Chapter 13
In This Chapter
● Understanding the causes of the Civil War
● Marching with the troops through horrendous battles
● Seeing the political, economic, and social background of the Civil War
The Civil War was four years of brutal fighting with clear a cause and bravery on each side. The first cuts of the Civil War were delivered with medieval broadswords near a peaceful river in Kansas, a thousand miles from the debates in Washington. The political decision that made the war inevitable came not from the divided Congress or the compromising president, but from the one place where the South had complete control: the Supreme Court.
When John Brown and his sons hacked five Southern slavery advocates to death in 1856, Northerners showed that at least some of them would shed blood to defeat slavery after the court blew the cracked lid off the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had bought time by dividing the country into slave and non-slave sections (see Chapter 11). With the 1857 Dred Scott decision (discussed later in this chapter), middle-of-the-road peacemakers no longer had a place to meet. When the new Republican Party elected a worried-but-determined antislavery president in 1860, Southern guns were already being moved into position.
Although the political, economic, and social focus of the AP exam limits your need to know the Civil War’s specific battles, you may be asked about the causes of the Civil War. Well, duh — slavery, of course. Also be sure to mention the political impact of the polarizing 1860 election, the economic influence of cotton profits, and the social dynamic of Northern immigrants wanting more free land in the West. Most of all, the growing Northern population threatened to swamp the South with more voters and more free states. In this chapter, I cover this information in more detail to give you the basic information you need to know.
How Reading Led to Fighting
In 1852, author Harriet Beecher Stowe had a hit on her hands. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, about the plight of a Southern slave, was the most popular book in the United States. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was a best seller not only in the United States but also in England and France and the best-selling novel of the entire 1800s. One copy of the book was in print for almost every voter in the North; Uncle Tom was banned in the South.
The impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin
What made Stowe's book so powerful? Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) put a human face on slaves for the first time in literary history. Most people don't like to see other people suffer. The way Americans coped with the cruelty of slavery was to pretend, without thinking too hard, that slaves were work animals without feelings. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, the slaves have names, families, hopes, and spiritual souls. Uncle Tom is never the kiss-up that his name has come to signify in modern times; he stands up for his beliefs and his friends even though he doesn't have the power to fight back physically against the slave masters.
Tom is an older Christian slave separated from his wife and children when his master falls on hard times and is forced to sell Tom down the river to a life of hard labor and punishment on a cotton plantation in the Deep South. A slave mother belonging to Tom's master who is about to have her son torn away from her manages to run north to freedom, carrying her son across the dangerously shifting ice of the Ohio River. On his way south, Tom saves a 6-year-old white girl named Eva from drowning. Eva's family buys Tom. By the time young Eva dies of natural causes several years later, she and Tom have developed a faith in goodwill that inspires everyone around them. Eventually, Tom is sold to an evil slave owner named Simon Legree. When Tom refuses to tell about two slaves who have escaped from the plantation, Legree has Tom beaten to death. Like Christ on the cross, as Tom is being killed, he forgives the slave drivers who are whipping him. The slaves who escaped from Legree meet the slaves who escaped from Tom's first master in Canada and realize they're all from the same family. Moved by Tom's story, the son of Tom's first master frees all his slaves.
Part of the power of Uncle Tom's Cabin for contemporary audiences came from readers' feeling that they were learning the truth about the taboo subject of slave life. The subtitle of the book is Life among the Lowly, making the cause sound plaintive and nonthreatening. The main title is a poem in three words. Cabin is the humble home familiar to all Americans; several U.S. presidents benefited in elections because they'd been born in log cabins. Tom is as simple as any male name; it was the name of both Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Didymus, a disciple of Christ. Tom incorporates the ohm sound used in meditation and as part of Amen; the name means twin in Latin and Greek. Uncle is a favorite relative, kindly without having to carry the emotional baggage of a mother or father.
Uncle Tom's Cabin followed the format of then-popular writing called domestic or women’s fiction; it could have been a hit even if it didn’t have so much meaning. It was as though a James Bond movie featured a suffering yet kindly alien who unites society and, with his death, saves the world from global warming.
