upcountry South Carolina. When her husband joined the
army in 1862, she was left to care for her seven children as well as supervise
the slaves and manage the farm. Despite the disruptions of wartime, she
succeeded remarkably, one year producing the largest crop of oats in the
neighborhood and always making enough money for her family to live decently.
She took little pride, however, in her achievements. “I shall never get used to
being left as the head of affairs at home,” she wrote on one occasion. “The
burden is very heavy, and there is no one to smile on me as I trudge wearily along
in the dark with it…. I am not an independent woman nor ever shall be.”
Self-doubt, lack of privacy, and the burdens of responsibility left her
depressed, and while she persevered, by 1865 she openly hoped for defeat.The
war also opened up new jobs for women off the farm. Given the manpower
shortage, “government girls” became essential to fill the growing Confederate
bureaucracy. At first women were paid half the wages of male coworkers, but by
the end of the war they had won equal pay. White women also staffed the new
factories springing up in southern cities and towns, undertaking even dangerous
work that normally would have been considered off-limits.
Confederate Finance and Government
The most serious domestic problem the Confederate
government faced was finance, for which officials at Richmond never developed a
satisfactory program. The South had few banks and only $27 million in specie
when the war began. European governments refused to float major loans, which
left taxation as the unappealing alternative. Only in 1863 did the government
begin levying a graduated income tax (from 1 to 15 percent) and a series of
excise taxes. Most controversial, the government resorted to a tax-in-kind on
farmers that, after exempting a certain portion, took one-tenth of their
agricultural crops. Even more unpopular was the policy of impressment, which
allowed the army to seize private property for its own use, often with little
or no compensation. Above all, the Confederacy financed the war effort simply
by printing paper money not backed by specie, some $1.5 billion, which amounted
to three times more than the federal government issued. The result was runaway
inflation, so that by 1865 a Confederate dollar was worth only 1.7 cents in
gold and prices had soared to 92 times their prewar base. Prices were highest
in Richmond, where flour sold for $275 a barrel by early 1864 and coats for
$350. By the end of the war, flour had reached an astronomical $1,000 a barrel.
Inflation that ate away at their standard of living was one of the great
wartime hardships borne by the southern people. In politics even more than in
finance the Confederacy exercised far greater powers than those of the federal
government before 1861. Indeed, Jefferson Davis strove to meet the demands of total
war by transforming the South into a centralized, national state. He sought to
limit state authority over military units, and in April 1862 the Confederacy
passed the first national conscription law in American history, drafting all
white males between 18 and 35 unless exempted. As conditions worsened, those
age limits widened to 17 and 50, mobilizing virtually the entire military-age
white population. Civilians, too, felt the effects of government control, for
in 1862 the Congress authorized Davis to invoke martial law and suspend the
writ of habeas corpus. Critics protested that Davis was destroying states'
rights, the cardinal principle of the Confederacy. Concerned foremost
about their states' safety, governors wanted to be able to recall troops if
their own territory was threatened. When President Davis suspended the writ of
habeas corpus, his vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, accused him of aiming
at a dictatorship.
Davis used those powers for a limited time, yet in
practice it made little difference whether the writ was suspended or not. With
disloyalty a greater problem than in the Union, Confederate authorities more
stringently regulated civil liberties, and the army arrested thousands of
civilians.
But the Confederate draft, more than any other measure,
produced an outcry. The law allowed the rich to provide substitutes, at a cost
that eventually rose, on the open market, to as much as $6,000. The Confederacy
eventually abolished this privilege, but as one Georgia leader complained,
“It's a notorious fact if a man has influential friends—or a little money to
spare he will never be enrolled.” Most controversially, the draft exempted from
service one white man on every plantation with 20 or more slaves (later reduced
to 15). This law was designed to preserve control of the slave population, but
more and more nonslaveholders complained that it was a rich man's war and a
poor man's fight. “All they want is to git you pumped up and go to fight for
their infernal Negroes and after you do their fighting you may kiss their hind
parts for all they care,” one Alabama farmer complained. In some counties where
the draft was unenforceable, conscription officers ventured only at risk to
their own safety.
Hardship and Suffering
By the last year of the conflict, food shortages had
become so severe that ingenious southerners concocted various substitutes:
parched corn in place of coffee, strained blackberries in place of vinegar. One
scarce item for which there was no substitute was salt, which was essential for
curing meat. The high prices and food shortages led to riots in several cities,
most seriously in Richmond early in April 1863. There, about 300 women and
children chanting “Bread!” looted a number of stores. As always, war corroded
the discipline and order of society. With the value of paper money dropping and
the future uncertain, many southerners spent money in frenzied haste. Gambling
halls were crowded with revelers seeking relief, while soldiers on furlough
drank heavily, aware of their increasingly poor chances of survival at the
front. Even in the army, theft became common. The search for escape from the
grim reality of the war led to a forced gaiety for those who could afford it.
“The cities are gayer than before the war,” one refugee reported, “—parties
every night in Richmond, suppers costing ten and twenty thousand dollars.”
Walking home at night after spending several hours at the bedside of a dying
soldier, Judith McGuire passed a house gay with laughter, music, and dancing.
“The revulsion … was sickening,” she wrote afterward in her diary. “I thought
of the gayety of Paris during the French Revolution, … the ball at Brussels the
night before the battle of Waterloo, and felt shocked that our own Virginians,
at such a time, should remind me of scenes which we were wont to think only
belonged to … foreign society.” The war was a cancer that ate away not only at
southern society but at the southern soul itself.
The Union Home Front
Because the war was fought mostly on southern soil,
northern civilians rarely felt its effects directly. Yet to be effective, the
North's economic resources had to be organized and mobilized.
Government Finances and the Economy
To begin with, the North required a comprehensive system
to finance its massive campaign. Taxing the populace was an obvious means, and
taxes paid for 21 percent of Union war expenses, compared with only 1 percent
of the Confederacy's. In August 1861 Congress passed the first federal income
tax, 3 percent on all incomes over $800 a year. When that, along with increased
tariff duties, proved insufficient, Congress enacted a comprehensive tax law in
1862 that for the first time brought the tax collector into every northern
household.
Excise fees taxed virtually every occupation, commodity,
or service; income and inheritances were taxed, as were corporations and
consumers. A new bureaucracy, the Internal Revenue Bureau, oversaw the
collection process. The government also borrowed heavily, through the sale of
some $2.2 billion in bonds, and financed the rest of the war's cost by issuing
paper money. In all, the Union printed $431 million in greenbacks (so named
because of their color on one side). Although legal for the payment of debts,
they could not be redeemed in specie, and therefore their value fluctuated.
Also by taxing state banknotes out of circulation, Congress for the first time
created a uniform national currency, as well as a national banking system. During
the war the Republican-controlled Congress encouraged economic development.
Tariffs to protect industry from foreign competition rose to an average rate of
47 percent, compared to 19 percent in 1860. To encourage development of the
West, the Homestead Act of 1862 granted 160 acres of public land—the size of
the traditional American family farm—to anyone (including women) who settled
and improved the land for five years. Over a million acres were distributed
during the war years alone. In addition, the Land Grant College Act of 1862
donated the proceeds from certain land sales to finance public colleges and
universities, creating 69 in all, many in the West.
