THE CIVIL WAR (1861-1865) Civil War: Causes and Results "Of the American Civil War it may safely be asserted that there was a single cause, slavery," wrote historian James Ford Rhodes in 1913. Although historians today would not put it quite so starkly, Rhodes's basic point remains valid. In the decades since 1913 various schools of historiography have advanced other interpretations of the war''s causes. The progressive historians emphasized the widening economic gulf between the North and South. Cultural and social historians stressed the contrast between the civilizations and values of the two regions. But revisionist historians denied the existence of any fundamental economic or social conflicts. They pointed instead to self-serving politicians who created and then exploited the false issue of slavery''s expansion into new territories to whip up sectional passions and get themselves elected to office. Few historians today subscribe to either the progressive or the revisionist interpretation in unalloyed form. To be sure, conflicts of interest occurred between the agricultural South and the industrializing North. But issues like tariffs, banks, and land grants divided parties and interest groups more than they did North and South. The South in the 1840s and 1850s had its advocates of industrialization and protective tariffs, just as the North had its millions of farmers and its low-tariff, antibank Democratic majority in many states. The Civil War was not fought over the issue of tariff or of industrialization or of land grants. Nor was it a consequence of false issues invented by demagogues. It was fought over profound, intractable problems that Americans on both sides believed went to the heart of their society and its future. In this sense the "two civilizations" thesis comes closest to the mark. As a lawyer in Savannah, Georgia, expressed it in 1860, "in this country have arisen two races [i.e., Northerners and Southerners] which, although claiming a common parentage, have been so entirely separated by climate, by morals, by religion, and by estimates so totally opposite to all that constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that they cannot longer exist under the same government." What lay at the root of this separation? Slavery. It was the sole institution not shared by North and South. The peculiar institution defined the South. "On the subject of slavery," declared the Charleston Mercury in 1858, "the North and South ... are not only two Peoples, but they are rival, hostile Peoples." Two of the North''s foremost political leaders echoed this point in the same year. Slavery and freedom, said Senator William H. Seward of New York, are "more than incongruous - they are incompatible." The collision between them "is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation." Abraham Lincoln, in a famous speech, declared that "]a house divided against itself cannot stand.[ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free." But why could it not so endure? After all, in 1858 it had done so for seventy years. To be sure, slavery had been a source of contention at the Constitutional Convention, at the time of Missouri''s admission into the Union in 1821, in the debates between abolitionists and slavery''s defenders especially in the 1830s, at the time of Texas''s admission as a state in 1845 and the subsequent war with Mexico, and on numerous other occasions. But compromises palliated these conflicts; the Republic endured. What made the rhetoric of 1858 different? What split the Republic in 1861? The answer lies mainly in the schism generated by the expansion of slavery. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had seemed to settle this matter by dividing the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase between slavery and freedom at the latitude of 36°30 (with Missouri as a slave-state exception north of that line). But the conquest from Mexico of vast new regions in the Southwest following the annexation of Texas as a slave state reopened the question in 1846. With the support of nearly all Northern congressmen, the House of Representatives passed over unanimous Southern opposition the Wilmot Proviso stating that slavery should be excluded from all territory acquired by the Mexican War. Southern strength in the Senate was sufficient to defeat the proviso there. And that was the point. With the Union comprising fifteen free states and fifteen slave states in 1848, the South could block in the Senate any measures threatening slavery. But if only free states were to be admitted in the future, the South would eventually become a helpless minority in all branches of government. Slavery would be doomed by Northern hostility. What explained the growing Northern hostility to slavery? Since 1831 the militant phase of the abolitionist movement had crusaded against bondage as unchristian, immoral, and a violation of the republican principle of equality on which the nation had been founded. The fact that this land of liberty had become the world''s largest slaveholding nation seemed a shameful anomaly to an increasing number of Northerners. "The monstrous injustice of slavery," said Lincoln in 1854, "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world - enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites." Slavery degraded not only the slaves, argued Northerners opposed to its expansion, by demeaning the dignity of labor and dragging down the wages of all workers; it also degraded free people who owned no slaves. If slavery goes into the territories, declared abolitionists, "the free labor of all the states will not.... If the free labor of the states goes there, the slave labor of the southern states will not, and in a few years the country will teem with an active and energetic population." The contest over expansion of slavery into the territories thus became a contest over the future of