The Civil War

U.S. History to 1877

Civil War: Goals & strategies

• South: a conservative revolution

• For Southern rights or Union—not slavery

• Southern strategy

• Keep viable

• Get foreign recognition

• Cotton embargo: force foreign recognition

• Northern strategy

• Anaconda Plan: strangulation by blockade

• Defeat Southern armies

• Cut South in two along the Mississippi River

Advantages and Disadvantages

South                                     North

Population 9.1 m                                 Population 22.3 m

  • 1.1 million white males                  • 4.6 million white males

Banks: $47 million                   Banks: $207 million

Manufactures: $156 million                Manufactures: $1,730 million

Railroads: 9,000 miles             Railroads: 22,000 miles

No foreign recognition                       Foreign relations

Best military men                                Navy

No political parties                 Political divisions

Jefferson Davis                        Abraham Lincoln

Hard to invade & hold           

First “modern” war

• 750,000 dead

• 18th century tactics

• Line up and march at each other

• 20th century weapons

• Rifles, not muskets: greater range, accuracy

• Gatling gun (machine gun)

• Armored ships

• Trench warfare

July 21, 1861: First Blood

• First Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas)

• Union panic

• Realization war would last more than the summer

The War at Sea

• Ironclads: Virginia (Merrimac) vs. Monitor

• Blockade runners, commerce raiders

War in earnest, 1862

• Battle for the Mississippi

• Admiral Farragut takes New Orleans

• Ulysses S. Grant advances

• Fort Henry

• Fort Donelson

• Shiloh: bloodbath

Eastern Stalemate, 1862

• George McClellan vs. Robert E. Lee:

• 7 Days’ Battle

• John Pope vs. Lee

• Second Bull Run

• McClellan vs. Lee

• September 17: Antietam

• Ambrose Burnside vs. Lee

• Fredericksburg

Emancipation

• “Contraband”

• Emancipation Proclamation: January 1, 1863

• Fighting for freedom: black troops

Homefront

• Northern economy booms; much waste and graft, especially early on

• Republicans pass Homestead Act, fund trans-continental railroad, create Agriculture Department

• Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada admitted to Union

• Resort to the draft on both sides

• Allowed substitutes or payment instead of service

• South exempts slaveowners; creates resentment

• Bloody antidraft race riots, New York City, July 1863

Turning point: July 1863

• Joseph Hooker vs. Lee at Chancellorsville

• George Meade vs. Lee at Gettysburg

• Grant takes Vicksburg

Gettysburg Address, Nov. 19, 1863

         FOURSCORE and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

         Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Grant & Sherman attack, 1864

• Election: Lincoln vs. McClellan

• Lincoln’s VP: Democrat Andrew Johnson

• Grant’s strategy: Keep attacking

• Very high casualties, but South can’t hold out

• Atlanta and Mobile fall

• Sherman’s march to the sea

• Lincoln’s reelection assured

Nevertheless, the South Persisted

• Obstacles to success

• Southern shortages of food and supplies: bread riots, 1864

• The Southern Constitution: weak central government vs. strong states

• Reluctance to tax, cotton embargo lead to printing money, runaway inflation

• Confidence in ultimate Southern victory

• Judah P. Benjamin’s success at manufacturing munitions

• “Pure” Southern religion & Biblical support for slavery assured God’s favor

• Faith in Robert E. Lee

Second Inaugural Address
March 4, 1865

Second Inaugural Address
MarCH 4, 1865

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Second Inaugural Address
March 4, 1865

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Surrender and Assassination

• Lee withdraws, Richmond falls

• April 4, 1865

• Lee surrenders

• Appomattox,  April 9, 1865

• Lincoln assassinated

• April 14, 1865

• Other Southern armies surrender through May and June

Legacy of the Civil War

• Union preserved

• Secession discredited

• Nation more unified than ever

• Defining moment for both sections

• Heroic fight for high ideals

• 13th Amendment: Slavery abolished

• Rise of industrial economy

• Southern economy & influence decline