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The American Civil War (1861–1865) was a war between the United States Federal government (the "Union") and eleven Southern slave states that declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America, led by President Jefferson Davis. The Union, led by President Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, opposed the expansion of slavery and rejected any right of secession. Fighting commenced on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a Federal military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

During the first year, the Union asserted control of the border states and established a naval blockade as both sides raised large armies. In 1862 the large, bloody battles began. In September 1862, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made the freeing of the slaves a war goal, despite opposition from northern Copperheads who tolerated secession and slavery. Emancipation ensured that Britain and France would not intervene to help the Confederacy. In addition, the goal also allowed the Union to recruit African-Americans for reinfdhjgkdylkhffdfjhfhghfdfgorcements, a resource that the Confederacy did not dare exploit until it was too late. War Democrats reluctantly accepted emancipation as part of total war needed to save the Union. In the East, Robert Edward Lee rolled up a series of Confederate victories over the Army of the Potomac, but his best general, Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, was killed at the Battle of Chancehzgdfhgfjfdhjdgllorsville in May 1863. Lee's invasion of the North was repulsed at the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania in July 1863; he barely managed to escape back to Virginia. In the West, the Union Navy captured the port of New Orleans in 1862, and Ulysses S. Grant seized control of the Mississippi River by capturing Vicksburg, Mississippi in July 1863, thus splitting the Confederacy.

By 1864, long-term Union advantages in geography, manpower, industry, finance, political organization and transportation were overwhelming the Confederacy. Grant fought a number of bloody battles with Lee in Virginia in the summer of 1864. Lee won most of the battles in a tactical sense but on the whole lost strategically, as he could not replace his casualties and was forced to retreat into trenches around his capital, Richmond, Virginia. Meanwhile, William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia. Sherman's March to the Sea destroyed a hundred-mile-wide swath of Georgia. In 1865, the Confederacy collapsed after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House and the slaves were freed.

The full restoration of the Union was the work of a highly contentious postwar era known as Reconstruction. The war produced about 970,000 casualties (3% of the population), including approximately 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease. The causes of the war, the reasons for its outcome, and even the name of the war itself are subjects of lingering controversy even today. The main results of the war were the restoration and strengthening of the Union, and the end of slavery in the United States.

Causes of the War

Main articles: Origins of the American Civil War, Timeline of events

Secession was caused by the coexistence of a slave-owning South and an increasingly anti-slavery North. Lincoln did not propose federal laws making slavery unlawful where it already existed, but he had, in his 1858 House Divided Speech, envisioned it as being set on "the course of ultimate extinction". Much of the political battle in the 1850s focused on the expansion of slavery into the newly created territories. Both North and South assumed that if slavery could not expand it would wither and die.

Well-founded Southern fears of losing control of the Federal government to antislavery forces, and northern fears that the slave power already controlled the government, brought the crisis to a head in the late 1850s. Sectional disagreements over the morality of slavery, the scope of democracy and the economic merits of free labor vs. slave plantations caused the Whig and "Know-Nothing" parties to collapse, and new ones to arise (the Free Soil Party in 1848, the Republicans in 1854, Constitutional Union in 1860). In 1860, the last remaining national political party, the Democratic Party, split along sectional lines.

Other factors include states' rights, modernization, sectionalism, the nullification crisis and economic differences between the North and South.

Note on causes

Civil rights and voting rights for blacks were not major issues before the Civil War; they became important afterward during Reconstruction. The issue of maltreatment of slaves was promoted by abolitionists (especially in the novel and play "Uncle Tom's Cabin"), but was not one of the main causes of secession or the war itself. Slavery was at the root of economic, moral and political differences that led to control issues, states' rights and secession of seven states. The creation of an independent Confederate nation in defiance of the United States was the main reason for the war. That is, secession itself triggered the war. The secession of four more states was (from the Southern point of view) a protest against Lincoln's call to invade the South. From the North's point of view it was an attempt to defend the nation after it was attacked at Fort Sumter. Lincoln's war goals evolved, and were separate from causes of the war. He did not emphasize national unity during the 1860 campaign but brought it to the front in his March, 1861, inaugural address. At first Lincoln stressed the Union as a war goal to unite the War Democrats, border states and Republicans. In 1862 he added emancipation because it would weaken the Confederacy and permanently remove a divisive issue. In his 1863 Gettysburg Address he tied preserving democracy to emancipation and the Union as a war goal.

