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American History
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CHAPTER 6: Sectional Conflict
An Outline of American History
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure
permanently half-slave and half-free.
-- Abraham Lincoln, 1858
By the mid-19th century, the United States began to attract a steady stream
of foreign visitors. As one historian has noted: "What had been a somewhat
obscure, occasionally romanticized backwater of colonial exploitation
became, virtually overnight, a phenomenon to be investigated, a political
and moral experiment to be judged."
TWO AMERICAS
No visitor to the United States left a more enduring record of his travels
and observations than the French writer and political theorist Alexis de
Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America, first published in 1835, remains
one of the most trenchant and insightful analyses of American social and
political practices. Tocqueville was far too shrewd an observer to be
uncritical about the United States, but his verdict was fundamentally
positive. "The government of democracy brings the notion of political rights
to the level of the humblest citizens," he wrote, "just as the dissemination
of wealth brings the notion of property within the reach of all the members
of the community." Nonetheless, Tocqueville was only one of the first of a
long line of thinkers to worry whether such rough equality could survive in
the face of a growing factory system that threatened to create divisions
between industrial workers and a new business elite.
Other travelers marveled at the growth and vitality of the country, where
they could see "everywhere the most unequivocal proofs of prosperity and
rapid progress in agriculture, commerce and great public works." But such
optimistic views of the American experiment were by no means universal. One
skeptic was English novelist Charles Dickens, who first visited the United
States in 1841-42. "This is not the Republic I came to see," he wrote in a
letter. "This is not the Republic of my imagination.... The more I think of
its youth and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thousand respects,
it appears in my eyes. In everything of which it has made a boast --
excepting its education of the people, and its care for poor children -- it
sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon."
Dickens was not alone. America in the 19th century, as throughout its
history, generated expectations and passions that often did not agree with a
reality that was both more mundane and more complex. Already, its size and
diversity defied easy generalization and invited contradiction: America was
both a freedom-loving and slave-holding society, a nation of expansive and
primitive frontiers as well as cities of growing commerce and
industrialization.
LANDS OF PROMISE
By 1850 the national territory stretched over forest, plain and mountain.
Within these far-flung limits dwelt 23 million people in a union comprising
31 states. In the East, industry boomed. In the Midwest and the South,
agriculture flourished. After 1849 the gold mines of California poured a
golden stream into the channels of trade.
New England and the Middle Atlantic states were the main centers of
manufacturing, commerce and finance. Principal products of these areas were
textiles, lumber, clothing, machinery, leather and woolen goods. At the same
time, shipping had reached the height of its prosperity, and vessels flying
the American flag plied the oceans, distributing wares of all nations.
The South, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River and beyond, was a
relatively compact political unit featuring an economy centered on
agriculture. Tobacco was important to the economies of Virginia, Maryland
and North Carolina. In South Carolina, rice was an abundant crop, and the
climate and soil of Louisiana encouraged the cultivation of sugar. But
cotton eventually became the dominant crop and the one with which the South
was identified. By 1850 the American South grew more than 80 percent of the
world's cotton. Slaves were used to cultivate all these crops, though cotton
most of all.
The Midwest, with its boundless prairies and swiftly growing population,
flourished. Europe and the older settled parts of America demanded its wheat
and meat products. The introduction of labor-saving implements -- notably
the McCormick reaper -- made possible an unparalleled increase in farm
production. The nation's wheat crops meanwhile swelled from some 35 million
hectoliters in 1850 to nearly 61 million in 1860, more than half being grown
in the Midwest.
An important stimulus to western prosperity was the great improvement in
transportation facilities; from 1850 to 1857 the Appalachian Mountain
barrier was pierced by five railway trunk lines linking the Midwest and the
East. These links established the economic interests that undergirded the
political alliance of the Union from 1861 to 1865. In the expansion of the
railway network, the South at first had much less part. It was not until the
late 1850s that a continuous line ran through the mountains connecting the
lower Mississippi River with the southern Atlantic seaboard.
SLAVERY AND SECTIONALISM
One issue, however, exacerbated the regional and economic differences
between North and South: slavery. Resenting the large profits amassed by
Northern businessmen from marketing the cotton crop, Southerners attributed
the backwardness of their own section to Northern aggrandizement.
Northerners, on the other hand, declared that slavery -- the "peculiar
institution," which the South regarded as essential to its economy -- was
wholly responsible for the region's relative backwardness.
As far back as 1830, sectional lines had been steadily hardening on the
slavery question. In the North, abolitionist feeling grew more and more
powerful, abetted by a free-soil movement vigorously opposed to the
extension of slavery into the Western regions not yet organized as states.
To Southerners of 1850, slavery was a condition for which they felt no more
responsible than for their English speech or their representative
institutions. In some seaboard areas, slavery by 1850 was well over 200
years old; it was an integral part of the basic economy of the region.
Only a minority of Southern whites owned slaves. In 1860 there were a total
of 46,274 planters throughout the slave-holding states, with a planter
defined as someone who owned at least 20 slaves. More than half of all
slaves worked on plantations. Some of the yeoman farmers, 70 percent of whom
held less than 40 hectares, had a handful of slaves, but most had none. The
"poor whites" lived on the lowest rung of Southern society and held no
slaves. It is easy to understand the interest of the planters in slave
holding -- they owned most of the slaves. But the yeomen and poor whites
supported the institution of slavery as well. They feared that if freed,
blacks would compete with them for land. Equally important, the presence of
slaves raised the standing of the yeomen and the poor whites on the social
scale; they would not willingly relinquish this status.
As they fought the weight of Northern opinion, political leaders of the
South, the professional classes and most of the clergy now no longer
apologized for slavery but championed it. Southern publicists insisted, for
example, that the relationship between capital and labor was more humane
under the slavery system than under the wage system of the North.