A Rich Man's War
Over the course of the war the government purchased more
than $1 billion worth of goods and services. In response to this heavy demand,
the economy boomed and business and agriculture prospered. Wages increased 42
percent between 1860 and 1864, but because prices rose faster than wages,
workers' real income dropped almost 30 percent, from $363 in 1860 to $261 in
1865. That meant the working class paid a disproportionate share of the war's
costs. The Republican belief that government should play a major role in the
economy also fostered a cozy relationship between business and politics. In the
rush to profit from government contracts, some suppliers sold inferior goods at
inflated prices. Uniforms made of “shoddy”—bits of unused thread and recycled
cloth—were fobbed off in such numbers that the word became an adjective
describing inferior quality. Stocks and dividends rose with the economy as
investors scrambled after profitable new opportunities. Speculation during the
last two years of the war became particularly feverish, and the fortunes made
went toward the purchase of ostentatious luxuries. Like Richmond, Washington
became the symbol of this moral decay. Prostitution, drinking, and corruption
reached epidemic proportions in the capital, and social festivities became the
means to shut out the numbing horror of the casualty lists.
Women and the Workforce
Even more than in the South, the war opened new
opportunities for northern women. Countless wives ran farms while their
husbands were away at war. One traveler in Iowa reported, “I met more women
driving teams on the road and saw more at work in the fields than men.” The war
also stimulated the shift to mechanization, which made the northern labor
shortage less severe. By 1865 three times as many reapers and harvesters were
in use as in 1861. Beyond the farm women increasingly found work in industry,
filling approximately 100,000 new jobs during the war. Like women in the South,
they worked as clerks in the expanding government bureaucracy. The work was
tedious and the workload heavy, but the new jobs offered good wages, a sense of
economic independence, and a pride in having aided the war effort. The war also
allowed women to enter and eventually dominate the profession of nursing. Their
service in the wards of the maimed and dying reduced the hostility to women in
medicine. Clara Barton, like so many other nurses, often found herself in
battlefield hospitals, amid massive death and suffering. During the battle of
Fredericksburg she wiped the brows of the wounded and dying, bandaged wounds,
and applied tourniquets to stop the flow of blood. She later recalled that as
she rose from the side of one soldier, “I wrung the blood from the bottom of my
clothing, before I could step, for the weight about my feet.” She steeled
herself at the sight of amputated arms and legs casually tossed in piles
outside the front door as the surgeons cut away, yet she found the extent of
suffering overwhelming.
She was jolted by the occasional familiar face among the
tangled mass of bodies: the sexton of the church in her hometown, his face
caked in blood, or a wayward boy she had befriended years ago. Sleeping in a
tent nearby, she drove herself to the brink of exhaustion until the last
patients were transferred to permanent hospitals.
Civil Liberties and Dissent
In order to mobilize northern society, Lincoln did not
hesitate to curb dissenters. Shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter, he
suspended the writ of habeas corpus in specified areas, which allowed the
indefinite detention of anyone suspected of disloyalty or activity against the
war. Although the Constitution permitted such suspension in time of rebellion
or invasion, Lincoln did so without consulting Congress (unlike President
Davis), and he used his power far more broadly, expanding it in 1862 to cover
the entire North for cases involving antiwar activities. The president also
decreed that those arrested under its provisions could be tried under the
stricter rules of martial law by a military court. Eventually more than 20,000
individuals were arrested, most of whom were never charged with a specific
crime or brought to trial. Democrats attacked Lincoln as a tyrant bent on
destroying the Constitution. Among those arrested was Clement Vallandigham, a
Democratic member of Congress from Ohio who called for an armistace in May
1963. He was convicted by a military commission and banished to the Confederacy
(in 1864 he returned to the North). The Supreme Court refused to review the
case, but once the war was over, it ruled in Ex parte Milligan (1866) that as
long as the regular courts were open, civilians could not be tried by military
tribunals. Republicans labeled those who opposed the war Copperheads, conjuring
up the image of a venomous snake waiting to strike the Union. Copperheads
constituted the extreme peace wing of the Democratic party. Often they had been
hurt by the economic changes of the war, but more crucial was their bitter
opposition to emancipation and also the draft, which they condemned as a
violation of individual freedom and an instrument of special privilege.
According to the provisions enacted in 1863, a person would be exempt from the
present (but not any future) draft by paying a commutation fee of $300, about a
year's wages for a worker or an ordinary farmer. Or those drafted could hire a
substitute, the cost of which was beyond the reach of all but the wealthy.
Despite this criticism in reality poor men also bought their way out of the
draft, often by pooling their resources; in addition, the government of some
communities paid the commutation fee for any resident who was drafted. In all,
approximately 118,000 men provided substitutes, and another 87,000 paid the
commutation fee. Perhaps another 160,000 northerners illegally evaded the
draft. Only 46,000 men were actually drafted into the Union army, out of more
than 2 million who served. In July 1863, when the first draftees' names were
drawn in New York City, workers in the Irish quarter rose in anger. Rampaging
through the streets, the mob attacked draft officials and prominent
Republicans, ransacked African-American neighborhoods, and lynched black
residents who fell into its hands. By the time order was restored four days
later, at least 105 people had been killed, the worst loss of life from any
riot in American history.
Gone to Be a Soldier
Marcus Spiegel came to the United States after the
revolution of 1848 failed in Germany. The son of a rabbi, Spiegel married an
American woman, became a naturalized citizen, and was trying to make it in the
warehouse business in Ohio when the war began. As an immigrant, he considered
it his duty to preserve the Union for his children, and the regular pay of an
officer was also enticing, so he enlisted in November 1861. Eventually he
became one the few Jewish colonels in the army. A loyal Democrat, Spiegel did
not go to war to end slavery and flatly proclaimed that black people were not
“worth fighting for.” By early 1864, however, his views had changed.
He had “learned and seen more of what the horrors of
Slavery was than I ever knew before,” and though he still doubted African
Americans' capabilities, he now was “in favor of doing away with the
institution of Slavery.” He assured his wife that “this is no hasty conclusion
but a deep conviction.” A few weeks later, Marcus Spiegel died of wounds he
received while fighting in Louisiana. By war's end about 2 million men had
served the Union cause and another million, the Confederate. They were mostly
young; almost 40 percent of entering soldiers were age 21 or younger. They were
not drawn disproportionately from the poor, and in both the North and the
South, farmers and farm laborers accounted for the largest group of soldiers.