Slavery in the territories

The specific political crisis that led to secession stemmed from a dispute over the expansion of slavery into new territories. The Republicans, while maintaining that Congress had no power over slavery in the states, asserted that it did have power to ban slavery in the territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 maintained the balance of power in Congress by adding Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. It prohibited slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase Territory north of 36°30'N lat. (the southern boundary of Missouri). The acquisition of vast new lands after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), however, reopened the debate—now focused on the proposed Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery in territories annexed from Mexico. Though it never passed, the Wilmot Proviso aroused angry debate. Northerners argued that slavery would provide unfair competition for free migrants to the territories; slaveholders claimed Congress had no right to discriminate against them by preventing them from bringing their legal property there.

The dispute led to open warfare in the Kansas Territory after it was organized by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This act repealed the prohibition on slavery there under the Missouri Compromise, and put the fate of slavery in the hands of the territory's settlers, a process known as "popular sovereignty". Fighting erupted between proslavery "border ruffians" from neighboring Missouri and antislavery immigrants from the North (including John Brown, among other abolitionists). Tensions between North and South now were violent.

Slavery and antislavery

The institution of slavery, introduced into colonial North America in 1619, had become a contentious issue between the North and the South early in the 1800s. The Compromise of 1850 included a new, stronger fugitive slave law that required federal agents to capture and return slaves that escaped into northern free states.

The Supreme Court decision of 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sandford added to the controversy. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's decision said that slaves "have no rights which any white man is bound to respect", and that slaves could be taken to free states and territories. Lincoln warned that "the next Dred Scott decision" could threaten northern states with slavery.

Since fewer than 800 of the almost 4 million slaves escaped in 1860, the fugitive slave controversy was not a practical reason for secession. (More had escaped in previous years; see Underground Railroad.) The number that escaped was offset by free Northern blacks who were kidnapped as slaves. And secession only did away with enforcement of the fugitive slave law altogether. Kansas had only two slaves in 1860 because the territories had the wrong soil and climate for labor-intensive forms of agriculture. Allan Nevins summarizes this argument by concluding that "Both sides were equally guilty of hysteria."

There was a strong correlation between the number of plantations in a region and the degree of support for secession. The states of the deep south had the greatest concentration of plantations and were the first to secede. The upper South slave states of Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee had fewer plantations and rejected secession until the Fort Sumter crisis forced them to choose sides. Border states had fewer plantations still and never seceded.

Rejection of compromise

Until December 20, 1860, the political system had always successfully handled inter-regional crises. All but one crisis involved slavery, starting with debates on the three-fifths clause in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Congress had solved the crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1819-21, the controversy over South Carolina's nullification of the tariff in 1832, the acquisition of Texas in 1845, and the status of slavery in the territory acquired from Mexico in 1850.

However, in 1854, the old Second Party System broke down after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Whig Party disappeared, and the new Republican Party arose in its place. It was the nation's first major party with only sectional appeal and a commitment to stop the expansion of slavery.

One Republican leader, Senator Charles Sumner, was violently attacked and nearly killed at his desk in the Senate by Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Brooks attacked Sumner with a gold-knobbed gutta-percha cane, which his Southern admirers replaced with similar canes with inscriptions like "Hit him again."

Open warfare in the Kansas Territory ("Bleeding Kansas"), the Dred Scott decision of 1857, John Brown's raid in 1859 and the split in the Democratic Party in 1860 polarized the nation between North and South. The election of Lincoln in 1860 was the final trigger for secession. During the secession crisis, many sought compromise—of these attempts, the best known was the "Crittenden Compromise"—but all failed.

A deeper reason for the rejection of compromise was the fear that conspiracies threatened to destroy the republic. By the 1850s, two loomed most threatening: the South feared the supposedly abolitionist Republican Party (the "Black Republicans"); Republicans in the North feared what they called the Slave Power.