The book had even more impact because Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first novel many people had ever read: Literacy was just becoming common for average people due to the growth in public schools. It would also be the last book many young Northerners read before they went off to enlist in the Union Army. The book not only helped start the war but also helped win it by causing Europeans to side with the North.
Because of the popularity of the book in Britain and France, those governments were morally afraid to intervene on the side of the South. The book was translated into languages around the world, including Chinese. Stowe had a simple answer when asked how her book came about. “God wrote it,” she said.
People didn’t even have to read the book to get the message; Tom appeared in thousands of plays performed in every Northern town before the Civil War. The message was so popular that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was still in theaters during the 1900s, 50 years after the Civil War.
Another book, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), written by middle-class Southerner Hinton Helper, argued that slavery was bad for the Southerners who didn’t own slaves. The book was banned in the South but used by the Republicans in the North as campaign publicity. Southerners were fighting mad about exposes they considered to be falsely libelous.
Question: Why was Uncle Tom’s Cabin important?
Answer: The book turned Northern opinion firmly against slavery.
Turning Words to Bullets in Bleeding Kansas
After the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) opened new territory for settlement, with popular sovereignty deciding whether the states to be formed would be slave or free, settlers poured into Kansas (see Chapter 12). Most of the Northern settlers just wanted land, but they included some well-armed partisans who were ready to fight to make Kansas a free state.
The South sent tough gangs of men to raid Northern settlements and fix elections with the goal of making Kansas a slave state. Northerners fought back, and the resulting sporadic violence won the area the name Bleeding Kansas from 1854 to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861.
For several years, Kansas lived under the proslavery Lecompton Constitution (1857), a railroaded partisan document forced through by crooked votes and supported by the U.S. president but not accepted by Congress.
Responding to raids by proslavery Southern bands, militant abolitionist John Brown and his sons brutally killed five Southern sympathizers in 1856 (see the discussion on John Brown later in this chapter). Brown wasn’t arrested and continued to lead antislavery defenders in pitched battles with Southern forces. Although plenty of property destruction and beatings occurred, fewer than 60 people were killed during the years of Bleeding Kansas.
Having let the genie out of the bottle by pushing through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Senator Stephen Douglas threw away Southern support for the Democratic Party in general and for his presidential campaign in particular by insisting on real popular sovereignty for Kansas. Douglas was from Illinois, like Abraham Lincoln, but he was willing to compromise on slavery. That made him a popular opponent, but Lincoln beat him in the presidential election of 1860.
Violence even reached the Senate floor when a Southern congressman named Preston Brooks beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner almost to death in 1856 over a virulent speech Sumner made against Southern-sponsored Kansan “hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization.” For some reason, that speech made Southerners mad. Outrage over the beating of Sumner contributed to the growth of his antislavery Republican Party in the North.
In the end, Kansas settlers were allowed to vote in a fair election in which they supported a free-state constitution by a margin of two to one. The territory never had more than a few slaves; no slave owner would risk his valuable property on such dangerous ground. Kansas was admitted to the Union after the beginning of the Civil War and was the scene of raids and reprisals by both sides during the war. Kansas contributed more than its share of volunteers to the Union Army.
The Dred Scott Decision
In the presidential election of 1856, the Democrats cast around for someone nobody knew enough about to hate and came up with James “Old Buck” Buchanan, who had been out of the country serving as ambassador to Britain. Buchanan beat John Fremont, the first presidential candidate of the new Republican Party.
Had Fremont won, the Civil War would have been off to an early start. Fremont believed in action and was so antislavery that he had to be recalled as a Union general during the Civil War for freeing slaves prematurely. He could have created so much animosity that the North may have let the South leave peacefully. Buchanan generally supported slavery and its extension to the territories under popular sovereignty, so the South stayed put during most of his presidency. He couldn’t have done much else to save the Union, though; sectional conflict was barreling down the tracks like a runaway freight train.