Discipline
The near-holiday atmosphere of the war's early months
soon gave way to dull routine. Men from rural areas, accustomed to the freedom
of the farm, complained about the endless recurrence of reveille, roll call,
and drill. “When this war is over,” one Rebel promised, “I will whip the man
that says ‘fall in’ to me.” Troops in neither army cared for the spit and
polish of regular army men. “They keep us very strict here,” noted one Illinois
soldier. “It is the most like a prison of any place I ever saw.” By modern
standards training was minimal and discipline lax in both armies. Troops from
rural families found it harder to adjust to army routine than did urban
soldiers, especially factory workers, who were more familiar with impersonal
organizations and used to greater social control. Many southerners were “not
used to control of any sort,” one Rebel noted, “and were not disposed to obey
anyone except for good and sufficient reason given.” Yanks and Rebs alike
complained about officers' privileges and had no special respect for rank. “The
boys recognized no superiors, except in the line of legitimate duty,” an
Indiana private explained. The Union discontinued the election of lower
officers, but this tradition was retained in the Confederate army, which
further undermined discipline, since those known as strict officers were
eventually defeated.
Camp Life
On average, soldiers spent 50 days in camp for every day
in battle. Camp life was often unhealthy as well as unpleasant. Poor
sanitation, miserable food, exposure to the elements, and primitive medical
care contributed to widespread sickness. Officers and men alike regarded army
doctors as quacks and tried to avoid them. It was a common belief that if a
fellow went to the hospital, “you might as well say good bye.” Conditions were
even worse in the Confederate hospitals, for the Union blockade produced a
shortage of medical supplies. Twice as many soldiers died from dysentery,
typhoid, and other diseases as from wounds. The boredom of camp life, the
horrors of battle, and the influence of an all-male society all corrupted
morals. Swearing and heavy drinking were common, and one Mississippian reported
that after payday games of chance were “running night and day, with eager and
excited crowds standing around with their hands full of money.” Prostitutes
flooded the camps of both armies. With death so near, some soldiers sought
solace in religion. Religious fervor was greater in the Confederate camps, and
a wave of revivals swept the ranks during the last two winters of the war,
producing between 100,000 and 200,000 conversions. Significantly, the first
major revivals occurred after the South's twin defeats at Vicksburg and
Gettysburg. Then, too, as battle after battle thinned Confederate ranks, the
prospect of death became increasingly large.
The Environment of Battle
As in all modern wars, technology revolutionized the
conditions under which Civil War soldiers fought. Smoothbore muskets, which at
first served as the basic infantry weapon, gave way to the rifle, so named
because of the grooves etched into the barrel to give a bullet spin. A new
bullet, the minié ball, allowed the rifle to be easily loaded, and the
invention of the percussion cap rendered it serviceable in wet weather. More
important, the new weapon had an effective range of 400 yards—five times
greater than that of the old musket.
As a result, soldiers fought each other from greater
distances, and battles took much longer to fight and produced many more
casualties. Under such conditions, the
defense became a good deal stronger than the offense. The larger artillery
pieces also adopted rifled barrels, but they lacked good fuses and accurate
sighting devices and could not effectively support attacking troops. They were
a deadly defensive weapon, however, that decimated advancing infantry at close
range. More than 100 regiments on both sides suffered in excess of 50 percent
casualties in a single battle. The loss of human life was fierce, but the face
of total war left gashes on the landscape as well. As armies of a hundred
thousand or more marched and massed, they dug trenches, threw up breastworks,
fouled streams and fields with waste, plundered nearby farms for supplies,
ripped down fences for firewood. Fires burned out of control at battle sites
such as the Wilderness, where the smoke from fires was worse than that from
cannon and rifle, and where wounded soldiers, unable to move, were burned
alive. Cities under siege, such as Vicksburg, Atlanta, Charleston, and
Richmond, were bombarded and burned. Vast armies used horses and mules for
transporting supplies, and these animals died in great numbers (perhaps 1.5
million horses alone), not only from bullets and bombs but also from disease
and overwork. Their corpses littered battlefields and decayed only gradually,
as gunfire generally frightened away vultures that would have picked at the
corpses. And still across the battered landscapes, the fighting
continued. As the haze of gunfire covered the land and the constant spray of
bullets mimicked rain pattering through the treetops, soldiers discovered that
their romantic notions about war had no place on the battlefield. Men witnessed
horrors they had never envisioned as civilians and choked from the stench of
decaying flesh and mortal slaughter. They realized that their efforts to convey
to those back home the gruesome truth of combat were inadequate. “No tongue can
tell, no mind can conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights I witnessed this
morning,” a Union soldier wrote after Antietam. And still they tried. An Ohio
soldier at Antietam (23,000 casualties), two days after the fighting: “The
smell was offul … there was about 5 or 6,000 dead bodes decaying over the field
… I could have walked on the boddees all most from one end too the other.” A
Georgian, the day after Chancellorsville (30,000 casualties): “It looked more
like a slaughter pen than anything else…. The shrieks and groans of the wounded
… was heart rending beyond all description.” A Maine soldier who fought at
Gettysburg (50,000 casualties): “I have Seen … men rolling in their own blood,
Some Shot in one place, Some another … our dead lay in the road and the Rebels
in their hast to leave dragged both their baggage wagons and artillery over
them and they lay mangled and torn to pieces so that Even friends could not
tell them. You can form no idea of a battlefield.”
Hardening Attitudes
Throughout the war, soldiers continued to speak in terms
of the traditional ideals of duty, honor, and patriotism. Nevertheless, military
service profoundly changed them. At first the war seemed a test of courage and
manhood, in which the winning side would display superior valor. Expecting a
restrained war that would uphold this moral code, volunteers admired the
courage of the foe and considered it pointless to kill an isolated soldier. But
the reality of combat did not fit such expectations, and by 1864 the nature of
war had been transformed. Soldiers discovered the futility of mass frontal
assaults, and under the rain of fire on the battlefield sought cover wherever
they could find it. As the fighting intensified, they sought to kill enemy
soldiers any way they could in order to hasten the war's end. At the same time,
they became indifferent to death and suffering. “The daily sight of blood and
mangled bodies,” observed a Rhode Island soldier, “so blunted their finer
sensibilities as almost to blot out all love, all sympathy from the heart.”
This hardening of attitudes produced a steady erosion of moral standards.
Combatants began taking personal property from the dead and wounded and even
prisoners after a battle. As they repudiated their earlier moral assumptions, the
soldiers in both armies felt increasingly alienated from civilians back home.
In reaction, they developed a stronger sense of comradeship with enemy
soldiers, based on their belief that only other soldiers could understand what
they had gone through and why they acted the way they did. They felt less an
actor in the war than an impersonal object caught in a relentless process of
destruction. In the face of what Charles Francis Adams Jr. termed “the carnival
of death,” soldiers braced themselves with a grim determination to see the war
through to the end. Not glorious exploits but endurance became the true measure
of heroism.
The Union's Triumph
In the spring of 1863 matters still looked promising for
Lee. At the battle of Chancellorsville, he brilliantly defeated Lincoln's
latest commander, Joseph Hooker. But during the fighting Stonewall Jackson was
accidentally shot by his own men, and he died a few days later—a grievous
setback for the Confederacy. Determined to take the offensive, Lee invaded
Pennsylvania in June with an army of 75,000. Lincoln's newest general, George
Gordon Meade, warily shadowed the Confederates. On the first of July, advance
parties from the two armies accidentally collided at the town of Gettysburg,
and the war's greatest battle ensued. For once it was Lee who had the extended
supply lines and was forced to fight on ground chosen by his opponent. After
two days of assaults failed to break the Union left or right, Lee made the
greatest mistake of his career, sending 14,000 men under General George Pickett
in a charge at the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. “Pickett's
division just seemed to melt away in the blue musketry smoke which now covered
the hill,” one Confederate officer wrote. “Nothing but stragglers came back.”