Before 1830 the old patriarchal system of plantation government, with its
personal supervision of the slaves by their masters, was still
characteristic. Gradually, however, with the introduction of large-scale
cotton production in the lower South, the master gradually ceased to
exercise close personal supervision over his slaves, and employed
professional overseers whose tenure depended upon their ability to exact
from slaves a maximum amount of work.
Slavery was inherently a system of brutality and coercion in which beatings
and the breakup of families through the sale of individuals were
commonplace. In the end, however, the most trenchant criticism of slavery
was not the behavior of individual masters and overseers toward the slaves,
but slavery's fundamental violation of every human being's inalienable right
to be free.
THE ABOLITIONISTS
In national politics, Southerners chiefly sought protection and enlargement
of the interests represented by the cotton-slavery system. Expansion was
considered a necessitybecause the wastefulness of cultivating a single crop,
cotton, rapidly exhausted the soil, increasing the need for new fertile
lands. Moreover, the South believed it needed new territory for additional
slave states to offset the admission of new free states. Antislavery
Northerners saw in the Southern view a conspiracy for proslavery
aggrandizement, and in the 1830s their opposition became fierce.
An earlier antislavery movement, an offshoot of the American Revolution, had
won its last victory in 1808 when Congress abolished the slave trade with
Africa. Thereafter, opposition was largely by the Quakers, who kept up a
mild but ineffectual protest, while the cotton gin and westward expansion
into the Mississippi delta region were creating an increasing demand for
slaves.
The abolitionist movement that emerged in the early 1830s was combative,
uncompromising and insistent upon an immediate end to slavery. This approach
found a leader in William Lloyd Garrison, a young man from Massachusetts,
who combined the heroism of a martyr with the crusading zeal of a demagogue.
On January 1, 1831, Garrison produced the first issue of his newspaper, The
Liberator, which bore the announcement: "I shall strenuously contend for the
immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.... On this subject I do
not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation.... I am in earnest --
I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single
inch AND I WILL BE HEARD."
Garrison's sensational methods awakened Northerners to the evil in an
institution many had long come to regard as unchangeable. He sought to hold
up to public gaze the most repulsive aspects of slavery and to castigate
slave holders as torturers and traffickers in human life. He recognized no
rights of the masters, acknowledged no compromise, tolerated no delay. Other
abolitionists, unwilling to subscribe to his law-defying tactics, held that
reform should be accomplished by legal and peaceful means. Garrison was
joined by another powerful voice, that of Frederick Douglass, an escaped
slave who galvanized Northern audiences as a spokesman for the Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society, and later as the eloquent editor of the abolitionist
weekly newspaper, Northern Star.
One phase of the antislavery movement involved helping slaves escape to safe
refuges in the North or over the border into Canada. Known as the
"Underground Railroad," an elaborate network of secret routes was firmly
established in the 1830s in all parts of the North, with its most successful
operation being in the old Northwest Territory. In Ohio alone, it is
estimated that from 1830 to 1860 no fewer than 40,000 fugitive slaves were
helped to freedom. The number of local antislavery societies increased at
such a rate that by 1840 there were about 2,000 with a membership of perhaps
200,000.
Despite the efforts of active abolitionists to make slavery a question of
conscience, most Northerners held themselves aloof from the antislavery
movement or actively opposed it. In 1837, for example, a mob attacked and
killed the antislavery editor Elijah P. Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois. But
certain Southern actions allowed the abolitionists to link the slavery issue
with the cause of civil liberties for whites. In 1835 an angry mob destroyed
abolitionist literature in the Charleston, South Carolina, post office. When
the postmaster stated he would not enforce delivery of abolitionist
material, bitter debates ensued in Congress. In addition, abolitionists
decided to flood Congress with petitions calling for a ban on slavery in the
District of Columbia. In 1836 the House voted to table such petitions
automatically, thus effectively killing them. Former President John Quincy
Adams, elected to the House of Representatives in 1830, fought this
so-called "gag rule" as a violation of the First Amendment. The House
repealed the gag rule in 1844.
TEXAS AND WAR WITH MEXICO
Throughout the 1820s, Americans settled in the vast territory of Texas,
often with land grants from the Mexican government. Their numbers soon
alarmed the authorities, however, who prohibited further immigration in
1830. In 1834 General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna established a dictatorship
in Mexico, and the following year Texans revolted. Santa Anna defeated the
American rebels at the celebrated siege of the Alamo in early 1836, but
Texans under Sam Houston destroyed the Mexican army and captured Santa Anna
a month later at the Battle of San Jacinto, ensuring Texan independence. For
almost a decade, Texas remained an independent republic, becoming the 28th
state in 1845.
Although Mexico broke relations with the United States over the issue of
Texas statehood, the most contentious issue was the new state's border:
Texas claimed the Rio Grande River; Mexico argued that the border stood far
to the north along the Nueces River. Meanwhile, settlers were flooding into
the territories of New Mexico and California at a time when many Americans
claimed that the United States had a "manifest destiny" to expand westward
to the Pacific Ocean.
U.S. attempts to buy the New Mexico and California territories failed, and
after a clash of Mexican and U.S. troops along the Rio Grande, the United
States declared war in 1846. U.S. forces occupied the territory of New
Mexico, then supported the revolt of settlers in California. A U.S. force
under Zachary Taylor invaded Mexico, winning victories at Monterey and Buena
Vista, but failing to bring Mexico to the negotiating table. In March 1847,
U.S. forces commanded by Winfield Scott landed near Vera Cruz on Mexico's
east coast, and after a series of heavy engagements, entered Mexico City.
Nevertheless, it was only after the resignation of Santa Anna that the
United States was able to negotiate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago in which
Mexico ceded the Southwest region and California for $15 million.