As he took the oath of office, Buchanan was looking forward to the Supreme Court’s decision on the Dred Scott case, issued only two days after he became president. Dred Scott (1857) was a slave who had been taken by his master to live in free Illinois and Wisconsin. Scott sued for his freedom, because he had spent years living with his master in places where slavery was illegal. The Supreme Court could have just ruled that Scott couldn’t sue because, in the twisted world of pre-Civil War law, Scott wasn’t a person. Legally, he could no more sue for freedom than your cat can sue for cat food. The law, bad as it was, was clear on a slave’s lack of standing to sue in court.
The Supreme Court chooses sides
The high court may be supreme, but that doesn’t mean the judges are blind to politics. Having lost its majority in the Senate, and with abolitionists nipping at Southerners’ heels in the House, the South still ruled in one place: the Supreme Court. Most of whose justices were Southern sympathizers. They took this opportunity to strike a legal blow against anybody who questioned slavery.
The Supreme Court ruled that because slaves were private property, and because the Fifth Amendment prohibited Congress from depriving people of their property without due process of law, every restriction on slavery, every hard-fought compromise, and every choice of the people in any state or territory was null and void. Due process of the law means that lawmakers must respect all of a person’s legal rights, not just some or most of them, when passing laws. If a slave owner had an unrestricted legal right to own a slave (and of course the slave, being property, had no rights at all) then the slave owner could take his slaves anywhere he wanted and work them as slaves as long as he wanted.
The ruling in the Dred Scott case probably is the worst decision the Supreme Court ever made. First, it was a bananas interpretation of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, the amendment that protects life, liberty, and property. Due process of the law is exactly what the Congress and the territorial and state legislatures had gone through in debating and passing laws banning slavery from jurisdictions under their control. The legislature clearly had the right to legally deprive people of their property for the public good; that’s what taxation and eminent domain are. Second, the ruling on the Dred Scott case virtually guaranteed that civil law would lead to civil war; the Supreme Court was stripping the power of the law by making it politically absurd.
The fallout from the Dred Scott decision didn’t take long to hit. Stephen Douglas, the Democratic cheerleader for popular sovereignty, felt stabbed in the back and fought back furiously in the Senate. The Republicans had a field day, calling the previously respected Supreme Court nothing but a Southern debating society. The South was first delighted and then aghast that the North wouldn’t follow the ruling of the august Supreme Court when the South was winning. Talk on both sides moved farther in the direction of “We can’t live with these people.”
Question: What was the overall legal importance of the Dred Scott decision?
Answer: The Dred Scott decision meant Congress could put no limits on slavery in the territories, or technically, anywhere else in the United States
Question: What laws did the Dred Scott decision overturn?
Answer: The Dred Scott case effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
The Panic of 1857
Just in time to increase the misery index in the North, the short but sharp Panic of 1857 brought financial collapse and unemployment. The South rode out the down market on the back of King Cotton, figuring that its relative prosperity was further proof that God was on its side. Hungry people in the North renewed their cries for the federal government to make cheap land available for settlement. Congress passed a Homestead Bill in 1860 to do just that, but President Buchanan vetoed it. Buchanan’s friends in the South didn’t want more settlers to vote against slavery in the territories.
An Election and a Division
With fights brewing in all branches of government, everyone looked anxiously toward the presidential election of 1860. Would the Democrats find a bring-us-together candidate? Could the Republicans possibly win when they weren’t even allowed south of the Mason-Dixon line? Who was going to save democracy?
Abraham Lincoln runs for president
Abraham Lincoln described himself as ugly. He towered above the short but determined fireplug figure of Stephen Douglas (see “Turning Words to Bullets in Bleeding Kansas,” earlier in this chapter) during their debates for the Senate in 1858, which turned out to be a prequel of the 1860 presidential race between the two.
Lincoln wasn’t exactly spending all his time splitting logs before the debates, but he wasn’t any superimportant guy, either. He had risen from his humble beginnings on the Illinois frontier to become one of the better-known local lawyers. In the House of Representatives, where incumbents usually kept getting reelected, he had managed to serve only one term. Up until the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, he didn’t stand out from a thousand other lawyer-politicians.