America, for these territories held the balance of power between slavery and freedom. The South accepted the gauntlet flung down by the Free-Soil movement. Proslavery advocates countered that the bondage of blacks was the basis of liberty for whites. Slavery elevated all whites to an equality of status and dignity by confining menial labor and caste subordination to blacks. "If slaves are freed," said Southerners, whites "will become menials. We will lose every right and liberty which belongs to the name of freemen." The fear that emancipation would degrade whites to the level of black slaves explains why most of the Southern whites who owned no slaves (70 percent of all whites) supported the institution. They agreed with slave owners that slavery must be allowed in the territories, for such expansion might increase their own chances of acquiring slaves. This question became the dominant political issue of the 1850s. Southerners led several filibustering expeditions into Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua to try to gain control of these regions in order to annex them to the United States as slave states. Southern Democrats used their domination of the party, which in turn controlled the federal government during most of the decade, to make annexation of Cuba a party policy (but Spain refused to sell its colony). Southern Democrats and their Northern allies passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise''s restriction on slavery north of 36°30 in Louisiana Purchase territories. The outraged Northern response led to the founding of the Republican party as a coalition of Free-Soilers, Northern Whigs, and those Northern Democrats who were fed up with Southern domination of their party. Tensions were exacerbated in 1857 when the Southern-dominated Supreme Court handed down its Dred Scott decision, which declared slavery legal in all territories. During the remainder of the decade, the territory of Kansas echoed with the gunfire of strife between pro- and antislavery settlers. Out of the Kansas conflict came John Brown with his vision of a holy war to free the slaves, which culminated with his attack on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. These events were flash points in the increasing polarization of North and South over slavery. When Lincoln won the presidential election in 1860 without winning a single electoral vote and with scarcely any popular votes in the slave states, Southerners knew they had lost control of the government. A Northern antislavery party would dominate the future. Slavery was doomed if the South remained in the Union. So seven slave states seceded (followed by four more after the firing on Fort Sumter) and formed the Confederate States of America. Still, that did not inevitably mean war. If the new Lincoln administration and the Northern people had been willing to accept secession, the two halves of the former United States might have coexisted in an uneasy peace. But most Northerners were not willing to tolerate the dismemberment of the United States. This would create a fatal precedent whereby "any minority [would] have the right to break up the Government at pleasure," declared Northern newspapers and political leaders. The government would become "a rope of sand" and "our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics.... Our example for more than eighty years would not only be lost, but it would be quoted as a conclusive proof that man is unfit for self-government." Lincoln intended to maintain the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay as a symbol of national sovereignty in the Confederate states, in the hope that a reaction toward Unionism in those states would eventually bring them back. To forestall this happening, the Confederate army attacked Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. This was the spark that ignited four years of war in which at least 620,000 American soldiers lost their lives - nearly as many as in all the other wars this country has fought combined. The destruction wrought in the South by the Civil War was devastating. It killed one-quarter of the Confederacy''s white men of military age and destroyed two-fifths of Southern livestock, half of the farm machinery and a similar proportion of factories and railroads, and two-thirds of Southern wealth. The Civil War was the great trauma and tragedy of American history. But it was also a great triumph of nationalism and freedom. The war resolved the two fundamental problems left unresolved by the Revolution of 1776, problems that had preoccupied the country for four score and nine years down to 1865. The first was the question whether this fragile republic would survive in a world of monarchs and emperors and dictators or would follow the example of most republics through history (including many in the nineteenth century) and collapse into tyranny or fragment in a dreary succession of revolutions and civil wars. Northern victory in the Civil War settled that question: the United States would survive as a single nation with a republican form of government. Since 1865 no state or region has tried to secede. The second problem left unresolved by the Revolution was slavery, which had divided the country from the beginning. The Civil War abolished the institution and freed 4 million slaves. What still remained unresolved in 1865 were the meaning and dimensions of that freedom - issues that continue to concern Americans today. ------------------------------------------- Civil War: Strategies and Tactics In military terminology, tactics is the handling of troops on the battlefield. The definition of strategy is usually divided into two parts: national strategy, which is the shaping of a nation''s political goals in time of war, and military strategy, which is the use of armed forces to achieve those goals. The Confederacy''s national strategy in the Civil War was to defend