The Union casualties of more than 23,000 represented a quarter of Meade's
effective strength, but Lee lost between 25,000 and 28,000—more than a third of
his troops. Never again was he able to assume the offensive.
Lincoln Finds His General
To the west, Grant had been trying for months to capture
Vicksburg, a Rebel stronghold on the Mississippi. In a daring maneuver, he left
behind his supply lines and marched inland, calculating that he could feed his
army from the produce of Confederate farms, weakening southern resistance in
the process. These actions were the tactics of total war, and seldom had they
been tried before Grant used them. His troops drove the defenders of Vicksburg
back into the city and starved them into submission. On July 4, the city
surrendered. With the fall of Port Hudson, Louisiana, four days later, the
Mississippi was completely in Union hands. Grant had divided the Confederacy
and isolated Arkansas, Texas, and part of Louisiana from the rest of the South.
He followed up this victory by rescuing Union forces holed up in Chattanooga.
His performance confirmed Lincoln's earlier judgment that “Grant is my man, and
I am his the rest of the war.” Congress now revived the rank of lieutenant
general, held before only by George Washington, which Lincoln bestowed on
Grant. In March 1864 Lincoln brought him east and put him in command of all the
Union armies. Grant recognized that the Union possessed the resources to wear
down the Confederacy but that its larger armies had “acted independently and
without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together.” He intended
to change that. While he launched a major offensive against Lee in Virginia,
William Tecumseh Sherman, who replaced Grant as commander of the western army,
would drive a diagonal wedge through the Confederacy from Tennessee across
Georgia. Grant's orders to Sherman were as blunt as his response had been that
rainy night when the two had conferred at Shiloh: “Get into the interior of the
enemy's country so far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against
their war resources.” In May and June 1864 Grant tried to maneuver Lee out of
the trenches and into an open battle.But Lee was too weak to win head-on, so he opted for a
strategy of attrition, hoping to inflict such heavy losses that the northern
will to continue fighting would break. It was a strategy that nearly worked,
for Union casualties were staggering. In a month of fierce fighting, the Army
of the Potomac lost 60,000 men—the size of Lee's entire army at the beginning
of the campaign. Yet at the end of the campaign Grant's reinforced army was
larger than when it started, whereas Lee's was significantly weaker. After
especially bloody losses at the battle of Cold Harbor, Grant changed tactics.
He marched his army around Richmond and settled into a siege of Petersburg,
which guarded Richmond's last remaining rail link to the south. A siege would
be agonizingly slow, but he counted on his numerical superiority to eventually
stretch Lee's line to the breaking point. In the west, meanwhile, the gaunt and
grizzled Sherman fought his way by July to the outskirts of Atlanta, which was
heavily defended. “Our all depends on that army at Atlanta,” wrote Mary Chesnut
in August, based on her conversations with Confederate leaders. “If that fails
us, the game is up.”
War in the Balance
The game was nearly up for Lincoln as the 1864 election
approached. In 1863 the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg sparked
Republican victories, indicating that public opinion seemed to be swinging
toward emancipation. But as the Union war machine swept more and more
northerners south to their deaths and as Grant and Sherman bogged down on the
Virginia and Georgia fronts, even leaders in Lincoln's own party began to
mutter out loud that he was not equal to the task. Perhaps the most remarkable
thing about the 1864 election is that it was held at all. Indeed, before World
War II, the United States was the only democratic government in history to
carry out a general election in wartime. But Lincoln firmly believed that to
postpone it would be to lose the priceless heritage of republicanism itself:
“We cannot have free government without elections, and if the rebellion could
force us to forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to
have already conquered and ruined us.” Exploiting his control of the party
machinery, Lincoln easily won the Republican nomination, and he made certain
that the Republican platform called for the adoption of a constitutional
amendment abolishing slavery. To balance the ticket, the convention selected Andrew
Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee and a prowar Democrat, as his
running mate. The two men ran under the label of the “Union” party. The
Democrats nominated George McClellan, the former Union commander. Their
platform pronounced the war a failure and called for an armistice and a peace
conference. Warned that a cessation of fighting would lead to disunion,
McClellan partially repudiated this position, insisting that “the Union is the
one condition of peace—we ask no more.” In private he made it clear that if
elected he intended to restore slavery. Late in August, Lincoln was still
gloomy about his prospects as well as those of the Union itself. But Admiral
David Farragut won a dramatic victory at Mobile Bay, and a few weeks later, in
early September, Sherman finally captured Atlanta. As Secretary of State Seward
gleefully noted, “Sherman and Farragut have knocked the bottom out of the
Chicago [Democratic] nominations.” Polling an impressive 55 percent of the
popular vote, Lincoln won 212 electoral votes to McClellan's 21. Eighteen
states allowed soldiers to vote in the field, and Lincoln received nearly 80
percent of their ballots. One lifelong Democrat described the sentiment in the army:
“We all want peace, but none any but an honorable one. I had rather stay out
here a lifetime (much as I dislike it) than consent to a division of our
country.” Jefferson Davis remained defiant, but the last hope of a Confederate
victory was gone. Equally important, the election of 1864 ended any doubt that
slavery would be abolished in the reconstructed Union. The Emancipation
Proclamation had not put an end to the , for its legal status remained unclear.
Lincoln and the Republicans insisted that a constitutional amendment was
necessary to secure emancipation. After the election, the president threw all
his influence behind the drive to round up the necessary votes, and the measure
passed the House on January 31, 1865. By December enough states had ratified
the Thirteenth Amendment to make it part of the Constitution.
The abolition of slavery in the United States was part of
a worldwide trend. The antislavery movement was spearheaded in Britain, where
Parliament abolished slavery in the empire in 1833. The other colonial powers
were much slower to act. Portugal did not end slavery in its New World colonies
until 1836, Sweden in 1847, Denmark and France in 1848, Holland in 1863, and
Spain not until 1886. Most of the Latin American republics had ended slavery
when they threw off Spanish or Portuguese control, but the institution remained
important in Cuba and Brazil; Spain abolished slavery in Cuba in 1886, and
Brazil ended the institution in 1888. European reformers also crusaded against
slavery in Africa and Asia, and indeed the antislavery movement increased
European presence in Africa. At the same time, European nations ended the
medieval institution of serfdom. In Russia, where serfdom had most closely
approximated slavery, Czar Alexander II emancipated the serfs in 1861, an act
that led him to strongly favor the Union in the American Civil War.
The Twilight of the Confederacy
For the Confederacy the outcome of the 1864 election had
a terrible finality. At the beginning of the war, Vice President Stephens had
proclaimed slavery the cornerstone of the Confederacy, but in March 1865 the
Confederate Congress authorized recruiting 300,000 slaves for military service.