Abolitionism

The Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and 1830s in religion inspired reform movements, one of the most notable of which was the abolitionists; these were later supported by Transcendentalism. Unfortunately, "abolitionist" had several meanings at the time, and still retains some ambiguity. The followers of William Lloyd Garrison, including Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, demanded the "immediate abolition of slavery", hence the name. Others, like Theodore Weld and Arthur Tappan, wanted immediate action, but that action might well be a program of gradual emancipation, with a long intermediate stage. "Antislavery men", like John Quincy Adams, did what they could to limit slavery and end it where possible. In the last years before the war, "antislavery" could mean the Northern majority, like Abraham Lincoln, who opposed expansion of slavery or its influence, as by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, or the Fugitive Slave Act. Many Southerners called all these abolitionists, without distinguishing them from the Garrisonians.

James McPherson explains the abolitionists' deep beliefs: "All people were equal in God's sight; the souls of black folks were as valuable as those of whites; for one of God's children to enslave another was a violation of the Higher Law, even if it was sanctioned by the Constitution."

Slaveowners were angry over the attacks on their "peculiar institution" of slavery. Starting in the 1830s, there was a vehement and growing ideological defense of slavery. Slaveowners claimed that slavery was a positive good for masters and slaves alike, and that it was explicitly sanctioned by God. Biblical arguments were made in defense of slavery by religious leaders such as the Rev. Fred A. Ross and political leaders such as Jefferson Davis.

Beginning in the 1830s, the U.S. Postmaster General refused to allow the mails to carry abolition pamphlets to the South. Northern teachers suspected of any tinge of abolitionism were expelled from the South, and abolitionist literature was banned. Southerners rejected the denials of Republicans that they were abolitionists, and pointed to John Brown's attempt in 1859 to start a slave uprising as proof that multiple Northern conspiracies were afoot to ignite bloody slave rebellions. Although some abolitionists did call for slave revolts, no evidence of any other actual Brown-like conspiracy has been discovered. The North felt threatened as well, for as Eric Foner concludes, "Northerners came to view slavery as the very antithesis of the good society, as well as a threat to their own fundamental values and interests".

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The most famous antislavery novel was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Inspired by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 which made the escape narrative part of everyday news, Stowe emphasized the horrors that abolitionists had long claimed about slavery. Her depiction of the evil slaveowner Simon Legree, a transplanted Yankee who kills the Christ-like Uncle Tom, outraged slaveowners. Stowe made Simon Legree a transplanted Yankee to show that she was attacking not the southern people but slavery as an institution. She published a Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to prove that, even though the book was fiction, many events in the book were based on fact. According to Stowe's son, when President Lincoln met her in 1862, he commented, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!" In response to Stowe's book, novelist Caroline Lee Hentz published a widely-read, but largely now forgotten, work entitled The Planter's Northern Bride in 1854, countering many of Stowe's depictions of the slavery institution.

John Brown

John Brown has been called "the most controversial of all nineteenth-century Americans." His attempt to start a slave rebellion in 1859 electrified the nation. Uniquely among the Garrisonians, he resorted to violence. Most historians depict Brown as a bloodthirsty zealot and madman who briefly stepped into history but did little to influence it. Some scholars, however, glorify Brown, giving him credit for starting the Civil War and arguing "it is misleading to identify Brown with modern terrorists."

John Brown started his fight against slavery in Kansas in 1856, during the Bleeding Kansas crisis. Border Ruffians used bowie knives and vote fraud to establish a pro-slavery government at Lecompton. There was Border Ruffian violence in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1855 and 1856 (see Sacking of Lawrence). And Border Ruffians kidnapped and killed six Free-State men. In response, Brown and his band killed five pro-slavery people at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas.

His famous raid in October 1859, involved a band of 22 men who seized the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, knowing it contained tens of thousands of weapons. Brown, like his Boston supporters, believed that the South was on the verge of a gigantic slave uprising and that one spark would set it off. Brown's raid, says historian David Potter, "was meant to be of vast magnitude and to produce a revolutionary slave uprising throughout the South." The raid was a fiasco. Not a single slave revolted. Instead, Brown was quickly captured, tried for treason (against the state of Virginia) and hanged. At his trial, Brown exuded a remarkable strength of character that impressed Southerners, even as they feared he might be right about an impending slave revolt. Shortly before his execution, Brown prophesied, "the crimes of this guilty land : will never be purged away; but with Blood."