Lincoln was against slavery, but he shied away from the troublemaking abolitionists. When the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act threatened to extend slavery, the Republican Party rose in opposition, and Lincoln became a tiger. He debated the famous Senator Douglas all over Illinois and came close to knocking him out of the Senate.
John Brown
Meanwhile, the abolitionist anger of John Brown could wait no more. Brown had been the bad-boy hero of peaceful-but-well-funded abolitionists since he chopped up a few slavery supporters during the war for Bleeding Kansas (see “Turning Words to Bullets in Bleeding Kansas,” earlier in this chapter). He went to Kansas to help protect the free-state settlers, including some of his adult children, from violent Southern raids.
Brown had a legitimate concern for the welfare of his sons and the free-state settlers in their vicinity, especially because the sacking of the free town of Lawrence seemed to signal an all-out campaign of violence by proslavery forces. After he murdered five proslavery men, he skillfully led the free-state settlers in defending themselves. When he captured a detachment of armed slavery raiders, he treated them well and negotiated for the return of two of his own sons who were being held by the slavery forces.
Brown put together a loony plan to start a slave uprising by marching through Virginia, handing out guns that he would steal from the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, north of Washington, D.C. Brown and a few men took the armory but were quickly arrested after a shootout with an army detachment under the command of (dramatic foreshadowing!) then-Union Col. Robert E. Lee. Brown’s Harpers Ferry idea could never have worked; during the Civil War, slaves didn’t revolt even when the Union Army was near.
Brown was quickly tried and hanged, but his spirit electrified the antislavery North and totally teed off and frightened the slaveholding South. His last words as the noose was being tied around his neck were “This is a beautiful country.” His death raised an anger in the North that helped elect antislavery Abraham Lincoln.
When a guy like Brown does something violent, labeling him crazy is natural. Maybe he was crazy, but how crazy and violent was the slave system he hated? People seem to have more tolerance for institutionalized violence than they do for attacks against violent institutions. Brown just thought somebody had to do something; he was driven crazy by the crazy system of slavery.
Lincoln gets elected, and the South says goodbye
It took two conventions for the Democrats to nominate Stephen Douglas for president in 1860. The Southerners walked out of the first convention and nominated John Breckinridge, a moderate who was willing to run on a Southern Democrat platform calling for the extension of slavery. The Northern Democrats who were left behind nominated Douglas. Desperate compromisers threw together a Constitutional Union Party, to put a fourth candidate in the race. The Republicans thought they were playing it as safe as possible by picking Abraham Lincoln; their other choices were better known but were radicals.
During a bitter campaign, the Southerners announced that if “that baboon” Lincoln became president, they were going to start their own country. Although Lincoln scored less than 40 percent of the popular vote, he got electoral votes from every free state. Even with Lincoln elected, the South was under no real danger of having its slavery institution taken way. That would take a constitutional amendment, and the slaveholders had almost twice as many states as they needed to defeat an amendment. The Republicans were a minority in both the House and Senate, and the Southerners still controlled the Supreme Court. But the South was fed up.
Within days of Lincoln’s election, Southern states had started to secede. Eventually, 11 states left the Union, taking with them most of the U.S. Army guns and supplies on Southern soil.
To tell the truth, the army didn’t have much to grab. The entire U.S. Army consisted of only 15,000 men, and lots of them were scattered across the frontier, looking out for American Indians. The Union held on to one major fort guarding the approach to the hotbed of the rebellion: Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.
Even as soldiers drilled, the sides made one final attempt at compromise: the Crittenden Amendments (1860), which would have allowed slavery in the Southwest and in territories to be acquired (watch out, Cuba). That law was a nonstarter.