When signing the bill, Davis announced that freedom would be given to those who
volunteered and to their families. That same month he offered through a special
envoy to abolish slavery in exchange for British diplomatic recognition. A
Mississippi paper denounced this proposal as “a total abandonment of the chief
object of this war.” The British rejected the offer, and the war ended before
any slaves were mustered into the Confederate army, but the abandonment of
slavery surely completed the Confederacy's internal revolution. The demands of
total war had forced Confederate leaders to forsake the Old South's fundamental
values and institutions. In the wake of Lincoln's reelection the Confederate
will to resist rapidly disintegrated. White southerners had never fully united
behind the war effort, but the large majority had endured great suffering to
uphold it. As Sherman pushed deeper into the Confederacy and General Philip
Sheridan mounted his devastating raid on the Shenandoah Valley, the war came
home to southern civilians as never before. “We haven't got nothing in the
house to eat but a little bit o meal,” wrote the wife of one Alabama soldier in
December 1864. “Try to get off and come home and fix us all up some and then
you can go back…. If you put off a-coming, 'twont be no use to come, for we'll
all … [be] in the grave yard.” He deserted. In the last months of the fighting,
more than half the Confederacy's soldiers were absent without leave. After the fall of Atlanta Sherman gave a frightening
demonstration of total war. Imitating Grant's strategy he abandoned his supply
lines for an audacious 300-mile march to the sea. Sherman intended to deprive
Lee's army of the supplies it desperately needed to continue and to break the
southern will to resist. Or as he bluntly put it, “to whip the Rebels, to
humble their pride, to follow them to their recesses, and make them fear and
dread us.” Moving in four columns, Sherman's army covered about 10 miles a day,
cutting a path of destruction 50 miles wide. “We had a gay old campaign,” one
of his soldiers wrote. “Destroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers,
burned their cotton and gins, spilled their sorghum, burned and twisted their
railroads and raised Hell generally.” Sherman estimated that his men did $100
million in damage, of which $20 million was necessary to supply his army and
the rest was wanton destruction. After he captured Savannah in late December,
he turned north and wreaked even greater havoc in South Carolina, which Union
troops considered the seedbed of the rebellion. By December the interior of the
Confederacy was essentially conquered. Only Lee's army remained, entrenched
around Petersburg, Virginia, as Grant relentlessly extended his lines,
stretching the Confederates thinner and thinner. On April 2 Confederate forces
evacuated Richmond. Grant doggedly pursued the Army of Northern Virginia
westward for another hundred miles. After Union forces captured supplies
waiting for Lee at Appomattox Courthouse, the weary gentleman from Virginia
asked to see Grant. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865.
As the vanquished foe mounted his horse, Grant saluted by
raising his hat; Lee raised his respectfully and rode off at a slow trot. “On
our part,” one federal officer wrote, there was “not a sound of trumpet … nor
roll of drum; not a cheer … but an awed stillness rather.” The guns were quiet.
General William Sherman demonstrated the tactics of total war in the autumn of
1864. “Destroyed all we could not eat … burned their cotton and gins … burned
and twisted their railroads …,” wrote one of Sherman's soldiers. This drawing,
done by a Union private, depicts a similar destructive raid on a plantation
along Virginia's James River in 1862, and by the spring of 1865 Confederate
armies were increasingly unable to resist Union might. With Lee's army gone,
resistance throughout the Confederacy collapsed within a matter of weeks.
Visiting the captured city of Richmond on April 4, Lincoln was enthusiastically
greeted by the black population. He looked “pale, haggard, utterly worn out,”
noted one observer. The lines in his face showed how much the war had aged him
in only four years. Often his friends had counseled rest, but Lincoln had
observed that “the tired part of me is inside and out of reach.” Day after day,
the grim telegrams had arrived at the War Department, or mothers had come to
see him, begging him to spare their youngest son because the other two had died
in battle. The burden, he confessed, was almost too much to bear. Back in
Washington the president received news of Lee's surrender with relief. The
evening of April 14, Lincoln, seeking a welcome escape, went to see a comedy at
Ford's Theater. In the midst of the performance John Wilkes Booth, a mentally
unstable actor and Confederate sympathizer, slipped into the presidential box
and shot him. Lincoln died the next morning. As he had called upon his fellow
Americans to do in his Gettysburg Address, the sixteenth president had given
his “last full measure of devotion” to the Republic. The assassination, which
capped four years of bloody war, left tiredness in the nation's bones—a
tiredness “inside” and not easily within reach. In every way the conflict had
produced fundamental, often devastating changes. There was, of course, the
carnage. Approximately 620,000 men on both sides lost their lives, almost as many
as in all the other wars the nation has fought from the Revolution through
Vietnam combined. In material terms, the conflict cost an estimated $20
billion, or about 10 times the value of all slaves in the country in 1860 and
more than 11 times the total amount spent by the federal government from 1789
to 1861. Even without
adding the market value of freed slaves, southern wealth declined 43 percent,
transforming what had been the richest section in the nation (on a white per
capita basis) into the poorest. The Civil War reordered not only the national
economy but also economic relations worldwide. Manufacturers were forced to
supply the army on an unprecedented scale over great distances. One consequence
was the creation of truly national industries in flour milling, meat packing,
clothing and shoe manufacture, and machinery making. People across the globe
felt the effects of the war, particularly due to changes in the cotton trade.
By 1860 the South was supplying more than three-quarters of all cotton imported
by Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. When the war cut off that supply,
manufacturers scrambled to find new sources. India, Egypt, and Brazil all
improved their railroad facilities and ports in order to encourage planters to
open new cotton fields. The effect of the trade on Egypt was so great;
historians of that nation rank the American Civil War along with the
construction of the Suez Canal as the most crucial events in its
nineteenth-century history. Politically, the war dramatically changed the
balance of power. The South lost its substantial influence, as did the
Democratic party, while the Republicans emerged in a dominant position. The
Union's military victory also signaled the triumph of nationalism. The war
destroyed the idea that the Union was a voluntary confederacy of sovereign
states. The Union was perpetual, as Andrew Jackson had first suggested—truly an
indivisible nation. In the short run the price was disillusionment and
bitterness. The war's corrosive effect on morals corrupted American politics,
destroyed idealism, and crippled humanitarian reform. Millennialism and
perfectionism were victims of the war's appalling slaughter, forsaken for a new
emphasis on practicality, order, materialism, and science.George Ticknor, a prominent critic of the day, reflected
on the changes that had shaken the nation.The war, it seemed to him, had left “a great gulf between
what happened before it in our century and what has happened since…. It does
not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born.”
Chapter Overview
The Demands of Total War
The war's two political leaders offered a study in contrasts. While well-meaning and not tied to the past, Confederate President Jefferson Davis proved a less effective leader than the Union's Abraham Lincoln. Concerned about the border states, Lincoln insisted at the beginning of the conflict that the nation was waging a war to save the Union. He resisted demands to make emancipation a war aim. The Union gained a vital triumph when the border states cast their lot with the Union rather than the Confederacy. The war also created a new border state, West Virginia, when many of Virginia's western counties refused to support the Confederacy.