The war proved to be a training ground for American officers who would later
fight on both sides in the Civil War. It was also a politically divisive war
in which antislavery Whigs criticized the Democratic administration of James
K. Polk for expansionism.
With the conclusion of the Mexican War, the United States gained a vast new
territory of 1.36 million square kilometers encompassing the present-day
states of Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and parts of New Mexico,
Colorado and Wyoming. But it was also a poisoned acquisition because it
revived the most explosive question in American politics of the time: would
the new territories be slave or free?
THE COMPROMISE OF 1850
Until 1845, it had seemed likely that slavery would be confined to the areas
where it already existed. It had been given limits by the Missouri
Compromise in 1820 and had no opportunity to overstep them. The new
territories made renewed expansion of slavery a real likelihood.
Many Northerners believed that if not allowed to spread, slavery would
ultimately decline and die. To justify their opposition to adding new slave
states, they pointed to the statements of Washington and Jefferson, and to
the Ordinance of 1787, which forbade the extension of slavery into the
Northwest. Texas, which already permitted slavery, naturally entered the
Union as a slave state. But California, New Mexico and Utah did not have
slavery, and when the United States prepared to take over these areas in
1846, there were conflicting suggestions on what to do with them.
Extremists in the South urged that all the lands acquired from Mexico be
thrown open to slave holders. Antislavery Northerners, on the other hand,
demanded that all the new regions be closed to slavery. One group of
moderates suggested that the Missouri Compromise line be extended to the
Pacific with free states north of it and slave states to the south. Another
group proposed that the question be left to "popular sovereignty," that is,
the government should permit settlers to enter the new territory with or
without slaves as they pleased and, when the time came to organize the
region into states, the people themselves should determine the question.
Southern opinion held that all the territories had the right to sanction
slavery. The North asserted that no territories had the right. In 1848
nearly 300,000 men voted for the candidates of a Free Soil Party, who
declared that the best policy was "to limit, localize and discourage
slavery." The Midwestern and border state regions -- Maryland, Kentucky,
Missouri -- were even more divided, however, with many favoring popular
sovereignty as a compromise.
In January 1848 the discovery of gold in California precipitated a headlong
rush of more than 80,000 settlers for the single year 1849. California
became a crucial question, for clearly Congress had to determine the status
of this new region before an organized government could be established. The
hopes of the nation rested with Senator Henry Clay, who twice before in
times of crisis had come forward with compromise arrangements. Now once
again he halted a dangerous sectional quarrel with a complicated and
carefully balanced plan.
His compromise (as subsequently modified in Congress) contained a number of
key provisions: that California be admitted as a state with a free-soil
(slavery-prohibited) constitution; that the remainder of the new annexation
be divided into the two territories of New Mexico and Utah and organized
without mention of slavery; that the claims of Texas to a portion of New
Mexico be satisfied by a payment of $10 million; that more effective
machinery be established for catching runaway slaves and returning them to
their masters; and that the buying and selling of slaves (but not slavery)
be abolished in the District of Columbia. These measures -- known in
American history as the Compromise of 1850 -- were passed, and the country
breathed a sigh of relief.
For three years, the compromise seemed to settle nearly all differences.
Beneath the surface, however, tension grew. The new Fugitive Slave Law
deeply offended many Northerners, who refused to have any part in catching
slaves. Moreover, many Northerners continued to help fugitives escape, and
made the Underground Railroad more efficient and more daring than it had
been before.
A DIVIDED NATION
Politically, the 1850s can be characterized as a decade of failure in which
the nation's leaders were unable to resolve, or even contain, the divisive
issue of slavery. In 1852, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe published
Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel provoked by the passage of the Fugitive Slave
Law. When Stowe began writing her book, she thought of it as only a minor
sketch, but it widened in scope as the work progressed. Immediately upon its
publication, it caused a sensation. More than 300,000 copies were sold the
first year, and presses ran day and night to keep up with the demand.
Although sentimental and full of stereotypes, Uncle Tom's Cabin portrayed
with undeniable force the cruelty of slavery and the fundamental conflict
between free and slave societies. The rising generation of voters in the
North was deeply stirred by the work. It inspired widespread enthusiasm for
the antislavery cause, appealing as it did to basic human emotions --
indignation at injustice and pity for the helpless individuals exposed to
ruthless exploitation.
In 1854 the old issue of slavery in the territories was renewed and the
quarrel became more bitter. The region that now comprises Kansas and
Nebraska was being rapidly settled, increasing pressure for the
establishment of territorial, and eventually, state governments.
Under terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the entire region was closed
to slavery. The Compromise of 1850, however, inadvertently reopened the
question. Dominant slave-holding elements in Missouri, objected to letting
Kansas become a free territory, for their state would then have three
free-soil neighbors (Illinois, Iowa and Kansas). They feared the prospect of
their state being forced to become a free state as well. For a time,
Missourians in Congress, backed by Southerners, blocked all efforts to
organize the region.
At this point, Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic senior senator from
Illinois, stirred up a storm by proposing a bill, the Kansas-Nebraska Act,
which enraged all free-soil supporters. Douglas argued that the Compromise
of 1850, which left Utah and New Mexico free to resolve the slavery issue
for themselves, superseded the Missouri Compromise. His plan called for two
territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and permitted settlers to carry slaves
into them. The inhabitants themselves were to determine whether they should
enter the Union as free or slave states.
Northerners accused Douglas of currying favor with the South in order to
gain the presidency in 1856. Angry debates marked the progress of the bill.
The free-soil press violently denounced it. Northern clergymen assailed it.
Businessmen who had hitherto befriended the South suddenly turned
about-face. Yet in May 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed the Senate amid
the boom of cannon fired by Southern enthusiasts. When Douglas subsequently
visited Chicago to speak in his own defense, the ships in the harbor lowered
their flags to half-mast, the church bells tolled for an hour and a crowd of
10,000 hooted so loudly that he could not make himself heard.