Arguments for and against slavery

William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist, was motivated by a belief in the growth of democracy. Because the Constitution had a three-fifths clause, a fugitive slave clause and a 20-year extension of the Atlantic slave trade, Garrison once publicly burned a copy of the U. S. Constitution and called it "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell."

In 1854, he said

I am a believer in that portion of the Declaration of American Independence in which it is set forth, as among self-evident truths, "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Hence, I am an abolitionist. Hence, I cannot but regard oppression in every form—and most of all, that which turns a man into a thing—with indignation and abhorrence.

Wendell Phillips, one of the most ardent abolitionists, attacked the Slave Power and presaged disunion as early as 1845:

The experience of the fifty years… shows us the slaves trebling in numbers—slaveholders monopolizing the offices and dictating the policy of the Government—prostituting the strength and influence of the Nation to the support of slavery here and elsewhere—trampling on the rights of the free States, and making the courts of the country their tools. To continue this disastrous alliance longer is madness.… Why prolong the experiment?

Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said that the cornerstone of the South was "That the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition."

Jefferson Davis said slavery "…was established by decree of Almighty God… it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation… it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts."

Robert E. Lee said, "There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil."

State Rights

The "States' Rights" debate cut across the issues. Southerners argued that the federal government was strictly limited and could not abridge the rights of states as reserved in Amendment X, and so had no power to prevent slaves from being carried into new territories. States' rights advocates also cited the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution to demand federal jurisdiction over slaves who escaped into the North. Anti-slavery forces took reversed stances on these issues.

Jefferson Davis said that a "disparaging discrimination" and a fight for "liberty" against "the tyranny of an unbridled majority" gave the Confederate states a right to secede.

South Carolina's "Declaration of the Immediate Causes for Secession" started with an argument for states' rights for slaveowners in the South, followed by a complaint about states' rights in the North (such as granting blacks citizenship, or hampering the extradition of slaves), claiming that Northern states were not fulfilling their federal obligations.

In 1860, Congressman Laurence M. Keitt of South Carolina said, "The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States."

The South defined equality in terms of the equal rights of states, and opposed the declaration that all men are created equal.

Economics

Regional economic differences

The South, Midwest, and Northeast had quite different economic structures. Charles Beard in the 1920s made a highly influential argument to the effect that these differences caused the war (rather than slavery or constitutional debates). He saw the industrial Northeast forming a coalition with the agrarian Midwest against the Plantation South. Critics pointed out that his image of a unified Northeast was incorrect because the region was highly diverse with many different competing economic interests. In 1860-61, most business interests in the Northeast opposed war. After 1950, only a few historians accepted the Beard interpretation, though it was picked up by libertarian economists. As Historian Kenneth Stampp—who abandoned Beardianism after 1950, sums up the scholarly consensus:

Most historians of the sectional conflict, whatever differences they may have on other matters, now see no compelling reason why the divergent economies of the North and South should have led to disunion and civil war; rather, they find stronger practical reasons why the sections, whose economies neatly complemented one another, should have found it advantageous to remain united. Beard oversimplified the controversies relating to federal economic policy, for neither section unanimously supported or opposed measures such as the protective tariff, appropriations for internal improvements, or the creation of a national banking system. Except for the nullification crisis of 1832-33, economic issues, though sometimes present, were not crucial in the various sectional confrontations. During the 1850s, Federal economic policy gave no substantial cause for southern disaffection, for policy was largely determined by pro-Southern Congresses and administrations. Finally, the characteristic posture of the conservative northeastern business community was far from anti-Southern. Most merchants, bankers, and manufacturers were outspoken in their hostility to antislavery agitation and eager for sectional compromise in order to maintain their profitable business connections with the South. The conclusion seems inescapable that if economic differences, real though they were, had been all that troubled relations between North and South, there would be no substantial basis for the idea of an irrepressible conflict.

