American Civil War

American Civil War
Clockwise from top: Battle of Gettysburg Union Captain John Tidball's artillery Confederate prisoners Ironclad USS Atlanta Ruins of Richmond, Virginia Battle of Franklin
Date April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865 (4 years, 1 month and 2 weeks) Location United States, Atlantic Ocean Result Union victory Abolition of slavery in the United States United States preserved as a single nation Beginning of the Reconstruction era Passage of the Reconstruction Amendments Territorial changes Dissolution of the Confederate States of America
Belligerents
United States	Confederate States
Commanders and leaders
Abraham Lincoln X Ulysses S. Grant and others...	Jefferson Davis  Robert E. Lee  and others...
Strength
2,200,000 698,000 (peak)	750,000–1,000,000 360,000 (peak)
Casualties and losses
110,000+ (KIA) / (DOW) 230,000+ accident/disease deaths 25,000–30,000 died in Confederate prisons 365,000+ total dead 282,000+ wounded 181,193 captured Total: 828,000+ casualties	94,000+ (KIA) / (DOW) 26,000–31,000 died in Union prisons 290,000+ total dead 137,000+ wounded 436,658 captured Total: 864,000+ casualties
50,000 free civilians dead 80,000+ slaves dead (disease) Total: 616,222–1,000,000+ dead

The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded from the Union. The central conflict leading to war was a dispute over whether slavery should be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prohibited from doing so, which many believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction.

Decades of controversy over slavery were brought to a head when Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's expansion, won the 1860 presidential election. Seven Southern slave states responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and forming the Confederacy. The Confederacy seized U.S. forts and other federal assets within their borders. The war began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina. A wave of enthusiasm for war swept over North and South, as military recruitment soared. Four more Southern states seceded after the war began and, led by President Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy asserted control over a third of the U.S. population in eleven states. Four years of intense combat, mostly in the South, ensued.

During 1861–62 in the Western theater, the Union made permanent gains—though in the Eastern theater the conflict was inconclusive. The abolition of slavery became a Union war goal on January 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in rebel states to be free, which applied to more than 3.5 million of the 4 million enslaved people in the country. To the west, the Union first destroyed the Confederacy's river navy by the summer of 1862, then much of its western armies, and seized New Orleans. The successful 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River, while Confederate General Robert E. Lee's incursion north failed at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to General Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. Inflicting an ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports, the Union marshaled resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions. This led to the fall of Atlanta in 1864 to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, followed by his March to the Sea. The last significant battles raged around the ten-month Siege of Petersburg, gateway to the Confederate capital of Richmond. The Confederates abandoned Richmond, and on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant following the Battle of Appomattox Court House, setting in motion the end of the war. Lincoln lived to see this victory but on April 14, was assassinated.

By the end of the war, much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed. The Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and four million enslaved black people were freed. The war-torn nation then entered the Reconstruction era in an attempt to rebuild the country, bring the former Confederate states back into the United States, and grant civil rights to freed slaves. The war is one of the most extensively studied and written about episodes in U.S. history. It remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. Of particular interest is the persisting myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The war was among the first to use industrial warfare. Railroads, the electrical telegraph, steamships, the ironclad warship, and mass-produced weapons were widely used. The war left between 620,000-750,000 soldiers dead, along with an undetermined number of civilian casualties, making the Civil War the deadliest military conflict in American history. The technology and brutality of the Civil War foreshadowed the coming World Wars.

Origins

Main articles: Origins of the American Civil War and Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War

Status of the states, 1861

   Slave states that seceded before April 15, 1861

   Slave states that seceded after April 15, 1861

   Border Southern states that permitted slavery but did not secede (both KY and MO had dual competing Confederate and Unionist governments)

   Union states that banned slavery

   Territories

The reasons for the Southern states' decisions to secede have been controversial, but most scholars identify preserving slavery as the central reason. Several seceding states' secession documents designate slavery as a motive for their departure. Although scholars have offered additional reasons for the war, slavery was the central source of escalating tensions in the 1850s. The Republican Party was determined to prevent the spread of slavery to the territories, which, after they were admitted as free states, would give the free states greater representation in Congress and the Electoral College. Many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican candidate, Lincoln, won the 1860 election. After Lincoln won, Southern leaders felt disunion was their only option, fearing the loss of representation would hamper their ability to enact pro-slavery laws. In his second inaugural address in 1865, Lincoln said:

slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

Slavery

Main article: Slavery in the United States

Disagreements among states about slavery were the main cause of the war. Slavery had been controversial during the framing of the Constitution in 1787, which, because of compromises, ended up with proslavery and antislavery features. The issue had confounded the nation and increasingly separated the US into a slaveholding South and a free North. The issue was exacerbated by rapid territorial expansion, which repeatedly brought the question of whether new territory should be slaveholding or free. The issue had dominated politics for decades. Attempts to resolve the matter included the Missouri Compromise and Compromise of 1850, but these only postponed the showdown over slavery.

Motivations of the supporters of the Union and Confederacy were not uniform; some Northern soldiers were indifferent on slavery, but a pattern can be established. As the war dragged on, more Unionists came to support slavery's abolition, to cripple the Confederacy or on moral grounds. Confederate soldiers fought to protect a Southern society of which slavery was an integral part. Opponents of slavery considered it an anachronistic evil incompatible with republicanism. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was to stop expansion, and put slavery on a path to extinction. Slaveholding interests in the South denounced this as infringing upon their constitutional rights. With large parts of the Southern population in slavery, white Southerners believed the emancipation of slaves would destroy Southern families, society, and its economy, with significant capital invested in slaves and fears of a free black population. Many Southerners feared repeat of the 1804 Haitian massacre, when former slaves murdered most of Haiti's white population after a slave revolution. Thomas Fleming points to the historical phrase "a disease in the public mind" used by critics of this idea and proposes it contributed to the segregation in the Jim Crow era. These fears were exacerbated by the 1859 attempt to instigate a slave rebellion in the South.

Abolitionists

Main article: Abolitionism in the United States

The abolitionists—those advocating slavery's end—were active in the decades leading up to the war. They traced their philosophical roots back to certain Puritans, who believed slavery was wrong. A Puritan writing on slavery was The Selling of Joseph, by Samuel Sewall in 1700, in which he condemned slavery and refuted justifications for it.

The American Revolution, and the cause of liberty, added impetus to the abolitionist cause. Even in Southern states, laws were changed to limit slavery and facilitate manumission; the amount of indentured servitude dropped throughout the country. An Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves sailed through Congress with little opposition and went into effect on January 1, 1808, the first day the Constitution permitted Congress to prohibit importation of slaves. Influenced by the Revolution, many slave owners freed their slaves, but some, such as George Washington, did so only in their wills. The number of free black people as a proportion of the black population in the upper South increased from less than 1 percent to nearly 10 percent between 1790-1810.

The establishment of the Northwest Territory as "free soil"—no slavery—would prove crucial. This territory doubled the size of the US. If those states had been slave states and voted for Lincoln's chief opponent in 1860, Lincoln would not have become president.

Frederick Douglass, a former slave, was a leading abolitionist

In the decades leading up to the war, abolitionists, such as Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederick Douglass, repeatedly used the country's Puritan heritage to bolster their cause. The anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, invoked Puritan values over a thousand times. Parker, in urging New England congressmen to support abolition, wrote, "The son of the Puritan ... is sent to Congress to stand up for Truth and Right." Literature spread the message; key works included Twelve Years a Slave, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, American Slavery As It Is, and the most important: Uncle Tom's Cabin, the best-selling book of the 19th century, aside from the Bible.

An unusual abolitionist was Hinton Rowan Helper, whose 1857 book, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, "[e]ven more perhaps than Uncle Tom's Cabin ... fed the fires of sectional controversy leading up to the...War." A Southerner and virulent racist, Helper was nevertheless an abolitionist because he believed, and showed with statistics, that slavery "impeded the progress and prosperity of the South, ... dwindled our commerce...into the most contemptible insignificance; sunk a large majority of our people in galling poverty and ignorance, ... [and] entailed upon us a humiliating dependence on the Free States...."

By 1840 more than 15,000 people were members of abolitionist societies. Abolitionism became a popular expression of moralism and a factor that led to the war. In churches, conventions, newspapers, abolitionists advocated an immediate end to slavery. The issue split religious groups; in 1845 the Baptists split over slavery into the Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists.

Abolitionist sentiment was not exclusively moral. The Whig Party became opposed to slavery because it saw it as against capitalism and the free market. Whig leader William H. Seward proclaimed there was an "irrepressible conflict" between slavery and free labor, and that slavery had left the South backward and undeveloped. As the Whig Party dissolved in the 1850s, the mantle of abolition fell to its successor, the Republican Party.

Territorial crisis

Further information: Slave states and free states

Manifest destiny heightened the conflict over slavery. Each new territory acquired had to face the thorny question of whether to allow or disallow the "peculiar institution". Between 1803-54, the US expanded significantly through purchase, negotiation, and conquest. At first, the new states were apportioned equally between slave and free states. Pro- and anti-slavery forces collided over the territories west of the Mississippi River.

The Mexican–American War and its aftermath was a key territorial event in the leadup to the war. As the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo finalized the conquest of northern Mexico in 1848, slaveholding interests looked forward to expanding into these lands. Prophetically, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "Mexico will poison us", referring to the ensuing divisions around whether the conquered lands would end up slave or free. Northern free-soil interests vigorously sought to curtail expansion of slave territory. The Compromise of 1850 over California balanced a free-soil state with a stronger federal fugitive slave law for a political settlement, after strife in the 1840s. But the states admitted following California were all free: Minnesota (1858), Oregon (1859), and Kansas (1861). In the Southern states, the question of slavery's expansion westward again became explosive. The South and North drew the same conclusion: "The power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the power to determine the future of slavery itself." After the Utah Territory legalized slavery in 1852, the Utah War of 1857 saw Mormon settlers fighting the government.

Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, author of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854

Sen. John J. Crittenden, of the 1860 Crittenden Compromise

By 1860, four doctrines had emerged to answer the question of federal control in the territories, and all claimed they were sanctioned by the Constitution. The first, represented by the Constitutional Union Party, argued that the Missouri Compromise apportionment of territory north for free soil and south for slavery should become a constitutional mandate. The failed Crittenden Compromise of 1860 was an expression of this view.

The second doctrine of congressional preeminence was championed by Lincoln and the Republicans. It insisted the Constitution did not bind legislators to a policy of balance—that slavery could be excluded in a territory, as it was in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, at the discretion of Congress. Thus Congress could restrict human bondage, but never establish it. The ill-fated Wilmot Proviso announced this position in 1846. The Proviso was a pivotal moment, as it was the first time slavery had become a major congressional issue based on sectionalism, instead of party lines. Its support by Northern Democrats and Whigs, and opposition by Southerners, was an omen of coming divisions.

Senator Stephen A. Douglas proclaimed the third doctrine: territorial or "popular" sovereignty, which asserted that settlers in a territory had the same rights as states, to allow or disallow slavery as a local matter. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine. In the Kansas Territory, political conflict spawned "Bleeding Kansas", a paramilitary conflict between pro- and anti-slavery supporters. The House of Representatives voted to admit Kansas as a free state in early 1860, but its admission did not pass the Senate until January 1861, after the departure of Southern senators.

The fourth doctrine was advocated by Mississippi Senator, later Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. It was one of state sovereignty ("states' rights"), also known as the "Calhoun doctrine", named after the South Carolinian political theorist and statesman John C. Calhoun. Rejecting the arguments for federal authority or self-government, state sovereignty would empower states to promote expansion of slavery as part of the federal union under the Constitution. These four doctrines comprised the dominant ideologies presented to the public, before the 1860 presidential election.

