Sectional conflict and Civil War[edit]
Divisions between North and South[edit]
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The central issue after 1848 was the expansion of slavery, pitting the anti-slavery elements in the North, against the pro-slavery elements that dominated the South. A small number of active Northerners were abolitionists who declared that ownership of slaves was a sin (in terms of Protestant theology) and demanded its immediate abolition. Much larger numbers in the North were against the expansion of slavery, seeking to put it on the path to extinction so that America would be committed to free land (as in low-cost farms owned and cultivated by a family), free labor, and free speech (as opposed to censorship of abolitionist material in the South). Southern whites insisted that slavery was of economic, social, and cultural benefit to all whites (and even to the slaves themselves), and denounced all anti-slavery spokesmen as "abolitionists".[94] Justifications of slavery included economics, history, religion, legality, social good, and even humanitarianism, to further their arguments. Defenders of slavery argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would have had a profound and killing economic impact in the South where reliance on slave labor was the foundation of their economy. They also argued that if all the slaves were freed, there would be widespread unemployment and chaos.[95]
Religious activists split on slavery, with the Methodists and Baptists dividing into northern and southern denominations. In the North, the Methodists, Congregationalists, and Quakers included many abolitionists, especially among women activists. (The Catholic, Episcopal and Lutheran denominations largely ignored the slavery issue.)[96]
Compromise of 1850 and popular sovereignty[edit]
The issue of slavery in the new territories was seemingly settled by the Compromise of 1850, brokered by Whig Henry Clay and Democrat Stephen Douglas; the Compromise included the admission of California as a free state in exchange for no federal restrictions on slavery placed on Utah or New Mexico.[97] The point of contention was the Fugitive Slave Act, which increased federal enforcement and required even free states to cooperate in turning over fugitive slaves to their owners. Abolitionists pounced on the Act to attack slavery, as in the best-selling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.[98]
The Compromise of 1820 was repealed in 1854 with the Kansas–Nebraska Act, promoted by Senator Douglas in the name of "popular sovereignty" and democracy. It permitted voters to decide on the legality of slavery in each territory, and allowed Douglas to adopt neutrality on the issue of slavery. Anti-slavery forces rose in anger and alarm, forming the new Republican Party. Pro- and anti- contingents rushed to Kansas to vote slavery up or down, resulting in a miniature civil war called Bleeding Kansas. By the late 1850s, the young Republican Party dominated nearly all northern states and thus the electoral college. It insisted that slavery would never be allowed to expand (and thus would slowly die out).[99]
Plantation economy[edit]
The Southern slavery-based societies had become wealthy based on their cotton and other agricultural commodity production, and some particularly profited from the internal slave trade. Northern cities such as Boston and New York, and regional industries, were tied economically to slavery by banking, shipping, and manufacturing, including textile mills. By 1860, there were four million slaves in the South, nearly eight times as many as there were nationwide in 1790. The plantations were highly profitable, due to the heavy European demand for raw cotton. Most of the profits were invested in new lands and in purchasing more slaves (largely drawn from the declining tobacco regions).
For 50 of the nation's first 72 years, a slaveholder served as President of the United States and, during that period, only slaveholding presidents were re-elected to second terms.[100] In addition, southern states benefited by their increased apportionment in Congress due to the partial counting of slaves in their populations.
Slave rebellions[edit]
Slave rebellions, by Gabriel Prosser (1800), Denmark Vesey (1822), Nat Turner (1831), and most famously by John Brown (1859), caused fear in the white South, which imposed stricter oversight of slaves and reduced the rights of free blacks. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required the states to cooperate with slave owners when attempting to recover escaped slaves, which outraged Northerners. Formerly, an escaped slave that reached a non-slave state was presumed to have attained sanctuary and freedom under the Missouri Compromise. The Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional; angry Republicans said this decision threatened to make slavery a national institution.
President Abraham Lincoln and secession[edit]
After Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, seven Southern states seceded from the union and set up a new nation, the Confederate States of America (Confederacy), on February 8, 1861. It attacked Fort Sumter, a U.S. Army fort in South Carolina, thus igniting the war. When Lincoln called for troops to suppress the Confederacy in April 1861, four more states seceded and joined the Confederacy. A few of the (northernmost) "slave states" did not secede and became known as the border states; these were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.
During the war, the northwestern portion of Virginia seceded from the Confederacy. and became the new Union state of West Virginia.[101] West Virginia is usually associated with the border states.