its political independence and territorial borders. This goal remained constant throughout four years of war, but the military strategies devised to achieve the goal fluctuated. The initial Southern military strategy consisted of what might be described as a "dispersed defensive." Numerous small contingents of troops were dispersed around the circumference of six thousand miles of land and water borders of the Confederacy in the hope of blocking enemy invasions at any and all points. Some of these troops were stationed in forts along the seacoast and on rivers; others were organized in small mobile armies that defended key rail junctions, mountain passes, or river crossings on or near the Confederate border. This proved to be an unwise use of the South''s limited military manpower (which was only one-third of the Union potential), for by fragmenting its forces the Confederacy risked a breakthrough at one or more crucial points by larger enemy forces. This was precisely what happened in the winter and spring of 1862, when Northern armies and river navies breached Southern defenses dispersed along a four-hundred-mile line in Tennessee and Kentucky with breakthroughs at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Island No. Ten on the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers. Yet though militarily unsound, the dispersed defensive was politically necessary. Confederate regiments were recruited and organized by the states, whose governors retained some control over them even after they were incorporated into the Confederate army. The governors of, say, South Carolina and Arkansas were unwilling to send most of their regiments to crucial points in Virginia or Tennessee if this would leave their own states unprotected. The political allegiance of states was almost as important to Confederate national survival as the military defense of the Southern heartland. Thus Jefferson Davis and his military leaders could never wholly abandon the dispersed defensive. Substantial numbers of troops remained scattered in several quiet sectors instead of concentrated in the most active and threatened theaters (mainly Virginia and Tennessee) until 1864, when Union conquests had shrunk Confederate territory to the point where most Southern troops were perforce concentrated into the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee. But even earlier, Southern strategists had used interior lines of communication to combine scattered forces into a larger army that could meet an invading Union army on even or nearly even terms. Joseph Johnston brought most of his small army from Winchester to Manassas Junction to combine with P. G. T. Beauregard''s force in July 1861 to win the Battle of Manassas. Robert E. Lee likewise brought Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson''s army from the Shenandoah Valley in June 1862 to join with the Army of Northern Virginia to drive George B. McClellan''s besieging force away from Richmond. After the losses of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ordered Confederate detachments from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama as well as those driven from Kentucky and Tennessee to concentrate at Corinth, Mississippi, where they launched the counteroffensive that almost won the bloody Battle of Shiloh. These modifications of the dispersed defensive became known in the Confederate lexicon as an "offensive-defensive" strategy. What this meant was that although the Confederate national strategy remained defensive, it could sometimes best be achieved by an offensive military strategy - by attacking the enemy in Confederate territory, as Lee did in the Seven Days Battles and as Johnston did at Shiloh, or by invading enemy territory, as Braxton Bragg and Lee did in September 1862 and Lee did again in June 1863. Large risks inhered in this offensive-defensive strategy. One was the danger that Union forces would move into the vacuum created by the departure of troops from one place to concentrate in another. The transfer of first-line Confederate regiments from Louisiana to Corinth in March 1862, for example, left New Orleans defended by only two forts, a makeshift navy, and raw militia. These were no match for the Union army-navy task force that fought its way up the Mississippi to Vicksburg during April and May, capturing New Orleans and gaining control of most of the vital Mississippi Valley. Another risk of the offensive-defensive strategy was the possibility of defeat and destruction of an army far from its home base. This danger was especially acute for Confederate armies, which did not have the logistical capacity to operate in enemy territory for an extended period. Thus Lee risked the loss or crippling of his army after the Battles of Antietam and Gettysburg. The timidity and caution of opposing commanders enabled Lee to bring his battered army back to Virginia on these occasions. But thereafter, Confederate armies were too weak for effective employment of an offensive-defensive strategy, though John B. Hood tried it once more with the Army of Tennessee in November 1864 - with disastrous results. The virtual destruction of Hood''s army in the Battles of Franklin and Nashville seemed to confirm the necessity for a less aggressive strategy that would minimize one''s own casualties and maximize the enemy''s. This was a strategy of attrition, which became the principal Confederate strategy in 1864. In Virginia and Georgia, Lee and Joseph Johnston stood on the entrenched defensive, forcing enemy armies to attack or carry out difficult flanking maneuvers, trading space for time in the hope that high Union casualties and prolonged stalemate would convince the Northern people to give up the attempt to conquer the South because the human and material cost was too high. It almost worked, owing to tactical changes introduced by rifled weapons and trenches. The Confederate strategy