States' rights

A long-running dispute over the war's origin is to what extent states' rights triggered it. The consensus among historians is that the war was not fought about states' rights. But the issue is frequently referenced in popular accounts and has traction among Southerners. Southerners advocating secession argued that just as each state had decided to join the Union, a state had the right to leave. Northerners rejected that notion as opposed to the will of the Founding Fathers, who said they were setting up a Perpetual Union.

James M. McPherson points out that even if Confederates genuinely fought over states' rights, it boiled down to states' right to slavery. McPherson writes:

While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states'-rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle.

States' rights was an ideology applied as a means of advancing slave state interests through federal authority. Thomas Krannawitter notes the "Southern demand for federal slave protection represented a demand for an unprecedented expansion of Federal power." Before the war, slavery advocates supported use of federal powers to enforce and extend slavery, as with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. The faction that pushed for secession often infringed on states' rights. Because of the overrepresentation of pro-slavery factions in the federal government, many Northerners, even non-abolitionists, feared the Slave Power conspiracy. Some Northern states resisted the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Eric Foner states that the act "could hardly have been designed to arouse greater opposition in the North. It overrode state and local laws...and 'commanded' individual citizens to assist, when called upon, in capturing runaways...It certainly did not reveal, on the part of slaveholders, sensitivity to states' rights." According to Paul Finkelman, "the southern states mostly complained that the northern states were asserting their states' rights and that the national government was not powerful enough to counter these northern claims." The Confederate Constitution "federally" required slavery to be legal in all Confederate states and claimed territories.

Sectionalism

Ambrotype of two unidentified young boys, one in blue Union cap, one in gray Confederate cap (Liljenquist collection, Library of Congress)

Sectionalism resulted from the different economies, social structure, customs, and political values of the North and South. Regional tensions came to a head during the War of 1812, resulting in the Hartford Convention, which manifested Northern dissatisfaction with a foreign trade embargo that affected the industrial North disproportionately, the Three-Fifths Compromise, dilution of Northern power by new states, and a succession of Southern presidents. Sectionalism increased between 1800-60 as the North, which phased slavery out, industrialized, urbanized, and built prosperous farms, while the deep South concentrated on plantation agriculture based on slave labor, with subsistence agriculture for poor whites. In the 1840s and 50s, the issue of slavery split the largest religious denominations into separate Northern and Southern denominations.

Historians have debated whether economic differences between the industrial North and agricultural South helped cause the war. Most historians now disagree with the economic determinism of historian Charles A. Beard in the 1920s, and emphasize that Northern and Southern economies were largely complementary. While socially different, they economically benefited each other.

Protectionism

Slave owners preferred low-cost manual labor and free trade, while Northern manufacturing interests supported mechanized labor and protectionism, such as tariffs. Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote the tariff laws between 1830 and 1860 and kept reducing rates until the Tariff of 1857 made them the lowest since 1816. In the 1860 election, Republicans called for an increase and in 1861 enacted the Morrill Tariff, after Southerners had resigned their seats in Congress. The issue was a Northern grievance, but neo-Confederates have claimed it was a Southern grievance. In 1860 and 1861 no group that proposed compromises to head off secession raised the tariff issue. Pamphleteers from the North and South rarely mentioned it.

Nationalism and honor

Nationalism was a powerful force in the early 19th century, with spokesmen such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster. While practically all Northerners supported the Union, Southerners were split between those loyal to it, "Southern Unionists", and those loyal to the South. Perceived insults to Southern collective honor included the enormous popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin and John Brown's attempt to incite a slave rebellion in 1859.

While the South moved towards a Southern nationalism, Northern leaders were becoming more nationally minded, and rejected splitting the Union. The Republican electoral platform of 1860 warned they regarded disunion as treason and would not tolerate it. The South ignored the warnings; Southerners did not realize how ardently the North would fight for the Union.

Lincoln's election

Main article: 1860 United States presidential election

Mathew Brady's Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, 1860

Lincoln's election in November 1860 was the final trigger for secession. Southern leaders feared Lincoln would stop slavery's expansion and put it on a course toward extinction. However, Lincoln would not be inaugurated until March 4, 1861, which gave the South time to secede and prepare for war during the winter of 1860-61.

According to Lincoln, the American people had shown they had been successful in establishing and administering a republic, but a third challenge faced the nation: maintaining a republic based on the people's vote, in the face of an attempt to destroy it.

Outbreak of the war

Secession crisis

Main article: Ordinance of Secession

Lincoln's election provoked South Carolina's legislature to call a state convention to consider secession. South Carolina had done more than any other state to advance the notion that a state had the right to nullify federal laws and even secede. On December 20, 1860, the convention unanimously voted to secede and adopted a secession declaration. It argued for states' rights for slave owners but complained about states' rights in the North in the form of resistance to the federal Fugitive Slave Act, claiming that Northern states were not fulfilling their obligations to assist in the return of fugitive slaves. The "cotton states" of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed suit, seceding in January and February 1861.

Among the ordinances of secession, those of Texas, Alabama, and Virginia mentioned the plight of the "slaveholding states" at the hands of Northern abolitionists. The rest made no mention of slavery but were brief announcements by the legislatures of the dissolution of ties to the Union. However, at least four—South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas—provided detailed reasons for their secession, all blaming the movement to abolish slavery and its influence over the North. Southern states believed that the Fugitive Slave Clause made slaveholding a constitutional right. These states agreed to form a new federal government, the Confederate States of America, on February 4, 1861. They took control of federal forts and other properties within their boundaries, with little resistance from outgoing President James Buchanan, whose term ended on March 4. Buchanan said the Dred Scott decision was proof the Southern states had no reason to secede and that the Union "was intended to be perpetual". He added, however, that "The power by force of arms to compel a State to remain in the Union" was not among the "enumerated powers granted to Congress". A quarter of the US army—the Texas garrison—was surrendered in February to state forces by its general, David E. Twiggs, who joined the Confederacy.

As Southerners resigned their Senate and House seats, Republicans could pass projects that had been blocked. These included the Morrill Tariff, land grant colleges, a Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, the National Bank Act, authorization of United States Notes by the Legal Tender Act of 1862, and the end of slavery in the District of Columbia. The Revenue Act of 1861 introduced income tax to help finance the war.

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America (1861–1865)

In December 1860, the Crittenden Compromise was proposed to re-establish the Missouri Compromise line, by constitutionally banning slavery in territories to the north of it, while permitting it to the south. The Compromise would likely have prevented secession, but Lincoln and the Republicans rejected it. Lincoln stated that any compromise that would extend slavery would bring down the Union. A February peace conference met in Washington, proposing a solution similar the Compromise; it was rejected by Congress. The Republicans proposed the Corwin Amendment, an alternative, not to interfere with slavery where it existed, but the South regarded it as insufficient. The remaining eight slave states rejected pleas to join the Confederacy, following a no-vote in Virginia's First Secessionist Convention on April 4.

On March 4, Lincoln was sworn in as president. In his inaugural address, he argued that the Constitution was a more perfect union than the earlier Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, was a binding contract, and called secession "legally void". He did not intend to invade Southern states, nor to end slavery where it existed, but he said he would use force to maintain possession of federal property, including forts, arsenals, mints, and customhouses that had been seized. The government would not try to recover post offices, and if resisted, mail delivery would end at state lines. Where conditions did not allow peaceful enforcement of federal law, US marshals and judges would be withdrawn. No mention was made of bullion lost from mints. He stated that it would be US policy "to collect the duties and imposts"; "there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere" that would justify an armed revolution. His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union, famously calling on "the mystic chords of memory" binding the two regions.

The Davis government of the new Confederacy sent delegates to Washington to negotiate a peace treaty. Lincoln rejected negotiations, because he claimed that the Confederacy was not a legitimate government and to make a treaty with it would recognize it as such. Lincoln instead attempted to negotiate directly with the governors of seceded states, whose administrations he continued to recognize.

Complicating Lincoln's attempts to defuse the crisis was Secretary of State William H. Seward, who had been Lincoln's rival for the Republican nomination. Embittered by his defeat, Seward agreed to support Lincoln's candidacy only after he was guaranteed the executive office then considered the second most powerful. In the early stages of Lincoln's presidency Seward held little regard for him, due to his perceived inexperience. Seward viewed himself as the de facto head of government, the "prime minister" behind the throne. Seward attempted to engage in unauthorized and indirect negotiations that failed. Lincoln was determined to hold all remaining Union-occupied forts in the Confederacy: Fort Monroe in Virginia, Fort Pickens, Fort Jefferson, and Fort Taylor in Florida, and Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

Battle of Fort Sumter

Main article: Battle of Fort Sumter

See also: President Lincoln's 75,000 volunteers

The Battle of Fort Sumter, as depicted by Currier and Ives

The American Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces opened fire on the Union-held Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter is located in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Its status had been contentious for months. Outgoing President Buchanan had dithered in reinforcing its garrison, commanded by Major Robert Anderson. Anderson took matters into his own hands and on December 26, 1860, under the cover of darkness, sailed the garrison from the poorly placed Fort Moultrie to the stalwart island Fort Sumter. Anderson's actions catapulted him to hero status in the North. An attempt to resupply the fort on January 9, 1861, failed and nearly started the war then, but an informal truce held. On March 5, Lincoln was informed the fort was low on supplies.

Fort Sumter proved a key challenge to Lincoln's administration. Back-channel dealing by Seward with the Confederates undermined Lincoln's decision-making; Seward wanted to pull out. But a firm hand by Lincoln tamed Seward, who a staunch Lincoln ally. Lincoln decided holding the fort, which would require reinforcing it, was the only workable option. On April 6, Lincoln informed the Governor of South Carolina that a ship with food but no ammunition would attempt to supply the fort. Historian McPherson describes this win-win approach as "the first sign of the mastery that would mark Lincoln's presidency"; the Union would win if it could resupply and hold the fort, and the South would be the aggressor if it opened fire on an unarmed ship supplying starving men. An April 9 Confederate cabinet meeting resulted in Davis ordering General P. G. T. Beauregard to take the fort before supplies reached it.

At 4:30 am on April 12, Confederate forces fired the first of 4,000 shells at the fort; it fell the next day. The loss of Fort Sumter lit a patriotic fire under the North. On April 15, Lincoln called on the states to field 75,000 volunteer troops for 90 days; impassioned Union states met the quotas quickly. On May 3, 1861, Lincoln called for an additional 42,000 volunteers for three years. Shortly after this, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina seceded and joined the Confederacy. To reward Virginia, the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond.

Attitude of the border states

Main article: Border states (American Civil War)

US Secession map. The Union vs. the Confederacy.

   Union states

   Union territories not permitting slavery

   Southern Border Union states, permitting slavery

(One of these states, West Virginia, was created in 1863, while KY and MO had dual competing Confederate and Unionist governments)

   Confederate states

   Union territories that permitted slavery (claimed by Confederacy) at the start of the war, but where slavery was outlawed by the U.S. in 1862

Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky were slave states whose people had divided loyalties to Northern and Southern businesses and family members. Some men enlisted in the Union Army and others in the Confederate Army. West Virginia separated from Virginia and was admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863.

Maryland's territory surrounded Washington, D.C., and could cut it off from the North. It had anti-Lincoln officials who tolerated anti-army rioting in Baltimore and the burning of bridges, both aimed at hindering the passage of troops to the South. Maryland's legislature voted overwhelmingly to stay in the Union, but rejected hostilities with its southern neighbors, voting to close Maryland's rail lines to prevent their use for war. Lincoln responded by establishing martial law and unilaterally suspending habeas corpus in Maryland, along with sending in militia units. Lincoln took control of Maryland and the District of Columbia by seizing prominent figures, including arresting one-third of the members of the Maryland General Assembly on the day it reconvened. All were held without trial, with Lincoln ignoring a ruling on June 1, 1861, by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, not speaking for the Court, that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus (Ex parte Merryman). Federal troops imprisoned a Baltimore newspaper editor, Frank Key Howard, after he criticized Lincoln in an editorial for ignoring Taney's ruling.