Opening Moves
The Union proclaimed a blockade of the southern coast, which became more effective every year. In addition, European powers refused to recognize the Confederacy or intervene militarily.
The first Union successes occurred in the West, where Ulysses S. Grant invaded Tennessee and pushed down the Mississippi Valley. His drive south stalled after the fierce battle of Shiloh. In the East, the leading Union commander was George McClellan, who possessed an army much larger than his opponent's but whose ingrained caution prevented him from using it aggressively. In Virginia, a stalemate quickly developed, as Robert E. Lee repulsed a series of Union invasions, yet suffered defeat himself at Antietam when he invaded Maryland. In a year of hard fighting with heavy losses on both sides, the Union had made little headway in the East.
Emancipation
As the fighting dragged on, Lincoln came under mounting pressure to attack slavery as a way to win the war. Under the influence of the Radical Republicans, Congress passed a series of laws that undermined slavery, and the Union refused to return runaway slaves to their owners, insisting that they were contraband. Believing that states rather than the federal government should abolish, Lincoln tried to get the border states to adopt a program of gradual emancipation, but they rejected his appeals. Finally, Lincoln decided to act against slavery. Following the battle of Antietam, he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He issued the final Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing the slaves in all areas under Confederate control. A large number of slaves, perhaps as many as half a million, eventually ran away to Union lines and received their freedom. The army subsequently forced many of these freed people to work for minimal wages on plantations in Union-controlled areas of the Mississippi Valley. Those who remained in the Confederacy seized greater personal freedom during the war, openly challenging white authority and refusing to work as hard as before. The Union also accepted African Americans into the Army and Navy, and eventually over 200,000 served. Some of these men were free black northerners, but the large majority were former slaves. As soldiers, African Americans developed a new sense of pride and personal ability.
The Confederate Home Front
War brought increasing hardship and moral decay on the Confederate home front. With European exports severely cut by the blockade, the Confederacy attempted to build up its industry in order to become self-sufficient. With so many men mobilized into the Army, it fell to women to run the farms and supply the necessary labor in factories. But inflation and food shortages became worse with each year. In an effort to win the war, Davis and his advisers concentrated power in the government at Richmond, inciting strong protests from many southerners. The draft and impressment particularly provoked complaints as interferences with states' rights and individual liberty. Increasingly, non-slaveholders claimed that slave owners were not carrying their share of the war's burdens. With tax revenues insufficient to finance the war, the Confederate population suffered from rampant inflation. Bread riots broke out in several cities, and the moral tone of society plummeted, as gambling, drinking, speculation, and crime overran the South.
The Union Home Front
Civilians in the Union suffered less. The North remained prosperous and well-fed during the war, and the inflation rate was much lower. Congress passed several laws to promote economic growth, including a protective tariff, a Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, and a national banking law. Nevertheless, fraud and corruption became rampant in the government, and workers saw their real wages decline. With the government spending unprecedented amounts of money, a cozy relationship developed between politicians and businesspeople eager for government contracts. A speculative fever pervaded society. As in the South, women ran farms and took factory jobs to maintain war production. Before gaining approval to work in military hospitals, though, they also had to battle Army doctors who found their presence in such places inappropriate. Nursing and teaching now quickly became female professions.Women also became a permanent part of the government bureaucracy in low-level positions and did much of the volunteer work in the Union to provide relief and medical supplies. Lincoln cracked down on antiwar activities by suspending the writ of habeas corpus, an action that incited significant controversy. He also authorized military trials of civilians, an action the Supreme Court declared illegal after the war. The draft, which allowed the wealthy to hire a substitute or pay $300 for an exemption, inspired further grievances. Peace Democrats, labeled Copperheads by Republicans, vigorously protested the government's violations of personal liberty, and a major anti-draft riot erupted in New York City in 1863.
Civilians in the Union suffered less. The North remained prosperous and well-fed during the war, and the inflation rate was much lower. Congress passed several laws to promote economic growth, including a protective tariff, a Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, and a national banking law. Nevertheless, fraud and corruption became rampant in the government, and workers saw their real wages decline. With the government spending unprecedented amounts of money, a cozy relationship developed between politicians and businesspeople eager for government contracts. A speculative fever pervaded society. As in the South, women ran farms and took factory jobs to maintain war production. Before gaining approval to work in military hospitals, though, they also had to battle Army doctors who found their presence in such places inappropriate. Nursing and teaching now quickly became female professions.Women also became a permanent part of the government bureaucracy in low-level positions and did much of the volunteer work in the Union to provide relief and medical supplies. Lincoln cracked down on antiwar activities by suspending the writ of habeas corpus, an action that incited significant controversy. He also authorized military trials of civilians, an action the Supreme Court declared illegal after the war. The draft, which allowed the wealthy to hire a substitute or pay $300 for an exemption, inspired further grievances. Peace Democrats, labeled Copperheads by Republicans, vigorously protested the government's violations of personal liberty, and a major anti-draft riot erupted in New York City in 1863.
Much like Jim Tinkham, soldiers in both armies soon discovered that war was more tedious and less glamorous than they had envisioned. Soldiers experienced great hardship from disease, poor food, and exposure, as well as risking life and limb fighting. They also struggled to adjust to the routinized life of the army, a problem that particularly affected farmers who had little previous experience in such a disciplined and supervised atmosphere. Traditional moral standards declined significantly under the pressures of war. The mounting casualty lists revealed how the war bore down with special force on the common soldiers. New technology, particularly the rifled musket and artillery piece, made most defensive positions considerably stronger than those held by attacking forces, leading to horrific carnage as exposed soldiers assaulted well-fortified targets. War became more deadly than ever before, yet despite heavy losses most the outcome of most battles proved indecisive.
The Union's Triumph
The war's turning point came in 1863 when the Union won twin victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Gettysburg destroyed Lee's offensive capabilities, while Grant's victories in the West that year led Lincoln to appoint him commanding general. With the Mississippi in Union hands, Grant instructed William Tecumseh Sherman to drive a diagonal wedge through the Confederacy from Tennessee through Georgia, while Grant himself fought a series of fierce battles with Lee in Virginia. Grant could not break Lee's lines, however, and with Sherman bogged down in front of Atlanta, Lincoln seemed headed for certain defeat in the 1864 presidential election. Sherman's capture of Atlanta in September proved the military breakthrough Lincoln needed, though, and he swept to victory. Lincoln's re-election made it clear that the Union would continue the war until it achieved reunion and emancipation. Following the election, Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery; the states ratified it in December 1865. With the Confederacy's hopes flickering, Jefferson Davis offered to abolish slavery in a desperate and unsuccessful bid for British recognition. In the meantime, Sherman embarked on his destructive march through Georgia and then the Carolinas. Civilian morale collapsed in the Confederacy and the southern armies became wracked by desertions. In April, Grant forced Lee to evacuate Richmond, and a few days later Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. The rest of the Confederate armies soon did the same. In the hour of the Union's victory, however, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln, the final tragedy in the conflict.