The immediate results of Douglas's ill-starred measure were momentous. The
Whig Party, which had straddled the question of slavery expansion, sank to
its death, and in its stead a powerful new organization arose, the
Republican Party, whose primary demand was that slavery be excluded from all
the territories. In 1856, it nominated John Fremont, whose expeditions into
the Far West had won him renown. Although Fremont lost the election, the new
Republican Party swept a great part of the North. Such free-soil leaders as
Salmon P. Chase and William Seward exerted greater influence than ever.
Along with them appeared a tall, lanky Illinois attorney, Abraham Lincoln.
The flow of both Southern slave holders and antislavery families into Kansas
resulted in armed conflict, and soon the territory was being called
"bleeding Kansas." Other events brought the nation still closer to upheaval:
notably, the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 decision concerning Dred Scott.
Scott was a Missouri slave who, some 20 years earlier, had been taken by his
master to live in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery had
been banned by the Northwest Ordinance. Returning to Missouri and becoming
discontented with his life there, Scott sued for liberation on the ground of
his residence on free soil. The Supreme Court -- dominated by Southerners --
decided that Scott lacked standing in court because he was not a citizen;
that the laws of a free state (Illinois) had no effect on his status because
he was the resident of a slave state (Missouri); and that slave holders had
the right to take their "property" anywhere in the federal territories and
that Congress could not restrict the expansion of slavery. The Court's
decision thus invalidated the whole set of comprise measures by which
Congress for a generation had tried to settle the slavery issue.
The Dred Scott decision stirred fierce resentment throughout the North.
Never before had the Court been so bitterly condemned. For Southern
Democrats, the decision was a great victory, since it gave judicial sanction
to their justification of slavery throughout the territories.
LINCOLN, DOUGLAS AND BROWN
Abraham Lincoln had long regarded slavery as an evil. In a speech in Peoria,
Illinois, in 1854, he declared that all national legislation should be
framed on the principle that slavery was to be restricted and eventually
abolished. He contended also that the principle of popular sovereignty was
false, for slavery in the western territories was the concern not only of
the local inhabitants but of the United States as a whole. This speech made
him widely known throughout the growing West.
In 1858 Lincoln opposed Stephen A. Douglas for election to the U.S. Senate
from Illinois. In the first paragraph of his opening campaign speech, on
June 17, Lincoln struck the keynote of American history for the seven years
to follow:
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government
cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the
Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do
expect it will cease to be divided.
Lincoln and Douglas engaged in a series of seven debates in the ensuing
months of 1858. Senator Douglas, known as the "Little Giant," had an
enviable reputation as an orator, but he met his match in Lincoln, who
eloquently challenged the concept of popular sovereignty as defined by
Douglas and his allies. In the end, Douglas won the election by a small
margin, but Lincoln had achieved stature as a national figure.
Sectional strife was growing ever more acute. On the night of October 16,
1859, John Brown, an antislavery fanatic who had captured and killed five
proslavery settlers in Kansas three years before, led a band of followers in
an attack on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry in what is now the state
of West Virginia. Brown's goal was to use the weapons seized to lead a slave
uprising. After two days of fighting, Brown and his surviving men were taken
prisoner by a force of U.S. marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee.
Alarm ran through the nation. For many Southerners, Brown's attempt
confirmed their worst fears. Antislavery zealots, on the other hand, hailed
Brown as a martyr to a great cause. Most Northerners repudiated his deed,
seeing in it an assault on law and order. Brown was tried for conspiracy,
treason and murder, and on December 2, 1859, he was hanged. To the end, he
believed he had been an instrument in the hand of God.
SECESSION AND CIVIL WAR
In the presidential election of 1860 the Republican Party nominated Abraham
Lincoln as its candidate. Party spirit soared as leaders declared that
slavery could spread no farther. The party also promised a tariff for the
protection of industry and pledged the enactment of a law granting free
homesteads to settlers who would help in the opening of the West. The
Democrats were not united. Southerners split from the party and nominated
Vice President John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky for president. Stephen A.
Douglas was the nominee of northern Democrats. Diehard Whigs from the border
states, formed into the Constitutional Union Party, nominated John C. Bell
of Tennessee.
Lincoln and Douglas competed in the North, and Breckenridge and Bell in the
South. Lincoln won only 39 percent of the popular vote, but had a clear
majority of 180 electoral votes, carrying all 18 free states. Bell won
Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia; Breckenridge took the other slave states
except for Missouri, which was won by Douglas. Despite his poor electoral
showing, Douglas trailed only Lincoln in the popular vote.
Lincoln's election made South Carolina's secession from the Union a foregone
conclusion. The state had long been waiting for an event that would unite
the South against the antislavery forces. Once the election returns were
certain, a special South Carolina convention declared "that the Union now
subsisting between South Carolina and other states under the name of the
"United States of America' is hereby dissolved." By February 1, 1861, six
more Southern states had seceded. On February 7, the seven states adopted a
provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America. The
remaining southern states as yet remained in the Union.
Less than a month later, on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as
president of the United States. In his inaugural address, he refused to
recognize the secession, considering it "legally void." His speech closed
with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union. But the South turned deaf
ears, and on April 12, guns opened fire on the federal troops stationed at
Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. A war had begun in
which more Americans would die than in any other conflict before or since.
In the seven states that had seceded, the people responded promptly to the
appeal of the new president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson
Davis. Both sides now tensely awaited the action of the slave states that
thus far had remained loyal. In response to the shelling of Fort Sumter,
Virginia seceded on April 17, and Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina
followed quickly. No state left the Union with greater reluctance than
Virginia. Her statesmen had a leading part in the winning of the Revolution
and the framing of the Constitution, and she had provided the nation with
five presidents. With Virginia went Colonel Robert E. Lee, who declined the
command of the Union Army out of loyalty to his state. Between the enlarged
Confederacy and the free-soil North lay the border states, of Delaware,
Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri which, despite some sympathies with the
South, remained loyal to the Union.