In Missouri, an elected convention on secession voted to remain in the Union. When pro-Confederate Governor Claiborne F. Jackson called out the state militia, it was attacked by federal forces under General Nathaniel Lyon, who chased the governor and rest of the State Guard to the southwestern corner of Missouri (see Missouri secession). Early in the war the Confederacy controlled southern Missouri through the Confederate government of Missouri but was driven out after 1862. In the resulting vacuum, the convention on secession reconvened and took power as the Unionist provisional government of Missouri.

Kentucky did not secede, it declared itself neutral. When Confederate forces entered in September 1861, neutrality ended and the state reaffirmed its Union status while maintaining slavery. During an invasion by Confederate forces in 1861, Confederate sympathizers and delegates from 68 Kentucky counties organized the secession Russellville Convention, formed the shadow Confederate Government of Kentucky, inaugurated a governor, and Kentucky was admitted into the Confederacy on December 10, 1861. Its jurisdiction extended only as far as Confederate battle lines in the Commonwealth, which at its greatest extent was over half the state, and it went into exile after October 1862.

After Virginia's secession, a Unionist government in Wheeling asked 48 counties to vote on an ordinance to create a new state in October 1861. A voter turnout of 34% approved the statehood bill (96% approving). Twenty-four secessionist counties were included in the new state, and the ensuing guerrilla war engaged about 40,000 federal troops for much of the war. Congress admitted West Virginia to the Union on June 20, 1863. West Virginia provided about 20,000 soldiers to both the Confederacy and Union. A Unionist secession attempt occurred in East Tennessee, but was suppressed by the Confederacy, which arrested over 3,000 men suspected of loyalty to the Union; they were held without trial.

War

See also: List of American Civil War battles and Military leadership in the American Civil War

The Civil War was a contest marked by the ferocity and frequency of battle. Over 4 years, 237 named battles were fought, and many more minor actions, which were often characterized by their bitter intensity and high casualties. In his book The American Civil War, historian John Keegan writes that it "was to prove one of the most ferocious wars ever fought". In many cases, without geographic objectives, the only target was the enemy's soldier.

Mobilization

See also: Economic history of the American Civil War

Rioters attacking a building during the New York anti-draft riots of 1863

As the first seven states began organizing a Confederacy, the entire US army numbered 16,000. However, Northern governors had begun to mobilize their militias. The Confederate Congress authorized the new nation up to 100,000 troops sent by governors as early as February. By May, Jefferson Davis was pushing for 100,000 soldiers for one year or the duration, and that was answered in kind by the U.S. Congress.

In the first year of war, both sides had more volunteers than they could effectively train and equip. After the initial enthusiasm faded, reliance on the cohort of young men who came of age every year and wanted to join was not enough. Both sides used a draft law—conscription—to encourage or force volunteering; relatively few were drafted and served. The Confederacy passed a draft law in April 1862 for men aged 18-35; overseers of slaves, government officials, and clergymen were exempt. The U.S. Congress followed in July, authorizing a militia draft within a state when it could not meet its quota with volunteers. European immigrants joined the Union Army in large numbers, including 177,000 born in Germany and 144,000 in Ireland. About 50,000 Canadians served, around 2,500 of whom were black.

When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in January 1863, ex-slaves were energetically recruited by the states and used to meet state quotas. States and local communities offered higher and higher cash bonuses for white volunteers. Congress tightened the law in March 1863. Men selected in the draft could provide substitutes or, until mid-1864, pay commutation money. Many eligibles pooled their money to cover the cost of anyone drafted. Families used the substitute provision to select which man should go into the army and which should stay home. There was much evasion and overt resistance to the draft, especially in Catholic areas. The New York City draft riots in July 1863 involved Irish immigrants who had been signed up as citizens to swell the vote of the city's Democratic political machine, not realizing it made them liable for the draft. Of the 168,649 men procured for the Union through the draft, 117,986 were substitutes, leaving only 50,663 who had their services conscripted.

In the North and South, the draft laws were highly unpopular. In the North, some 120,000 men evaded conscription, many fleeing to Canada, and another 280,000 soldiers deserted during the war. At least 100,000 Southerners deserted, which was 10 percent of the total. Southern desertion was high because the highly localized Southern identity meant that many Southerners had little investment in the outcome of the war, with soldiers caring more about the fate of their local area than the Southern cause. In the North, "bounty jumpers" enlisted to get the generous bonus, deserted, then went back to a second recruiting station under a different name to sign up for a second bonus; 141 were caught and executed.

From a tiny frontier force in 1860, the Union and Confederate armies had grown into the "largest and most efficient armies in the world" within a few years. Some European observers at the time dismissed them as amateur and unprofessional, but historian John Keegan concluded that each outmatched the French, Prussian, and Russian armies, and without the Atlantic, would have threatened any with defeat.

Prisoners

Main article: American Civil War prison camps

At the start of the war, a system of paroles operated. Captives agreed not to fight until they were officially exchanged. Meanwhile, they were held in camps run by their army. They were paid, but were not allowed to perform any military duties. The system of exchanges collapsed in 1863 when the Confederacy refused to exchange black prisoners. After that, about 56,000 of the 409,000 POWs died in prisons, accounting for 10% of the conflict's fatalities.

Women

See also: Women in the military § United States, and Gender issues in the American Civil War

Historian Elizabeth D. Leonard writes that between 500 and 1000 women enlisted as soldiers on both sides of the war, disguised as men. Women served as spies, resistance activists, nurses, and hospital personnel. Women served on the Union hospital ship Red Rover and nursed Union and Confederate troops at field hospitals. Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor, served in the Union Army and was given the medal for treating the wounded during the war.

Naval tactics

Battle between the USS Monitor and Merrimack

The small U.S. Navy of 1861 was rapidly enlarged to 6,000 officers and 45,000 sailors in 1865, with 671 vessels, having a tonnage of 510,396. Its mission was to blockade Confederate ports, take control of the river system, defend against Confederate raiders on the high seas, and be ready for a possible war with the British Royal Navy. The main riverine war was fought in the West, where major rivers gave access to the Confederate heartland. The U.S. Navy eventually gained control of the Red, Tennessee, Cumberland, Mississippi, and Ohio rivers. In the East, the Navy shelled Confederate forts and provided support for coastal army operations.

The Civil War occurred during the early stages of the industrial revolution. Many naval innovations emerged during this time, most notably the advent of the ironclad warship. It began when the Confederacy, knowing they had to match the Union's naval superiority, responded to the Union blockade by building or converting more than 130 vessels, including 26 ironclads and floating batteries. Only half of these saw service. Many were equipped with ram bows, creating "ram fever" among Union squadrons wherever they threatened. In the face of overwhelming Union superiority and Union ironclad warships, they were unsuccessful. The Union Navy used timberclads, tinclads, and armored gunboats. Shipyards at Cairo, Illinois, and St. Louis built new boats or modified steamboats.

The Confederacy experimented with the submarine CSS Hunley, which did not work satisfactorily, and with building an ironclad ship, CSS Virginia, which was based on rebuilding a sunken Union ship, Merrimack. On its first foray, on March 8, 1862, Virginia inflicted significant damage to the Union's wooden fleet, but the next day the first Union ironclad, USS Monitor, arrived to challenge it in the Chesapeake Bay. The resulting three-hour Battle of Hampton Roads was a draw, but proved ironclads were effective warships. The Confederacy was forced to scuttle the Virginia to prevent its capture, while the Union built many copies of the Monitor. Lacking the technology and infrastructure to build effective warships, the Confederacy attempted to obtain warships from Great Britain. However, this failed, because Great Britain had no interest in selling warships to a nation at war with a stronger enemy, and doing so could sour relations with the US.

Union blockade

Main article: Union blockade

General Scott's "Anaconda Plan" 1861. Tightening naval blockade, forcing rebels out of Missouri along the Mississippi River, Kentucky Unionists sit on the fence, idled cotton industry illustrated in Georgia.

By early 1861, General Winfield Scott had devised the Anaconda Plan to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible, which called for blockading the Confederacy and slowly suffocating the South to surrender. Lincoln adopted parts of the plan, but chose to prosecute a more active vision of war. In April 1861, Lincoln announced the blockade of all Southern ports; commercial ships could not get insurance and regular traffic ended. The South blundered in embargoing cotton exports in 1861 before the blockade was effective; by the time they realized the mistake, it was too late. "King Cotton" was dead, as the South could export less than 10% of its cotton. The blockade shut down the ten Confederate seaports with railheads that moved almost all the cotton. By June 1861, warships were stationed off the principal Southern ports, and a year later nearly 300 ships were in service.

Blockade runners

Main article: Blockade runners of the American Civil War

Gunline of nine Union ironclads. South Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Charleston. Continuous blockade of all major ports was sustained by North's overwhelming war production.

The Confederates began the war short on military supplies and in desperate need of arms, which the agrarian South could not provide. Arms manufactures in the industrial North were restricted by an arms embargo, keeping shipments of arms from going to the South, and ending existing and future contracts. The Confederacy looked to foreign sources for their military needs and sought out financiers and companies like S. Isaac, Campbell & Company and the London Armoury Company in Britain, who acted as purchasing agents for the Confederacy, connecting them with Britain's arms manufactures, and ultimately becoming the Confederacy's main source of arms.

To get the arms safely to the Confederacy, British investors built small, fast, steam-driven blockade runners that traded arms and supplies brought in from Britain, through Bermuda, Cuba, and the Bahamas in return for high-priced cotton. Many were lightweight and designed for speed and could only carry a small amount of cotton back to England. When the Union Navy seized a blockade runner, the ship and cargo were condemned as a prize of war and sold, with the proceeds given to the Navy sailors; the captured crewmen were mostly British, and were released.

Economic impact

The Southern economy nearly collapsed during the war. There were multiple reasons for this: severe deterioration of food supplies, especially in cities; failure of Southern railroads; loss of control of the main rivers; foraging by Northern armies; and the seizure of animals and crops by Confederate armies. Most historians agree the blockade was a major factor in ruining the Confederate economy; however, Wise argues blockade runners provided enough of a lifeline to allow Lee to continue fighting for additional months, thanks to fresh supplies of 400,000 rifles, lead, blankets, and boots that the homefront economy could no longer supply.

Surdam argues the blockade was a powerful weapon that eventually ruined the Southern economy, at the cost of few lives in combat. Practically, the Confederate cotton crop was useless, costing the Confederacy its main source of income. Critical imports were scarce and the coastal trade was largely ended as well. The measure of the blockade's success was not the few ships that slipped through, but the thousands that never tried. Merchant ships owned in Europe could not get insurance and were too slow to evade the blockade, so they stopped calling at Confederate ports.

To fight an offensive war, the Confederacy purchased arms in Britain and converted British-built ships into commerce raiders. Purchasing arms involved the smuggling of 600,000 arms that enabled the Confederacy to fight on for two more years and the commerce raiders were used in raiding U.S. Merchant Marine ships in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Insurance rates skyrocketed and the American flag virtually disappeared from international waters. However, the same ships were reflagged with European flags and continued unmolested. After the war, the U.S. government demanded that Britain compensate it for the damage done by blockade runners and raiders outfitted in British ports. Britain partly acquiesced to the demand, paying the U.S. $15 million in 1871 only for commerce raiding.