Fighting the Civil War
Most Southerners actually thought they could just say, “Well, it’s been a nice country, but gotta go,” and the North would wave a peaceful goodbye. Although three quarters of the soldiers from the South owned no slaves, they were still ready to fight for those who did. Southerners figured that Northern businessmen would want to hold on to Northern middleman profits from the cotton trade and the millions of dollars owed to them by the South. They found out that money talks, but not as loud as a cause does. For the North, saving the Union and opposing slavery were causes worth fighting for.
Five border slave states chose to stay with the Union — luckily for the North, because border-state people, manufacturing, and horses would have added more than a third to Southern Confederate strength. As it was, the North had more than twice as many people as the South, three times as much money, and ten times as many factories.
Those figures didn’t mean that the North was sure to win, though; Britain had those kinds of advantages over the colonies, and the Revolution still triumphed. As in the Revolutionary War, the South didn’t really have to win; it just had to not lose. The North was forced to attack the South on the South’s own soil; the South mostly fought from behind prepared defenses with short internal lines of supply and communications. The Union Navy blockaded Southern ports, but the South had enough food and weapons to last a few years.
The hotheads of South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter, the key to Charleston harbor held by the Union, thereby rousing Northerners into feeling that their nation’s flag was under attack. Lincoln asked for 75,000 volunteers. After the Union troops had a few months of training, they marched off to take the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and end the war quickly. At First Bull Run (1861) in Northern Virginia, the first battle of the war, one unit of Confederates held firm like stone, earning their talented general the nickname “Stonewall” Jackson and buying the South enough time to win the fight.
The Union regrouped under Gen. George McClellan, who was good at organizing parades but not much at actually fighting. About a year after Bull Run, he lost the Peninsula Campaign (July 1862) to the Confederate Army under Robert E. Lee. Lee beat the Union again at Second Bull Run (August 1862) and headed into Union territory, only a few miles from Washington, D.C. In one of the two most important fights of the Civil War, Lee was turned back, barely, at Antietam (September 1862). Second Bull Run and Antietam showed that both sides could defend their own territory.
Britain and France were talking about getting involved on the Southern side, but Antietam made them shut up. It also gave Lincoln the backing he needed to announce his plan to free the slaves in the states then fighting the Union. On New Year’s Day, he officially issued the
Emancipation Proclamation (1863). With the Union on record as fighting for the cause of freedom, average people in Britain and France made sure their governments wouldn’t help the South. They had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin (see “How Reading Led to Fighting” earlier in this chapter).
Question: What was the significance of the Battle of Antietam?
Answer: It helped convince England and France not to support the Confederacy, and it gave Lincoln the political strength to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
Meanwhile, the North tightened its blockade to cut off Southern supplies. Southerners had figured that Britain would have to help them because something like one out of five jobs in Britain was tied to Southern cotton. Even though some British working people went unemployed and hungry, the British refused to help. The Northern states shipped Britain extra food; they had plenty to share.
The South tried to break the blockade with a homemade iron-sided ship called the Merrimack. Just in time, a Union ironclad arrived to fight. The Monitor and the Merrimack (1862) fought to a tie. After this first fight between metal ships, it was clear that warships of the future would be made out of iron, not wood.
As slaves were freed, many of them enlisted in the Union Army. Paid less than whites until the last year of the war, they fought bravely in difficult battles. About 10 percent of Union forces were black, and they suffered more than their share of casualties. Southern slaves never rose up against their masters, but they did run away to freedom when they could.
The Union lost badly at Fredericksburg (December 1862) by attacking an unbeatable Southern entrenchment and at Chancellorsville (May 1863) by being suckered in a brilliant flank attack by Lee. Up to that time, Union generals deserved a grade of about F+.
Lee was feeling his oats and decided to have another go at invading the North. At Gettysburg (July 1863) in Pennsylvania, he attacked Union troops who would not be moved. For three days of ferocious fighting, the Union held. The battle was very close; the South had peace commissioners ready to take the Union’s surrender. Instead, Lee’s army was forced to retreat to Virginia. Gettysburg, the South’s last real chance to win the Civil War, joined Antietam as the other key battle of the conflict.