Each side entered the war with high hopes for an early victory. In material
resources the North enjoyed a decided advantage. Twenty-three states with a
population of 22 million were arrayed against 11 states inhabited by 9
million. The industrial superiority of the North exceeded even its
preponderance in population, providing it with abundant facilities for
manufacturing arms and ammunition, clothing and other supplies. Similarly,
the network of railways in the North enhanced federal military prospects.
The South had certain advantages as well. The most important was geography;
the South was fighting a defensive war on its own territory. The South also
had a stronger military tradition, and hence the region initially boasted
the more experienced military leaders.
WESTERN ADVANCE, EASTERN STALEMATE
The first large battle of the war, at Bull Run, Virginia, (also known as
First Manassas) near Washington, stripped away any illusions that victory
would be quick or easy. It also established a pattern, at least in the
eastern United States, of bloody Southern victories, but victories that
never translated into a decisive military advantage. For the first years,
the South would often win the battle, but not the war.
In contrast to its military failures in the East, Union forces were able to
secure battlefield victories and slow strategic success at sea and in the
West. Most of the Navy, at the war's beginning, was in Union hands, but it
was scattered and weak. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles took prompt
measures to strengthen it. Lincoln then proclaimed a blockade of the
Southern coasts. Although the effect of the blockade was negligible at
first, by 1863 it almost completely prevented shipments of cotton to Europe
and the importation of munitions, clothing and the medical supplies the
South sorely needed.
Meanwhile, a brilliant naval commander, David Farragut, conducted two
remarkable operations. In one, he took a Union fleet into the mouth of the
Mississippi River, where he forced the surrender of the largest city in the
South, New Orleans, Louisiana. In another, he made his way past the
fortified entrance of Mobile Bay, Alabama, captured a Confederate ironclad
vessel and sealed up the port.
In the Mississippi Valley, the Union forces won an almost uninterrupted
series of victories. They began by breaking a long Confederate line in
Tennessee, thus making it possible to occupy almost all the western part of
the state. When the important Mississippi River port of Memphis was taken,
Union troops advanced some 320 kilometers into the heart of the Confederacy.
With the tenacious General Ulysses S. Grant in command, Union forces
withstood a sudden Confederate counterattack at Shiloh, on the bluffs
overlooking the Tennessee River, holding their ground stubbornly until
reinforcements arrived to repulse the Confederates. Those killed and wounded
at Shiloh numbered more than 10,000 on each side, a casualty rate that
Americans had never before experienced. But it was only the beginning of the
carnage.
In Virginia, by contrast, Union troops continued to meet one defeat after
another. In a succession of bloody attempts to capture Richmond, the
Confederate capital, Union forces were repeatedly thrown back. The
Confederates had two great advantages: strong defense positions afforded by
numerous streams cutting the road between Washington and Richmond; and two
generals, Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson, both of whom
far surpassed in ability the early Union commanders. In 1862 the Union
commander, George McClellan, made a slow, excessively cautious attempt to
seize Richmond. But in the Seven Days' Battles between June 25 and July 1,
the Union troops were driven steadily backward, both sides suffering
terrible losses.
After another Confederate victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run (or
Second Manassas), Lee crossed the Potomac River and invaded Maryland.
McClellan again responded tentatively, despite learning that Lee had split
his army and was heavily outnumbered. The Union and Confederate Armies met
at Antietam Creek, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, in the
bloodiest single day of the war: more than 4,000 died on both sides and
18,000 were wounded. Despite his numerical advantage, however, McClellan
failed to break Lee's lines or press the attack, and Lee was able to retreat
across the Potomac with his army intact. As a result, Lincoln fired
McClellan.
Although Antietam was inconclusive in military terms, its consequences were
nonetheless momentous. Great Britain and France, both on the verge of
recognizing the Confederacy, delayed their decision, and the South never
received the diplomatic recognition and economic aid from Europe that it
desperately sought.
Antietam also gave Lincoln the opening he needed to issue the preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that as of January 1, 1863, all
slaves in states rebelling against the Union were free. In practical terms,
the Proclamation had little immediate impact; it freed slaves only in the
Confederate states, while leaving slavery intact in the border states.
Politically, however, it meant that in addition to preserving the Union, the
abolition of slavery was now a declared objective of the Union war effort.
The final Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1, 1863, also authorized
the recruitment of blacks into the Union Army, which abolitionist leaders
such as Frederick Douglass had been urging since the beginning of armed
conflict. In fact, Union forces already had been sheltering escaped slaves
as "contraband of war," but following the Emancipation Proclamation, the
Union Army recruited and trained regiments of black soldiers that fought
with distinction in battles from Virginia to the Mississippi. About 178,000
African Americans served in the United States Colored Troops, and 29,500
blacks served in the Union Navy.
Despite the political gains represented by the Emancipation Proclamation,
however, the North's military prospects in the East remained bleak as Lee's
Army of Northern Virginia continued to maul the Union Army of the Potomac,
first at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862 and then at
Chancellorsville in May 1863. But Chancellorsville, although one of Lee's
most brilliant military victories, was also one of his most costly with the
death of his most valued lieutenant, General Stonewall Jackson, who was
mistakenly shot by his own men.
GETTYSBURG TO APPOMATTOX
Yet none of the Confederate victories was decisive. The federal government
simply mustered new armies and tried again. Believing that the North's
crushing defeat at Chancellorsville gave him his chance, Lee struck
northward into Pennsylvania, in July 1863, almost reaching the state capital
at Harrisburg. A strong Union force intercepted Lee's march at Gettysburg,
where, in a titanic three-day battle -- the largest of the Civil War -- the
Confederates made a valiant effort to break the Union lines. They failed,
and Lee's veterans, after crippling losses, fell back to the Potomac.