The regional economic differences of the North and South frequently appeared in the government's tariff policy. As Frank Taussig observed, "In the years between 1832 and 1860 there was great vacillation in the tariff policy of the United States." The debate centered around whether the tariff schedule should favor free trade and duties for revenue only, or protectionism to encourage factories for manufactured goods. As the northeastern economy industrialized, protective tariffs were sought by the iron mills of Pennsylvania, western Virginia (West Virginia) and New Jersey and the textile factories of New England. Most northern merchants, bankers and especially railroads wanted low tariffs.

Meanwhile, the South, in addition to much subsistence agriculture, depended upon large-scale production of export crops, primarily cotton and (to a lesser extent) tobacco, raised by slaves. The slaveowning plantations—which comprised less than a third of the white population—were export-dependent. Plantation owners typically accepted the theory that protective tariffs on iron and textiles hurt them, though they bought very little iron and only the cheapest cloth for the slaves. They believed cotton was in such heavy demand that Britain and France had no choice but to buy expensive southern cotton. Cotton fed industrial production and profits everywhere it was sent, to Europe or the northeastern United States. James M. McPherson suggests that what South Carolina nullifiers really feared was not so much high tariffs but centralization of Federal government power, which might eventually threaten slavery itself.

Douglas Irwin notes that antebellum tariff policy was often determined by the crucial swing vote of the Midwest. The Midwest supported the low Walker Tariff in 1846 and a further reduction in the Tariff of 1857. This section had an export economy of food crops giving them reason to side with the South at times, and its numerous railroads opposed tariffs on iron. Notably, there was no unanimity of support for a single tariff program even within each region. Northern farmers also depended upon exports; early railroad managers desired reduced tariffs on imported iron; many Northern Democrats opposed any federal role in the nation's infrastructure, and Southern Whigs such as Henry Clay favored it. Throughout the antebellum period though, majorities in the southern congressional delegation favored free trade while majorities from northeastern industrial states such as Pennsylvania consistently sought protection.

Tariffs were low and did not protect northern industry before 1861. The Tariff of 1857 was the lowest since 1816 and a great victory for the South. However the Panic of 1857 energized the iron protectionists to fight back. The Morrill Tariff passed the House of Representatives on a strictly sectional vote on May 10, 1860. Pressures to pass the bill in the Senate quickly became a campaign issue for the Republican Party in the Northeast, while Southerners delayed voting on the tariff in the Senate until the following year. A heated battle of rhetoric from both sides compounded the tariff issue. Economist Henry C. Carey led the protectionist charge in Northern newspapers by blaming free trade for the economic recession and accompanying budget shortfalls. Southerners circulated copies of Thomas Prentiss Kettell's 1857 book Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, which argued that protective tariffs unduly burdened the slave states to the benefit of the north. The Morrill Tariff did not pass until after the deep South seceded—it was signed by President Buchanan (a Democrat) in March 1861 and took effect in April, the same month the fighting started. The tariff was rarely mentioned in the heated debates of 1860-61 over secession, although Robert Toombs of Georgia did denounce "the infamous Morrill bill" as where "the robber and the incendiary struck hands, and united in joint raid against the South." The tariff also appeared in two secession documents of the states. South Carolina's secession convention published a declaration by Robert Barnwell Rhett that listed as its reason for secession "the consolidation of the North to rule the South, by the tariff and Slavery issues." Georgia also published a declaration listing economic grievances such as the tariff , though it emphasized the future of slavery as the main cause.

Alexander Stephens, for example, mentioned tariffs in his "Cornerstone Speech", but said the main cause was slavery. Stephens had been previously sympathetic to tariffs though, and had argued against Toombs's critique of the Morrill bill (as well as secession itself) a few months prior.

The many compromises proposed to resolve the crisis in 1860-61 never included the tariff, but instead always focused on the slavery issue. Economic historian Lee A. Craig points out, "In fact, numerous studies by economic historians over the past several decades reveal that economic conflict was not an inherent condition of North-South relations during the antebellum era and did not cause the Civil War."