Dinçaslan argues another outcome of the blockade was oil's rise to prominence as a widely used and traded commodity. The already declining whale oil industry took a blow, as many old whaling ships were used in blockade efforts, such as the Stone Fleet, and Confederate raiders harassing Union whalers aggravated the situation. Oil products that had been treated mostly as lubricants, especially kerosene, started to replace whale oil used in lamps and essentially became a fuel commodity. This increased the importance of oil as a commodity, long before its eventual use as fuel for combustion engines.

Diplomacy

Main article: Diplomacy of the American Civil War

Further information: United Kingdom and the American Civil War and France and the American Civil War

A December 1861 cartoon in Punch magazine in London ridicules American aggressiveness in the Trent Affair. John Bull, at right, warns Uncle Sam, "You do what's right, my son, or I'll blow you out of the water."

Although the Confederacy hoped Britain and France would join them against the Union, this was never likely, and so tried to bring them in as mediators. The Union worked to block this and threatened war if any country recognized the Confederacy. In 1861, Southerners voluntarily embargoed cotton shipments, hoping to start an economic depression in Europe, that would force Britain to enter the war to get cotton, but this did not work. Worse, Europe turned to Egypt and India for cotton, which they found superior, hindering the South's recovery after the war.

Cotton diplomacy proved a failure as Europe had a surplus of cotton, while the 1860–62 crop failures in Europe made the North's grain exports of critical importance. It also helped to turn European opinion further away from the Confederacy. It was said that "King Corn was more powerful than King Cotton", as U.S. grain went from a quarter of the British import trade to almost half. Meanwhile, the war created employment for arms makers, ironworkers, and ships to transport weapons.

Lincoln's administration initially failed to appeal to European public opinion. At first, diplomats explained that the US was not committed to ending slavery and repeated legal arguments about the unconstitutionality of secession. Confederate representatives, on the other hand, started off more successfully, by ignoring slavery and instead focusing on their struggle for liberty, commitment to free trade, and the essential role of cotton in the European economy. The European aristocracy was "absolutely gleeful in pronouncing the American debacle as proof that the entire experiment in popular government had failed. European government leaders welcomed the fragmentation of the ascendant American Republic." However, there was still a European public with liberal sensibilities, that the U.S. sought to appeal to by building connections with the international press. As early as 1861, Union diplomats, such as Carl Schurz, realized emphasizing the war against slavery was the Union's most effective moral asset in the struggle for European public opinion. Seward was concerned an overly radical case for reunification would distress the European merchants with cotton interests; even so, Seward supported a widespread campaign of public diplomacy.

U.S. minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams proved particularly adept and convinced Britain not to openly challenge the Union blockade. The Confederacy purchased warships from commercial shipbuilders in Britain. The most famous, CSS Alabama, did considerable damage and led to serious postwar disputes. However, public opinion against slavery in Britain created a political liability for politicians, where the anti-slavery movement was powerful.

War loomed in late 1861 between the U.S. and Britain over the Trent affair, which began when U.S. Navy personnel boarded the British ship Trent and seized two Confederate diplomats. However, London and Washington were able to smooth this over after Lincoln released the two men. Prince Albert had left his deathbed to issue diplomatic instructions to Lord Lyons during the Trent affair. His request was honored, and, as a result, the British response to the US was toned down and helped avert a war. In 1862, the British government considered mediating between the Union and Confederacy, though even such an offer would have risked war with the US. British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston reportedly read Uncle Tom's Cabin three times when deciding on what his decision would be.

The Union victory in the Battle of Antietam caused the British to delay this decision. The Emancipation Proclamation would increase the political liability of supporting the Confederacy. Realizing that Washington could not intervene in Mexico as long as the Confederacy controlled Texas, France invaded Mexico in 1861 and installed the Habsburg Austrian archduke Maximilian I as emperor. Washington repeatedly protested France's violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Despite sympathy for the Confederacy, France's seizure of Mexico ultimately deterred it from war with the Union. Confederate offers late in the war to end slavery, in return for diplomatic recognition, were not seriously considered by London or Paris. After 1863, the Polish revolt against Russia further distracted the European powers and ensured they remained neutral.

Russia supported the Union, largely because it believed that the U.S. served as a counterbalance to its geopolitical rival, the UK. In 1863, the Russian Navy's Baltic and Pacific fleets wintered in the American ports of New York and San Francisco, respectively.

Eastern theater

Further information: Eastern theater of the American Civil War

County map of Civil War battles by theater and year

The Eastern theater refers to the military operations east of the Appalachian Mountains, including Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and the coastal fortifications and seaports of North Carolina.

Background

Army of the Potomac

Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan took command of the Union Army of the Potomac on July 26, 1861, and the war began in earnest in 1862. The 1862 Union strategy called for simultaneous advances along four axes:

1. McClellan would lead the main thrust in Virginia towards Richmond.
2. Ohio forces would advance through Kentucky into Tennessee.
3. The Missouri Department would drive south along the Mississippi River.
4. The westernmost attack would originate from Kansas.

Army of Northern Virginia

Robert E. Lee

The primary Confederate force in the Eastern theater was the Army of Northern Virginia. The Army originated as the (Confederate) Army of the Potomac, which was organized on June 20, 1861, from all operational forces in Northern Virginia. On July 20 and 21, the Army of the Shenandoah and forces from the District of Harpers Ferry were added. Units from the Army of the Northwest were merged into the Army of the Potomac between March 14 and May 17, 1862. The Army of the Potomac was renamed Army of Northern Virginia on March 14. The Army of the Peninsula was merged into it on April 12, 1862.

When Virginia declared its secession in April 1861, Robert E. Lee chose to follow his home state, despite his desire for the country to remain intact and an offer of a senior Union command. Lee's biographer, Douglas S. Freeman, asserts that the army received its final name from Lee when he issued orders assuming command on June 1, 1862. However, Freeman does admit that Lee corresponded with Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston, his predecessor in army command, before that date and referred to Johnston's command as the Army of Northern Virginia. Part of the confusion results from the fact Johnston commanded the Department of Northern Virginia (as of October 22, 1861) and the name Army of Northern Virginia can be seen as an informal consequence of its parent department's name. Jefferson Davis and Johnston did not adopt the name, but it is clear the organization of units as of March 14 was the same organization that Lee received on June 1, and thus it is generally referred to today as the Army of Northern Virginia, even if that is correct only in retrospect.

On July 4 at Harper's Ferry, Colonel Thomas J. Jackson assigned Jeb Stuart to command all the cavalry companies of the Army of the Shenandoah. He eventually commanded the Army of Northern Virginia's cavalry.

Battles

In July 1861, in of the first highly visible battles, Union troops under the command of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell attacking Confederate forces led by Beauregard near Washington were repulsed at the First Battle of Bull Run.

The Union had the upper hand at first, nearly pushing Confederate forces holding a defensive position into a rout, but Confederate reinforcements under Joseph E. Johnston arrived from the Shenandoah Valley by railroad, and the course of the battle quickly changed. A brigade of Virginians under the relatively unknown brigadier general from the Virginia Military Institute, Thomas J. Jackson, stood its ground, which resulted in Jackson's receiving his famous nickname, "Stonewall".

Upon the urging of Lincoln to begin offensive operations, McClellan attacked Virginia in the spring of 1862 by way of the peninsula between the York River and James River, southeast of Richmond. McClellan's army reached the gates of Richmond in the Peninsula campaign.

The Battle of Antietam, the Civil War's deadliest one-day fight

Also in the spring of 1862, in the Shenandoah Valley, Stonewall Jackson led his Valley Campaign. Audaciously employing rapid, unpredictable movements on interior lines, Jackson's 17,000 troops marched 646 miles (1,040 km) in 48 days and won minor battles as they successfully engaged three Union armies (52,000 men), including those of Nathaniel P. Banks and John C. Fremont, preventing them from reinforcing the Union offensive against Richmond. The swiftness of Jackson's men earned them the nickname of "foot cavalry".

Johnston halted McClellan's advance at the Battle of Seven Pines, but he was wounded in the battle, and Robert E. Lee assumed his position of command. Lee and top subordinates James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson defeated McClellan in the Seven Days Battles and forced his retreat.

The Northern Virginia Campaign, which included the Second Battle of Bull Run, ended in yet another victory for the South. McClellan resisted General-in-Chief Halleck's orders to send reinforcements to John Pope's Union Army of Virginia, which made it easier for Lee's Confederates to defeat twice the number of combined enemy troops.

Emboldened by Second Bull Run, the Confederacy made its first invasion of the North with the Maryland Campaign. Lee led 45,000 troops of the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River into Maryland on September 5. Lincoln then restored Pope's troops to McClellan. McClellan and Lee fought at the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day in US military history. Lee's army, checked at last, returned to Virginia before McClellan could destroy it. Antietam is considered a Union victory because it halted Lee's invasion of the North and provided an opportunity for Lincoln to announce his Emancipation Proclamation.

When the cautious McClellan failed to follow up on Antietam, he was replaced by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside. Burnside was defeated at the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, when more than 12,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded during futile frontal assaults against Marye's Heights. After the battle, Burnside was replaced by Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker.

Pickett's Charge

Hooker, too, proved unable to defeat Lee's army; despite outnumbering the Confederates by more than two to one, his Chancellorsville Campaign proved ineffective, and he was humiliated in the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. Chancellorsville is known as Lee's "perfect battle" because his risky decision to divide his army in the presence of a much larger enemy force resulted in a significant Confederate victory. Stonewall Jackson was shot in the left arm and right hand by friendly fire during the battle. The arm was amputated, but he died of pneumonia. Lee famously said: "He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right arm."

The fiercest fighting of the battle—and the second bloodiest day of the Civil War—occurred on May 3 as Lee launched multiple attacks against the Union position at Chancellorsville. That same day, John Sedgwick advanced across the Rappahannock River, defeated the small Confederate force at Marye's Heights in the Second Battle of Fredericksburg, and then moved to the west. The Confederates fought a successful delaying action at the Battle of Salem Church.

Gen. Hooker was replaced by Maj. Gen. George Meade during Lee's second invasion of the North, in June. Meade defeated Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863). This was the bloodiest battle and has been called the war's turning point. Pickett's Charge on July 3 is considered the high-water mark of the Confederacy because it signaled the collapse of serious Confederate threats of victory. Lee's army suffered 28,000 casualties, versus Meade's 23,000.

Western theater

Further information: Western theater of the American Civil War

The Western theater refers to military operations between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, including Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and parts of Louisiana.

Background

Army of the Tennessee and Army of the Cumberland

Ulysses S. Grant

The primary Union forces in this theater were the Army of the Tennessee and Army of the Cumberland, named for the two rivers, Tennessee River and Cumberland River. After Meade's inconclusive fall campaign, Lincoln turned to the Western theater for new leadership. At the same time, the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg surrendered, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River, permanently isolating the western Confederacy, and producing the new leader Lincoln needed, Ulysses S. Grant.

Army of Tennessee

The primary Confederate force in the Western theater was the Army of Tennessee. The army was formed on November 20, 1862, when General Braxton Bragg renamed the former Army of Mississippi. While the Confederate forces had successes in the Eastern theater, they were defeated many times in the West.

Battles

The Union's key strategist and tactician in the West was Ulysses S. Grant, who won victories at Forts Henry (February 6, 1862) and Donelson (February 11 to 16, 1862), earning him the nickname of "Unconditional Surrender" Grant. With these victories the Union gained control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. Nathan Bedford Forrest rallied nearly 4,000 Confederate troops and led them to escape across the Cumberland. Nashville and central Tennessee thus fell to the Union, leading to attrition of local food supplies and livestock and a breakdown in social organization.

Confederate general Leonidas Polk's invasion of Columbus ended Kentucky's policy of neutrality and turned it against the Confederacy. Grant used river transport and Andrew Hull Foote's gunboats of the Western Flotilla, to threaten the Confederacy's "Gibraltar of the West" at Columbus, Kentucky. Although rebuffed at Belmont, Grant cut off Columbus. The Confederates, lacking their gunboats, were forced to retreat and the Union took control of west Kentucky and opened Tennessee in March 1862.