More than 3,000 Union soldiers and almost 4,000 Confederates died at
Gettysburg; wounded and missing totaled more than 20,000 on each side. On
November 19, 1863, Lincoln dedicated a new national cemetery at Gettysburg
with perhaps the most famous address in U.S. history. He concluded his brief
remarks with these words:
...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.
On the Mississippi, Union control was blocked at Vicksburg, where the
Confederates had strongly fortified themselves on bluffs too high for naval
attack. By early 1863 Grant began to move below and around Vicksburg,
subjecting the position to a six-week siege. On July 4, he captured the
town, together with the strongest Confederate Army in the West. The river
was now entirely in Union hands. The Confederacy was broken in two, and it
became almost impossible to bring supplies from Texas and Arkansas.
The Northern victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in July 1863 marked the
turning point of the war, although the bloodshed continued unabated for more
than a year-and-a-half.
Lincoln brought Grant east and made him commander-in-chief of all Union
forces. In May 1864 Grant advanced deep into Virginia and met Lee's
Confederate Army in the three-day Battle of the Wilderness. Losses on both
sides were heavy, but unlike other Union commanders, Grant refused to
retreat. Instead, he attempted to outflank Lee, stretching the Confederate
lines and pounding away with artillery and infantry attacks. "I propose to
fight it out along this line if it takes all summer," the Union commander
said at Spotsylvania, during five days of bloody trench warfare that largely
characterized fighting on the eastern front for almost a year.
In the West, Union forces gained control of Tennessee in the fall of 1863
with victories at Chattanooga and nearby Lookout Mountain, opening the way
for General William T. Sherman to invade Georgia. Sherman outmaneuvered
several smaller Confederate armies, occupied the state capital of Atlanta,
then marched to the Atlantic coast, systematically destroying railroads,
factories, warehouses and other facilities in his path. His men, cut off
from their normal supply lines, ravaged the countryside for food. From the
coast, Sherman marched northward, and by February 1865, he had taken
Charleston, South Carolina, where the first shots of the Civil War had been
fired. Sherman, more than any other Union general, understood that
destroying the will and morale of the South was as important as defeating
its armies.
Grant, meanwhile, lay siege to Petersburg, Virginia, for nine months, before
Lee, in March 1865, abandoned both Petersburg and the Confederate capital of
Richmond in an attempt to retreat south. But it was too late, and on April
9, 1865, surrounded by huge Union armies, Lee surrendered to Grant at
Appomattox Courthouse. Although scattered fighting continued elsewhere for
several months, the Civil War was over.
The terms of surrender at Appomattox were magnanimous, and on his return
from his meeting with Lee, Grant quieted the noisy demonstrations of his
soldiers by reminding them: "The rebels are our countrymen again." The war
for Southern independence had become the "lost cause," whose hero, Robert E.
Lee, had won wide admiration through the brilliance of his leadership and
his greatness in defeat.
WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE
For the North, the war produced a still greater hero in Abraham Lincoln -- a
man eager, above all else, to weld the Union together again, not by force
and repression but by warmth and generosity. In 1864 he had been elected for
a second term as president, defeating as his Democratic opponent, George
McClellan, the general whom Lincoln had dismissed after Antietam.
Lincoln's second inaugural address closed with these words:
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.
Three weeks later, two days after Lee's surrender, Lincoln delivered his
last public address, in which he unfolded a generous reconstruction policy.
On April 14, the president held what was to be his last Cabinet meeting.
That evening -- with his wife and a young couple who were his guests -- he
attended a performance at Ford's Theater. There, as he sat in the
presidential box, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Virginia actor
embittered by the South's defeat. Booth was killed in a shootout some days
later in a barn in the Virginia countryside. His accomplices were captured
and later executed.
Lincoln died in a downstairs bedroom of a house across the street from
Ford's on the morning of April 15. Wrote poet James Russell
Never before that startled April morning did such multitudes of men shed
tears for the death of one they had never seen, as if with him a friendly
presence had been taken from their lives, leaving them colder and darker.
Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the silent look of sympathy which
strangers exchanged when, they met that day. Their common manhood had lost a
kinsman.
The first great task confronting the victorious North -- now under the
leadership of Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson, a Southerner who
remained loyal to the Union -- was to determine the status of the states
that had seceded. Lincoln had already set the stage. In his view, the people
of the Southern states had never legally seceded; they had been misled by
some disloyal citizens into a defiance of federal authority. And since the
war was the act of individuals, the federal government would have to deal
with these individuals and not with the states. Thus, in 1863 Lincoln
proclaimed that if in any state 10 percent of the voters of record in 1860
would form a government loyal to the U.S. Constitution and would acknowledge
obedience to the laws of the Congress and the proclamations of the
president, he would recognize the government so created as the state's legal
government.
Congress rejected this plan and challenged Lincoln's right to deal with the
matter without consultation. Some members of Congress advocated severe
punishment for all the seceded states. Yet even before the war was wholly
over, new governments had been set up in Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and
Louisiana.
To deal with one of its major concerns -- the condition of former slaves --
Congress, in March 1865, established the Freedmen's Bureau to act as
guardian over African Americans and guide them toward self-support. And in
December of that year, Congress ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, which abolished slavery.
Throughout the summer of 1865 Johnson proceeded to carry out Lincoln's
reconstruction program, with minor modifications. By presidential
proclamation he appointed a governor for each of the former Confederate
states and freely restored political rights to large numbers of Southern
citizens through use of presidential pardons.