Free labor vs. pro-slavery arguments

Historian Eric Foner (1970) has argued that a free-labor ideology dominated thinking in the North, which emphasized economic opportunity. By contrast, Southerners described free labor as "greasy mechanics, filthy operators, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists." They strongly opposed the homestead laws that were proposed to give free farms in the west, fearing the small farmers would oppose plantation slavery. Indeed, opposition to homestead laws was far more common in secessionist rhetoric than opposition to tariffs. They argued that only a slave-owning society allowed the leisure for education and cultural refinement. They depicted slavery as a positive good for the slaves themselves, especially the Christianizing that had rescued them from the paganism of Africa.

Southern fears of modernization

In a broader sense, the North was rapidly modernizing in a manner deeply threatening to the South, for the North was not only becoming more economically powerful; it was developing new modernizing, urban values while the South was clinging more and more to the old rural traditional values of the Jeffersonian yeoman. As James McPherson argues:

The ascension to power of the Republican Party, with its ideology of competitive, egalitarian free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the Northern majority had turned irrevocably towards this frightening, revolutionary future.

Southern fears of Republican control

Southern secession was triggered by the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln because regional leaders feared that he would make good on his promise to stop the expansion of slavery and would thus put it on a course toward extinction. Many Southerners thought that even if Lincoln did not abolish slavery, sooner or later another Northerner would do so, and that it was thus time to quit the Union. The slave states, which had already become a minority in the House of Representatives, were now facing a future as a perpetual minority in the Senate and Electoral College against an increasingly powerful North.

A house divided against itself

Secession winter

Before Lincoln took office, seven states declared their secession from the Union, and established a Southern government, the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861. They took control of federal forts and other properties within their boundaries, with little resistance from President Buchanan, whose term ended on March 3, 1861. Buchanan asserted, "The South has no right to secede, but I have no power to prevent them." One quarter of the U.S. Army—the entire garrison in Texas—was surrendered to state forces by its commanding general, David E. Twiggs, who then joined the Confederacy. By seceding, the rebel states would reduce the strength of their claim to the Western territories that were in dispute, cancel any obligation for the North to return fugitive slaves to the Confederacy, and assure easy passage in Congress of many bills and amendments they had long opposed.

The Confederacy

Seven Deep South cotton states seceded by February 1861, starting with South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. These seven states formed the Confederate States of America (February 4 1861), with Jefferson Davis as president, and a governmental structure closely modeled on the U.S. Constitution. In April and May 1861, four more slave states seceded and joined the Confederacy: Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia. Virginia was split in two, with the eastern portion of that state seceding to the Confederacy and the northwestern part joining the Union as the new state of West Virginia on June 20, 1863.

The Union states

There were 23 states that remained loyal to the Union during the war: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. During the war, Nevada and West Virginia joined as new states of the Union. Tennessee and Louisiana were returned to Union control early in the war.

The territories of Colorado, Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington fought on the Union side. Several slave-holding Native American tribes supported the Confederacy, giving the Indian territory (now Oklahoma) a small bloody civil war.

Border states

Main article: Border states (Civil War)

The Border states in the Union comprised West Virginia (which broke away from Virginia and became a separate state), and four of the five northernmost slave states (Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky).

Maryland had numerous pro-Confederate officials who tolerated anti-Union rioting in Baltimore and the burning of bridges. Lincoln responded with martial law and called for troops. Militia units that had been drilling in the North rushed toward Washington and Baltimore. Before the Confederate government realized what was happening, Lincoln had seized firm control of Maryland (and the separate District of Columbia), by arresting the entire Maryland statehouse and holding them without trial.

In Missouri, an elected convention on secession voted decisively to remain within 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 the rest of the State Guard to the southwestern corner of the state. (See also: Missouri secession). In the resulting vacuum the convention on secession reconvened and took power as the Unionist provisional government of Missouri.

Kentucky did not secede; for a time, it declared itself neutral. However, the Confederates broke the neutrality by seizing Columbus, Kentucky in September 1861. That turned opinion against the Confederacy, and the state reaffirmed its loyal status, while trying to maintain slavery. During a brief invasion by Confederate forces, Confederate sympathizers organized a secession convention, inaugurated a governor, and gained recognition from the Confederacy. The rebel government soon went into exile and never controlled the state.

Counties in the northwestern portion of Virginia opposed secession and formed a pro-Union government shortly after Richmond's secession in 1861. Unlike the remainder of Virginia, residents in this mountainous region were poor subsistence farmers. These counties were admitted to the Union in 1863 as West Virginia. Similar secessions appeared in East Tennessee, but were suppressed by the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis arrested over 3,000 men suspected of being loyal to the Union and held them without trial.