The Impact of War
The war profoundly changed the nation, altering its political institutions, its economy, and its values. Secession was dead, and power was concentrated in the federal government at the expense of the states. Slavery had been abolished, the South's wealth destroyed. Industry was stimulated and, with the pro-business Republican Party dominant, the government now played a much more active role in the economy. The war also impacted people around the world, causing explosive growth in overseas cotton production and fostering the growth of aggressive imperialist foreign policies among the European powers.But the war had a high spiritual cost: sectional bitterness, a greater tolerance of corruption, moral complacency, and a loss of the crusading idealism that had characterized the nation before the war.
Review Questions
1. The chapter introduction
tells the story of the first battle of Manassas (Bull Run) to make the point
that:
A.
the Union army was unprepared to fight.
B.
the Confederate army was unprepared to fight.
C.
both
sides underestimated what it would be like to fight a total war.
D.
although the North had the advantage of
initiative, the fighting would often turn out to be a series of Confederate
victories against all odds.
2. The North had the
advantage in all of the following at the start of the war EXCEPT:
A.
population.
B.
industrial capacity.
C.
transportation.
D.
war
aims.
3. What was Jefferson
Davis' central problem?
A.
In a culture that prized the English country
gentry, Davis was rough-hewn and awkward.
B.
In a
society that prized states' rights, Davis had to centralize authority.
C.
In a crisis that demanded tough-minded
attention to military details, Davis was more of a grand strategist.
D.
In a war that required rapid mobilization of
a whole society, most ordinary folk in the South were reluctant to enlist.
4. President Lincoln:
A.
had significant experience in national
politics before taking over the presidency.
B.
was a
more effective military leader than Jefferson Davis.
C.
was unpopular with the soldiers in the Union
army.
D.
was able to easily find generals to execute
his military strategy.
5. What was the first Union
success of the war?
A.
blocking a southern invasion
B.
holding coastal forts in the South
C.
holding
the border states in the Union
D.
winning the first battle of Bull Run
6. All of the following are
true about Lee's invasion of the North in 1862 EXCEPT:
A.
his aim was to detach Maryland from the Union
and isolate Washington.
B.
he knew that the South needed a decisive
victory to gain recognition from France and England.
C.
he
soundly defeated McClellan at Antietam.
D.
McClellan found a copy of Lee's orders, which
revealed that the northern army vastly outnumbered Lee's force.
7. Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation declared slaves to be free:
A.
in the border states and western territories.
B.
in those areas of the South under Union
control.
C.
in
those areas of the South under Confederate control.
D.
everywhere in the U. S. (including the
South).
8. What is true about
African Americans during the Civil War?
A.
Many
slaves escaped to Union lines, where they were put to work or even allowed to
join the army.
B.
In the North, both whites and free blacks
welcomed black soldiers into the Union Army.
C.
Lincoln permitted African Americans to serve
in the navy but not the army.
D.
Their servile work and segregated status
meant that blacks found wartime service a humiliating ordeal.
9. Southern women did each
of the following during the war EXCEPT:
A.
work in munitions factories.
B.
serve as smugglers and spies for the
Confederacy.
C.
oversee agricultural production and supervise
the slaves.
D.
fail
to receive equal pay for work in the Confederate bureaucracy.
10. Lincoln, later revered
as the Great Emancipator, infringed on the civil liberties of Northerners
during the Civil War-specifically by:
A.
suspending
the writ of habeas corpus in specified areas in the North.
B.
suspending the writ of habeas corpus in areas
still in rebellion in the South.
C.
recommending postponement of the presidential
election due to be held in 1864.
D.
defying the Supreme Court's order to free
those imprisoned without being charged.
11. As he assumed
leadership of all Union armies, Grant began to conduct a "total war"
against the South by:
A.
coordinating
the movement of Union armies to utilize the North's natural resources and wear
down the South.
B.
concentrating the Union offensives against
Lee in Virginia while adopting a defensive strategy in the West.
C.
seeking one decisive battlefield victory over
Lee to convince southerners that further resistance was useless.
D.
systematically strangling southern trade so
that Confederate troops would no longer receive supplies.
12. The military
significance of the battle of Gettysburg was that:
A.
the Confederacy was cut in half.
B.
Lee
could never again take the offensive as he liked to do.
C.
the victory gave Lincoln an occasion to issue
the Emancipation Proclamation.
D.
Lee's surrender ended the war.
13. Historians who have
investigated the New York Draft Riots generally believe:
A.
the riots were caused by the Conscription
Laws, which contained a $5,000 commutation clause.
B.
the riots were directed against the
Democratic Party by skilled workers.
C.
the riots were the only way that Irish and
German immigrants could protest living conditions in the city.
D.
the
riots were the work of different crowds with different grievances.
14. Which of the following
characterizes the war's impact on the soldiers?
A.
They continued to act in accordance with the
traditional ideals of duty, honor, and patriotism.
B.
Their cumulative exposure to death and
suffering generally left them less willing to fight.
C.
Their cumulative exposure to death and
suffering generally caused a heightening of their moral standards when not
fighting.
D.
Their
cumulative exposure to death and suffering generally caused a decline of their
moral standards and a sense of alienation from civilians back home.
15. According to the text,
what event decided the "war in the balance," or dashed the last hopes
of the Confederacy and assured the abolition of slavery?
A.
the Emancipation Proclamation
B.
the elevation of Grant to Commander in Chief
C.
the victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg
D.
the
re-election of Lincoln
Practice
Test
1. The
state admitted to the Union during the Civil War was
A. Iowa.
B. Minnesota.
C. Wisconsin.
D. West Virginia.
E. Nevada.
2. The Confiscation Act of 1861:
A. saw the Confederate government claim the right to seize
free blacks in the South.
B. gave Union troops the authority to seize Confederate
property.
C. empowered banks in the Union to freeze the financial
assets of all slaveholders.
D. declared that
slaves used by Confederate states in the war effort were free.
E. abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and the
western territories.
3. Sherman's
march through Georgia was designed to:
A. find supplies for the Union armies in Virginia.
B. free the slaves in central Georgia.
C. get Lincoln reelected.
D. break the will of
the southern people.
E. cut off Lee's army.
4. The
first battle of the Civil War was:
A. Shiloh.
B. the Seven Days.
C. First Bull Run.
D. Wilson's Creek.
E. Fort Pickens.
5. In naval warfare during the Civil War,
A. the Union blockade of the South was largely ineffective.
B. the Confederacy managed to build a navy equal to the
Union.
C. both the Union and
Confederate militaries developed ironclads.
D. the Confederacy devastated Union fleets with ironclad
warships.
E. the Confederacy managed to seize key Union ports such as
Baltimore.
6. The
Battle of Gettysburg:
A. represented the
last time Confederate forces seriously threatened Union territory.
B. saw Union General George Meade lose nearly a third of his
army.
C. saw Union General George Meade clearly be more aggressive
than Robert E. Lee.
D. saw Robert E. Lee poised for victory after his attack on
Cemetery Ridge.