In due time conventions were held in each of the former Confederate states
to repeal the ordinances of secession, repudiate the war debt, and draft new
state constitutions. Eventually a native Unionist became governor in each
state with authority to convoke a convention of loyal voters. Johnson called
upon each convention to invalidate the secession, abolish slavery, repudiate
all debts that went to aid the Confederacy and ratify the 13th Amendment. By
the end of 1865, this process, with a few exceptions, was completed.
RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION
Both Lincoln and Johnson had foreseen that the Congress would have the right
to deny Southern legislators seats in the U.S. Senate or House of
Representatives, under the clause of the Constitution that says "Each house
shall be the judge of the...qualifications of its own members." This came to
pass when, under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens, those congressmen
(called "Radical Republicans") who sought to punish the South refused to
seat its elected senators and representatives. Then, within the next few
months, the Congress proceeded to work out a plan for the reconstruction of
the South quite different from the one Lincoln had started and Johnson had
continued.
Wide public support gradually developed for those members of Congress who
believed that blacks should be given full citizenship. By July 1866,
Congress had passed a civil rights bill and set up a new Freedmen's Bureau
-- both designed to prevent racial discrimination by Southern legislatures.
Following this, the Congress passed a 14th Amendment to the Constitution,
which states that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and
subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and
of the states in which they reside," thus repudiating the Dred Scott ruling
which had denied slaves their right of citizenship.
All the Southern state legislatures, with the exception of Tennessee,
refused to ratify the amendment, some voting against it unanimously. In
addition, in the aftermath of the war, Southern state legislatures passed
black codes, which aimed to reimpose bondage on the freedmen. The codes
differed from state to state, but some provisions were common. Blacks were
required to enter into annual labor contracts, with penalties imposed in
case of violation; dependent children were subject to compulsory
apprenticeship and corporal punishments by masters; and vagrants could be
sold into private service if they could not pay severe fines.
In response, certain groups in the North advocated intervention to protect
the rights of blacks in the South. In the Reconstruction Act of March 1867,
Congress, ignoring the governments that had been established in the Southern
states, divided the South into five districts and placed them under military
rule. Escape from permanent military government was open to those states
that established civil governments, took an oath of allegiance, ratified the
14th Amendment and adopted black suffrage.
The amendment was ratified in 1868. The 15th Amendment, passed by Congress
the following year and ratified in 1870 by state legislatures, provided that
"The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color or
previous condition of servitude."
The Radical Republicans in Congress were infuriated by President Johnson's
vetoes (even though they were overridden) of legislation protecting newly
freed blacks and punishing former Confederate leaders by depriving them of
the right to hold office. Congressional antipathy to Johnson was so great
that for the first time in American history, impeachment proceedings were
instituted to remove the president from office.
Johnson's main offense was his opposition to punitive congressional policies
and the violent language he used in criticizing them. The most serious legal
charge his enemies could level against him was that despite the Tenure of
Office Act (which required Senate approval for the removal of any
officeholder the Senate had previously confirmed), he had removed from his
Cabinet the secretary of war, a staunch supporter of the Congress. When the
impeachment trial was held in the Senate, it was proved that Johnson was
technically within his rights in removing the Cabinet member. Even more
important, it was pointed out that a dangerous precedent would be set if the
Congress were to remove a president because he disagreed with the majority
of its members. The attempted impeachment failed by a narrow margin, and
Johnson continued in office until his term expired.
Under the Military Reconstruction Act, Congress, by June 1868, had
readmitted Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia,
Alabama and Florida, to the Union. In many of these seven reconstructed
states, the majority of the governors, representatives and senators were
Northern men -- so-called "carpetbaggers" -- who had gone South after the
war to make their political fortunes, often in alliance with newly freed
African Americans. In the legislatures of Louisiana and South Carolina,
African Americans actually gained a majority of the seats. The last three
Southern states -- Mississippi, Texas and Virginia -- finally accepted
congressional terms and were readmitted to the Union in 1870.
Many Southern whites, their political and social dominance threatened,
turned to illegal means to prevent blacks from gaining equality. Violence
against blacks became more and more frequent. In 1870 increasing disorder
led to the passage of an Enforcement Act severely punishing those who
attempted to deprive the black freedmen of their civil rights.
THE END OF RECONSTRUCTION
As time passed, it became more and more obvious that the problems of the
South were not being solved by harsh laws and continuing rancor against
former Confederates. In May 1872, Congress passed a general Amnesty Act,
restoring full political rights to all but about 500 Confederate
sympathizers.
Gradually Southern states began electing members of the Democratic Party
into office, ousting so-called carpetbagger governments and intimidating
blacks from voting or attempting to hold public office. By 1876 the
Republicans remained in power in only three Southern states. As part of the
bargaining that resolved the disputed presidential elections that year in
favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republicans promised to end Radical
Reconstruction, thereby leaving most of the South in the hands of the
Democratic Party. In 1877 Hayes withdrew the remaining government troops,
tacitly abandoning federal responsibility for enforcing blacks' civil
rights.
The South was still a region devastated by war, burdened by debt caused by
misgovernment, and demoralized by a decade of racial warfare. Unfortunately,
the pendulum of national racial policy swung from one extreme to the other.
Whereas formerly it had supported harsh penalties against Southern white
leaders, it now tolerated new and humiliating kinds of discrimination
against blacks. The last quarter of the 19th century saw a profusion of "Jim
Crow" laws in Southern states that segregated public schools, forbade or
limited black access to many public facilities, such as parks, restaurants
and hotels, and denied most blacks the right to vote by imposing poll taxes
and arbitrary literacy tests.