At the Battle of Shiloh, in Shiloh, Tennessee in April 1862, the Confederates made a surprise attack that pushed Union forces against the river as night fell. Overnight, the Navy landed reinforcements, and Grant counterattacked. Grant and the Union won a decisive victory—the first battle with the high casualty rates that would occur repeatedly. The Confederates lost Albert Sidney Johnston, considered their finest general before the emergence of Lee.

The Battle of Chickamauga, the highest two-day losses

One of the early Union objectives was to capture the Mississippi River to cut the Confederacy in half. The Mississippi was opened to Union traffic to the southern border of Tennessee with the taking of Island No. 10 and New Madrid, Missouri, and then Memphis, Tennessee.

In April 1862, the Union Navy captured New Orleans. "The key to the river was New Orleans, the South's largest port [and] greatest industrial center." U.S. Naval forces under Farragut ran past Confederate defenses south of New Orleans. Confederate forces abandoned the city, giving the Union a critical anchor in the deep South, which allowed Union forces to move up the Mississippi. Memphis fell to Union forces on June 6, 1862, and became a key base for further advances south along the Mississippi. Only the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, prevented Union control of the entire river.

Bragg's second invasion of Kentucky in the Confederate Heartland Offensive included initial successes such as Kirby Smith's triumph at the Battle of Richmond and the capture of the Kentucky capital of Frankfort on September 3, 1862. However, the campaign ended with a meaningless victory over Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell at the Battle of Perryville. Bragg was forced to end his attempt at invading Kentucky and retreat, due to lack of logistical support and infantry recruits. Bragg was narrowly defeated by Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans at the Battle of Stones River in Tennessee, the culmination of the Stones River Campaign.

Naval forces assisted Grant in the long, complex Vicksburg Campaign that resulted in the Confederates surrendering at the Battle of Vicksburg in July 1863, which cemented Union control of the Mississippi and is one of the turning points of the war.

The one clear Confederate victory in the West was the Battle of Chickamauga. After Rosecrans' successful Tullahoma Campaign, Bragg, reinforced by Lt. Gen. James Longstreet's corps, defeated Rosecrans, despite the defensive stand of Maj. Gen. George Henry Thomas.

Rosecrans retreated to Chattanooga, which Bragg then besieged in the Chattanooga Campaign. Grant marched to the relief of Rosecrans and defeated Bragg at the Third Battle of Chattanooga, eventually causing Longstreet to abandon his Knoxville Campaign and driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee and opening a route to Atlanta and the heart of the Confederacy.

Trans-Mississippi theater

Further information: Trans-Mississippi theater of the American Civil War

Background

The Trans-Mississippi theater refers to military operations west of the Mississippi, encompassing most of Missouri, Arkansas, most of Louisiana, and the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. The Trans-Mississippi District was formed by the Confederate States Army to better coordinate Ben McCulloch's command of troops in Arkansas and Louisiana, Sterling Price's Missouri State Guard, as well as the portion of Earl Van Dorn's command that included the Indian Territory and excluded the Army of the West. The Union's command was the Trans-Mississippi Division, or the Military Division of West Mississippi.

Battles

Nathaniel Lyon secured docks and arsenal in St. Louis, leading Union Army forces to expel the Missouri Confederate forces and government

The first battle of the Trans-Mississippi theater was the Battle of Wilson's Creek (August 1861). The Confederates were driven from Missouri early in the war as a result of the Battle of Pea Ridge.

Extensive guerrilla warfare characterized the trans-Mississippi region, as the Confederacy lacked the troops and logistics to support regular armies that could challenge Union control. Roving Confederate bands such as Quantrill's Raiders terrorized the countryside, striking military installations and civilian settlements. The "Sons of Liberty" and "Order of the American Knights" attacked pro-Union people, elected officeholders, and unarmed uniformed soldiers. These partisans could not be driven out of Missouri, until an entire regular Union infantry division was engaged. By 1864, these violent activities harmed the nationwide antiwar movement organizing against the re-election of Lincoln. Missouri not only stayed in the Union, but Lincoln took 70 percent of the vote to win re-election.

Small-scale military actions south and west of Missouri sought to control Indian Territory and New Mexico Territory for the Union. The Battle of Glorieta Pass was the decisive battle of the New Mexico Campaign. The Union repulsed Confederate incursions into New Mexico in 1862, and the exiled Arizona government withdrew into Texas. In the Indian Territory, civil war broke out within tribes. About 12,000 Indian warriors fought for the Confederacy but fewer for the Union. The most prominent Cherokee was Brigadier General Stand Watie, the last Confederate general to surrender.

After the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, Jefferson Davis informed General Kirby Smith in Texas that he could expect no further help from east of the Mississippi. Although he lacked resources to beat Union armies, he built up a formidable arsenal at Tyler, along with his own Kirby Smithdom economy, a virtual "independent fiefdom" in Texas, including railroad construction and international smuggling. The Union, in turn, did not directly engage him. Its 1864 Red River Campaign to take Shreveport, Louisiana, failed and Texas remained in Confederate hands throughout the war.

Lower Seaboard theater

Further information: Lower seaboard theater of the American Civil War

Background

The Lower Seaboard theater refers to military and naval operations that occurred near the coastal areas of the Southeast as well as the southern part of the Mississippi. Union Naval activities were dictated by the Anaconda Plan.

Battles

New Orleans captured

One of the earliest battles was fought at Port Royal Sound (November 1861), south of Charleston. Much of the war along the South Carolina coast concentrated on capturing Charleston. In attempting to capture Charleston, the Union military tried two approaches: by land over James or Morris Islands or through the harbor. However, the Confederates were able to drive back each attack. A famous land attack was the Second Battle of Fort Wagner, in which the 54th Massachusetts Infantry took part. The Union suffered a serious defeat, losing 1,515 soldiers while the Confederates lost only 174. However, the 54th was hailed for its valor, which encouraged the general acceptance of the recruitment of African American soldiers into the Union Army, which reinforced the Union's numerical advantage.

Fort Pulaski on the Georgia coast was an early target for the Union navy. Following the capture of Port Royal, an expedition was organized with engineer troops under the command of Captain Quincy A. Gillmore, forcing a Confederate surrender. The Union army occupied the fort for the rest of the war after repairing it.

In April 1862, a Union naval task force commanded by Commander David D. Porter attacked Forts Jackson and St. Philip, which guarded the river approach to New Orleans from the south. While part of the fleet bombarded the forts, other vessels forced a break in the obstructions in the river and enabled the rest of the fleet to steam upriver to the city. A Union army force commanded by Major General Benjamin Butler landed near the forts and forced their surrender. Butler's controversial command of New Orleans earned him the nickname "Beast".

The following year, the Union Army of the Gulf commanded by Major General Nathaniel P. Banks laid siege to Port Hudson for nearly eight weeks, the longest siege in US military history. The Confederates attempted to defend with the Bayou Teche Campaign but surrendered after Vicksburg. These surrenders gave the Union control over the Mississippi.

Several small skirmishes but no major battles were fought in Florida. The biggest was the Battle of Olustee in early 1864.

Pacific Coast theater

Further information: Pacific coast theater of the American Civil War

The Pacific Coast theater refers to military operations on the Pacific Ocean and in the states and Territories west of the Continental Divide.

Conquest of Virginia

William Tecumseh Sherman

At the beginning of 1864, Lincoln made Grant commander of all Union armies. Grant made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac and put Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in command of most of the western armies. Grant understood the concept of total war and believed, along with Lincoln and Sherman, that only the utter defeat of Confederate forces and their economic base would end the war. This was total war not in killing civilians, but in taking provisions and forage and destroying homes, farms, and railroads, that Grant said "would otherwise have gone to the support of secession and rebellion. This policy I believe exercised a material influence in hastening the end."

Grant devised a coordinated strategy that would strike at the entire Confederacy from multiple directions. Generals Meade and Benjamin Butler were ordered to move against Lee near Richmond, General Franz Sigel was to attack the Shenandoah Valley, General Sherman was to capture Atlanta and march to the Atlantic Ocean, Generals George Crook and William W. Averell were to operate against railroad supply lines in West Virginia, and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks was to capture Mobile, Alabama.

Grant's Overland Campaign

Grant's army set out on the Overland Campaign intending to draw Lee into a defense of Richmond, where they would attempt to pin down and destroy the Confederate army. The Union army first attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles, notably at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. These resulted in heavy losses on both sides and forced Lee's Confederates to fall back repeatedly. At the Battle of Yellow Tavern, the Confederates lost Jeb Stuart.

An attempt to outflank Lee from the south failed under Butler, who was trapped inside the Bermuda Hundred river bend. Each battle resulted in setbacks for the Union that mirrored those they had suffered under prior generals, though unlike them, Grant chose to fight on rather than retreat. Grant was tenacious and kept pressing Lee's Army of Northern Virginia back to Richmond. While Lee was preparing for an attack on Richmond, Grant unexpectedly turned south to cross the James River and began the protracted Siege of Petersburg, where the two armies engaged in trench warfare for over nine months.

Sheridan's Valley Campaign

Philip Sheridan

Grant finally found a commander, General Philip Sheridan, aggressive enough to prevail in the Valley campaigns of 1864. Sheridan was repelled at the Battle of New Market Confederate Gen. John C. Breckinridge. The Battle of New Market was the Confederacy's last major victory and included a charge by teenage VMI cadets. After redoubling his efforts, Sheridan defeated Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early in a series of battles, including a decisive defeat at the Battle of Cedar Creek. Sheridan then proceeded to destroy the agricultural base of the Shenandoah Valley, a strategy similar to the tactics Sherman later employed in Georgia.

Sherman's March to the Sea

Meanwhile, Sherman maneuvered from Chattanooga to Atlanta, defeating Confederate Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood. The fall of Atlanta on September 2, 1864, guaranteed the reelection of Lincoln. Hood left the Atlanta area to swing around and menace Sherman's supply lines and invade Tennessee in the Franklin–Nashville Campaign. Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield defeated Hood at the Battle of Franklin, and George H. Thomas dealt Hood a massive defeat at the Battle of Nashville, effectively destroying Hood's army.

Leaving Atlanta, and his base of supplies, Sherman's army marched, with no destination set, laying waste to about 20% of the farms in Georgia in his "March to the Sea". He reached the Atlantic at Savannah, Georgia, in December 1864. Sherman's army was followed by thousands of freed slaves; there were no major battles along the march. Sherman turned north through South Carolina and North Carolina, to approach the Confederate Virginia lines from the south, increasing the pressure on Lee's army.

The Waterloo of the Confederacy

Lee's army, thinned by desertion and casualties, was now much smaller than Grant's. One last Confederate attempt to break the Union hold on Petersburg failed at the decisive Battle of Five Forks on April 1. The Union now controlled the entire perimeter surrounding Richmond–Petersburg, completely cutting it off from the Confederacy. Realizing the capital was now lost, Lee's army and the Confederate government were forced to evacuate. The Confederate capital fell on April 2–3, to the Union XXV Corps, composed of black troops. The remaining Confederate units fled west after a defeat at Sayler's Creek on April 6.

End of the war

Main article: Conclusion of the American Civil War

This New York Times front page celebrated Lee's surrender, headlining how Grant let Confederate officers retain their sidearms and "paroled" the Confederate officers and men.

News of Lee's April 9 surrender reached this southern newspaper (Savannah, Georgia) on April 15—after the April 14 shooting of President Lincoln. The article quotes Grant's terms of surrender.