E. was a Union victory, thanks to Meade having found a copy
of Lee's orders.
7. The
New York City draft riots:
A. occurred when Irish strikebreakers were attacked by New
York longshoremen.
B. led to the deaths of 1,000 people.
C. included lynching’s
of a number of African Americans.
D. ended the use of conscription as a means of gaining new
soldiers for the Union army.
E. were in protest of the high $300.00 draft avoidance fee.
8. The
1862 Morrill Land Grant Act was designed to help:
A. industry.
B. education.
C. banks.
D. railroads.
E. free blacks.
9. King
Cotton diplomacy:
A. enabled the South to get all the war material it needed
from Europe.
B. worked for most of the war.
C. was a failure.
D. worked for the North.
E. enabled the South to get all the war material it needed
from Europe and worked for most of the war.
10. Robert
E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Court House after:
A. President Jefferson Davis announced the Confederate
government was defeated.
B. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
C. Lee recognized the
futility of continued fighting.
D. President Lincoln met President Davis.
E. President Jefferson Davis was captured by Union forces.
11. African
Americans were not allowed to serve in organized fighting units.
A. True
B. False
12. "Cotton
diplomacy" worked to the extent that England extended diplomatic
recognition to the Confederacy.
A. True
B. False
13. The
Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to all of the slave states.
A. True
B. False
14. The
Civil War helped transform nursing into a female profession, but these nurses
encountered considerable resistance from male doctors.
A. True
B. False
15. Despite being a Democrat, Andrew Johnson
was selected to run with Lincoln in 1864.
A. True
B. False
16. The
first ironclad ships to engage in a naval battle were the Merrimac (also known
as Virginia) and the ________.
Monitor
17. In
1864 the Republicans changed their name to the ________ Party.
Union
18. One component of the Republican economic
legislation passed during the war was the ________, which provided 160 acres of
public land to settlers who would farm for five years.
Homestead Act
19. Not
until 1864 did Lincoln find a military commander he could trust: ________.
Ulysses S. Grant
20. The
Republicans sought to encourage the development of the West by passing the
________.
Homestead Act
21. The
North printed paper currency, or ________, in order to finance the Civil War.
Greenbacks
22. Wartime
targets of military arrest in the North were Peace Democrats, or ________.
Copperheads
23. As
in all modern wars, technology revolutionized the conditions under which Civil
War soldiers fought. The ________ musket, which at first served as the basic
infantry weapon, gave way to the rifle, so named because of the grooves etched
into the barrel to give a bullet spin.
smoothbore
24. Slaves
in the border states and other areas not controlled by the Confederacy were
freed by the ________ Amendment.
Thirteenth
25. Issued
as a military measure against the South and thus applicable only in areas still
in rebellion, Lincoln's ________ redefined the war as a struggle to create a
new nation.
Emancipation
Proclamation
26. Black
enlistment in the Union military increased after the ________ was issued.
Emancipation
Proclamation
27. _______
was the celebrated Virginian who led the Army of Northern Virginia so well for
so long, but who finally had to surrender to Ulysses S. Grant.
Robert E. Lee
28. At
the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, Confederate General ________ was
killed.
Stonewall Jackson
29. Four
days of draft riots in ________ in 1863 constituted the bloodiest riot in all
of American history.
New York City
30. The most celebrated battle of the Civil
War was fought at ________ in early July of 1863.
Gettysburg
31. The
tragic war ended with one more tragedy just days after the surrender of the
Army of Northern Virginia, when John Wilkes Booth shot and killed ________.
Abraham Lincoln
32. Republicans
gave the scornful nickname of ________ to northerners who opposed the war
effort.
Copperheads
33. To
obtain sufficient manpower for their armies, both the North and the South not
only called for volunteers but also instituted, for the first time in U.S.
history, the controversial device of a(n) ________.
draft
34. The
president who had served previously as secretary of war was ________.
Jefferson Davis
35. In
1861 Congress passed the ________ Act, which declared that all slaves used for
"insurrectionary" purposes would be considered, freed.
Confiscation
Chapter
Test
1. The
greatest source of division in the South was:
A. the doctrine of
states' rights.
B. the difference of opinion over the war.
C. the question of whether to use slaves in combat.
D. over "King Cotton diplomacy."
E. the role of women in the war effort.
2. Which
of the following was true when the Civil War began?
A. All the important
material advantages lay with the North.
B. The South had the active support of England.
C. Southern industry was sufficient to conduct a war.
D. The Union was prepared for a long war.
E. The Union had the active support of France.
3. No
European nation offered diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy.
A. True
B. False
4. In
both the North and the South, the draft was accepted with little protest.
A. True
B. False
5. George
McClellan was the most important military commander in the Union.
A. True
B. False
6. African
American soldiers in the Union:
A. constituted a large segment of the initial volunteers who
joined the war effort.
B. died in combat in larger numbers than white soldiers.
C. were not paid for their military service.
D. experienced a
higher mortality rate than white soldiers.
E. were allowed only to dig trenches and transport water.
7. Many
southerners believed that the dependence of English and French textile
industries on American cotton would force them to intervene on the side of the
Confederacy.
A. True
B. False
8.
Which of the following was an advantage enjoyed by the South at the outset of
the war?
A. It would be fighting, for the most part, a defensive war.
B. Most of the white population of the South supported the
war.
C. Northern opinion on the war was divided.
D. The South had better military commanders.
E. All these answers
are correct.
9. Although
Lincoln himself proved to be the most important Union military commander,
"his general" was:
A. George McClellan.
B. Ulysses S. Grant.
C. George Meade
D. William Tecumseh Sherman.
10. During
the Civil War, the Union financed the war by all of the following methods,
EXCEPT:
A. levied the first federal income tax
B. borrowed money through the sale of bonds.
C. sold 160 acres of
public land very cheaply through the Homestead Act
D. issued greenbacks (paper money)
E. were backed by gold and silver.
11. The
Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves:
A. in the North as well as the South.
B. in areas of the
Confederacy except those already under Union control.
C. and offered compensation to the masters in slave states
that remained loyal to the Union.
D. in the South but offered to return them to masters who
declared their loyalty to the Union.
E. in southern areas already under Union control.
12. After
the Battle of Gettysburg, the weakened Confederate armies were never again able
to seriously threaten Northern territory.
A. True
B. False
13. "Copperheads"
were:
A. northerners who secretly spied for the Confederacy.
B. often arrested on
the order of President Lincoln.
C. largely members of the Republican Party.
D. intent on using the Civil War to rapidly end slavery.
E. strong Lincoln supporters who often suppressed dissent
violently.
14. When
the war began, which of the following border slave states was the only one
certain to remain in the Union?
A. Maryland
B. Missouri
C. Delaware
D. Kentucky
15. The
Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
A. declared that the right to vote could not be denied on
account of race.
B. officially ended
slavery.
C. granted "citizenship" to the freedmen.
D. provided that states could only count three-fifths (60%)
of their black population when determining how many members they would be given
in the U.S. House of Representatives.
E. opened up the West to homesteading by African Americans.