of attrition was a matter of tactics as well. In the military campaigns of 1864 the opposing armies seldom lost contact with each other. Fighting or maneuvering in the presence of the enemy was almost continuous, merging battlefield operations (tactics) with campaign maneuvers (strategy). The Napoleonic tactics taught in American military schools and employed in the Mexican War were becoming obsolete in the age of rifled muskets and artillery. These tactics involved close-order assaults by troops bunched in lines of two or three ranks or in dense columns in order to mass firepower and impact. This worked reasonably well in the era of the muzzle-loading, smoothbore musket and bayonet. The effective (i.e., accurate) range of the smoothbore musket was at most a hundred yards, and a good soldier could get off two shots a minute. Heavy close-order assaults often succeeded because of the short range of defensive fire before attackers reached the defenders'' line. But the development of rifled muskets in the 1850s increased the effective firing range of an infantryman to four or five hundred yards, and the range of an expert sharpshooter to nearly twice as far. This vastly strengthened the defense against close-order assaults. Civil War soldiers by 1863 also learned to entrench whenever they came into contact with the enemy because of the added protection this provided against long-range rifled muskets and rifled artillery. Old-fashioned cavalry charges became suicidal because enemy fire could cut down men and horses long before the shock of their charge could break a defensive line. The Civil War thus produced the evolution of dismounted cavalry tactics, as well as looser infantry assault tactics, which amounted to large-scale skirmishing, flank attacks, and the like. Although commanders on both sides continued to order close-order assaults until virtually the end of the war, thus providing an example of how tactics lagged behind technology, these assaults became increasingly suicidal, especially for Union attackers running up against Confederate trenches, which by 1864 were almost as elaborate as those on the western front in World WarI. What kind of Union strategy could overcome the vastly increased strength of defensive warfare? The Northern national strategy was to preserve the territorial and governmental integrity of the United States. At first this meant restoring the Union as it had existed before 1861 by suppressing the insurrection that had gained control of eleven states. This seemed to require a military strategy of limited war: defeat the armies of the insurrectionists and arrest their leaders, in order to enable the Unionists (whom Northerners in 1861 assumed to be the silent majority in most Southern states) to regain control and bring the states back into the Union. This strategy worked well in the border states of Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky, which were kept in the Union with the aid of military force despite the Confederate allegiance of a substantial minority of their citizens. It worked also in Virginia west of the Alleghenies, where Northern troops helped the Unionist majority form the new state of West Virginia. But elsewhere the silent majority of Unionists remained largely a myth. By 1862, therefore, Union strategy evolved to a second stage: conquest of Confederate territory. This too seemed to result in great success. In Tennessee and the lower Mississippi Valley, Union arms conquered and occupied fifty thousand square miles of territory in the spring of 1862 while McClellan''s Army of the Potomac swept up the Virginia peninsula and stood poised to capture Richmond. But then the Confederate offensive-defensive onslaught recaptured some of this territory and knocked Union armies back on their heels. It became clear that so long as Southern armies retained striking power, the Confederacy would remain a viable state. Thus in 1863 Northern military strategy evolved to a third phase: destruction of Confederate armies. Ulysses S. Grant captured one whole army at Vicksburg and badly crippled another at Chattanooga; Lee''s army limped home to Virginia badly hurt after Gettysburg. But the Confederacy still lived, its armies sustained by the will of the population to resist and to continue producing the sinews of war. By 1864 Union strategists recognized that it was not enough to conquer territory and cripple enemy armies; they must destroy the resources and capacity of the Southern people to wage war. Gen. William T. Sherman saw this most clearly. "We are not only fighting hostile armies," he wrote, "but a hostile people." In Sherman''s march through Georgia and South Carolina in 1864-1865 and in the campaigns of other Union armies elsewhere, Northern forces burned and destroyed railroads, factories, farms - anything that could feed and supply Confederate armies as well as the civilian population, to break their will and ability to continue the war. This worked. It had been foreshadowed in 1861 by the Union naval blockade to restrict Confederate imports of war matériel and by the Lincoln administration''s adoption of an emancipation policy in 1862 to uproot the South''s labor force and convert it to a Union labor and fighting force. By 1863 several hundred thousand former slaves had become free people within Union lines, and the Union army had begun the process that ultimately recruited 180,000 of them to fight for the Union - and freedom. This crippled a crucial Southern resource for waging war and added a powerful resource to the Northern strategic effort. Sherman''s destruction of all Southern resources was a logical extension of these policies. It was a strategy of total war that by 1865 overcame the South''s defensive tactics and strategy of attrition by totally destroying the Confederacy''s capacity to continue fighting. In several respects, therefore, the tactics and strategy of the American Civil