34 The American Civil War

The founding fathers of the USA were aware of the moral ambivalence of their position: at the same time as fighting for the freedom of their fellow whites from tyranny and oppression, they continued to hold black slaves.

Slavery in the USA was largely restricted to the Southern states, where large numbers of African slaves worked on the vast tobacco and cotton plantations on which the Southern economy depended. The economies of the Northern states were much more dependent on industry and small-scale farming, and it was in the North that the first calls for the abolition of slavery—often religiously inspired—originated. Starting with Pennsylvania in 1780, the Northern states introduced legislation for the gradual abolition of slavery. But calls for a federal ban throughout the Union were countered by those who argued that the US Constitution protected the status of slavery: the Fifth Amendment prohibited uncompensated seizure of property, while the Tenth Amendment reserved to the states all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government. Thus it was the right of each state to determine whether slavery should be permitted on its territory. Even many moderate abolitionists felt that Congress had no power in the matter.

The extension of slavery Conflict arose, however, when it came to the status of slavery in the new territories. Cotton had become economically much more significant after 1793, when Eli Whitney had improved the cotton gin, a device for separating the seeds from the fiber, and there was increasing pressure to extend cotton plantations based on slave labor into the new territories of the southwest. The result was the Missouri Compromise of 1820, by which no new slave states north of the thirty-sixth degree of latitude were to be admitted to the Union, with the exception of Missouri. Tensions between abolitionists and pro-slavers grew after the USA acquired further vast areas of western land following the Mexican War of 1846–8. The Compromise of 1850 sought to defuse the situation, restricting slavery in the new territories while protecting the institution where it already existed.

The Compromise of 1850 was overturned, however, by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed the inhabitants of these new territories to decide for themselves whether or not to permit slavery. Violence between pro-slavery forces and radical abolitionists such as John Brown ensued, and in 1859 Brown and a number of supporters seized the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, in what is now West Virginia, in an abortive attempt to initiate a general slave uprising in the South.

“Where Slavery is, there Liberty cannot be; and where Liberty is, there Slavery cannot be.”

Charles Sumner, senator, November 5, 1864

The broken Union John Brown was hanged, but his action gave the abolitionists a martyr, and at the same time heightened Southern fears of the consequences of emancipation. These fears were heightened even more when in 1860 the Republican candidate in the presidential election, Abraham Lincoln, was voted into office. The new Republican Party was more sympathetic to the cause of abolition than any previous party had been, but it was not a top priority for Lincoln, who, although a supporter of emancipation, insisted that the Constitution protected slavery where it existed, and who had publicly stated that he was not in favor of “bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

Despite such assurances, even before Lincoln’s inauguration the Southern states began to secede from the Union, forming the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as their president. In April 1861 Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter, a Union stronghold in South Carolina. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to crush the rebellion. Thus began four years of bitter civil war that were to cost the lives of nearly two-thirds of a million men.

The “war between the states” Despite the greater economic and manpower advantages of the industrial North, Lincoln was at first hampered by the ineptitude of his generals, as compared to the flair of such rebel commanders as Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Initially, Lincoln kept quiet on the issue of slavery, for fear of alienating those slave states—such as Maryland and Missouri—that had remained within the Union. But pressure from radical Republicans led him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863. This freed all slaves within the seceding states (but not in those slave states remaining within the Union); all such freed slaves, if fit, were to join the Union forces. Thus Lincoln dressed up this partial abolition as “military necessity,” and at the same time Northern blacks were, for the first time, admitted into the armed forces, albeit in segregated regiments commanded by white officers.

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it …”

President Abraham Lincoln, August 22, 1862

That year witnessed a turning of the tide in favor of the North. In July, General George Meade repelled Lee’s attempted invasion of Pennsylvania at Gettysburg, and Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant took the rebel stronghold of Vicksburg in Mississippi. The following year Grant was appointed commander-in-chief, and began a campaign of total war against the South, whose resources were eventually exhausted. On April 9, 1865 Lee’s army surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House.

Lincoln had been re-elected the previous autumn, and in his second inaugural address, on March 4, 1865, had held out a promise of reconciliation to the Southern states, then on the verge of defeat. Within days of victory, on April 15, Lincoln was assassinated by a Southern sympathizer. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery throughout the Union, took effect from December 18, 1865.

After the Civil War

Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, pursued the former’s policy of reconciliation of the South, overseeing the rapid readmission to the Union of the secessionist states. This angered the radical Republicans in Congress, who wished to see a top-to-bottom “Reconstruction” of Southern society and politics, and nearly succeeded in impeaching Johnson, who was left as a lame duck.

The radicals then took charge of Reconstruction, putting the former Confederate states under the control of the army, and then holding elections in which freed slaves could vote, but from which former leading Confederates were barred. This resulted in the installation of radical Republican state governments and violent opposition by conservative, racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Over time, people in the North turned their backs on the South, and Southern Democrats gradually reassumed power, introducing the so-called Jim Crow laws that denied most blacks their civil rights, including the right to vote. These rights were only restored after great struggles—by Martin Luther King among others—in the 1950s and 1960s.

the condensed idea

The Civil War ended slavery in the USA