Overview

Some 10,000 military engagements took place during the war, 40% of them in Virginia and Tennessee. Separate articles deal with every major battle and some minor ones. This article only gives the broad outline. For more information see Battles of the American Civil War.

The war begins

For more details on this topic, see Battle of Fort Sumter

Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of 1860 triggered South Carolina's declaration of secession from the Union. By February 1861, six more Southern states made similar declarations. On February 7, the seven states adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America and established their temporary capital at Montgomery, Alabama. A pre-war February peace conference of 1861 met in Washington in a failed attempt at resolving the crisis. The remaining eight slave states rejected pleas to join the Confederacy. Confederate forces seized all but three Federal forts within their boundaries (they did not take Fort Sumter); President Buchanan protested but made no military response aside from a failed attempt to resupply Fort Sumter via the ship Star of the West, and no serious military preparations. However, governors in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania began buying weapons and training militia units to ready them for immediate action.

On March 4, 1861, Abraham 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, that it was a binding contract, and called any secession "legally void". He stated he had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did he intend to end slavery where it existed, but that he would use force to maintain possession of federal property. His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union.

The South sent delegations to Washington and offered to pay for the federal properties and enter into a peace treaty with the United States. Lincoln rejected any negotiations with Confederate agents on the grounds that the Confederacy was not a legitimate government, and that making any treaty with it would be tantamount to recognition of it as a sovereign government.

Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, was one of the three remaining Union-held forts in the Confederacy, and Lincoln was determined to hold it. Under orders from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederates under General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard bombarded the fort with artillery on April 12, forcing the fort's capitulation. Northerners reacted quickly to this attack on the flag, and rallied behind Lincoln, who called for all of the states to send troops to recapture the forts and to preserve the Union. With the scale of the rebellion apparently small so far, Lincoln called for 74,000 volunteers for 90 days. For months before that, several Northern governors had discreetly readied their state militias; they began to move forces the next day.

Four states in the upper South (Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia) which had repeatedly rejected Confederate overtures, now refused to send forces against their neighbors, declared their secession, and joined the Confederacy. To reward Virginia, the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond. The city was the symbol of the Confederacy; if it fell, the new nation would lose legitimacy. Richmond was in a highly vulnerable location at the end of a tortuous supply line.

Anaconda Plan and blockade, 1861

For more details on this topic, see Naval Battles of the American Civil War, Union blockade and Confederate States Navy

Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the U.S. Army, devised the Anaconda Plan to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible. His idea was that a Union blockade of the main ports would strangle the rebel economy; then the capture of the Mississippi Riv