War foreshadowed those of the two world wars in the twentieth century. ------------------------------------------- Civil War: Foreign Relations The Confederacy''s principal goals in foreign policy were to obtain diplomatic recognition and material assistance from European countries. The Union''s main diplomatic objective was to prevent this. In the end the South failed to achieve diplomatic recognition or British aid in breaking the Union blockade. But foreign assistance and sympathy did contribute in a minor way to the Confederate war effort. Both the Union and the Confederacy focused their diplomatic activities primarily on Britain, the world''s foremost industrial and naval power whose lead other nations would follow. On April 19, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of Confederate ports. By 1863 the Union navy had built up its force sufficiently to make this blockade effective, seriously curtailing the export of cotton and the imports of war matériel the agricultural South needed to supply its armies. But when, in 1861, the blockade was still little more than nominal, Southerners pursued one of their objectives by placing an embargo on cotton exports, reasoning from what has been termed "the King Cotton illusion." Aware that textiles were the most important industry in Britain (and almost as important to the economy of France) and that 80 percent of Britain''s raw cotton came from their fields, Southerners believed that by withholding the 1861 crop from export they would compel British intervention to break the blockade in order to obtain cotton. They miscalculated. The 1859 and 1860 cotton crops had been so large that British mills had enough on hand to carry them into 1862, and the war boom in arms trade and shipping to both the Union and the Confederacy took up part of the slack in the British economy caused by a slowdown in textiles. In any case, the world''s richest and most powerful nation was not likely to submit to economic blackmail. Moreover, many working-class leaders and their middle-class allies in Britain sympathized with the Union, thinking it was fighting for democracy and the dignity of labor against a society dominated by slaveholders. After the Emancipation Proclamation, it became even less likely that Britain would side with the South. Confederate diplomats tried to convince British leaders that the Union blockade in 1861-1862 was so leaky that under international law it should be considered a "paper blockade" and therefore illegitimate. Such arguments fell on deaf ears. As a naval power, Britain relied on blockades in time of war and did not want to create an antiblockade precedent that might boomerang on the Royal Navy in a future conflict. Hence the British government recognized the Northern blockade as legal, and British blockade-runners seized and confiscated by the Union navy could expect no help from their government. One crisis associated with the blockade, however, almost ruptured relations between the United States and Britain: the Trent affair. On November 8, 1861, the uss San Jacinto stopped the British packet Trent on the high seas near Cuba and captured James Mason and John Slidell, Confederate diplomats on their way to London and Paris, respectively, to seek diplomatic recognition. The British government considered this a violation of international law and demanded an apology and the release of Mason and Slidell. Public opinion in the North and in England rose to fever pitch while Southerners watched with high hopes that a war would break out between Britain and the United States. But President Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward cooled the crisis by releasing Mason and Slidell, and Britain dropped the demand for an apology. Confederate hopes for diplomatic recognition rose again in the summer of 1862. Southern armies were on the offensive, having won several small battles in Tennessee and two big ones in Virginia. This convinced some European leaders that the North could never conquer the South. And, too, the cotton shortage was beginning to hurt. The British and French governments discussed the possibility of jointly offering to mediate a peace on the basis of Confederate independence, planning to recognize the Confederacy if the Lincoln administration rejected the offer. As Southern armies invaded Maryland and Kentucky in September 1862, European governments awaited the outcome. When Union forces turned back the invasions at Antietam and Perryville, Britain dropped the idea of mediation. As things turned out, this was the closest the South came to gaining diplomatic recognition. One other issue exacerbated Anglo-American relations. Confederate agents contracted with private British shipyards to build fast, sleek warships to prey on American merchant vessels. This was a violation of British neutrality laws, but forged papers and lax British enforcement allowed some of these ships to put to sea. Two of them, the css Alabama and css Florida, sank or captured nearly one hundred American merchant ships. Union protests did not stop these and other commerce raiders from putting to sea but did prevent the culmination of an even more egregious and dangerous violation of British neutrality. In 1863 the Laird shipbuilding firm in Liverpool built for the Confederate navy two armor-plated warships fitted with seven-foot iron spikes at their prow for ramming enemy vessels. Designed for use against the blockade, these powerful ships would surely have occasioned a diplomatic breach between Britain and the United States if they had gone to sea. At the last minute, however, the British government seized and detained them. In this as well as other diplomatic crises, the painstaking, skillful efforts of the American minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, did much to ensure the success of Union foreign policy, which in turn played an important role in Northern victory.