Lee did not intend to surrender, but planned to regroup at Appomattox Station, where supplies were to be waiting, and then continue the war. Grant chased Lee and got in front of him, so that when Lee's army reached the village of Appomattox Court House, they were surrounded. After an initial battle, Lee decided the fight was hopeless, and surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Grant on April 9, 1865, during a conference at the McLean House. In an untraditional gesture and as a sign of Grant's respect and anticipation of peacefully restoring Confederate states to the Union, Lee was permitted to keep his sword and horse, Traveller. His men were paroled, and a chain of Confederate surrenders began.

On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. Lincoln died early the next morning. Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson, was unharmed, because his would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, lost his nerve, so Johnson was immediately sworn in as president.

Meanwhile, Confederate forces across the South surrendered, as news of Lee's surrender reached them. On April 26, the same day Sergeant Boston Corbett killed Booth at a tobacco barn, Johnston surrendered nearly 90,000 troops of the Army of Tennessee to Sherman at Bennett Place, near present-day Durham, North Carolina. It proved to be the largest surrender of Confederate forces. On May 4, all remaining Confederate forces in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana east of the Mississippi, under the command of Lt. General Richard Taylor, surrendered. Confederate president Davis was captured in retreat at Irwinville, Georgia on May 10.

The final land battle was fought on May 13, 1865, at the Battle of Palmito Ranch in Texas. On May 26, 1865, Confederate Lt. Gen. Simon B. Buckner, acting for Edmund Smith, signed a military convention surrendering Confederate forces in the Trans-Mississippi Department. This date is often cited by contemporaries and historians as the effective end date of the war. On June 2, with most of his troops having already gone home, a reluctant Kirby Smith had little choice but to sign the official surrender document. On June 23, Cherokee leader and Brig. General Stand Watie became the last Confederate general to surrender his forces.

On June 19, 1865, Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger announced General Order No. 3, bringing the Emancipation Proclamation into effect in Texas and freeing the last slaves of the Confederacy. The anniversary of this date is now celebrated as Juneteenth.

The naval part of the war ended more slowly. It had begun on April 11, two days after Lee's surrender, when Lincoln proclaimed that foreign nations had no further "claim or pretense" to deny equality of maritime rights and hospitalities to U.S. warships and, in effect, that rights extended to Confederate ships to use neutral ports as safe havens from U.S. warships should end. Having no response to Lincoln's proclamation, President Johnson issued a similar proclamation dated May 10, more directly stating that the war was almost at an end and insurgent cruisers still at sea, and prepared to attack U.S. ships, should not have rights to do so through use of safe foreign ports or waters. Britain finally responded on June 6, by transmitting a letter from Foreign Secretary John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, to the Lords of the Admiralty withdrawing rights to Confederate warships to enter British ports and waters. U.S. Secretary of State Seward welcomed the withdrawal of concessions to the Confederates. Finally, on October 18, Russell advised the Admiralty that the time specified in his June message had elapsed and "all measures of a restrictive nature on vessels of war of the United States in British ports, harbors, and waters, are now to be considered as at an end". Nonetheless, the final Confederate surrender was in Liverpool, England where James Iredell Waddell, the captain of CSS Shenandoah, surrendered the cruiser to British authorities on November 6.

Legally, the war did not end until August 20, 1866, when President Johnson issued a proclamation that declared "that the said insurrection is at an end and that peace, order, tranquillity, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America".

Union victory and aftermath

Map of Confederate territory losses year by year

The causes of the war, reasons for its outcome, and even its name are subjects of lingering contention. The North and West grew rich while the once-rich South became poor for a century. The national political power of the slaveowners and rich Southerners ended. Historians are less sure about the results of postwar Reconstruction, especially regarding the second-class citizenship of the freedmen and their poverty.

Historians have debated whether the Confederacy could have won the war. Most scholars, including James M. McPherson, argue Confederate victory was possible. McPherson argues that the North's advantage in population and resources made Northern victory likely, but not guaranteed. He argues that if the Confederacy had fought using unconventional tactics, it would have more easily been able to hold out long enough to exhaust the Union. Confederates did not need to invade and hold enemy territory to win, but only to fight a defensive war to convince the North the cost of winning was too high. The North needed to conquer and hold vast stretches of enemy territory and defeat Confederate armies to win. Lincoln was not a military dictator and could fight only as long as the American public supported it. The Confederacy sought to win independence by outlasting Lincoln; however, after Atlanta fell and Lincoln defeated McClellan in the election of 1864, hope for a political victory for the South ended. Lincoln had secured the support of the Republicans, War Democrats, border states, emancipated slaves, and the neutrality of Britain and France. By defeating the Democrats and McClellan, he defeated the Copperheads, who had wanted a negotiated peace with the Confederacy.

Comparison of Union and Confederacy, 1860–1864

	Year	Union	Confederacy
Population	1860	22,100,000 (71%)	9,100,000 (29%)
	1864	28,800,000 (90%)	3,000,000 (10%)
Free	1860	21,700,000 (98%)	5,600,000 (62%)
Slave	1860	490,000 (2%)	3,550,000 (38%)
	1864	negligible	1,900,000
Soldiers	1860–64	2,100,000 (67%)	1,064,000 (33%)
Railroad miles	1860	21,800 (71%)	8,800 (29%)
	1864	29,100 (98%)	negligible
Manufactures	1860	90%	10%
	1864	98%	2%
Arms production	1860	97%	3%
	1864	98%	2%
Cotton bales	1860	negligible	4,500,000
	1864	300,000	negligible
Exports	1860	30%	70%
	1864	98%	2%

Some scholars argue the Union held an insurmountable long-term advantage over the Confederacy in industrial strength and population. Confederate actions, they argue, only delayed defeat. Historian Shelby Foote expressed this view succinctly:

I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back .... If there had been more Southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that War.

A minority view among historians is that the Confederacy lost because, as E. Merton Coulter put it, "people did not will hard enough and long enough to win." However, most historians reject the argument. McPherson, after reading thousands of letters written by Confederate soldiers, found strong patriotism that continued to the end; they truly believed they were fighting for freedom and liberty. Even as the Confederacy was visibly collapsing in 1864–65, most Confederate soldiers were fighting hard. Historian Gary Gallagher cites General Sherman, who in early 1864 commented, "The devils seem to have a determination that cannot but be admired." Despite their loss of slaves and wealth, with starvation looming, Sherman continued, "yet I see no sign of let-up—some few deserters—plenty tired of war, but the masses determined to fight it out."

Also important were Lincoln's eloquence in rationalizing the national purpose and his skill in keeping the border states committed to the Union cause. The Emancipation Proclamation was an effective use of the President's war powers. The Confederate government failed to get Europe involved militarily. Southern leaders needed to get European powers to help break the blockade the Union had created around Southern ports. Lincoln's naval blockade was 95% effective at stopping trade goods; as a result, imports and exports to the South declined significantly. The abundance of European cotton and Britain's hostility to slavery, along with Lincoln's naval blockades, severely decreased any chance that Britain or France would enter the war.

Historian Don Doyle has argued that the Union victory had a major impact on world history. The Union victory energized popular democratic forces. A Confederate victory, on the other hand, would have meant a new birth of slavery, not freedom. Historian Fergus Bordewich, following Doyle, argues that:

The North's victory decisively proved the durability of democratic government. Confederate independence, on the other hand, would have established an American model for reactionary politics and race-based repression that would likely have cast an international shadow into the 20th century and perhaps beyond.

Scholars have debated what the effects of the war were on political and economic power in the South. The prevailing view is that the southern planter elite retained its powerful position in the South. However, a 2017 study challenges this, noting that while some Southern elites retained their economic status, the turmoil of the 1860s created greater opportunities for economic mobility in the South, than in the North.

Casualties

One in thirteen veterans were amputees.

Remains of both sides were reinterred.

Andersonville National Cemetery, Georgia

Casualties according to the US National Park Service

Category	Union	Confederate
Killed in action	110,100	94,000
Disease	224,580	164,000
Wounded in action	275,154	194,026
Captured (inc those who died as POWs)	211,411 (30,192)	462,634 (31,000)
Total	821,245	914,660

The war resulted in at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease—and 50,000 civilians. J. David Hacker believes the number of soldier deaths was approximately 750,000, 20 percent higher than traditionally estimated, and possibly as high as 850,000. A novel way of calculating casualties, by looking at the deviation of the death rate of men of fighting age from the norm, through analysis of census data, found at least 627,000 and at most 888,000 people, but most likely 761,000 people, died in the war. This would break down to approximately 350,000 Confederate and 411,000 Union military deaths, going by the proportion of Union to Confederate battle losses. As McPherson notes, the war's "cost in American lives was as great as in all of the nation's other wars combined through Vietnam."

Based on 1860 census figures, 8 percent of all white men aged 13-43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South. About 56,000 soldiers died in prison camps during the War. An estimated 60,000 soldiers lost limbs.

Of the 359,528 Union Army dead, amounting to 15 percent of the over two million who served:

• 110,070 were killed in action (67,000) or died of wounds (43,000).
• 199,790 died of disease (75 percent was due to the war, the remainder would have occurred in civilian life anyway)
• 24,866 died in Confederate prison camps
• 9,058 were killed by accidents or drowning
• 15,741 other/unknown deaths

In addition, there were 4,523 deaths in the Navy (2,112 in battle) and 460 in the Marines (148 in battle).

After the Emancipation Proclamation authorized freed slaves to "be received into the armed service of the United States", former slaves who escaped from plantations or were liberated by the Union Army, were recruited into the United States Colored Troops regiments of the Union Army, as were black men who had not been slaves. The US Colored Troops made up 10 percent of the Union death toll—15 percent of Union deaths from disease and less than 3 percent of those killed in battle. Losses among African Americans were high. In the last year and a half and from all reported casualties, approximately 20 percent of all African Americans enrolled in the military died during the war. Their mortality rate was significantly higher than white soldiers. While 15% of US Volunteers and just 9% of white Regular Army troops died, 21% of US Colored Troops died.

An illustration of the war dead following the Battle of Antietam battlefield in 1862

While the figures of 360,000 army deaths for the Union and 260,000 for the Confederacy remained commonly cited, they are incomplete. In addition to many Confederate records being missing, partly as a result of Confederate widows not reporting deaths due to being ineligible for benefits, both armies only counted troops who died during their service and not the tens of thousands who died of wounds or diseases after being discharged. This often happened only days or weeks later. Francis Amasa Walker, superintendent of the 1870 census, used census and surgeon general data to estimate a minimum of 500,000 Union military deaths and 350,000 Confederate military deaths, a total of 850,000 soldiers. While Walker's estimates were originally dismissed because of the 1870 census's undercounting, it was later found that the census was only off by 6.5% and that the data Walker used would be roughly accurate.

Losses were far higher than during the war with Mexico, which saw roughly 13,000 American deaths, including fewer than two thousand killed in battle, between 1846-48. One reason for the high number of battle deaths in the civil war was the continued use of tactics similar to those of the Napoleonic Wars, such as charging. With the advent of more accurate rifled barrels, Minié balls, and (near the end of the war for the Union) repeating firearms such as the Spencer repeating rifle and the Henry repeating rifle, soldiers were mowed down when standing in lines in the open. This led to the adoption of trench warfare, a style of fighting that defined much of World War I.

Deaths among former slaves has proven hard to estimate, due to the lack of reliable census data, though they were known to be considerable, as former slaves were set free or escaped in massive numbers in areas where the Union army did not have sufficient shelter, doctors, or food for them. Professor Jim Downs states that tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of slaves died during the war from disease, starvation, or exposure, and that if these deaths are counted in the war's total, the death toll would exceed 1 million.

It is estimated that during the war, of the equines killed, including horses, mules, donkeys and even confiscated children's ponies, over 32,600 of them belonged to the Union and 45,800 the Confederacy. However, other estimates place the total at 1,000,000.