Civil War[edit]
The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when elements of 100,000 Confederate forces attacked a U.S. military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. In response to the attack, on April 15, Lincoln called on the states to send detachments totaling 75,000 troops to recapture forts, protect the capital, and "preserve the Union", which in his view still existed intact despite the actions of the seceding states. The two armies had their first major clash at the First Battle of Bull Run (Battle of Manassas), ending in a Union defeat, but, more importantly, proved to both the Union and Confederacy that the war would be much longer and bloodier than originally anticipated.[102]
The war soon divided into two theaters: Eastern and Western. In the western theater, the Union was relatively successful, with major battles, such as Perryville and Shiloh along with Union gunboat dominance of navigable rivers producing strategic Union victories and destroying major Confederate operations.[103]
Warfare in the Eastern theater began poorly for the Union as the Confederates won at Manassas Junction (Bull Run), just outside Washington. Major General George B. McClellan was put in charge of the Union armies. After reorganizing the new Army of the Potomac, McClellan failed to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia in his Peninsula Campaign and retreated after attacks from newly appointed Confederate General Robert E. Lee.[104] Meanwhile, both sides concentrated in 1861–62 on raising and training new armies. The main action was Union success in controlling the border states, with Confederates largely driven out of Maryland, West Virginia (a new state), Kentucky and Missouri. The autumn 1862 Confederate campaign into Maryland was designed to hurt Union morale and win European support. It ended with Confederate retreat at the Battle of Antietam, and Lincoln's warning he would issue an Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 if the states did not return. Making slavery a central war goal energized Republicans in the North, as well as their enemies, the anti-war Copperhead Democrats. It ended the risk of British and French intervention.
Lee's smaller army won at the Battle of Fredericksburg late in 1862, causing yet another change in commanders. Lee won again at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, while losing his top aide, Stonewall Jackson. But Lee pushed too hard and ignored the Union threat in the west. Lee invaded Pennsylvania in search of supplies and to cause war-weariness in the North. In perhaps the turning point of the war, Lee's army was badly beaten at the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863, and barely made it back to Virginia.[105] On the homefront, industrial expansion in the North expanded dramatically, using its extensive railroad service, and moving industrial workers into munitions factories. Foreign trade increased, with the United States providing both food and cotton to Britain, And Britain sending in manufactured products and thousands of volunteers for the Union Army (plus a few to the Confederates). The British operated blockade runners bringing in food, luxury items and munitions to the Confederacy, bringing out tobacco and cotton. The Union blockade increasingly shut down Confederate ports, and by late 1864 the blockade runners were usually captured before they could make more than a handful of runs.
In the West, on July 4, 1863, Union forces under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant gained control of the Mississippi River at the Battle of Vicksburg, thereby splitting the Confederacy. Lincoln made General Grant commander of all Union armies. Grant put General William Tecumseh Sherman in charge of the Western armies. In 1864, Sherman marched south from Chattanooga to capture Atlanta, a decisive victory that ended war jitters among Republicans in the North who feared they might fail to reelect Lincoln in 1864. Lincoln won a landslide. The last two years of the war were bloody for both sides, With Sherman marching almost unopposed through central and eastern Georgia, then moving up through South Carolina and North Carolina, burning cities, destroying plantations, ruining railroads and bridges, but avoiding civilian casualties. Sherman demonstrated that the South lacked the long-term ability to resist a northern invasion. Much of the heartland of the Confederacy was physically destroyed, and could no longer provide desperately needed food, horses, mules, wagons, boots or munitions to its combat armies. In spring 1864 Grant, realizing that Lee was unable to replenish casualties, while Lincoln would provide replacements for Union losses, launched a war of attrition against Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. This war of attrition was divided into three main campaigns. The first of these, the Overland Campaign forced Lee to retreat into the city of Petersburg where Grant launched his second major offensive, the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign in which he besieged Petersburg. After a near ten-month siege, Petersburg surrendered. However, the defense of Fort Gregg allowed Lee to move his army out of Petersburg. Grant pursued and launched the final, Appomattox Campaign which resulted in Lee surrendering his Army of Northern Virginia numbering 28,000 on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House. Other Confederate armies followed suit and the war ended with no postwar insurgency.
The American Civil War was the world's earliest industrial war. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, and mass-produced weapons were employed extensively. The mobilization of civilian factories, mines, shipyards, banks, transportation and food supplies all foreshadowed the impact of industrialization in World War I. It remains the deadliest war in American history, resulting in the deaths of about 750,000 soldiers and an undetermined number of civilian casualties.[106] About ten percent of all Northern males 20–45 years old, and 30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18–40 died.[107] Its legacy includes ending slavery in the United States, restoring the Union, and strengthening the role of the federal government.
According to historian Allan Nevins, the Civil War had a major long-term impact on the United States in terms of developing its leadership potential and moving the entire nation beyond the adolescent stage:
- The fighting and its attendant demands upon industry, finance, medicine, and law also helped train a host of leaders who during the next 35 years, to 1900, made their influence powerfully felt on most of the social, economic, and cultural fronts. It broke down barriers of parochialism; it ended distrust of large-scale effort; it hardened and matured the whole people emotionally. The adolescent land of the 1850s…rose under the blows of battle to adult estate. The nation of the post-Appomattox generation, though sadly hurt (especially in the South) by war losses, and deeply scarred psychologically (especially in the North) by war hatreds and greeds, had at last the power, resolution, and self-trust of manhood.[108]
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