Question: What were the two key battles of the Civil War?
Answer: Antietam, where the North held the line against the South, and Gettysburg, where the South was defeated in Northern territory.
The day after Gettysburg, General Ulysses S. Grant took the Confederate fortress at Vicksburg (1863), splitting the South at the Mississippi River. With the twin victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Britain and France even stopped taking Southern money to build them warships. The Confederacy was on its own. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman marched across the Confederacy from Atlanta to the sea (1864), leaving a 60-mile-wide path of destruction and freeing 25,000 slaves. His tactics were brutal, but they helped shorten the war and save lives. He said, “War is all hell.”
Lincoln won reelection in 1864 on the Republican ticket, cleverly including a loyal border-state Democrat as vice president. When Lincoln won, desertions from the Confederate Army increased. General Grant, now in command of the main Union Army, hammered relentlessly at Lee throughout 1864. Finally, in April 1865, the Confederacy surrendered. Lincoln visited the defeated Southern capital of Richmond. When grateful slaves tried to kneel in front of him, he pulled them up and said, “You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty.”
People will tell you the AP never asks about battles, but that isn’t necessarily true. Don’t get lulled into studying nothing about the way the Civil War unfolded. At a minimum, remember Antietam, which kept out foreign intervention and let in the Emancipation Proclamation, which I talk about in the next section. The battle of Gettysburg stopped the South’s invasion of the North and marked the last real chance for the South to win the war.
Question: How many Southerners owned slaves?
Answer: Only about one quarter of Southern whites owned slaves.
Question: What was the role of black troops in the Civil War?
Answer: Black soldiers made up 10 percent of the Union Army. They suffered more than their share of casualties and by the end of the war were paid the same as white troops.
Emancipation and the Loss of Lincoln
Although the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 (see “Fighting the Civil War” earlier in this chapter) technically only freed slaves in the Confederacy (which was out of the reach of the law), more and more slaves were freed as the Union Army rolled up Southern territory. More than 200,000 freed slaves joined the Union Army and fought to free those still held in bondage. More important, the proclamation showed that the North was fighting to end slavery, not just keep the Union intact.
Question: What was the most important immediate impact of the Emancipation Proclamation?
Answer: Issuing the Emancipation Proclamation showed that the North was fighting to end slavery, not just to preserve the Union. This increased support from ex-slaves and from foreign nations opposed to slavery.
A few days after he knew the war would end, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, an actor with Southern sympathies who thought he could somehow revive the Confederacy by killing Lincoln. Actually, killing Lincoln hurt the South. Lincoln had planned to let Southern states rejoin the Union on relatively easy terms. With Lincoln gone, Democratic Vice President Andrew Johnson would have to try to manage Reconstruction, the rebuilding of the South with free blacks (see Chapter 14), through a Republican-controlled Congress eager to make sure that the South learned a lesson.
Question: What was the impact of the assassination of President Lincoln?
Answer: Without the forgiving Lincoln to guide the process, Reconstruction of the South after the war became a partisan political controversy.
More than 600,000 men died in the Civil War — close to the total for all the other wars the United States has ever fought. Family members fought one another. Mary Lincoln, the president’s wife, had three brothers killed fighting for the Confederacy. Four million slaves were freed, although real social freedom took another 100 years to accomplish, which I talk about in the following chapters. Extreme states’ rights were abolished, and the twin national challenges of nullification and secession, which first threatened while George Washington was still alive (see Chapter 10), were finally laid to rest.
The Union’s victory in the Civil War expanded federal power. The first 12 amendments to the Constitution, in place before the war, all limited the power of the government. The next three amendments, passed after the war, all expanded national power.
The Civil War led to a national banking system with national currency; the first income tax (3 percent, starting in 1861); the first draft (1863); and, through attempts to help freed slaves, the beginning of a national welfare system.
Before the Civil War, the term United States was plural. People said, “The United States — they have decided to expand.” After the war, United States was singular, as in “The United States — it has decided to grow.” Small words can make a big difference.