It is estimated that 544 Confederate flags were captured during the war by the Union. The flags were sent to the War Department in Washington. The Union flags captured by the Confederates were sent to Richmond.

Emancipation

Abolition of slavery in the various states over time:

  Abolition of slavery during or shortly after the American Revolution

  The Northwest Ordinance, 1787

  Gradual emancipation in New York (starting 1799, completed 1827) and New Jersey (starting 1804, completed by Thirteenth Amendment, 1865)

  The Missouri Compromise, 1821

  Effective abolition of slavery by Mexican or joint US/British authority

  Abolition of slavery by Congressional action, 1861

  Abolition of slavery by Congressional action, 1862

  Emancipation Proclamation as originally issued, January 1, 1863

  Subsequent operation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863

  Abolition of slavery by state action during the Civil War

  Operation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1864

  Operation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865

  Thirteenth Amendment to the US constitution, December 18, 1865

  Territory incorporated into the US after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment

Abolishing slavery was not a Union war goal from the outset, but quickly became one. Lincoln's initial claims were that preserving the Union was the central goal. In contrast, the South fought to preserve slavery. While not all Southerners saw themselves as fighting for slavery, most officers and over a third of the rank and file in Lee's army had close family ties to slavery. To Northerners, the motivation was primarily to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery. However, as the war dragged on, and it became clear slavery was central to the conflict, and that emancipation was (to quote the Emancipation Proclamation) "a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing [the] rebellion," Lincoln and his cabinet made ending slavery a war goal, culminating in the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln's decision to issue the Proclamation angered Peace Democrats ("Copperheads") and War Democrats, but energized most Republicans. By warning that free blacks would flood the North, Democrats made gains in the 1862 elections, but they did not gain control of Congress. The Republicans' counterargument that slavery was the mainstay of the enemy steadily gained support, with the Democrats losing decisively in the 1863 elections in the Northern state of Ohio, when they tried to resurrect anti-black sentiment.

Emancipation Proclamation

Main article: Emancipation Proclamation

Slavery for the Confederacy's 3.5 million blacks effectively ended in each area when Union armies arrived; they were nearly all freed by the Proclamation. The last Confederate slaves were freed on June 19, 1865, celebrated as the modern holiday of Juneteenth. Slaves in the border states and those in some former Confederate territory occupied before the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state action or (on December 6, 1865) by the Thirteenth Amendment. The Emancipation Proclamation enabled African Americans, both free blacks and escaped slaves, to join the Union Army. About 190,000 volunteered, further enhancing the numerical advantage the Union armies enjoyed over the Confederates, who did not dare emulate the equivalent manpower source for fear of undermining the legitimacy of slavery.

During the war, sentiment concerning slaves, enslavement, and emancipation in the United States was divided. Lincoln's fears of making slavery a war issue were based on a harsh reality: abolition did not enjoy wide support in the west, the territories, and the border states. In 1861, Lincoln worried that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss of the border states, and that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game." Copperheads and some War Democrats opposed emancipation, although the latter eventually accepted it as part of the total war needed to save the Union.

At first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Generals Frémont and David Hunter, to keep the loyalty of the border states and the War Democrats. Lincoln warned the border states that a more radical type of emancipation would happen if his plan of gradual compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization was rejected. But compensated emancipation occurred only in the District of Columbia, where Congress had the power to enact it. When Lincoln told his cabinet about his proposed emancipation proclamation, which would apply to the states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, Seward advised Lincoln to wait for a Union military victory before issuing it, as to do otherwise would seem like "our last shriek on the retreat". Walter Stahr, however, writes, "There are contemporary sources, however, that suggest others were involved in the decision to delay", and Stahr quotes them.

Contrabands, who were fugitive slaves, including cooks, laundresses, laborers, teamsters, railroad repair crews, fled to the Union Army, but were not legally freed until the Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln signed on January 1, 1863, more than two years before the end of the Civil War.

In 1863, the Union Army accepted Freedmen; seen here are black and white teenaged soldiers who volunteered to fight for the Union.

Lincoln laid the groundwork for public support in an open letter published in response to Horace Greeley's "The Prayer of Twenty Millions"; the letter stated that Lincoln's goal was to save the Union, and that, if he freed the slaves, it would be as a means to that end. He also had a meeting at the White House with five African American representatives on August 14, 1862. Arranging for a reporter to be present, he urged his visitors to agree to the voluntary colonization of black people. Lincoln's motive for both his letter to Greeley and his statement to the black visitors was apparently to make his forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation more palatable to racist white people. A Union victory in the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, provided Lincoln with an opportunity to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and the War Governors' Conference added support for the proclamation.

Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. It stated that slaves in all states in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be free. He issued his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, keeping his promise. In his letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln explained his belief that "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong .... And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling .... I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."

Lincoln's moderate approach succeeded in inducing the border states to remain in the Union and War Democrats to support the Union. The border states, which included Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and Union-controlled regions around New Orleans, Norfolk, Virginia, and elsewhere, were not covered by the Emancipation Proclamation. Nor was Tennessee, which had come under Union control. Missouri and Maryland abolished slavery on their own; Kentucky and Delaware did not. Still, the proclamation did not enjoy universal support. It caused much unrest in what were then considered western states, where racist sentiments led to a great fear of abolition. There was some concern that the proclamation would lead to the secession of western states, and its issuance prompted the stationing of Union troops in Illinois in case of rebellion.

Since the Emancipation Proclamation was based on the President's war powers, it applied only in territory held by Confederates at the time it was issued. However, the Proclamation became a symbol of the Union's growing commitment to add emancipation to the Union's definition of liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation greatly reduced the Confederacy's hope of being recognized or otherwise aided by Britain or France. By late 1864, Lincoln was playing a leading role in getting the House of Representatives to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, which mandated the ending of chattel slavery.

Reconstruction

Main article: Reconstruction era

Through the supervision of the Freedmen's Bureau, Northern teachers traveled into the South to provide education and training for the newly freed population.

The war devastated the South and posed serious questions of how it would be reintegrated into the Union. The war destroyed much of the South's wealth, in part because wealth held in enslaved people (at least $1,000 each for a healthy adult prior to the war) was wiped off the books. All accumulated investment in Confederate bonds was forfeited; most banks and railroads were bankrupt. The income per person dropped to less than 40 percent of that of the North, and that lasted into the 20th century. Southern influence in the federal government, previously considerable, was greatly diminished until the second half of the 20th century. Reconstruction began during the war, with the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, and it continued until 1877. It comprised multiple complex methods to resolve the outstanding issues of the aftermath, the most important of which were the three "Reconstruction Amendments" to the Constitution: the 13th outlawing slavery (1865), the 14th guaranteeing citizenship to former slaves (1868), and the 15th ensuring voting rights to former male slaves (1870). From the Union perspective, the goals of Reconstruction were to consolidate victory by reuniting the Union, to guarantee a "republican form of government" for the ex-Confederate states, and to permanently end slavery—and prevent semi-slavery status.

President Johnson, who took office in April 1865, took a lenient approach and saw the achievement of the main war goals as realized in 1865, when each ex-rebel state repudiated secession and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Radical Republicans demanded proof that Confederate nationalism was dead and that the slaves were truly free. They overrode Johnson's vetoes of civil rights legislation, and the House impeached him, although the Senate did not convict him. In 1868 and 1872, the Republican candidate Grant won the presidency. In 1872, the "Liberal Republicans" argued that the war goals had been achieved and Reconstruction should end. They chose Horace Greeley to head a presidential ticket in 1872 but were decisively defeated. In 1874, Democrats, primarily Southern, took control of Congress and opposed further reconstruction. The Compromise of 1877 closed with a national consensus, except on the part of former slaves, that the war had finally ended. With the withdrawal of federal troops, however, whites retook control of every Southern legislature, and the Jim Crow era of disenfranchisement and legal segregation was ushered in.

The war had a demonstrable impact on American politics. Many veterans on both sides were elected to political office, including five U.S. Presidents: Ulysses Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley.

Memory and historiography

Monument to the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veteran organization

Cherokee Confederates reunion in New Orleans in 1903

The war is a central event in American collective memory. There are innumerable statues, commemorations, books, and archival collections. The memory includes the home front, military affairs, the treatment of soldiers, both living and dead, in the war's aftermath, depictions of the war in literature and art, evaluations of heroes and villains, and considerations of the moral and political lessons of the war. The last theme includes moral evaluations of racism and slavery, heroism in combat and behind the lines, and issues of democracy and minority rights, as well as the notion of an "Empire of Liberty" influencing the world.

Historians have paid more attention to the causes of the war than to the war itself. Military history has largely developed outside academia, leading to a proliferation of studies by non-scholars who nevertheless are familiar with the primary sources and pay close attention to battles and campaigns and who write for the general public. Practically every major figure in the war, both North and South, has had a serious biographical study.

Even the name used for the conflict has been controversial, with many names used for it. During and immediately after the war, Northern historians often used a term like "War of the Rebellion". Writers in rebel states often referred to the "War for Southern Independence". Some Southerners have described it as the "War of Northern Aggression".

Lost Cause

Main article: Lost Cause of the Confederacy

The memory of the war in the white South crystallized in the myth of the "Lost Cause": that the Confederate cause was just and heroic. The myth shaped regional identity and race relations for generations. Alan T. Nolan notes that the Lost Cause was expressly a rationalization, a cover-up to vindicate the name and fame of those in rebellion. Some claims revolve around the insignificance of slavery as a cause; some appeals highlight cultural differences between North and South; the military conflict by Confederate actors is idealized; in any case, secession was said to be lawful. Nolan argues that the adoption of the Lost Cause perspective facilitated the reunification of the North and the South while excusing the "virulent racism" of the 19th century, sacrificing black American progress to white man's reunification. He also deems the Lost Cause "a caricature of the truth. This caricature wholly misrepresents and distorts the facts of the matter" in every instance. The Lost Cause myth was formalized by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, whose The Rise of American Civilization (1927) spawned "Beardian historiography". The Beards downplayed slavery, abolitionism, and issues of morality. Though this interpretation was abandoned by the Beards in the 1940s, and by historians generally by the 1950s, Beardian themes still echo among Lost Cause writers.

Battlefield preservation

Main article: American Civil War battlefield preservation

Beginning in 1961, the U.S. Post Office released commemorative stamps for five famous battles, each issued on the 100th anniversary of the respective battle.

The first efforts at Civil War battlefield preservation and memorialization came during the war, with the establishment of National Cemeteries at Gettysburg, Mill Springs and Chattanooga. Soldiers began erecting markers on battlefields beginning with the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. The oldest surviving monument is the Hazen Brigade Monument near Murfreesboro in Central Tennessee, built in the summer of 1863 by soldiers in Union Col. William B. Hazen's brigade to mark the spot where they buried their dead, following the Battle of Stones River.

In the 1890s, the government established five Civil War battlefield parks under the jurisdiction of the War Department, beginning with the creation of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and the Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland, in 1890. The Shiloh National Military Park was established in 1894 in Shiloh, Tennessee, followed by the Gettysburg National Military Park in 1895, and Vicksburg National Military Park in 1899. In 1933, these five parks and other national monuments were transferred to the National Park Service. Chief among modern efforts to preserve Civil War sites has been the American Battlefield Trust, with more than 130 battlefields in 24 states. The five major battlefield parks operated by the National Park Service had a combined 3 million visitors in 2018, down 70% from 10 million in 1970.