1. http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/other/stats/warcost.htm
2. Dred Scott v. Sandford, U. S. Supreme Court, Roger Taney's decision, 1857
3. First Lincoln Douglas Debate at Ottawa, Illinois August 21, 1858
4. 1860 Census
5. J. G. Randall, Lincoln the President, (1997), vol 1, pages 237-241
6. Nevins, Ordeal of the Union 1:383; Pressly, 123-33, 278-81
7. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom 1988 p 242, 255, 282-83. Maps on page 101 (The Southern Economy) and page 236 (The Progress of Secession) are also relevant
8. William E. Gienapp, "The Crisis of American Democracy: The Political System and the Coming of the Civil War." in Boritt ed. Why the Civil War Came 79-123
9. Fox Butterfield; All God's Children page 17
10. Gienapp, "Crisis of American Democracy" p. 92; McPherson, pp 228-9
11. McPherson, Battle Cry p. 8; James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1976); Pressly, 270ff
12. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage (2006) pp 186-192.
13. Mitchell Snay, "American Thought and Southern Distinctiveness: The Southern Clergy and the Sanctification of Slavery," Civil War History (1989) 35(4): 311-328; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (2005), pp 505-27.
14. Schlesinger Age of Jackson, p.190
15. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage (2006) p 197, 409; Stanley Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861 (1995) p. 62; Jane H. and William H. Pease, "Confrontation and Abolition in the 1850's" Journal of American History (1972) 58(4): 923-937.
16. Eric Foner. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970), p. 9
17. Curti, p. 381; Heidler, pp 1991-3.
18. McPherson, Battle Cry pages 88-91
19. Most of her slaveowners are "decent, honorable people, themselves victims" of that institution. Much of her description was based on personal observation, and the descriptions of Southerners; she herself calls them and Legree representatives of different types of masters.;Gerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p.68; Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1953) p. 39
20. Charles Edward Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life (1911) p. 203. Historians are undecided whether Lincoln said the line.
21. Frederick J. Blue in American Historical Review (April 2006) v. 111 p 481-2.
22. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (2005).
23. David Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861 (1976), chapter 14, quote from p. 367. Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union: A House Dividing, pages 472-477 and The Emergence of Lincoln, vol 2, pages 71-97
24. Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, (2000), page 26
25. http://members.aol.com/jfepperson/garrison.html
26. Wendell Phillips, "No Union With Slaveholders," Jan. 15, 1845, in Louis Ruchames, ed. The Abolitionists (1963) p. 196.
27. Alexander Stephen's Cornerstone Speech, Savannah; Georgia, March 21, 1861
28. Dunbar Rowland, Jefferson Davis, Vol. 1, pages 286 and 316-317
29. http://www.civilwarhome.com/leepierce.htm 1856 letter by Lee in which he further states that slavery is worse for the white man than for the black, and that the blacks are better off in the US than in Africa
30. Resolved, That the union of these States rests on the equality of rights and privileges among its members, and that it is especially the duty of the Senate, which represents the States in their sovereign capacity, to resist all attempts to discriminate either in relation to person or property, so as, in the Territories -- which are the common possession of the United States -- to give advantages to the citizens of one State which are not equally secured to those of every other State. Jefferson Davis' Resolutions on the Relations of States, Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol, February 2, 1860, From The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 6, pp. 273-76. Transcribed from the Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 658-59.
31. Jefferson Davis' Second Inaugural Address, Virginia Capitol, Richmond, February 22, 1862 Transcribed from Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist, Volume 5, pp. 198-203. Summarized in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 8, p. 55.
32. Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union - Adopted December 24, 1860
33. Lawrence Keitt, Congressman from South Carolina, in a speech to the House on January 25, 1860: Congressional Globe.
34. "Who has been in advance of him in the fiery charge on the rights of the States, and in assuming to the Federal Government the power to crush and to coerce them? Even to-day he has repeated his doctrines. He tells us this is a Government which we will learn is not merely a Government of the States, but a Government of each individual of the people of the United States.", Jefferson Davis' reply in the Senate to William H. Seward, Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol, February 29, 1860, From The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 6, pp. 277-84. Transcribed from the Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 916-18.
35. "We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority." - Jefferson Davis' reply in the Senate to William H. Seward, Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol, February 29, 1860, - From The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 6, pp. 277-84. Transcribed from the Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 916-18.
36. Woodworth, ed. The American Civil War: A Handbook of Literature and Research (1996), 145 151 505 512 554 557 684; Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1969); for one dissenter see Marc Egnal, . "The Beards Were Right: Parties in the North, 1840-1860." Civil War History 47, no. 1. (2001): 30-56.
37. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (1981) p 198
38. Richard Hofstadter, "The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War," The American Historical Review Vol. 44, No. 1 (Oct., 1938), pp. 50-55 full text in JSTOR
39. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1992)
40. Huston, James L. The Panic of 1857 and The Coming of the Civil War (1987)
41. Donald 2001 pp 134-38
42. Woodworth, ed. The American Civil War: A Handbook of Literature and Research (1996), p. 505
43. Stephen B. Oates, Abraham Lincoln, The Man Behind the Myths, 1994, page 69
44. Richard Hofstadter, "The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War," The American Historical Review Vol. 44, No. 1 (1938), pp. 50-55 full text in JSTOR
45. J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (1978)
46. James McPherson, "Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question," Civil War History 29 (Sept. 1983)
47. Mark Neely, Confederate Bastille: Jefferson Davis and Civil Liberties 1993 p. 10-11
48. Gabor Boritt, ed. War Comes Again (1995) p 247