In contrast with the moral clarity and high drama of the Civil War,
historians have tended to judge Reconstruction harshly, as a murky period of
political conflict, corruption and regression. Slaves were granted their
freedom, but not equality. The North completely failed to address the
economic needs of the freedmen. Efforts such as the Freedmen's Bureau proved
inadequate to the desperate needs of former slaves for institutions that
could provide them with political and economic opportunity, or simply
protect them from violence and intimidation. Indeed, federal Army officers
and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau were often racists themselves. Blacks
were dependent on these Northern whites to protect them from white
Southerners, who, united into organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan,
intimidated blacks and prevented them from exercising their rights. Without
economic resources of their own, many Southern blacks were forced to become
tenant farmers on land owned by their former masters, caught in a cycle of
poverty that would continue well into the 20th century.
Reconstruction-era governments did make genuine gains in rebuilding Southern
states devastated by the war, and in expanding public services, notably in
establishing tax-supported, free public schools for blacks and whites.
However, recalcitrant Southerners seized upon instances of corruption
(hardly unique to the South in this era) and exploited them to bring down
radical regimes. The failure of Reconstruction meant that the struggle of
African Americans for equality and freedom was deferred until the 20th
century -- when it would become a national, and not a Southern issue.
SIDEBAR: PEACE DEMOCRATS, COPPERHEADS AND DRAFT RIOTS
Throughout his presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced serious opposition to his
political and wartime policies. Even in the North, the Civil War was so
divisive and consumed so many lives and resources that it could hardly have
been otherwise.
Opposition to Lincoln naturally coalesced in the Democratic Party, whose
candidate, Stephen Douglas, had won 44 percent of the free states' popular
vote in the 1860 election.
The strength of the opposition generally rose and fell in proportion to the
North's effectiveness on the battlefield. The first manifestation of
dissatisfaction with the war effort -- and by extension Lincoln -- came not
from the Democrats, however, but from the Congress, which formed the Joint
Committee on the Conduct of the War in December 1861 to investigate the poor
Union showing at Bull Run and Ball's Bluff. Dominated by radical
Republicans, the Joint Committee pushed the Lincoln administration toward a
more aggressive engagement of the war, as well as toward emancipation.
As might be expected from the party of "popular sovereignty," some Democrats
believed that full-scale war to reinstate the Union was unjustified. This
group came to be known as the Peace Democrats. Their more extreme elements
were called "Copperheads."
Whether of the "war" or "peace" faction, few Democrats believed the
emancipation of the slaves was worth shedding Northern blood. Indeed,
opposition to emancipation had long been party policy. In 1862, for example,
virtually every Democrat in Congress voted against eliminating slavery in
the District of Columbia and prohibiting it in the territories.
Much of the opposition to emancipation came from the working poor,
particularly Irish and German Catholic immigrants, who feared a massive
migration of newly freed blacks to the North. Spurred by such sentiments,
race riots erupted in several Northern cities in 1862.
With the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, Lincoln clearly added
the abolition of slavery to his war aims. This was far from universally
accepted in the North. In both Indiana and Illinois, for example, the state
legislatures passed laws calling for peace with the Confederacy and
retraction of the "wicked, inhuman and unholy" proclamation.
The North's difficulties in prosecuting the war led Lincoln, in September
1862, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and impose martial law on those
who interfered with recruitment or gave aid and comfort to the rebels. This
breech of civil law, although constitutionally justified during times of
crisis, gave the Democrats another opportunity to criticize Lincoln.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton enforced martial law vigorously, and many
thousands -- most of them Southern sympathizers or Democrats -- were
arrested.
The Union's need for manpower led to the first compulsory draft in U.S.
history. Enacted in 1863 to "encourage" enlistment, the draft further
alienated many. Opposition was particularly strong among the Copperheads of
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin, where federal troops had to be
called out to enforce compliance with it.
It must be noted that a man who was drafted could buy his way out for $300,
about the equivalent of an unskilled laborer's annual income at that time.
This feature added to the impression -- strongly held in parts of the
Confederacy as well -- that this was a "rich man's war and a poor man's
fight."
The most significant resistance to the draft took place in New York City in
the summer of 1863. A Democratic Party stronghold, New York had already seen
several draft officials killed that year. In July a group of blacks were
brought into the city, under police protection, to replace striking Irish
longshoremen. At the same time, officials held a lottery drawing for the
unpopular draft. The conjunction of the two events led to a four-day riot in
which a number of black neighborhoods, draft offices and Protestant churches
were destroyed and at least 105 people killed. It was not until several
Union regiments arrived from Gettysburg that order could be restored.
The most celebrated civil case of the Civil War also took place that year.
It concerned Clement Vallandigham, an aspiring Democratic candidate for the
governorship of Ohio. Apparently seeking to bolster his candidacy,
Vallandigham defied a local military ban against "treasonous activities" and
attacked Lincoln's policies, calling for negotiations to end the war and
terming it "a war for the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the
whites." Union soldiers subsequently broke into his house and arrested him.
The legality of Vallandigham's arrest was immediately challenged by the
Democrats and, indeed, some Republicans as well. Lincoln's response was to
have him sent behind Confederate lines, where Vallandigham won the
nomination. Making his way to Canada, he then carried out a boisterous, but
unsuccessful, campaign.
Despite the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in 1863, Democratic
"peace" candidates continued to play on the nation's misfortunes and racial
sensitivities. Indeed, the mood of the North was such that Lincoln was
convinced he would lose his re-election bid in November 1864.
The Democratic candidate for president that year was General George
McClellan, the man Lincoln had removed as commander of the Army of the
Potomac two years earlier. McClellan's vice presidential candidate was a
close ally of Vallandigham. Despite the hopes of the Democrats, however,
McClellan refused to embrace the party's goal of negotiating an end to the
war. Nonetheless, with victory at last within sight, Lincoln easily defeated
McClellan in November, capturing every Northern state except New Jersey and
Delaware.
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The U. S. Constitution