Commemoration

Further information: Commemoration of the American Civil War and Commemoration of the American Civil War on postage stamps

Top: Grand Army of the Republic (Union)
Bottom: United Confederate Veterans

The Civil War has been commemorated in many capacities, ranging from the reenactment of battles to statues and memorial halls erected, films, stamps and coins with Civil War themes being issued, all of which helped to shape public memory. These commemorations occurred in greater numbers on the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the war. Hollywood's take on the war has been especially influential in shaping public memory, as in such film classics as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Lincoln (2012). Ken Burns's PBS television series The Civil War (1990) is well-remembered, though criticized for its historical inaccuracy.

Technological significance

Technological innovations during the war had a great impact on 19th-century science. The war was an early example of an "industrial war", in which technological might is used to achieve military supremacy. New inventions, such as the train and telegraph, delivered soldiers, supplies and messages at a time when horses had been the fastest way to travel. It was also in this war that aerial warfare, in the form of reconnaissance balloons, was first used. It saw the first action involving steam-powered ironclad warships in naval warfare history. Repeating firearms such as the Henry rifle, Spencer rifle, Colt revolving rifle, Triplett & Scott carbine and others, first appeared during the Civil War; they were a revolutionary invention that would soon replace muzzle-loading and single-shot firearms. The war saw the first appearances of rapid-firing weapons and machine guns such as the Agar gun and Gatling gun.

In works of culture and art

The Peacemakers by George Peter Alexander Healy portrays, from left to right, Sherman, Grant, Lincoln, and Porter discussing plans for the last weeks of the Civil War aboard the steamer River Queen in March 1865. It currently hangs in the Oval Office dining room.

The Civil War is one of the most studied events in American history, and the collection of cultural works around it is enormous. This section gives an abbreviated overview of the most notable works.

Literature

• When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd and O Captain! My Captain! (1865) by Walt Whitman, famous eulogies to Lincoln
• Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) poetry by Herman Melville
• The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) by Jefferson Davis
• The Private History of a Campaign That Failed (1885) by Mark Twain
• Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South (1887) by Jules Verne
• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890) by Ambrose Bierce
• The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane
• The Challenge to Sirius (1917) by Sheila Kaye-Smith
• Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell
• North and South (1982) by John Jakes
• The March: A Novel (2005) by E. L. Doctorow, fictionalized account of Sherman's March to the Sea

Film

• The Birth of a Nation (1915, US)
• The General (1926, US)
• Operator 13 (1934, US)
• Gone with the Wind (1939, US)
• The Red Badge of Courage (1951, US)
• The Horse Soldiers (1959, US)
• Shenandoah (1965, US)
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966, Italy-Spain-FRG)
• The Beguiled (1971, US)
• The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976, US)
• North and South (miniseries; 1985–1994, US)
• Glory (1989, US)
• The Civil War (1990, US)
• Gettysburg (1993, US)
• The Last Outlaw (1993, US)
• Cold Mountain (2003, US)
• Gods and Generals (2003, US)
• Lincoln (2012, US)
• Free State of Jones (2016, US)

Music

See also: Music of the American Civil War

• "Dixie"
• "Battle Cry of Freedom"
• "Battle Hymn of the Republic"
• "The Bonnie Blue Flag"
• "John Brown's Body"
• "When Johnny Comes Marching Home"
• "Marching Through Georgia"
• "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"

Video games

• North & South (1989, FR)
• Sid Meier's Gettysburg! (1997, US)
• Sid Meier's Antietam! (1999, US)
• American Conquest: Divided Nation (2006, US)
• Forge of Freedom: The American Civil War (2006, US)
• The History Channel: Civil War – A Nation Divided (2006, US)
• AGEOD's American Civil War (2007, US/FR)
• History Civil War: Secret Missions (2008, US)
• Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (2009, US)
• Darkest of Days (2009, US)
• Victoria II: A House Divided (2011, US)
• AGEOD's American Civil War II (2013, US/FR)
• Ultimate General: Gettysburg (2014, UKR)
• Ultimate General: Civil War (2016, UKR)
• War of Rights (TBD, US)

See also

• American Civil War by state
• Central Confederacy
• Foreign enlistment in the American Civil War
• Outline of the American Civil War
• Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials

References

Bibliography

Main articles: Bibliography of the American Civil War and Bibliography of American Civil War naval history

• Ahlstrom, Sydney E. (1972). A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-01762-5.
• Anderson, Bern (1989). By Sea and By River: The naval history of the Civil War. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80367-3.
• Asante, Molefi Kete; Mazama, Ama (2004). Encyclopedia of Black Studies. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications. ISBN 978-0-7619-2762-4.
• Beringer, Richard E., Archer Jones, and Herman Hattaway (1986). Why the South Lost the Civil War, influential analysis of factors; an abridged version is The Elements of Confederate Defeat: Nationalism, War Aims, and Religion (1988)
• Bestor, Arthur (1964). "The American Civil War as a Constitutional Crisis". American Historical Review. 69 (2): 327–52. doi:10.2307/1844986. JSTOR 1844986.
• Canney, Donald L. (1998). Lincoln's Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1861–65. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-55750-519-4.
• Chambers, John W.; Anderson, Fred (1999). The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-507198-6.
• Dinçaslan, M. Bahadırhan (2022). Amerikan İç Savaşı El Kitabı (US Civil War Handbook). Ankara, Turkey: Altınordu Yayınları Press. ISBN 978-6-257-61066-7.
• Donald, David Herbert (1995). Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-80846-8.
• Dunkerly, Robert M. (2015). To the Bitter End: Appomattox, Bennett Place and the Surrenders of the Confederacy. El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie. ISBN 978-1-61121-252-5.
• Foner, Eric (1981). Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-502926-0. Retrieved April 20, 2012.
• Foner, Eric (2010). The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 978-0-393-34066-2.
• Foote, Shelby (1974). The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-394-74623-4.
• Frank, Joseph Allan; Reaves, George A. (2003). Seeing the Elephant: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-07126-3.
• Fuller, Howard J. (2008). Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-59114-297-3.
• Gallagher, Gary W. (1999). The Confederate War. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-16056-9.
• Gallagher, Gary W. (2011). The Union War. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-06608-3.
• Gallagher, Gary W., and Elizabeth R. Varon, eds. (2019). New Perspectives on the Union War. New York: Fordham University Press. online
• Gara, Larry (1964). "The Fugitive Slave Law: A Double Paradox," in Unger, Irwin, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970 (originally published in Civil War History, Vol. 10, No. 3, September 1964, pp. 229–40).
• Hacker, J. David (December 2011). "A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead". Civil War History. 57 (4): 307–48. doi:10.1353/cwh.2011.0061. PMID 22512048. S2CID 30195230.
• Heidler, David S.; Heidler, Jeanne T.; Coles, David J. (2002). Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-57607-382-7.
• Herring, George C. (2011). From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-976553-9.
• Hofstadter, Richard (1938). "The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War". American Historical Review. 44 (1): 50–55. doi:10.2307/1840850. JSTOR 1840850.
• Holzer, Harold; Gabbard, Sara Vaughn, eds. (2007). Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-2764-5.
• Hunt, Jeffrey Wm (2015). The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-73461-6.
• Johannsen, Robert W. (1973). Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-501620-8.
• Johnson, Timothy D. (1998). Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-7006-0914-7.
• Jones, Howard (2002). Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913. Wilmington, Delaware: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-8420-2916-2.
• Jones, Terry L. (2011). Historical Dictionary of the Civil War. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-7953-9.
• Keegan, John (2009). The American Civil War: A Military History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-26343-8.
• Krannawitter, Thomas L. (2008). Vindicating Lincoln: defending the politics of our greatest president. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7425-5972-1.
• Long, E.B. (1971). The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. OCLC 68283123.
• McPherson, James M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-503863-7.
• McPherson, James M. (1997). For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-974105-2.
• McPherson, James M. (2007). This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-539242-5.
• Mendelsohn, Adam (2012). "Samuel and Saul Isaac: International Jewish Arms Dealers, Blockade Runners, and Civil War Profiteers" (PDF). Journal of the Southern Jewish Historical Society. 15. Southern Jewish Historical Society: 41–79. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 9, 2022.
• Murray, Williamson; Bernstein, Alvin; Knox, MacGregor (1996). The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War. Cabmbridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56627-8.
• Neely, Mark E. (1993). Confederate Bastille: Jefferson Davis and Civil Liberties. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press. ISBN 978-0-87462-325-3.
• Neff, Stephen C. (2010). Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-1-61121-252-5.
• Nelson, James L. (2005). Reign of Iron: The Story of the First Battling Ironclads, the Monitor and the Merrimack. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-052404-3.
• Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union, an 8-volume set (1947–1971). the most detailed political, economic and military narrative; by Pulitzer Prize-winner
  • 1. Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852 online; 2. A House Dividing, 1852–1857; 3. Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857–1859; 4. Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861; vols 5–8 have the series title War for the Union; 5. The Improvised War, 1861–1862; 6. online; War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863; 7. The Organized War, 1863–1864; 8. The Organized War to Victory, 1864–1865
• Olsen, Christopher J. (2002). Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-516097-0.
• Potter, David M. (1962b). "The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa". American Historical Review. 67 (4): 924–50. doi:10.2307/1845246. JSTOR 1845246.
• Potter, David M.; Fehrenbacher, Don E. (1976). The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-013403-7.
• Richter, William L. (2009). The A to Z of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-6336-1.
• Russell, Robert R. (1966). "Constitutional Doctrines with Regard to Slavery in Territories". Journal of Southern History. 32 (4): 466–86. doi:10.2307/2204926. JSTOR 2204926.
• Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. A Companion to the U.S. Civil War 2 vol. (April 2014) Wiley-Blackwell, New York ISBN 978-1-444-35131-6. 1232 pp; 64 Topical chapters by scholars and experts; emphasis on historiography.
• Stampp, Kenneth M. (1990). America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-503902-3.
• Stern, Phillip Van Doren (1962). The Confederate Navy. Doubleday & Company, Inc.
• Symonds, Craig L.; Clipson, William J. (2001). The Naval Institute Historical Atlas of the U.S. Navy. Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-55750-984-0.
• Thornton, Mark; Ekelund, Robert Burton (2004). Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War. Rowman & Littlefield.
• Tucker, Spencer C.; Pierpaoli, Paul G.; White, William E. (2010). The Civil War Naval Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-59884-338-5.
• Varon, Elizabeth R. (2008). Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-3232-5.
• Vinovskis, Maris (1990). Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-39559-5.
• Ward, Geoffrey R. (1990). The Civil War: An Illustrated History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-394-56285-8.
• Weeks, William E. (2013). The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-00590-7.
• Weigley, Frank Russell (2004). A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–1865. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-33738-2.
• Welles, Gideon (1865). Secretary of the Navy's Report. Vol. 37–38. American Seamen's Friend Society.
• Winters, John D. (1963). The Civil War in Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-0834-5.
• Wise, Stephen R. (1991). Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8724-97993.  Borrow book at: archive.org
• Woodworth, Steven E. (1996). The American Civil War: A Handbook of Literature and Research. Wesport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-29019-0.

External links

• West Point Atlas of Civil War Battles
• Civil War photos at the National Archives
• View images from the Civil War Photographs Collection at the Library of Congress
• The short film A House Divided (1960) is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive.
• "American Civil World" maps at the Persuasive Cartography, The PJ Mode Collection, Cornell University Library
• Statements of each state as to why they were seceding, battlefields.org
• National Park Service Civil War Places
• Civil War Battlefield Places from the National Park Service
• American Battlefield Trust – A non-profit land preservation and educational organization with two divisions, the Civil War Trust and the Revolutionary War Trust, dedicated to preserving America's battlefields through land acquisitions.
• Civil War Era Digital Collection at Gettysburg College – This collection contains digital images of political cartoons, personal papers, pamphlets, maps, paintings and photographs from the Civil War Era held in Special Collections at Gettysburg College.
• The Civil War – site with 7,000 pages, including the complete run of Harper's Weekly newspapers from the Civil War